Bay of Secrets (6 page)

‘Are you sure it wouldn’t be easier to live in a modern place that’s done up already?’ Mel asked. ‘Do you really want the hassle of all this?’

Ruby considered. Maybe this was exactly what she needed – a project; something to think about. She couldn’t stay in the house. She had to go somewhere. Apart from the fact that it was too big and she needed to release some capital … Her parents’ house would always be theirs. She didn’t need ghosts to help her remember. And those cliffs summed up her childhood for Ruby. That was what she wanted.

Outside, they explored the steep terraced garden. Predictably, it was overgrown, but equally predictably the best view was at the top. All Ruby could hear was the wind, the waves, the shrieking gulls.

‘It needs a lot doing to it, darling,’ Mel said to Ruby after the estate agent had driven away. ‘But I do like it.’

And so did Ruby. ‘I’ll have to get on to the bank,’ she said. There wasn’t much capital left, but there was the house to
trade on. Yes, it needed a lot doing to it. But she could see herself here. It wouldn’t bring her parents back. But it was the kind of place where she needed to be.

Mel raised an eyebrow. ‘Does this mean you’re definitely going to stay in Dorset?’

Ruby took a deep breath. She’d have to talk to James. Tell him what she’d decided to do. ‘I think it does,’ she said.

*

They went back to Ruby’s for tea. Mel stretched out on the sofa and Ruby curled up in the armchair.

‘It’ll be so good having you around,’ Mel said. She looked at Ruby thoughtfully. ‘But I can’t see you staying here for ever.’

‘Because of James?’

Mel sat up. ‘Not really. More because you seem to be kind of … ’ She hesitated. ‘In limbo.’

Ruby thought about this. James hadn’t understood why she had to go back, but she’d felt she had to – in order to go forwards. ‘Or in process,’ she said to Mel.

She nodded. ‘Exactly.’ They exchanged a conspiratorial smile.

‘Maybe I should get a car?’ She hadn’t needed one in London. James had owned a Saab convertible which they’d used at weekends, but mostly it had been easier to use the Tube and buses. Now though …

‘Something cool and sporty?’ Mel grinned.

‘Absolutely.’ Maybe an MX5. ‘And a Dutch bike for cruising the country lanes.’

Mel laughed. ‘Definitely a Dutch bike.’

If she moved back to Dorset, her life was going to change.

*

Ruby went to the kitchen to make more tea and when she got back Mel was standing by the walnut table flipping through the old family photo album Ruby had left there.

‘Your mum was so pretty,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Ruby peered over her shoulder. There were her parents – in Cornwall the summer before Ruby was born, arms wrapped around each other like a couple of newlyweds.

Mel turned the pages and Ruby watched her parents’ lives unfold. Her mother running into the sea and laughing; her father caught off guard as he chatted to a grizzled fisherman beside his brightly painted fishing boat; the two of them posed by some railings, the view of St Ives harbour behind. Ruby sighed. The neat précis produced at the funeral had left her dry-eyed and aching. It was nothing like the real, tangled parent days she’d known when she was a girl. More images came into her mind’s eye. Her mother, brushing her teeth with one hand, pinning back her long brown hair with the other; running down the street breathless, getting Ruby to school late. Her father frowning as he smoothed and planed the surface of a table, his grin as he swept little girl Ruby from her feet and turned her upside down to see a topsyturvy world where everything was standing on its head.

‘And I look nothing like her.’ Both her parents were dark while she … ‘Oh, my God,’ she said.

‘What?’

Ruby grabbed Mel’s arm. ‘Look at me, Mel. What do you see?’

‘You do look a bit tired,’ Mel admitted. ‘I’m not sure whether you’re eating properly. And your hair’s a terrible mess, to be honest. But we have just been out to the beach. And—’

‘What colour’s my hair?’ Ruby ran her fingers through it. She’d never had to colour it or even have highlights.

Mel looked confused. ‘Blonde?’

‘Exactly.’ Ruby prodded a finger at the photos in the album. ‘Look at them. They’ve both got dark hair. And brown eyes.’ She could hear her voice rising. Why couldn’t she see?

‘Oh, Ruby.’ Mel hugged her. ‘Lots of kids don’t look anything like their parents.’

‘Come on, Mel.’ Ruby could picture the shade of her mother’s hair as if she was sitting right opposite them. Hazelnut brown. And … ‘Look at my eyes, Mel.’

‘Blue,’ she said.

‘Exactly.’

Mel frowned. ‘But you must have noticed that ages ago. Maybe you’re the dead spit of some ancient uncle or someone. Didn’t you ever talk to your parents about it?’

‘Yes, I did.’ Her mother had told her she was their beautiful throwback. When Ruby was a bit older and she’d pressed her for further information, Vivien had enlarged on this and said that her grandmother had been a blue-eyed blonde and
that must be where Ruby’s genes had come from. But she had never really wanted to talk about it. And after all, what did it matter? But now …

‘Ruby.’ Mel took her hand. ‘Please don’t let this spoil your memories of them.’

She didn’t want to. On its own the fact that she looked nothing like her parents wasn’t necessarily significant. But taken with the things she’d found in the shoebox and the letter about her parents’ infertility … How could it not spoil her memories? How could it not creep into her mind and make her doubt everything she’d always believed?

‘I think you’re getting this way out of proportion,’ Mel said. ‘Can you seriously imagine your parents—’

‘No.’ She couldn’t. Didn’t want to. She was beginning to feel not quite real, as if her identity had been snatched away, as if her very existence was now in doubt. ‘But … ’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Baby pictures,’ she said. She pulled the photo album back towards her.

‘Baby pictures?’ echoed Mel.

Ruby’s childhood had been captured on film and processed in the old-fashioned way, and she was glad. It was wonderful to have such a complete record of those years, of her family. But was it complete?

She flipped the pages. There was Ruby playing in her cot; Ruby crawling around the living-room floor; Ruby’s first tottering steps in the garden, amongst the grass and the daisies.

‘How old do I look to you?’ she asked Mel. In the first
photo her eyes were alert and she was smiling at the camera. Blue eyes. A fair down of hair. Fiercely holding Ginger, her teddy bear. When she was seven Ginger had gone on holiday somewhere and she’d never got him back.

Mel frowned. ‘Six months?’

‘And how do you explain that?’ Ruby felt as if her head was exploding. ‘Why aren’t there any photos of me when I was first born?’ She flipped the pages back again. Two months old? Three? Four? Nothing. So this wasn’t such a complete record of her childhood after all.

‘Maybe they were too busy looking after you to take pictures.’ Mel poked Ruby affectionately in the shoulder. ‘Babies can be hard work, you know, darling. Though Stuart keeps reminding me that my time is running out and we should start a family before it’s too late.’ Just for a second she looked wistful. And Ruby knew what she was thinking. If she had a baby it wouldn’t be so easy to run the hat shop. And right at this minute, the hat shop
was
her baby.

But who was too busy to take baby photographs? Wasn’t it something you did automatically? Kind of top priority when you’d just had a baby? And hang on a minute … She turned back to the pictures of her parents in Cornwall. After that there was nothing but the odd landscape until Ruby was six months old. ‘There aren’t any photos of Mum when she was pregnant either,’ she whispered.

‘Honestly, Ruby.’ Mel sighed. ‘What is it with you? Who wants pictures of themselves when they’re fat?’

‘Maybe.’ Although pregnant wasn’t the same as fat, was it?
Pregnancy was a time of hope, expectation and excitement. And she was doing the maths. ‘That’s no photos for about a year,’ she said. A year. Even before the digital age that was a long time.

‘Unless the photographs they took weren’t good enough to make the album,’ Mel said. ‘Or the camera broke and they couldn’t afford to get a new one.’

‘Yes. Or I’m not really their daughter.’ There. She’d said it.

How many times had she looked through this album? The truth was staring her in the face and she hadn’t been able to see it. No pregnancy. No newborn baby.

‘What about your birth certificate?’ Mel asked.

Ruby stared at her. Birth certificate?

‘You must have one.’

Yes, of course she had one. ‘It’s in London.’ With the rest of her stuff – at James’s flat. She hadn’t looked at it for ages though, she’d just tucked it away in a drawer. But she’d used it to get her first passport. The relief flooded through her.

Mel stood, hands on hips. ‘And who does it say your parents are?’

‘Oh, Mel … ’ Vivien and Tom Rae were her parents – they had to be; their names were on her birth certificate.

‘If I can’t convince you you’re imagining things then your birth certificate will,’ Mel said. ‘You’re getting into a state about nothing. Trust me. Ruby Rae is Ruby Rae in every sense of her. OK?’

‘OK.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Thanks, Mel.’ She would
phone James, she decided. She would go to London and she would collect all her stuff. She would find her birth certificate and she would stop worrying. Mel was right. She could be getting all stressed out for no reason at all.

But after Mel had left, Ruby took the photograph out of her bag where she’d tucked it for safe keeping. The blonde girl with the little baby on a Mediterranean beach somewhere. She stared at the baby. Tiny face, a fair down of hair. A baby was just a baby – didn’t they all look much the same?

She stared at the girl too. At her mouth which was half-smiling and at the love beads she wore around her neck. ‘Who are you?’ she whispered. Secrets … If only photographs could tell.

Dorset, 1977

‘I don’t understand,’ Tom said, ‘why it matters so much to you?’

Vivien’s fists were tightly balled. She felt that if she let her fingers relax, even for a second, she would lose the will to make him see.

‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But it does.’ She eyed him helplessly. They never quarrelled – but they were close to it now. She shifted her dinner plate to one side of the table; she couldn’t eat any more. She’d thought this would be a good time to broach the subject – in the after-dinner relaxation following Tom’s favourite sausage and mash. Not so.

Tom looked sad. ‘Aren’t I enough for you?’ he asked.

‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘It’s just that … ’

She’d known, hadn’t she, when she wrote to him in the months after they’d met at the fair, when she sent him little drawings of stick-Viviens and stick-Toms swimming, cycling and kissing, that he was what she wanted?

And he seemed to want it too, because he’d stopped saving for a motorbike and instead saved up for train fares to visit Worthing as often as he could. But it was never often enough.

*

On Vivien’s eighteenth birthday he had phoned her. ‘If you were here, my lovely girl,’ he said. ‘I’d take you out for a slap-up dinner.’

Vivien had held the telephone receiver even closer. ‘And would you buy me some flowers?’ she said. Some of the girls at college envied her the boyfriend from Dorset who wrote to her and came to stay at weekends. They thought it was dead romantic. But Vivien wanted more.

‘Course I would,’ he said.

‘It’s almost the end of term,’ she said. ‘Maybe I could come and see you in the holidays.’ In September she was going on to teachers’ training college in Kingston upon Thames. It was all planned. It was what she’d wanted to do – before Tom.

‘I was thinking … ’ Noisily, he cleared his throat. ‘Have you never thought about coming to college nearer here?’

Vivien almost stopped breathing. ‘Now, why would I want to do that?’ she teased.

‘To be closer to me,’ he said. ‘We could move in together if you want.’

If you want
 … It was all she wanted. She’d just been waiting for him to ask. ‘All right,’ said Vivien, uprooting two years’ plans in one casual word.

And that was it.

‘You’re doing what?’ Her mother was horrified. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘How can you throw everything away because of some boy? You’re far too young to know what you want.’

But Tom wasn’t some boy, and Vivien did know what she wanted. Tom was on his own. He needed her. And she was quite keen to live in sin – it sounded both risky and thrilling.

Vivien never went to teachers’ training college although she did study art at evening classes. Tom was only just qualified and money was tight so she found a job as a shop assistant. Six months later Tom proposed and Vivien accepted and they got married in the register office in Bridport.

*

Now, Vivien looked at him with fond exasperation. Tom was her husband, lover, best friend, soulmate. She loved everything about him. Most especially she loved watching his hands as he worked with wood – chiselling and sculpting, planing and polishing. He had started off working for a local company, but he wanted to run his own business eventually, he said. He was ambitious. He knew where he was going. She liked the way he teased her and made her laugh. She liked it when he was grumpy and she could rub his shoulders and kiss the corners of his mouth to make the bad mood evaporate. She liked the way he lost himself when they made love and came to afterwards with a sort of vacant wonder as he held her very, very tight. She liked the life in him, the love in him, his strengths and his vulnerabilities. And yes, he’d always been enough for her. But now she wanted more.

‘Why now?’ Tom asked. He pushed his plate aside. ‘What’s the hurry?’

My biological calendar, Vivien thought. ‘It’s been five years of trying, Tom,’ she reminded him gently. She’d
thought it would just happen. She watched the candle flicker on the table, stared at the food sitting in congealed gravy on her plate.

‘That’s not so long,’ he said. ‘We’re still young. There’s plenty of time.’