* * *
If there was one room Max hated more than any other in his mother’s house, it was the dining room. Most people were left speechless when they walked inside for the first time, at least for a few moments, then the exclaiming would begin.
Apparently, his great-grandfather had had a fondness for whimsy, and had commissioned an artist to paint the whole room so it resembled a ruined castle in a shady forest glade. Creepers and vines twined round the doorway and round the fireplace. Low down there were painted stone blocks, making the tumbledown walls, and above, tree trunks and leaves, giving glimpses of rolling fields beyond. It even carried on up onto the ceiling, where larks peered down and a pale sun shone directly above the dining table. It was all just one big lie.
The table only filled a fraction of the vast space, even though it seated twelve. Max sat down at one of the three places laid at one end and scowled as his mother sat at the head and Ruby sat opposite him. He hadn’t liked being manoeuvred into this whole arrangement and he wasn’t going to pretend he liked it any more than he was going to pretend they were sitting in a real forest glade enjoying the dappled sunshine. He was just going to eat and get out of here. The plans he’d left on the desk only a few minutes ago were already calling to him.
‘My family were successful merchants here in Venice for five hundred years,’ his mother told Ruby as they tucked into their main course. ‘But now I live more simply and rent the other parts of the house out.’
Max saw Ruby’s eyes widen at the word ‘simply’. As always, his mother had no grip on reality, and no awareness of how other people carried on their lives. He tuned the conversation out. His mother was busy regaling Ruby with stories from the annals of their family history, both triumphant and tragic. He’d heard them a thousand times, anyway, and with each telling the details drifted further and further from the truth.
Then his mother ran out of steam and turned her attention to their guest. Well, not guest...employee. But it was hard to think of Ruby that way as she listened to his mother with rapt attention, eyes bright, laughter ready.
‘So, tell me, Ruby, why did you decide to become a nanny?’
Ruby shot a look in his direction before answering. ‘Your son offered me a job and I took it.’
Fina absorbed that information for a moment. ‘You didn’t want to be a nanny before that?’
Ruby shook her head.
‘Then what were you?’
Max sat up a little straighter. He hadn’t thought to ask her that during their ‘interview’. Maybe he should have. And maybe Ruby was annoyingly right about details being important on occasion.
Ruby smiled back at his mother. ‘Oh, I’ve been lots of things since I left university.’
He leaned forward and put his fork down. ‘What course did you take?’
‘Media Studies.’
Max frowned. ‘But you don’t want to work in that field, despite having the qualification?’
She pulled a face. ‘I didn’t graduate. It was my father’s idea to go.’ She shook her head. ‘But it really wasn’t me.’
His mother shot her a sympathetic look. ‘Not everyone works out the right path first time.’
Max snorted. If these dinners had been his mother’s plan to soften him up, it was backfiring on her. Every other word she uttered just reminded him of how she’d selfishly betrayed the whole family. She might not have been a Martin by birth, but she’d married into the institution, and if there was one rule the family lived by it was this: loyalty above all else.
If his mother had heard the snort, she ignored it. ‘You must have had some interesting jobs,’ she said to Ruby, smiling.
Ruby smiled back. ‘Oh, I have, and it’s been great. I’ve made jewellery and I worked in a vineyard.’
‘In France?’ Fina asked.
Ruby shook her head. ‘No, in Australia. I did that the year after I left university. And then I just sort of travelled and worked my way back home again. I tended bar in Singapore, worked on a kibbutz in Israel. I did a stint in a PR firm, I joined an avant-garde performance company—that was too wacky, even for me—and I’ve also busked to earn a crust.’
His mother’s eyebrows were practically in her hairline. ‘You play an instrument?’ she asked, taking the only salvageable thing from that list.
Ruby gave her a hopeful smile. ‘I can manage a harmonica and a bit of tap dancing.’
Lord, help them all! And this was who he’d thought was exactly what he needed? No wonder his sensible plan was falling to pieces.
‘And will you stay being a nanny after this? Or is it on to the next thing?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I know this sounds stupid, but I see the way my father loves his work, and I want to find something that makes me feel like that.’
His mother leaned forward. ‘What does your father do?’
Ruby froze, as if she realised she’d said something she shouldn’t. She looked up at them. ‘Oh, he makes nature programmes.’
‘What? Like Patrick Lange?’ his mother exclaimed, clapping her hands. ‘I loved his series on lemurs! It was fascinating.’
‘Something like that,’ Ruby mumbled.
Now it was Max’s turn to freeze. Lange?
‘Your father’s Patrick Lange?’ he asked, hardly able to keep the surprise from his voice. The man seemed such a steady kind of guy. Max could hardly believe he had a daughter like Ruby.
She nodded and returned to eating her pasta.
‘How marvellous,’ his mother gushed and then the smile disappeared from her face. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry about your mother, Ruby. It was such a tragedy. She was such a wonderful woman.’
Ruby kept her head down and nodded.
Max racked his brains. There had been a news story... Oh, maybe fifteen years ago? That was it. Martha and Patrick Lange had always presented their nature documentaries together until she’d contracted some tropical disease in a remote location while filming. She’d reassured everyone she was fine, that it was just a touch of flu, and had carried on, reluctant to abandon the trip. By the time they’d realised what it was, and that she’d needed urgent treatment, it had been too late. She’d died in an African hospital a week later.
Max watched Ruby push her pasta around her plate. He knew what it was like to lose a parent, and it had been bad enough in his early thirties. Ruby could have only been...what? Nine or ten?
‘Anyway,’ Ruby suddenly said, lifting her head and smiling brightly. ‘I’d like to find my perfect fit. My niche.’
His mother, who had finished her meal, put her knife and fork on her plate and nodded. ‘There’s no sense in doing something if your heart isn’t in it.’
There she went again. He’d just about forgotten about being angry with her for a moment, distracted by Ruby’s sad story, but she had to dig herself another hole, didn’t she? It just proved she would never change.
His mother must have noticed the expression on his face, because she stopped smiling at Ruby and sent him a pleading look. He carried on eating his pasta. She tried to smile, even though her eyes glistened in the light from the chandelier.
‘Well, maybe being a nanny will be your niche. You’re a natural with Sofia.’
‘Thank you, Fina.’ Ruby smiled, properly this time, and the gloom of her previous expression was chased away. How did she do that? How did she just let it all float away like that, find the joy in life again?
‘Massimo wanted to be an architect since he’d