Mourning Ruby (7 page)

‘You could bring her to see me in Moscow,’ Joe said. ‘There’s enough room in the apartment for all of you to stay.’

The door opened and there was Adam with snow on his hair and his arms full of flowers and carrier bags. Joe stood up and the two men faced each other, oddly squared up to each other like boxers or dancers. But Adam dropped the flowers and bags on the bed and took hold of Joe. They embraced, crushed close. I wished I had once held Joe like that.

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ asked Adam. He knelt by the bed and a drop of snow fell, dissolving in the heat that Ruby and I made. Adam’s face was ablaze and tender and I knew that he was like me, not safely himself any more, but lost in Ruby. We’d made her and in doing so we’d lost ourselves.

I remembered the night she’d been conceived. No one had ever told me I’d know the moment it happened. I’d expected to be surprised one day by a blue line in a pregnancy test in a public toilet.

We were going down and down in the dark, locked together. We didn’t speak or move or seem to breathe. In the deepest of those circles of bliss I felt Ruby’s touch.

One day I’d tell her about it.

‘
You can’t have known
,’ she’d say.

‘
I did know
.’

‘
You can’t have done
.’

Or maybe I’d say nothing. Ruby must have her own life, right from the beginning.

‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘She’s beautiful.’

9

First Christmas

I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray,

And think of nothing. I see and hear nothing:

Yet seem too, to be listening, lying in wait

For what I should, yet never can, remember:

No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush

Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,

Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;

Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

We were walking down a long, grey street of terraced houses. It was Christmas Day, and three in the afternoon. Adam had just come back from the hospital.

A baby had died that morning. A boy called Nicholas, born at thirty weeks. He’d died following a haemorrhage into the lungs, six days after birth.

Nicholas had been born after years of fertility treatment. Labour had started at twenty-five weeks, they’d stopped it but there were still problems and Jess had delivered by Caesarean at thirty weeks. The baby had moderately severe respiratory disease but he was being managed on a ventilator and Adam thought he was stabilizing.

Adam got a call at 10 p.m., went into the hospital and
stayed most of the night. He came home for a shower and breakfast, and then went back. We didn’t say any Christmas things to each other.

Ruby was eleven months old. Sometime we’d have to decide whether we would celebrate Christmas with her or not, but this year it wasn’t necessary. Adam was irreligious in a Jewish way, and I was irreligious in a Christian way. What kind of way Ruby would be irreligious, we didn’t yet know.

We walked along the street, which was stripped of people, as if a war had taken place rather than a festival.

People think that doctors become callous. They think that a man like Adam must keep a membrane around his work so that it won’t get into his life. Maybe it would be better that way. But Adam knew them so closely in those hours and days and weeks, mother and father and child, the holy trinity of the maternity hospital that gets made and remade and remade, day after day after day.

He’d first seen Jess when she’d been brought in with contractions, panicky, knowing much too much already about all the things that can go wrong. She’d been trying to have this child for years. He’d explained to her what would happen if her labour could not be stopped, how the baby would be cared for, what a twenty-five-week baby looks like, how big he would be, what to expect. Jess and Ian knew already that the child was a boy, and they had named him. And then for five weeks Jess had been in the hospital, on a drip, holding on to each hour and day. When the baby couldn’t be held back any longer, Adam was in the operating theatre, and Nicholas was delivered into his hands. Adam was responsible for Nicholas’s care until he died.

Adam did something I can’t fathom, to absorb that experience into him time after time without flinching, and yet be ready to begin again, by another bedside, with another phone call, with another baby born so early it couldn’t cry.

I knew that Adam was going back, in his head, over everything that had been done for Nicholas. He would evaluate it all. There were things to be learned, even if all you learned was more about unpredictability and your own limitations. These were the worst times, when it had looked as if a baby would make it and then it didn’t.

Nicholas was chill and stiff. The nurses would have made a print from the palms of his hands, and a print from the soles of his feet, and photographed him in death as they’d photographed him in life. If the parents could not bear these things now, they might ask for them later.

We had our living baby in her all-in-one winter suit, in her sheepskin pushchair liner. I stopped pushing and knelt to look at her. Her cheeks were lit with a flush of sleep, and I leaned close to feel her breath, so much stronger now than when she was new-born.

‘Is she warm enough?’ Adam asked. He came round and tucked her hands inside the sheepskin. Ruby would never wear mittens. I knew how big she would seem to him, and solid, with her skin like a fortress compared to the veiny, dark, translucent skin of the prem babies in their incubators.

Already, I thought, Nicholas knows all the mystery of life.

Adam put his arm around me. He took the left handle of the pushchair and I took the right. We walked
awkwardly, bumping hips through the bulk of our winter coats.

That night we would put Ruby into the deep cot where she seemed to swim herself to sleep. We would leave on the little light beside her. We would prop her door open, and prop our door open. We would take hold of each other. We would sink into each other.

We voyaged on in the dark, going farther each night. In the day, no matter what, I felt the waves of it beating in me, moving me. Soon Adam would come home. Soon we would walk upstairs. Soon we would turn on the little light, prop the doors, begin. We would fall asleep, still deep in each other’s bodies, locked, going down. In the morning Adam would get up first for Ruby and put her into bed beside me while I still slept. I would wake and see her face rising like the sun.

10

Damiano’s Dreamworld

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone –

Before he went into the hotel business, Mr Damiano ran a fairground. It was a place of dreams, both tawdry and bright. When I met him, his fairground days were long gone, but the more I knew him, the more I thought that one day he’d disappear and go back there. He would vanish from his empire of hotels and if you looked for him you might find him in a little travelling fair touring Linz and Melk and the outskirts of Vienna. He would be back in his booth in the middle of the fair, holding the strings that made a thousand dreams move. He would have shrugged off his beautiful suits and he’d be wearing embroidered waistcoats, white shirts and leather boots so soft they made you want to bite into them.

But then he’d be an old man. Mr Damiano, like anyone else, would accelerate into age. His power would be gone.

I could not believe it would happen. He appeared immune from death and sickness. You couldn’t see Mr
Damiano without sensing that this was a man in his prime, at the height of his powers and knowing it. It was a prime that had nothing to do with youth. No, it was a climate which he had created, and in which he lived. By sheer force of what he was, he was borne through a high, sunny air in which things happened faster and more brilliantly than they did on earth.

He had rescued me. He had thought it was only a job interview, the time we first met. How could he know that when I answered his questions my lips creaked open because for weeks I had talked to no one? I had lain in my rented room day after day, watching the money go. I’d unlearned all Joe’s lessons of pleasure, all Adam’s knowledge of love. I’d learned again what I’d known in childhood: the habit of nothing. It was the icy truth on which I holed myself, and sank down.

To eat becomes troublesome.

To choose a T-shirt or a pair of jeans becomes a mountain of weariness.

The phone rang until it stopped, waited ten minutes, rang again. I listened as if I was hearing church bells for services I would never attend.

I did not bath or wash my hair or look in the mirror. If I had done what I wanted I would have torn out my hair and dressed in rags and ashes. Rags and ashes would have comforted me, as the sharp, rank stink of my flesh and my dirty hair comforted me.

I was effaced. For a while, in the years I’d shared with Joe and then with Adam, I’d forgotten what it felt like to be nothing. I’d believed the life I’d lived was really mine, that I possessed it and was safe at last.

With Adam I’d become the woman I’d once glimpsed
at the door of lighted houses, and envied. A young woman in an old narrow house with a porch light that spilled yellow on the steps at homecoming. Behind her was the sound of children playing, water running for a bath, footsteps in another part of the house. A young woman who hurried downstairs with a baby on her hip when a delivery man rang on the doorbell. She gave the signature that was needed, took the package, smiled a smile that had nothing to do with the delivery man, and went back inside her house.

I was home, at home, like her.

Those grey streets where we’d walked arm in arm, those grey streets where we had wheeled Ruby in her pushchair and smiled at passers-by who smiled at our smiles. That bed where we’d lost ourselves. Those knotted, tangled, sweat-stained sheets. The key in the door, the phone call when one of us was running late, the reassurance, the details which we shared and which were of no interest to anyone else. The way I would shape the things that happened in my days with Ruby into news for Adam.

Ruby’s heat. The living heat of Ruby that you sensed as you walked into the room where she slept.

I pushed her to the baby clinic feeling an impostor, because my joy was so great. I liked the health visitor, because she never doubted that the dailiness of Ruby was really mine. It was my job to look after her. Ruby’s hearing test, her vaccinations, her difficulty in moving on to solids, her weight-gain. With the other mothers I clucked and deprecated babylife, but I knew that like me they must be masking the joy they felt so that no one would sense it and steal it from them.

*

When Mr Damiano called me into his employment I was like Lazarus, sunk in the grave of myself. I’d learned that story at school and always hated it. Imagine going through the pain and fear of dying, and then being brought back to life, and knowing that you had to go through it all again.

God knows, Mr Damiano wasn’t Jesus. He treated me better than that. He didn’t think that he was resurrecting me, but he gave me a job. He became my employer, paid me a wage, and filled my days with a life I could never have imagined. He believed in my capabilities. He wanted to know where I was and what I was doing. My opinions and my information mattered. He sent me zigzagging on aeroplanes from continent to continent. Once he sent me up in an air balloon because he wanted to find out if such a trip might give pleasure to our guests.

I told him I was afraid of falling. I told him I was afraid I would jump out if there was only the edge of a basket between me and a hundred-mile map of where I might drop.

‘They won’t let you jump,’ Mr Damiano told me. ‘They will have thought of that. I hope they have, because among our guests there will be some with a tendency to fall. We are not fixing up these hotels for superhumans, always remember that.’

Sometimes, after a long day’s work, we would drink a glass of wine together. Mr Damiano would tell me about his fairground days.

‘Everyone who worked for me was an artiste. Did you never see my advertisements?’

His eyes searched my face seriously. There was a quality of innocence in his vanity which made me want to laugh aloud as I used to laugh when Ruby made a hat from a plastic saucepan out of her toy oven, and danced for me. Mr Damiano’s hair was not yet grey. Sometimes, every six weeks or so, it would begin to seem grey, but then it would blacken again.

‘You will have seen my advertisements, Rebecca,’ said Mr Damiano, ‘even if you don’t remember them.’

He used to hire light aircraft. He sent them flying along the length of summer beaches, then back again, trailing their banners.

‘Come to Damiano’s Dreamworld,’ the banners read.

Yes, I had seen them. Suddenly I was sure I had seen them. I remembered a windy day at Southend, with the sea miles out and my adoptive mother beside me, handing me an egg sandwich. The wind blew. There was grit in my teeth. We sat in a row, my adoptive parents and I, with the car blanket on our knees, a flask of tea, a bottle of Seven-Up for me, and a little packet of Twiglets which I sucked until all the Marmite was off them. I let my saliva wash the twigs into mush. I counted how many seconds each Twiglet took to dissolve.

They promised that the sea would come back, and then we would swim. They had timed it wrong and I know she was disappointed, after the effort and the long drive, that the sea had shrunk to a pencil line at the horizon.