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.’