Iris and Ruby. Rosie Thomas

you hungry?’ Xan asked me and I remembered that I was ravenous.

      After the men had withdrawn again, bowing and smiling, Xan put a bowl into my hands and ladled out the food. It was a thick stew of lamb with beans and tomato, and we sat turned towards each other on our bank of cushions and devoured it. I tore up chunks of bread and mopped the spicy sauce, then Xan took hold of my wrist and licked my fingers clean for me. He kissed each knuckle in turn and I noticed how his hair grew in different directions at the crown of his head. This tiny detail, more than anything else, made me want to touch him. And want him to touch me. I was almost frightened by how much I wanted it.

      ‘Who is Hassan?’ I asked. ‘What is this place?’

      ‘We played together when we were boys. His father taught me to ride. Now we work together, if you understand what I mean. Hassan knows the desert better than anyone else in

      Egypt.’

      One of Xan’s eyebrows lifted as he told me this.

      ‘Work’, I guessed, would probably be for one of the secret commando raiding groups that operated between and behind enemy lines. In my months with Roddy Boy I had glimpsed a few reports of their missions.

      ‘That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’

      ‘This is a war.’

      Both statements were true. There was nothing either of us could add, so we just looked at each other in the candlelight.

      Then Xan leaned forward. ‘I’m here now,’ he whispered. ‘We are here.’

      I put my hand to his head as he kissed me, drawing him closer, and the whorl of unruly hair felt springy under the flat of my hand.

      ‘We weren’t going to talk about the war,’ I said at last.

      ‘It would be a mistake to do so. It would be a mistake of profound dimensions. It would even be a blunder of historic proportion and therefore I candidly advise against it. Most certainly I advise against it.’

      I spluttered with surprised laughter. The voice was Roddy Boy’s, his plump circumlocutions captured to perfection.

      ‘And I concur. What’s more, the ambassador agrees with me.’

      This time it was Sandy Allardyce’s faintly self-important drawl. I laughed even harder. Xan was an excellent mimic.

      ‘Good.’ Xan smiled. ‘That’s better.’ He knelt upright and rummaged among the dishes. ‘What have we got here?’

      There was a glazed bowl of dates, and a little dish of plump shelled almonds. He made me open my mouth and popped the food in piece by piece.

      ‘Stop. I’ll explode.’

      In an old Thermos flask there was strong black coffee, and when everything else was finished we drank that from our tin mugs. I saw Xan glance at his watch and I felt a cold draught at the back of my neck. I shivered a little and immediately he put his arm round me.

      ‘Hassan and I have to leave again very early in the morning. I’ll take you home now.’

      I smiled at him, pushing the meaning of tomorrow out of my thoughts, then leaned forward and gave him a lingering kiss. It took a serious effort of will to pull back again.

      ‘That was the very best evening of my life,’ I said.

      ‘Was it? Do you mean that?’

      Once again, his eagerness touched my heart.

      ‘I do.’

      ‘There will be more,’ he promised. ‘Hundreds, no, thousands more. A lifetime of evenings, and mornings and nights.’

      I touched my fingers to his lips, stalling him for now. I couldn’t ask where he was going, or when he would be back. All I could do was to send him off with the certainty that I would wait for him.

      We blew out the candles together and untied the tent flap. We stood side by side and looked across to the Pyramids. And then we turned away from the tent and the view, and walked back hand in hand to the tiny oasis. The men who had been sitting around the fire were gone and the fire itself had burned down to a heap of ash with a heart of dull red embers. Hassan was waiting for us, sitting with his back against the trunk of a palm tree.

      We drove back into the City. At the door to the apartment Xan touched my face. ‘I will be back soon,’ he promised.

      ‘I will be here,’ I said.

      My eyes hurt from staring into the darkness.

      My body aches, deep in the bones, and I am shivering as if with a fever. A little while ago I heard the child wandering about, but the street outside and the house are silent now. She must have fallen asleep. I long for the same but instead there is the patchy, piebald mockery of recall, and fear of losing even that much.

      Always fear. Not of death, but of the other, a living death.

      I think of Ruby’s offer to help me, innocent and calculating, and instead of finding her interesting I am suddenly overwhelmed with irritation, discomfort at the invasion of my solitude, longing for peace and silence.

      The shivering makes my teeth rattle.