My Former Heart

At half past four tea would be waiting for them: paste sandwiches, bread and butter spread with red jam; or sometimes, as a treat, extra thinly sliced and sprinkled with demerara sugar. Then there would be a piece of the sponge cake which was baked once a fortnight; only a small piece, because it used up such a lot of fat and sugar. It was a matter of pride to Ruth’s grandmother that there should be cake despite the shortages, as if she was not bowing to the Enemy by allowing standards to fall.

A few chickens were kept in an outhouse behind the shrubbery, and once the warmer weather came there was never a shortage of eggs. This was meant to be tremendously lucky, but Ruth had secretly gone off eggs, since being given the task of collecting them, most mornings. She hated the sweetly rotting smell in the henhouse, and covered her nose with her elbow when she went in. She thought she detected something almost snakelike in the furtive sideways glances of the chickens. Once, she found a hen with a dead mouse in its beak, shaking the little corpse as if to loosen its skin, like someone impatient to take a damp overcoat from a guest. After that she found it hard to swallow the runny boiled eggs she was given for breakfast once or twice a week. An egg fluffed up and hidden in a cake was not so bad.

And then two letters came from Iris. She was in Cairo, which gave Ruth a shock. One was addressed to her grandmother, who did not open it at breakfast, but went into her husband’s study with it afterwards, shutting the door quietly behind her. The other was for Ruth.

Darling girl,

It is all the greatest fun here with people from all over the place, New Zealand and Australia and goodness knows where else. I think I may be able to stay on and do my bit to help out, so I hope you will settle nicely with Granny for the time being and be a good girl. I know you will.

One can find all sorts of things in the market, which they call a souk. Queer kinds of fruits like pomegranates and also great vats of powdered dyes in bright colours. Lots of odd-smelling spices in big sacks. Such a change from dreary old London! They drink a kind of tea which is made of mint leaves, rather good.

I’ve seen several camels! Close to they have the longest eyelashes, and when they stand up they make a complaining noise, rather like an old drawer being opened.

Darling, it will do you good, being in the country. I’m sure your uncle will teach you all about nature while you are there, so that you’ll have lots to tell me when I get home. On no account let him take you to watch cricket when the summer begins! It is absolutely deadly, tell him I absolutely forbid it.

When you write, Granny will address the envelope for you to be extra sure your letter reaches me, I’ve sent her the poste restante.

With lots of love,

Mummy

For the time being. What did that mean? Did it mean weeks, or months? She had mentioned cricket and the summer: did that mean Ruth might be here until the summer, or throughout the summer, until autumn came? What could she possibly be doing that would help the war? Iris could type and she was quick at things, but she hadn’t had a job in London. Ruth wasn’t sure that her mother had ever worked at anything. And most importantly she didn’t say whether she’d found Edward. The fact that she didn’t, Ruth reasoned, must mean that she had not. But surely that was why her mother had gone away in the first place, to look for him? So why was she staying on? Why didn’t she carry on travelling, looking for him? Or simply come home?

Ruth didn’t like to ask her grandmother about these things because she thought, although her grandmother didn’t show it, she must have been fearfully worried to have a son missing in the war: so worried that it was never mentioned. Instead she waited until after school, when she was alone with her uncle Christopher. But unusually for Christopher, who was so good at explaining things, he offered no clarification. ‘I really couldn’t say,’ he told her. ‘I’m sure your mother has her reasons.’ Ruth felt a thin trickle of disappointment spreading down her body. It lodged in her chest, like a boiled sweet swallowed the wrong way. That night in bed, she curled the side of her mattress back, so as to reveal the words she had written on the wallpaper. She looked and looked at them, until the letters blurred.

Chapter 2

Even before she had opened her eyes, Iris could sense the brightness at the window, a weight to the light which could only come from snow. The room was cold, much colder than the nights in Cairo had been, but Iris didn’t feel the cold despite her slender frame. The old hotel had been quite empty when they’d first taken it over a few months earlier, hadn’t even had the benefit of electricity or running water. During the big snowstorm, before she’d arrived, they’d run out of kerosene for the lamps. But supplies had begun to arrive and the place was taking shape. They had furnished her room adequately, even if the furniture was shabby. There was a writing table in front of the window, which would do as a dressing table too; and a good comfortable chair with a footstool, set by a low table with a rather dingy lamp; and plenty of clothes hangers in a cupboard which smelled vaguely of cloves. Not that she had all that many clothes with her, certainly not enough warm things for up here in the mountains. She’d have to write to Jocelyn, the friend with whom she’d left a key to the London house, and get her to send some things out: jerseys and her tweed coat and perhaps a couple of dresses for the evenings. One of the things Jimmy was keen for her to do, once they got the place fully established, was to organise entertainments for the men, music and suchlike. It wouldn’t hurt to have a frock or two.

Jimmy was a friend of Edward and Bunny’s, from Cambridge days. It had been pure chance running into him in Cairo. Iris had had no idea he was out in the M.E., although one came across so many familiar faces out here – people one used to run into, for ever ago, at London parties – that she hadn’t been the least bit surprised to see him. Jimmy had always been one for the most tremendous schemes, and mad on skiing of course. Terrifically good at it too. In Cairo he’d told her that he was recruiting for a mountain-training school in the Lebanon. It was just the sort of ambitious, almost foolhardy scheme one would have expected of him. When he mentioned that he was looking for someone to help with the office side of things – to go through lists of men with experience of cold-weather conditions, get in touch with them, order equipment – she at once proposed herself. ‘Done,’ he’d said straight away, grinning. He didn’t enquire as to the particulars of why or how Iris had got to Cairo, nor what she was doing there in the first place. He didn’t ask if she’d ever done this sort of work before, or any work. He wasn’t that sort of person.

The Cedars was on a plateau surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains, all covered in snow. Far in the distance, six thousand feet down beyond the valley, was a glimpse of the Mediterranean. The old hotel took its name from a wood nearby, where some of the trees were said to be more than a thousand years old. There was a wall around it to protect the trees. If Iris had thought of the Lebanon at all before now, it would always have been in connection with the cedars which reached their long wide arms across familiar English lawns, shading the grass, their branches the colour of green baize. But here, in their homeland, nearly all the trees had been cut down, all but this small wood near the hotel. Great swathes of snow collected in their outstretched branches, then fell when the weight became too much for the trees to support. The sound was just like bombs, exploding in the distance. Iris had thought it was a raid the first time she’d heard it, until Jimmy put her right.

Jimmy told her that you could spend the morning skiing up here and then drive down to the coast to bathe in the sea that very afternoon. Not that his notion had much opportunity to be tested, when he and the men were out for almost eight hours a day, sometimes overnighting in tents further up in the mountains, coming back exhausted and frozen. Iris did get down to Beirut every few weeks, but she didn’t bathe, although she’d have liked to. The women there didn’t seem to; there were only men with fishing nets and young boys playing on the beach.

There were already signs of spring down in the city, the almond trees in blossom. It wasn’t so much fun as Cairo of course, but one could dine reasonably well and buy French scent and other treats, and go dancing if one was overnighting. Generally one or other of the officers took her to lunch at the French club, where they had heavenly food: there were even prawns in that delicious pinkish sauce, and sole meunière. Jimmy told her that he’d caused the most frightful embarrassment the first time he’d been to the club. British officers hadn’t been using the place then, but because he’d been doing some liaison for one of the Free French generals he didn’t see why he shouldn’t. He’d gone in and asked for a table, but once he was sitting down he noticed a deathly hush had descended. It turned out he was sitting in the Vichy half of the dining room. He’d been asked to move to the Free French side, and only then had conversation resumed at the other tables. Now the place was frequented by all the English officers. Some of them gave Iris to understand that they disapproved of the ski school. Why should Jimmy – and the Aussies he’d somehow managed to inveigle his way among – be allowed to create a private holiday camp in the mountains? Iris laughed. ‘You should come up,’ she told them. ‘Anything less like a holiday could scarcely be imagined.’

True though this may have been for the men who trained there, to Iris the place did provide a kind of extended vacation, a break from thinking about what to do with her life. Not that she didn’t work, and work hard. There was a great deal to get done: wood for the skis to be ordered from Turkey, supplies to be organised, the men’s letters to send out, reports to be typed up. The whole building smelled as if it was constantly being polished – a familiar and comfortingly English church-hall smell of beeswax and paraffin – but the floors remained scuffed, for these ingredients were used only to make wax for the skis. The furniture was anyway too makeshift to merit polishing. One of the tasks which fell to Iris was to ensure that there were always adequate supplies to make the ski wax. Graphite was another ingredient, which it eventually became impossible to track down; in the end, she’d had to request a huge pile of gramophone records, which they’d ground down, to add to the wax mixture. To Iris this seemed a pity, a waste of music. One of the officers had a wireless, which picked up music stations from Germany and Italy, and before long Jimmy managed to obtain a gramophone from somewhere. When further boxes of gramophone records arrived, Iris kept back some of the better ones to play in the evenings.

Iris often had headaches from spending so long at her desk. But she was glad to be tired and found that she no longer felt restless or on edge. She didn’t have to fret here, as she had at home, about what would happen when Edward came back, how she would explain herself. And it was better for Ruth to be with her grandmother, away from the damp foggy city, in the fresh air; and away from the danger of the city of course. Several people – including her own mother – had let it be known that they’d thought it selfish of Iris to keep the little girl in London with her during the bombing raids.

A couple of doctors had been imported to the school, since fractures and sprains were expected to be a daily occurrence, especially among men who’d never skied before. In fact hardly anyone hurt themselves: Jimmy’s theory was that it helped to actually climb up a mountain before you skied down it, because that way you were strengthening the muscles first. He believed that it was because there were no ski lifts here that people didn’t seem to get hurt as they did in the Alps. But they did get sunburn. Snow blindness too. The Australians in particular were averse to using protective cream or dark glasses. Sometimes at night Iris was kept awake by their horrible screams of pain from the hospital ward across the courtyard.

One of the doctors, Digby Richards, had a friend nearby, a naturalist who was stationed down by the coast, collecting things for the Natural History Museum in London. Digby was going to meet this friend in Tripoli when he next had a day off duty: would Iris like to join them, he wondered, and see the crusader castle? Digby didn’t say much on the drive down, but his friend Michael turned out to be excellent company. The spring weather was a delightful contrast to the snow at the Cedars. Michael had arranged an exotic picnic for them: flat bread more like Bath Olivers than the bread at home, and salty cheese – which he said was made from goat’s milk, but which Iris liked nevertheless – and some olives, with a bottle of red wine from Cyprus. After they’d eaten Michael wandered off, head bowed, while Iris and Digby sat on the coarse grass and looked at the sea, smoking in silence. Within minutes Michael returned with a posy of flowers in his hands.

‘For you,’ he said, pretending to produce the flowers from behind his back with an elaborate flourish.

‘Well, thank you,’ said Iris, smiling.

‘If you care to examine the specimens, you will note that there are several types of iris among them,’ Michael went on, as if he were a teacher and Iris his pupil.

‘Really? I wouldn’t have known. I only know the blue kind that you get in England. Oh, and those rather ugly tall brownish ones with yellow bits. I never care for them much; they look like dead leaves.’

‘These are Mediterranean ones. And wild. They’re quite different.’

‘This looks like a cornflower.’

‘Good girl! It is a close relative, yes. And this one is of course a kind of daisy.’

Iris held the flowers to her nose, inhaling their trace of scent, not floral as much as like hay and blackberries: the smell of faraway English fields in autumn.

Back in the car Michael leant forward from the back seat, telling them things. He said that one of the gorges leading down to the coast was where Adonis had lived, by the source of the river which bore his name. This was where the story of Venus and Adonis came from.

‘It’s terribly romantic, don’t you think?’ he asked Iris, his nose level with her ear so that she could feel his breath, slightly damp, tickling her neck just below her ear lobe. Iris smiled and carried on looking straight ahead.

They stopped at the crusader castle and clambered up, disturbing flicking lizards and fat black beetles as they climbed. The mossy walls were covered in honeysuckle, the honeysuckle busy with sparrows.

‘What will you do when the war’s over?’ Digby asked her, the first question he’d put to her all day.

‘I don’t know. Go home, I s’pose. Carry on as before.’ She was aware of how ungracious she sounded, but a sudden lurch of feeling made her monosyllabic: even as she spoke the words, she knew that she would not be able to continue with her old life. The idea of that life filled her now with panic. There was nothing terrible about it, it was pleasant enough: she had a kind husband, a comfortable house, a child. But to Iris it all felt terribly wrong, as if she’d caught the wrong train and was now speeding, unstoppably, towards a destination miles and miles away from where she was meant to be. She could feel the colour coming to her cheeks and hoped her companions would not notice her blushing. ‘What about you?’ she said.

‘I’d like to travel. I’ve met some super fellows from New Zealand. Might go there for a time, see if I can help out at a hospital.’

‘Nonsense!’ Michael interjected. ‘I know you, Digby. You’ll be tucked up safe and sound up north, same as ever. It’ll be a local practice: elderly ladies in narrow-brimmed hats with varicose veins, farmers with bunions. Anything for a quiet life.’

Digby grinned. ‘We’ll see.’

After the picnic she barely saw Digby for days. Two hundred Greeks arrived at the school, as well as a detachment from the SBS. The doctors had plenty to do, giving them all the once-over before they were sent out to train in the snow, and there was a lot of paperwork for Iris. When Digby appeared at the door of the room she used as an office, to ask whether she’d like to make up a four at bridge after dinner that night, she felt inordinately pleased to see him, as if they’d known one another for years. There was something very endearing about him, she found: his almost absurd height and the prominent bone in the bridge of his nose made him resemble a rather solemn wading bird. She liked his voice and his rather shy sidelong smile. She was fond of Jimmy, but he was always so busy and caught up with running things and anyway he was really from Edward’s past life more than hers. It was nice to find a new friend. This was the first time Iris had made a friend of a man: although she knew men, and liked them, they were generally friends of her husband’s or the husbands of her friends. Or else they hadn’t been friends but boyfriends, which was quite a different thing. Digby was the first man she’d ever made friends with on her own account. Most evenings after that they played cards, and when they had days or afternoons off they went down to the sea somewhere or to a café in a town. Occasionally Michael joined them, reminding Iris what it was like to be flirted with.

‘Has anyone ever told you what marvellous eyes you have?’ Michael asked her, one afternoon.

‘Now, what would you think?’ she said.

‘I think yes. But I bet no one’s told you what colour they are.’

‘No?’ She smiled.

‘Aventurine.’ He looked very pleased with himself, as if he’d produced a winning hand at cards.

‘But that’s cheating!’ exclaimed Iris. ‘I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it looks like.’

‘It looks like your eyes is the thing. It’s tawny-coloured glass, with flecks of gold in it.’

‘Sounds lovely.’

‘It is. You are.’

Iris blushed.

As the spring went on, the snow around the Cedars began to shrink back, exposing ever wider strips of bare, rocky ground. The school was to remain open for the early part of the summer at least, training men in other aspects of mountain warfare, such as rock climbing. One morning, when Iris was at her desk, Digby came in without knocking.

‘Quick! You absolutely must come at once!’ he told her.

She stood up, flustered.

‘Where? What’s happened?’

‘It’s nothing to worry about. Not anything like that, but you must come. Outside. Quickly.’

She followed him along the corridor, out into the courtyard and round the side of the building to a spot where they could see straight down the valley, which sloped away towards the sea. There were already a number of people standing about, looking. And then Iris saw what they were staring at: below them, suspended in the air, hung a great dark cloud which writhed and tumbled in the cool air.

‘Look,’ said Digby, pointing.

‘Goodness!’ said Iris. ‘What on earth is it? Not locusts surely?’

‘If it’s a swarm of bees we might be well advised to get out of the line of fire,’ someone said.

‘They’re too big to be bees.’

‘You don’t think they’re bats, do you?’

‘I hope not.’

‘Are they wee birds?’ someone asked.

‘They must be,’ someone else said.

Everyone stood still as the cloud danced closer and closer, until it was possible to discern individual shapes among its mass. Spots of colour on their wings flashed as they caught the sunlight; others were only white, fluttering upward like handkerchiefs blown from a washing line, caught in a current of air.

‘Butterflies!’ Iris laughed, delighted.

There must have been hundreds of thousands of them, some flying only a few inches above the ground, others as high as a three-storey house. They flew up onto the plateau and then on, up towards the pass. It was as if some invisible dam had burst, and the butterflies were flooding the sky in a swollen river of flight. Almost as remarkable as the sight of them was the silence: they moved as soundlessly as a great shoal of fish. By and by, everyone in the building came out to look. Some of the men were holding out their hats, catching the butterflies in them as easily as if they had been shrimping nets, dangled in a shallow rock pool. Iris put her arm through Digby’s and they stood looking together.

The butterflies kept coming for two days. Everyone talked of little else. Teams who ventured up towards the col said the upper slopes were littered with dead butterflies, their wings darkening as they blotted the moisture from the ever-retreating snow. Iris and Digby collected several from the ground in the courtyard and put them in cigarette boxes, to take to Michael. He’d be able to identify them, they were sure.

‘You don’t mind, do you, the way Michael goes on?’ Digby asked her, as they drove down to the coast, a week after the butterflies had stopped, with the specimens on the back seat. ‘I mean, you don’t find it tiresome the way he …?’

‘Heavens, no,’ said Iris. ‘It’s all quite good-natured. Anyway, he’s amusing.’

‘But you’re not …’

‘Oh no. Absolutely not.’

‘Because of your husband?’ asked Digby. It was the first time in their friendship that he had mentioned her marriage.

‘Not actually.’ Confiding didn’t come readily to Iris; she preferred to live than to talk, but she felt she could trust Digby, that there was an understanding between them.

‘Look, the thing is that there’s been someone else. Someone since I was married, I mean. It all came to a head last year, while Edward was out of the country on service. Then things got rather complicated because he was sent away suddenly, and I didn’t know where he’d been posted – this other man, not Edward. Then I saw him, I was sure it was him, on a newsreel and it was all rather frantic, and one way or another that led me to Cairo …’

Digby was silent.

‘Oh dear. Do you disapprove?’ asked Iris.

‘No. It’s not that,’ said Digby.

‘The thing is that I didn’t find him, and now I’m not sure that it would have been a good idea anyway. I’m not sure that I want to know where he is after all. I mean as long as he’s all right. I’ve been trying to forget about him. It was too much, you see. He isn’t free either, his wife’s … well, perhaps we needn’t go into that. Anyway, I … I certainly wasn’t thinking that Michael … I mean, it’s the last thing …’

‘No. I should think not.’

‘You’re the only one who knows. Jimmy doesn’t know anything about it, and I’d rather he didn’t,’ she said, suddenly regretting her unaccustomed candour. ‘It’s all been rather a muddle. I know I’m entirely at fault, but …’

‘No, of course. I’ll say nothing.’

After this she began to see rather less of Digby. Their nightly card games somehow stopped, although they still kept each other company, not talking much, when they both had a day’s leave. In due course Michael went back to London. Among his luggage were several crates full of carefully wrapped insects, the shells of gastropods and of other molluscs, seed pods, snakeskins, and the butterflies his friends had brought him. Personnel changed too up at the Cedars; people came and went. By now there was a staff of some hundred ski instructors. Extra buildings had had to go up, to accommodate the two thousand students who were billeted at any one time. Jimmy offered Iris the opportunity to return to England if she wanted to, but she chose to stay on. Ruth was happily installed at her grandparents’, busy with her school and a best friend whom she evidently adored, to judge by how often she was mentioned in letters. It was rather a wrench, being away from her, but it was better for Ruth to have the continuity of her life in Malvern. Iris had learned to ski herself and found it exciting. Also, somewhat to her surprise, she realised how much she liked to work, to be of use. She was in no hurry to go back, uncertain as she remained about her future with Edward. She rather imagined she might end up alone, although the thought no longer troubled her.