and keep them, piling up her acquisitions greedily but carelessly, as if she were building a dam.
She moved on to shells after her enthusiasm for collecting autographs had waned, and after shells lost their fascination she became obsessed with beetles. There were boxes and cases of preserved specimens on every flat surface.
Lesley crouched down beside a row of mahogany display cases and peered through the dusty glass fronts. These had cost Ruby all her pocket money and every Christmas and birthday present for years, and the contents still made Lesley smile and suppress a faint shudder at the same time. Some of the beetles were two-inch monsters with stiff jointed legs, minutely articulated antennae and folded wings with an iridescent polish. Lesley had always recognised that they were exquisite as well as interesting, these skewered trophies of Victorian entomologists that had so fascinated her twelve-year-old daughter.
Other items in the collection were just matchboxes containing tiny shrivelled items that Ruby had pounced on in the garden, trapped and kept. Lesley smiled again at the memory of absorbed Ruby crouching beside a bush of artemisia, her latest discovery caught in her cupped hands.
‘What are they all? Do you know?’ Andrew used to ask.
‘Yes,’ Ruby would answer flatly, offering nothing more.
‘Why do you like them?’
‘They’re beautiful. Don’t you think?’ She would turn away then, not looking for an answer, as if she had already said too much.
‘At least it’s not spiders,’ Lesley had said appeasingly to her husband once she was out of earshot.
The beetle passion eventually faded like its precursors, but Ruby would never consider selling any of her acquisitions or even allowing them to be stored up in the loft. Almost everything, including the shoeboxes full of autographs, was in this room.
Lesley kept her eyes averted now from the case containing a single enormous conker-brown insect that looked like a giant cockroach. There was hardly room to place her feet among the boxes and cartons, the scribbled drawings and pages torn from magazines, discarded clothes and spilt tubes of make-up. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, Ruby had taken with her. She stepped gingerly across the floor and sat down on the rucked-up bed. She placed her hand in the hollow of the pillow, but no warmth lingered there.
Every corner of the room, every shelf and cupboard and drawer, spilled hoarded belongings. Nothing was in any order. The collecting seemed to have little to do with quality, only quantity. To having and holding, Lesley guessed, maybe as a way of shoring up a world that might otherwise crumble. But for all the random, chaotic and overwhelming material clutter, the impression that it now held was of emptiness.
Ruby had gone.
Lesley placed her feet together and rested her hands in her lap as if to offer up her own composure in response to the room’s disorder.
Ruby hadn’t gone like her contemporaries were going, on well-planned gap year travels to Asia and South America or amid clouds of A-level glory to good universities. Not mutinous, truanting, dyslexic and serially expelled Ruby. She hadn’t passed any exams, or spent a summer raising money to fund a year’s work with children in Nepal or wildlife in Namibia. Ruby had left the family house in Kent to lodge with Andrew’s brother and his family in central London, supposedly while she was attending sixth-form college. But college hadn’t lasted long and in Camden Town, Ruby had spent her days hanging out with new friends that none of the Ellises approved of. Then, just recently, she had abruptly moved back home again. She passed long hours closeted in her room and when she emerged she spoke only when spoken to. Andrew chivvied her for decisions about a career. Making a contribution to the world, as he called it.
Ruby had lifted her black-painted eyes and stared at him as if he belonged to a species she didn’t recognise.
Nothing could have enraged him more.
And now, she had simply removed herself altogether. The absence of Ruby swelled to fill her bedroom and bled outwards, hollowing the comfortable house.
‘I love you,’ her mother said to the motionless, smelly air.
Tenderness and longing sprang from the marrow in her bones. The feeling was turbulent, baffled, nothing like the calm, sturdy love she had for Edward, or her regularly thwarted affection for Andrew.
Her love for Ruby was the deepest passion in Lesley’s life.
The silence deepened. There was no ready explanation to be found, in this room or anywhere else, for what had gone wrong with her daughter. Or with me, Lesley added meticulously. It wasn’t that she blamed Ruby for being difficult. She took all the responsibility for that on herself, which further irritated Andrew. In their late-night conversations or in the car on the way to deal with another of Ruby’s situations she had asked the same questions over and over: what have I done wrong? Have I been a bad mother?
‘You have lacked a role model,’ Andrew tended to say.
One thing did strike her with peculiar certainty now: this time the departure was final. Wherever she had gone, by her own choice or – please, let it not be that – under compulsion, Ruby wouldn’t be coming back.
Lesley bent her head. She examined her knees in their second skin of smooth nylon mesh. She picked at a loose thread in the grosgrain hem of her skirt and, to her shame even though there was no one to see, tears suddenly ran out of her eyes and dripped on the fabric.
Ruby opened her eyes.
White light poured in through the arched window, filling the bare room until the air seemed almost solid with floating particles of dust. It wasn’t the sunshine that had woken her, however, but a burst of chanting. The words were incomprehensible, delivered in a rich sing-song voice distorted by heavy amplification. She pushed back the sheet and scrambled to look outside. Her eyes widened in amazement.
In the street below, rows of men were kneeling on mats laid over the cobbles, with their foreheads pressed to the ground. They made a patient sea of white- and grey-clad fish backs, the soles of their feet turned innocently upwards like so many pairs of fins.
The city was stilled. Ruby rested her own forehead against the thick greenish glass and tried to hear the prayers.
A few minutes later a wave broke across the sea as the men kneeled upright and then stood up. The mats were casually whisked away and movement flowed back into the street again. Two little boys chased each other up some steps and scuttled through a doorway. A handcart loaded with fruit trundled past, pushed by two men. Realising that she was hungry, Ruby reluctantly turned from the inviting view.
The house was so quiet. The stone walls must be very thick, she thought, as she wandered along the outside corridor. She couldn’t remember which way Auntie had brought her last night and the layout of interconnecting rooms was confusing. Here was a broader corridor with seats facing a carved screen with little hinged trapdoors in it. She peered casually through one of the propped-up hatches and was surprised by the grand double-height space it overlooked. This big hall was almost unfurnished except for a long table and some high-backed chairs pushed against the walls. At the far end was a low dais backed by a wall painting of entwined flowers and fruit and exotic foliage. Huge lamps of iron and glass were suspended on chains from the arched roof. It would be a pretty good space for a party, she reflected. If you half closed your eyes as you peered through the screen you could see the whirling dancers and hear the beat of the drums.
After
