Red is for Rubies

by Linda Mitchelmore

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Lydie asked, the words all spoken with the same timbre, with no emphasis on any particular word, even though she knew now exactly why Jonty was here. Grace had been working for him. And somehow in the course of that work Grace had had this awful accident.

  Lydie couldn’t bear now to look at Jonty in case it had been his fault. Her feelings were electrified, coursing through her body, making her tremble. Love and hate, longing and regret, fear and hope, were leaching the strength from her.

  Jonty put out a hand to steady her but she brushed it away angrily.

  She should have asked Grace where she was working. With whom. One mention of the name Jonty, even without the added surname of Grant, would have warned Lydie. Maybe she could have found Grace another job. A safer job. There was a first class restaurant by the river looking for experienced staff, wasn’t there? Grace knew all about running restaurants. Lydie had been dreading the moment when she might have to tell Grace the truth – and that moment was hovering, like a threatening storm, over Grace’s still, damaged body.

  ‘Hello, Lydie,’ Jonty said.

  He looked at Lydie and then at Grace. Then at his hand that was clasped tightly around something. He unclasped it and held Grace’s pendant out towards Lydie.

  Seeing it took Lydie’s breath away and she couldn’t speak.

  And for what seemed minutes but was probably only seconds, neither could Jonty.

  ‘A nurse took it from Grace’s neck and gave it to me, not an hour ago. I’m sorry,’ he said at last, his voice a whisper but still it echoed from the hard surfaces in the room.

  ‘Sorry? What happened?’ Lydie asked.

  They were stood, facing one another, her and Jonty. She could see the ruby red of the ceramic and the glint of silver framework of the pendant resting on the palm of Jonty’s outstretched hand. She remembered fashioning the silver, bending it, twisting it to get the shape and design she wanted. She had never made another one the same, not ever. Not even when someone had admired the pendant and asked Lydie if they could make them one too. And she remembered promising never to part with it.

  Jonty stretched his arm further towards her, the pendant a link and yet a chasm between them.

  ‘The nurse took it off her neck. To make things easier for them I suppose. X-rays, scans.’

  ‘I don’t mean what happened with the pendant.’ Lydie made tight balls of her hands, refusing to take it. It was Grace’s now. She turned away from Jonty towards Grace. She bent over her, listening to her breathing just as she’d done when Grace had been a child and snuffling with a cold, or hot from some childhood fever and tossing fretfully in sleep, listening for a rattle that would tell Lydie that pneumonia might have set in and she would have to call an ambulance. But now, Grace was breathing evenly, rhythmically.

  The scent of Grace’s perfume, slight but still there, seemed to fill Lydie’s nostrils as she herself breathed in. Poison. Lydie’s favourite too – almost the only thing mother and daughter had in common. It always had been Grace’s favourite, right from the time when she’d sneaked a squirt from the bottle on Lydie’s dressing-table when she was three years old. Only it hadn’t been a squirt but spray after spray after spray of it so that it had made Grace cough and splutter and revealed her sins.

  ‘I’ll buy you a dozen bottles, Gracie, if only you’ll wake up and be as you were,’ Lydie whispered into Grace’s hair; hair caked with blood and bits of clay. Gently Lydie began to pick off the pieces, making a little pile on the pillow beside Grace’s head. But Grace didn’t stir, her freckles more pronounced now in the waxy whiteness of her skin.

  Grace felt Jonty moving closer towards her.

  ‘She will be all right, won’t she, my daughter?’ Lydie asked without turning round to look at him.

  ‘Our daughter?’ Jonty asked.

  Lydie nodded, unable to speak. Of all the day-dreaming scenarios that Lydie had been through, imagining that moment when Jonty met his daughter, this wasn’t one of them.

  ‘Does she know? About me?’

  ‘No,’ Lydie mouthed. She couldn’t risk Grace waking at that moment and hearing. And then in a louder voice Lydie said, ‘Ralph is her father,’ putting a smidgeon of extra emphasis on the ‘is’. Jonty would know by that stress that she had not told Ralph the truth either.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Jonty said, his voice a wail of anguish. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’ He reached out for a plastic chair, dragged it noisily across the room and sank down into it, dropping his head, covering it with his hands, onto the bed by Grace’s feet.

  ‘She’s got such perfect feet,’ Jonty said.

  ‘Feet?’ Lydie said. She knew she sounded sharp, and she hadn’t meant to. Whatever had happened, Jonty had done the right thing in staying with Grace. So she added, with more gentleness in her voice: ‘Her perfect feet were the first thing I noticed about her when she was born, too.’

  She saw Jonty gulp and swallow, which only served to bring tears to her own eyes and she did some gulping and swallowing of her own.

  ‘We must get a grip,’ Lydie said. ‘It wouldn’t do for Grace to wake up and find us snivelling, would it?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Lydie said, her voice firmer than she felt, ‘what happened. Please.’

  ‘Okay. Grace came for a job at RED. My pottery. Remember it was always my dream to run my own pottery?’

  Lydie nodded.

  ‘Well, I needed another painter in a hurry because Tess upped sticks and left …’

  ‘Tess?’ Lydie asked. His wife? In her dreams Jonty had never married and …

  ‘She worked for me. Twenty. Knew it all. Don’t we all at that age?’

  ‘Go on,’ Lydie said. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if Jonty were to so carelessly explain away his rejection of her as being a victim of his youth. ‘Tell me what happened to Grace.’

  ‘Can I build up to it? It’s important. And Grace is still sleeping.’

  ‘Concussed is the word you’re looking for,’ Lydie said.

  ‘Concussed then. But she’s going to be okay. I was talking to the doctor at the desk. This is all just a precaution, this monitoring.’

  Jonty waved an arm at a barrage of machines and wires that Lydie found alarming in themselves – what were they all for? How long would Grace need to be attached to them?

  ‘So,’ Jonty struggled to go on with his story, ‘Grace turned up, dressed more for a day’s shopping in Oxford Street than messing about with glaze and clay but I was desperate, Drew knew that. Drew works for me too, single father, about Grace’s age I should say. Anyway, he took her on because she’d answered some daft advert he’d put in the Western Morning News, while I was upstairs seeing to Becca and …’

  ‘Becca? Your sister? Becca lives with you? How is …’

  Jonty put up a warning hand to stop Lydie’s question.

  ‘Yes. My sister, Becca. That’s a long story, too, but in prècis – Becca has lost the plot in life. I should have had her sectioned ages ago. She was jealous of Grace, I think. She …’

  ‘Jealous? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s impossible to know what Becca’s thinking most of the time and it’s also probably too scary to know anyway. Becca’s emotions aren’t like a normal person’s, however we define normal. Shall I go on?’

  ‘Please,’ Lydie said, feeling her shoulders tense of their own volition.

  ‘Grace went out to the market to get some clothes more suitable for working in a pottery; dust gets in everything and her clothes are too lovely to spoil with glaze. Drew went after her for some reason. I’d been trying to calm Becca but she got away from me. She’d found a knife, even though I keep them locked up except at meal times obviously. But …’

  ‘Grace hasn’t been knifed, has she?’ Lydie interrupted.

  ‘No. Becca didn’t get to Grace with the knife, don’t worry. But she cut the ropes of the hoist just as Grace and Drew came in. The hoist was full of heavy pottery scu
lptures and it tipped and part of it caught Grace on the head and shoulder. And, well, you know the rest.’

  Jonty stood up and went to the water-cooler in the corner of the cubicle, poured himself a plastic cupful and then another for Lydie.

  Such a normal gesture, Lydie thought, watching him. Something he’d done so many times for Lydie so long ago. It’s what lovers do. What people who are soul mates do – give the other person a drink, or serve them something from a dish and put it on their plate without asking if they’d like it or not, just knowing that they would.

  Lydie took the proffered plastic cup without thanks, knowing Jonty wouldn’t want any because that’s what lovers do, too – accept things without the need for thanks.

  ‘Did you have any inkling before now that Grace was your daughter?’ Lydie asked.

  How clinical her words were; spoken as her father would have spoken them.

  ‘Not a single one. Although thinking about it now, there was something about the way she holds a paintbrush.’

  ‘A paintbrush?’

  ‘I hold it so lightly that sometimes I can barely feel it in my fingers. Grace does that too.’

  ‘I think Grace is coming round,’ Lydie said. ‘Her eyelashes flickered just now, Jonty, and …’

  ‘Jonty?’ Grace said.

  Her voice, Lydie thought, sounded hoarse, harsh, as though her throat was arid. Her eyes were wide open now, peering slowly around the room, orienting herself. She moved her head slowly, grimaced as though in pain. At last her eyes settled on Jonty and a slow, relieved smile turned up the corners of her mouth a little. She reached out a hand towards him, pleadingly.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m here.’ Jonty grasped Grace’s hand in both of his own. ‘And so is your mother.’

  ‘Where’s Jonty?’ Becca screamed. ‘Where? With that trollop no doubt.’

  ‘Quiet, Becca,’ Drew said. ‘Her name is Grace and you damn near killed her. For all we know at this moment you might have done.’

  ‘Good. It’s no less than she deserves.’

  ‘I said quiet!’

  He knew it was pointless shouting at her, being angry with her – the more time he spent alone with Becca, the more he understood how troubled she was, how incapable of rational thought she was. No, any anger he felt was still directed at Mel for walking out on him and Amy. And perhaps it was more frustration that he was feeling anyway at the moment – frustration that other people’s tangled lives were stopping him from being with Amy. She would be wondering where he was, why he wasn’t flipping through the pictures of her favourite Hungry Caterpillar book, making her laugh when he poked the tip of his little finger through the holes in the leaves and the apples on the stiff, cardboard pages.

  As sad as it was that Becca had a doll in a box that she believed was real, or that she was married to Hugh-drop-his-pants-Harris as the press were wont to call him, Drew knew he couldn’t take on Becca’s problems on top of the ones he already had. He wondered now if he should have insisted he went to the hospital with Grace, leaving Jonty with Becca. Had he messed up his chances of making any sort of relationship with Grace for all time? Probably. Bugger, bugger, bugger – he’d quite fancied Grace Marshall, although God only knows why because she certainly didn’t come across as earth-mother material, which – if he was honest – was the sort he needed for Amy. He couldn’t imagine Grace with her London clothes and her estuary accent, finding the patience to sit silently with Amy just looking at things, touching things, smelling things, but having no verbal exchange whatsoever. But then, people could change if the circumstances warranted it. He had.

  ‘He hasn’t noticed. I have.’ Becca’s voice was a whisper now.

  ‘Who hasn’t noticed what?’ Drew asked. ‘Hugh Harris?’

  He’d seen yesterday’s newspaper with Hugh Harris’s name in bold splashed across the front page, lying torn and shredded for the most part on a chair in the kitchen. Something to do with him no doubt, if the conversation he’d had earlier with Jonty was anything to go by.

  ‘Jonty hasn’t noticed.’

  ‘Hasn’t noticed what, Becca?’

  God, this was almost as difficult as talking to Amy – or trying to. But just as Amy was damaged, so too was Becca in a way. It could be a long, long night. And there was no way he was going to risk going to sleep, risk Becca doing yet more damage – to him perhaps. He would humour her, talk to her. Listen. His anger was beginning to subside. Anger was mostly pointless, he knew that really. Anger only had a point if you could change something, make a difference. Becca was beyond change.

  ‘You can tell me, Becca, if you think it would help. I won’t breathe a word.’

  It would help to pass the time, and if he just listened enough to understand, respond, maybe the time until Jonty rang with good news, or got back, would pass all the quicker.

  ‘She’s his girl.’

  Becca folded her arms across her skinny middle, her hands disappearing behind her back. She pressed her lips together tightly, as though she didn’t want to say anything else. Drew saw that her lipstick hadn’t been put on properly and overlapped the edges of her thin lips, giving her a clown-like appearance.

  ‘Who are you talking about? Names?’

  ‘Jonty is that trollop’s father. Her mother was a doctor’s daughter. Lydie something. I forget now. It was a long time ago. Right stuck-up little madam she was. Was doing it with everyone I should think because she married someone else. Broke my Jonty’s heart.’

  ‘How come,’ Drew asked levelly, ‘you know all this when you don’t know fact from fiction most of the time?’ God, but he was up to his neck with all this. Becca was mad. Totally, totally mad. Off the wall.

  ‘Because I do. She’s got the same eyes that trollop has – the same eyes as her trollop mother before her. Met her a few times at a folk club in Bathampton. They don’t have folk clubs today, do they? I saw Paul Simon once, before he was famous. Do you know who Paul Simon is?’

  ‘Yes. Bridge over troubled water.’

  Well, Drew was up almost over the top of his bloody head with troubled water here with Becca at the moment, wasn’t he?

  ‘I like that one,’ Becca said, the same way Amy always used to say she liked it when he read Cinderella to her. Before …

  And Becca really was just like a child, Drew thought. Nothing was important or had depth. Calling Grace names one minute, Paul Simon and folk clubs the next.

  ‘Go on. You were talking about Grace.’

  ‘But she hasn’t got the hair. Not the same hair as her trollop mother. She’s got Jonty’s. Anyone can see that. The way it flops no matter how many times they try and flick it back. And she draws the same way as Jonty. Haven’t you noticed that Andrew?’

  ‘Drew. Not Andrew,’ he corrected her.

  It was the only thing he could correct her on, because now that he thought about it, they did have the same mannerism of flicking back their floppy fringes, and they did draw the same way. But did that prove anything? And did he give a monkey’s if it did?

  ‘Drew’s a surname, not a given name.’

  ‘Well, it’s the one my parents gave me, so Drew it is. Okay?’

  ‘Family history research should only be done through the female line. Did you know that?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Drew was having trouble following Becca’s butterfly mind again.

  ‘It’s the only given. Any passing chancer could be the father, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Put as elegantly as that,’ Drew laughed, ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right. And Jonty is that trollop’s father. I’m right about that. You mark my words I am.’

  ‘Her name is Grace and if you use that word once more, I—’ Drew began, but his words were cut off by the phone’s shrill beep. ‘Oh, there’s the phone.’ He snatched it from its rest. ‘Jonty!’ he snapped.

  ‘Jonty here, Drew? As bad as that is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s no picnic here, that’s for sure. How
’s Grace?’

  ‘I’ll be back soon. She’s woken up. Seems okay, thank God, but they’re keeping her in overnight. Her mother’s here now.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Drew said. ‘Her mother’s name is Lydie? Right or wrong?’

  Time seemed suspended for Drew. He could hear his own breathing, hear Becca’s beside him. He heard the central heating boiler cutting off, and the wind blowing the leafy branches of the tree outside against the window. He could smell Becca’s overly sweet perfume, and the clay in his own fingernails as he held the phone. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his chest, yet his hands felt icy on the warmish plastic of the handset.

  ‘Right,’ Jonty said at last. ‘Too bloody right.’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘A baby, Jonty, a baby. I’m carrying a baby. Your baby.’ Lydie’s eyes were bright with the promise of the future as she saw it – her and Jonty, a baby. Her father would have to let them get married now. She tucked her hand into Jonty’s, felt his fingers stiffen against her instead of clasping her tightly as he usually did. ‘You don’t want us to get married?’

  ‘It’s not that, Lyd.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘I’m not ready to be a father yet.’

  ‘You don’t love me, is that it?’

  ‘No! It’s like I said, I’m not ready to be a father. And I do love you.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘You probably think I’m the biggest shit on the planet right now, but I don’t lie.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Lydie said. ‘I was told Ralph was here but he wasn’t.’

  And she was rather glad he wasn’t now – that he wasn’t here to have witnessed Jonty at Grace’s bedside and for it to have been his name she’d said first when she’d woken up.

  ‘Perhaps the person who said your husband was here thought I was Grace’s father. Well … I am, aren’t I? We’ve establisehed that. But she’s going to be all right, Lyd,’ Jonty said.

  ‘Don’t call me Lyd! That was then, this is now. You forfeited all rights to call me Lyd when you walked away from me. Me and our unborn baby.’ Lydie hurried across the car park, one pace ahead of Jonty.