Mourning Ruby

  I was ready. My heart beat hard, as if something frightening or wonderful was about to happen. It was a long time since it had beat like that. I had been calm for so long now. Nothing had brought tears to my eyes since I’d sat in Ruby’s bedroom and found the scent of her still there, like treasure. Nothing, until I saw her again, on the runway. My heart beat and I felt afraid. I didn’t know where this would lead me. I walked to the window and the light dazzled me and prickled my eyes. There was the bright sky and the trees shaking their electric green leaves in the morning wind and the rush of London and I was not separate from it any more. I could not hide in the stiff, chill pocket where I had hidden since I left my home.

  It was a narrow, white house in a narrow, white, quiet street. It had an old iron bell-pull and when I pulled it down I heard the sound in the heart of the house, and then Mr Damiano’s tread. He opened the door to me. He was dressed in one of those pale linen summer suits that English men can’t wear. It looked fine on him. He was upright and smiling.

  The house was everything I hadn’t expected. Beautiful rugs criss-crossed each other, trees stood about in the corners of rooms, the walls were covered with fine, silky Turkish carpets, there were piles of cushions and low divans. It looked like the tent of a travelling merchant.

  ‘Sit down. We’ll have coffee.’

  A woman I had never seen before brought in the coffee. She was dressed in black, with a broad strong face, and she looked about fifty. It surprised me when she spoke in English.

  ‘Angela is my housekeeper,’ Mr Damiano explained.

  It struck me that he had layer upon layer of lives. Maybe there were other houses, quite different, in Rome or Alicante or Berlin. More housekeepers. More Rebeccas, I thought. It was a thought that chilled me. But his smile was real. Even if it was only an illusion, his skill was wonderful.

  Angela served the coffee and went out. All the doors of the house were left open and soon we heard her begin to sing. The volume rose and fell. She must have been moving around, working. Her voice was strong, not sweet, but true. She was singing ‘Blue Moon’.

  ‘She has a good voice,’ I said.

  ‘We go to Covent Garden together. Angela has to explain the stories to me. They are so far-fetched that they must be true, I think.’

  I drank my coffee. It was very peaceful here and I noticed that my hand holding the cup was perfectly steady.

  ‘You slept well,’ said Mr Damiano.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because you had come to a decision.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I haven’t asked you here to make you change your mind, Rebecca. I asked you because I wasn’t satisfied with the way we parted. I was too tired to think of you properly, as I should have done. You are leaving my employment, and I have been very happy with the work you’ve done. I intend to give you something.’

  ‘But I’ve left with no notice – I’ve made things difficult for you.’

  ‘No. You have made me see that I should go to New York. That’s good. This business was not built by sitting in an office in London. I have been behaving like an old man. You’re laughing at me, Rebecca. You think, “Of course he is an old man. He should behave like one.”’

  ‘I don’t think that today. Maybe I did think it last night, just for a while –’

  ‘You mean the night before last –’

  ‘Yes. But you have renewed yourself.’

  ‘Aha! You found the right word, Rebecca! That’s because you are a native speaker. That is the word I wanted to find for you, after what you told me about your aeroplane, and that you saw Ruby in the fire-truck. But I am not a native speaker and so I have to say it like this, with words that aren’t quite right. Because I don’t know when a horse should be a horse and when it is a mount. So. I will say it in my way and you will understand me.

  ‘I look at your face, Rebecca, and I see that the worst thing that can happen to you has happened to you. It’s there, look. Anyone can see it. It has made its mark on you and the mark will never come off.

  ‘You take it with you wherever you go. But maybe you renew it.

  ‘No, I am not explaining this right. My horse has turned into a mount. What I want to say is, you take it with you, Rebecca. What you are now is the woman that Ruby’s death has made. And with that – well, that’s enough.’

  He paused. There was a film of sweat on his forehead. For a moment he looked drained and old, as he’d done in the garden. But then he gathered himself and shook off his age.

  ‘Eat one of Angela’s almond biscuits. They are excellent. And then I’ll show you what I have for you.’

  After we’d drunk our coffee and eaten the biscuits, he rose and went out. I heard his voice and Angela’s from the kitchen. I couldn’t hear the words. Suddenly her voice rose in protest but I still couldn’t understand. They were not speaking English.

  They sleep together, I thought. They got out of the same bed this morning. There was that feeling about them, and Angela was one of those women with a face that could lighten with her mood and a fine body under that dull dress.

  Well. He was not mine after all, my Mr Damiano. He had another name, in Angela’s language.

  Her voice was quieter now. They’d resolved whatever it was.

  It’s not possible to listen to a couple talking privately in another room without a pang of some kind. But I didn’t need to say to myself what the pang was. He was coming back.

  He held out a small, flat, brown-paper parcel.

  ‘Open it, and see if you can tell me what it is.’

  The parcel was tied with string. It had been tied up a long time ago and the knots were difficult, but I picked them loose. The paper was old and fragile. I unwrapped it carefully and there was a folded piece of cloth.

  ‘Take it out,’ said Mr Damiano.

  I unfolded the cloth. It was made of strong, silky stuff. A panel of blue and a panel of gold were stitched together. The piece of cloth was about a yard square. Mr Damiano looked at me expectantly.

  I stroked the cloth. Blue and gold, different pieces of fabric sewn together into one… I had it.

  ‘Your mother sewed it,’ I said. ‘It’s the tent of your first Dreamworld.’

  He slapped his hands together. ‘I knew you would remember! It’s for you, Rebecca, to mark the time we’ve spent together. And your excellent work for me.’

  ‘I can’t take it from you. You’ve kept it all this time.’

  ‘Of course you can take it, if I give it to you. Take it with you. Put it in your bag. It doesn’t take up much space, and feel how light it weighs. My mother chose material which was tough and would survive use. It has barely faded. Take it.’

  I folded the cloth carefully, corner to corner. He was right. It folded almost to nothing. I thought of the queues outside the first Dreamworld, waiting to come in, and how Bella had told fortunes.

  ‘I’ll keep it for ever,’ I said.

  Mr Damiano shrugged expansively. ‘Of course you will. And if you lose it, never mind.’

  It was time to go. Angela remained in the kitchen, singing and clattering plates. Mr Damiano came into the hall. As he reached to open the door for me, I reached for him. I felt the weight and bulk of him for the first time, the shock of his body after so much of his mind and voice. His warmth and smell enveloped me. This close, the colour of his hair had a certain deadness which made me know for sure that Mr Damiano tinted his hair. We held each other, not moving, locked together, while Angela sang in the kitchen. And then the door opened and I was gone.

  23

  The Deep Blue Sea

  We dip our heads in the deep blue sea

  The deep blue sea the deep blue sea

  We dip our heads in the deep blue sea

  On the last day of September

  Dearest Rebecca,

  It was an email from Joe. I sat in the internet café and read it through once, and then again. St Ives had an internet café now. The town was so much changed from the days when A
dam and I first came. Everywhere, the differences between places were being smoothed out.

  He had always begun with those words when he wrote to me. Dearest Rebecca. I’d taken it for granted, but now I wondered. Right from the beginning, Joe’s endearments had made me feel that I had a place in the world.

  Dearest Rebecca,

  I am on Vancouver Island now. I’ve begun a new book, but this time it’s not going to be history – or, if it is history, it’s of a different kind. I don’t know if I’ll ever publish it. It’s just a story. I’ve never written anything like it before. I think it’s for you. It’s been strangely easy to write, as if the story was there all the time, waiting for me to notice it.

  No more Stalin, Rebecca. I’m finished with that. I’ll never get to the end of that book about Stalin’s fugue.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Nadezhda Alliluyeva and her death. You were right, Rebecca, when you saw the horror of how she left her children. I couldn’t let go of her, even after I’d finished the book about her. But now I have, and it’s killed the book I was trying to write. It was always Nadya who interested me, not him. Strange, isn’t it? The mark Stalin makes on the world is so great. A stain, a mark that spreads like a greasy fingerprint on papers in an archive. We’ll never get rid of it. And yet as a subject he is barren. I can rehearse everything he did and everything he was, and it comes out dead on the page. It’s the effect he has on other people that matters. I try to see him alone in a room, eating or sleeping or whistling a tune he likes, and every time I fail.

  I can think of the things that may have run through his mind when he was in the dacha. An argument, a cry, a blow. A woman running out of a room. A wound smelling of blood that has already congealed, and a letter lying on the floor which he knows he should not read, but which of course he will read. A face that was alive with love for him, but now it’s shut like a stone. Children who feared him and men who danced for him like bears. But I cannot imagine myself into that room where he is alone. I’ve come to the end of trying.

  You told me a long time ago that story was all you had. You were angry with me for trying to reinterpret your story, maybe even trying to change the way you looked at it.

  All you know about your mother is that she gave birth to you. All I know about my father is what my mother has told me. I can’t remember him at all. He was a flyer. My father flew and my grandfather flew and I know almost nothing about what they did and what drove them. They went to war, both of them, one in each generation, but I don’t know anything about it.

  He would never talk about it, my mother says. When there was a programme about the war he wouldn’t watch it. He never went to reunions. ‘He’d had enough of all that,’ my mother said.

  There’s a small museum of aviation here at Victoria, close to the airport. That’s how my story started. I walked around those aeroplanes and imagined men inside, starting up the engines. I could see it, feel it. One of the characters might be my grandfather. And there’s a woman, too. I see her alone in a room which she has painted herself. I watch the way she moves and hear the song she hums under her breath.

  Do you remember telling me about how the midwife sat down with a long form to fill in, on your first ante-natal visit? You couldn’t give her any of the details she needed, about your family medical history. She was very tactful about it. She must have come up against the situation before, you said, people who don’t know who they are or where they come from. I recall your exact words: ‘It’s not only that I don’t know my mother or my father. They’ve cut me off from the whole chain of my ancestors.’

  I felt for you then, though I may not have shown it. You don’t want my pity, any more than I want yours. But in thinking it over, I’ve come to see that it isn’t true. No one can cut you off from the chain of your ancestry. They can’t do it by mistake, or even deliberately. It would be the hardest thing in the world to do.

  You’ve got all the information inside you that everyone else has got: the genetic map, the mitochondrial DNA. Your features rise up from the swamp of the past, just like everyone’s.

  Nobody really knows their ancestors, even if they’re living beside the graveyard where their great-great-grandparents are buried, or in the house which their family built and lived in for generations. They may possess papers, objects, maybe money and property. But they don’t possess the lives of the past, any more than you do.

  But they may possess stories. I was thinking about what you said, Rebecca, and that the most important thing you haven’t got about your family are their stories. That’s why you got so angry when I suggested that there was another way to interpret your shoebox. It was your story and it was all you had and you were going to cling on to it. No one was going to wrestle that shoebox out of your arms.

  So I thought I would give you another story. It’s presumptuous of me, isn’t it? Lucky I’m not with you so I can’t see you slap me down with a look.

  If you don’t want it, you don’t even have to read it. It’s not finished yet, but when it is I’ll email you to find out where you are, and then I’ll come and give it to you.

  I’m not being completely honest. In fact, my dearest Rebecca, I’m not being honest at all. I’m not writing this story entirely for you. How could I? I’m also writing it for myself. I want to look at the features of it. I want to see my grandfather’s lips move. I want to hear the words that will come out of Florence’s lips. She’s called Florence, the woman I told you about, the one who’s in the room alone. At least, she’s alone now, but soon she won’t be –

  So I am not going to write any more about Stalin. Olya was right, I should have written Volodya’s story, but I can’t do that, either.

  I’m writing about the people who have been there all the time, waiting. I’m writing about you, and me. And you wouldn’t believe how fast I’m writing. All those years of struggle and research and drafts, and no book; and now I’m going to write this one in a matter of months. I can feel it.

  Don’t take fright. Don’t sheer off, Rebecca, the way you do sometimes. All I’m asking you to do is to be my reader.

  Yesterday, I saw a grizzly bear. We were on one side of a gorge, with our guide. There was a slippery path, and a steep drop to the river below. The river roared through the gully. They have close to six feet of rain a year there. Enough rain to bury you standing, Mikey said. He’s our guide. We’d camped the night before. Did you know that you can’t leave a trace of food in a tent in bear country? You have to seal it in boxes and hang it in trees well away from the camp.

  Mikey touched my arm. He spoke quietly. I knew that he wanted to draw my attention to something without alerting the others.

  ‘Look down by the water. On the other side of the river. There’s a grizzly.’

  I looked down. The bear was easy to see, though I wouldn’t have known it was a grizzly. It seemed to be playing with the water, right by the edge, where it churned through the rocks.

  ‘He’s hunting salmon,’ said Mikey. ‘Didn’t expect to see him here.’

  I could tell that although Mikey took a certain detached satisfaction in the presence of the grizzly, he wasn’t in the usual sense of the words pleased to see him. And I could see why. The bear had climbed down his side of the gorge. He could most certainly climb up again, on ours.

  But he was at a distance. None of his senses registered us through the roar of the water.

  Mikey didn’t mention the presence of the grizzly to anyone else in our group. We walked on through the wet, in single file.

  But as we went on it occurred to me that we weren’t walking into safety. Phew, no more bears, that’s a relief. It wasn’t like that. We were simply walking into the territory of being less close to a grizzly bear. There were pretty much bound to be bears within calling distance all the way we walked.

  You know how they say that you are never more than three yards from a rat, in the city? And yet you rarely see one, unless it’s your job to do so.

  So here I am
, Rebecca. To be exact, here I am sitting in a pool of electric light, with my iBook burning blue. I’m drinking whiskey and I’m about to start writing again. I’m in the territory of bears. They are all around me, even if I can’t yet see them. I can sense them, smell them. You know me, Rebecca, I’m an indoor man by nature, and words are the kind of bears I hunt.

  With love,

  Joe

  I must have been smiling as I read it, because a young guy who was wiping the tables smiled back at me.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine.’ I glanced round. The place was full and there were more backpackers barging in the doorway. Too much trade for one pair of hands.

  ‘Do you need any help here?’ I asked.

  And now it’s September. The thirtieth of September, to be exact. The families and children left weeks ago, and even the students have to go now. Tomorrow, people will be permitted to let their dogs run on the beaches again. Porthmeor has a washed, innocent look to it. The light’s changed too. It’s golden now, rather than white.

  I can walk freely, where there would have been a hundred camps set up on the sand in August. Family camps: children, parents, grandparents, young girls with their boyfriends, maybe a son-in-law who keeps staring at gaps in the canvas walls that surround him, as if he plans a break-out.

  But in some of the camps everybody looks content. Even happy. I want to get close, to find out how their happiness works. I want to watch from the very first moment, when the first member of the family dumps an armload of chairs, cushions and mats on the sand and then another comes up with rolls of windbreak under each arm, and a big smooth stone for hammering in the poles. They don’t want to lie in the naked air of the beach, with people like me watching. They’re very genial but they know what they want, which is themselves.