The strain on my parents was enormous. Maman couldn’t get through a day without weeping and my father chain-smoked all evening, a thick, worrying vein pulsing down the middle of his forehead. They had come to love Peter, you see, after the initial shock. Maman wept because she dreamed of his death every night, a far from fantastic scenario but thoroughly unhelpful in the circumstances. Papa smoked for the same reason. However, Papa felt that Célia’s choice of husband, provided he stayed alive of course, was anything but disastrous. Maman’s family had been in Egypt for centuries but Papa’s had arrived only eighty years previous from Sidon, and he had a sense of the changeability of things. “You think life will go on forever like this, for people like us,” he used to say to her when I was a child. “As if Alexandria is an old auntie, turning up every spring at Sham el Nessim with trays of eggs for the picnic, wagging her finger at the youngsters, saying, Haha, bet you thought I was dead. But it will come to an end. Mark my words.”

And Papa’s been proved right. It did all come to an end. Alexandria, Alexandrie, by which I mean the city of my youth, exists only in the past. Célia and Peter went to Australia, James and I to England, Maman and Papa to Nice. All of us gone by 1952, taking our lives (and our money: let’s not forget the money) in our hands and making the leap. Landing in foreign lands, rooting down, loving each other, the young having children.

Love, and children. Those are the important things. And keeping going.

—

As our parents had given themselves over to weeping and smoking respectively, Célia and I took it upon ourselves to arrange her wedding. Having flown and fought themselves to absolute shreds during this latest retreat, 274 Squadron had been put on rest for the whole month, quelle miracle, so Célia and Peter had jumped at the chance. I had managed to squeeze the happy couple in at St. Mark’s Anglican for the ceremony, and booked the tea lounge at the Metropole for the reception. All that remained, on the eve of the great day, was to get dressed to the nines and go to a lovely calming piano recital.