Bay of Secrets

by Rosanna Ley

Genres: Family Life; Holiday books; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Spain, 1939. A young girl, Julia, enters a convent to stay safe during the war. Whilst volunteering in a maternity clinic, the worrying adoption practices force Sister Julia to decide on helping those placed in her care.
England, 2011. Six months after her parents' death, 34-year-old journalist Ruby Rae has finally found the strength to sell the family home. But as she does so, she unearths a devastating secret her parents have kept from her all her life.

Release date: November 9, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 560

Sample

The house looked just the same. Red brick, white front door, sash windows, worse for wear. Ruby exchanged a glance with Mel. ‘Thanks for picking me up,’ she said. Could she have done it alone? She thought of James back in London and those different directions they seemed to be taking. Well, yes, she could have. But it would have been so much harder.

‘I’m not just dumping you here,’ Mel said. ‘I’m coming in to help.’

‘Help?’ But Mel was already getting out of the car, so Ruby followed suit. ‘You don’t have to—’ she began.

‘Don’t be daft.’ Mel opened the front gate and took Ruby’s arm as they walked up the path. The grass was overgrown, the plants were wild and untended and the garden was full of weeds. It didn’t take long.

But Ruby felt the relief wash over her. Mel was her oldest friend and exactly what she needed right now. She was thirty-five years old and yet she felt like a child. She squeezed Mel’s arm. It had been two months. It was time. Time to tackle the past and take the first steps towards moving on.

At the front door, Ruby closed her eyes, smelling the jasmine her mother had planted here years ago. The heady scent of the tiny white flowers seemed to wrap itself around her, shunt her forward. You can do this.

She put her key in the door, almost heard her mother’s voice. You have to pull it out a bit and wiggle. The door eased open – reluctantly.

Mel held back, understanding that Ruby had to go first. Ruby straightened her shoulders, stepped over the letters and circulars lying beached on the doormat. And took her first breath of parents and home since it had happened.

*

Of course Ruby had been back to Dorset since the accident. She and James had driven from London for her parents’ funeral. She sighed now as she remembered the journey, the expression on James’s face – his mouth thin and unsmiling, his eyes fixed on the road ahead with hardly a glance at the woman by his side. Ruby had barely noticed as the car swallowed up the miles, as the familiar green Dorset hills came into sight. Because the pleasure of coming home had turned into a terrible sort of emptiness. And she hadn’t felt able to face the house, not even with James by her side. James. How long had it been since they’d just walked hand in hand down by the river or since they’d talked – really talked, as if they wanted to hear what the other had to say? And now this. Poor James. He hadn’t known how to deal with it, how to deal with her. He’d started looking at her as if he no longer knew her. Which in a way he didn’t. It sounded a bit crazy. But she’d become someone else since she’d lost them.

After the funeral they’d returned to London. Ruby had dealt with the awful aftermath. The sympathy cards from friends and from acquaintances of her parents’ she hardly knew, and some she did know, like Frances, her mother’s oldest friend, who had been so kind at the funeral, giving Ruby a note of her address and phone number and offering her help should she need it. There was the will and the probate; the winding up of their affairs that she’d accomplished somehow, finding a temporary and cold objectivity from some desperate corner of her grief.

Somehow too, she finished the feature she was in the middle of writing – an exposé of a certain hotel chain and the recycling of house wine – and then she’d thrown herself into the next project and then the next. She’d hardly seen any of her friends. She hadn’t gone to the gym or had one of those occasional girlie evenings with Jude, Annie and the rest of them that always somehow made her feel better about everything. She simply worked. It was as if all the time she was writing, all the time she was interviewing people and investigating their stories, Ruby didn’t need to think about her own life, about what had happened to them, to her. She was functioning on autopilot. And in there somewhere was James and their foundering relationship.

But Ruby wasn’t sure she could let it go – not yet. She knew she had to go back to the house in Dorset, had to sort through her parents’ things, had to decide what to do with the place now that they were gone. But how could she? If she did that it would be like admitting … That it was true. That they had really left her.

Last night the situation had reached a head. Ruby had finished the story she was working on. She had a long bath. She felt as if her head was bursting. Afterwards, she sat on the sofa with her notebook, her sax and her guitar and waited for inspiration, but nothing came. She hardly played her saxophone, she hadn’t written a song for months. It wasn’t just her parents’ death. Something else was wrong in her life. Very wrong.

James came back late from drinks after work, tired and irritable and not even wanting the supper she’d cooked for him. He ran his fingers through his fair hair and let out a long sigh. ‘May as well get off to bed,’ he said. He didn’t touch her.

A final thread snapped. She couldn’t hold back. ‘What’s the point of us staying together, James?’ Ruby asked him. ‘We seem to want such different things. We hardly even spend any time together any more.’ She half wanted him to disagree, to fling her doubts aside, to take her in his arms. She didn’t want to keep having these arguments with him. But how could they go on living separate lives? Something had to change.

But he didn’t disagree. ‘I don’t know what you want, Ruby,’ he said instead. ‘I just don’t know any more.’ His hands were in his pockets now. Ruby wondered what he was trying to stop them from doing. Reaching out to her, maybe?

What did she want? What did he want, come to that? James loved living in London. He liked going out to crowded bars and restaurants and taking city breaks in Prague or Amsterdam – preferably with a few mates in tow. Apart from her occasional nights out with the girls, Ruby wanted a bit more peace and solitude these days. She’d rather tramp along the cliffs at Chesil Beach than shop in Oxford Street. He liked Chinese food, she preferred Italian. He was into hip hop, she loved jazz. He watched telly, she read books. He played football, she liked to dance. The list in her head went on. She couldn’t even remember how or why she had fallen in love with James in the first place. They used to do things with one another. They used to have fun. What was the matter with her?

She realised that she was crying.

He had his back to her though and he didn’t even see.

And that’s when Ruby knew what she had to do. She had to take some time off – she had worked as a freelance journalist for over five years, her parents had left her a small inheritance as well as the house, so at least she had some breathing space – and she had to come back here to Dorset. She had to face up to what had happened. She was strong enough now to deal with it. She had to be.

*

The house, though, wasn’t easy.

Ruby went into the living room first. Stopped in her tracks as she surveyed the scene. It was awful. It was as if they had just popped out for an hour or two. She went over to the table. Ran a fingertip over the stiff sheet of pale green water-colour paper. Her mother had been in the middle of a painting; her brushes still stood in a jar of murky water, her watercolour paints thrown into the old tin, her mixing palette on the table, the wilted flowers in a jug. Ruby touched them and they crumbled like dust in her fingers. There were two mugs on the table crusted with long-ago dried-up dregs of tea. And her father’s green sweater – slung on the back of the armchair. Ruby picked it up, buried her face in it – just for a moment – smelt the Dad-smell of the citrus aftershave she’d bought him last Christmas, mixed in with waxy wood polish and pine. They were so young. It wasn’t fair …

What had he said to her? ‘Fancy a quick spin on the bike? Fancy a ride down to the waterfront? Go on. What d’you reckon? Shall we give it a whirl?’

And her mother would have been busy painting but she would have smiled and sighed at the same time in that way she had, and pushed her work to one side. ‘Go on then, love,’ she’d have said. ‘Just for an hour. It’ll probably do me good to take a break.’

For a moment Ruby pictured her, dark greying hair falling over her face as she painted, eyes narrowing to better capture her subject, silver earrings catching the light … No. It wasn’t fair.

Mel put a comforting arm around her. ‘I’ve got some milk in the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch it and make us a nice cup of tea. And then we’ll make a start, OK?’

‘OK,’ Ruby sniffed and nodded. That was what they were here for. But there was so much stuff and it all meant so much to her. A lifetime of memories.

*

‘What I reckon,’ Mel said, over tea, ‘is that you need to clear away some of the personal things so that you can see more clearly.’

Ruby nodded. She knew exactly what she meant.

‘Because you’re going to sell the house, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Even if … Well, she hadn’t come to a decision either way. But on the train to Axminster she’d been thinking. What held her to London – really? There was her job – but being freelance meant she could work just about anywhere she had her laptop. It had been a huge jump after working for the local rag in Pridehaven and then the glossy Women in Health in London. But she’d made it after a year of juggling nine to five on the magazine with the freelance articles she really wanted to write – articles that gave her the freedom to research and choose her own remit. And she made a living – though admittedly things were tight sometimes.

It was handy living in the city for editorial meetings and what have you, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. She had to be ready to drop everything and go wherever the next story or article might be, but provided she was within reach of a decent airport or railway station, what difference did it make so long as she could email through her copy? There were her friends – she’d miss Jude in particular and their grumpy-women rants over a bottle of wine. And there was James, of course. She thought of him as she’d seen him last, as the taxi took her to the station; framed in the doorway, tall and fair, his blue eyes still sleepy and confused. But was there still James? She really didn’t know.

‘So we’ll do one room at a time. Three piles, darling.’ Mel tucked a strand of bright auburn hair behind one ear. ‘One for you to keep, one for anything you want to sell and one to give away to charity shops.’

Fair enough.

And by the time they stopped for a beer and a cheese and pickle sandwich at lunchtime, Ruby really felt they were getting somewhere. She’d shed plenty of tears, but she was doing what she’d spent two months plucking up the courage to do. She was at last sweeping the decks. It was hard – but therapeutic.

She looked around. It was warm enough to sit outside at the garden table and good to get some fresh air. The old-fashioned sweet peas her mother had loved were blooming in wild abandon on the worn trellis by the back wall and their scent drifted in the breeze. Her mother used to cut bundles of them for the house. ‘To make sure everyone knows it’s summer,’ she used to say. Ruby decided that this afternoon she’d do the same.

‘I suppose you’ll want to get back to London as soon as you can?’ Mel was munching her sandwich. She pulled a sad face. Mel had missed her vocation in life; she should have been an actress. But she’d met Stuart when she was eighteen and fallen dramatically and irrevocably in love. Stuart was an accountant and Mel had her own business she’d started ten years ago; the hat shop in Pridehaven High Street, which had become a thriving concern. It had branched out to include fancy accessories – quirky ties, screen-painted silk scarves, hand-crafted leather purses and belts. But its speciality hadn’t altered. The town even had its own hat festival now, she’d informed Ruby earlier. Forget about London, darling, this is where it’s all happening these days.

And perhaps she was right. ‘I’m not sure about going back.’ Ruby lifted her face up to the sun. She’d missed this garden, missed having outside space. And she’d missed not living near the sea.

Ruby had left Dorset ten years ago when she was twenty-five. She’d wanted to be independent, to see somewhere new, to experience a different kind of life. She was bored with following up local stories for the Gazette, with interviewing local minor celebrities and with her weekly health file problem page. She applied for the job at Women in Health because it sounded glamorous and exciting, and because it was an escape from what had come to seem parochial. When she met James she’d thought for a while that everything had slotted neatly into place. He was attractive, intelligent and good company. They both had jobs they enjoyed and the city was their oyster. It was all happening in London – theatre, music, film, galleries, everything you could want. But … It had turned out that Women in Health had its limitations and that Ruby wasn’t really a city girl after all. She’d lived the life and she’d enjoyed it. But home was where it was real. And although her parents were no longer here, somewhere in her heart this was still home and this was where she wanted to be – at least for now.

Mel’s eyes widened. ‘What about James?’

Ruby traced a pattern on the tabletop with her fingertip.

‘Ah,’ said Mel.

‘Exactly.’ Ruby sighed.

‘You haven’t split up?’

‘No.’ At least not yet, she thought. I’ll call you, was the last thing he’d said to her when she left for the station this morning. But when he did – what would she say? He hadn’t made any objection to her coming here. But he’d assumed it was just for a week or two – not for ever.

‘What then?’ Mel asked.

Good question. ‘I suppose you could say we’re taking a break.’

Mel knew her so well – she didn’t have to say more. But whether she stayed for a week or two or whether she stayed for ever, Ruby wouldn’t be staying in this house. It was far too big for her and it held way too many memories. Her parents’ ghosts would be haunting her every move.

*

After lunch, Ruby tackled her parents’ bedroom. She’d already pulled out all the clothes, put them in their designated piles. And at the bottom of the wardrobe, tucked behind assorted handbags, she’d found a shoebox. It had some writing – maybe Spanish – on the lid and a thick rubber band around it, but otherwise it appeared ordinary enough.

Ruby sat back on her haunches. Downstairs, she could hear Mel vacuuming. The woman was an angel. Because this was so difficult; harder than she’d ever imagined it would be.

When it happened to you – when the doorbell rang early in the morning and you opened the door to see two police officers standing there, about to tell you that your parents were dead – it didn’t feel like you could ever have imagined. She’d noticed silly and insignificant things. Like the fact that the female PC was wearing a padded body-warmer and had dark circles under her eyes. And that it was 21 March, the first day of spring.

‘There’s always a blind spot,’ the male PC had said to Ruby. ‘That’s why motorbikes are so dangerous.’ He’d glanced at her apologetically. ‘It’s not that they’re badly ridden. It’s the car drivers usually.’

There’s always a blind spot …

‘They wouldn’t have suffered,’ the female PC added.

Ruby had looked at her. Did she know that? For sure?

The woman’s words sent an image spinning through her brain – of tyres squealing and smoking, the stench of molten rubber. Her hands gripping his waist. The clashing impact of metal on metal. Bodies somersaulting through the air. Not just bodies. Her parents’ bodies. And then the silence. God. Not suffered?

Ruby shook the memory away. Everyone said that time healed. But how much time did it take? Was she healing? Some days she wasn’t even sure. She held her hands out in front of her. But at least her hands weren’t shaking and she’d even stopped bumping into doors.

She eased the rubber band from around the box. It wasn’t heavy enough to be boots or even shoes. She shook it gently. Something rustled.

If only he hadn’t bought that motorbike. How many times had she thought that since it had happened? She’d warned him, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she told him off for trying to relive his lost youth? He was supposed to be close to retirement age. He should have been thinking about playing bowls or cribbage, not riding motorbikes around the countryside.

Ruby let out a breath she hadn’t even known she was holding. She had come here for the weekend – a chilly weekend in early March; James had gone off on one of his weekends with the lads. It was the last time she’d seen them. It would probably stay in her mind for ever.

‘You’ll never guess the latest, love.’ Her mother had put a mug of fresh coffee down on the table in front of Ruby and flicked the hair out of her eyes like a girl.

‘What?’ Ruby returned her mother’s grin.

‘He’s only bought a bike, hasn’t he? Can you imagine? At his age?’ She put her hands on her hips, tried to look cross.

‘A bike?’ Ruby had visualised high handlebars, a narrow saddle, a cross bar.

‘A motorbike.’ Her mother took Ruby’s hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘A pushbike wouldn’t be fast enough for him. Old Speedy Gonzales.’

‘You’re joking.’ But Ruby knew she wasn’t. She twisted round in her chair. ‘Dad? Are you crazy? How old do you think you are?’

‘Never too old to enjoy yourself, love,’ he said. His face was buried in the paper but he looked up and treated her to one of his eyebrow waggles. ‘I had a Triumph Bonneville 650 for a while before you came along. Always fancied getting another. Blame Easy Rider – that’s how it started.’ He gave her mother a look. ‘I always fancied the leathers too.’

‘Get on with you.’ But she’d blushed – furiously – and Ruby had thought: they look ten years younger.

‘Maybe it’s the male menopause,’ Ruby teased. She loved coming back to see them at weekends and she knew they loved having her, but they’d never raised any objections to her moving to London. Why should they? They’d always made it clear that they respected what she did for a living and that they would never try to tie her down. They’d brought her up to be independent; they’d always expected her to fly.

‘Maybe it’s time he grew up.’ Ruby’s mother tousled his hair as she passed the sofa and he reached up suddenly, making a grab for her wrist. She tried to pull away, he wouldn’t let her and they ended up giggling like a couple of kids.

‘You two,’ Ruby said. She’d got up, put her arms around them both and felt herself wrapped in one of their special hugs. But she had wished she could be like that, like them. She and James maybe. Or someone …

He’d shown her the bike the following day. It was big, red and black and she’d watched, arms folded, while her father roared up and down the street for her benefit. ‘I’ll give you a ride if you want, love,’ he said. ‘I passed my test years ago.’

Ruby had put a hand on his arm. ‘You will be careful, won’t you, Dad?’ She didn’t like the idea of him racing round the lanes of west Dorset on a motorbike. Nor the idea of her mother on the back of it.

‘Course I will.’ He winked at her. ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily, my girl.’

*

But she had. Ruby blinked back the tears. She had.

She took a deep breath. And opened the shoebox.

Some tissue paper and some photographs. She flipped through them. No one she knew. Who were they then and why were they here? They looked – well, interesting. She picked one up and scrutinised it more closely.

A young couple on some Mediterranean beach were leaning against the orange wall of a beach-house. In the background she could see pale gold sand, turquoise sea, some black rocks and a red and white striped lighthouse. The girl, who was wearing a flowing, maxi-dress with an Aztec design and loose sleeves, had long blonde hair and was laughing. The boy was olive-skinned with curly black hair and a beard, one arm slung casually around her shoulders.

Ruby picked up another snapshot. It was the same girl – she looked no more than mid-twenties, but she could be younger – sitting in the driver’s seat of a psychedelic VW camper van. Ruby smiled. It was like an instant flashback to the days of flower power – way before her time, of course, but she could see the appeal. And another; a group of hippies on the beach, sitting on the black rocks, someone – maybe the same girl again, though she was too far away to tell – playing a guitar. And the same girl again on the beach holding a small baby. A baby.

Something – grief perhaps? – caught in Ruby’s throat. Her mother would never see Ruby holding a baby. She would never be a grandmother and her father would never be a grandfather. They would never see Ruby be married, have children. They wouldn’t be proud of her when one of her articles made the pages of a Sunday supplement. They wouldn’t come to any more of her jazz gigs where she played the sax in local pubs, mixing her own songs in with all the famous jazz covers her parents loved – though, truth to tell she hadn’t done much of that since moving to London; she’d let her music slide. They wouldn’t be here for any of that stuff, for her future.

Ruby blinked back the tears. She put the photos on the floor beside her and investigated the rest of the contents of the box. Some pale pink tissue paper was nestling in the bottom corner. She unwrapped it. Out dropped a string of multicoloured love beads. Ruby let them drift between her fingers. They were the kind people wore in the sixties and seventies. The kind … She picked up one of the photos once more. The kind this girl was wearing. They were old, delicate and fragile. Maybe then they were one and the same.

Gently, she unwrapped some more tissue at the bottom of the box to reveal a little white crocheted bonnet – so small it would only fit … She frowned. A baby. She picked it up – it was so soft – and put it with the beads. And unwrapped the final tiny parcel. A piece of grey plastic. A plectrum. Just like the one she used when she was playing her guitar. But why would there be a guitar plectrum in the shoebox? She looked at the small heap of apparently random objects. Why was any of this stuff in a shoebox in her parents’ wardrobe?

*

‘I’ve put a pile of papers on the table in the living room.’ Mel was talking as she came up the stairs. ‘You might want to take a look at them. You probably should have gone through them weeks ago, to be honest.’

Ruby looked up at her. She was standing in the doorway. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘Found anything interesting?’

‘Oh … Just a shoebox with some things in.’

‘Things that aren’t shoes?’ Mel sat down on the bed and Ruby showed her the photos, the love beads, the plectrum, and the white crocheted baby’s bonnet.

‘What do you reckon to all this?’ she asked.

Mel picked up the photo of the girl with the baby. ‘It looks like this lot must belong to her.’

‘Yes.’ But who was she?

‘You don’t recognise her then?’

‘I don’t recognise any of them. I don’t remember Mum or Dad mentioning anyone like this either.’

Mel shrugged. ‘Maybe your mum was looking after the stuff for someone else?’

‘Maybe.’ But who?

‘That’s nothing. You should see all the things I’ve got at the bottom of my wardrobe.’ Mel glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go, darling. Stuart’s mum’s coming round for supper – and I haven’t even gone to the supermarket yet.’

Ruby laughed. It would be good, she thought, to be around Mel and Stuart again and some of the old friends she’d had before she moved away. It was exactly what she needed.

And maybe it was nothing, but she replaced all the items and put the shoebox in the ‘things to keep’ pile. Just in case it was important. Just in case – for some reason – her parents had wanted her to find it.

*

That evening, Ruby went into the bedroom that had continued to be hers even after she’d moved away. One of her old guitars still leant against the chest of drawers – she’d left it here, partly because she had a new one she’d taken to London with her, and also so that she could use it when she was staying with her parents. You never knew when a song would stroll into your head and you’d need to strum a few chords.

She picked it up now, sat on the bed as she had done so often when she was a girl, head slightly to one side to listen more acutely, automatically starting to retune. That was better. She put the guitar to one side and lifted her saxophone from its case. It had been a mission bringing it with her on the train, but she couldn’t leave it behind. It was the first thing she’d rescue from a fire, something she’d always assumed necessary to her existence – like a third arm. Could it be that way again? She’d let her practice lapse since James, since living in London, since not having a regular band to play with. But maybe she could get together again with the guys from the band here in Pridehaven? Play again at the Jazz Café. Why not?

Ruby touched the shiny keys and the sax seemed to shimmer a lazy response. When she’d first started playing, she could barely hold it. The only sound that emerged when she blew was a kind of desperate squeak. ‘Is there a mouse in the house?’ her father would enquire, raising an eyebrow. Now though … It was her blue fire.

A random line came into her head and she scribbled it in the notebook on the bedside table. Her mother had been a happy person, hadn’t she? But she too had loved jazz and the blues. She’d listen to her old albums and CDs while she was cooking, cleaning, painting, whatever. And the sad songs were always her favourites. ‘The Nearness of You’ … Ruby sighed. She missed her mother. She missed them both. She ached for them. For a hug. To hear her father’s laughter. Her mother’s voice.

Tenderly, she replaced the sax in its case. ‘Wish you touched me like that,’ James had said once. Yes, but the saxophone never asked for too much in return. It was responsive too. It echoed every breath, every feeling, every mood that Ruby poured into it. Faithfully.

‘Are you jealous?’ she had teased. That was in the early days of their relationship. Before they stopped teasing and before she stopped playing.

‘Of course I am,’ he’d laughed. ‘It gets so close to you. When you play that thing, you go off somewhere without me. You’re transported.’

It was true. The saxophone had a way of hitting a spot deep inside. It made her think of a dark nightclub in the early hours. Did she want to go there? There was something inside her that wanted it, yes. Even while it hurt. To escape to another world, she thought. She closed her eyes and started seeing a new song climbing inside her head. Its pattern was rising and falling, she could hear the beat, feel its rhythm. It was coming alive. The lyric she’d written fell into place. Yes, she thought. To escape to another world … Sometimes it was all she wanted.

*

An hour or so later, Ruby went downstairs to make herself some hot chocolate. But she wasn’t tired enough for bed so she started going through the pile of papers that Mel had unearthed in her parents’ bureau. Letters from banks and utility companies. Letters about mortgages and interest rates and council tax. They were ancient; surely they could all be thrown away? She opened a wrinkled cardboard folder. Medical certificates. And her own vaccination record – very much out of date. She spotted a letter from her old family doctor and quickly began to scan its contents. There could be something important tucked away in this lot. Neither of her parents were the most organised people in the world.

But hang on … She refocused on the print. What was that? She sat up straighter, blinked, read it again. Following our consultations and tests. This is to confirm our diagnosis of unexplained infertility … Infertility? Should you wish to pursue the option of the fertility treatment discussed, please telephone the surgery to arrange for your first appointment. What on earth? Ruby checked the date on the letter. It was dated seven months before her birth.

She read the letter again and then again. But it still said the same thing. Seven months before Ruby was born her parents had been told one or the other of them was infertile and unable to have children. Unexplained infertility. It didn’t make sense whichever way you looked at it. Because seven months later her mother had given birth to Ruby.

Ruby stared at the sweet peas in a vase on the table. Well, hadn’t she?

20 March 2012

Should she – shouldn’t she? Vivien had found herself thinking this more and more often lately – more often than she was happy with. It disturbed her equilibrium, poked its head into her peace of mind. It had been a long time. So. Should she or shouldn’t she tell the truth?

To distract herself, she frowned at the flowers she’d picked from her wild patch out back. A cutting of spiky acid-yellow forsythia, a few stems of soft-leafed sage still in bud, a single cream early rose. She rearranged them so that the sage