Chapter 48 Ruby
Ruby
I was genuinely sad when Dad died. He was a good man.
He had always done the right thing, as far as he knew.
Despite our estrangement, I could see that he tried to do his best under the circumstances.
I had been too harsh on him. He had so often begged me to come home for a visit.
I should have gone to the funeral, but I was terrified.
Mom went over and, now that Dad was out of the picture, I was afraid she might say something.
He had the most to lose materially, if the truth were ever to come out.
But now he was gone, she could sink us both if she wanted to.
Before Mom left, I begged her to keep our secret. She said it hadn’t crossed her mind; she was too grief-stricken. She accused me of being cold and calculating, and maybe I was, but I was doing it for my daughter.
The biggest shock came about when Dad’s will went through probate.
I had always assumed that I would inherit at least two million dollars.
Two years previously, we had moved into a beautiful old red-brick detached home in Ranelagh, closer to the city.
Ranelagh was quiet but had full access to all the nice restaurants and public transport and was close to the private school I wanted for Lucy.
Jack had been against the move. He hadn’t seen the need for a three-million-euro four-bedroom house when we had one child, and he didn’t want to be saddled with a huge mortgage in his early forties.
The Round Table had come to an end after seven series.
He was still getting good film and TV roles in limited series, but they were becoming further apart.
It was a year since he’d done a prestige role, and his income was never guaranteed.
In those years, it was very difficult to get a mortgage.
I told Jack to flirt with the mortgage adviser.
He didn’t think I was serious, but he didn’t realize how much I wanted this house.
When I grew up in Boston, we had a big house with a huge lawn front and back, and a double garage.
The garden of this new house was beautiful, the kitchen was state of the art, with a separate utility room, and it had a large dining room.
‘We’ll never use it,’ Jack had said. The mortgage adviser was an avid fan of The Round Table and was star-struck.
I suspect she worked very hard to get us mortgage approval.
When we moved in, I had dinner parties once a month for the first six months to prove Jack wrong about the dining room.
But he turned out to be right. We weren’t dinner-party people – sober alcoholics rarely are.
It was too formal for lunch. The circular table in the kitchen seated eight at a squeeze, and that’s where we ended up entertaining lunch parties on a smaller scale.
After a year, the only person who went into the dining room was the cleaner to polish the twelve-seater dining table and the candelabra.
I had never worried about taking on a huge mortgage because of Dad, and then I got the shock of my life after he died and I discovered he had only left me $50k in his will.
I called Erin and she was snippy with me on the phone: ‘What did you expect? He and Mom already bought you a house. You didn’t visit him.
You never met Kathy. You didn’t even come to his funeral. ’
I realized with a sinking feeling that paying this mortgage would be a challenge.
The Academy was breaking even, but Jack’s roles were not as big as they used to be.
He was now represented by CAA in Los Angeles, but he was getting less work than he used to.
He was not ageing as well as some of his peers.
He never wanted to be away from home for long, but I pushed him to take the roles that meant he might be away for five months or more.
‘You wanted this big house, and now, to pay for it, I can’t be in it.
I miss Lucy,’ he said down the line from Tunisia.
‘Just Lucy?’ I was hurt.
‘Aw, you know what I mean, Rubes. I miss you too, of course I do, but she’s growing up and I’m not there to see it.’
Lucy had turned twelve the summer before Dad died.
She had only met him a handful of times, but now she started asking questions about dads, my dad and her birth dad.
She had picked up everything she needed to know about the facts of life long before we sat her down, aged nine.
At twelve, she was aware of the difference between vanilla sex and kinky sex.
I’d had no idea at that age about any sex, except that it was how you made babies.
Jack was home at that time. She asked why, if Granny and Grandad loved each other, had they divorced?
Was it because they didn’t want to have sex any more?
Jack laughed until I reminded him privately of the ‘real’ reason why my parents had divorced.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I forgot.’
I never forgot. It was like having a constant zit. I could see the lie in the mirror every day.
A week later, Lucy asked about her real dad. ‘I think it’s time to tell me the truth, Mum, who is he?’ We were alone in the house.
‘Don’t you love Jack?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, I do, but it’s my right to know. On my birth certificate, it’s blank where it should say his name.’
‘Oh, Lulu, it’s complicated. You know I’m an alcoholic, right? Around the time I got pregnant, I had sex with a lot of people. I couldn’t be sure which one was your dad.’
‘Like a gang bang?’ she asked.