Pearl was not her real auntie; she was an old friend of her mother’s. Or as old as you could get when you emigrated to a new country at the age of eighteen.
‘Your mother was pregnant when I met her, and the same age as you are now.’ Pearl was one of the only women of that generation that Ruby knew who smoked. They had parked themselves up at the end of the long narrow garden on a couple of overturned crates that served as seating. They were close enough to the barbecuing uncles and gossiping aunties to hear a general din of chatter, but not close enough to make out any individual words.
‘We met at the market. Her accent was still so strong, and she couldn’t believe the cost of bananas.’ Pearl could usually be relied on for a juicy titbit, but now she spoke with the distant-eyed cadence of nostalgia. ‘She was only just showing, but I clocked it straight away, told the vendor he should be ashamed of himself for overcharging an expectant mother like that.’ Pearl laughed. It was an empty sound, a recollection of something funny. ‘Hortense was embarrassed, of course – your mother hates to make a fuss – but afterwards she ran up to me and thanked me.’
Pearl exhaled with a heavy sigh. Ruby got the sense that Pearl was only tangentially telling this story to someone else; it felt more like she was trying to commit it firmly to memory. ‘I could also tell she was lonely. There was something so sad in her eyes, so I invited her to tea. Me and Winston had only been married for a year and he was so put out when I brought her into our kitchen, but I said to him, “She has no one here, she is all alone and still only a child herself.”’
Suddenly Pearl became aware of Ruby’s presence again. ‘It’s funny to say that now. I was only just twenty myself, but I was used to the cold, and the bad bananas by then, you know?’ Ruby nodded. She was a little stoned, and more than happy to play her part in this one-way conversation.
‘And she told me right there over tea, that first day I met her, she told me about your daddy.’
That got Ruby’s attention. She’d never heard a thing about her father. She’d asked her mum, naturally. Hortense would always brush it off; when she was little it was: ‘You’re my own little baby. I made you myself.’ And then it was a vaguer ‘he’s not with us anymore’, which Ruby had interpreted as ‘he’s died’. The colour of her skin at least revealed one fact about the mysterious man who had fathered her: that he was white.
‘She worked in a big house, helping her mama with the cleaning, and the son in that house had taken a liking to Hortense.’
‘So that’s my dad then,’ Ruby interrupted, eager to get to the revelatory part of the tale. Pearl looked at Ruby, her dark eyes now a little hooded with age, and gave her a woeful smile.
‘No, Ruby, that is not your father. Your father, he was a friend of the young son. He was …’ Pearl looked down at her hands, the butt between her fingers long extinguished, and Ruby felt a knot of dread settle in her stomach. ‘He was not such a nice man. Your mama, she was waiting for the young son one night. They were going to go to the beach together, but this friend, he came across her, and he was very drunk and he …’ Pearl trailed off.
Ruby knew in her bones what the end of that sentence was; maybe because her bones were conceived in the end of that sentence. And still, she pushed it. Maybe she’d hoped to be surprised.
‘Pearl, tell me, please.’ Ruby’s voice was a whisper.
‘He forced himself on her.’ Pearl’s voice was even softer.
‘He raped her?’ Something in Ruby needed the words to be said.
Pearl looked up. Tears were swelling in her eyes, and in that moment Ruby imagined her, eighteen years prior, with the exact same look on her face as Hortense recounted the story over the kitchen table. Pearl nodded.
‘Why are you telling me this now?’ Ruby couldn’t work out if she was angry. The feeling was strange, hot but somehow satiating. Maybe it was relief.
‘These days, you look so much like she did then. I don’t know, maybe it’s just too many of your uncle Winston’s rum punches, but I cannot carry the burden of that story alone anymore, God forgive me.’
They had sat in silence for the longest time. Each rolling and lighting another cigarette. At a certain moment Pearl must have told her more about how Hortense’s father had kicked her out when she’d eventually worked up the courage to tell him what happened. And she had been sent to live with a distant cousin for a time. How she had continued, in secret, to meet with her own mother, who was the one, in the end, who suggested she get a one-way ticket far away. And who had given her the money for the boat fare.
When Hortense had arrived at St Pancras in the winter of 1960, she had only the number of a church warden that a friendin Kingston had scribbled on a scrap of paper and told her to call. But by the time Ruby had been born the following February, she’d managed to secure herself a bedsit off Loughborough Junction. Hortense was nothing if not resourceful.
As Pearl spoke the sun must have begun to dip in the sky and the view over the terraced roofs of Brixton must have taken on an auburn gleam.
Sitting at the huge oak desk now, looking out at the brilliant green of Opal Fairfax’s extensive lawn, Ruby couldn’t remember how they’d left that place, at the bottom of the garden. How they’d walked back up towards the festivities and joined the rest of the family as though something hadn’t been shattered.
Somehow Ruby must have managed to put on enough of a convincing act that Hortense had not asked her if anything was wrong. Pearl had danced in Winston’s arms for the rest of the night, sporadically laughing too loudly. Ruby could only now remember the feeling she had of bitterness, watching Pearl appear lighter, freer of the truth. The albatross settled comfortably onto Ruby’s shoulders now, still as toxic as a secret to be kept.
And yet, Ruby found herself, then and now, trying to imagine this man. Faceless and brutal and inextricably part of her. He could be anywhere, anyone. The only thing that she knew about him was that he had evil in him. Would she ever be able to shake the fear that it was in her too?
She shut her notepad. She wasn’t as ready as she’d thought. In all the words she’d written about men, it was only occurring to her in that moment that her widespread anger and disdain for them, even while she yearned for their adoration, was rooted in her hatred for her father. She could not write about birth without writing about him. She decided to have that bath instead.
Chapter 19
Noah and Heather wandered across the lawn towards the two huddled ‘outhouses’. Noah was excited to get started, but unusually for him, he felt awkward in Heather’s presence. He supposed he must have met lesbians before, but none so … explicit as Heather. She wore her vividly red hair in an upright streak down the middle of her head. The sides were buzzed short. She wore jeans that were wide and scuffed at the bottom and a leather jacket, even though the sun was shining. She didn’t make small talk, and so Noah had a go.
‘Must have been a long journey down for you last night?’ He wondered if they were allowed to walk diagonally across the lawn as they were, especially in those heavy boots that Heather was wearing.
‘From Glasgow?’ Her tone was dry. ‘Yeah, man, it’s a pretty long way.’
He nodded and looked down at his own feet. His boots were less sturdy, but they still left a path of flattened blades in his wake.
‘Sorry.’ Heather spoke so quietly that Noah wasn’t convinced she was addressing him. ‘I’m not used to, I don’t know,socialising? I tend to spend days on end in my fucking freezing studio with only the mice for company.’
