Red is for Rubies

by Linda Mitchelmore

  Red is for Rubies

  Linda Mitchelmore

  Copyright © 2014 Linda Mitchelmore

  Published 2014 by Choc Lit Limited

  Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK

  www.choc-lit.com

  The right of Linda Mitchelmore to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

  ISBN 978-1-78189-109-4

  Contents

  Title page

  Copyright information

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  More from Linda Mitchelmore

  In memory of my much-loved cousin, Betty Gardner – more like a sister to me.

  Acknowledgements

  It goes without saying that the Choc Lit Team and my fellow Chocliteers are top of the list for thanks, for their unwavering help and support. What would life be without good friends? And I have some of the best who drag me away from the keyboard to go for a walk/have lunch/talk about things other than writing. And, in no particular order, those friends include Celia and Phill Platfoot, Frank and Brenda Crispin, Cliff and Rosemary Brumfield, and Kim Maidment and Angie Howard. Thanks guys.

  Chapter One

  ‘Why don’t you come with us, darling? Why don’t you?’ Lydie asked. ‘Leave the sad memories behind and move on.’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing, Mum? Leaving behind your sad memories?’

  Lydie flinched. Had Grace guessed she had memories best not talked about? But Grace was intent on the study of her hands which were clenched tightly together in her lap. Lydie watched as Grace unclasped her hands and fingered the ruby-coloured pendant resting, ice-like, against her breastbone.

  ‘Memories,’ Lydie whispered. Memories – such a soft and gentle word when Lydie’s own memories were sharp and jagged and blood-raw still.

  ‘Ralph, we need to talk.’

  Moving to Devon had been Ralph’s idea. Ralph’s dream. And now she’d been here a month, Lydie wasn’t at all sure it was what she wanted. She’d been awake most of the night thinking about it, wondering how she could tell her husband she didn’t think she could ever settle here. Her heart wasn’t in it, as Ralph’s was and it would be like taking sweets from a child to tell him so, to shatter his dreams.

  ‘What about?’ Ralph asked sleepily. He turned over onto his side, slid one arm underneath Lydie’s pillow and reached an arm across her waist with the other.

  ‘About us.’ Lydie’s eyes were closed but she knew Ralph would be looking at her, drinking her in, loving her. Wanting to make love to her. ‘Whether this is the right thing to be doing? For us. For you and me.’

  ‘Phew! That sort of us,’ Ralph laughed. ‘You had me worried there, Lyd. But don’t worry, we’ll be fine here. I’ll make a go of The Gallery, just watch me. A lick of paint, a …’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  Lydie opened her eyes, peered at the luminous green numbers on the bedside clock. 5.24 a.m.

  ‘Then what is it? I know, I know, we’ll take a holiday. I’ll get The Gallery up and running and then I’ll find someone to run it and we’ll go to Italy. We always said we’d go, didn’t we? Anything for my Lyd.’

  ‘You said,’ Lydie muttered. ‘About going to Italy.’

  Dear Ralph, always trying to please – like a Labrador puppy, not realising the person to whom they are giving all their affection is simply not a dog lover. Lydie shifted uneasily under the weight of Ralph’s outstretched arm.

  Ralph wriggled his not inconsiderable bulk and placed the palm of his free hand on the side of Lydie’s face, turned her head towards him and kissed her nose.

  ‘With you. Just think of the buildings, Lyd, all that architecture. We’ll book into the best hotel money can buy. Siena, Rome, Venice – name your place. Now, before we’re too old to enjoy it.’ He laughed his noisy schoolboy laugh.

  ‘Ssh,’ Lydie said. ‘Not so loud. It’s not five-thirty yet.’

  Ralph slid his hand from Lydie’s face, ran it down the softness of the outside of her left breast.

  ‘Not now, Ralph,’ she said, with what she hoped was kindness and not a rebuff. ‘We’ll wake Grace. And I think she’s only just gone to sleep. I don’t think she had a very good night.’

  ‘You think I don’t know?’ Ralph said. ‘Poor Gracie. Well, seeing as we’re awake, how about I make us a nice cup of tea? And then you can tell me more about what’s wrong with her. Although for the life of me I can’t think what.’

  Lydie sighed. Grace had only recently split from Justin – what did Ralph think was wrong with her?

  ‘She was with Justin a long time, and now she’s not,’ Lydie said.

  ‘Relationships break down all the time, Lyd. And I know you’ll think I’m an insensitive bastard for saying that. Anyway, I can’t say I ever really warmed to him.’

  ‘You’re not a bastard or insensitive,’ Lydie told him. ‘Just a bit tied up in the new venture to notice what others might be feeling perhaps.’

  What I’m feeling?

  ‘Phew!’ Ralph said. ‘Glad you added “perhaps” there.’

  ‘And for the record,’ Lydie said, ‘and between you and me and underneath this duvet, I never warmed to Justin either. I never felt he was right for Grace.’

  ‘Not like you and me, eh?’ Ralph quipped, dropping a noisy kiss on Lydie’s forehead.

  ‘Something like that,’ Lydie said, as Ralph scrambled out of bed, blowing her a kiss as he went, and disappeared down the corridor towards the kitchen.

  Slowly Lydie slid out of bed, slipped her arms into her ancient but comfortable dressing gown, and followed.

  Everything felt wrong to Grace. Everything; the pillow, the weight of the duvet, the firmness of the mattress. Even the smell of it all was different; different fabric conditioner to the one she used, and someone else’s living and loving had seeped into the walls perfuming the room.

  She breathed in deeply through her nose holding the air to her. Slowly she crossed her arms pushing down the silk of the nightdress, al
lowed a hand to cup each breast; breasts which felt less full, less firm, as though Grace herself had shrunk somehow. Even her own body felt different now.

  What sort of madness had made her say yes to a move to Devon with her parents? At thirty-one? Grace could only assume that the same madness that strikes a person when first in love, so that they forget to eat, to sleep, and they do mad things like stand for hours in the cold just to get a glimpse of the person who is filling their heart, their mind, is the same madness that has waited – like some praying mantis – for when that love goes. A madness that turns every day grey, every night full of terrors. A madness that makes a fully-grown woman take the idiotic, backward step of returning to live with her parents after thirteen years spent living her own life.

  Grace turned over, tried to block out the sounds of someone on the terrace dragging something across the flagstones. This was never going to work, not living with Lydie and Ralph again, the gentleness of their lives as bland as porridge, with no highs and lows to punctuate their days. Oh, she loved them, and if the fact they were still together after over thirty years was a benchmark, then they loved one another too.

  But there wasn’t the excitement she’d had with Justin; the petty rows that escalated into voices raised far higher than they need have been, but it was their way. Grace found herself frustrated that Lydie and Ralph, by their very acquiescence to one another’s needs and wants, were denying themselves the making-up afterwards; making-up which far outweighed an hour or so’s bad feeling.

  She remembered asking her mother once if she and Ralph ever rowed. Her mum had been totally bemused and said, ‘Row? Why would we row?’ as though to do so was alien to her, or wrong somehow.

  Already Grace was missing the exhilaration of running a busy restaurant with staff problems and supplier problems and over-fussy clientele sending food back to the kitchen – all things with which she had dealt with easily and with humour and with style. It was all she knew how to do for God’s sake. What could she do now?

  Grace sat up, plumped up the pillow and rearranged it. She would not get up yet. She hurled the pillow back against the mattress, thumped its middle hard in an effort to purge herself of perhaps a smidgeon of anger and hurt, but nothing happened.

  ‘Do I still love him?’ Grace asked the floral pattern of the pillowcase. ‘Do I?’

  ‘Ah, you’re awake, Gracie.’ Her father’s voice preceded his bear-sized head around the corner of the bedroom door. ‘Tea?’

  ‘How long have you been standing outside the door?’ Grace snapped. God, this was worse than when she’d been a teenager, riddled with angst over her body, her friends, her exams. Always Ralph had appeared as if by magic to cheer her up.

  ‘I haven’t. The tea would be cold if I’d been there for ages, and it isn’t, it’s hot. See.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ Grace said. ‘Feeling fragile, you know.’

  Ralph laughed. ‘Fragile? I don’t think I’ve ever been fragile in my life, and I know that’s not the response you want. And I am sorry you’re sad, but I’m not sorry about Justin.’

  Grace rested her eyes on the bulk of her father; his height, his solidness. And his kindness. If Ralph could package his kindness he’d be a millionaire more times over than he was already.

  ‘No one would ever be good enough for Daddy’s little girl, right?’

  ‘Wrong,’ Ralph said. ‘I’d give my right arm to the man who will one day make you happy, but you haven’t been happy for ages, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Grace conceded. How much easier it was to talk like this with her father than her mother. But this was as far as she wanted to go for now. ‘Thanks for the tea.’ She held out her hands to take the cup and saucer.

  ‘Dismissed?’ Ralph said.

  ‘For now, Dad.’

  Grace conjured up a watery smile.

  And the second Ralph closed the door behind him Grace was out of bed, tipping the tea down the washbasin in the corner of the room. Then she threw herself back down, pulled the duvet back up to her neck, rolled onto her side and reached out across the bed with a long, slender arm – an automatic action, a reflex action, reaching for Justin. But there would be no more Justin.

  ‘Lydie, have you seen my new boat shoes? The leather ones. They were here last night and …’

  ‘Ralph, for goodness’ sake, how do I know where your shoes are? I don’t even know the way to the loo yet. The one on this level anyway.’ Lydie wondered if she would ever get used to living in a house that started twenty feet above ground level and which had no garden, although there was a deck that needed cleaning on which she planned to put pots of agapanthus or lilies. She kept her voice low, whispering almost. Grace had gone very quiet again in the room above their heads – no more tossing and turning, making the bedstead creak. When Lydie had heard her daughter crying in the night she’d been torn – to go to her, or not? To make a noise of some sort so that Grace would know she had been heard and could call out into the darkness and ask for help? Or not? Because wasn’t it the hardest thing to start mothering a child all over again when that child was thirty-one and broken-hearted? No longer could Grace be soothed with nursery rhymes and hot milk with honey in it and the promise of a visit to the zoo.

  Lydie’s husband made a snorting noise; the noise he always made when he was dissatisfied with an answer or a person or his dinner. But because he was so very good-natured he wasn’t going to make a fuss, it simply wasn’t worth it. The snort, Lydie knew, was Ralph’s way of saying the subject was closed, and really he didn’t know why he’d asked and he’s sorry he did, and he’s even more sorry if he’s made the wife he loves more than anyone in the whole world upset. Lydie watched as Ralph opened cupboards, peered under tables and chairs looking for the boat shoes.

  Goodness! Boat shoes. Ralph was going the full ten yards with the shoes, wasn’t he? Two boxes of clothes and shoes seemed to have gone missing between Bath and Dartmouth and Ralph had been desperate to replace them even though both Lydie and Grace had told him they would turn up sometime. He had grabbed Lydie’s hand and said, ‘Come with me, darling, or I’ll never find my way back to The Gallery’. So Lydie had gone with him to the shops, leaving Grace to wander silently and as though she were still in shock, around the large and spacious two-storey maisonette.

  ‘Ah, I remember where they are now.’ Ralph strode across the kitchen on his mission to locate his new shoes.

  New shoes, new life. The Gallery, River Side, Dartmouth was Lydie’s new address. She had not yet committed the postcode to memory. But there was time; lots and lots of it stretching terrifyingly ahead of her.

  ‘Ssh,’ she said, a finger to her lips, at Ralph’s retreating back, ‘Grace must have gone back to sleep again. How was she?’

  ‘Tea went straight down the basin.’

  ‘Did you see her do it?’

  Ralph tapped his left ear with a finger. ‘It wasn’t for nothing that my nickname on the building sites was Radar. She should get up. Nothing’s going to get better lying in bed, is it?’

  ‘Hmmm. Perhaps not. Where are you going anyway? It’s very early.’

  ‘I thought I’d take some photos of the front of The Gallery before anyone’s about. Now what sort of a name is that for a shop that sells pictures? The Gallery! I ask you? No imagination whatsoever, some people.’

  ‘And the alternative?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it. And of course, I shall change the whole layout of the window and the outside walls will need painting – Aegean blue, I think, and I’m not sure if having just paintings on display is a good idea. I want to add sculpture in all sorts of forms. Can you imagine? An art gallery without sculpture! Needs waking up, this place.’

  ‘And you’re going to be the man to do it,’ Lydie laughed. ‘Only do it quietly, it’s not six-thirty yet.’

  ‘Have you ever known me fail?’

  ‘Never,’ Lydie said. Ralph was a consummate businessman. Although she feared that this time, know
ing nothing whatsoever about art, and having paid a vast amount of money for The Gallery, Ralph might be overestimating his abilities a bit.

  And I must be a consummate actress because Ralph has never noticed that while I love him dearly, I’ve never been in love with him. And there’s a difference.

  And Lydie knew the difference. She knew she’d never had that dizzying, breathless, all-consuming love for Ralph that she’d had for her first love. And she still woke in the night with worrying regularity, shivering, hating herself almost for her deception.

  Lydie hated herself for having the wrong sort of love for Ralph. She loved him for being how he was which was kind and hardworking, and she wished she could change and be in love with him, she really did. But although she could change the colour of her hair, her dress size, her eyes even with coloured contacts, she could not change her feelings. She shivered now as Ralph slipped his feet into his boat shoes, kissed her very noisily on the cheek and began to whistle as tunelessly as he always did, oblivious as he’d ever been to the chill within Lydie, and left.

  The room seemed empty and much larger without Ralph in it. Ralph’s dynamism left Lydie drained of her own energy sometimes, just being with him. And she felt guilty. Guilt played a part, like a weight around her spirit.

  Bare-footed Lydie walked on the cold slates of the kitchen to the window which overlooked the river. French doors opened out onto the deck where Lydie could see, through the dirty glass of the doors, a herring-gull was pecking at something between the slats of wood. Lydie found the key, opened the doors and the gull flapped in alarm, flying off in such a lumbering way that Lydie was sure he would hit the sides of the railings. How big gulls were close up, how evil looking with their sulphur-yellow eyes.