Iris and Ruby: A gripping, exotic historical novel

This is how I recall it:

It was an airless night thick with the scent of tuberoses.

There were two dozen little round tables set out in a lush garden, candle lanterns hanging in the branches of the mango and mimosa trees, and beyond tall windows a band playing in a panelled ballroom.

I was twenty-two years old, fresh from the wartime austerity of London, drunk on the glamour of Cairo as well as on champagne cocktails.

Giggling, my friend Faria led me over to a table and introduced me to a group of men in evening clothes. There was a bottle of whisky and a phalanx of glasses, cigar smoke competing with the tuberoses.

‘This is Iris Black. Stay right where you are, Jessie, please.’

But the young man with pale yellow hair was already on his feet, his head bent low as he lifted my hand to his mouth. His moustache tickled my fingers.

‘I can’t possibly sit still,’ he murmured. ‘She is too beautiful.’

Inside my head I was still the London typist, making do on a tiny wage in a basement flat in South Ken, but I had learned enough in my weeks in Cairo not to glance over my shoulder in search of whoever the beauty might be. Here, in this exotic garden with the band playing and the orchid presented by my evening’s date pinned to the bodice of my evening dress, I knew that she was me.

‘Frederick James. Captain, Eleventh Hussars,’ he murmured. And then he released my hand and stood up straight. He was slim, not very tall. ‘For some reason, everyone calls me Jessie James.’

His arm crooked and his fist, lightly clenched, rested just for a second on the smooth flank of his dinner jacket.

There were plenty of rather fey young men in Cairo. I had several times heard the RAF boys collectively described as ‘the flying fairies’, but Jessie James didn’t seem to belong in quite the same category. In spite of the hair and the well-tailored evening clothes, he looked tough. His face was sunburned and there was a shadow in his eyes that went against his playful manner.

‘How do you do?’ I said.

‘Ah, she is so nice, our Iris,’ Faria gurgled. ‘A good girl, from a diplomatic family. When she was twelve, you know, her daddy was Head of Chancery right here in Cairo. She is practically a native citizen.’

Faria was one of my two flatmates. Two years older than me, the elegant daughter of a prosperous Anglo-Egyptian family, she had taken me under her wing almost as soon as I arrived. Faria was engaged to the son of one of her father’s business associates and liked to tell everyone that as she was practically married, she was ideally placed to chaperone Sarah and me. Behind the backs of whoever we were talking to she would then deliver a huge wink. In fact, Ali was often away, on business in Alexandria or Beirut or Jerusalem, and Faria would have benefited from the attentions of a chaperone rather more than we did.

We were drawn into the group. Chairs were brought over and placed at the table as the officers eagerly made room. I accepted a glass of whisky, at the same time looking around the glimmering garden for my escort. Sandy Allardyce was one of the young men from the British embassy. He insisted to anyone who would listen that he was desperate to get into uniform, but so far he was still chained to his office desk. I guessed that he felt uncomfortable in the company of so many men who were actually fighting, and that he dealt with this by drinking too much. His pink face had turned red within an hour of our arrival at the party.

‘So you lived here as a young girl?’ one of the officers asked. The man next to him clicked his lighter to a cigarette and I glimpsed his face, briefly lit by the umber flare.

‘Just in the holidays. I was at school in England most of the time.’

Faria was laughing extravagantly at a joke made by one of the others, her head thrown back to reveal her satiny throat and the diamond and pearl drops swinging in her ears.

Jessie leaned forward to command my attention again. ‘Are you looking for Sandy? I saw you dancing with him.’ He had noticed my anxiety.

Gratefully I said, ‘Yes. He brought me to the party. I ought to go and find him. He …’ I was going to add something about the orchid, I was already fingering the waxy tip of one of the petals.

Then the man with the cigarette moved his chair so the light from one of the candle lanterns threw his face into relief. There was a blare of music from the band and a burst of applause as a dance finished. I looked at him and forgot whatever remark I had been on the point of uttering, not that it mattered. Cairo party conversation was profoundly superficial.

The man’s eyes were bright with amusement. He was dark-haired, dark-skinned. He might have appeared saturnine if there hadn’t been so much fun in his face.

He leaned across the table. I saw the way his mouth formed a smile. ‘Don’t dance with Allardyce. And if it’s a choice between Jessie and me – well, that’s not really a choice at all, is it?’

‘Alexander.’ Jessie pouted.

‘Not now, dear,’ the man said. He drew back my chair and I stood up, he put his hand under my arm.

‘Xan Molyneux,’ he said calmly. We walked across the lawn together, under the branches of the trees. The heat-withered grass smelled acrid, nothing like an English garden. I had never felt so far from home, yet so happily and entirely not homesick.

‘I’m Iris.’

‘I know. Faria did introduce you. Is she a friend of yours?’

‘Yes. We share the same flat. Sarah Walker-Wilson lives there too. I suppose you know her?’

I can’t bear it, I thought. Every man in Cairo adores Sarah. In the six weeks since I had moved in, Sarah had not spent a single evening at home.

Xan inclined his head until his cheek almost touched mine.

‘The three flowers of Garden City,’ he murmured. Garden City was the quarter of Cairo where we lived. I wasn’t sure if he was making a joke or not.

We reached the dance floor. Xan’s expression was serene and he was humming the tune as he took me in his arms. He didn’t enquire whether or not I thought it was a jolly band, or if I was going to Mrs Diaz’s shindig in Heliopolis tomorrow night. We just danced. He was a good dancer, but I had had other partners who were better. It was more that Xan gave the steps and the music and me all his attention, which made spinning round a crowded floor to the tootling of an Egyptian band seem singular, invested with a kind of magic. Laughter shone in his face and the pleasure that he was obviously taking in this precise, isolated moment radiated out of him. I felt energy beating like a pulse under the black weft of his coat, transmitting itself through my hands and arms and singing between us, and an answering rhythm began to beat in me. We both felt it and we were swept along, becoming more absorbed in the dance and each other. We looked straight into one another’s eyes, not talking but communicating in a language I had never used before.

That first dance seamlessly ran into the next, and the one after that.

I stopped being drunk on champagne and whisky, and grew intoxicated with excitement and the music and Xan Molyneux’s closeness instead. I saw the bandleader glancing over his shoulder at us, and some other couples were eyeing us too, but I didn’t care and Xan was looking only at me. We had exchanged hardly more than a dozen words but I felt that I knew him already, better than anyone I had met in Cairo.

I also felt a clear, absolute certainty that from now on all things were and would be possible. Happiness became wound up with anticipation to a point of tension that was almost unbearable, and it made me suddenly giddy. As Xan swung us in an exuberant circle I tripped and overbalanced on my high heel. A hot skewer of pain stabbed from my ankle up my calf and I would have fallen if he hadn’t wrapped his arm more tightly round my waist.

‘Are you all right?’

I drew in a breath and blew it out hard to stop myself howling.

‘Just … twisted it.’ The dancers formed a circle round us.

‘Here, I’ll carry you.’ He slid his other arm beneath my thighs, ready to lift me off my feet. At that moment I saw Sandy. He came steaming through the dancers towards us, crimson in the face, the studs popping out of his shirt front. His eyes seemed to swivel in opposite directions.

‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. ‘Molyneux. You … what d’you think you’re doing?’

‘Helping Miss Black to a chair,’ Xan drily replied, straightening up. ‘She has twisted her ankle.’

I took a step away from his side and nearly fell over, Xan immediately lunged to my rescue, and we almost toppled in a heap. As we struggled to right ourselves in a tangle of arms and legs I laughed up at him, in spite of the pain in my ankle, and I heard a wounded bellow from Sandy. He came flailing at Xan and caught the collar of his evening coat. Xan let go of me and twisted round to face Sandy who planted a wild punch on his jaw.

‘Leave my girl alone,’ Sandy shouted, but having landed his awkward blow the belligerence was visibly draining out of him. He gazed around at the circle of onlookers but he couldn’t see any ready support. His big, shiny red face seemed to crumple inwards, oozing whisky from every pore. I watched miserably, balancing on one foot, wanting to tell the sticky air – but for Xan to hear – that I wasn’t Sandy’s girl at all, and feeling ashamed of the impulse.

‘You know, I really don’t want to hit you back, Allardyce,’ Xan drawled. One hand slipped into the pocket of his coat. He sounded amused, not at all perturbed. ‘It would make such a mess.’

‘He’s right, it would,’ another voice chipped in. Jessie James had appeared, with Faria beside him. Her sharp eyes took in everything. She held out her arm and I leaned on it as Sandy caught hold of me on the other side. His hand was hot and damp, and there were little glittering rivulets of sweat running from his hairline to his stiff collar. He jerked his head at Xan and Jessie, but he was already in retreat.

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Are we laughing?’ Jessie innocently asked.

Sandy turned away from them and muttered to me, ‘C’mon, s’get another drink. Be all right.’