‘This is my friend Hassan,’ Xan said quietly.
‘Good evening, Hassan.’
The man nodded at me.
We sat in the back of the car and I watched the shuttered streets gliding by. Excitement and anticipation chased through me and I found that I had to remind myself to breathe. But it was easy to be with Xan; he didn’t talk for the sake of it and he didn’t make me feel that I should chatter and gossip in an attempt to be entertaining.
‘I live there,’ Xan said, pointing up at some balconied windows.
I craned my neck in an effort to see more. ‘Alone?’ I asked.
He laughed. ‘With some other men. You never know quite who’s going to be there. When someone comes back from a picnic in the desert it’s a matter of taking a look around to see if there’s a bed that looks more or less unoccupied. You dump your kitbag and hope for the best. It’s pretty empty at the moment, actually. Not all that surprising, if you know what I mean.’
I knew what he meant by a picnic. We were both quiet as we thought about the recent Allied defeats in Crete and Greece as well as Cyrenaica.
‘Does Jessie James live there too?’
I had liked Captain James and wanted to know what was happening to him.
‘Jess? Yes, when he’s in town. But the Cherry Pickers are away now.’
Jessie’s famous cavalry regiment had charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Now, with armoured vehicles instead of horses and cannon, they were in the line east of Tobruk.
I nodded.
Xan glanced at me as we crossed the English Bridge. We were heading towards Giza and the desert.
‘You’re at GHQ, aren’t you? Who do you work for?’
‘Lieutenant-Colonel Boyce.’
Xan’s smile broadened. ‘Small world, the army. May I drop in and see you in the office one of these days?’
‘I’ll make you a cup of HQ tea. It’s a treat not to be missed.’
His finger rested on my wrist for a second. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’
We were passing through the fields and scrubby mud-brick settlements and lines of palms that marked the western edge of the delta. There was almost no traffic out here, and ahead lay the flat pans and low wind-blown dunes of the desert’s margin. Even at the height of summer the desert nights are bitterly cold, and thinking about it made me draw my shawl closer round my shoulders.
‘Don’t worry,’ Xan said.
I had thought perhaps we were heading for the Mena House Hotel, a popular destination near the Pyramids, but then the car turned in an unfamiliar direction down a narrow unmade track. There were no lights here at all and we drove with only the headlights slicing through the soft darkness. I gave up trying to work out what our destination might be and sat back instead, watching Xan’s dark head outlined against the darkness outside and letting the currents of happiness wash through me.
After a while Xan leaned forward and murmured something in Arabic to Hassan. I was surprised that he knew the language, and yet not surprised.
‘We’re nearly there.’
Directly ahead of us I could make out the smoky glow of a fire, and the black silhouettes of a handful of palm trees. There were some tents and a few people moving between us and the fire. Camels were tethered in a line. We were coming to a tiny oasis.
Hassan brought the car to a halt. Xan and I stepped out where the shingle-and-sand camel track petered out in a sea of fine, soft ripples.
‘Welcome,’ Hassan said to me. ‘Mahubbah. These are my people.’
A circle of men sat close to the fire on upturned oil drums. Through the smoke I could smell the rich scent of food and realised that I was hungrier than I had ever been on arriving at Fleurent’s. One of the men stood up and came towards us. He was old and had a white beard. He was wrapped in a coarse woven blanket.
‘Mahubbah,’ he murmured. He touched his forehead to Xan who returned the salute, then the two men embraced each other.
‘Abu Hassan,’ Xan said respectfully.
I stood in the sand, and fine cool trickles ran into my shoes. I felt strange in my coral-pink silk evening dress with the chill desert breeze blowing strands of hair across my face.
The old man bowed to me and Xan took my arm. He murmured in my ear, ‘Hassan and his father welcome you. They would like you to know that their house is your house, and they are your servants.’
I didn’t know the proper phrases to offer in return for this formal welcome and I tightened my grip on Xan’s arm.
‘Will you tell them I am unworthy of their generosity, but I am proud to be their guest?’
‘Exactly,’ he said warmly, and I listened again to the clicking of unfamiliar Arabic.
Hassan and his father bowed once more and retreated towards the circle of seats and the firelight, leaving Xan and me standing alone.
‘This way,’ he said, pointing away into the darkness. ‘Wait a minute, though.’
He reached into the boot of the car and produced a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and an army greatcoat which he held out to me.
‘Wear this for a moment or two, in case the cold gets too much. Will you take my hand?’
I did so and the warmth of his fingers enveloped mine.
The ghost of a path curved round a swelling dune, the path’s margin marked by low thorny bushes. I stumbled a little in my dancing shoes, but Xan held me tightly. After a few more yards I saw a dark smudge ahead of us, then the glow of lights caught within it.
The shape resolved itself into a tent, a little square structure made of some kind of woven animal hair. There were long tassels hanging from the four corner poles, their filaments lifting in the breeze. We plunged hand in hand through the heavy sand, and Xan drew back the tent flap and stood aside to let me in. The tent was lined with hangings in broad strips of green, black, cream and maroon, and the floor was covered with rugs and piled with embroidered cushions. Lit candles on flat stones burned everywhere, and in the centre of the little room, under a hole in the roof, stood a rough metal brazier full of glowing embers. It was as warm inside the tent as in Lady Gibson Pasha’s ballroom, and in the flickering candlelight it was a hundred times more beautiful.
I caught my breath in a sharp oh of surprise and delight, but then Xan came close behind me and put his big hands over my eyes.
‘Are you ready?’ he murmured, and his breath was warm against my ear. He turned me through a half-circle again, so that I was facing the way we had come in.
‘Ready,’ I answered and his hands lifted.
I blinked, and stared. Ahead of us, framed and cut off from the rest of the world by the dunes, lay the Pyramids. I had never seen them from this viewpoint and it was as if the three great tombs with the prickling sky unrolled behind them were ours alone. Their mass, pinned between the stars and the shapeless desert, was rendered two-dimensional and even more mysterious by the darkness. Silence shrouded the desert as time slipped out of gear 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.