Red is for Rubies

by Linda Mitchelmore

  ‘On my way.’

  The nurses and doctors had gone leaving Lydie alone with Grace. There was so much she wanted to say and prayed she’d be able to before much longer. Four more hours and Grace should start to wake up gradually, the nurse had said. Lydie reached out a hand to touch the butterfly clips on a gash on Grace’s temple. There was a deep cut and a massive bruise rapidly darkening on her shoulder.

  Would it hurt to pour out her heart to her daughter? Darling I do love you and I do love your dad in my way but I’m not in love with him. I never have been. Can you understand that? You must know what that means – you had it with Justin in the beginning. I had it once too. And you are the result. I’ve been living half a life not being true to myself. Or you. Or Ralph. I see your biological father in you every time you toss your hair back off your forehead, every time you smile your slow lazy smile. Just like he did. But you haven’t smiled much lately, have you? Have any of us? Well, okay, Ralph has. He’s like a kid in a toyshop with The Gallery, isn’t he?

  If Lydie were to say her thoughts out loud might Grace hear on some deeply subconscious level? And if she did, was it fair to assuage her own guilt? No, Lydie couldn’t risk that. She would sit and wait for Grace to wake up, will her to live, not be damaged. So many questions she needed to ask still. When Ralph arrived perhaps they could ask them together. She’d been told he was here somewhere. So where was he?

  ‘Well, well, well, don’t we look like the cat that’s got the cream!’

  If only she knew! Cream and best salmon and the pickings from rare Scotch steak was how Ralph felt at that moment.

  ‘Hello, Margot.’ Even seeing the last person he really needed or wanted to see couldn’t dim Ralph’s lightness of being, his awakening. God, fifty-four and still doing the rites of passage stuff.

  ‘Hmm, I smell a rat.’

  Smell a rat! Was he still emitting sex hormones or something? Sweat? He ought to have asked Marianne if he could have a shower, but there hadn’t been time. Not that he wanted to. Taking a tiny, exploratory sniff all Ralph could smell was the patchouli oil Marianne’s skin had been perfumed with. He suddenly felt that he was in danger of getting another erection. Fumbling in the pocket of his chinos, Ralph found his keys, selected the one for the front door of the gallery and pushed it into the lock.

  ‘My aftershave, I expect. Have you had much experience of aftershave, Margot?’

  ‘Chauvinist. But I refuse to rise to the bait. Anyway, just to let you know your phone’s been ringing itself off the hook in there. Every time I’ve walked past it’s been ringing.’

  ‘There’s a law against stalking, Margot.’

  ‘I have to remind you – as you are an incomer – that it is my duty as a councillor to see that the standards of the town are upheld. And what’s that?’

  ‘Margot. I run an art gallery. From time to time I will need to bring in stock. These are painted canvases. I will get them framed and then they are going to go in the window.’

  ‘They’re nudes, aren’t they?’

  ‘Let me see.’ Ralph leaned the six canvases against the gallery window and slowly thumbed through them. ‘They seem to be, yes.’

  He placed his body firmly between Margot and the canvases, but still she managed to worm her way to a view of them.

  ‘Marianne Knight-Taylor! I might have known.’

  ‘Not all of her, surely?’ Ralph laughed. Even being unfrocked by Margot couldn’t dim the warm, joyful feelings Marianne had awakened in him.

  ‘Your phone’s ringing again.’

  ‘So it is. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll go and answer it. And then I’ll see if I can find the best positions for Marianne.’

  ‘You’re a cocky one,’ Margot sniffed.

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘And those paintings will go in the window over my dead body.’

  ‘Carnations or lilies, Margot?’ Ralph said. He closed the door on Margot Bartlett. He’d better answer that phone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘It’s a girl,’ the midwife said. ‘And by the length of her she’s going to be a model. Knock that Viv Neves off her perch she will. Will you look at all that hair!’

  And so Lydie had looked and seen long wisps of hair sticking out at all angles from her new daughter’s head. Straight hair like Jonty’s, and not curly like Ralph’s. Her baby’s hair wasn’t as black as the two babies Lydie had seen when she’d arrived in maternity – it was more like fair hair when it’s wet. Thank God both Ralph and Jonty were blond, or Lydie would have had some explaining to do – especially to her father.

  Lydie woke with a start. Her neck was stiff and the fingers of her left hand were numb. How could she have fallen asleep! And for how long? Anxiously she turned towards Grace. What if …? But Grace had a better colour now, not so milky-white with that awful greyish tinge, like not very well-laundered white underwear.

  This is all my fault, isn’t it? If I hadn’t tricked Ralph into thinking Grace was his child; if I hadn’t persuaded Grace to come with us because I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone with Ralph in Devon, where I didn’t want to be in the first place, none of this would have happened. And my father – I should have stood up to him years ago, especially over Jonty. If I had we’d all have been living totally different lives. Maybe not such well-financed ones, but good lives all the same. And then Grace wouldn’t have met Justin in all probability, and she wouldn’t have had her heart broken by him and wouldn’t have needed to work at the pottery and this would never have happened. And Ralph could have had the sort of emotional love he needed and which I’ve never been able to give him. Poor Ralph – he deserves better than me. If, if, if … Lydie swallowed back her sobs, held her head in her hands, her whole body wracked with guilt.

  A disorientated Lydie glanced at her watch, scanned the walls of the cubicle for a clock to check her watch hadn’t stopped. But there was no wall clock. She could only have dozed off for a few minutes at the most but it felt like hours. Good. If she was to get through the night, be there when Grace woke fully, then she’d need to be alert. And she needed to pull herself together.

  The sound of footsteps getting louder, getting closer, made Lydie look towards the curtains. A doctor? Nurses? Ralph? Oh please, please, let it be Ralph. The light had all but gone now – he would have to be here soon. They would get Grace through this and then Lydie would begin the slow and painful steps to walk away from her marriage. Set Ralph free. Set them both free in a way. She knew now that it was the right thing to do. She stood up, ready to calm him, tell him things weren’t as bad as they seemed with Grace, thank God, because Grace was a daddy’s girl, always had been, always would be. It had taken all of Lydie’s persuasive powers to stop Ralph going around to Justin’s restaurant and smashing seven bells out of him when he’d broken Grace’s heart.

  Lydie struggled to compose her face into welcoming, but concerned, yet hopeful – an almost impossible task and her jaw began to ache with the effort.

  A man’s footfalls, the swish of the curtain. Lydie rose from her chair to go towards Ralph.

  But nothing, nothing, could have prepared Lydie for the shock when not Ralph, but Jonty Grant stepped between the gap in the curtains around Grace’s bed. An older Jonty, but just as good-looking, just as charismatically Jonty as when she’d last seen him. And despite the awfulness of the situation he was still doing the same things to her heart. And Lydie wondered if she would ever, ever forgive herself for feeling like that at this moment.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. Keeping me only unto thee until death us do part.’

  Ralph took a deep breath, ready to repeat the vicar’s words.

  Such a stupid bit that last bit – keeping me only unto thee. Why would a man want to look at another woman ever again when he was marrying someone as wonderful as Lydie?

  He glanced sideways at Lydie before responding. But she was staring
resolutely ahead, pale and fragile-looking, her auburn curls tumbling around her porcelain shoulders. God, what a lucky sod he was she’d said ‘yes’ at last!

  Ralph pressed ‘Msg’ on the answerphone. Click, click, whirr. He hummed a tune to himself waiting for a voice to cut in. It would be Lydie, he was sure of that, and he knew he should have been feeling as guilty as the sin he’d just performed with Marianne Knight-Taylor, but guilt wouldn’t come. Lydie and Marianne were as different as it was possible for two women to be. And it wasn’t just the age thing. Where Lydie was slim and elegant, ladylike, almost regal in everything she did – and that included sex – Marianne was soft and gloriously dishevelled and wanton. And right at that moment wanton was what Ralph wanted more of.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, helpfully to the answer-machine. ‘Spit it out, sunshine.’ His voice sounded over-loud in the gallery, bouncing off the painted stone walls, and the oak flooring he’d had laid at hideous expense. He remembered then that he hadn’t locked the door. Hmm, better do it if he didn’t want that witch Margot Bartlett barging in. But first he had to get this dratted answerphone to perform.

  Nothing. More clicks, more whirrs. But no voice. Then a sort of ripping noise; a grating and jarring. He glanced towards the window – Margot was still there, peering in at him through cupped hands, checking he was listening to his messages no doubt. Ralph made pretence of jotting something down on the pad beside the phone. He nodded as if in agreement to something being said on the tape. Yet there was still nothing coming through in reality.

  Maybe it had gone to the end of the tape if it had been ringing itself off the hook as Margot had told him it had. Ralph tried endless combinations of ‘Stop’ and ‘Answer’ and ‘Memo’ and ‘Msg’ but still nothing. So he gave up and fetched Marianne’s canvases and propped them up in a row along the wall. When he had positioned the last one to his liking he looked up and saw that Margot had at last gone.

  God, but Marianne was lovely. Ralph reached out with a finger and ran it from Marianne’s big toe, up the inside of her leg, then stopped.

  ‘I suppose,’ Ralph said, as he gathered the canvases up again and turned them to face the wall, ‘I have sullied my marriage now. And I’ve left myself open to blackmail forever more.’ Another laugh, another tickly sensation in his windpipe. ‘And I’m on the threshold of madness talking to stone walls.’

  Ralph was usually a good judge of character – you had to be when you were hiring and firing staff, talking with clients, getting suppliers to supply on time and not when they felt they should. Although that life was over now that he had The Gallery to occupy him. No, he’d judged Marianne rightly, he was sure of that. She was simply a lovely, talented, but lonely woman. And she’d recognised the arid desert of Ralph’s sex life and maybe the emotional loneliness – something Ralph hadn’t known he had until a few hours ago. They had merely been two consenting adults in need of that special sort of comfort that only good sex can bring.

  ‘Nah, cut the navel-gazing crap, Ralphie boy,’ he said. ‘You were just up for a good time, no better and no worse than the next man.’

  And he wondered, seeing as Lydie didn’t appear to be back yet, whether he could risk going back to Marianne’s – no lost credit cards as an excuse this time – for more of the same. He would have to be honest and say there was no way he was leaving Lydie. But right at that moment he was feeling more sixteen than fifty-four.Well, his mind was, if not his body. His muscles were beginning to ache in places he’d forgotten he had muscles.

  ‘God, think of it,’ Ralph said. ‘Your first bit of al fresco and you’re pushing for your pension.’ He rubbed away a niggle of a pain below his ribs. But no sooner had he taken his hand away then the niggle was back again. Hmmm. The grass had been okay this time, but next time – if there was a next time, and he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure yet that there would be – Ralph would have to insist on more comfort, more padding for his bones. He had a feeling Marianne’s bedroom would be sumptuous, Bohemian even. He could cope with Bohemian. Velvet and silk bedlinen if he was lucky. And candles – there were bound to be candles. Scented ones. Something 1970s, like sandalwood or vanilla. And maybe crystals hanging at the window to catch the light and send swirls of rainbows over their naked bodies as they made love.

  With one hand Ralph rubbed the niggle again, and with the other stabbed at the buttons on the answerphone. But neither hand seemed to be working, and they were shaking. No, not shaking, more of a tremble. A tingle. Guilt kicking in, Ralph supposed.

  Mobile. He searched in his pocket for his mobile. He would ring Lydie at Robert’s house, try not to sound as if he’d just had the best sex of his life with another woman, and ask her when she was coming back. And then he’d do the sensible thing and put this whole mad moment behind him and get on with making his gallery the best in the whole of Devon. He’d get onto the best bloke in the business for creating a website in the morning, regardless of cost.

  Ralph scrolled down to Robert’s number. Or did he? He could see the separate names but the letters in them seemed to be moving, criss-crossing one another, going fuzzy, indistinct. Ralph told himself to just press zero and his brain would do the rest, automatically take over and pad in the correct number. But although his mind was telling his finger what to do, his finger seemed to refuse to respond. He tried his other hand, managed to find zero and then one, before his legs forgot how to hold him up and he sank heavily and noisily onto the floor taking a large glass plate with him which smashed into thousands of fragmented pieces.

  ‘It’s a good job I came back to check he’d answered that phone if you ask me,’ Margot said to the ambulance man. ‘And there he was keeled over like some drunk, except I knew he wasn’t drunk because I’d spoken to him only fifteen minutes before. Full of himself he was. Like he’d been having too good a time doing something he ought not to have been doing, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘Are you a relative?’ the ambulance man asked, not looking at Margot as he spoke but never taking his eyes from the patient. ‘Name?’

  ‘Margot Bartlett. Miss. Twenty-seven …’

  ‘Not yours, madam, this poor gent’s here.’

  ‘Oh him. Ralph Marshall. Says so on a little plaque by the letter box if you care to take a look.’

  ‘Not right now, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘I expect all this has something to do with that Marianne Knight-Taylor.’

  ‘Is she a relative? Girlfriend perhaps? Is she around?’

  ‘Hmph,’ Margot snorted. ‘He’s got a wife some place. Wasn’t here five minutes before she went rushing back to where she came from. That’s incomers for you. Think the grass is greener and it’s all cream teas and cider and better weather and then they find it’s nothing of the sort and they blame the council for too high taxes and not sweeping the streets of rubbish and that means me because I’m on the council. And …’

  ‘Right. I think that’s more than I need to know, Miss Bartlett.’

  ‘Can I ride in the ambulance with him? I mean it’s not right a man should have a wife and then she’s not here to hold his hand when he needs it, is it?’

  ‘No to both, Miss Bartlett, I’m afraid.’

  Ralph listened to Margot laying bare his sins to some stranger dressed in bright green and Ralph didn’t have the powers to tell her to shut the fuck up. How strange that the language of the building site took over – like a trip-switch in his brain. He’d never gone in for swearing much, it lost its power to shock after a while in his opinion. But it was feeling good now, emotionally at least, to be thinking it. If only he could form the words with his lips, spit them out at Margot bloody Bartlett. It was none of her business where Lydie was or why, and what the hell had happened to him? Not a heart attack, he’d had no pain, not if you discounted that little niggle, he hadn’t.

  ‘Stroke,’ Margot said. ‘That’s what he’s got, isn’t it? I know it. Good job I called you when I did. Of course, he’s dead lucky I didn’t have to
smash the glass in the door to get in. Being a man he’d forgotten to lock it. Men don’t have to think about rape and suchlike, do they? And he was bleeding badly, so I had to see to that first. Before I dialled 999. It’s not right, is it?’

  ‘It’s not for me to say, madam. Ready?’ the driver asked the man in green bent over Ralph, adjusting straps to stop Ralph falling off the chair as though he were physically handicapped, which Ralph supposed he now was.

  ‘Ready,’ came the reply.

  Ready? Ralph was ready to murder Margot Bartlett if only he could get his fingers to work and close around her throat. It was going to be all over Dartmouth in no time that Ralph Marshall had almost dropped dead of a stroke after extra-marital sex. Like Chinese whispers, Ralph wondered what version would eventually reach Lydie and Grace.

  ‘Don’t worry mate,’ one of the ambulancemen told Ralph, ‘it’s common knowledge in this backwater that Margot Bartlett is only a stone’s throw from the funny farm. No one’s going to believe you were seduced by a lap-dancer in Slapton or wherever else it was you’ve been today regardless of what fiction she’s touting around. We found you with a cut hand, having fallen while trying to dial 999. And that’s the story your wife will get.’

  ‘Okay, let’s hit the road,’ the driver said.

  Blimey, I hope not, Ralph thought – things couldn’t get worse than this.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘Grace. Such a perfect name. And she is perfect,’ Ralph said. ‘Look at her fingernails! Have you ever seen anything so small?’ He bent to kiss the top of the baby’s head.Then he turned to Lydie, lifted her hand and brought it to his lips. ‘Thank you, darling.’

  ‘For Grace?’

  ‘For giving me a family.’

  Ralph’s smile slid from his face and Lydie wondered then if he’d guessed; if he’d known he wasn’t Grace’s biological father. But the moment passed, and their new life – as a family – began.