‘Eleven years,’ I said.
‘It’s a long time. You must have been a young bride.’
I nodded, thinking maybe too young.
‘But a lady such as yourself must have had other admirers?’
I was surprised by the openness of the question, but her talk of her fellas and the warm fog of alcohol in my head had numbed me. ‘Yes, one,’ I said, then added quickly, ‘well, no, none actually, none.’ I had been thinking of my past lover my man in the grass, the memory that had been stirred as I sunbathed in the lido, but I couldn’t quite manage her honesty. After all, it had been so long ago that it felt like it had been, well before George, almost like another lifetime.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Really, it was nothing.’
I saw the rest of the party through a shimmer of alcohol: Audrey dancing with the vicar under the bunting; the bath chair crashing into one of the tables; Maud singing ‘God Save the King’ as Jim and John ran round the garden with the Union Jack round their shoulders; the lady in pink clasping her hands in delight at the sight of the blancmange; peals of laughter; empty plates; the chink of wine glasses; jokes, debates and good wishes. But none of this had been my intention – the party had been for Ruby yet I had seen so little of her. Then, before I knew it, the sun had sunk low and people were starting to gather up their coats and bags.
‘Wait!’ I shouted, running frantically into the house. I had bought new yo-yos for the children and I raced upstairs to find them, rummaging through the bedroom cupboard and stuffing them into my pockets. Then I stopped on the top of the landing by the locked door, my mind racing. I had not been into the nursery for nine years, I had never wanted to until now, but I had always known where George had put the key. I fumbled on the top of the door frame and unlocked the door quietly, trying not to disturb George. Then, very quietly, I went into the nursery. The room was in darkness, the curtains drawn, but I saw what I had come for and took it quickly, locking the door behind me and replacing the key in the hope that George would not notice that the room had been disturbed.
Back downstairs, the Union Jack lay abandoned in the kitchen and I took it, throwing it over Ruby’s gift before I carried it outside. Audrey was towing Ethel and Alan towards the house and I heard the growl of Walter’s car on the road.
‘Wait!’ I shouted again. ‘I have presents for the children.’ Then I looked round and raised my voice hopefully: ‘All the children.’
Alan and Ethel took their yo-yos timidly, each saying a quiet thank you.
‘You’re welcome!’ I said cheerfully, feeling giddy inside.
People clustered round and made polite comments: ‘That’ll give you something for the playground!’; ‘What lovely colours!’; ‘The other children will be jealous!’
Henry appeared, his eyes round as he thrust his face between the adults’ legs.
‘Henry, get back!’ yelled Maud.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘There is a gift for him too, there’s gifts for all the children.’ I handed Henry a yo-yo, and then one each to Jim and John. Henry took his shyly and put it in his pocket, while the other two, span them on the end of their strings, the wood cracking on to the garden path.
‘Say thank you to Mrs Marks.’
‘Thank you,’ they chorused.
Then Henry started playing with his yo-yo – the ball dropped to the end of the string, but the lady in pink showed him how to do it and everybody clapped.
‘And now, Ruby,’ I said. ‘Where are you, Ruby?’ People moved out the way as Maud pushed her to the front of the crowd.
‘I’ve got you a special gift,’ I said, then I pulled away the Union Jack with a flourish. The crowd gasped. Then there was a cautious smattering of applause. Ruby’s eyes were wide.
‘Don’t you see, Ruby?’ I said. ‘It’s a rocking horse. It’s your grey mare.’
She swallowed and nodded, glancing quickly up at Maud.
The horse was magnificent. The dust wiped free by the Union Jack, its flanks gleaming in the last rays of sunlight. It stood proudly, muscles tensed in mid gallop, eyes bright and shining.
‘Mrs Marks, you really shouldn’t have,’ said Maud quickly. ‘It really is far too much.’ I was shocked to see that she was blushing. She who usually talked so openly was actually blushing. I looked round at the other guests – there were some raised eyebrows and open mouths. A few of the adults shot glances at each other and then at the horse, and most of the children were standing back as if they were scared to touch it.
Suddenly I became aware of the fog of wine in my head. ‘You’re not too old for a rocking horse, are you Ruby?’ I said quietly.
I don’t think she heard the question but she had found her voice at last. ‘Thank you, Mrs Marks.’
‘Good.’ I clapped my hands, reassured but disappointed that I didn’t see the excitement I had expected. I lifted the rocking horse and handed it to Ruby. It looked massive against her body. She had to twist her shoulder to take hold of it, one of her tiny hands on the belly and another on the neck. Suddenly I felt silly. How would she carry it home?
‘Thank you, Mis-sus-Marks,’ she said again, almost automatically.
I saw Audrey turn and whisper in the pink lady’s ear.
‘Of course, it’s for all of you really,’ I said loudly. ‘Henry is just not big enough to ride it yet, so for now it’s for Ruby.’
Audrey had still not broken away from the pink lady’s ear.
‘Oh, no, it’s nothing,’ I said loudly in response to the muted thanks. Then I felt myself blushing again and said: ‘You’d better get moving, Maud, if you want to get home before it gets dark.’
‘Yes,’ she said quickly, grabbing Henry by the hand, her arm round Jim and John like a protective wing. ‘Come along you lot. You heard the lady. Shake a leg!’
I stood in the drive and waved them goodbye. They made a strange bunch of silhouettes on the road – Mrs Brown walking quickly, almost trotting, my stained dress trailing from her bag, and Jim and John running ahead, swinging round the streetlights. Ruby moved slowly behind them, dragged sideways by the massive gift, moving along the pavement like a big, slow crab. I watched them until they got to the war memorial, all the time not one of them stopping to help Ruby.
Then I turned back to the house, my eye catching a crack of light between the curtains in the bedroom. George’s face was in the window, his eyes following Ruby down the road.
14
Ruby
My name is Ruby Brown. But now there is another name on Emma’s lips: Violet. And violets bring bad luck.
The morning after Emma’s party Maudy had a sore head. She staggered out of bed and slumped in her chair with her head in her hands. She didn’t even shout when Jim dragged the rocking horse out of the back room, didn’t even stand up or slap him, she just sat all hunched and groaning.
Jim and John climbed all over that horse. They rocked it hard and with each rock it shot forward, the rocker grating on the floor. Jim spied Smokey, the whiskery buffalo, and shot a stick at him with a bow made from bloomer thread. Andy pulled the horse round and round by the tail, Jim and John still riding hard, cheering and whooping like Red Indians. That horse was never going to be my grand grey mare. No, this was always going to be a cowboy steed – shot with arrows, hit, battered and ridden hard. A poor old nag sent to the knackers, worked to death for the glue factory.
The rocking horse was already dead when Maudy stood up and screamed at us. She heaved its poor carcass above our heads and threw it out into the yard, then she bolted the door behind it, locking Jim and John out for good measure. She had work to do, she said. She had to work to feed us because we couldn’t always rely on the charity of hoity-toity people who could afford blancmange and wine. Then she let out a little sniff and sucked her mouth in tight until it looked like a dog’s bum. Maudy was upset, but this wasn’t her usual screaming raging upset, this was something different, like a sickliness she caught f
rom Emma’s party and hadn’t been able to shake off. So I went all soft and said that I would help her. Maudy beamed brown teeth. I was her special girl again.
Maudy had a problem, you see. When the van had showed up that week there weren’t any aprons inside, just a load of white cotton sheets and a pattern for ladies’ gloves. Maudy was no good at gloves. The gloves she made were baggy, with fingers like sausages. She knew that Walker’s could never sell those sausage-gloves to fashionable ladies. She’d slaved over them all week, pinning out nice thin little paper fingers and drawing round them with charcoal. But those nice thin little fingers looked like sausages once the gloves were made and Maudy’s charcoal had stained the cotton, so the dainty white gloves Maudy wanted were now all fat and baggy and had to be dyed to cover up the charcoal smudges.
Maudy tore open a big packet of red carmine dye and mixed it in a little copper basin. She cursed as some of the carmine spilled onto the draining board, trickles of red oozing from the dark powder. Soon the dye was boiling away on the stove, and the whole house stank like a chicken on fire. When it was ready, she poured the dye into buckets and stirred the gloves in their bloody water, the red soaking into the white. She forgot all about my offer of help and even when I reminded her, she just shook her head as if my help would only knock over the buckets or stop the dye from fixing. She worked for hours, kneeling on the floor until the sun was high in the sky and the day grew hotter and hotter. Then at last she sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her forehead.
‘This’ll be the last of the red,’ she said. ‘Not enough for another bucket but at least it won’t go to waste while I gets my wind back.’ She poured a stream of carmine into the bucket and started squeezing the dye through a wodge of material.
‘What’s that?’ I said. ‘It’s not gloves.’
‘It’s just some of your old hair ribbons, Ruby, oh, and a dress of Mrs Marks’s. She said it had grass stains on. She couldn’t get them off. I might as well throw it in with the gloves. Only carmine will be strong enough to cover these stains.’
‘Why are you doing that for her? She ain’t paying you!’ Andy stood in the doorway, pointing to his exercise book as if the dyed dress would upset all his sums. ‘Don’t you know anything about the Depression? There’s people like us in the North that have to take the dole and you’re doing this for free!’
‘She’s a friend,’ said Maudy firmly. ‘That’s what friends do, women friends anyway. I guess it’s too much for you men to understand.’ She looked at me and winked, just to make sure that I didn’t forget – I was a girl, her special girl.
‘I want to see.’ I sat down on the floor next to her.
Maudy held the wet dress up against her chest, her face peeping over the top. ‘She must have been a tiny little thing when she wore this,’ she said. ‘Still it’s a woman’s dress, not a child’s, you can tell by the tailoring.’
It was a small dress, more like a pinafore with hardly any skirt, and sleeves only just past the shoulders and a low waist. I imagined a little Emma, invisible inside.
‘It’s a bit old-fashioned now though,’ said Maudy. ‘Even I know that much – that big bow on the collar and all that scalloping on the hem dates it. I used to see young ladies wearing this sort of thing back in the twenties. She must have had it a while, probably wore it when she was courting.’
‘I wonder why she kept it all this time,’ I said.
‘Oh, I dunno. I doubt she would fit into it now. Not that she’s fat, mind, not like your Aunt Sadie, but women of a certain age can’t help filling out a bit. Grass stains too! Grass stains on the bum – it’s not like a lady to get grass stains.’ Maudy drew herself up and twisted her voice like Emma’s: ‘Not a lady from Sunningdale Estates!’ She chuckled and dug her elbow into my ribs. ‘Grass stains on the bum, what can she have been doing?’
I ignored her. It didn’t feel right to joke about a lady like Emma. I thought to myself that maybe Emma was sad, maybe she wanted to remember some happy times. People keep things for all sorts of reasons, Maudy herself was always saying that.
Maudy ran her hands over the dress, squeezing out the water. ‘Still, she must have looked lovely in it when she were younger,’ she said. ‘No fat flab back then.’ She opened up the fabric so she could see the top of the dress again and held it up, a hand on each little sleeve. Then she started to hum to herself, a strange old-fashioned tune, and turned the dress from side to side, making it dance in front of her, the dye tinkling back into the bucket like the most delicate piano notes. Then she stopped suddenly and let out a long sigh. She dipped the dress forward, making it bow to her and dunked it back into the bucket, the invisible Emma swirling around in the red.
‘You shouldn’t envy her,’ said Andy. ‘Her kind can afford to look swish. Even back then her husband’s money was paying for that dress. You shouldn’t be doing this, not people like us, for people like her. It’s like you’re her slave.’
‘I told you,’ said Maudy, ‘she’s a friend.’ But this time she didn’t sound like she meant it at all.
But Andy wasn’t finished: ‘It ain’t like she can’t afford to pay you,’ he said. He held up his hand, four shillings between his fingers.
‘Where did you get that?’ shouted Maudy.
‘It’s her wages,’ he said. ‘She must have forgotten to pick them up. Funny – you think she’d need them to afford all that wine and blancmange and--’
‘Enough!’ Maudy jumped up and slapped the coins from his fingers.
Andy looked stunned. They both stared at each other and neither moved to get the coins. Maudy’s mouth tightened. She sat back on her heels and rocked. I looked at the dress in the bucket and saw Emma drowning in blood.
Maudy went all quiet after that. I fancied that she might be a statue if it wasn’t for the hollow in her cheek and the pinch of her teeth where she chewed the inside of her mouth. It was something she’d been doing for a week or so. It was a mouth ulcer, she said, it was giving her gyp and our carry-on was only making it worse. Andy made his excuses and left, murmuring something about checking that Jim-John and Henry weren’t scrumping. But he took his book with him and the blanket that he lay on when he napped in the barn.
Then it was just Maudy and me and suddenly she had forgotten about her ulcer because I was her special girl. And her special girl had to work hard. Maudy fished the red gloves from the buckets and took them out to the yard. She knelt at the mangle feeding the gloves through the rollers while I turned the handle. When the water had stopped splattering my shoes, she stopped and hung the gloves on the clothes line to dry. It was only when Maudy was sure that all the gloves were drying that she went back to fetch Emma’s dress. She forced it hard through the mangle, again and again, then pegged it high on the line, where it hung, limp and dripping with blood.
*
That evening Clarence came home drunk, a bloody sheen on the flagstones when he kicked a bucket across the kitchen floor.
‘What the hell?’ He reeled around, looking for someone to blame; the wife, the girl, the cat, the bucket, but with too many culprits to choose from, he just slumped in his chair. ‘Can’t I come home to a normal house, like any normal man?’ he slurred.
For a moment I agreed with him. He wanted a normal home with four windows and a door in the middle and children who went to Sunday school and a wife who kissed him when he came in. But he wasn’t normal either – no more than we were, so instead he yelled at Maudy, his arms flailing and spit flying from his mouth. But Maudy was used to it and she carried on working, ringing gloves over the buckets, her back to him as if he wasn’t there at all.
‘I will move the buckets, Clarence,’ she said at last, ‘just as soon as I am finished with them.’
I didn’t get up to help. I didn’t want to risk moving when Clarence was like that. I could smell him over the carmine; a smell like whisky and cigarettes and a wet dog and old muddied boots and rotting leaves, like the back of your mouth when you wake up.
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Then his eyes changed and I saw the madness again – the madness I saw when the stove got broken and the Bad Thing happened. ‘Ruby—’
I felt my stomach drop but then there was a loud bang and Maudy stood with a bucket at her feet, a pool of red spreading over the floor.
‘For God’s sake, woman! You’re giving me a headache,’ he yelled.
‘No, Clarence,’ she said firmly, ‘the whisky did that.’
He turned to me again: ‘What are you staring at, Pox-face?’
I looked down and bit my tongue, hard.
‘Don’t take it out on her, Clarence. What’s she ever done to you?’
He answered by calling her a stupid bitch and me a leper, but by then he had no energy to shout, he was just muttering and all the spite was gone.
When I next looked up, his eyes were rolling and his head was nodding forwards. I didn’t dare move until I heard his breath slow and the air wheeze from his nose.
‘You did the right thing,’ whispered Maudy. ‘It’s best not to rattle his cage.’ She sat down next to me like her body weighed the earth. ‘You mix with Sunningdale Estate types now, my girl, the blancmange-eating garden-party types. You can’t have the likes of Clarence bringing you down.’
‘How can you say that!’ Andy stood in the doorway, shock all over his face. ‘How can you say that about Clarence?’
‘Shhh!’ Maudy pointed to the sleeping Clarence and Andy came in slowly, followed by Jim-John and Henry, wide-eyed and clutching apples.
‘Look, all I’m saying is that we have friends in Missensham now, on the Sunningdale Estates, it might be best for you boys too. Andy, it don’t matter how many numbers you write in that book of yours, you won’t stand a hope in hell of being a clerk at Walker’s if you keep company with—’
‘Bitch!’ yelled Andy. ‘You are trying to tear this family apart. You are always making trouble. I am proud of Clarence. Much prouder than I am of—’
The Liar Page 9
