and the great wheels of the universe spun free around us. I tilted my head to try to catch a whisper beyond audible range, but all I could hear was the camels coughing as they shifted in their line.
Xan took the greatcoat from my shoulders. The fire was warm on my ankles and bare arms.
‘Do you like it?’ he asked.
I turned my head from the view, meeting his eyes, trying to find a word. ‘Yes,’ I whispered.
He undid the canvas bag he had brought with him and took out a bottle of champagne tied up in an ice bag. He peeled off the foil and eased the cork. Then he burrowed in the bag again, produced two tin mugs and handed them to me. I held them out as he popped the cork and the silvery froth ran into the mugs. We clinked them together.
‘I’m sorry about the glasses. But this is the desert, not Shepheard’s Hotel.’
‘I would rather be here with you, looking at the Pyramids and drinking champagne from a tin mug, than anywhere else in the world.’
‘Really?’ His face suddenly glowed in the candlelight.
‘Yes.’
I was amazed that Xan had taken such pains to surprise me, and that this evening was so important to him. He had planned it so that we stepped straight from the Cairo cocktail circuit into another world, and in my limited experience no one had ever done anything so deft, or so perfectly judged. At the same time he was as eager for my approval as a young boy.
In actual years Xan couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or -six, just three or four years older than me, and I guessed that in other important ways we were contemporaries.
He was probably more experienced with women than I was with men, but neither of us had ever felt anything as dazzling, as momentous as this.
We were not-quite children together. And we were also immortal.
How could we not be?
I lifted the tin mug to my lips. ‘Here’s to us,’ I said and drank my champagne.
‘Here’s to us,’ he echoed.
He took my arm and drew me to the heap of cushions next to the brazier. ‘Are you warm enough? Are you comfortable?’
Ripples of coral-pink silk were crushed between us. I rested my head partly against the cushions and partly against Xan’s shoulder, and saw how the Great Pyramid of Cheops sliced an angle of pitch blackness out of the desert sky.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Iris?’
This was the first time he had spoken my name, rather than teasingly calling me Miss Black.
‘Mm.’
‘Talk to me. Tell me. Let me listen to your voice.’
This moment was a part of Xan’s dreams. Perhaps when he lay in a scraped shelter in the desert, hungry and cold and suspended between remembered horrors and stalking danger, with a pair of boots for a pillow and the butt of his handgun close against his ribs, this was what he had allowed himself to imagine. It was the intimacy of talking with nothing held back, the sharp pang of desire mingled with the sweetness of trust. It was a dream that had become real tonight for both of us.
I reached up and touched his temple. A thin blue vein was just visible beneath the sun-darkened skin.
I told him about growing up as a diplomat’s daughter, shuttled between embassies around the world with loving but distant parents who insisted, when the time came, that boarding school back home was best for me and that homesickness – for a home that I couldn’t quite locate – was to be overcome by people like us, never yielded to.
In his turn, Xan told me about his father who had been a distinguished and decorated commander in the first war. In the years afterwards he had come out to Egypt to expand the family textiles empire, but business had never been his strong point and the Molyneux family set-up had been an eccentric one. Xan had spent much of his boyhood playing with the children of the family servants.
‘So that’s how you know Arabic so well.’
‘Kitchen Arabic, yes. Then I was sent home to school, and after that on to Sandhurst. My father insisted that I was going to be a regular soldier and I was commissioned in 1938. Until I was eighteen or so I used to come out to Alexandria or Cairo for summer holidays. My family weren’t nearly enough the thing to be invited to embassy parties, but maybe you and I saw each other somewhere else? Maybe I sat at the next table to you at Groppi’s one afternoon and envied your ice cream.’
‘You wouldn’t have spared me a glance. I was a plump child and my mother made me wear tussore pinafore dresses and hair ribbons.’
Xan spluttered with laughter. ‘And look at you now.’
‘Where d’you call home?’ I asked.
It was a question that I asked myself often enough, without ever being able to supply a proper answer. It wasn’t the Hampshire village where my parents had lived since my father was invalided out of the Diplomatic Service, or the London that I hardly knew and which in any case was now being flattened by the Luftwaffe. Nor was it the Middle East, and the starchy embassy compounds of my childhood.
Home was a strange, evanescent complex of spicy cooking smells and my mother’s French perfume, the brown arms of my nursemaids, shimmering heat hazes, and jacaranda blooms outlined against a sun-bleached sky.
It was dreams, mostly.
‘Home?’ Xan mused. The candle flames were reflected in his eyes. ‘It’s here,’ he said at length.
‘Cairo?’
‘No, here.’
I understood that he meant our tent with its coloured hangings, the starry night outside and the two of us. I explored the significance of this, allowing it to swell and flower in my mind. I wanted the exact same thing but I was afraid that it was too much to ask. I had lived all my life effectively alone and the prospect of not being alone, the luxury of it, made me feel giddy.
‘Why?’ I ventured to ask and hated the break in my voice. A burning log broke up in the brazier and a shower of powdery sparks flew into the air.
Xan propped himself on one elbow, his face just two inches from mine. ‘Don’t you know why, Iris?’
‘I am not sure. I want to hear you say it.’
He smiled then, lazily confident of us. ‘I saw you walking under the trees at that party, with Sandy Allardyce. I looked at you and I thought that I would give anything to be in Sandy’s place. Then Faria Amman brought you across to our table and I felt so damned triumphant, as if it was the sheer force of my will-power that had brought you there.
‘When I heard your voice, it was exactly how I knew it would be. Your smile was familiar too. It’s not that I think I know you – that would be presumptuous – it’s more that I have dreamed you. You have stepped straight out of a fantasy and become real. Does that sound idiotic? I expect every man who takes you out to dinner says the same thing.’
‘No, they don’t.’
I wanted to tell him that I understood what he meant, if I could have found a way of saying it that didn’t sound conceited. And I wanted to be Xan’s dream.
The night was so perfect, I even believed that I could be.
‘And now I see you aren’t a phantom. It turns out that you have warm skin, and eyes brighter than stars. Your hair’ – he twisted a lock of it round his finger – ‘smells of flowers. So this is where I want to be. This is what I want home to mean.’
His mouth was almost touching mine. As I closed my eyes, I heard several sets of footsteps scuffing through the sand outside the tent.
Xan sat up, grinning, and poured more champagne into the tin mugs.
‘Sayyid