Mourning Ruby

by Helen Dunmore

  The thing was to stay in her room. The dark and the Ruby smell melted into me and I hung in time. There were no minutes any more. I didn’t have to hold on.

  ‘I’m here, Ruby,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep. You had a bad dream.’

  I thought that Adam had come home too, and slipped into the house without telling me. He was waiting in bed, feeling the empty space where I belonged. He knew that I’d come soon, when I’d settled Ruby down.

  I didn’t try to touch Ruby, not even to stroke her cheek. She knew I was there.

  ‘Go to sleep, Rubes,’ I said.

  The days were nothing any more. I had to get through them and I understood why Ruby wasn’t there in them. I would look at my watch as the day drew on and know it was only a few hours now, and then I would be with her again.

  One night the phone kept ringing. It rang for twenty rings and then it stopped, but after a brief pause it began to ring again. I couldn’t answer it. When you’re settling a child down you can’t always get to the phone in time. People understand that.

  Ruby’s bedroom was dark and warm. Water sucked and gurgled in her radiator. I must find the key and bleed it, I thought. The noise was loud enough to keep Ruby awake.

  ‘It’s only your radiator, Rubes,’ I said, in case she thought it was something bad. I moved my chair closer to her bed. I didn’t need to touch her. She could always tell when I was there. She felt my presence just as I felt hers.

  ‘I’m here. Go back to sleep,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to be tired and grumpy in the morning.’

  Ruby was restless. I knew she wanted me to sing to her.

  How many miles to Babylon?

  Four score miles and ten.

  Will we get there by candlelight?

  Yes, and back again.

  If your heels are nimble and light

  We may get there by candlelight.

  ‘My heels are nimble and light,’ said Ruby.

  ‘I know they are.’

  ‘Are yours?’

  ‘Not as light as yours. But we’ll get there, Rubes.’

  The light crashed on. It was Adam standing there in his coat. He came across to me and the cold air of outside touched me.

  ‘I heard you talking,’ he said. ‘Rebecca, you’ve got to stop this.’

  Everything shrivelled and went. In front of me there was a flat bed, a lamp, and a toy reindeer. On my lap there was a limp pair of pyjamas.

  ‘She’s gone,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam.

  ‘She’s –’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you let me keep her?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Rebecca. For Christ’s Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Adam,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Ruby, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry –’

  It was the heart of the night. Our best time, the time we always returned to ourselves. We could dissolve the day’s quarrels in a moment. I checked the illuminated face of the alarm clock. Twenty past one. Adam had fallen asleep. He was breathing shallowly, fighting the current of sleep as it tried to carry him into deeper waters. I wondered who was in his dream.

  He must sleep. He must recover himself. He needed eight hours’ sleep, or he wouldn’t be able to work.

  He had to work. When I’d first met him and loved him I’d loved his work too without knowing it, because it was in every part of him, twisted into his fibres. His sureness, his attentiveness, his boldness. His lack of fear when he touched a baby who was little bigger than his hand, and had been startled into life months too soon. I would have shrunk back. I would have been too scared of causing more pain. I would not have dared do anything for fear of doing harm. But Adam wasn’t afraid. He didn’t shrink back and he trusted that what he did would be of use. He held together in his head the whole complex thing, and acted simply. He always talked to the babies, wouldn’t do anything to them without telling them what he was doing.

  He must sleep. I thought of his hands which I knew so well I seemed to know them from the bones outward. Robust hands, and practical and tender. It was too dark for me to see if his hands were still clenched into fists.

  So often I’d thought that our bed was a ship and we were voyaging in it together. I would roll over in the bed and imagine the waves leaping around us, and the fathomless water. Everything that was in us made up the voyage. Our body heat, our dreams, the taste of Adam’s sweat, the juice of sex, the pang of Ruby’s conception. We would go on and on, pushed where the waves took us. We would die in that bed, I believed.

  Nothing in Adam was alien to me. There were unknown things, but nothing alien.

  He groaned, and heaved himself over. Now his back was turned to me.

  The wind was getting up. I’d left the window open and it sucked at the curtain, drawing it in and then letting it belly outwards. I always left our bedroom door open and I couldn’t stop doing it. The door creaked, and moved. Its catch tapped against the frame.

  I must close the door. I must close the window so that the wind doesn’t come in.

  I pushed back the bedclothes and slid out of bed. I went over to the window and the curtain blew into my face. I fumbled between the folds of cloth, found the parting of the curtains and drew them back.

  There was the tree-lined street. The plane trees were tanned orange by the street lights, and they had lost their leaves. Wind was moving in the big, bare branches. The street was blank and still.

  The cold wind made me shiver but I pulled the sash up a little higher.

  On the first day that Ruby came home, we wrapped her cherry-coloured shawl around her in the car seat. We carried her swiftly from the car to the house, and shut the door, and turned the heating up. We would not have let a drop of rain fall on her.

  When it was a cold day but we weren’t sure if it would rain or not, we would stand in the hall and debate which coat she should wear. Her waterproof was not as warm as her fleece-lined coat. And we’d tie on her scarf, even though she didn’t like it. It’ll keep you warm, Rubes. Ruby always spread her fingers out wrong for her gloves. She would have three fingers crammed into one woollen finger, and half the glove limp.

  Ruby, stand still. You are not going out without your gloves.

  When there was frost I would turn her radiator up and creep into her room before we went to bed to check that she hadn’t thrown off her covers. Outside, the frost burned its way into the Turkey fig Adam had planted, and killed it. Inside the house, in her warm room, in the nest of her bed, was Ruby.

  I stood at the window now, and watched the sterile, flickering shadows that the wind made out of bare twigs and branches. She would never be in her bedroom again. The line was cut. I could go into the bedroom and sit beside her bed in the dark but I would not feel her or smell her. The bed would remain blank and her soft toys would slowly lose their characters. She was out there, in the wind and cold. I knew she couldn’t feel it but I flinched at the rain spattering on the windows.

  ‘Put on your boots, Ruby. No, not your fleece, you’ll need your waterproof today. Let’s put your hood up.’

  The rain spattered. We couldn’t shelter her. We had failed.

  ‘Ruby,’ I said, but even as the word left my mouth I knew how thin it would sound. There would never be an answer.

  The house was nothing any more. It was a shell, booming where the weather struck it. It meant nothing.

  I must close the window, I thought. But I couldn’t bring myself to shut the window when Ruby was still outside. I wanted the rain to come in, and the wind. I wanted the house to dissolve.

  15

  Reproaches

  We wove a web in childhood,

  A web of sunny air,

  We dug a spring in infancy,

  Of water pure and fair:

  We sowed in youth a mustard seed,

  We cut an almond rod…

  ‘You reproach yourself,’ said Mr Damiano, when I had finished speaking. I nodded. I h
ad told him everything and now it was quite dark. I hadn’t gone to my flat or showered or unpacked. I had gone straight from Heathrow to the office.

  I was in Mr Damiano’s office, with the stale taste of aeroplanes still in my mouth. My feet ached. Mr Damiano looked tired, too. His eyes were pouchy and black underneath, and his skin was sallow. For the first time, I wondered exactly how old he was.

  ‘You remember how you made the garden, Rebecca?’ asked Mr Damiano. ‘When you first came?’

  I nodded again. It was about two months after I began to work for Mr Damiano that I discovered there was a backyard at the base of the office building. Mr Damiano rented the yard, even though our offices were not on the ground floor.

  ‘For storage,’ he shrugged, when I first asked him about it. But there was nothing stored there.

  The door to the yard was kept locked and bolted. The lock was stiff when I turned the key, as if no one ever bothered to open it. I went down the three steep steps and I was in the yard. It was full of rubbish, and a lean-to shed sagged against the far wall. The yard was paved with greasy flagstones, grained with filth. The walls were high and dirty and they needed pointing here and there, but they were sound. Generations of London soot had gone into the brick. The Clean Air Acts had been passed, but the old dirt had stayed there.

  Sunlight was leaking over the walls and onto the heaps of cardboard and black rubbish bags. I checked my watch and looked at the position of the sun. The yard faced south-west.

  There was a rustle in the corner and I turned sharply. But I saw nothing, even when I went around the yard stirring the piles of rubbish with a stick. Nothing came out. In London you are never more than a few steps from a rat. I knew that.

  I looked at the open door that led into the building. The door, piles of rubbish, boxes, shed, bins. Sound of traffic and footsteps beyond the high walls. I had been here before. I had been born into a place like this. Not my first birth, out of my mother’s body, which I knew nothing about. Nobody remembered it. But my second birth, when Lucia lifted me out of my cardboard shoebox and brought me into the heat of the kitchen. My resurrection had happened in a yard like this.

  I went back up the steps with the key in my pocket, to speak to Mr Damiano.

  I worked on that yard every weekend. I hired ladders and a high-pressure hose. I cleared the rubbish, and dismantled the lean-to. The wood was rotten and the shed fell apart as soon as I pulled at the planks. I filled heavy-duty plastic bags with the rubbish and arranged for a council collection.

  For three weekends I worked on painting the walls. Painting the walls, leaning free from my ladder, thinking of nothing but the sweep of my brush and the tide of Dulux Weathershield in Brilliant White advancing over the bricks. As I painted I was letting light down into the yard. The sun came round and settled strongly. I saw how it would be: white walls, leaf-shadows, light.

  Mr Damiano never came to see what I was doing. He knew about the project but seemed to take no interest in it. I would finish work late on Friday night, then I would be back again on Saturday morning, walking through the early streets in my oldest jeans.

  I didn’t want to plant flowers. I wanted things that belonged to the yard, ferns and ivies that would drip down the walls. There should be a seat and there should be a tall pot at either side of it, but I couldn’t afford to buy them. In time, though, I would do so.

  Next time I came to the garden there was a fig tree in the sunniest corner. It was in a terracotta pot and when I bent down I smelled its musky, fertile scent, and saw tiny figs on the branches.

  The Turkey fig Adam had planted died in the frost. I would buy horticultural fleece this time and mummify this fig tree when frost threatened.

  *

  ‘You remember how you made that garden, Rebecca?’ asked Mr Damiano again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was nothing before. Rubbish.’

  In three years I had bought a seat and table for the garden and the two pots. I had allowed some flowers in. There was a sundial on the wall now, though I didn’t know how to tell the time by it. I liked to sweep the flagstones, trim the ivies, and feed and water the pots. Mr Damiano sat there in the evenings, often, with a bottle of wine on the iron table. The blue smell of his cigarettes filled up the yard. He asked me if I would plant some scented things and so I put a wooden tub of nicotiana and night-scented stock close to the seat.

  ‘That’s right, put them near,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘My sense of smell is poor.’

  ‘Because you smoke.’

  He smoked too much and couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without stopping to wheeze. He liked the garden. He would walk around it in his urban way, peering at the plants as if he didn’t know what they would do next.

  ‘You have the touch for this,’ he would say approvingly, like a man in a restaurant who is a connoisseur of food without knowing how to make the simplest dish. Right from the beginning he spoke to me as if we’d known each other for a long time. Once or twice I wondered if this was because I reminded him of someone. But I put the thought out of my mind. When people say you remind them of someone it means that you remind them of themselves, of their own life, of their own concerns. You are a mirror, that’s all.

  *

  ‘You reproach yourself,’ said Mr Damiano again. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t think about it.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, but not as if agreeing with me. ‘Let’s go downstairs, Rebecca. Let’s go in your garden.’

  It was an August night and still warm. There was a light on the garden wall and when Mr Damiano switched it on everything sprang into focus. The tide of London receded. The orange street-light murk vanished and the sound of traffic dimmed.

  Mr Damiano walked up and down, and I sat on the seat and watched the red point of his cigarette grow bright as he drew on it. The perfume of the nicotiana was strong. I thought of Mr Damiano’s hotels – the Sidney, Lampedusa, Villon, Langland, Sorescu, Cavafy, Sexton and Bishop – and all the people sleeping in them at this moment. Where the time was different, children would be playing with their baskets of toys. The hotels would be brightly lit at their hundreds of windows and they would have the privileged look that such places have at night, seen from a distance. Then, you can believe that the building holds everything you’ve ever wanted.

  Mr Damiano’s gift was to keep that dream just as bright when you came close. As I thought of the hotels he had created and the fact that I was leaving them, they were like great ships in my mind, pulling away from the quay where I stood, lights blazing and music drifting over the gap between us. In London, in New York, in California, Mr Damiano’s ships blew their sirens on the water.

  ‘We should change our olive supplier for Sidney,’ I said.

  ‘Who are we using?’

  ‘I Promessi Sposi. And those napkins won’t work in New York. They’ll think we’re cheap.’

  Mr Damiano sighed. It was hard for him to let go of his best ideas. He’d loved the thought of that patient, tiny darning. As I’ve said before, he had no time for the comfortless clichés of the luxury hotel. The bed heaped with over-stuffed pillows and bolsters, the petty sewing-kit and shoe wipes, the routine health spa toiletries, the gyms and massage services and pretentious bistros, the minibar which electronically registers everything that is taken out of it, the turning-down of the bed by tired middle-aged women who are working without papers, the offering of porn channels and crested writing-paper. Mr Damiano had sent me to visit many such hotels, to learn.

  He wanted to give finesse to the thought of having everything you wanted. He wanted you to believe that your old nurse had known that you were coming and had got out the family napkins and held them up to the light and begun to darn. As you entered the hotel you entered a story where you had your own part, where you were considered, where you knew and were known. If you were afraid to sleep at night (and God knows how many people who have reached the peak of their careers are afraid to sleep at night) you would find a f
ire lit, and a book laid by your bed with the page marked.

  ‘You are sure about the napkins?’ asked Mr Damiano.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘It was a nice idea,’ said Mr Damiano.

  ‘Yes, it was a nice idea.’

  Mr Damiano had stopped walking. He stood beside the seat and rubbed the petals of the night-scented stock between his fingers.

  ‘And so you’re leaving me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mr Damiano rubbed the back of his head. His hair was dark again. It had been greying, just a little, before I left for New York. I wondered if he coloured it himself, or if someone did it for him. And if so, who would it be – what kind of hands –

  ‘I am older than you think,’ said Mr Damiano abruptly. ‘How old do you think I am, Rebecca?’

  ‘Sixty-two? Sixty-three?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am much older than that. In my family we age very slowly. My father’s hair was black at fifty. My mother did not give birth to me until she was almost forty, and then she gave birth again at forty-eight. We age very slowly, if we get the chance to age. You’ve worked well with me, Rebecca. You remember when you came here first? You told me that you knew nothing about hotels, as if that was a disqualification. But it was exactly what I needed. And you reproach yourself, and so do I. Let me sit down and tell you.’

  16

  Flyer and Catcher

  Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night

  To be cut down by the sharp axe of light –

  Mr Damiano had switched off the garden light. His bulk settled on the seat beside me. The dark was soft and comforting. Out of it his voice came heavily.

  ‘I am seventy-one,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘If my sister had lived she would have been sixty-three.’

  ‘What was she called?’

  ‘Bella. It wasn’t her real name, but we always called her Bella. Not that she was so very beautiful, but she was full of life and it looked like beauty.’

  A bird flew suddenly out of the ivy and across the garden. I couldn’t see where it went.