Free Iris and Ruby by Rosie Thomas Page A

lamplit room. Andrew was working on his laptop, Ed was upstairs in his bedroom.
    ‘She said Ruby’s not a baby anymore.’
    ‘Quite right.’
    She wanted to explain to him something about how, in one corner of her mother’s heart, Ruby would always be an infant. That was how mothers functioned. She believed, too, that in some recess deep within themselves, daughters also yearned for childhood again.
    But Andrew would not be interested in her theories about mother love. He might put his work aside to discuss the new electronic chart plotter to be installed in his boat, but not much else.
    ‘Are we going down to the Hamble at the weekend?’ she asked.
    ‘Depends on whether I get this report finished.’
    Lesley put down her unopened book and wandered into the kitchen. She polished two water glasses that had been left on the sink drainer and put them away in the glassfronted cupboard. She checked the fridge to make sure there was enough juice and milk for breakfast, and glanced at Ed’s homework diary pinned to the noticeboard. The kitchen wasa warm, ordered space which she had planned and laid out in every detail.
    Yet she felt superfluous in it.
    She wondered where Iris and Ruby were sitting now, trying to imagine the room and its decoration. It took on a Moroccan flavour, inevitably. Lesley had never been to Cairo, but in the 1970s she had run a business that imported fabrics and furniture from North Africa, mostly from Marrakesh. In those days, however, Iris had been working elsewhere and when the two of them met it was during Iris’s brief visits to England, or once or twice elsewhere in Europe. Iris travelled wherever and whenever she could, usually alone, usually with the minimum of luggage and complete disregard for her own comfort. She didn’t mind sleeping on airport benches and riding in the backs of trucks. Living as she did, in African villages where she provided basic medical care for the poorest women and children, being comfortable didn’t have as many complicated factors as it did for most people.
    Lesley remembered how they had once met up in a hotel in Rome. The doorman had looked askance at Iris when she walked into the lobby. Her clothes were not dirty, but they were worn and unmatching. She carried a couple of African woven bags, her face was bare and her feet were splayed in flat leather sandals. She walked straight across the marble floor to where Lesley was waiting, and the smartly dressed Italian crowd fell back to make way for her. Nobody knew who she was, but everyone knew she was somebody.
    And it was Lesley, in her Armani and Ferragamo, who felt overdressed.
    On a whim, she had ordered champagne cocktails for them both. Iris seized and drank hers with such delight (‘how heavenly! Oh, what a taste of the lovely wicked world’) that Lesley suddenly understood why her mother chose a life in which a drink in a hotel bar could deliver so much pleasure.
    Of course, her imagined Moroccan-style interior was probably much too elaborate and over-designed to come anywhere close to reality. Iris’s actual house would be bare, verging on uncomfortable.
    Now Ruby was there with her. They had taken a distinct liking to each other, the two of them. Lesley had understood that from the telephone conversations, although no one had mentioned it.
    What were they talking about? What were they telling each other?
    Jealousy fluttered in her, and she did her best to ignore it.
    The quiet of her own house was oppressive. It was a long time since she had spoken to Ruby’s father, Lesley realised. She resolved to give him a call.
    Iris and Ruby ate dinner together, in a small room through an archway off the double-height hall. Auntie rubbed a grey veil of dust off the table and Mamdooh lit a pair of tall candles, so Ruby understood that this was an occasion. As she gazed upwards into the dim, cobwebbed heights Iris briefly explained to her that the celebration hall was where important male guests would have been