Bay of Secrets (3 page)

Ruby blinked back the tears. She put the photos on the floor beside her and investigated the rest of the contents of the box. Some pale pink tissue paper was nestling in the bottom corner. She unwrapped it. Out dropped a string of multicoloured love beads. Ruby let them drift between her fingers. They were the kind people wore in the sixties and seventies. The kind … She picked up one of the photos once more. The kind this girl was wearing. They were old, delicate and fragile. Maybe then they were one and the same.

Gently, she unwrapped some more tissue at the bottom of the box to reveal a little white crocheted bonnet – so small it would only fit … She frowned. A baby. She picked it up – it was so soft – and put it with the beads. And unwrapped the final tiny parcel. A piece of grey plastic. A plectrum. Just like
the one she used when she was playing her guitar. But why would there be a guitar plectrum in the shoebox? She looked at the small heap of apparently random objects. Why was any of this stuff in a shoebox in her parents’ wardrobe?

*

‘I’ve put a pile of papers on the table in the living room.’ Mel was talking as she came up the stairs. ‘You might want to take a look at them. You probably should have gone through them weeks ago, to be honest.’

Ruby looked up at her. She was standing in the doorway. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘Found anything interesting?’

‘Oh … Just a shoebox with some things in.’

‘Things that aren’t shoes?’ Mel sat down on the bed and Ruby showed her the photos, the love beads, the plectrum, and the white crocheted baby’s bonnet.

‘What do you reckon to all this?’ she asked.

Mel picked up the photo of the girl with the baby. ‘It looks like this lot must belong to her.’

‘Yes.’ But who was she?

‘You don’t recognise her then?’

‘I don’t recognise any of them. I don’t remember Mum or Dad mentioning anyone like this either.’

Mel shrugged. ‘Maybe your mum was looking after the stuff for someone else?’

‘Maybe.’ But who?

‘That’s nothing. You should see all the things I’ve got at the bottom of my wardrobe.’ Mel glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve
got to go, darling. Stuart’s mum’s coming round for supper – and I haven’t even gone to the supermarket yet.’

Ruby laughed. It would be good, she thought, to be around Mel and Stuart again and some of the old friends she’d had before she moved away. It was exactly what she needed.

And maybe it was nothing, but she replaced all the items and put the shoebox in the ‘things to keep’ pile. Just in case it was important. Just in case – for some reason – her parents had wanted her to find it.

*

That evening, Ruby went into the bedroom that had continued to be hers even after she’d moved away. One of her old guitars still leant against the chest of drawers – she’d left it here, partly because she had a new one she’d taken to London with her, and also so that she could use it when she was staying with her parents. You never knew when a song would stroll into your head and you’d need to strum a few chords.

She picked it up now, sat on the bed as she had done so often when she was a girl, head slightly to one side to listen more acutely, automatically starting to retune. That was better. She put the guitar to one side and lifted her saxophone from its case. It had been a mission bringing it with her on the train, but she couldn’t leave it behind. It was the first thing she’d rescue from a fire, something she’d always assumed necessary to her existence – like a third arm. Could it be that way again? She’d let her practice lapse since James, since living in London, since not having a regular band to play with. But maybe she could get together again with the
guys from the band here in Pridehaven? Play again at the Jazz Café. Why not?

Ruby touched the shiny keys and the sax seemed to shimmer a lazy response. When she’d first started playing, she could barely hold it. The only sound that emerged when she blew was a kind of desperate squeak. ‘Is there a mouse in the house?’ her father would enquire, raising an eyebrow. Now though … It was her blue fire.

A random line came into her head and she scribbled it in the notebook on the bedside table. Her mother had been a happy person, hadn’t she? But she too had loved jazz and the blues. She’d listen to her old albums and CDs while she was cooking, cleaning, painting, whatever. And the sad songs were always her favourites. ‘The Nearness of You’ … Ruby sighed. She missed her mother. She missed them both. She ached for them. For a hug. To hear her father’s laughter. Her mother’s voice.

Tenderly, she replaced the sax in its case. ‘Wish you touched me like that,’ James had said once.
Yes, but the saxophone never asked for too much in return.
It was responsive too. It echoed every breath, every feeling, every mood that Ruby poured into it. Faithfully.

‘Are you jealous?’ she had teased. That was in the early days of their relationship. Before they stopped teasing and before she stopped playing.

‘Of course I am,’ he’d laughed. ‘It gets so close to you. When you play that thing, you go off somewhere without me. You’re transported.’

It was true. The saxophone had a way of hitting a spot deep inside. It made her think of a dark nightclub in the early hours. Did she want to go there? There was something inside her that wanted it, yes. Even while it hurt. To escape to another world, she thought. She closed her eyes and started seeing a new song climbing inside her head. Its pattern was rising and falling, she could hear the beat, feel its rhythm. It was coming alive. The lyric she’d written fell into place. Yes, she thought. To escape to another world … Sometimes it was all she wanted.

*

An hour or so later, Ruby went downstairs to make herself some hot chocolate. But she wasn’t tired enough for bed so she started going through the pile of papers that Mel had unearthed in her parents’ bureau. Letters from banks and utility companies. Letters about mortgages and interest rates and council tax. They were ancient; surely they could all be thrown away? She opened a wrinkled cardboard folder. Medical certificates. And her own vaccination record – very much out of date. She spotted a letter from her old family doctor and quickly began to scan its contents. There could be something important tucked away in this lot. Neither of her parents were the most organised people in the world.

But hang on … She refocused on the print. What was that? She sat up straighter, blinked, read it again.
Following our consultations and tests. This is to confirm our diagnosis of unexplained infertility
 … Infertility?
Should you wish to pursue the
option of the fertility treatment discussed, please telephone the surgery to arrange for your first appointment.
What on earth? Ruby checked the date on the letter. It was dated seven months before her birth.

She read the letter again and then again. But it still said the same thing. Seven months before Ruby was born her parents had been told one or the other of them was infertile and unable to have children.
Unexplained infertility.
It didn’t make sense whichever way you looked at it. Because seven months later her mother had given birth to Ruby.

Ruby stared at the sweet peas in a vase on the table. Well, hadn’t she?

20 March 2012

Should she – shouldn’t she?
Vivien had found herself thinking this more and more often lately – more often than she was happy with. It disturbed her equilibrium, poked its head into her peace of mind. It had been a long time. So.
Should she or shouldn’t she tell the truth?

To distract herself, she frowned at the flowers she’d picked from her wild patch out back. A cutting of spiky acid-yellow forsythia, a few stems of soft-leafed sage still in bud, a single cream early rose. She rearranged them so that the sage drooped its fragrant herbiness over the lip of the terracotta jug. From yellow to green to cream, back to yellow; colours merging, that was how Vivien liked it. Paint what you see – not what you think you see.

Some famous artist had said that – Monet or maybe Van Gogh. She supposed that was what Impressionism had been about. You resisted
how
your brain was telling you to paint; flat sea, for example, with white waves. And you painted it as your senses perceived it – moving, curling, rippling lines punctuated with pinpricks of light and patches of shade; all colours – grey, green, white, blue, dark violet – separated
and merging, shifting with the breeze and the current, paddling into ringlets on to sandy beaches or grey rocks. And Vivien liked to take it one step further in her flower paintings. She liked to merge colour so that it blurred and bled. Wet on wet. So that it was fluid and became one.

Should she – shouldn’t she?
Similarly, this decision – which had nothing to do with art – was not clear cut and the boundaries were fuzzy. Some truths were like that. For starters, she would have to be very brave.

Vivien shuffled through her paints. She preferred water-colour, which had the transparency, the opaque finish, the fluidity that she wanted. Was she brave? Not really. She was thankful though; goodness, she was thankful.

It wasn’t a question of should she or shouldn’t she have done it in the first place.
That
decision at least had been clear cut. She had felt she had no choice –
they
had no choice. Someone else might have taken a different pathway after that. But not Vivien. She was done for. It wasn’t in her make-up to resist. She’d always been heart over head. So …

No. It was a question of whether or not she should tell her secret to the one person who might deserve to know. That was the tricky thing. Whether or not she should tell the truth. Because the truth could be difficult to tell, and even more difficult to hear.

She decided on a pale mint background wash, so frail it was almost not there at all; just the feel of it, like a gossamer stole on her shoulders. She began mixing, humming softly a Joni Mitchell song. ‘Little Green’, just as this was.
And it reminded her, would always remind her, of that day.

It was, she supposed, a moral dilemma. The dilemma being – did everyone have the right to the truth?

Vivien generally did tell the truth. She liked to think of herself as honest, open, straightforward. And she had never wanted to keep this secret to herself – at least not at the start. But one had to think of the consequences. There were such things as white lies, after all – untruths that protected people’s feelings perhaps, that prevented people from being hurt.

Was she protecting anyone’s feelings? Was she stopping anyone from being hurt? Maybe. What would happen if she were to tell? Vivien almost gasped at the thought. That was the thing about secrets; they took on a furtive life of their own. She selected her broad brush, swept and smoothed the paper with the bridge of her hand in order to begin. What was the worst thing that could happen?

Vivien heard the front door open and Tom’s familiar whistle.

‘Where are you, my lovely?’ he called.

Vivien smiled. Yes, she was lucky. ‘Working,’ she called back. She was in their living room. It was large, it was messy and it was home. Vivien had flung open the French windows at the back and the sun flamed the scruffy orange tendrils of the carpet and the faded red of their big, old and comfy sofa, spotlighting the dust motes settled on the wooden furniture – mostly crafted by Tom, like the elegant mahogany book-case
he’d made just after they were married. The table at which she worked was covered – in tubes of paints, a mixing palette, Vivien’s jar of brushes and water, paper and the vase of flowers – so that you’d hardly know it was a beautifully mottled walnut beneath. But Vivien knew and it felt good. She loved Tom’s furniture; the weeks of painstaking work, love and care that could go into one of his pieces.

‘Working? On a sunny day like this?’ Tom filled their doorway. He pulled off his sweater as if to demonstrate how warm it was and chucked it on to the back of the armchair. And it was true that it was warm for March.

Sometimes Tom didn’t seem much older than when they’d first met more than thirty years ago. Though his hair was greying and he was more world-weary. ‘People don’t want hand-crafted furniture any more,’ he sometimes said wistfully. ‘They want cheap and factory-made. Who can blame them?’ And Vivien would hug his sad-looking back and she would blame them – fiercely. She would never stop loving what he did even though these days he spent more time fixing kitchen cupboards and skirting boards for people than he did making tables and chests of drawers. Despite this, Tom still had the brown twinkly eyes and sense of fun she’d first fallen in love with.

Vivien had never wanted to be with anyone but Tom.

She remembered the first time she’d seen him, the tinny fairground music and whoosh of the rides, the laughter of the boys and screaming of the girls. The sweet sticky scent of candyfloss and toffee apples heavy in the air, the neon bulbs
of light dazzling in the dusk of the summer evening. Charmouth Fair.

Vivien was sixteen. She and her friend Lucy were camping in a field behind a pub in the village – on holiday in Dorset on their own for the first time. They’d told their parents they were hiking and staying at youth hostels; in fact they were hitch-hiking and staying wherever the fancy took them.

The fancy had taken them on this occasion to Charmouth. They had heard the fair was in town. They sat on their sleeping bags with their mirrors and mascara and got themselves ready for a night out that wouldn’t include any curfew from their parents. Because they were here on their own. And they were free …

The adrenalin hit Vivien as they walked to the green and heard the music. It was past eight o’clock but still light; most of the families had left to go home and the fairground was just beginning to buzz. There were groups of girls and groups of boys, young couples hand in hand, and boys operating the rides, strutting along the walkways, giving the girls the eye.

Vivien and Lucy made for the waltzer. They jumped into the silver car. The ride gathered speed and as the boy spun the car around, they gripped on to the metal handrail with white knuckles, threw back their heads and shrieked with laughter and fear. It was over all too soon, a whirlwind ride.