Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas
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really close around you, dead and alive, the family all together. With no – what’s the word – taboo about it, like we have. And I suppose you don’t feel lonely, either.’
She is making a direct comparison, Ash’s grandmother with her own. Yes, I have been lonely. And I am so used to it that it is only the lessening of loneliness, through her company, that has made me aware of it. I have not always been so brusque, in my words or in my judgements: this is what too much solitude does. You forget how to be tactful and gentle. But Ruby doesn’t seem to mind and I’m glad of this.
She leans forward, tilting her chair closer to mine. ‘Iris? What happened? Why don’t you and Lesley get along?’
I want to answer her, but the words and reasons and recollections jumble together and then swirl away, out of my reach …
… No. That won’t do. It would be easier to take refuge in the windy spaces of forgetfulness, but this truth is still sharp enough in my memory and I have to admit it: I didn’t want to be a mother. Not then, not to Gordon’s child, not to Lesley.
Maybe I never was cut out to be anyone’s mother. Even if everything else had been different, my lack of maternal inclination might have been the same.
I was a good doctor. I loved my work and surely I must have been good at it. To one or two people, maybe, I was a good friend. Can’t that be enough?
‘I think Lesley and I respect each other,’ I say.
Ruby feels rebuffed, I can tell. Silence spreads through the room as I try to work out a way to undo this.
Outside, the sky is overcast. Winter is coming, and it brings a damp chill that seeps through Cairo like mist off the Nile. I don’t mind the heat of summer, spending the days as I do within these thick walls or in the tiled shade of the garden, but nowadays I am like Faria – I feel the cold.
I try to ward off the automatic shiver. Ruby is here, and I can imagine how the silence in this old house must be dispiriting for her. Ideas suddenly jostle in my head and I clap my hands, making her jump.
‘When did you get here?’
She looks startled. ‘What? Do you mean, when did I arrive? Um, it was twelve days ago.’
‘Is that all? It seems longer than that.’
‘Does it? I mean, I don’t want to get in the way or anything, just say if I am.’
‘In the way? Of course you are not in the way. I am only thinking that you have been in my house for nearly two weeks and I haven’t taken you anywhere, or shown you anything except for that one outing with your friends, and it is high time that I did. I promised your mother that I would educate you.’
I clap my hands again, louder this time.
‘We’ll go out now. We’ll have an excursion. I know, we’ll go to Giza.’ The idea develops its own momentum. I am overtaken by a longing to leave the house and walk a different route, away from the repetitive circuit of my thoughts. ‘We’ll drive out there, visit the Pyramids and then watch the sun set over the desert. What do you think?’
‘Drive out there? Nafouz and Ash aren’t here today. That was last week, when we went to Groppi’s, remember?’
I stand up. Ruby picks up the blanket as it falls from my knees and folds it over the back of my chair.
‘Will you call Mamdooh? Tell him I will need the car.’
She follows me into my bedroom. In the cupboard hangs my warm deerskin coat.
‘You have a car?’
I am thinking of the sky fading to the colour of amethysts and the way that you have to steer a car when the wheels turn wayward in loose sand.
‘Of course I do. Hurry up, or we will miss the sunset.’
Mamdooh’s face was dark.
‘Mum’reese, it is not a good idea. For Miss, I can arrange to make a visit with a guide who will speak English. Tomorrow, or even better the next day.’
Ruby followed Mamdooh through the kitchen, both of them in Iris’s wake. He had given her one furious glare, indicating that all this must be her fault, and Ruby had done her best to signal back that it was nothing to do with her.
‘Where is the key? Mamdooh?’
‘It is here.’ Auntie stood aside and Mamdooh took a set of keys out of a drawer in one of the old cream-painted cupboards.
‘Very good. Come on.’
Auntie picked up a duster and polishing rag. In a small procession, with Ruby at the back, they passed through a door she had never seen opened before. It led from the kitchen into a small scullery, very small but high, with a tiny window let into the thick wall far above their heads. Mamdooh slid several bolts and opened another door. Ruby saw that it led into a cobbled alley at the back of the house. The blank walls out here were scabbed and blistered, and a thin trickle of grey water ran down the central gutter. The smell of sewage was powerful.
Iris stepped over the gutter and stood expectantly beside a pair of wooden doors secured with a chain and padlocks. Mamdooh very slowly went about the business of unlocking and withdrawing the chain. Finally he folded back the doors.
There was faint scurry in the dim interior, unmistakably a rat making for safety in the darker recesses of what must once have been a barn. There were wooden feed troughs along one wall, and a cobwebbed harness hanging from a peg.
And there was a car.
Auntie moved first. With her bunched-up duster she made a little swipe over the bonnet. Under the thick coat of Cairo dust and gritty sand, it was just possible to tell that the car had once upon a time been black.
Iris looked mystified. She opened the driver’s door and leaned into the interior, dust rising in little puffs under her fingers as she twisted the steering wheel.
‘Not any insurance, not any service, oil, benzene,’ Mamdooh muttered. ‘Look, tyres all flat.’
Ruby wandered round to the back and rubbed the rear insignia plate clean. Even though it was ancient, the car seemed quite familiar. It was a Volkswagen Beetle, not so very different from the new one owned by Lesley in which Ruby had learned to drive.
‘Mum had one of these.’ She smiled as she came round to the front again.
‘What?’
‘A Beetle. Until last year, then she got an Audi.’
Now Mamdooh stood back with his fists clenched on his hips. ‘It is not possible to drive this car.’
Iris gently closed the door again. ‘I bought it in the seventies, when I was living in Swakopmund, from a German dentist called Werner Esch. He was going back to live in Europe but he didn’t want to ship the car home, and he gave me a good price. When I moved up here to Cairo I drove all the way, and everything I wanted to bring with me fitted into here.’ Absently she patted the hood, her fingertips leaving little marks like the blurred footprints of birds.
Auntie had been rubbing the chrome door handle but her eyes were watering from the dust and she coughed into a fold of her white headscarf. Reluctantly Iris stepped away from the car although her hand still stretched out as if she didn’t want to relinquish the memory and promise of adventure that went with it.
‘We’ll get a taxi instead.’
‘Mum-reese, it is too late today. When you get to Giza it is dark.’
‘I have been out after dark in my life, you know.’
‘Miss will not see anything.’
Iris’s eyes glittered. He had outflanked her, but she wouldn’t be deflected. ‘We’ll go somewhere else, then. Ruby, tell me, where would you like to go?’
Without waiting for an answer she clicked her fingers. ‘The museum. We’ll go