Red is for Rubies

by Linda Mitchelmore

  ‘It was an accident,’ Jonty said. ‘Becca. At the hospital. One second she was waving to me from a barely open window, and the next she was standing on the ledge. She wasn’t a suicide risk, they said. Although the window was open it had a fixed bar on it so it wasn’t wide enough for a person to climb through. The nurse was preparing a shower, apparently, and while she was doing that, Becs – being so thin –just slipped easily through the tiny gap.’

  ‘It was just awful, Mum,’ Grace said. ‘Thank God I didn’t actually see her fall, but Jonty did. It was an accident though, I’m sure of that.’

  ‘You’d better come in, both of you,’ Lydie said. She was aware she was staring at Grace’s arm linked so casually through Jonty’s, as though she were used to holding onto him. Grace was tapping Jonty’s arm with her other hand, in a comfort-giving way. And in that moment Jonty must have seen that Lydie had noticed because he very gently lifted Grace’s hand and dis-entwined it from his arm. And Lydie was cross with herself for feeling as she did because wasn’t it simply something any man would do for a woman – his daughter or not – if she was distressed, as Grace was now? ‘I’ll make some tea, then you can tell me about it when you’re ready.’

  ‘Good old tea,’ Grace said, as she carved a path around the exhibits in The Gallery, looking neither left nor right, but straight ahead towards the door that led to the flat above.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Jonty said.

  ‘No! Please. I think Grace needs you.’

  Now more than ever she wanted to say, but couldn’t bring herself to voice the words. Jonty was looking not at her, but at the nude paintings. Marianne Knight-Taylor. On a whim Lydie had opened The Gallery that morning, although she’d been opening it less and less as her jewellery-making was taking up more and more of her time. She had even started putting some on display in the window of The Gallery and had sold about a dozen pieces in two weeks so far. But five of Marianne Knight-Taylor’s works had sold in a morning.

  ‘Marianne Knight-Taylor,’ Jonty said.

  ‘There were six, that’s the last one. She’s sold really well, but for some reason she’s reluctant to let me have any more. Says she’s through that stage of her life, whatever that means. Do you know her?’

  ‘Everyone knows everyone else in the art world around here. Or knows of them – knows their work. Marianne’s the latter scenario for me.’

  ‘I see,’ Lydie said. She’d been wondering if Jonty could possibly know that she had considered it might have been as a lover that Jonty had known her. And if that was why he had clarified his relationship – or not – to Marianne. Still Jonty hadn’t made a move to either follow Grace up to the flat, or leave. ‘But we shouldn’t be talking about Marianne, should we?’

  ‘Perhaps not, but she’s safer somehow.’

  Safer than what, Lydie wanted to ask. But now wasn’t the time.

  ‘You’ll come in?’

  ‘If it won’t be too awful for you, having me here.’

  ‘Not in the circumstances,’ Lydie said. She could have bitten back her words because she saw Jonty flinch. ‘I, I didn’t mean it to sound condescending …’

  ‘It didn’t. I won’t be able to stop long. Coroner and so on. There’ll be a funeral to arrange. Then I’ll have to tell Hugh, of course. Lucky sod’s got an out, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Hugh?’

  ‘Harris. MP. It’s thanks to him that Becca was the way she was.’

  ‘We’ve got a lot to catch up on, haven’t we?’ Lydie said. She knew who Hugh Harris was; who in the country who read newspapers didn’t? But what he was to Becca and Jonty she had a feeling she was soon to find out. She closed the door behind Jonty, turned the key in the lock. She changed the sign on the door to ‘Closed’.

  ‘Mum! Jonty!’ Grace called down, her voice wobbly, cracking, as though she was frightened now that she was on her own. ‘Are you coming? Please?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lydie called back.

  ‘Lyd, I’m sorry, I really am,’ Jonty whispered. ‘I’ve done nothing but muck up your life, haven’t I? Back then, and then now with Becca nearly killing Grace.’

  ‘Sssh,’ Lydie said. ‘I think we need to sit down, all of us, have our tea, and then talk.’

  ‘It’s almost unbelievable,’ Grace said.

  ‘Becca?’ Jonty said.

  ‘Yes. But not just that. Everything lately. I feel like I’m caught up in some sort of Hollywood movie, and any minute now Russell Crowe is going to pop up as my love interest, whisk me away to some Hawaiian beach – I mean, it’s all that unreal, isn’t it?’

  They were talking in low whispers as Lydie made tea in the kitchen. Grace could hear the snap of the switch as the automatic cut-out turned the kettle off. Then the sounds of a cupboard door being opened and the biscuit tin scraping along the shelf; mugs and plates being placed on the tin tray with gaudy hibiscus painted on it – very un-Lydie in its gaudiness. Lydie always used it to carry drinks through to the sitting room so as not to spill anything on the carpets. Perhaps Dad had bought it for her, Grace had never asked, but it was far, far too late to ask him now.

  ‘More than unreal,’ Jonty muttered. ‘Take this,’ he said, pulling the ceramic and silver pendant from his pocket. ‘I didn’t expect ever to see this again.’ He handed the pendant to Grace but she shook her head.

  ‘No. It’s Mum’s. Give it back to her.’

  ‘It’s not mine to give any more.’

  Jonty was still holding the pendant out towards Grace, waiting for her to take it, but she pushed his hand away from her. How could her mother have worn that pendant day and night for years in front of Ralph? Just how could she?

  ‘What happens now?’ she said, changing the subject. ‘With Becca?’

  ‘Coroner. Funeral. Solicitor. Police as it’s a sudden death. Not necessarily in that order.’

  ‘You do believe it was an accident, don’t you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. The hospital authorities will hold an enquiry. Some smart-arse doctor will have the definitive decision on that. But I expect they’ll exonerate themselves from all blame as usual.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter,’ Grace said. ‘I haven’t known you for long but you don’t strike me as bitter.’

  ‘No, and it’s not a nice taste. Ah, here’s the tea.’

  Jonty stuffed the pendant back in his pocket and stood up when Lydie entered the room and took the tray from her.

  ‘Here?’ he said, indicating a low, glass coffee table – Art Deco. Grace had always loved that table.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Lydie said. ‘Thank you.’

  Jonty sat down beside Grace again as Lydie began pouring tea. Black with one sugar for Grace. Milk but no sugar for herself. Grace watched, mesmerised as Lydie handed Jonty his mug of tea – black, no sugar – just the way he liked it.

  ‘I just don’t believe this!’ Grace rounded on her mother. ‘It’s like you poured Jonty tea only yesterday, isn’t it? You haven’t got to ask him how he takes his tea because you know. You’ve never forgotten. I can’t remember how Justin took his tea and that was only months ago. It’s like the thirty years with Dad never existed for you, isn’t it? Like I don’t exist! What a cosy, intimate gesture, this is! Like all you’ve been waiting for all this time is the chance to get back to how things were. Well, excuse me, but I just don’t want to stop here and watch this any more.’ She turned to Jonty then and said, ‘I’m sorry about Becca, I really am. She didn’t deserve to die the way she did, for whatever reason. But you two …’

  ‘Stop it!’ Jonty said. ‘Don’t speak to your mother like that. You’re in shock. We all are. In a calmer frame of mind you wouldn’t say those things.’

  A coldness came over Grace then, an all-embracing coldness, as though she’d been standing in the frozen food section of the supermarket for far too long trying to make up her mind about something. She didn’t know why the gesture had so enraged her, but it had. An insult to Ralph perhaps, knowing that Lydie had wrapped her memor
ies of Jonty up in cotton-wool, ready to unwrap them the second she got the chance. Which was now – with Ralph dead, and Becca dead. God! Couldn’t they bloody wait a second?

  ‘I’d like to be able to say,’ she said, ‘that you can’t speak to me like that because you’re not my father. But it seems, irrevocably and without doubt now, that you are.’

  Lydie stood in the bay window of the sitting room watching Grace stride down the street, her long legs making her look as though she were gliding rather than walking, until she disappeared in the throng of holidaymakers heading for Bayard’s Cove. Only when she could no longer see the swish of Grace’s long hair did she turn back towards Jonty.

  ‘Too much has happened to Grace in too short a time,’ Lydie said.

  ‘Not just to Grace, Lyd. To all of us. I can’t believe Becca’s gone. I feel I want to shout at someone. It should never have happened the way it did. Never. Someone’s going to pay the price for this. Lose his or her job. And I’m not blaming the nurse either. God, but I’m going to miss her. I’m missing her already.’

  Jonty swiped the back of his hand across his eyes and tears, Lydie guessed, weren’t far away.

  ‘This tray,’ Lydie said, tapping it with a finger. ‘Becca gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday. I’ve never been able to part with it. I can’t imagine the life you’ve had with her with her illness. I’m sorry. But it doesn’t change the fact that I think Grace is right. It is all a bit too convenient isn’t it, for you and me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have said becoming a widow and watching your sister fall to her death could be called convenient. Grace ought not to have said those things. She’s not a child, Lyd.’

  No, no she isn’t, Lydie thought. She almost laughed out loud then because what was Grace doing now if it wasn’t being childish, setting one parent off against the other – which one loves me best? Was she hoping that either Lydie or Jonty would race after her? And if one of them did it would surely have been the wrong parent.

  ‘No, but she’s our child,’ Lydie said, looking towards Jonty but not directly at him, focusing on something imaginary in the middle distance. ‘I’ve hurt her, possibly beyond forgiveness.’

  ‘We both have come to that. I’ve often wondered, haven’t you, what might have been if I’d faced up to my responsibilities.’

  Lydie wasn’t sure she wanted to go through everything again – her rejection, her parents forcing her to marry Ralph, who’d been only too keen, if a bit shocked considering she had turned him down so many times. Grateful perhaps that Ralph was good enough then – keeping scandal from the doctor’s house.

  ‘Becca?’ Lydie said. ‘You cared for Becca, didn’t you? Grace has said very little since Ralph died, but I gather Becca was far from well.’

  ‘Off the wall really, Lyd. Looking after her was just my way of giving something back for walking out on you. Becca got the caring I should have given you.’

  ‘And Grace.’

  ‘And Grace,’ Jonty agreed. ‘Of course you’d have been dirt poor if I had married you. RED’s not in a good way. It’s only Becca and her conscience money that’s kept me going. Or maybe I might have made a better job of it all if I hadn’t had Becca at the forefront of my mind 24/7. Who knows?’’

  ‘Conscience money?’

  ‘I’ll tell you some other time. But it involves Hugh Harris and it’s not pretty. Officially he is her next of kin, so no doubt by now he’s been informed of her death. I’d put money on the fact my answerphone is chock full of messages from him already. Bastard pushed her – almost literally, I think – over the edge when he wrote demanding a quickie divorce. I’d better go home.’

  ‘Oh. Won’t you wait for Grace to get back?’

  Lydie was conscious of Jonty crossing and uncrossing his legs; of his faded jeans – almost bleached looking – and the fact his feet were bare where they poked out from scuffed, leather loafers.

  ‘I still can’t quite believe that you don’t wear socks,’ Lydie said. Jonty, with his fondness for not wearing socks, even in winter, had been a turn-on then. And much to Lydie’s middle-aged shock it was a turn-on now.

  Jonty glanced down at his feet, then back at Lydie. A slow smile was spreading across his face.

  ‘Seems I don’t, Lyd,’ he said.

  ‘You were going?’ Lydie said.

  ‘I was, wasn’t I?’ He stood up, tidied the now empty mugs into a neat line on the tray. ‘Fancy you keeping Becca’s tray all these years. Very kitsch.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Do you remember her giving it me?’

  ‘I remember a lot of things, Lyd.’ Jonty picked up the tray of mugs. ‘Kitchen that way?’ he asked, gesturing in the right direction with a toss of his head.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Lydie said.

  She took the tray from him and their fingers touched.

  ‘Right, best get back to RED,’ Jonty said.

  ‘Of course.’ Lydie had an urge then to lean over and kiss him – just the once. No, once wouldn’t be enough.

  Lydie flushed. How stupid of her to think that Jonty, who had just seen his sister falling to her death, would feel like resuming their relationship at that moment. And what was she thinking? Ralph had not turned to dust yet in the cemetery at the top of the hill.

  ‘You still blush very prettily, Lyd.’

  ‘Stop playing games with me.’ Lydie looked away quickly, felt the flush creeping further up her neck, and down to her breastbone at the same time.

  ‘I don’t play games if you recall.’

  ‘You did with my heart once, remember?’

  ‘Not on purpose.’

  ‘We were young,’ Lydie said.

  ‘I had no parents to be afraid of, but you were scared of yours, weren’t you?’

  ‘I still am. Mum’s dead, but I still quiver standing up to my father. Stupid, isn’t it, at my age?’

  ‘But you’re doing it? Does he know about Grace? About her being our child, I mean.’

  ‘He guessed.’

  ‘I can’t imagine today’s kids being scared of their parents, can you? Or scared of anyone for that matter.’

  ‘Scared? I think it was more respect than scared. I know I was respectful of Dad’s position in society. Hence the hasty wedding.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t have that excuse.’

  Jonty sat back down again, and Lydie put the tray of empty mugs down on the table.

  ‘There were no excuses, Jonty. There still aren’t. And there’s more tea in this pot.’ Lydie automatically poured more tea into Jonty’s mug, aware that the action qualified Grace’s outburst, and Jonty nodded his thanks and picked up the mug, cradling it in both hands. ‘But we shouldn’t be talking about us. Becca can’t …’

  ‘Be cold yet?’

  Jonty was supplying the end of Lydie’s sentence, the way he used to.

  ‘I didn’t mean it to sound so callous.’

  ‘It didn’t. The bottom line is, Lyd, that Becca has been “dead” for a long time. I’ve mourned the beautiful, talented Becca she was, for a very long time. It was never a matter of how she died, but when. Which isn’t to take away the awfulness of how she did die. Years ago, a shrink called me an enabler. He didn’t say it like he thought I was a great guy either. In caring for her, shielding her, I was enabling her not to have to face the truth. So this shrink said. I never thought I’d hear myself say it but the guy was right.’

  ‘You did what you thought was right at the time – in the light of experience. Us, I mean. Or me.’

  ‘And us now?’ Jonty asked. ‘Regardless of what Grace thinks?’

  ‘I have to respect what Grace thinks.’

  ‘Why? Why for God’s sake? Isn’t it time you started living your life, not the life other people want you to live? If you’d stood up to your parents over me, well …’

  ‘Well, I didn’t. We can’t rewrite the history books.’ Lydie shuffled the remaining empty mugs around on the tray just for something to do.

  Jonty knocked back his tea.<
br />
  ‘You’re wearing sack cloth and ashes like a true martyr, Lyd, if I may say so.’

  ‘And you haven’t? With Becca? Hadn’t you better get back?’

  ‘Perhaps I better had. We need more time.’

  ‘More time for what?’

  ‘Stop fighting it,’ Jonty said. ‘You know we still care for one another. I’ll lay my heart and soul bare right here and now.’

  ‘Well, I can’t.’

  ‘Ah, can’t isn’t the same as won’t. Is it?’

  ‘Grace was right. It is all far, far too convenient to think we can get back together. Get married. Give Grace back a family.’

  ‘But that’s what you’d like? I’m reading between the lines here but I think I’m reading them right. I don’t remember saying anything about wanting to marry you, Lyd. Not yet. But I’m still being honest when I say I want to kiss you, make love to you. But perhaps not at this very moment.’

  ‘No. No,’ Lydie said. ‘Not at the moment, I mean. We’re both saying things perhaps we ought not to say given what’s happened to Becca today. Our emotions are still so raw for lots of reasons. And I’ll need time, you know …’

  ‘And it’s marching on, Lyd. Time.’ Jonty placed his empty mug on the tray and walked to the door. ‘I’ll see myself out. You’ve got my number. Let me know when you’ve had enough of it on your own. I’ll be waiting. I loved you then and I love you now. Waiting a bit longer won’t hurt me.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘She’s pregnant, isn’t she?’Becca said.

  ‘She might be.’ Jonty had a hunch Lydie’s father would have a friend only too willing to do an abortion. How the hell could he, Jonty, keep a family, as much as he loved Lydie? Pottery paid peanuts, even though it was all he ever wanted to do with his life. No, let Lydie’s father take care of this one. Then …?

  Jonty closed the door of The Gallery firmly behind him. He hadn’t expected Lydie to be following him anyway

  He looked up and down the street searching for Grace. Hopefully she had walked off her anger, her sadness, and was on the way back. Crowds of holidaymakers were spilling out onto the road from the narrow pavements – all of them in day out, money to spend, looking for something to spend it on mode. Any other time but now with Becca lying, probably not yet cold, on a mortuary slab, he might have asked if he could exhibit some more of his larger, sculptured pieces at The Gallery, so that some of that money could come his way.