Mourning Ruby (6 page)

It was my dream of home. Why would I jump out of the window into the dark and the rain?

7

Fall or Fly

‘I don’t want him to come again,’ I said. Joe blinked, rubbed his eyes and said nothing. His eyelids were permanently reddened from too much reading and working at the computer screen.

‘I mean Adam,’ I said. ‘It’s better if he doesn’t come again.’

‘I knew who you meant,’ said Joe, and he took two oranges from the yellow bowl on the table. ‘I’ve been seeing someone,’ he added.

A wave of heat swept across me.

‘Who?’

Joe took a third orange from the bowl. He held two oranges in his right hand and one in his left. He tossed up the left-hand orange and began to juggle. He couldn’t look at me while he was juggling. His eyes followed the oranges as they swung into rhythm and his eye movements were like a shoal of fish darting to safety. But his hands were sure and the oranges flew swift and even.

‘She’s called Daniela. Dani.’

‘How long have you been seeing her? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I thought it was best to wait until we saw how things went. Between me and Dani.’

Faster and faster he whipped the oranges into the air from the cup of his hands. They blurred, and I stopped looking at them.

‘You’ve been practising again,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I practise when I get stuck. It clears my mind.’

No one I’d ever known used their mind as Joe did. I wondered then if he would ever wear out, but now I know that when he sat there juggling the oranges he was only at the beginning, feeling the ease with which he was coasting past what he was doing even six months earlier, beginning to sense how far acceleration might take him.

‘When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union,’ said Joe, ‘Stalin went into a state of fugue. He retreated to his dacha. He fell in on himself. No one knew why he’d gone or whether he’d come back again.’

I knew that fugue was a musical term. I thought of aeroplanes dive-bombing, and German parachutists landing like dandelion clocks all over Europe. What had that got to do with music or Stalin? Maybe he was one of those dictators who imagine they are a creator, and play clumsily on grand pianos while their cowed intimates applaud. I imagined a row of Stalins in a hall lined with mirrors, playing on the black and white keys with pudgy fingers while above him a chandelier shivered from the bombardment.

‘Did Stalin play a musical instrument?’ I asked. I never felt foolish asking Joe any question I wanted, no matter how ignorant.

‘By fugue here, I meant flight,’ said Joe.

‘You mean he ran away?’

‘The dacha was outside Moscow. So he went to the
forest, which is what a north European would naturally do when he was at his wits’ end. A man from Finland or Sweden, say.

‘“How long shall I stay in the forest? – Until my heart is healed of its sickness,”’ sang Joe.

When he sang he had a dramatic projection that you never heard in his speaking voice. He stopped singing and grinned at me.

‘But Stalin wasn’t a northern European. He was a Georgian. Think about it,’ he went on, letting the oranges fall, catching them. ‘It’s June. There are birch trees growing around the dacha and it’s warm. The German army’s advancing, he ought to have known it was going to advance. He’s the leader. He’s the heir of Lenin, the father of the nation, the guardian of the revolution. And now he’s let this happen. He and Hitler go and make a gentleman’s agreement between dictators and Hitler doesn’t keep it. Just like Stalin’s never kept an agreement in his life, unless it suits him. So there he is, outmanoeuvred by the most obvious thing in the world. Everyone’s been trying to tell him what’s going to happen, and he’s ignored them. The outcome is that he’s been fucked by the man he’d hoped to screw.’

‘Why are you so interested?’

‘Don’t you see how crucial it is? It’s a key event. Stalin went to his dacha and no one knew what to do. What would any of them have dared do? Think of how he treated the whole crew of them. Mandelstam called them a gang, a rabble.

‘Stalin used to make them dance after dinner. They had to keep drinking, because he watched them to see
how many glasses they had. He wanted them drunk and incapable. If they dared, they’d ask the servants to bring them red water instead of red wine. He wanted them drunk, so that they would humiliate themselves and know that they’d humiliated themselves.

‘When they were drunk enough, they had to dance. He’d get them up on their hind legs. He made Khrushchev dance a Cossack folk dance.’

Joe’s face was lit. He leaned towards me.

‘If only we knew about all these things while they were still happening. Think how different the world would be.’

‘We wouldn’t need historians,’ I said.

‘Imagine if we’d known about the Politburo dancing like bears on chains, or John Kennedy fucking everything that had a heartbeat.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘You do.’

‘I don’t. It scares me. It seems as if there’s no pattern in anything. Just people stumbling over themselves into nowhere.’

‘Listen, Rebecca. It’s 1941. Anything could have happened. What if Stalin had stayed at the dacha? What if he’d never come back to Moscow? They’d have had to get rid of him eventually. No matter how terrified they were they’d have done it, and history would have got going again. But a different history.’

‘We’d still have won,’ I said vaguely. I didn’t know enough about the war.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Joe. ‘Fugue. You take a flight inside yourself when reality becomes unbearable.’

‘Did he go back to Moscow?’

‘Of course he did,’ said Joe. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here.’

‘So we’re in this flat thanks to Stalin.’

Joe got up and went to the window. He leaned forward gently with his palms on the sill.

‘I thought you were crazy when you chose this colour for the walls,’ he said.

Our kitchen walls were the clear colour of crushed red cherries.

‘But you were right,’ he added.

I remembered how I hadn’t been sure about the colour, but Joe had said so firmly, ‘Yes, that’ll look good, Rebecca,’ that I had believed him.

‘It’s a beautiful colour,’ Joe said. Very gently, he stroked the wall as if it were a living thing, then he turned to the window. He stood looking over the city to the southwest, where the weather came from.

‘Time to leave the dacha,’ he said. ‘I’ve been offered a job in the States.’

‘Where?’

‘Princeton. I’m going to take it.’

‘But what about –?’

Joe turned. His eyes were on me, fully mine.

‘What about what, Rebecca?’

‘What about Dani? Daniela?’

Joe stared at me blankly and I knew he’d been lying. He was lying. He was heroic. My eager, greedy heart wanted him for the first time.
You can have them both
, it whispered to me, but Joe knew better.

‘No, Rebecca,’ he said to me, his voice low and toneless. ‘No, no, no. I don’t want that.’

8

A Yellow Cardigan

Joe was the first person to visit me when Ruby was born. He came when she was eight hours old and I was washed and stitched and adrift in the holy feeling that the pain was over. Adam had gone to catch the shops before they shut. (He came back with white freesias, chocolate, a heap of January peaches, a patchwork cushion to support Ruby while she fed, a pot of jasmine trained around a wooden hoop, a cherry-coloured cashmere shawl. Adam hadn’t a mean bone in him. To him money really was what we all pretend to believe it is – a means, never an end. He would stand in the flower shop, staring at the big zinc buckets. He would taste the cold sweetness of the air and ask the girl for all the white freesias she had. He let money spray and splash and then if he wanted nothing he spent nothing.)

It was coming dark outside the windows. When they changed shift the new midwife leaned over the bed and I felt the cold air on her.

‘It’s trying to snow,’ she said.

The baby smelled of birth. There were little clots of blood in the wisps of her hair, weighing it down. She hadn’t stirred when Adam laid her down in the plastic cot, and I saw how skilfully he handled her, as if he already knew her.

Joe had cut his hair short. The back of his neck looked exposed, raw. There was grey at his temples, and he looked older than he was. He leaned over Ruby’s cot and touched her cheek with the back of his index finger. Her lips mambled and she pressed towards him.

‘You look so well,’ he said to me.

‘I could pick her up and walk straight out now,’ I said. ‘But I have to wait. We’re all going home tomorrow.’

They’d given me a room of my own because I was married to Adam. Ruby’s cot was a little way farther from the bed than it should have been, and I reached out and pulled it close. Less than a month before, while I was waiting for the birth, a woman had dressed up as a nurse and gone into a maternity hospital in Birmingham and stolen a day-old boy called Billy Joe. It had taken them two weeks to find him. He was living in a new four-bedroomed estate house with a happy couple who had bought off-plan and confided to the estate agent when they moved in that their baby was due in three months’ time. And that maybe they’d be looking for a bigger house soon!

How many months had they been preparing for that baby? While Billy Joe’s mother dreamed of his birth, their plans were ripening. Her baby was already their kidnap. I did not dare shut my eyes until Adam was in the hospital room with me. Then I’d sleep, while he watched Ruby.

What if one of the nurses was a fake, biding her time until I slept and she could take my baby from her cot like a pea from a pod? I was in a room on my own. No one would see. Even if I woke up maybe I wouldn’t have
the strength to fight her, and no one would hear if I called. I wished myself in a ward with other women, with only a floral curtain between us. We could watch out for each other and sleep in turns. I knew they would be thinking of the stolen baby, as I was.

My mother put me in a shoebox and we were parted for ever. I knew that the time that surrounded birth was dangerous. I wouldn’t be safe until Ruby knew who she was, and how to get back to me if we were ever parted. And even then –

‘My mother sent you this,’ said Joe, giving me a rose-sprinkled parcel. I opened it. It had a dry floral scent, like pot-pourri. There was a little cardigan, chick yellow and meltingly soft, with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons.

Who would have believed that Iris’s red, raw fingers could make something like this? But I felt the old panicky flash of guilt towards her.

‘She thought yellow would be right, whatever,’ said Joe. ‘If you had a boy or a girl.’

‘Yes.’

‘But if you don’t like it, put it in a drawer. The baby doesn’t have to wear it.’

‘I do like it. It’s beautiful.’

I stroked the wool. The texture was as tough and fine as cobweb, and the colour so true it looked as if it would come off on my fingers. I imagined myself dressing Ruby in it.

‘I’ll write to Iris,’ I said. ‘I’ll send her a photo of Ruby wearing the cardigan.’

‘She’d like that.’ Joe smoothed and folded the wrapping paper, looking down. Then he smiled at me. ‘I’m going away soon, Rebecca.’

‘But you’ve been away. You’ve only been back a few months.’

‘I’m going to Moscow,’ said Joe. ‘I’m researching my next book.’

My eyes filled with tears. It was the sight of that cardigan, which Iris had made for a different baby, a baby that would never be born.

‘You’re always going to Moscow.’

‘I need to stay there for a while. There’s a lot of stuff I can only do out there.’

There was Moscow, thick with history. I’d never seen it but I imagined Joe there, stamping his feet on the packed snow, talking Russian and buying chicken feet from a stall off one of the main streets. It was Joe who had told me about an old woman counting out her coins to buy two hundred grams of chicken feet. She was short of fifty kopeks and he’d offered her coins but she had looked at him with suspicion and had refused to take them.

Here was Ruby, washed up on the shore of my body and knowing no better. It was only eight hours since I’d turned into a mother, but I would never be good enough for her.

‘I’m afraid I won’t know what to do with her,’ I said.

‘Of course you’ll know,’ said Joe.

He touched my hand. We were two separate people, touching. My concerns were not his and we were not a family any more. It was right and natural and only what I could expect, but I wanted more. I was greedy and selfish, wanting him to feel for me what it wasn’t good for him to feel. I was a glutton for intimacy.

‘Why do you think you won’t know?’ asked Joe.

‘Because I can’t remember what anyone did for me. I can’t remember my childhood at all.’

‘Look at her,’ said Joe. Ruby was wrapped in sleep, her closed eyes a thin, sealed line. Her hospital nightgown had slipped off one shoulder, and her skin was mottled, purple and pink.

‘She’s got furry shoulders,’ I said. Suddenly I couldn’t bear her to be in that plastic cot any longer. I lifted her awkwardly and the hospital blanket fell off so that her frail purplish legs dangled naked. She was hot. I laid her beside me and she moved in close, burrowing her way back towards the smell of my skin and the flesh she’d lived in all her life until eight hours ago. One of her eyes opened. I’d been told that babies couldn’t focus, but she was looking at me. Then her eyelid fell shut again and she slept.

‘Did you know she was a girl?’

‘Yes.’

My girl, my daughter. I hadn’t thieved this love, though I was still fearful that someone would come in and denounce me for taking a baby that didn’t belong to me. The midwives called her my daughter straightaway and I wondered how they dared, how they could be so certain.

‘Oh, she’s lovely, your little girl,’ said the midwife who’d delivered her, wrapping Ruby up in a sure way that made a parcel of her. ‘She’s like a little doll.’ Ruby was my little girl and there would never be any need to explain her. For the first time, I was tied to someone by blood.