Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas

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. 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