Iris and Ruby: A gripping, exotic historical novel. Rosie Thomas

nineteen. It’s really time she started taking responsibility for herself. You can’t stand in the firing line for her for ever.’

      ‘I don’t think I do,’ Lesley answered mildly. ‘Do I?’

      Andrew exhaled sharply through his nose, pulling down the corners of his mouth to indicate disagreement without bothering to disagree, and resumed his reading.

      Looking away from him, at the pleasant room that was arranged just how she wanted it, with the duck-egg blue shade of the walls that was restful without being cold and the cushion and curtain borders exactly matching it, Lesley felt anxiety fogging the atmosphere. Concern about Ruby distorted the room’s generous proportions and made it loom around her, sharp with threatening edges. The air itself tasted thin, as if she couldn’t draw enough of it into her lungs to make her heart beat steadily. Lesley knew this feeling of old, but familiarity never lessened the impact.

      Where was Ruby? What was she doing this time, and who was she with?

      One day, Lesley’s inner voice insisted, the unthinkable will happen. She shook her head to drive away the thought.

      She never experienced the same anxiety about Edward, Ruby’s half-brother. Edward was always in the right place, doing the right thing. It was only for Ruby that she feared.

      Justifiably, Andrew would snap.

      Lesley closed her address book and secured it with a woven band. They had eaten dinner and she had cleared it away. The dishwasher was purring in her granite-and-maplewood kitchen, the central heating had come on, the telephone obstinately withheld its chirrup. Ruby had been gone since yesterday afternoon. She had slipped out of the house without a word to anyone.

      Just to break the silence she asked, ‘Would you like a drink, darling? A whisky, or anything?’

      ‘No thanks.’ Andrew didn’t even look up.

      ‘I’ll go and … see if Ed’s all right with his homework.’

      Lesley went slowly up the stairs. At the top she hesitated, then tapped on her son’s door: ‘Hello?’

      Ed was sitting at his table. The television was on at the foot of his bed, but he had his back to it and she saw an exercise book and coloured pencils and an encyclopaedia open in front of him.

      ‘How’s it going?’

      ‘OK.’ His thick fair hair, the same colour as his father’s, stuck up in a tuft at the front and made him look like a placid bird. He was the opposite of Ruby in every single respect. He rolled a pencil between his thumb and forefinger now and Lesley was aware that he was politely waiting for her to go away and leave him in peace.

      ‘No word from Ruby,’ she said. ‘I really thought she’d ring this evening.’

      Ed nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘You know, I don’t think we should worry. She’s probably staying in town with one of her mates. It’s not like it’s the first time she’s just forgotten to come home, is it?’

      For an eleven-year-old, Edward was remarkably well thought-out.

      ‘No,’ Lesley agreed.

      ‘Have you tried her mobile again?’

      Only a dozen times. ‘Still turned off.’

      ‘Well, I think we should just tell ourselves that no news is good news. She’ll probably ring you tomorrow.’

      ‘Yes. All right, darling. I’ll pop in later and say goodnight.’

      ‘OK.’ He had his nose in his book again before the door closed.

      Lesley went along the landing to another door at the far end. The thick sisal matting, expensively rubber-backed, absorbed the sound of her footsteps. She leaned against the handle for a moment, then walked into the room.

      It was dark and stuffy, and the room’s close smell had a distinctly brackish quality to it.

      Lesley had already looked in here two or three times during the day but the otherness of Ruby’s bedroom, the way it seemed to rebuff her, never failed to take her by surprise. She felt cautiously along the wall for the light switch, then clicked it on.

      The smell was from Ruby’s collection of shells. She had lost interest in adding to it at least eight years ago but the cowries and spindles never quite gave up the traces of fish and salt locked in their pearly whorls. The wall cabinets that Lesley had had put up to display them contained a jumbled, teetering mass of sandy jars and broken conches. The collection had never been properly organised or catalogued. Ruby had just wanted to get specimens 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