“Bloody thing,” I say to Rick as we push the sofa across the floor of the van. “I don’t remember it being so heavy when I moved in.”

He grins. “Sofas do get heavier over the years. It’s well-known.”

The last to go into the van is a giant leather armchair. Rick’s eyes are red behind his glasses.

“I remember how she used to have a snooze in that chair,” he says. “Before she took to her bed, God bless her.”

I close my eyes and am visited by a sudden vision of hot desert sky and a woman, very young, walking toward me over stony sand.

“God bless you, Rick,” I say.

TWO

Yvette

8 January 1964

He held my hand in the dust. That was the first time he touched me.

Every time the building shook, more ceiling plaster came down. I had one hand on my sister’s shoulder and James was holding my other hand. His grip tightened with each bomb that fell.

He wasn’t meant to be there at all.

Of course, James and I had already met. But this holding of hands, in fear and darkness, has to come first. Such an impression it made! As I write, I taste the dust on my lips all this time later.

—

I said that James wasn’t meant to be there. But it was April 1942, and precious few people were where they should have been. Half of Alexandria had fled to the countryside, unable to bear any more bombing, to be replaced by crowds of foreigners of every conceivable stripe both military and civilian. My mother used to wring her hands. “I can put up with a lot,” she was given to exclaim, “but this jumbling of people is quite intolerable!” She made me laugh. As if social displacement were the worst consequence of the fighting.

My mockery didn’t bother Maman. Without the war, she asserted, my sister Célia would have settled down with a nice, familiar, French-speaking young man from a Levantine commercial family like ours, preferably in a villa in Cleopatra, the same leafy quarter of Alexandria as our parents’ house, so she—Maman—could trot around the corner and visit. Célia would call her children Maurice and Philippe and Lucette and they’d all go to hear Mass together and everything would go on forever.

But Célia had spoiled this scenario. In 1940 she’d fallen in love, heavily and irretrievably, with Flying Officer Peter Ingram, a Hurricane pilot of 274 Squadron, RAF. Now, two years later, Peter having survived the war thus far, she was going to marry him.