Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas

he folded away his reading glasses, took a mouthful of wine when it arrived and appeared to be chewing on it, then leaned back with a rich sigh.

      ‘Now then,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Ruby.’

      ‘Have you talked to her?’

      ‘As a matter of fact I have. Since you and I were going to meet today, I gave our daughter a call last night.’ Sebastian twinkled at her. As a senior publisher with a large staff of young, attractive women, the twinkle was a well-used weapon in his armoury. ‘I couldn’t get her mobile, of course, so I tried the number you gave me and lo and behold, my ex-mother-in-law answered.’

      ‘What did she say?’

      ‘To be perfectly honest, I don’t think she had a clue who I was.’

      Lesley made a quick reckoning. Sebastian and Iris had met only a handful of times. Iris had come home from Africa for the wedding, and during the eight years before Ruby was born there had been maybe four or five other encounters. Iris came to London again soon after Ruby arrived, she was sure of that; there was a photograph of her holding the new baby and gazing unsmilingly into the camera lens.

      Family life hadn’t really suited Sebastian. When Ruby was three, he left home and moved in with a youngish novelist with a growing literary reputation. There had been a succession of other women since then, getting younger and younger. Ruby had resented this. ‘This one’s not much older than me. It’s pathetic, that’s what it is.’

      So far, Ruby was his only child. ‘Doesn’t need to have kids, does he? He just goes out with them,’ she sneered.

      ‘Iris’s memory isn’t good,’ Lesley said now.

      ‘Anyway, I asked to speak to Ruby and she came on the line.’

      Their starters were placed in front of them and Sebastian immediately broke off and dug a fork into his. Lesley looked out of the window at the crowds of shoppers and the buses trundling like giant logs in a slow current. It was odd to be sitting across the table from a plump, routinely genial stranger who had once been her husband. A man with whom she had had a child. But then she quite often looked up and saw Andrew and he seemed to be no less of a stranger, and they were also joint parents and she was still married to him. Much of her life, it seemed to Lesley, now had a flimsy, two-dimensional quality to it, as if you might walk round to take a look behind the painted flats and see another world altogether.

      The only real, solid, unshakeable constant was her love for Ruby. She loved Ed too, of course, but Ed was entirely knowable. He did what he was supposed to do and took pleasure in that, like his father.

      But Ruby …

      Lesley ached with longing for her missing daughter. Her shoulders bowed, curving inwards on the dart of pain that pierced her ribcage.

      She had to hold on to the leg of the table to stop herself flying out of her seat and rushing to Heathrow for the first plane to Cairo. The only thing that held her was the mental picture of herself arriving at Iris’s house, and the flat, baffled stares – one mirroring the other – that Ruby and Iris would give her.

      She cleared her throat. ‘Er, how did she seem?’

      Sebastian put down his fork, dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘She seemed perfectly fine.’

      Lesley waited.

      ‘She shouldn’t have run off. She shouldn’t have worried you like that. But she did get herself all the way to Cairo. She’s going to museums, she said, seeing the sights. She’s made friends with some people of her own age, they’re showing her the city. What’s the real problem with that? She’s with her …’ Even unctuous Sebastian couldn’t quite bring himself to say Granny, where Iris was concerned. ‘… With your mother.’

      And there you have it, Lesley thought.

      My mother, my daughter.

      I don’t think my mother ever loved me, otherwise she wouldn’t have left my father and me.

      I love Ruby more than anything and she doesn’t want my love. It chafes her, just like when she was a little girl and I took her to have her hair cut. The tiny ends of her hair worked their way inside her vest and itched and itched. Even though I undressed her and gave her fresh clothes, the memory of the itching still made her scream. I am the cut hairs, for Ruby. Part of her but not part of her, and an irritation.

      Iris and Ruby.

      Motherhood, or actually the denial of it, is the thread that connects all three of us. I wanted to spin a better, finer filament for Ruby and me, a gossamer link that wouldn’t drag between us and trip us up the way that Iris’s and mine always has done. But all I seem to have created is a different kind of unwelcome tie.

      Or look at it another way: perhaps we are like the same poles of a magnet, Ruby and me and Iris and me, always driven apart. And by the same analogy Ruby and Iris have leapt together, irresistibly attracted.

      Lesley was familiar with all the images of repelling and chafing and restraining. She had no need to ask herself what an analyst would make of them, she already knew the answer. Over and over again, whichever way she entered the circle, everything led back to Iris.

      Rejection has become my pattern, my expectation. Sebastian and Ruby have made their own flamboyant rejections. Andrew and even Ed, in their invisible and within-bounds way, make their own smaller gestures.

      ‘What is the problem?’ Sebastian asked. He was looking hard at her.

      Despair rose in Lesley. The food she was trying to chew turned to a thick paste on her tongue.

      What was to be done? Leave Andrew, dismember their son’s life, because her husband preferred his work and his boat and his yachting magazines to her company?

      What was there to do, except go on living and working and being grateful for all the benefits in her life?

      ‘Lesley?’

      She forced herself to swallow and then took a deep breath. She wanted to cry, but that was impossible.

      ‘I miss her,’ she said. It was only the thinnest, icy sliver of the vast glacier of truth, but she was offering it to Sebastian.

      He leaned back in his chair and let out a laugh.

      ‘Les, poor old Les. Of course you miss her. It’s what happens, it’s perfectly natural. We have kids, we give them everything we can, just to enable them to grow up and not to need us anymore. It’s harsh, but it’s the way it goes. Isn’t it the same for all your friends? Would you rather Ruby was some dependent little creature who didn’t want to take a step away from us?’

      Lesley lifted her eyes. What did he know? She saw Sebastian’s plump, well-fed face through a fog of rage. It was as if all the capillaries suddenly burst inside her skull, flooding her brain with black blood and madness.

      She picked up the knife from her plate. With a single swoop of her arm she lunged across the table and with all the weight of her body behind it she stabbed the point of the blade deep into her ex-husband’s left eye.

      Then she blinked and looked again. The knife still lay on her plate, Sebastian was still smiling broadly at her. Her hands shook.

      When she finally spoke, her voice came out as a croak.

      ‘We? Us?’

      Sebastian’s smile moderated, crimping inwards into a rueful, amused moue of roguish culpability.

      ‘I know. Of course. You’re quite right. I haven’t been much of a dad to her. I said so, you know, on the phone, and we promised each other that when she’s back in England we’ll spend some more time together. I’ve got to make a trip to New York before Christmas, seeing a couple of my opposite numbers over there. Maybe Ruby could come with me. She’ll have to amuse herself a bit during the day because I’ll have meetings, but she’s proved that she’s old enough to do that.’

      Taken with this idea, Sebastian