The Triple Goddess (143 page)

For such as Ruby, whose discernment was a byword in good society, to take up arms against so hitherto unimpeachable an authority as
The Lady Bird
would come as a major disappointment to its readers. Like her, they’d been raised accustomed to hearing their parents assuring friends in the course of conversation, if there were ever some doubt on a point of fact, ‘I can assure you it’s true, for I read it in the
Lady Bird
.’ And there would be nothing more to say on the matter.

The campaign that Ruby would launch against
The Lady Bird
would cause subscriptions to fall off so badly that the magazine might even find itself in danger of going out of business.

Ruby’s determination to air her grievance in public was short-lived. Were she to write such a letter, she realized, she’d be revealed to all and sundry as a woman who was so vain and shallow, that she was prepared to experiment with untested and unproven methods of cosmetic alteration; to falsify her appearance, and endeavour to render herself by artificial means more beautiful than she was. She’d never be able to show her face, let alone her back, again. She might as well have Nethersole give all her shoes to the gardener to add to the bonfire, and what a mighty conflagration that would be.

But in a tragic irony, if she said nothing, and didn’t attend Lady Fitzlady’s garden party, people would nod, and comment, ‘I knew it when I saw her the other day, traipsing around town buying all those bizarre things and gallons of gin. Ruby’s fallen on hard times, make no mistake, and is too embarrassed to come.’ Even if she wrote to tell Lady Fitzlady that she was indisposed, nobody would believe her; everyone knew that Ruby wouldn’t miss this party for the world, even if she’d fallen downstairs and broken all her legs and had to be carried there on a stretcher.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Ruby decided that she must have made a mistake in following the directions of the treatment. Either that, or the delicatessen had kept the pheasant eggs out after their sell-by date, which wouldn’t surprise her, given that the owner was a Russian-speaking Latvian.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, she thought. Now that there were only a few days remaining before Lady Fitzlady’s garden party, drastic action was called for.

So the next morning, just as the shops were opening, Ruby put on a housecoat and her second darkest pair of sunglasses, the ones she’d got for a holiday in Portugal. And because footwear is the first thing to give one away, when Nethersole was elsewhere she took out a pair of her oldest pumps and trod on them until they bore no resemblance to the designer shoes that they were. Doing this was as painful as having someone stamp on all her corns and bunions at once, but she had no choice.

“There,” said Ruby to herself; “the real me wouldn’t be seen dead in these.” Then it struck her that, were she rumbled again it would be taken as conclusive evidence of how down at heel she was. “Can’t be helped,” she grimaced, squeezing into the broken pumps. But how shoddy they looked, and how awful it would be to have to wear them all the time! She was living a nightmare.

In town she bought more clotted cream...which she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to eat again on a scone…which would be a pity, though beneficial to her diet...and the detested goats’ milk from the malodorous yokel down the lane, who had the temerity to ask if she’d like to place a regular order; and everything else that was on the list.

When she went into Wine Rack to buy the sloe gin, the man shook his head in amazement. “That must have been some party,” he said; “nobody could drink that much on their own. Or could they...Ruby?” The way he leered at her, leaning across the counter, made her want to crack one of the bottles over his skull, and she would have done so if she could have spared it.

“You’re in luck,” said the man, “there are just three bottles left. Must be the ‘in’ drink these days. Don’t understand it myself, I tried it and it tastes filthy. Now crème de menthe, there’s a drink. Are you sure you wouldn’t fancy some nice crème de menthe? There’s nothing like it to cheer you up when you’re down, and make you feel...newly minted. Heh heh.”

Receiving no reply, he wrapped the bottles, and was about to put them in a plastic carrier with the off-licence’s name on it, when Ruby passed over the old straw bucket bag she’d brought with her. As the man laid them inside, he said that he must have misfiled her account, and would she mind paying in cash?.

Ruby bit her tongue and handed over the money, took back her bag, and scuttled round the corner to where her chauffeur, Bentley, was waiting in an alley with the Rolls-Royce’s engine running. She couldn’t endure another taxi, and had thrown caution to the winds, so desperate was she to get home as quickly as possible.

’

Chapter Twenty

‘

This time, when Ruby had mixed everything up in the bath and stirred it for two hours, she decided to be reckless. To heck with the rubber gloves and spatula and mask: she got into the iron tub, which was now bare of enamel, sloshed the cream all over herself and rubbed it in with her feet. That Ruby’s legs were double-jointed, so that she could manage this, was known only to her doctor, who had been informed by his patient that Ruby would take steps to have him struck off the medical register if he told anyone. There were a lot of doctors in this town.

She did everything except drink it; though she did take several lengthy pulls of the sloe gin, which she agreed with the off-licence man tasted disgusting.

Ruby lay in the tub for the rest of the day, and all night too, unable to sleep for fear that she would drown in the liquid, or suffer the same fate as the two rubber ducks, which had melted, that she used to play with in the bath. If the lotion had such an effect on them, she thought, surely it could handle a bunch of stupid spots.

In the morning when it was light, it was a while before Ruby dared to get out of the bath and look at herself in the cracked mirror. And when she did...oh, calamity of calamities! Instead of ten spots there were now—she counted and counted again—TWENTY-TWO. Not two, not ten, not eleven or twelve, but twenty-two! What had she done to deserve such a thing? And the spots were now even blacker than the blacker they’d been the day before, and bigger than bigger, on a shell that was redder than redder.

It was an hour before Ruby stopped pacing up and down the bathroom, pausing to shudder in front of the glass. The only ladybirds she knew of with twenty-two spots were her peasant country cousins, who farmed aphids to produce the juices that went into such drinks as Aphidia. Ruby’s cousins didn’t wear even broken-down pumps: the only pumps in their lives were the ones they used to draw water. They walked around in bare feet by choice, and thought a chiropodist was someone who taught martial arts.

Ruby sobbed and sighed and hyperventilated, and wished she hadn’t emptied all the smelling salts into the useless mixture. So discomposed was she that on the spot, or spots, she resolved to become a nun; it was clear that she’d been sent a message from Above, that she should retreat from the world and embark upon a life of prayer and contemplation.

“Hallelujah,” said Ruby fervently; “Hallelujah!” Not liking the sound of the word, she rescinded her decision to enter a nunnery.

Ruby pulled herself together. She couldn’t stay in the bathroom another day, it was too uncomfortable, and she was hungry. No, she would have to come up with some means of saving her reputation. She couldn’t slight Lady Fitzlady by not attending her party, for her rudeness would be the talk of the town even more than her shopping habits.

But neither could she show up with twenty-two spots on her shell, for the sight of them—the mark of the peasant class—would be seized upon as the obvious explanation for her recent eccentric behaviour. People would conclude, not without justification, that Ruby was nothing more than a common farm girl born of a family of aphid breeders, with her roots in clay rather than loam.

At the party she would be as popular as a skunk at a wedding, and might as well arrive with the goats’ milk yokel on her arm.

Then inspiration struck. She must make a fashion statement of a different kind to that of removing her spots, something that would draw attention to herself whilst concealing the unfortunate fact of her appearance.

Something like...wearing a winter coat.

That was the ticket! In a dramatic reversal of fortune, instead of humiliating herself, everyone would turn unfashionably green with envy as Ruby held her feelers high and announced that…why, didn’t they know?...the next big thing, so big that even the
Lady Bird
hadn’t yet got hold of it, was going to be the wearing of coats in summer. Why, in the Tuileries gardens behind the Louvre, where
le tout Paris
goes to see and be seen, everyone had been parading around in furs for weeks, and the temperature and humidity there were in the high nineties.

It was the perfect idea. Ruby’s peers would be mightily impressed with how
au courant
she was with the fashion trends in Europe. They would look at her with renewed respect, and wish that they had time to fly away home; not because their houses were on fire, as in the nursery rhyme, but to shake the mothballs out of their winter coats.

That business about goats’ milk and clotted cream would be forgotten, as the other guests bemoaned not having paid more attention to how people were dressing in Europe, and fulminated at
The Lady Bird
for being behind the times. They would never trust it again; and what a fine revenge that would be for Ruby against the magazine, when they all cancelled their subscriptions and it went bankrupt.

Ruby’s thoughts were interrupted as she heard Audrey and Nethersole talking outside the bathroom door. Something must be wrong, Audrey was saying: she’d been knocking and knocking and there was no response, and Ruby wasn’t in her bedroom. Nethersole, after trying the handle and finding that it was locked, said that maybe he should try to pick the lock or force the door.

Before he could do either, Ruby put on her dressing gown, to conceal her interesting condition, unlocked the door, and confronted the pair with a haughty air.

“All right you two,” she said; “less noise and more action. Audrey, prepare my breakfast
tout de suite
; I’ll take it in my room. And Nethersole, don’t just stand there with your mouth open, there are no flies to catch in here or there better not be. Lady Fitzlady’s garden party is on Saturday, and you must get my furs out of storage. I’m going to wear the full-length mink coat, with the matching fur hat and the fur muff. And call up the fur-lined boots on the system; they’re number ninety-three, if I’m not mistaken, and I’m not.”

Nethersole gaped wider. “The fur coat, ma’am? And the fur hat and the fur muff, and the fur-lined boots?”

“‘Is there an echo in the room?’”, said Ruby, quoting Mrs Gradgrind in
Hard Times.
”Jump to it, man, or I’ll dock your wages. And be sure to check for moth-holes.”

“But fur, ma’am? It’s the middle of summer. You’ll boil in your shell like a lobster.”

“Thank you, Nethersole,” said Ruby, “but now is not the time for flattery. The mink it shall be with all the trimmings; and look out my largest and darkest pair of sunglasses, the ones I got for the beach on Bali.”

“Beachwear, ma’am?” said Nethersole, “for a garden party?”

“I don’t employ you for the acuteness of your hearing, Nethersole; but I will shortly be deaf to your pleas that I retain your services, such as they are. There are a lot of footmen in this town. Chop-chop, both of you, or you’ll be for the chop yourselves.”

And so it was that Ruby donned her furry garments, and her boots, and Bali sunglasses, on a hot summer’s day, and went to Lady Fitzlady’s garden party brimming with the self-confidence for which she was known, ready to mingle with
la crème de la crème
and
brûler
them with her cleverness in stealing a march on them all.

But how extraordinary are the minds and ways of ladybirds!

When Ruby arrived promptly at the appointed time in her chauffeured Rolls-Royce, in which they passed through the grandly gated entrance and up the long gravelled drive to the forecourt of Lady Fitzlady’s historic and imposing residence—feeling faint from the heat despite having had the air-conditioning on full blast, and fanning herself faster than a hummingbird’s wings with a Chinese fan, and glugging iced Aphidia directly from a flask—and when Bentley had held the door open for her to debouch from the vehicle, and when she had walked up the circular steps to the left of the parapeted front terrace, and through the wrought-iron gate that led to the landscaped gardens at the rear...the debonair remarks that she had prepared about the Tuileries died on her Ruby lips.

She was
bouleversée
: all the lady ladybirds at Lady Fitzlady’s garden party were wearing fur coats!

A little earlier—Ruby had been fashionably, but not too fashionably, late—Lady Fitzlady, who, as her servants ushered the first to arrive of her guests round the house to the back terrace above the great lawn, had been waiting to greet them, was nowhere to be seen.

And instead of mingling and talking all at once, those arriving grabbed a cup of iced Aphidia with a sprig of mint in it, and a second cup if they could get it, from the trays being circulated by the waiters; and either beetled off in different directions into the shrubbery bordering the great lawn, where they could conceal themselves amongst the huge rhododendrons; or they hurried into the walled garden, or the parterre garden, or the rose garden, or the sunken garden, or the kitchen garden, or even the nursery and greenhouse and composting areas—anywhere that they might avoid running into each other.