Mourning Ruby (3 page)

It took me a long time to learn to love Mandelstam. At first he belonged too much to Joe. But I love him now. He was murdered by Stalin and no one knows where he is buried. He was last seen picking over a rubbish heap in a transit camp at Vladivostock.

Before that, in Voronezh, standing in the ruins of his own life, he wrote about a woman limping over the empty earth. He wrote of her beautiful, uneven footsteps. Stalin had not yet murdered him, but he was, let’s say, in the process of murdering him. The decision was already made in some playful, trivial corner of the Stalin brain. All it had to do was take the trouble to enact itself.

I believe that Mandelstam was right about those baby aeroplanes. He’d given the whole of his life in order to understand them. Although I haven’t yet seen them, I believe that they are there. So I look out for the moment when a cigar tube of sterile metal gives birth, whilst flying at full strength.

But in my experience, we cannot always fly at full strength.

3

An Engine has Failed

When you fly at full strength you cannot fall. Once I watched a TV programme which aimed to show scared flyers why they were wrong. The programme was made for flying phobics, and it worked so well they thought we should all have a chance to see it.

In the TV diagrams the grey metal body of the plane was borne aloft by cushions of force and thrust. The diagrams proved that no aeroplane could ever shrug its metal shoulders, stop pretending that it’s possible to defy gravity, and plummet out of the air. Not only was the aeroplane incapable of such a wish, but natural forces would not permit it.

Once, when I was flying to meet Adam in Hong Kong, where he was taking part in a conference, I woke at dawn and walked to the back of the plane. A man had lifted the window shutter and was staring down. I joined him. Thirty-three thousand feet below us were the mountains of Mongolia, red as the mountains of the moon.

‘We wouldn’t last a minute down there,’ said the man, in a cold determined voice. ‘What takes you to Hong Kong?’

‘I’m meeting my husband. He’s at a conference.’

‘What’s he do?’

‘He’s a neonatologist.’

‘Neonatologist, hey?’ said the man, regarding me with his boiled blue eyes.

‘Yes. He works with newborn babies. Premature babies.’

‘I know what the word means,’ said the man. ‘You got any babies yourself?’

Adam and I had been married twelve months. I remember the moment I answered that man. The clarity and sureness with which I said, ‘No. Not yet,’ and the way he said, ‘All the fun still to come, eh?’ in a lubricious voice as if he was thinking of the sex we would have to conceive the child.

The mountains beneath us were Mongolia, yet I could reach out my hand for a paper cup of iced water. I went back to my seat and shut my eyes as the plane began to buck through clear-air turbulence. I said to myself what I always say at these times:
Rocked in the cradle of the deep. Rocked in the cradle of the deep
. I don’t know where it comes from or why it helps, but it does. Around us the deep held our plane on the palm of its hand, tossed it up, let it fall.

When an engine fails there’s no preparation. It was years later that I found this out. I was on my way back from New York to London. A work trip. I’d done everything I was sent to do. Sidney House would open in five weeks and my employer, Mr Damiano, would probably bring me back with him for the opening. I had been sorting out all the last-minute glitches. Snagging.

I thought Mr Damiano was pushing it with the name he’d chosen for the new hotel. It wasn’t a name with any style. Mr Damiano disagreed. He said that Sidney
had a nice feel to it. It was a good name to give to a cab driver. What he really meant is that we’ve got people to the point where any name we give will work. I hoped I wouldn’t find out that Sidney was the name of the dog Mr Damiano had when he was a boy, rather than that of the minor English poet whose work he’d given me to read.

We have Sidney, we have Lampedusa (
Where’re you staying? Oh, the Lamp Post. Naturalmente.
), we have Villon (
Village
), Langland, Sorescu, Cavafy, Sexton and Bishop. Mr Damiano is an educated man and right from the start, as each hotel was named, he would give me what he considered the finest work of the author. After a week or two he would talk to me about it, as if the writer were as important as the bar, the quality of the wet-room tiling, the reputation of the chef. Lampedusa is the only prose writer. Mr Damiano says there is no reason for this, but that he also intends to name a hotel after F. Scott Fitzgerald one day, so I’m reading
The Last Tycoon
.

Mr Damiano has educated me, as Joe did. Adam, no. Adam changed me. We changed each other. That’s something different.

It’s nice on a plane when your work’s all done. We were already out of land and the big dark swell of the Atlantic was moving under us. I flicked on the flight map and watched our plane, as big as New York State, push its way north-eastward. The flight attendant brought the dinner I’d ordered, but I didn’t feel like eating it. I drank my wine and watched the sky darken. More than an hour of the flight was already gone. The air was so smooth that my drink lay still in its glass.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Willis again,’ came the light Surrey voice that had already told us about the fine weather, the tail wind that would get us to London ahead of schedule, and the fact that he hoped we would enjoy our flight with him, ‘I’m afraid that one of our engines has failed and so we are not able to proceed to Heathrow, but shall be returning to Kennedy instead.’

I was surprised that he didn’t put it better.
We have a problem with one of our engines
, maybe.
A minor problem
.

I looked around. The flight attendants, smiling pleasantly, immediately began to collect up the dinner plates. The man behind me protested that he had not even begun on his fillet steak. ‘It’s just a routine procedure, sir,’ said the girl, whipping his steak out of sight. A dark-haired, confidential, heartbreakingly handsome steward came and sat beside me.

‘As you are sitting by the emergency exit, madam,’ he said, ‘you’ll be aware that we’ll be carrying out certain special procedures on landing, to ensure the safety and well-being of all our passengers.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll be preparing the exit for an emergency landing,’ he said, with a wink. ‘And you’ll be in the front row.’

‘Is that good?’

‘It’s not bad,’ he said consideringly. ‘Not one of the worst places to be sat, I’d say.’

The man behind me leaned around my seat and asked if I thought the engine noise sounded different. I listened but I couldn’t tell. He put his lips together in a smile and asked if I’d like to see a picture of his little girl. He passed me a plump blondey baby with a smiling face
and I held out a photo of Ruby, but without letting go of it.

‘She’s beautiful,’ he said immediately, before he could have had time to take in how beautiful she was. I said that his baby was beautiful too.

‘I’ve never been on a plane when they’ve pulled one like this,’ said the man. I told him I had, and it had all been fine. They had done an emergency landing and everything had worked out.

‘Oh, OK,’ said the man, nodding firmly. ‘I’m glad to know that.’ Then he asked me where it had been.

‘Moscow,’ I said, thinking it through.

‘Jesus,’ said the man. ‘You wouldn’t get me on one of those Russian planes. Don’t you know their air traffic control is all shot to hell?’

I shut my eyes.
Rocked in the cradle of the deep. Rocked in the cradle of the deep
. I could hear a change in the engine noise and I wondered if we were still over the Atlantic Ocean. Joe had told me once where the continental shelf began, but I couldn’t remember. If we were over land maybe someone was looking up at this moment. Maybe they could hear the change in our engine sound. They would listen and be glad that their feet were planted on solid earth.

The man behind me tapped my arm.

‘I’ve been watching that girl over there.’ He indicated the flight attendant who was checking the overhead lockers. ‘She looks pretty upset to me. When the crew gets scared, I get scared.’ He said it as if this was a rule of life he’d always abided by.

‘She split up with her boyfriend last night,’ I said. ‘She was telling me about it when she brought the wine.’

‘Girl stuff, huh,’ he said. ‘You’d think she’d have something better to worry about than her boyfriend right now.’

The hour passed slowly, but the two times the man tapped my arm again I pretended to be sleeping. I was afraid he’d wake me to say, ‘Sleeping, huh. Think you’d have something better to do than sleep,’ but after a couple of taps he rang for the flight attendant and started telling her that everyone gets bad knocks in life but they are part of growing into the person God means you to be.

‘We’re following a routine procedure for the benefit of customer welfare and safety, sir,’ she replied. ‘After our landing in Kennedy you will be transferred to the next available flight with the minimum of wait.’

The plane was going down fast. Suddenly the lights of New York shocked into view. My ears hurt, and the handsome steward came to take his seat directly opposite me.

‘Soon be down,’ he said, and winked again. He leaned forward braced like a runner, with his hand gripping the emergency handle. The plane whooshed upwards, then steadied itself.

‘We’re coming in to land.’

The plane went down with a bang but held steady as it hurtled down the runway. What I hadn’t thought of were the fire-trucks and other emergency vehicles with flashing lights that raced with us parallel to our runway. We were down. We were on the runway. We were not on fire. The handsome steward relaxed his grip on the emergency handle.

‘You won’t get your chance to go down the chute
today,’ he said. The plane slowed until it was a solid thing again on solid land.

‘No way are they getting me up in one of these things again. No way,’ said the man behind me. But I knew they would.

4

Mr Damiano’s Dream

So there I was on the tarmac, waiting for someone to shepherd me. The air was thick and warm and wind blew in gusts from the hurricane tail that had passed through New York two days before.

I already knew how disappointed in me Mr Damiano would be. I was going to go back to London and tell him that I was leaving his employment. I wouldn’t be caught up into his bright new future. My momentum had stalled. I no longer wanted to sit in business class in the hope of sitting in first class one day.

No way are you getting me up in one of these things again.

I would never tell Mr Damiano the true reason. Mr Damiano has given me everything he knows about life. Not many employers would share their dream as he does. How you have to be tough, and how you can put the name of a minor English poet on everyone’s lips. In his heart he’s a fairground man. He picked me up out of the mud and cleaned the dirt off me. He put me up on the trapeze with a plume of light on me. I swooped from continent to continent, I dealt with men who wanted to cheat him, I cached a thousand details in my memory and reported them to him. There we were, the hotels and all of us who worked in them, spangled with the dream Mr Damiano carried. He gave me a job.

But Mr Damiano could never see what I saw as our big grey aeroplane turned solid and hit the ground and churned into the tarmac with all its force and thrust. The fire-trucks raced alongside us with their flashing lights and the wall of foam they’d made for us. Ruby was riding up front, in the cabin of the very first truck. She had a fireman’s helmet crammed onto her dark-red curls and she was staring straight ahead with her lips parted. I think she was saying something but I couldn’t hear it through all the metal, and the thunder of engines. She didn’t look at me but I could tell she knew I was here. She had come for me.

I’m on the tarmac, Mr Damiano. Everything was going sweetly on the route you made for me, but now the engine has failed, and I’ve had to turn back.

I know you would come to get me if I asked. I know you’d pick me up and shake me and make something of me again. I am your personal assistant, and I know that you value me.

These past three years you could have lain me on two planks and sawn me in half if you’d wanted. I trusted you that much, and I still do. You taught me the business and said that working with me gave you a nice feeling, and so we kept on. Three years between us now.

(Mr Damiano, I don’t like those olives from I Promessi Sposi that I ordered for the Moon Bar. They look like washed-out baby aubergines in the lighting we’ve chosen. And beautifully darned linen napkins aren’t going to work in New York. Not unless you put the seamstress in the corner to darn very slowly all the while that the people are dining, so they see how much time
and skill it costs and how much more luxurious it is than buying new.)

I love your business more than anything in my life now. It was you who taught me that there doesn’t have to be a minibar and a glaze-eyed man in a braided coat springing to open the door and say, ‘Welcome home!’ every time a guest steps into the lobby, and a ten-dollar charge to wash a shirt. There don’t have to be ill-paid women coming in to turn down the beds at night, for cash on the pillow. Hotels don’t have to smell of sealed windows, central heating and flower-scented cleaning products.

You got rid of all the comfortless clichés of luxury. You filled toyboxes to bring along to guests’ rooms when they had their children with them, and before the guests arrived you invited some of the staff children in to play with the toys, to take the newness off them. ‘Kids playing with toys puts life into them.’ You paid the best wages in the business and wouldn’t allow tipping. You told me that true luxury was an emotion. When people feel it, they know what it is.

I saw Ruby for one second. I thought that this time she had come for me. For once I had not been waiting for her, but she had come all the same. My body melted and I waited for the aeroplane to splinter. I waited for one of those grey metal splinters to hurl me on its spear through the perspex window to where Ruby was.