by Adle Geras
Sex with Nick was all very well, Claudia thought twenty minutes later, but when it was over the bloody man seemed quite ready to go and find some other amusement almost at once, instead of … instead of what? What did she want from him, really? Would she have liked Nick to fling himself at her feet and declare endless love? That wasn’t going to happen. He’d never said a word to make her think so. All he was feeling, all she was feeling, if she was honest with herself, was strong desire added to a bit of boredom and distance from the normal world. Claudia had been telling herself this ever since New Year’s Eve and it hadn’t helped much. She wouldn’t have wanted a permanent relationship but the fact that he was so clearly not interested in one either wasn’t exactly flattering.
He was standing by the door now, on the point of going back to the house.
‘I’ll see you later, then,’ he smiled. ‘Ciao.’
He was off and away with a wave of his hand. Blast and damn his casual attitude! She peered at herself in the mirror. Better pull myself together before Hugo sees me, she thought. I look as though I’ve been unravelled.
*
Hugo didn’t know where to sit. If this had been a scene he was directing, he would probably have said that there was no logical reason for this man, himself, to be standing next to the door, leaning against the wall. Go and find a chair for God’s sake, he’d have cried. Balance things up a bit. He glanced to his left and there was the famous portrait of Hester Fielding, the one known as A Backward Glance. This was the image people all over the world had of her, a beautiful, perfectly dressed, delicate and ethereal ballerina. If they could see her now, sitting very upright on the chaise-longue, they’d probably not recognise her. Edmund was standing behind her, with his hand very near her, ready, it seemed to Hugo, to comfort her.
For the first time since he came to Wychwood, Hugo saw things about Hester that he’d never noticed before: dark violet shadows under her eyes, threads of grey at her hairline, a tremor around her mouth and her graceful hands looking older than they should have done, with the beginnings of what Claudia called ‘grave-spots’ here and there. Poor Claudia! She was forever holding her arms out in front of her, flapping her wrists as she examined her skin, in dread of their sudden appearance. Hester’s head was bent. She was waiting for Ruby to speak.
I have not the slightest notion of what’s going on, Hugo thought, but it’s serious. He looked at Ruby. She was even more changed than Hester. She sat on an upright chair on the other side of the small table by the chaise-longue. Her face looked as though it was melting. The tears she’d shed seemed to have eroded the flesh of her cheeks and dragged it out of shape. Her normally neat, rather schoolmarm-ish appearance had utterly disintegrated. While she was still in her faint Hester had opened the neck of her blouse, undoing the first few buttons and Ruby hadn’t done them up again. Her hair was disordered, messy. She was like someone coming round after being drunk. George had come in with his wife and was uncharacteristically quiet. He was standing at the window, a little removed from everyone else, but his eyes remained fixed on Ruby.
Hester was the first to speak.
‘Tell us everything. Take as long as you like. There’s no hurry at all.’
Ruby wiped her nose with a handkerchief.
‘I don’t know how to say it, except to say it straight out, Hester. Your little baby, he never died. He was adopted. I didn’t bury the necklace. As you saw. I gave it to the lady from the adoption agency.’
‘My baby? What are you saying? My baby lived?’ Hester was short of breath. She closed her eyes for a few seconds. Then she opened them and looked at Hugo. ‘Does the chain belong to you, Hugo?’
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And, I remember this now, almost the first time we met, you told me you were adopted.’
Hugo felt as though something had shifted in his brain. Had he understood correctly? What was Hester really saying. He couldn’t take it in, not any of it. He concentrated only on answering what he’d been asked.
‘My mother never hid it,’ he said. ‘She made much of it, actually. She used to say that they’d chosen me specially. That they hadn’t been able to have their own children, but the moment they saw me, they knew I was theirs. I never felt as though I wasn’t their child. When I was twenty-one, my mother gave me the tortoiseshell box and explained that, well, that it had belonged to my birth mother, who wanted me to keep it safe. And I have. I have kept it safe. Forgive me if I’ve got it wrong, but I think that maybe …’
‘Look at my chain, Hugo. It’s the other half of what was once a single chain. My grandmother had it cut in half. Your half. I thought I’d buried it with my dead son, but …’ Her voice faltered. When she spoke again, Hugo had to strain to hear what she was saying. ‘I think you’re my son. I can’t … haven’t … I don’t know the words to say what I’m feeling. All the different pieces of my life, everything’s different now. I’m your mother, Hugo.’
Hugo felt a mixture of complete bewilderment and shock. He found that his heart was beating far too quickly and he knew that if he spoke his voice wouldn’t be steady. He longed to do something, go to Hester, put his arms around her. Her voice – she hadn’t sounded in the least like herself. He could hear that she was almost breathless with emotion. But the moment passed and she was talking to Ruby again, and sitting up straighter.
‘There’s so much I want to ask you, Ruby,’ she said. ‘And I’ve just remembered something Madame Olga said to me on her deathbed. She asked me to forgive her. I’ve never understood why till now. Oh, I can’t … I don’t know where to begin.’
Edmund put his hand on Hester’s shoulder and spoke gently to Ruby. ‘Why don’t you tell us what happened? Tell us everything. Hugo needs to know about it as much as Hester does.’
‘And please,’ Hester added, ‘don’t leave anything out to spare our feelings. I want to know the truth; every detail.’
Ruby took the damp handkerchief she was holding and began to pick at the lace trimming.
‘It was Madame Olga’s idea. She was the one who thought of it, though Mr Cranley helped her. He helped her do everything. The money mostly came from her, but he told the stories that everyone believed, that you’d had some kind of nervous breakdown. They never wanted you to have a baby, Hester. Madame Olga said it would be the ruin of your career. Impossible to be a dancer and a mother was how she put it.’
Hugo noticed Hester shivering.
‘No one wanted to hurt you, Hester. You must believe that. I didn’t know you properly when I was hired to look after you, but Madame Olga and Mr Cranley were devoted to you. I know how that sounds. Ridiculous and downright wrong when I think about what we did to you, how we deceived you over years and years. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? You can’t start a lie without carrying it through to the end. While Madame Olga was alive, she persuaded me every day that we’d done the right thing. How can this not be good, she’d say as the reviews came in for your performances. Don’t forget that, Hester. The whole world has watched you dance and been made happier, made better, Madame Olga would say, because of your work. You’ve added something to their lives and it’s not something insignificant or trivial. And you’ve created all this.’ She waved a hand to take in the room and more than that, the whole of Wychwood and the Arcadia and the Festival. ‘I’m crying again. I’m sorry … I’ll stop …’ She put her handkerchief to her eyes again.
Hugo spoke. ‘I had no idea about any of this. I feel … I feel quite shaken. I wasn’t even one of those adopted children who long to know who their birth parents are. I was happy in my family. I’m ashamed to say I scarcely gave my adoption any thought. But poor Hester.’
‘Yes,’ said Edmund gently. ‘It’s Hester who’s spent more than thirty years mourning a dead baby. Unable even to let the world know that she’d had a baby, because that old Russian dragon decided it would be bad for her image. And we all fell in with her wishes. You can’t believe it now, Hugo, but in those days, not so long ago,
either, stars were supposed to be unblemished. Perfect and better than ordinary mortals. I knew about it, but no one else did as far as I know. Everyone was very discreet.’
Ruby wiped her eyes again. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t stop crying. I don’t know what to say to any of you. I’ve done something so dreadful.’
Hugo saw that George was frowning. He wanted, you could see, to go to Ruby and take her in his arms, but was stopping himself. Ruby was still speaking.
‘You’ve always known there was something, haven’t you?’ she said to Hester. ‘I’ve seen you looking at me sometimes. Wondering what was wrong if I was unhappy. Poor George thought when he married me that I sometimes had bad moods. He got used to it, but it’s been hard for us. George and me, we’ve been through everything together. If only you knew how often I nearly told you everything!’
‘Why didn’t you? Why couldn’t you have told me when I stopped dancing? That was years and years ago. I needn’t have—’
‘I’d given my word, and they’d paid me good money to keep my silence. Money that made such a difference to my family. There are so many of us. My poor mother could never cope on her own and I saw the money as a chance for them to … well, never mind, I shouldn’t have taken the job. That’s what I say to myself, but then I think if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, and they wouldn’t have looked after you properly. Not like me. I’ve …’ Ruby looked up at Hester. ‘I’ve loved you, Hester. It’ll sound strange to you, I know, but everything I did was because I loved you.’
Hester began to cry. Edmund knelt beside her.
‘Take this.’ He handed her a white handkerchief.
‘Thank you,’ she said and wiped her eyes, then she turned to Ruby. ‘How could you, Ruby? I don’t understand how you could have deceived me, all these years. Surely you could have … But of course I know you love me, and you’ve helped me so much, for years and years. I can’t take it in. I’d never have done anything, any of this, at Wychwood without you. I’m sorry. I can’t help the tears.’
Hugo approached Hester’s chair and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ll wait till you’re ready, Hester. It’s all right.’
Ruby went on, ‘I know I should never have given in to Madame Olga. She had these eyes, you see. They’d look right into you, as though she was hypnotising you, and they were a kind of browny yellow and you couldn’t argue with her. Hester has possibilities of greatness, that’s what she said. Imagine if we were to deprive her of fame that will last for ever. Imagine how sad she will be if she does not dance. Think of what you are helping to create, Ruby. So I agreed. I said I’d look after you till the birth was over, but after that, well, I asked if I could stay. That’s the truth. It wasn’t Madame Olga’s fault. She and Mr Cranley would have let me go, given me my money and sent me away, but I couldn’t bear to leave you. You had no mother to look after you. I begged her to find me something I could do for you once you began to dance again. But what is there for you in a theatre, Madame Olga said. I told her about the sewing and Mr Cranley mentioned that I’d sometimes helped out in the wardrobe department at the Royalty and so—’
‘My baby.’ Hester interrupted her. ‘Tell me about my baby.’
‘They had it all planned. Dr Crawford, Mrs McGreevey, the adoption agency. Everything was arranged before we ever got to Gullane. They made sure that you were unconscious for some while after the birth, and then, well, you know what happened. They told you that your child died.’
Ruby covered her face, shaken by a new storm of tears.
‘I need you to tell me, Ruby. I was unconscious because of the eclampsia. No one could have known I was going to get that. What would’ve happened if I’d had a normal delivery?’
‘The eclampsia was a stroke of luck for them. Three days of sedation after your Caesarean was exactly what they needed. But there were other things they could have done. They had pills, and they wouldn’t have hesitated. After all, Madame Olga made sure you didn’t attend the funeral, didn’t she? There was a pill she gave you, d’you remember?’
Hester put her hands over her face. ‘I can’t believe it! It’s … it was so risky! What if I’d insisted on seeing where my child was buried? Madame Olga couldn’t have known how cowardly I’d be, how I wouldn’t ever want to face the pain of seeing my baby’s grave. How I wanted to try and forget it, erase it from my mind. Oh, Ruby, if only you knew how many times I’ve nearly gone back there, to Gullane, to try and find it.’
‘And you would’ve found it, too,’ said Ruby. ‘Dr Crawford took care of that, he and the funeral director between them. Just in case. It’s not so difficult to persuade people to do things if you also convince them that they’re acting for the good of someone. If you say, this woman will go mad and even kill herself if you don’t act at once. Sitting here, it’s easy to condemn everyone, but they all thought they were doing the best for you.’
Hester looked at Hugo. ‘His father. Hugo’s father. What about him? Did Madame Olga give him any thought?’
Ruby shook her head. ‘She said, he cares nothing for my darling girl. He nearly destroyed her. Such a man does not deserve a child. Let him know his son is dead. As a punishment. She and Mr Cranley told Edmund the story of the child’s death and knew that he would tell the father.’
Edmund spoke quietly. ‘Yes, I told him, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. He didn’t say much but he was deeply hurt. He changed from that day in very many ways. One of them was distancing himself from everything. Partly living in America. Seeing less of me because I reminded him of you, Hester.’
He took Hester’s hand and she smiled at him. ‘I was so grateful to you for doing that for me. I couldn’t have written to him. I wasn’t … I wasn’t myself. People say “heartbroken” don’t they, when they mean something quite different? But I was. Everything in me was broken.’
For a few moments, no one said anything and the only sound was a slight snoring from Siggy, who was fast asleep under the curtain near the radiator. Then Hugo said, almost whispering, ‘Will you tell me about my father, Hester?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, of course I will. But not now. Now I need time to think, and there’s Sarabande. We mustn’t forget that.’ She smiled at him. ‘Shall we talk tomorrow morning, Hugo, just after breakfast? You’ll have time before class, I think?’
‘Yes, I’ve already worked out a timetable. Class at eleven, early lunch and dress rehearsal at three.’
‘Good. I want you to know the truth as soon as possible, Hugo. But no one else needs to know about this, I don’t think. It’s not their business and in any case, you want to keep the company focused on the ballet, don’t you?’
Hugo nodded. ‘What shall we tell them?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Edmund said. ‘I’ll say Ruby was taken ill and needed time to recover. That’s all. I’ll say Hester was very distressed to see this because she’s so used to Ruby being in the best of health. But I’ll stress that everything will be back to normal tomorrow. Will you be able to face them then, Hester?’
‘The show must go on,’ she said, smiling a little. ‘I’ve always believed that.’
Hugo looked down at the floor. He felt embarrassed. ‘May I ask you one thing, though?’
‘Anything.’
‘Did you love him? My father?’
‘Very much. Too much. I loved him more than I can tell you. And then I hated him, but that was part of the same thing. That’s all over now. I’ve …’ She looked at Edmund. ‘I’ve let him go.’
‘Thank you. I’ll go and talk to the others.’
He went to the door and stood there for a moment, looking at the woman he would have to get used to thinking of as his mother. It was too much to take in. I’m Hester Fielding’s son, he thought, and a pang of sorrow for the woman who had adopted him and cared for him all his life, the woman he’d loved since he was a baby, made him catch his breath. This new relationship would need to be worked on. He and Hester would have to grow used to
one another.
*
‘He’s gone, Ruby,’ said Hester. ‘I can ask you something else now. I’m surprised it didn’t occur to Hugo. Or perhaps it did and he was just being tactful in not mentioning it.’
She stood up and went to the window. Edmund and George had now sat down and were talking quietly. Dusk had fallen over the garden and Hester could see the moors, a black mass outlined against the sky. She knew that Ruby’s eyes were on her back, and she deliberately didn’t turn to face her as she spoke. Let her guess at my feelings, she told herself. Let her wonder whether there are tears in my eyes. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand. How could you not have told me the truth after Madame Olga died? What possible reason was there for hiding it from me then, when she couldn’t hurt you or dismiss you? I’d have been spared years, whole years of anguish. Why didn’t you speak, Ruby?’
‘Because I was terrified, that’s why. I asked myself over and over, what would you do if you knew? That question haunted me all the time, every day. George and I spoke about it again and again. Didn’t we, George?’
George nodded and took his wife’s hand. She went on, ‘I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t hate me. Oh, I imagined the scene so many times and I knew, I thought I knew, exactly what you’d do. You’d throw me out, however long I’d been with you. And I wanted to go sometimes, too. No, that’s not right. I didn’t want to go, but just seeing you every day was like a torture, because I knew how much I’d hurt you. How much pain you were still feeling, in spite of the fame and the dancing and the money and the glitter of the rest of your life. I saw you at your lowest moments. I saw you when you were tired and injured and sick and depressed and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, let you send me away. And I didn’t know the answer to the question you were bound to have asked me.’
‘What question?’
‘Where he was. Who’d adopted him. I knew nothing about that. You’d have been tormented knowing your child was in the world and yet nowhere to be found.’