Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore

while he watched Ruby.
    What if one of the nurses was a fake, biding her time until I slept and she could take my baby from her cot like a pea from a pod? I was in a room on my own. No one would see. Even if I woke up maybe I wouldn’t havethe strength to fight her, and no one would hear if I called. I wished myself in a ward with other women, with only a floral curtain between us. We could watch out for each other and sleep in turns. I knew they would be thinking of the stolen baby, as I was.
    My mother put me in a shoebox and we were parted for ever. I knew that the time that surrounded birth was dangerous. I wouldn’t be safe until Ruby knew who she was, and how to get back to me if we were ever parted. And even then –
    ‘My mother sent you this,’ said Joe, giving me a rose-sprinkled parcel. I opened it. It had a dry floral scent, like pot-pourri. There was a little cardigan, chick yellow and meltingly soft, with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons.
    Who would have believed that Iris’s red, raw fingers could make something like this? But I felt the old panicky flash of guilt towards her.
    ‘She thought yellow would be right, whatever,’ said Joe. ‘If you had a boy or a girl.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But if you don’t like it, put it in a drawer. The baby doesn’t have to wear it.’
    ‘I do like it. It’s beautiful.’
    I stroked the wool. The texture was as tough and fine as cobweb, and the colour so true it looked as if it would come off on my fingers. I imagined myself dressing Ruby in it.
    ‘I’ll write to Iris,’ I said. ‘I’ll send her a photo of Ruby wearing the cardigan.’
    ‘She’d like that.’ Joe smoothed and folded the wrapping paper, looking down. Then he smiled at me. ‘I’m going away soon, Rebecca.’
    ‘But you’ve been away. You’ve only been back a few months.’
    ‘I’m going to Moscow,’ said Joe. ‘I’m researching my next book.’
    My eyes filled with tears. It was the sight of that cardigan, which Iris had made for a different baby, a baby that would never be born.
    ‘You’re always going to Moscow.’
    ‘I need to stay there for a while. There’s a lot of stuff I can only do out there.’
    There was Moscow, thick with history. I’d never seen it but I imagined Joe there, stamping his feet on the packed snow, talking Russian and buying chicken feet from a stall off one of the main streets. It was Joe who had told me about an old woman counting out her coins to buy two hundred grams of chicken feet. She was short of fifty kopeks and he’d offered her coins but she had looked at him with suspicion and had refused to take them.
    Here was Ruby, washed up on the shore of my body and knowing no better. It was only eight hours since I’d turned into a mother, but I would never be good enough for her.
    ‘I’m afraid I won’t know what to do with her,’ I said.
    ‘Of course you’ll know,’ said Joe.
    He touched my hand. We were two separate people, touching. My concerns were not his and we were not a family any more. It was right and natural and only what I could expect, but I wanted more. I was greedy and selfish, wanting him to feel for me what it wasn’t good for him to feel. I was a glutton for intimacy.
    ‘Why do you think you won’t know?’ asked Joe.
    ‘Because I can’t remember what anyone did for me. I can’t remember my childhood at all.’
    ‘Look at her,’ said Joe. Ruby was wrapped in sleep, her closed eyes a thin, sealed line. Her hospital nightgown had slipped off one shoulder, and her skin was mottled, purple and pink.
    ‘She’s got furry shoulders,’ I said. Suddenly I couldn’t bear her to be in that plastic cot any longer. I lifted her awkwardly and the hospital blanket fell off so that her frail purplish legs dangled naked. She was hot. I laid her beside me and she moved in close, burrowing her way back towards the smell of my skin and the flesh she’d lived in all her life until eight hours ago. One of her eyes opened. I’d been told