Mourning Ruby (15 page)

‘Not that she wanted bread. She wanted money, and she certainly got it. Little girls in stiff dresses would mince across in their tight Sunday shoes to drop coins into Bella’s lap. Each time, Bella would make the sign of the cross.

‘I watched from a distance in case anyone hurt her or stole her money. When they had all gone, Bella would signal to me and I’d come over. She would show me the money, and she would spit on the ground. Each Sunday I bought her two soft white rolls from the baker, and the rest of the money went under the tile.

‘We saw through the people on the street as if they were glass. We knew who would give, who would linger to watch and who would rush onwards with barely a glance. We knew who would try to thieve our coins, and who would call the police. We knew from their eyes what they wanted. Late at night I would set two torches in the ground and the light would catch the passers-by and draw them into our show. Sometimes we would buy a box of oranges and cut them into quarters.

“‘Refresh yourselves, ladies and gentlemen! With our compliments!”

‘They would suck and spit out the peel and they would give more generously when the time came.

‘They did not simply want pleasure. They wanted
to be given pleasure
. Once we had learned that, we used the knowledge in everything.

‘The first Dreamworld was very small. My mother made the tent for us by hand. It took her weeks, working when she had finished her work for the day. It was striped in blue and gold. My mother made it in stripes so that she could use odd pieces of material, which were cheaper to buy. You could barely see the seams.

‘Only a dozen people could be admitted at a time. We hired a boy called Jaime to keep the doorway while the show was on. He had to be fierce. The more they waited, the more they heard the pleasure inside the tent, the bigger the crowd grew.

‘Inside there were cushions which my mother had also made. As well as juggling and fortune-telling, there was a Moroccan storyteller, a Fado singer, a snake-charmer. There were sweet pastries, and wine. The light shone through the tent walls, blue and gold. We had spent all the money we had saved under the tile.

‘Every day, what happened inside the tent changed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. One day there would be fruit, the next honeyed nuts. We hired a man who could do portraits in ten minutes. There was a gipsy girl who could make a fountain of silver coins spring from her ears.

‘What happened inside our tent was a dream, a story. You entered and while you were there, your pleasure was everything. And then you had to leave, while your pleasure was still rising towards its peak. We worked
until late, late at night. One in the morning, or two in the morning. The hours we worked, you would scarcely believe. I didn’t think of Bella as a child any more, and nor did she. We were partners. We shared the same dream. It was those who came to us who became like children. Not childish, but like children.’

‘What happened to Bella?’ I asked.

‘She died in Vienna, when she was thirty,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘We were famous by then. The Viennese love shows, but they are very sophisticated. Not at all credulous. We had restored an exquisite merry-go-round. We had a medium who could speak to whole regiments of the dead. That was very popular. You would think you saw the rows of the dead standing there. We had a living statue team from Prague.

‘Bella had flu. She didn’t stop work. She wouldn’t stop. She was booking a dwarf Shakespeare act from England and they were appearing at a fair in Innsbruck. Bella had to see them. She took the train west, saw the act, negotiated, stood on the platform for a long time waiting for the train back. I was away in Graz, visiting a scrap merchant who had a horse which he said came from the Imperial Fair at Kreuzburg. It was cold.

‘Bella was half-poisoned with flu. When she got back, she found there was a quarrel between the living statues and the fire-eaters. Both acts were troublesome. I had already changed their accommodation, made sure their rehearsal times did not overlap, and negotiated new performance times. They should never have troubled Bella. Instead of going to bed she stood in the evening cold while one side argued at her and then the other. If she had been well she would not have let them behave
like that. But she was too tired, for once, to assert her authority.

‘She developed pneumonia, she developed pleurisy, her lungs filled with fluid. Antibiotics didn’t touch it. Her chest was weak, we knew that. The only part of her that was.’

19

Our Business is Pleasure

I thought of Bella, flat on her back, fighting for breath as she had fought all those years before, after her fall from Mr Damiano’s shoulders.

‘We hoisted her up on pillows,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘She was given oxygen. But we could see the darkness creeping up her face, from the lips. She died in the late evening. They all came to pay their respects, the fire-eaters and the living statues, all of them. When Sasha – our clairvoyant – came in, she covered her face with a white handkerchief and wept, so that she would not have to meet my eyes. Her professional status was compromised, she thought, because she hadn’t predicted Bella’s death. It’s strange, what people consider important at such times.’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’re going away, Rebecca. You’re leaving us.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know.’ Mr Damiano was silent for a while and then he said, ‘Not back to your husband.’

‘No.’

‘It’s not yet time?’

‘No, I mean never, it will never be time. We’ve separated. It’s permanent.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Mr Damiano, ‘unless he’s found another woman.’

‘Of course he hasn’t,’ I rapped out without thinking.

‘Of course he hasn’t…’ Mr Damiano repeated. ‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s –’

‘Because he’s a man in the prime of life? Because he’s easy to love? Because he has an excellent profession? All those reasons?’

Mr Damiano had turned to face me. His creased dark eyes were trying to make me laugh.

‘He hasn’t stayed in a box since you left him.’

He has, I wanted to say. He’s in our house now, fast asleep. The bedroom door’s open. Down in the hall there’s his case with his work for tomorrow in it. He works all the time. Sometimes he has colleagues round, sometimes he goes to see a film. He hasn’t abandoned the life we had together. He’s just…

Waiting.

Waiting
. The word shocked me. I put it away in my mind to think of later.

‘But you don’t write to him? You don’t telephone him?’

‘No.’

‘Then I think the chances are high that he’s found another woman,’ observed Mr Damiano. He spoke so surely that for a second I could see this woman, too, as if Mr Damiano had conjured her up. ‘If you went back to your house, Rebecca, I think the front door would be a different colour. Yes. The first thing she will want to do is to change the appearance of the house. She won’t want it to resemble the home where you and Adam lived together.’

Our front door was blue. A beautiful duck-egg blue. It had taken me weeks to find the exact shade. Of course no one would want to alter its colour. Adam wouldn’t want it changed.

‘She will tell Adam that it’s time for something new. She will repaint your daughter’s bedroom and take the furniture out of it, because it’s not needed any more. She will want to free him from the past.’

‘You can’t do that. The past is what you are. Anyway, Adam doesn’t want to be free of us.’

‘You think so… Did you have a carpet in Ruby’s room?’

‘Yes.’

‘She will have removed the carpet and stripped the floor, you can be sure of that. She will have hired the stripper and done the work herself, wearing a mask so that the wood dust wouldn’t choke her. I know what these women do.’

‘Why are you saying these things?’

His face seemed to glint and glitter. ‘Because they are true. And your husband’s clothes will have changed, too.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘I do.’

‘You’ve been there.’

‘No. How would I know where your house was, or where you lived when you were married? You never told me.’

‘Things like that are easy to find out, if you want to.’

‘Believe me, Rebecca, I haven’t visited your house. But do as I say. Go there. See if the front door is still the same colour. Then come back and tell me if I’m right or wrong.’

*

It was more than three years and a hundred and thirty miles that separated me from Adam. Mr Damiano did not see the film in my head that started each time I thought of Adam. Although it was my own film, I couldn’t edit it. It started to roll and I was helpless to do anything but watch. The empty, sunlit house, the minute I spent by the mirror doing my hair, the open front door, the steps going down. The blue car driving innocently four streets away. It would happen and there was nothing to stop it.

I was afraid of what Adam saw. We couldn’t comfort each other. He was locked into it, as I was.

People had rushed to tell us that we weren’t guilty of anything. There was a bereavement counsellor at the hospital, with the blondest hair I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t listen to a word she said.

We couldn’t have done anything. It was an accident.

But if it was an accident then everything is an accident. Ruby was born to us by accident. The joy of her was an accident. No matter how solid and safe it looked, all the time our household had been an accident, a frenzy of atoms butting against each other. And now it had all flown apart.

‘You mustn’t blame yourselves. It was an accident.’

We couldn’t have another child together. I knew it as soon as Ruby was buried. I could not keep a child safe. One stupid second, one mouthful of food going the wrong way, one reaction to a vaccine, one phone call from the teacher in charge of the school trip. I understood what it meant now.
All the ills that flesh is heir to
. Those ills were real, they were here and now. They were what we got, for being human. We inherited our lives by
accident and we were haunted by what could happen at any minute.

The day I knew I had to leave home, I’d passed the primary school two streets away. Ruby had been in the reception class there.

A car was parked on the yellow zigzag lines outside, beside the notice in red lettering stuck to the iron gates, which read:
Stopping or parking here will endanger your child’s life
.

Leisurely, the woman who’d parked her car there undid the seat belts that protected her two children and helped them out on the pavement side. They were only a step from the entrance gate. She wouldn’t have to take them in. She could watch them safely into school from her car, which blocked the sight line of every other child crossing the road.

‘Don’t forget, VIOLINS,’ she hooted after her children.

I took hold of her open car door. I shook as if an electric current had got hold of me.

‘Children could be killed, trying to cross the road here with your car in the way,’ I said.

She looked at me, her face blank and smooth and unsurprised. This wasn’t the first time. Other parents must have got hold of her car door and shouted. She was bland, and smooth and sure of herself. Shut off from me and I couldn’t reach her.

‘They could be killed,’ I repeated. I thought I would kill her. I would drag her out of the car by the roots of her hair. But she didn’t see it. Her right hand tapped the steering wheel.

‘I’m just dropping them off. It only takes a minute.’

‘It only takes a minute to die,’ I said. She heard me then. Her eyes stretched, but she tightened her lips self-righteously.

‘Please take your hands off my car.’

‘If I ever see you parked here again, I’ll slash your fucking tyres.’

‘Don’t you dare threaten me.’

‘It’s not a threat,’ I said. ‘It’s a promise.’ I tightened my grip on her car door. I was pumping full of murder and she knew it. She rammed the car into gear and its acceleration shook me off and left me standing in the road.

I would have hurt her. She’d known it and I knew it. I was going crazy with Ruby. This was what Adam would be left with, if I stayed. A crazy woman keeping guard outside the school our daughter no longer attended, until the school secretary had to call the police.

‘I’m tired, Rebecca,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘I must sleep.’

I saw that it was true. The fire and glitter had gone out of him. I was used to his gift for being any age when he wanted, but he was old now. He sagged forward, then he clambered to his feet. He smiled at me, as he always did, with his formidable courtesy. With the warmth that made you feel he had a world to offer each time.

‘I’m too tired to go home tonight,’ he said. His voice was thick and blurred. ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa upstairs.’

He planted the palms of his hands on the iron table, bracing himself for the walk across the courtyard. He’d told the truth when he said that he was older than I thought. He was old. It was easy to believe that he was seventy-one, or even older.

‘Turn the lights off,’ he said. His head was bowed and I couldn’t see his face. ‘Make sure the tent is cleared.’

‘What?’

He gestured impatiently. ‘You know. And we must watch Gottfried. He’s been drinking. They all drink, if you give them a chance.’

‘Who do you mean, Mr Damiano?’

‘All of them, Bella, all of them. They drink too much and then they no longer give pleasure. But our business is pleasure.’

‘I’m not Bella, Mr Damiano.’

He was silent, supporting himself.

‘I know that,’ he said after a while, very quietly. ‘You’re Rebecca. I know you.’ But he stared up at me as if he was finding the lineaments of another face in mine. ‘Yes, I know you. How did you come to find me?’ He stared at me and his face was tired and naked.

‘Shall I take your arm?’ I asked. ‘You don’t look well.’

He shook his head, ridding it of something.

‘You’ve never been inside one of our Dreamworlds, have you, Rebecca? You’re too young. It was all over before I knew you. But I’ll make one for you. The last of Damiano’s Dreamworlds, it’ll be for you, Rebecca. I’ll send an aeroplane overhead when it’s ready.’