Mourning Ruby (29 page)

When the oaken leaves that fall from the trees

Are green and spring up again,

Are green and spring up again.

The room is high up, at the top of the house. A gull lands, spreads its wings in balance against the force of the wind, folds them. It begins to strut but the wind is too strong and the gull takes off, back into the current. It beats its way upward on oiled, powerful wings.

The window is small and high, the light strong. It’s one of those wild, white days of the first autumn gales. No rain yet, but the wind is still rising.

There are no curtains. There’s no need for blinds or curtains, since nothing overlooks this window. Below it there’s a spread of slate roofs, some of them silvery with age, some with sagging, broken tiles, others smooth and new. Orange lichen has colonized the slate and put a bloom over all the roofs. There are sea glimpses in the distance, and this morning the sea is white with turbulence.

Two bodies rest on the narrow bed. The woman lies on her stomach, her face sideways, pressed into the
man’s shoulder. Her fist hangs loose over the edge of the bed. They are both naked. His skin is pale, hers darker. The duvet has slipped off both of them onto the floor by the bed. The man lies on his back, deeply asleep. There are no pillows, or maybe these have fallen off the bed, too, and lie tumbled under the duvet on the floor. The man sleeps, his face stern and distant. The woman’s face is hidden by the spread of her hair, and there’s a crumpled rag of blue and yellow silk between her thighs. They both lie quite still, as if they have fallen from a great height together, onto this mattress in a small attic room in a little town by the sea. They look as if they may never move again. The wind bangs, the frame of the window creaks and a draught sucks at the door. Nobody stirs.

We sit cross-legged on my bed, facing each other.

Outside there are gulls riding on the wind, into the frame of the window and then out of sight. The house creaks and booms with the coming storm.

We stare at each other. I think of him as he was when he came up the narrow staircase to the flat where I lived with Joe. His hair was red then, and now it is grey. His face is more deeply scored, and this time I know what has put the lines there.

He’s here now, within touch. He is with me. I can see him, touch him, taste him. I am printing him back onto me, dot by dot by dot. It will take me a lifetime and that’s what I want.

Marie is banging about two floors down, cleaning the hallway. You can hear her thumping the broom against the skirting boards, even through the noise of the wind.
She’s got a vacuum cleaner but she prefers to suffer. She sweats proudly over brooms and buckets. She’s an odd kind of landlady, but maybe there’s no other kind, and so far we’ve got on.

‘She takes her underwear off when she does the cleaning,’ I say. Adam smiles. He lifts my wrist and kisses the inside skin. It’s a light kiss at first and then more hungry. He runs his lips up my arm.

There’s an explosion that buffets the air, and then another. I don’t know what it is.

‘It’s the maroons,’ says Adam.

A yell from downstairs. ‘RebeccA! RebeccA! Lifeboat’s going out! You coming down the harbour?’

‘Shall we?’ asks Adam.

‘I’ve never seen it.’

‘Get your clothes on. We’ll have to be quick.’

‘You go on down, Marie, I’ll come in a minute,’ I call. ‘I’m not dressed.’

The doors of the lifeboat station are open. The edge of the harbour bulges with people as the boat comes down the slipway. Tide’s high enough that she won’t need the tractor to get out. Water’s slopping up the slipway. Even inside the harbour the sea is chopped up, grey and white and wild.

‘It’s a yacht off Godrevy. She’s lost her engine and she’s drifting.’

The way the lifeboat goes out, she makes your eyes sting, even if you know nothing about her. We are pressed tight together by the crowd. She falls to the water and cuts into it and at once she’s off, her engines gunning for the harbour mouth.

And she’s gone. All round the harbour the lining of people breaks into clots and begins to disperse. The old man beside us is holding a child’s hand. Indicating the child, he says, ‘He’s never seen her go out for real. Only on Lifeboat Day.’

People are pushing around us, trying to bear us away as he goes on to tell his tale. It was the lifeboat disaster of 1939. He remembers it. He was a boy then but he remembers all the women going down to the harbour in the black of the night. All of them afraid, the night was so bad. The worst he can remember. And waiting for the boat but she didn’t come back, she broke up. One man lived, he was swept over to Gwithian and he was the only one to survive. Some farm people found him when he crawled out of the water. It was morning by then and his wife already thought he was dead, then she got a message. Among all those widows she still had her living man.

‘I was eight years old when the lifeboat was lost.’

We listen and say nothing. The tale is told and the boy tugs at his grandfather’s hand because it’s raining now and they’re getting wet. And so we part. Adam and I walk close, arms linked against the rush of wind. Suddenly everyone’s melted away, back indoors. The old man and the child have vanished. We never even saw Marie.

The wind shoves us along the bare grey streets, around corners, uphill. Rain streams on us now. Uphill, clinging close, catching my breath.

We are at the top. We walk heads down, buffeted. There’s a skinny, ripped Tesco bag whirling along the road. Man’s Head crouches to our left with the
sea blowing up on it. Porthmeor below is buried in white waves.

‘There are surfers out,’ says Adam. ‘Look.’

There are two worlds, I think. In one of them the surfers put on their wetsuits in the car park and take up their boards. The wild sea is their playground. They call the inside of the waves the green room. In the green room they rehearse for the next wave, and the next, and the next. The wave goes on until autumn folds into winter, winter to spring, and then the summer comes again. They ride the sea and the sea lets them.

It’s a dreamworld, I think. It’s like the places Mr Damiano makes. If he saw Porthmeor he would recreate it as a Dreamworld. He would make a tent fashioned like the inside of a wave. It would teem with bubbles and there would be the noise of surf in your ears, and the taste of salt.

In the other world we are opening the iron gate that leads into Barnoon Cemetery. There is a notice saying that dogs are forbidden here. The gate whines as it opens. Adam holds it for me, in case the wind catches it.

I am baffled. I cannot get my bearings or my breath in all this wind. There’s a place in my mind I can’t get to. I can’t remember where Ruby lies.

Adam guides me along the grassy path. We turn downhill, between a line of graves. Ruby used to watch the lugger’s brown sails from here, as it came around the Island.

This isn’t a graveyard where only dead people and mourners come. We used to walk through it in our
shorts and sun cream. We would go down to the beach this way, with rolled-up towels and Ruby’s wetsuit. We would stop hereabouts to name what we saw. Over to Clodgy, Man’s Head, Porthmeor, the Island, St Nicholas Chapel, the fishing boats and then the lugger, the
Dolly Pentreath
with her brown sails, bucking as she passed the Island. Ruby could name them all. I would pick her up, smelling sweetly of Ambre Solaire and baby sweat. She would ride in the crook of my arm and name the places. White sand, black rocks.

‘Here she is,’ says Adam. We kneel at the side of the grave, on the wet ground. The grass grows thick around the headstone, where Ruby’s name is printed more sharply than the name of Adam’s grandmother.

Rain pelts on our backs.

‘No, don’t go, let’s stay here,’ I say, although Adam hasn’t spoken.

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘I’m not going.’

Rain blows in white gusts from the sea. I clutch the grass that grows by Ruby’s grave. We don’t want to shelter ourselves. Ruby’s here, and we are here with her.

I see her. We are walking on the field path north of Zennor Head. The sun is brilliant on her dark-red curls, making them shine blue. It’s late June and we are walking through the foxgloves. Ruby’s ahead, with Adam. Where the furze pushes out over the path, he lifts her so that the prickles won’t scratch her legs, then he sets her down.

She runs ahead in a sharp spurt of running. She’s seen something we haven’t seen. She runs ahead, then stops. As I come up behind her she turns, her face astonished,
her fist held up. A Painted Lady has settled on her hand.

There is Ruby. The Painted Lady flirts its wings, then spreads them. In a minute it will fly off. Ruby stands neck-high in foxgloves, and the butterfly stays on her hand. Sun strikes on the thick warm dust under the foxgloves. We stand in its cupped heat.

We gave her a box of compressed cardboard because we didn’t want to crib her in a wooden box with brass fittings.

They dissolve, they don’t last long.

Rain pelts on our backs. We are joined, side to side, as if we’d been made that way.

‘Come away now,’ says Adam, and I do. I let him lift me up from the soaked earth.

Final Chapter: Heaven’s Gate

Have you tumbled from the sky until your wires were shrilly screaming

And watched the earth go spinning round about?

Have you felt the hard air beat your face until your eyes were streaming

Have you turned the solar system inside out?

Spit’s grooming the Nieuport again. He checks the mounting of the Lewis gun. His repair to the port wingtip is holding up perfectly, where it was shredded three days ago.

Will is vomiting into a zinc bucket behind the Mess tent. That’s what he does before a contact patrol. It’s quite routine and the best way of dealing with things. By the light of his hurricane lamp he sees that the inside of the bucket is spattered with orange and beige particles of the food he ate last night. It seems not to have been digested at all. Will’s stomach heaves again and releases a last jet of vomit.

That’s it. Done.

He picks up the bucket and walks to the far end of the field, where the stream runs away from the camp. He empties the zinc bucket, sluices it, sluices it again and listens to the water splash away.

Dawn’s coming. Dawn is approximately twenty-three
minutes off. Now he is on the earth with his boots in dew-wet long grass. He bends down and wipes his hands on the wetness, then cups his hands together, dips them into the stream and lifts clean water to his mouth. He rinses his mouth, spits into the grass, dips his hands again and drinks. The water tastes cold and fresh. The feel and taste of the water is startlingly clear, as if separate from every other experience he’s ever had. His head aches slightly and his diaphragm is sore from vomiting.

On his left the hedge is a grey bulk. It’s a hawthorn hedge. Will stretches his hand and brushes it against the leaves. They have lost the skin-softness of early spring, when they burst out of their packed buds.

He thinks of the granite hedges at home, on a grey morning with the cows moving to be milked. At this season the granite is swallowed up in fuchsia, foxgloves and young bracken. The fields slope towards the sea and there he is, walking the lane between them, hidden, with a switch of bracken in his hand.

But this hawthorn hedge is grey. When the sun rises it will be green, and he’ll be gone. A blackbird calls, then falls silent as if she might have made a mistake. But she hasn’t. Another day’s coming, nearly here now.

That sound that the stream makes: it really is babbling. Quick water over small pebbles. Twenty-one minutes.

Will walks back across the field, swinging the bucket. He’s empty now but he won’t eat anything. Once you’re in the sky there’s too much adrenalin: you can’t digest. He takes out a flask and opens it. Two silver capfuls of brandy-and-water, that’s the measure. You have to know these things and not drink blindly or
too much. Just enough to help you to know what you’re doing.

There is a letter in his breast pocket, from his wife. Why did he put that letter there? It was a lie to make it lie over his heart. She was anxious in her letter. She hadn’t heard from him and she’d wanted to know that he was well. She always wants to know that he is well, as if the war is an illness that he might catch.

How the minutes jump. He’s in the Nieuport now and Spit’s telling him to take the engine up to full rev. Spit listens. He hears things in the texture of the engine’s roar that Will can’t hear.

Six hours ago he was in bed with Florence. They lay side by side. Claire woke up and Florence disappeared. When she came back and slid her cold feet into bed he said to her, ‘Make a mark on me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A mark. Haven’t you got a little pair of scissors, Florence? Or a knife?’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘You can. You can. I want it to be there when you’re not. When I’m up at eight thousand feet. When I think that this isn’t real.’

She was silent for a long time, lying beside him so quietly that he thought she’d fallen asleep. He was on the edge of anger with her for leaving him alone, awake, when she said quietly, ‘Very well.’

She got out of bed and lit the candle. He watched her rummage in a drawer with her back to him and the nightdress fallen around her again.

‘They’re in here somewhere –’

She showed him a pair of ornamental scissors with
mother-of-pearl handles. He couldn’t fit his fingers into them, but Florence could. Her long hair made a shadow but under it her face was intent.

‘Make a mark, Florence,’ he said.

‘Where?’

He thought for a few seconds. ‘Where I can see it but no one else can. On my hand. No. On the underside of my arm.’

‘We’ll have to be careful,’ she said.

He turned his arm over. The skin was pale and the veins clear.