Read Online Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore - Free Book Online Page B

on the level. I don’t need to bury my egg sandwiches any more, I can simply hand them back to him.
    ‘I don’t like this.’
    And he’s free too. He can tell me what he really thought of his hunched wife and child, of the blank beach and the aeroplane that went away with its message thatstirred his senses and would never satisfy them. I don’t like this , he might say too, and with justification. He wanted something and he didn’t get it. He made himself safe by pretending to want nothing.
    Mr Damiano liked to fly with the pilot. He liked to hear the snap of the banner as the plane turned, and the noise it made as it flowed behind them like a sail. Maybe he once saw my face among all those upturned faces.
    He restored scarlet and gold horses for the merry-go-rounds. They were the size of beast a full-grown man could ride on. Their nostrils flared as the music began and they rose and fell, faster and faster, their silver stirrups glinting in the fairground lights. Each of them had a name, like a horse of flesh.
    They came from far places. Mr Damiano got word of them and they arrived after long journeys by strange, circuitous routes. A neat brown pair from Hungary, a single plumed horse from Vienna, a ruined nag from a German fair that needed paint and leather and metal and a new mane and tail of real horse-hair. Mr Damiano took the flotsam of a dozen carousels and prepared them to face the music again. Their saddles creaked, their bridles clinked, slowly they began to rise and fall against the dark-blue fairground night. They were made to take the weight of a full-grown man, and a woman too, the pair of them crushed together, gripping the pole, joined at breast and hip and thigh. When the ride was over and the couple stepped off they would stagger, and catch hold of each other again before they wandered, dazed, into the crowd.
    He hired jugglers and fire-eaters by the season. The clairvoyant had predicted the death of Kennedy, and inthe supper-tent roast pigs were sliced and served up with crackling on plates of bread.
    There were tumblers and a dance-band, tight-rope walkers, barrel-organs. There were clowns and conjurors and a man who could free himself when bound with chains at the bottom of a dull-green glass tank. There was a girl who had trained a poodle to pick out words from an alphabet board, at her direction. There were men in rags who magicked them into tail-coats, and a woman who could hang by her teeth from a rope suspended thirty feet above the crowd. Behind the hall of mirrors a mind-reader practised, and one year a real mermaid told fortunes.
    ‘A dugong,’ said Mr Damiano.
    ‘What made you go into hotels?’ I asked Mr Damiano when he interviewed me. He was telling me about the bears that still dance in Russia, and I didn’t say that I had seen them. He was looking at me too closely. I thought he would see the cracks in my smooth face.
    ‘How old are you?’ he asked back.
    ‘Thirty-three.’
    ‘Have you children?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘A husband?’
    ‘No.’
    Mr Damiano looked at me. His back was to the window and his face was hard to read. His big shoulders rested peacefully inside the most beautiful suit I had ever seen. The room was pale and still, lit only by a jar of tulips. In the outer offices there were telephones and computers. In here, nothing.
    ‘They are similar businesses,’ Mr Damiano answered me. ‘A man who succeeds in the fairground business will do well in hotels if he puts his mind to it. People do not visit my hotels to sleep and to be fed. They visit them to discover that I have already found out what will give them the greatest pleasure. If you want the job, it is as simple as that. That’s all we are trying to do.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want it.’
    He looked at me closely to check that it was true, and then he nodded.

11
    Moscow
    Adam and I first took Ruby to Moscow when she was two years old. By then Joe had a Russian girlfriend called Olya. There’d be no problem