Mourning Ruby

by Helen Dunmore

  After five years Joe Hazell is unable to work because of his injuries. He dies at forty-three.

  Will decides that when he is a man he will get himself into a job where no one can tell him what to do. (But he will not achieve this, because there’s no money or influence to get him into a profession. Will is picked up as an exceptionally clever boy and goes to grammar school on scholarship. His father’s employers pay for his school uniform. He steals from them all the time, gladly.

  But he has to leave school to take a clerical job when his father dies, because his mother needs the money. He will work at a higher level than his father and enter a different class, but he will still be an employee and work in a hierarchy where he is not in control.)

  My father’s RAF greatcoat. Mum putting it over me on winter nights, on top of the bedclothes. The weight of it. Heavy wool which I thought had a smell of the war. The way the coat would slip when I turned over in bed, as if it had a life of its own. The weight of it years after Dad died. The way I would think about the stories Mum told me about Dad. This is important. This must be how Will feels about his father.

  What happened to the coat? Must ask Mum if she remembers. If she has still got it.

  Will hates the thought of being in anyone else’s power. He hates what Madame Blanche does to Florence: her grooming of Florence.

  Madame Blanche. She will die when a German plane (Albatros?) drops a bomb wide after raid on local railway station. She’ll be wearing her lilac kid boots. She looks up and sees the Albatros but doesn’t recognize it. She thinks it’s an English plane. She thinks that Will may be the pilot. She looks up, thinks she recognizes his face through the goggles. The plane dives on her.

  (But she’s a tough practical woman, so this scene must not be loose or over-emotional in any way.)

  Madame Blanche really in love with Florence. Jealous of Florence’s child, not maternal. Grooming Florence to take her place or more.

  Madame Blanche walking in the attics at night, noiseless, spying on her household. Florence and Claire don’t wake.

  One night when she is doing this she’ll find Will and Florence together, sleeping. They won’t wake. Clasped, but not sexual. Florence has had a bad dream. Will clasps her. She feels his arms around her as she falls back into sleep. Moonlight falls on the bed but it’s not romantic at all – in fact it is rather desolate.

  ? Cut the war graveyard scene opening? Have Will live? Florence and Will are together at the end, after the war? The pair of them together, back in Cornwall, at Chysauster. Claire playing hide-and-seek in and out of the ruined houses, above the bones of Will’s ancestors. Violets. Shadows of the past flattened by sun of the present moment –

  No. For fuck’s sake. This is not an idyllic love story.

  *

  I want to look at how things are remembered. How they are memorialized. How Florence fits Will into her history.

  At the beginning she and Claire walk in the raw garden that will become one of the classic graveyards of the First World War. That raw graveyard will become manicured. It will become beautiful because so many crosses stand in line and make different patterns depending from which angle you come upon them. Fifty years later, fifty-seven years later, ninety years. It will be set aside for ever as a place for people to come and remember in a certain way.

  Florence remembers Will but her life goes on, forward, into Claire. Will’s wife gives birth to a boy and tells him stories about his father. They are good stories and they present Will in a favourable light. There’s no one to contradict them and because Will is dead he won’t stand in the way of the version she chooses. And slowly, year by year, she forgets how they sat at the same table and slept in the same bed and became strangers to each other. Instead, she remembers odd moments: sponging him down when he had measles, two months after they were married. ‘Imagine a grown man getting measles!’ he whispered, and his cracked lips smiled at her. The first time he flew solo, when he flew low over the house and she ran out, thinking the noise of the engine was the end of the world.

  ‘And do you know, the shadow of that plane ran right over me,’ she’ll say to Will’s child.

  *

  Will and Florence together in Florence’s attic bed. Whispering. Clasped together after Florence’s nightmare. Complete intimacy, like an intimacy after death. Against this moment he will judge all other moments. But she will not.

  Will confides in Florence. He wants to tell her all the stories of his life. He tells Florence the story of the rip and his father underground. He talks to Florence about flying. For once he is not angry with Florence because of the sexual failure between them. In the dark he talks and she listens. They are like brother and sister, the same information flowing through both of them.

  He understands her withdrawal and her weariness. He clasps her.

  The next day, Will’s flight. He’s afraid. Frizell has gone down in a flamer.

  (By now it’s clear that Will’s relationship with Florence doesn’t and can never include sexual happiness. That’s been arrested in her, if not destroyed. Everything happened prematurely to Florence. Her first blundering, half-wanted and completely unenjoyable sexual experience gave birth to Claire. Since then she’s traded sex for Claire’s survival. Because of the sex Florence sells, Claire is warm, clothed, cherished. She has her mother close to her. She drinks chicken soup and eats fruit from the orchard. She’s surrounded by flowers, chickens, animals. Florence believes that her daughter doesn’t even notice the sound of the guns.

  Will knows what has happened to Florence. But he thinks, maybe, that she’ll change. Given enough time, warmed and cherished, she’ll become again what she might have been. It’s too frightening to contemplate that she can’t change, that life at Madame Blanche’s has destroyed something in her – and that it can’t be undone –)

  – So Will dies before he has to know it fully? But there has been that moment of perfect intimacy between them. He has held her and they have exchanged their stories. He loves her. He loves what she is in his life.

  The graveyard. It comes back to that at the end of the story, as it was in the beginning. Claire and Florence hand in hand again, just the two of them. Will inside the ground. They walk above him but he doesn’t know it.

  Claire and Florence, hand in hand. The sensation of Claire’s hand inside Florence’s, in the field of the dead. (Ruby’s hand.)

  PART THREE

  Flight

  By the time I finish reading Joe’s story, it’s dark. Late and dark. I put the manuscript on the bed and lie back.

  It’s too frightening to contemplate that she can’t change.

  I think about this for a long time, and about all the stories that cover us – me and Adam and Joe – and weigh us down. I think about Florence and Will lying together, whispering. Like an intimacy after death. Yes, that’s possible. I know what it means. Me and Adam in bed, when so much sex had washed through us that it seemed to leave us sexless, beyond ourselves. The night that Ruby was conceived.

  She had her life and it was her own life.

  Hours seem to pass but it’s still only eleven-thirty when I look at the clock. I get up, and take the piece of blue and yellow silk that Mr Damiano gave me. I spread it over the bed. I want to sleep on it tonight. I spread it out carefully, and lie down again, on the piece of fairground silk that’s been travelling with Mr Damiano all his life. I think about the first time the tent went up, and Bella’s eyes watching it billow.

  There are footsteps on the stairs. It’ll be Marie. I snap out my light and Joe’s manuscript rustles as I roll over onto it. If Marie hears no sound and sees no light she’ll go away. She’ll be wanting to talk to me about her daughter’s marriage again. Day and night mean nothing to Marie. She’s as likely to clean the house at midnight as at mid-morning. I lie still.

  The footsteps stop outside my door. There’s a knock. I don’t answer or move a muscle. Another knock. I still do nothing, but suddenly, all over my body, my skin starts to
burn. I know with every cell of myself that it’s not Marie.

  And then his voice says my name.

  25

  Painted Lady

  When shall we meet again, sweetheart?

  When shall we meet again?

  When the oaken leaves that fall from the trees

  Are green and spring up again,

  Are green and spring up again.

  The room is high up, at the top of the house. A gull lands, spreads its wings in balance against the force of the wind, folds them. It begins to strut but the wind is too strong and the gull takes off, back into the current. It beats its way upward on oiled, powerful wings.

  The window is small and high, the light strong. It’s one of those wild, white days of the first autumn gales. No rain yet, but the wind is still rising.

  There are no curtains. There’s no need for blinds or curtains, since nothing overlooks this window. Below it there’s a spread of slate roofs, some of them silvery with age, some with sagging, broken tiles, others smooth and new. Orange lichen has colonized the slate and put a bloom over all the roofs. There are sea glimpses in the distance, and this morning the sea is white with turbulence.

  Two bodies rest on the narrow bed. The woman lies on her stomach, her face sideways, pressed into the man’s shoulder. Her fist hangs loose over the edge of the bed. They are both naked. His skin is pale, hers darker. The duvet has slipped off both of them onto the floor by the bed. The man lies on his back, deeply asleep. There are no pillows, or maybe these have fallen off the bed, too, and lie tumbled under the duvet on the floor. The man sleeps, his face stern and distant. The woman’s face is hidden by the spread of her hair, and there’s a crumpled rag of blue and yellow silk between her thighs. They both lie quite still, as if they have fallen from a great height together, onto this mattress in a small attic room in a little town by the sea. They look as if they may never move again. The wind bangs, the frame of the window creaks and a draught sucks at the door. Nobody stirs.

  We sit cross-legged on my bed, facing each other.

  Outside there are gulls riding on the wind, into the frame of the window and then out of sight. The house creaks and booms with the coming storm.

  We stare at each other. I think of him as he was when he came up the narrow staircase to the flat where I lived with Joe. His hair was red then, and now it is grey. His face is more deeply scored, and this time I know what has put the lines there.

  He’s here now, within touch. He is with me. I can see him, touch him, taste him. I am printing him back onto me, dot by dot by dot. It will take me a lifetime and that’s what I want.

  Marie is banging about two floors down, cleaning the hallway. You can hear her thumping the broom against the skirting boards, even through the noise of the wind. She’s got a vacuum cleaner but she prefers to suffer. She sweats proudly over brooms and buckets. She’s an odd kind of landlady, but maybe there’s no other kind, and so far we’ve got on.

  ‘She takes her underwear off when she does the cleaning,’ I say. Adam smiles. He lifts my wrist and kisses the inside skin. It’s a light kiss at first and then more hungry. He runs his lips up my arm.

  There’s an explosion that buffets the air, and then another. I don’t know what it is.

  ‘It’s the maroons,’ says Adam.

  A yell from downstairs. ‘RebeccA! RebeccA! Lifeboat’s going out! You coming down the harbour?’

  ‘Shall we?’ asks Adam.

  ‘I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘Get your clothes on. We’ll have to be quick.’

  ‘You go on down, Marie, I’ll come in a minute,’ I call. ‘I’m not dressed.’

  The doors of the lifeboat station are open. The edge of the harbour bulges with people as the boat comes down the slipway. Tide’s high enough that she won’t need the tractor to get out. Water’s slopping up the slipway. Even inside the harbour the sea is chopped up, grey and white and wild.

  ‘It’s a yacht off Godrevy. She’s lost her engine and she’s drifting.’

  The way the lifeboat goes out, she makes your eyes sting, even if you know nothing about her. We are pressed tight together by the crowd. She falls to the water and cuts into it and at once she’s off, her engines gunning for the harbour mouth.

  And she’s gone. All round the harbour the lining of people breaks into clots and begins to disperse. The old man beside us is holding a child’s hand. Indicating the child, he says, ‘He’s never seen her go out for real. Only on Lifeboat Day.’

  People are pushing around us, trying to bear us away as he goes on to tell his tale. It was the lifeboat disaster of 1939. He remembers it. He was a boy then but he remembers all the women going down to the harbour in the black of the night. All of them afraid, the night was so bad. The worst he can remember. And waiting for the boat but she didn’t come back, she broke up. One man lived, he was swept over to Gwithian and he was the only one to survive. Some farm people found him when he crawled out of the water. It was morning by then and his wife already thought he was dead, then she got a message. Among all those widows she still had her living man.

  ‘I was eight years old when the lifeboat was lost.’

  We listen and say nothing. The tale is told and the boy tugs at his grandfather’s hand because it’s raining now and they’re getting wet. And so we part. Adam and I walk close, arms linked against the rush of wind. Suddenly everyone’s melted away, back indoors. The old man and the child have vanished. We never even saw Marie.

  The wind shoves us along the bare grey streets, around corners, uphill. Rain streams on us now. Uphill, clinging close, catching my breath.

  We are at the top. We walk heads down, buffeted. There’s a skinny, ripped Tesco bag whirling along the road. Man’s Head crouches to our left with the sea blowing up on it. Porthmeor below is buried in white waves.

  ‘There are surfers out,’ says Adam. ‘Look.’

  There are two worlds, I think. In one of them the surfers put on their wetsuits in the car park and take up their boards. The wild sea is their playground. They call the inside of the waves the green room. In the green room they rehearse for the next wave, and the next, and the next. The wave goes on until autumn folds into winter, winter to spring, and then the summer comes again. They ride the sea and the sea lets them.

  It’s a dreamworld, I think. It’s like the places Mr Damiano makes. If he saw Porthmeor he would recreate it as a Dreamworld. He would make a tent fashioned like the inside of a wave. It would teem with bubbles and there would be the noise of surf in your ears, and the taste of salt.

  In the other world we are opening the iron gate that leads into Barnoon Cemetery. There is a notice saying that dogs are forbidden here. The gate whines as it opens. Adam holds it for me, in case the wind catches it.

  I am baffled. I cannot get my bearings or my breath in all this wind. There’s a place in my mind I can’t get to. I can’t remember where Ruby lies.

  Adam guides me along the grassy path. We turn downhill, between a line of graves. Ruby used to watch the lugger’s brown sails from here, as it came around the Island.

  This isn’t a graveyard where only dead people and mourners come. We used to walk through it in our shorts and sun cream. We would go down to the beach this way, with rolled-up towels and Ruby’s wetsuit. We would stop hereabouts to name what we saw. Over to Clodgy, Man’s Head, Porthmeor, the Island, St Nicholas Chapel, the fishing boats and then the lugger, the Dolly Pentreath with her brown sails, bucking as she passed the Island. Ruby could name them all. I would pick her up, smelling sweetly of Ambre Solaire and baby sweat. She would ride in the crook of my arm and name the places. White sand, black rocks.

  ‘Here she is,’ says Adam. We kneel at the side of the grave, on the wet ground. The grass grows thick around the headstone, where Ruby’s name is printed more sharply than the name of Adam’s grandmother.

  Rain pelts on our backs.

  ‘No, don’t go, let’s stay here,’ I say, although Adam hasn’t spoken.


  ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘I’m not going.’

  Rain blows in white gusts from the sea. I clutch the grass that grows by Ruby’s grave. We don’t want to shelter ourselves. Ruby’s here, and we are here with her.

  I see her. We are walking on the field path north of Zennor Head. The sun is brilliant on her dark-red curls, making them shine blue. It’s late June and we are walking through the foxgloves. Ruby’s ahead, with Adam. Where the furze pushes out over the path, he lifts her so that the prickles won’t scratch her legs, then he sets her down.

  She runs ahead in a sharp spurt of running. She’s seen something we haven’t seen. She runs ahead, then stops. As I come up behind her she turns, her face astonished, her fist held up. A Painted Lady has settled on her hand.

  There is Ruby. The Painted Lady flirts its wings, then spreads them. In a minute it will fly off. Ruby stands neck-high in foxgloves, and the butterfly stays on her hand. Sun strikes on the thick warm dust under the foxgloves. We stand in its cupped heat.

  We gave her a box of compressed cardboard because we didn’t want to crib her in a wooden box with brass fittings.

  They dissolve, they don’t last long.

  Rain pelts on our backs. We are joined, side to side, as if we’d been made that way.

  ‘Come away now,’ says Adam, and I do. I let him lift me up from the soaked earth.

  Final Chapter: Heaven’s Gate

  Have you tumbled from the sky until your wires were shrilly screaming

  And watched the earth go spinning round about?

  Have you felt the hard air beat your face until your eyes were streaming

  Have you turned the solar system inside out?

  Spit’s grooming the Nieuport again. He checks the mounting of the Lewis gun. His repair to the port wingtip is holding up perfectly, where it was shredded three days ago.