Chapter 37 Ruby
Ruby
There were three months between audition and shooting, and Jack was working hard at the beard and working out in the gym.
He was on the point of closing the Academy, but I persuaded him not to.
He’d only be away for four months and if the show’s producers’ reputation was as good as its budget and it became a hit, his name might attract more students.
It was a long time since he’d been a presence on TV.
When I first met him, people in AA rooms used to say, ‘Isn’t that Jack Brady?
’ or passers-by would nudge each other as he walked down the street, but it was ages since that had happened.
He had faded from the public consciousness.
I could keep the Academy ticking over for him while he was gone.
Lucy was in a kindergarten, and I knew the business well enough by now to handle it.
It would take some juggling, but I could do it.
There was no question of him not taking the job.
He couldn’t afford not to, but he had worries about being away in a new environment, being around booze and inevitably cocaine, but he talked to his AA friends, and I wasn’t worried about him at all.
I knew he could do this sober. It was too important, and he knew it too.
He had a plan for every eventuality: he was going to be honest with them all about his recovery, and there was a gym between the film studio and his apartment accommodation that he could escape to when the cast and crew headed for the bar.
He also took a ton of books with him and had made contact with AA members in Belfast.
Jack was gone for the whole summer and I missed him.
He would call from time to time and tell me about the bust-ups on set, the unexpected egos of bit-part actors.
Lucy would constantly ask when he was coming home, but she chattered away to him on the phone too and whatever he said made her giggle.
And then the calls petered out and I reckoned he was too busy, and besides, it wasn’t as if we were a couple in a relationship.
I never even thought about him that way until I got a five-word text from him.
Hey Rubes, I’ve met someone.
I felt my heart lurch. Well, maybe not my heart, but there was a sudden pain in my stomach as if someone had punched me. He must have seen that I’d read the message, but my feelings were too complicated to allow me to respond. I decided to reply like a male friend would.
Is she hot? What’s her name?
Her name was Isobel Lucas, and I didn’t have to google her.
She was English, the leading lady in The Round Table, and had been Oscar nominated when she was a child.
She’d been a Bond girl ten years ago. Maybe not A-list now but definitely B.
I googled her anyway. She was thirty-four, divorced but rumoured to be dating one of the lesser known Baldwins.
I dug further and found a Facebook fan page that showed her posing at beautiful locations, wearing couture clothing.
On YouTube, I was able to see scenes from her films and TV series. She was way out of Jack’s league.
I called Jack and quizzed him. He was besotted, and he didn’t seem to understand that she existed in a different realm to us, though I kept those thoughts to myself.
He told me they’d met first on the set but later he had spotted her at an AA meeting, and they felt a spark.
I hadn’t even known that I loved Jack before this gilded pixie arrived on the scene, but now I knew. I wanted Jack badly.
I also felt a spark of something that I hadn’t felt for ten years. It was the way I’d felt that day when Erin had gone to New York with Mom. She had what I wanted. Now Isobel did.
Jack and Isobel had a weekend off and he wanted to bring her to Dublin, to stay in the Merrion Hotel.
I guessed he was ashamed to bring her to our humble home.
I played along, with Delighted for you, dying to meet her.
I reminded myself that I was a trained actress.
I was disappointed that he was going to spend much of the money he should have been putting towards the Academy on a five-star hotel for the weekend, but I went ahead and even made the booking for him.
He wanted me to meet her. He wanted my approval. Why?
I insisted that he bring her out to the house.
Jack didn’t object at all, and I realized that it was I who felt the shame of living in a mid-terrace former council house.
He didn’t want to stay here with his new girlfriend in a single bed, with me and a toddler floating around.
Why wouldn’t he want to impress her with a fancy hotel?
He had been contributing a lot more to the house since he’d taken this role.
Lump sums were deposited in my bank account even though I had never asked for them. But he wanted to pay his way.
When she arrived, without entourage or limo or make-up, I was taken aback.
Her dark hair was loosely scraped back into a ponytail.
Without the flashbulbs, it was far less glossy.
She looked nothing like the shiny person on Google or IMDb.
She was wearing a pair of boot-cut jeans and an authentic Aran sweater beloved of tourists, but also practical for an Irish summer.
She was no less beautiful, perhaps more so.
I had piled on the make-up and had a blow-dry that morning in a salon.
Lucy went straight for Jack, putting her hands up, demanding to be lifted. Jack let go of Isobel’s hand.
‘Isobel, meet Lucy and her mum, Ruby.’
She put out her hand and said, ‘All right,’ in a Cockney accent.
I’d watched her in Gosford Park the night before and the crystal tones of her accent in that were nowhere to be heard.
‘Your house is great,’ she said, and I could tell she was being kind, but I also felt that she did not come from money and probably grew up in a house not too dissimilar to this.
‘Hi, you’re welcome,’ I said and stood back from the door to let them pass into the open-plan kitchen. She was slim and at least six inches taller than me. Lucy reached out her sticky hands to grab one of Isobel’s loose strings of hair.
‘Lulu, no.’ I was firm, but too late.
Jack said, ‘Lucy, we don’t hurt other people, do we?’ and he said it in a stern voice that Lucy wasn’t used to. I don’t care that he was trying to impress Isobel, this wasn’t the Jack I knew. Lucy’s lip trembled and I lifted her from him while she sobbed.
‘It’s okay, Lulu. We know you didn’t mean to hurt Isobel.’
‘The poor little thing, I’m sure she didn’t mean no harm,’ said Isobel, making herself comfortable on one of the island stools.
I smiled sweetly. ‘It’s fine, isn’t it, Lucy?
’ I said, and I nuzzled her neck until she giggled.
Jack was uneasy. By trying to protect his girlfriend from my marauding three-year-old, he had given the impression that he could be overly strict with children.
He desperately tried to remedy the situation by getting down on all fours and snuffling around my child like a dog. It was not a good look.
I offered Isobel some peppermint tea and Jack said he’d have a regular tea.
We made small talk for an hour. She had grown up in a tower block in Brixton.
From an early age, she sang and danced, first at her primary school and then later at stage school, as her mom cleaned houses to save the money to pay for her talented little girl while her dad worked as a Tube driver.
She loved musicals and we bonded over that for a while, and then she left with Jack.
Later, Jack called me. It was about 9 p.m. ‘I need to stay the night. Can I come home?’
‘Of course. Have you had an argument with Isobel? We thought she was lovely.’
‘I can’t … I need to be home, okay?’ There was desperation in his voice.
When he arrived, he told me that as soon as they got back to the hotel, while he went to buy a pair of shoes, Isobel had gone straight to the bar.
He’d found her flat-out drunk on the bed when he got back.
Jack tried to talk to her, but she wasn’t making sense.
She had said she’d been four years sober but now he wasn’t sure if that was true. He couldn’t stay with her.
A few hours earlier, I had added a miniature bottle of vodka to Isobel’s pot of peppermint tea and warned her that the kick she might taste was lemongrass.
I knew how easy it was to go back to drinking, because I had, several times.
I was crafty about it. Waited until Jack was out for the day and Lucy was in kindergarten before I started.
I would drink myself into a stupor and fall asleep, and then, on waking, I’d shower and change, eat a pack of Polo mints and an orange.
The first time it happened was an accident.
I had called to Deirdre’s house to collect Lucy from a play date, and Deirdre had invited me in to join a group of parents swilling wine.
I accepted a soda, and someone offered me some salmon paste on toast. I tried it and it certainly tasted great.
And on the way home, an hour later, I desperately wanted a drink.
I stopped at an off-licence and bought a half-bottle of vodka.
The rest of the day went to hell. I can’t remember where Jack was, but he wasn’t around that night.
I know Lucy kept trying to wake me up, saying she was hungry.
I let her have a box of dry cornflakes. When I woke on my bed about 10 p.m. I was horrified and had no clue what had driven me to drink, until Deirdre called me the next day to see if I was okay.
After I left, Deirdre’s sister, who had made the salmon paste, had boasted that the secret ingredient was vodka.
Deirdre knew I was in recovery. I was furious but too ashamed to admit what had happened afterwards.
I had other episodes that were planned. Sometimes, life felt hard, and I knew I needed a little alcoholic release.
I didn’t consider these to be relapses, as they only lasted a day, and I could almost schedule them around Lucy and Jack’s comings and goings.
As far as Jack was concerned, I sometimes suffered from severe migraines, and if it was the weekend he’d be only too glad to take Lucy out for the day.
They didn’t affect my work or my relationships, though they sapped my energy, like a bad migraine might.
It was a different kind of drinking than before, planned and controlled, but I still felt horrible afterwards.
Isobel would never suspect the tea. Jack had told her it was a sober house. We knew about each other’s sobriety. Jack had talked me up as if I was some kind of guardian angel who’d been able to put a roof over his head.
When he came out to the house that night, he was distraught. I feigned upset too, on his behalf. ‘What was she thinking?’ I said. ‘She knows you’re in recovery. Maybe she’s one of those Hollywood types. You can’t tell whether they’re acting or not.’ My own performance was worthy of an Oscar.
Poor Isobel went on a bender that weekend.
Jack had to drive her back to Belfast on the Sunday night.
She ranted and raved and blamed him for leaving her on her own in the hotel.
She had a bottle of gin in her bag, and Jack had to throw it out of the car window on the motorway.
He called the Second Assistant Director when he got back to Belfast. I don’t exactly know the sequence of events, but Isobel Lucas was written out of the show.
She was ‘taking the rest of the year off’ said the gossip columns ‘because of a recurring throat infection’.
Everyone, certainly everyone in the business, knew that was code for ‘problematic’.
I will accept the blame for her slip, but not her relapse, although that might have been caused by Jack breaking up with her and then losing her job.
Maybe it was all my fault, but she wasn’t right for Jack.
Later, he told me that she had a mansion in Essex, drove a Range Rover and kept ponies.
They didn’t have anything in common. Besides, she was an obstacle and she was in my way.