Red is for Rubies

by Linda Mitchelmore

  Becca scoured every single national newspaper every single day. She could still see the dark print if she held the newspaper towards the light. And besides, she only ever read anything with Hugh’s name in it. Or her’s. Something which might mean she deserved yet another exquisitely cut, set ruby.

  Becca carried on with scraping the chair across the polished oak floorboards until she found just the right position for it. She untangled the crimson, bead-encrusted, hem of her dress from her ankles. She pulled three dry and curled brown leaves from a pot of geraniums, scrunching the fibre into ash almost in her hand.

  ‘Damn, damn and fuck her.’

  Becca’s cheeks were aching with the grimace on her face as she hissed out the words. And wrinkles, Becca knew, were bad for a woman, so ageing. Whoever it was who had first called wrinkles laughter lines was a liar.

  Jonty had mentioned that hateful word – ageing – at breakfast.

  ‘Eat up, Becs,’ he’d said, ‘thin is so ageing. In my humble opinion, I think Barbara Cartland got it right. You know, fat and happy, sitting down all the time and with lovely, peachy skin. Eh, Becs?’

  Becca hated being called Becs, hated being told to eat – told! But she hated the thought of being old even more. Twenty-six was such a nice age to have been, the climax of her life. At twenty-six she had been curvy and toned, full-bosomed and beautiful still. Becca had been twenty-six in her head ever since.

  So, just to appease Jonty she had nibbled at some wafer-thin slices of nectarine and eaten one teaspoonful of low-fat yoghurt.

  ‘That’s a good girl,’ Jonty had said. ‘Shall I brush your hair or will you do it?’

  Becca’s hair was waist-length and silver now – but with some strands of raven in it still; the lush, glossy raven Hugh had loved so much. It was why he loved her, so he’d said. The hair. Never, ever, cut it he’d said – as Prince Andrew was reputed to have said to Sarah Ferguson, too. Silly Sarah had cut her hair and been divorced. But not Becca – her hair was lovely still.

  ‘You do it,’ Becca had said, because she loved having her hair brushed and if she closed her eyes she could almost believe that Jonty was Hugh for the fifteen minutes it took for the one hundred brushstrokes. And it kept Jonty from the studio just that little bit longer and Becca liked that; the control of it.

  Becca consigned the powdered geranium leaves to the waste bin. She supposed she would have to do some sort of tidying up soon. But what was the point? Jonty would come in and sit down and brush clay dust from his jeans, and little balls of hardened clay that had shot off from the wheel as he turned a plate or a bowl or a mug, would slip from between his toes and be ground into the carpet sooner or later.

  She smoothed the already smoothness of her hair, pulled back into a ballet-dancer’s bun as it always was in daytime. Only at night did she let it down, let herself melt into the tickly, sensuous feel of it as it wrapped around her shoulders, settled in the small of her back.

  She fingered the bun now, pushing in imaginary loose ends. She stretched her neck, elongating it like Audrey Hepburn had in every single photograph she’d ever had taken, twisting her head – like Audrey again – this way and that. Bringing her hands down over her shoulders she pushed the straps of her dress just a little further towards the tops of her arms, smoothed the sides of the thin, crimson cotton down over her hips; now boyish, no longer the rounded, sink-into hips she’d had at twenty-six. Becca flexed her long bony fingers, one by one.

  Only then was she ready for the rubies. All of them. Three necklaces, seven rings, a bracelet, two brooches. One of the rings held a pigeon’s blood ruby – the most coveted and valuable sort. And with luck, after lunch, a Post Office van would be bringing a parcel for which she would have to sign, and inside would be the ring with the baguette-cut ruby that was her right.

  ‘Hi.’ Drew’s voice cut across the silence of the studio.

  ‘Hi, yourself,’ Jonty said. The clay mixer had finished, shut itself off. The phone – for once – was silent. His sister had finished playing Pickfords overhead. Why she felt the need to move the furniture about every day, only to put it back where it had come from was beyond him. But, he supposed, it gave her something to do, seeing as she never left the flat. ‘Okay?’

  Okay. Just the one word would do. It was what blokes did – speak in prècis. Drew would know that Jonty was asking if he’d had a good or a bad morning at the hospital; if Amy was about the same or more withdrawn; if the hospital had been able to give him any hope for Amy’s future or not. Such a useful word, okay. And Drew would divulge as much of his morning or as little as he felt Jonty needed or wanted to know.

  ‘So-so.’

  Another useful phrase; meaning don’t push any further, this is the only information I want you to have for now.

  ‘Ah,’ Jonty said. ‘Well. Tess has gone. Buggered off with that low-life. Two cancelled orders because we’re behind. It’s nearly lunch-time so I think a pint at The Firkin is in order.’

  ‘Count me out,’ Drew said.

  ‘Ah, so the morning was shit so-so and not sunny so-so?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘I just did, Drew old boy.’

  ‘Right. First turd was Mel wanting maintenance. Seems she’s found herself a hot family solicitor. I’m in the wrong for not putting Amy in care, it seems. In Mel-speak that equates to me denying Mel her rights as a wife, ergo, a loving husband with sex on tap when she wants it. She considers she’s been robbed because I chose to care for my deafened, frightened child, which means I’m often too tired to lift a finger let alone anything more satisfying. Second turd – there’s an op Amy could have, if there’s enough money in the NHS coffers, if she fulfils all the criteria. Third turd, I’m skint again. I’d have been classed as a vagrant by now if it wasn’t for Mother.’

  ‘Could be worse, then.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Oh, but it could, Drew, it could. If I can’t persuade Becca to release a bit more of Hugh’s shut-up money, this place is going down the pan. And then you’d be jobless as well.’

  ‘And could you? Persuade Becca. I mean. It’s none of my business but she is a sort of drain on things for you.’

  ‘She’s my sister. I’m keeping her out of the funny farm. Just. Okay?’ Okay – that very useful word again. Jonty’s voice accentuated the word louder, harder, sharper than was strictly necessary.

  ‘Whoa! Whoa!’ Drew made backing-off movements with his hands. ‘Sorry. I’ll shut it right now. What needs doing? Kiln-packing? I’ll even have a go at Tess’s painting if you want. Or I could overturn my previous decision and join you for that pint. And if there’s a cheese and onion roll going I’ll draft the ad for the newspaper for you while I’m there. God, but it’s been a damned awful morning.’

  ‘Right. Fair enough. But what we both need, Drew old boy, more than a pint, more than getting our lungs filled with someone else’s filthy fag smoke, more than a cheese and bloody onion roll, is another sort of roll all together.’

  Drew laughed. ‘The in the hay sort? With each other?’ Drew looked mock-affronted.

  ‘Cheeky sod. I tried some daft things in my youth but that wasn’t one of them.’

  ‘So, we’ll go get that pint, then? Now I know there are no strings attached. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Jonty turned off the lights, pulled the plug from the clay-mixing machine. That should save 0.0004 pence-worth of electricity. At least. Jonty laughed out loud at the thought and Drew raised a quizzical eyebrow at him.

  ‘Don’t even ask,’ Jonty said. The thought of a pint had never been sweeter.

  Chapter Three

  ‘It will be a new life for us all, Lyd. Put years on us it will. Give us a new purpose.’

  ‘But you know nothing about art.’

  ‘So? It’s like any other business – houses, jewellery, vegetables, whatever. And if the Prime Minister knows sod all about running a country and he’s got the job then I can run an art gallery and
make it work, which is more than you can say for the Prime Minister.’

  Lydie laughed despite her misgivings. If anyone could make this work, Ralph could.

  ‘You aren’t going to believe this,’ Ralph said, ‘but it seems there’s a limited selection of colours I can paint this place.’

  ‘And Aegean blue isn’t one of them?’ Lydie said. She wasn’t sure Aegean blue was the right sort of shade for any building – not even a beach hut – anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere but she wasn’t going to offer her opinion now.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ Ralph said. ‘That old biddy, Margot Bartlett was right. It’s taken me a week to read through all the regulations for the painting of the outside of listed buildings in this area. And that meeting with the planning officer didn’t go as planned. But I’m not finished yet.’

  ‘Well,’ Lydie said, ‘You certainly sound determined.’

  ‘Dad, for pity’s sake, we haven’t even finished unpacking yet. Look at this place. Stop putting people’s backs up. And if you two are going to argue, I’m off.’

  ‘Permanently?’ Ralph asked. He ho-ho-hoed at his own joke, his shoulders heaving with mirth.

  ‘We never argue,’ Lydie said. She shot Ralph a warning look – don’t upset Grace, for goodness’ sake, the look said – because she was awake most of the night crying again, even if you didn’t hear her. But Ralph only winked back at Lydie, because he thought all his Christmases had rolled into one having Grace back under his roof.

  ‘That’s not funny, Dad. You know I’ve got nowhere to go. But I do need to get out of this place sometimes. I just need a job …’

  Grace crumpled then and she began to cry and Lydie instinctively went to her, folding her daughter into her arms. She jerked her head at Ralph and gave him a ‘couldn’t-you-just-go-somewhere-else’ look.

  ‘Sorry, Gracie,’ Ralph said. ‘I’m being an insensitve bloke again, aren’t I?’

  ‘With knobs on,’ Grace sniffed into Lydie’s shoulder. ‘Haven’t you got a gallery to open, or a neighbour or someone from the council to harass?’

  ‘Might have,’ Ralph said. He looked genuinely contrite now that he’d upset his daughter, even though that was the last thing he’d wanted to do.

  Lydie mouthed ‘Just go,’ at him.

  Ralph ruffled the top of Grace’s head, the way he’d always done when she was a child, and went.

  Lydie whispered into Grace’s freshly washed and still damp hair, ‘We weren’t arguing, darling. We almost never do.’

  Which was true. They didn’t argue much, her and Ralph. Ralph – she knew – had done a lot of things over the years he hadn’t really wanted to do. But he’d done them, ever eager to please. Lydie often wished he would stand up to her sometimes, say no once in a while. An antique bed? A Smeg fridge? An Audi? ‘Yeah, ‘course you can, sweets,’ Ralph always said. ‘Anything for my baby.’

  Bland was not a nice word – it conjured up images of porridge and sun-dried, dead grass and digestive biscuits and walls painted a nice, safe magnolia and Lydie didn’t like any of those things. But Lydie always thought of them in connection to Ralph and her marriage and wished that she didn’t. It was not fair to her husband.

  ‘Well, lucky you, then,’ Grace said, her voice dripping with disbelief.

  ‘Luck doesn’t come into it much, Gracie. You have to work at it and—’

  ‘You think I didn’t!’ Grace pushed Lydie away, twisted herself and the chair away from her mother so that the screeching noise it made on the bare boards of the kitchen made Lydie put her hands over her ears.

  ‘Of course I—’

  ‘Then why did you say it? Why?’ Grace was screaming at Lydie now. ‘I worked my arse off for that bloody restaurant, Mum. Restaurants plural. Twenty-four seven in the catering industry, you know. Up before dawn for the veggie market, and the flowers, and the fish. Then there’s always some sort of staff crisis, personal stuff – violent husbands, boyfriends, wives even; we’ve had the lot to deal with, you know. And even celebs nick the loo rolls and the complimentary hand wash, all that stuff. That was my job, making sure everything looked perfect, everything arrived on time, nothing was missing. I didn’t know the first thing about interior decoration or colour or style when I was eighteen, you know. But I found out. I read books, I went to museums, other people’s houses. And I looked and I absorbed and I learned. I worked so bloody hard, Mum. And I expected you to understand what this – this being abandoned, deserted – is like for me; at least you.’

  Lydie, who knew exactly how it felt to be abandoned, could think of nothing that would comfort Grace. As nothing had comforted her.

  ‘And, so I’m told, I’m owed nothing. Because I was on no pay-roll, paid no National Insurance, no tax.’ Grace began to cry large, silent tears which quickly soaked her cheeks, her neck. ‘I was like those old-fashioned things, concubines or geishas. Mistresses, except Justin wasn’t married. I was a kept woman. Just one up from a prostitute really. And it stinks and it hurts and I am never, ever, going to live with a man again.’

  ‘Grace, don’t. That’s not true. The things about the pr—’ But Lydie couldn’t finish the word because that was exactly what her father had called her when he’d found out she was pregnant before her marriage.

  ‘Prostitute is the word you’re looking for, Mum. And if I wasn’t one of those then what was I, then? I was paid for my favours, right? And now he’s got this TV thing coming up, he’ll be all Gordon Ramsay, strutting his stuff, only better; he knows more swear words and he used every single one on me when I demanded a half-share in the restaurants.’

  ‘There must be something you can do. Citizens Advice Bureau? A solicitor?’

  ‘Get real, Mum. There’s nothing, okay? There is no record of my input into the business, monetary or physical. Justin paid all the bills from his personal bank account. Every penny Justin gave me has been classed as a gift. I spent it all on clothes or shoes, make-up, perfume and stuff. To look nice. For Justin and his bloody punters.’

  ‘And for you, darling. Don’t forget that. It was your choice.’

  ‘My choice? You didn’t try to stop me exactly. I was only eighteen, for God’s sake, when I met Justin. He was fifteen years older than I am and you didn’t try and stop me. You might have said something.’

  ‘Would you have listened?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that.’

  ‘There then. What would have been the point of me wasting my breath?’

  ‘Oh God, Mum, I’m in a mess. I don’t want to stop with you and Dad a moment longer than I have to. I’ll have to find a job of some sort. And before you say it, I am not going to work on the reception desk in The Gallery. And if I ever even look like I’m going to watch Justin on TV, pull the plug out. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ Lydie said.

  ‘And I won’t be doing bar work or waitressing or cleaning hotel bedrooms or standing behind the till in some tatty gift shop, so don’t even think about telling me there are loads of jobs out there. I am not lowering my standards. If I can’t wear my heels and the clothes I feel most comfortable in then I won’t be doing it. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Lydie said. ‘Now, I’d really love to keep talking to you but I’ve got a million things to finish off for my new jewellery collection and I’d better get on. I’m going to have to go back to Bath. Very soon.’

  ‘But you’ve only just got here!’

  ‘We’ve been here almost six weeks.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Grace said, raising her eyes heavenwards.

  Lydie chose not to rise to the sarcasm.

  ‘Bath is where my work sells, so …’

  ‘There are shops here, Mum. You own one, remember?’

  Lydie nodded. Of course she hadn’t forgotten she part-owned a shop. A gallery.

  ‘It’s important to me to put something into the family coffers.’

  ‘Mum, your jewellery stuff is nothing to what Dad earned, and will earn again

  once he
gets this place up and running.’

  ‘I know. But it’s important. To me. Now I must get on.’

  ‘So, I’m on my own, then? About getting a job?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lydie said, and resisted the urge to tell her daughter, much as she loved her, that at thirty-one it was time she grew up.

  Was that Margot Bartlett going into the café? Ralph was pretty sure it was. He’d been a bit fired up the last time he’d seen her and really he shouldn’t have said half the things to Margot that he had. It was probably having Grace about that had done it. For two pins he’d smash that Justin through two brick walls for the way he’d treated his Gracie.

  But he had plans to expand The Gallery. Planning permission for change of use would have to be sought, he knew that. Just a formality really. It hadn’t been such a bright move upsetting Margot who probably had a lot of clout with the planning department, had it? In all probability she’d got to the planning officer before Ralph had, which is why the bloke had been so frosty with him. Ralph had seen concrete blocks that had more bend in them than that bloke had.

  There was a courtyard at the back of his premises, walled on three sides with The Gallery on the fourth. Ralph wanted to knock out the back wall of The Gallery, put in French doors, flag the courtyard, put up tables and chairs. Then, he could do coffees in the day time for the browsers and wine in the evenings for the serious punters; people who were busy running their own businesses during the day who would appreciate a little more time, an ambient atmosphere, to savour and consider the spending of thousands of pounds on artwork.

  It would be something for Grace to do. She could choose the tables and the chairs, think about seat covers and tablecloths and other women’s stuff. Flowers even. She was good at that sort of thing; looking good, speaking posh, knowing a canapé from a Cornish pasty.

  Ralph quickened his step and held on to the door just as Margot was about to close it behind her, so that her arm was jerked and she turned round to see what the obstruction was.