Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas
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Iris said slowly, in her different voice, ‘His name was Alexander Napier Molyneux, Captain in the Third Hussars, on secondment to Tell force. That picture was taken in October 1941, on the day that Xan asked me to marry him.’
Ruby was delighted with this information.
‘Really? Did he? Did you say yes?’
‘I did.’
She waited for more, but Iris was silent. Gently Ruby put the photograph aside and folded Iris’s hands in hers. The old fingers were like twigs, the tendons rigid against Ruby’s smooth palms.
‘Are you afraid of forgetting him?’
‘I never kept diaries, you see. I was so certain of my mind. And now it’s going. Sometimes I reach and there is nothing there. In the accustomed place. Most of the pieces don’t matter. But if this one breaks, there will be nothing left.’
Ruby understood that she meant nothing of value. If the precious bowl was missing or shattered, what remained was rendered worthless.
She tightened her grip on Iris’s hands, suddenly understanding what they must do together.
‘You can remember. I know you can, because of the photographs and the fountain and the ship and the travel agents. You told me about those without even thinking. You’ve just told me about Xan Molyneux, haven’t you? It’s there, Iris, I know it is. And I know what we have to do. It’s just talking. You have to tell me the stories and I will remember them for you. I’m really good at that, my friend Jas told me. I remembered all kinds of things about people we used to know back in London, and he was always amazed. But I did it automatically. I told him it was like collecting anything. I used to have these collections, you know, when I was a kid. Shells, insects. Hundreds of them. I used to know exactly what they all were and where to find them in my room, although Lesley was always going on about mess. All you have to do is tell me.
‘I’ll keep it all in my mind. And then, if you do forget, I can tell your memories back to you, like a story.’
She massaged Iris’s cold hands, trying to rub warmth and certainty into them.
‘Do you see?’
Iris’s colour had faded and the tight lines pursed her mouth again. ‘Maybe,’ she said uncertainly.
Ruby smiled. Confidence and an idea of her own value swept through her, and she leaned up to kiss her grandmother’s cheek.
‘Definitely,’ she insisted.
Before the war Colonel Boyce’s office at GHQ had been a spacious bedroom in a substantial villa. By the time I came to work there the room had been partitioned into three cubbyholes, each with one-third of a window giving a thin vertical view of the untended gardens and a checkpoint where a couple of soldiers guarded a gate in the perimeter fencing. Roddy Boy had one cubbyhole, and as his typist I occupied a walled-off slice of the corridor outside the bedroom. My desk was wedged between a pair of tall tin cabinets in which I filed the endless succession of pinks generated by interdepartmental communications.
Roddy’s head poked out of his office. ‘Miss Black? Could you take this along to Brigadier Denselow?’
I took the sealed folder marked Secret and walked down two sets of stairs and through a pair of temporary doors into what had once been the villa’s kitchens. The GHQ buildings were a warren of stairways and cramped offices, packed with sweating staff officers who ploughed through mounds of paperwork and vied with each other for access to bigger fiefdoms. It was a swamp of bureaucracy, rumour and competitiveness as Headquarters expanded and the prospect of fast-track promotions encouraged ambitious officers to try to outsmart each other. Roddy Boy was always in the thick of some piece of intrigue designed to thwart his rivals.
Brigadier Denselow and his staff had four adjacent offices that opened through the servants’ back door into the villa garden, so there was daylight and fresh air. This empire was jealously guarded against all comers. Denselow’s assistant, Captain Martin Frobisher, was sitting with his feet on his desk reading a novel from the Anglo-Egyptian Club library.
‘Hullo, light of my life,’ he greeted me routinely.
I handed over the folder and Martin signed the docket for it. In answer to his entreaty I told him that no, I wasn’t free for dinner.
‘You never are,’ he sighed. ‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘Nothing. But I am in love with another man.’ Whom I had not seen, nor even heard from, in seventeen and a half days. Each of those days was a glassy structure of routine within which I contained – as patiently as I could – my longing for Xan and my constant fears for his safety. I was only one of millions of women in similar circumstances.
‘He’s a lucky devil. Lunch, then?’
I had a pile of memos composed in Roddy’s trademark verbose style to type and circulate. I shook my head, smiling at him. I liked Martin. He had been welcoming when I first arrived in the military maze of Headquarters. ‘Pressure of work,’ I explained and threaded my way back past the first-floor salon where shifts of cipherenes worked twenty-four hours a day, to my own office.
When I reached my desk I saw that Roddy’s door was firmly closed and the hand-made ‘Do not disturb’ sign hanging from the knob indicated that he was busy.
There was no window in my segment of corridor, so I worked under a metal-shaded desk lamp that gave off an acrid smell of burning dust. I switched it on and took the cover off my typewriter.
I had been painstakingly typing for perhaps half an hour before Roddy’s door opened again. I saw my boss’s knife-creased trousers emerge first. Even in the hottest weather Roddy always wore immaculate service dress, including tunic, Sam Browne, tie and long trousers.
‘Matter of morale,’ he would mutter. ‘This is GHQ. Notwithstanding, some chaps around here are reprehensibly sloppy.’
He was followed by a pair of sunburned legs in khaki shorts, very stained and dusty.
My heart lurched in my chest. I looked up at the owner of the legs and Xan smiled down at me. Behind the smile he looked exhausted.
‘You promised me a cup of GHQ tea, remember?’
‘So I did. Milk and sugar?’ I laughed because I knew perfectly well how he took his tea.
‘Let me think. Do you know, maybe it isn’t tea I want at all? Perhaps a drink instead? At Shepheard’s?’
Roddy gave us his pop-eyed stare. ‘Ah, yes. You two know each other, don’t you?’
‘We have met,’ I said demurely. The last time I had seen Xan was as he was leaving my bed, at dawn, before heading away into the desert on one of his mysterious sorties. After the first relief at seeing him alive and unhurt, I could hardly think of anything except how much I wanted us to be back in bed together.
‘It is lunchtime,’ Xan said, consulting his watch. ‘Colonel Boyce, may I take Miss Black away from you for an hour?’
Roddy could hardly say no, although it was obvious that he would have preferred to do so.
‘Hurrrmph. Well, yes, all right. Only an hour. We are extremely pressed at the moment, you know.’ He turned to me, eyes bulging. ‘Have you heard from your father lately, by the way?’
This was a not very oblique reminder that, through his acquaintance with my father, Roddy considered himself to have a paternal role to play.
‘Yes, I had a letter about two weeks ago. He’s living very quietly these days, down in Hampshire. My mother hasn’t been very well lately. He did ask to be remembered to you. I think he’s quite envious of you, Sir, being so much in the thick of the war out here.’