Red is for Rubies

by Linda Mitchelmore

  And Jonty laughed so loud and so hard the poor girl looked like she’d been shot. But the laugh felt good. It felt as though this act of laughing was giving his soul a workout.

  He was still laughing when he got back. Drew was talking to someone at the far end of the studio where the decorating was done. A man’s voice. Che, at least, had turned up, then? Well, let Drew get on with it. Jonty saw Drew lift a hand in greeting, saw Drew cock his head on one side in a ‘do-you-want-to-deal-with-this?’ gesture. Jonty shook his head. No way. He had Becca’s sandwich to make, and the rest of his life to get on with.

  Chapter Five

  ‘He will never be good enough for you, Lydie. Never.’

  ‘That’s your opinion, Dad. Not mine. And I am not a child. I am eighteen years old, nearly.’

  ‘And pregnant.’

  ‘Ten out of ten, Doctor.’

  ‘That builder I suppose.’

  ‘Suppose what you like.’

  ‘This will kill your mother.’

  ‘Then let’s not tell her,’ Lydie said. She swallowed. And the fact she was pregnant was something she hadn’t told Ralph yet either.

  Lydie flicked the indicator, pulled into the side of the road and turned left into Mount Hill, grateful that her journey had been trouble-free and only just over three hours door-to-door. Ralph really hadn’t wanted her to go. Grace had been very quiet at breakfast, apart from mentioning she had a job interview to go to. When pushed for more information, Grace had shrugged. And Lydie read into that shrug and the silence that followed it that her daughter thought she was weak and a coward running back to Bath. But Lydie had made her decision and now here she was.

  The sun was high in the sky now, making the Bath-stone walls glow. Lydie always thought of Bath-stone as milky fudge; the soft and crumbly sort that dissolves almost the second it hits your tongue.

  She pulled up outside number four. Such a beautiful house, this house of her father’s, perched high on the hill overlooking the bowl in which the city sat. Four storeys, like most of the houses in Bath, and only one room wide, if you didn’t count the hallway and the wide stairs that twisted up through the storeys.

  Robert’s house was one of the few in this terrace with a balcony on the first floor, or indeed any floor at all. The balcony was reached through French doors in the centre of the sitting room. Lydie could almost taste the sherry she knew her father would pour for her half an hour before dinner at six. If the weather was fine he would insist she stepped out onto the balcony to drink it and they would make small talk.

  Lydie grabbed her suitcase and the case with her newest jewellery collection in it, slammed shut the car door with her bottom and stepped through the open gateway into the garden.

  The scent of roses hung heavy in the warm evening air. Acanthus leaves scratched her bare legs as she hurried across the flagstoned path. She was not looking forward to lunch with her father, even though she’d brought the meal with her – smoked-trout quiche from the deli in Dartmouth and a box of salad. Some raspberries from a stall by the side of the road near Wotton-under-Edge. They would have to be washed. She wondered if there might be some cream to go with them in her father’s fridge.

  And there was Robert now, opening the door for her.

  ‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, offering her cheek to be kissed.

  ‘Good morning, Lydie,’ Robert said, glancing at his wristwatch to check that it was still indeed morning and not afternoon. His face was bereft of a smile, or even the promise of a flicker of one.

  Oh dear. So, he still hadn’t forgiven her for moving to Dartmouth.

  ‘I’ve brought lunch,’ Lydie said.

  ‘There was no need. I could have taken you out somewhere. I would have preferred it in fact.’

  ‘If this is all too much trouble I can still book into a hotel somewhere,’ Lydie said. Her father had always been a bully. With her mother, with his patients, with his neighbours – there was an ongoing vendetta with the owners of the allotment next to Robert’s. And with Lydie. And she wasn’t going to be bullied now. Not any more.

  ‘You will not,’ Robert said, his voice softening a little. ‘Sherry on the balcony coming up. I’m glad you’re here. One should never drink alone in my opinion.’

  Sherry? Before lunch? Was her father seeing her as merely a drinking companion?

  ‘Lovely,’ Lydie said in a not very lovely at all voice. Lydie slipped her arm through her father’s and walked towards the dresser where Robert kept the sherry in a cut-glass decanter surrounded by upturned, and rarely used, sherry glasses.

  Ralph tossed and turned, then tossed and turned some more. This bed without Lydie in it might as well have been concrete because Lydie’s softness and the reason for being in it had gone for Ralph. He’d have to get up again soon. He’d got up to see Lydie off, and then Grace to wherever it was she was going but he’d slipped back in under the duvet for another hour or so.

  He’d always hated it when Lydie went on her jewellery selling trips. When they’d lived in Bath she’d often gone to Cardiff and Oxford. Bristol, too. And she always stopped over even though she could have gone to them all and back in a day from Bath. He hated it because there was no need. He couldn’t understand for the life of him why Lydie needed to earn money now. There had been that terrible time in the nineties with negative equity. He had been all but washed-up then, but he’d hung on. Or rather he and Lydie had hung on, Lydie’s jewellery money making the difference between eating and starving. Sometimes Ralph woke in the night remembering it; remembering Grace’s birthday when there wasn’t a spare pound in the bank and Lydie had taken her necklace from her neck, cleaned it, wrapped it in tissue and given it to Grace; given away her most precious possession. Lydie had made the necklace – some sort of red stone which she’d set in twisted silver rods – before she’d met Ralph and up until the moment she’d taken it from her neck and given it to Grace she had always worn it. Even on their wedding day she’d worn that necklace. Ralph often wondered why. But the necklace was Grace’s now and Ralph hoped that in the giving of it to her daughter Lydie had also given away her reasons for needing to wear it.

  What on earth was he doing lying in bed thinking about necklaces for goodness’ sake when he had a shop to open. Half-day closing. Now, that had been a new one to him.

  Margot Bartlett had informed him that ‘old’ traders adhered to half-day closing. Or, in the case of The Gallery and a couple of other shops, didn’t open at all. It implied that enough money was made not to have to open one day in the middle of the week.Well, half-day closing or not, Ralph was going to keep The Gallery open all day today. What else was there to do? Ralph showered, found a new pair of chinos, a pink linen shirt and his leather boat shoes. He was having fun with this dressing-up lark. How far he’d come from that bricklayer’s apprentice he’d once been – the frayed jeans, the above-the-waist Egyptian suntan, the builder’s bum cleavage. And then the grey suit for meeting bank managers and planning officials and the like as head of Marshall Properties.

  Ralph crossed the oak-floored gallery and turned the sign on the door from CLOSED to OPEN.

  A very small Asian couple came smiling and bowing and treading as gently as though they were walking on spun sugar into the gallery.

  ‘Dartahbaze,’ the man said. He bowed his head in a sharp, bird-like movement.

  Ralph wondered for a moment if he’d been addressed in Japanese – or possibly Chinese – and if so what sort of reply he should make. Dartahbaze? Hello? Good morning? Ralph bowed his head jerkily.

  ‘Good morning,’ Ralph said, very loudly and very slowly.

  ‘Dartahbaze,’ the man said again. A bit more bowing from the man, a sweet, slightly dazed smile from the woman.

  Dartahbaze? Ralph mulled over the sound. Ah, got it. Database. These two were database clients. The previous owners had taken him through the two-thousand or so database clients. All he had to do was post up digital photographs of the paintings on the website and in two-thousand
homes worldwide those clients would scroll down, select the painting – or hopefully paintings, plural – and whizz over their credit card details quicker than Ralph could say Visa.

  ‘Database!’ Ralph said – he could almost see the dagger-like exclamation mark of triumph dancing in the air between him and his clients. He wondered why they were here.

  ‘Weeboy, weeboy,’ the woman said. She held up both hands for Ralph’s inspection, thumbs bent into her palms, four fingers on each hand facing him, their tiny pink tips no bigger than a child’s.

  Weeboy? The Japanese or Chinese for eight? Lydie, where are you when I need you? Lydie would be able to sort this. But Ralph was not going to be beaten.

  ‘Weeboy?’ Ralph said.

  ‘Weeboymallionnighttayyor,’ the woman said excitedly, eyes like flashing coals at promised pleasures.

  Ralph found a pad and a pen and slid it across the reception desk. Galleries don’t have tills he was told. Nothing quite so vulgar as a cash till with the price displayed for all to see. If one has to ask, then one can’t afford it was the rule. He indicated for the woman to write down what it was she had just said – and with a bit of luck what it was she wanted.

  We buy eight paintings. Marianne Knight-Taylor.

  Of course. What else? Round one to Ralph. He’d understood. He switched on the computer, found Marianne Knight-Taylor’s portfolio. Margot had mentioned Marianne Knight-Taylor and warned him to steer clear of her clutches. Well, clutches or not, at £500 a time, Marianne was going to eat very well for a little while, wasn’t she? And at thirty per cent commission so was Ralph Marshall. How much easier this was than buying houses that had woodworm and dry rot and damp and subsidence.

  Ralph swivelled the computer screen so that this delightful, this charming, couple could select the paintings for which they had come all the way from China or Japan. Ralph gave them a little bow, but when the couple looked at one another with puzzled frowns Ralph guessed that perhaps this wasn’t the time for bowing or nodding, so he laughed a ‘silly me’ laugh and said, ‘Which ones would you like?’

  Ralph didn’t have every single painting of Marianne’s in the gallery and he hoped the ones these lovely people wanted were either on the walls or propped up in the back room.

  The couple clapped their hands together, making little prayer-like gestures.

  The man pointed to eight paintings, counting very carefully – one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight – struggling for the correct pronunciation.

  Ralph gulped. Would the credit card machine take an amount as large as this was going to be?

  ‘For our restaurant,’ the woman said.

  ‘In New York,’ the man supplied.

  ‘Smashing,’ Ralph said, which only served to give him an identical set of puzzled frowns.

  ‘We take now,’ the man said. He handed Ralph a business card with his name on – lots of vowels but not very many consonants. No way on this earth was Ralph going to have a stab at pronouncing that.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘Now, which ones is it you want?’ He was barely able to control his glee at how easy this was turning out to be. Good job he hadn’t listened to Margot and shut up shop completely today.

  The man pointed to two that Ralph had on the walls behind him, and six that he didn’t. Bugger.

  ‘No problem,’ Ralph said, ‘Just a tiny phone call and the paintings will be yours.’ He sent up a silent prayer that Marianne was in, hadn’t sold the paintings to anyone else, and was sober. At the little get-together of artists and new owners – namely him and Lydie – Marianne, if he remembered rightly, had been totally sloshed within the hour. Someone had pointed her out to him but he struggled now to remember just what Marianne looked like, and gave up – so many people drinking his very decent champagne.

  ‘Cash,’ the man said. ‘I have yacht outside.’

  ‘Yacht?’ Ralph said.

  ‘Big boat,’ the woman supplied helpfully.

  ‘From New York?’ Ralph said.

  ‘Nice, France,’ the man said. ‘We buy paintings there also.’

  Bloody hell. A floating gallery. What a mercy pirates in these waters were a thing of the past.

  Ralph pressed the numbers on the phone, managed to locate Marianne who said she did indeed still have the paintings there and also asked whether he could pick up a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé on the way out. A celebration was called for, was it not?

  ‘You can’t deliver? Not now, right this minute?’ Ralph asked. ‘These lovely, lovely people here have a yacht outside waiting.’

  ‘Sorry, Ralph, no can do. Breast-feeding. See you later. Don’t forget the wine. Byeee.’

  Ralph wondered if Marianne should be breast-feeding and drinking Pouilly-Fuissé at the same time. But then, she was probably breast-feeding and painting at the same time, wasn’t she? He saw that, currently, Marianne had thirty-two paintings for sale – how the hell did she find the time to get pregnant?

  Now, what could he do with these dear people with the unpronounceable name while he drove to Marianne’s? Why couldn’t Gracie have taken the job on the reception desk that he’d offered her?

  And at that precise moment Margot Bartlett came storming into The Gallery, eyes flashing, teeth if not bared, then very definitely on display.

  ‘Margot!’ Ralph said, rushing around from behind the desk, not giving her the flicker of a chance to speak first. He kissed Margot very noisily on both cheeks. ‘Big, big favour required. I will shut up forever and for all time about Aegean bloody blue, and I promise never, ever to put nudes in the front window, if you could just hold the fort for a little while.’

  ‘How little a while?’ Margot wiped Ralph’s kisses from her cheeks with the backs of her hands.

  Ah, so Ralph had read the signs wrong – Margot didn’t fancy him. Phew! Not that he would have done anything about it if she had. Ralph had only had one lover; Lydie. He was in no hurry to take another. What a disgrace to the building trade he was, and how he would have been laughed off every building site if anyone had found out he’d been a virgin on his wedding night. He pushed his doubts that Lydie most certainly hadn’t been to the back of his mind, where they languished like socks with holes in the heels at the back of his sock drawer.

  ‘Half an hour?’

  Ralph explained briefly about Marianne and the paintings and these tiny people (dwarfed by Margot) who needed entertaining, and could she just field any enquiries from any other punters, please?

  ‘Marianne Knight-Taylor lives near Kingsbridge. It’s going to take you rather longer than half an hour to get there and back.’

  ‘Ah. So you think it might be an idea to suggest my clients don’t hang around waiting for me?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Margot said.

  Ralph spent a good five minutes explaining the situation to his potential customers. Margot helped him out by suggesting places of interest they could visit.

  ‘I’ll make it up to you,’ Ralph said as the couple at last left the gallery.

  ‘You’d better get going,’ Margot said. ‘And you’d do well to heed my advice about Marianne Knight-Taylor. If you remember it.’

  ‘Something about clutches, wasn’t it? Only I don’t think you meant handbags, did you?’

  He couldn’t help winding Margot up.

  Margot gave him a puzzled look.

  ‘A clutch is a sort of handbag,’ Ralph explained. ‘Or so my wife and daughter inform me.’

  ‘And it’s also something on a car, I believe,’ Margot retorted. ‘And I thought you had more pressing needs than playing at words.’

  ‘I do. I do,’ Ralph said. ‘Back in a jif.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘Get her to eat,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘Anything for now – crisps, chocolate. The trauma is making her lose the will to live.’

  ‘She never has eaten crisps and chocolate.’ Jonty was out of his depth, totally out of his depth and floundering. Becca was worse than the pickiest of eaters at the
best of times.

  ‘Then use your imagination, man,’ the doctor snapped. ‘Oysters? Smoked salmon? What was she used to before this happened?’

  Jonty stood in the bay window, a smoked salmon sandwich partway to his mouth. It would be smoked salmon sandwiches every day for lunch now that he’d managed to find something Becca would eat. He wasn’t that keen on smoked salmon himself but he couldn’t see the point in making two different lunches. Although today’s lunch was very, very late.

  Drew hadn’t rung up to say whether Che was any good or not. He’d ring down and ask in a minute, when he’d eaten. Oh. Someone was walking into the courtyard. A girl – no not a girl, more of a young woman.

  The late afternoon sunshine was highlighting some strands of blond in her hair, turning them gold. Jonty noticed things like colour and light and shade and depth. He watched as she picked her way carefully in very high-heeled shoes over the uneven slabs, dodging the weeds that sprung up between the broken bits and which he refused to put weedkiller on in case it killed minute wildlife.

  What a waste of time this one was going to be!

  ‘She’s wearing a black dress, for God’s sake,’ Jonty said to himself. A black, almost to her ankles dress; matt black, not shiny – linen possibly.

  ‘Who is?’ Becca asked. Although Jonty had cut the crusts from her sandwiches as asked, Becca was finding he hadn’t quite got all the hard bits off and was picking delicately at a triangle of soft white bread with her fingernails.

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘A customer?’ Becca asked.

  ‘I wish!’ Jonty said. Although the studio was open to the public, the public rarely came, and Jonty’s sales were mostly through trade fairs and art shops and exhibitions.

  ‘Do you need money? Is this what all this is about?’ Becca asked.

  Jonty watched as Becca poured herself a glass of white wine, filling the glass to the brim.

  ‘All this what?’

  ‘Being nice to me. Going out for the smoked salmon especially. Cutting the crusts off.’