by Sue Margolis
There was only one more customer before lunch, but Chanel managed to sell her a Silver Cross Balmoral pram and a whole load of nursery furniture and baby clothes—including half a dozen Guatemalan romper suits.
“Kerrr-ching,” Chanel declared after the woman had gone. Chanel was on commission and worked out the sale had earned her over £50. She insisted that lunch was on her.
They sat eating bacon and fried egg sandwiches in the tiny kitchen area at the back of the shop. The filling had been Ruby’s idea—not that Chanel had objected. Like Ruby, she was always up for a bacon sandwich smothered in ketchup, but of the two of them, Ruby was far and away the worst junk food junkie. Ruby was the only person she knew who had watched Supersize Me and salivated throughout. Afterward she demolished two Big Macs, large fries and a Coke.
She was aware that for somebody committed to opening a baby-wear shop devoted to all things organic, her love of junk food was—to put it mildly—something of a contradiction. These days, though, she’d stopped trying to explain it. She reasoned that vices were part of being human and lusting after fatty, processed comfort food was hers.
To her credit, she did try to limit her intake of rubbish. She had no wish to end up with a quadruple bypass before she reached menopause, or turn into one of those wobblyarsed lard people you saw on documentaries about Texas. Tonight she would atone for the bacon sandwich with a chickpea salad in a low-fat dressing, but it wouldn’t give her anything like the same olfactory satisfaction or serotonin hit as a hamburger.
While they ate they glanced up at the CCTV screen from time to time, looking out for customers.
“Ooh, look,” Chanel said, picking up her magazine again. “Claudia Planchette’s expecting again.”
“I know,” Ruby said. “There was a piece about it in Hello!”
Ruby looked down at the picture. It was very different from the Hello! photograph. In that one she had been caught unawares with her hair all over the place and no makeup. In this—clearly posed—picture she was a vision of fresh-faced, high-cheekboned loveliness—or as Chanel put it: “Bloody ’ell, look at her. She’s got the hair, the figure, the tits, everything.”
Ruby pointed out that the star was six months pregnant and even though she looked pretty stunning she wasn’t exactly her usual svelte self. Chanel grunted, turned sideways and pointed at her not inconsiderable stomach. “She’s six months gone and she looks smaller than me. God, why do some women get all the blinkin’ genes?”
Ruby laughed and told her it wasn’t about genes, it was about being rich enough to have dieticians, personal trainers and makeup artists on tap.
Chanel kept staring at the photograph. “So, where’s her spiritual guru, then? That Raj Bhojan or whatever he’s called. You never see her in a photograph without him in tow.” Claudia wasn’t simply a staggeringly rich Hollywood actress and mother of Avocado, aged two, she was also a self-proclaimed seeker after truth and spiritual enlightenment.
“Probably off somewhere, putting drops in his third eye,” Ruby remarked. Chanel laughed so much she almost choked on her sandwich. She carried on devouring the article and reading bits out to Ruby. “Blimey, get this: ‘St. Luke’s has agreed to Planchette bringing in her own Ghanaian midwife to deliver the baby. After the birth, in an ancient Ghanaian ritual, the midwife will bury the placenta in the garden of Planchette’s £7.5 million home to ensure the child doesn’t wander from its roots.’
“So, what do you think she’ll call this one?” Chanel went on. “My money’s on Lychee or Quince. Or Pomegranate. Pomegranate Planchette. It’s got a certain ring about it, don’t you reckon?”
They spent the next couple of minutes convulsed with laughter as they came up with even more bizarre names like Paw Paw and Papaya.
“Oh, by the way,” Chanel said when they couldn’t think of any more, “I forgot to mention…Strange coincidence—while you were at St. Luke’s this morning, one of their hospital managers rang to speak to you.”
She explained that the manager, whose name was Jill McNulty, was in charge of the prenatal department. She wanted to know if Ruby would be prepared to give a regular talk to first-time mothers about what they needed to buy for a new baby. “I think you should do it,” Chanel went on. “It’d be great PR for the shop.”
“And not only that,” Ruby said with faux brightness, “it would give me the perfect opportunity to bump into Dr. Double Barrel. Not to mention the American doctor.”
“Oh, come on, you won’t see either of them. When you arrive, this Jill woman will probably whisk you straight into a lecture room and afterward there’ll be a quick cup of something herbal and disgusting and you’ll be on your way.”
Ruby let out a long slow breath. “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “I’m just being silly. I’ll give Jill McNulty a call. It’d be daft to pass up a chance like this.”
Chapter 4
That evening Ruby should have been having dinner at Laura and Jack’s. She hadn’t seen them since they got married a few months ago. They were old friends from her Camden Market days. Jack still ran their stall selling art deco glass and porcelain, while Laura now worked for a small arts theater in Islington where she was in charge of wardrobe. She had rung Ruby to say that Jack was cooking Thai and that she was inviting actors. Seriously cute actors, she’d said.
Then, last Saturday, Ronnie had phoned Ruby at the shop and also invited her to dinner on Monday. Ruby said she would love to have come if she hadn’t already accepted Laura and Jack’s invitation.
“I don’t suppose there’s any possibility,” Ronnie began tentatively, “that you could beg off.”
“I guess I could,” Ruby said, “but what’s so special about me coming on Monday? I can make any other night next week.”
“It’s just that your dad and I decided on the spur to take a short trip to Rome next week and Monday’s the only night we’ve got free before we go.”
Ruby asked what was so vital it couldn’t wait until they got back the following weekend.
“There’s just something I have to tell you, that’s all.”
“But why can’t you tell me now?” Panic suddenly engulfed her. “Mum, there’s nothing the matter, is there? You’re not ill, are you?”
“I’m fine. Honest—and Dad’s fine, too. It’s nothing like that. Please just say you’ll come. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”
“OK, but can’t you just give me a clue about what’s going on?”
“I’d rather not over the phone and anyway I’ve really got to run.” Ronnie couldn’t get off the line fast enough. “I’m meeting a couple of girlfriends for lunch and I’m late. Bye, darling. See you Monday.” That had been it. End of conversation. Her mother had hung up.
For nearly three days Ruby had barely stopped thinking about what could be so important. Now, driving toward her parents’ house in Hendon, she was still trying to work it out. The most likely answer was that her parents were going to announce that they had come into some money. But if they’d had a windfall, surely they would have been bursting with the news. They wouldn’t have kept it a secret.
She knew there was an inheritance in the offing, but Ronnie and Phil had been perfectly open about it. Grandma Esther, her father’s very elderly and ailing mother, had died a few months ago. Maybe she had left a fortune that nobody knew about.
Ruby had always assumed—along with her parents—that Grandma Esther didn’t have much more than a few savings and the flat in Hackney where she and Ruby’s late Grandpa Leo had lived for the last forty years. Her grandparents’ glove manufacturing business had made them a reasonable living, but Ruby never got the impression it had done that well. Phil had always been nagging them to expand and buy more up-to-date sewing machines and cutting equipment, but Grandpa Leo refused to believe new equipment would increase his output. The truth was that neither Leo nor Esther was particularly bright. In the twenties, just after they got married, they decided to emigrate from Germany and make a fr
esh start in New York. They bought boat tickets from some shyster travel agent and ended up in London, thinking it was New York. Family legend had it that they spent the next three months looking for the Statue of Liberty.
Nope, Grandma Esther had left no great fortune. Ruby was sure of it.
If her parents hadn’t had a windfall and neither of them was ill, she had no idea what the big secret could be.
She felt mean having the thought, but ever since Ronnie’s call, Ruby hadn’t been able to stop herself muttering that her mother’s news had better be worth her having canceled on Laura and Jack. Now that Ruby was finally back in the saddle dating-wise, she didn’t take kindly to missing a chance to meet severely cute actors.
Until recently, romantically speaking, she had been going through a bit of a dry spell. Not that this had been forced upon her. It was very much self-imposed.
It had taken her a good three months to get over her last boyfriend, Matt. During that time she’d continued to see her girlfriends, but she hadn’t been remotely interested in meeting new men.
The sad part was that Ruby and Matt had only been going out for eight weeks when the publishing company he worked for offered him the job in Australia. If they’d known each other longer—a year maybe—they would have had a bit of history to fall back on.
Nevertheless, during the short time they had been going out, both had declared their love for each other and were determined to give the relationship across two continents thing a try. She promised she would fly out every couple of months and he said he would do the same. But because of the distance and the jet lag, it was impossible for Ruby to “pop” to Sydney for the weekend, and going for any longer meant leaving Chanel on her own to run the shop.
What made it worse was that since Matt had gone to Sydney to set up an entire new arm of the publishing company, it was impossible for him to take much time off at all, let alone disappear back to London for a week at a time.
Even though they phoned and e-mailed constantly, after a couple of months, the strain of not seeing him got too much.
After several tearful, late-into-the-night discussions with Fi, she ended it with Matt. Not in a letter or e-mail. That would have been unspeakably cruel. Instead, she flew to Sydney. Over a candlelit dinner at one of those trendy Paddington eateries, packed with blissfully happy, doe-eyed young couples, she took his hand and told him as gently as she could that she didn’t think things were working out.
When he said he was struggling with their relationship, too, she felt relieved. It made the whole thing easier to talk about.
Then, after dinner, they went back to his flat and ended up making love. This threw them both into a tailspin of confusion and they stayed up the entire night going round and round in circles trying to find a formula, some way of salvaging it and making it work, but it always came back to the same thing: neither was prepared to put the relationship before their careers.
Just before dawn they decided to take a stroll by the harbor. At one point they sat down on a bench, both staring out into the early morning mist. When their eyes finally met a few minutes later, they knew it was over. They clung to each other and cried.
Despite the clinging and the crying, it was clear to Ruby that there must have been something missing between them from the beginning. Otherwise, surely they would have found a way to make it work. If she’d really loved Matt she would have given up Les Sprogs in a heartbeat and flown out to be with him. If he’d loved her, wouldn’t he have offered to give up his job and find a new one in London? When she gave it some thought, it slowly dawned on her that their relationship had always been a bit odd. Why had she never questioned the amount of time they spent talking about work? The truth was that when they weren’t making love, they were talking shop. It wasn’t humor, affection and a shared view of the world that had bound them together. It was ambition.
Understanding this didn’t stop her feeling sad for ages after the split.
For a while they phoned and e-mailed, but pretty soon communication petered out.
It was only in the last few weeks that she’d felt like dating again, so she’d accepted every party invitation going and had even gone on a couple of disastrous blind dates organized by Fi.
Because Fi was almost obsessive about not losing touch with friends from university and even school, she knew tons of people. It wasn’t so bad when Fi suggested a blind date with one of her old friends. The problem came when the guy in question was a friend of a friend and Fi didn’t have any information to go on—other than “apparently he’s really nice.”
Ruby had gone on two blind dates with men Fi didn’t know firsthand. One turned out to be forty-five, which wouldn’t have been a problem if it hadn’t been for the hairpiece. All through dinner, he kept urging Ruby to tug it to feel how real it was. The second spent the entire evening telling her about his depression and how his shrink said it stemmed from his fear of changing. Ruby decided that this explained his working for the Department of Social Security since graduating, as well as the stains down his shirt.
Fi was the sister Ruby never had. They’d met at Manchester University, where they both studied English. They’d clicked immediately and pretty soon they were staying in each other’s rooms until the small hours, drinking cheap wine and talking about boys and sex.
One particularly boozy night in the first year, they got into a daft competition trying to remember the lines from all their childhood Dr. Seuss books. Ruby was positive she could recite the whole of Fox in Socks. She got as far as “Gooey goo for chewy chewing! That’s what that Goo-Goose is doing” and couldn’t get any further. Fi won because she was able to finish Fox in Socks as well as remembering large chunks of Green Eggs and Ham.
Somehow, from here the Green Eggs and Ham society was formed. Each week a group of English and philosophy students would meet to discuss why he would not eat them on a train or on a plane and whether he had an eating disorder brought on by an emotionally abusive relationship with that Sam I am. Between ten and twenty students showed up every week and afterward they would all go out for a curry and get slaughtered.
After they graduated Ruby set up her market stall at Camden Lock and Fi became an English teacher. She was talented and dedicated and pretty soon she was made head of the department.
Then, four years ago, Laura and Jack moved and invited Ruby to their housewarming party. Ruby took Fi along and Fi met Saul, one of Laura’s “seriously cute” actor friends.
Ruby took an instant liking to Saul and couldn’t have been more delighted when Fi announced a few months later that they were in love.
Fi’s widowed mother, Bridget, now in her late sixties, had always been determined that each of her five daughters should marry “a professional and a good Catholic.” One by one they had all let her down. Two had got hitched to beer-gutted builders, for whom religion held about as much interest as aromatherapy. One had married a Muslim social worker and another was living in sin in Woking with a podiatrist. As it happened, the podiatrist was Catholic, but in Bridget’s eyes, so far down the food chain, careerwise, that it made no difference.
Fi had often told Ruby how pressured she felt to do right by her mother. When she finally plucked up the courage to break the news and tell her that she was not only marrying an actor, but a Jewish actor, Bridget turned white and had to grab the back of a chair to stop herself from collapsing. Then, gazing up at the ceiling, she crossed herself three times and pleaded with the Holy Father to take her now.
In the months leading up to the wedding, Bridget was forever on the phone, begging Fi to call it off. Ruby would never forget visiting Fi one particular evening and sitting listening to her on the phone to Bridget. For over an hour Fi tried to placate her. Finally she got furious and put the phone down on her mother. No sooner had she done this than the phone rang again. Fi could see from the caller display that it was Bridget.
Fi begged Ruby to take it. “You know how much she loves you. She’ll listen to you. Just
tell her what a great bloke Saul is and how much we love each other.”
Ruby took the phone, but she barely got a word in.
“Sweet Jesus, will you tell me how could she do this to me?” came Bridget’s hysterical voice with its heavy southern Irish accent. “God knows marrying some layabout actor is bad enough, but to hitch her wagon to a heathen. You know it was the Jews that betrayed our Lord. How could she commit such a sin? Has she no thought for her mortal soul?”
“You know, Mrs. Gilhooley,” Ruby said, “I’m Jewish.”
“Ah, yes, I know darlin’, but you weren’t one of them heathen Jews that crucified our Lord.”
“But Mrs. Gilhooley, I don’t think Saul was exactly standing there cheering with a two-shekel bucket of popcorn and a can of diet ass’s milk.”
Neither Ruby’s reason nor Fi’s tearful begging and fury got through to Bridget.
Saul’s parents, on the other hand, had no problems with their son marrying a Catholic. They weren’t particularly religious and were happy for the wedding to take place in a Catholic church and for the ceremony to be conducted by a priest and a Reform rabbi working in tandem.
When the big day came, it all went off rather well. Much to everyone’s surprise, Bridget turned up—albeit red eyed, wearing black and clutching her rosary—and if anybody overheard one of Saul’s elderly uncles muttering about the rabbi being so Reform he was a Nazi, nothing was said.
Admittedly, things did get a bit sticky at the point in the service where the priest asked if anybody had any objections to the marriage. Ruby couldn’t help noticing one of Fi’s brothers practically getting Bridget in a half nelson and threatening to strangle her with her rosary beads if she so much as opened her mouth.
BACK IN THE car, Ruby was pulling up outside her parents’ house.
Phil answered the door. She kissed him hello and hung her coat on the end of the banister. Whenever she came home she never failed to notice how much the house had changed in the last few years. Since Phil had started to earn decent money, it was barely recognizable. OK, the place was still full of clutter, the familiar smell of turpentine hung in the air and it was clear that cleaning still wasn’t a top priority chez Silverman, but now there was a posh kitchen, newly laid wooden floors, fresh blinds and trendy furniture. The house had never really felt comfortable when she was growing up. Now it did.