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  Thanks to Dr. Jane those possibilities were even more real. A couple of years ago—urged by Ronnie—Ruby had undergone a series of scans and tests, only to be told by a gleeful Dr. Jane that she had most definitely not inherited her mother and Aunty Sylvia’s dodgy fallopian tubes.

  When the baby and children’s wear started to take off, even more good fortune came her way. Stella, one of her mother’s cousins—married to a filthy rich art dealer—heard about Ruby’s market stall on the family grapevine. She happened to be looking for a new venture to add to her business portfolio and offered to put up 90 percent of the money to open a mother and baby shop. She made it clear that her interest was purely financial and that she wanted no part in the day-to-day running of the business. That would be Ruby’s responsibility.

  Of course Ruby leaped at the offer and she and Stella had several meetings to discuss setting up the business. Stella was an elegant, rather haughty woman with a spectacularly taut face and a child substitute in the form of a yappy pooch named Blanche. Their first meeting took place over coffee at The Sanderson. The moment Stella spotted Ruby, she rose to her oyster suede heels, her wide mouth a barely upturned crimson gash. As Ruby shook her hand she was aware of Stella’s chilly gray eyes giving her the Sloane Street once-over.

  Ruby explained how she wanted to make the shop egalitarian with an ethnic twist—sort of Mothercare meets Body Shop. Ronnie had warned her daughter that Stella’s experience of ethnic didn’t extend beyond the best table at La Gavroche and that she balked at words like egalitarian in the same way that she balked when Harvey Nicks had the audacity to run out of demitasse sugar sticks. Ruby chose to ignore her mother and remained convinced until the moment she met Stella that she would be as thrilled by her vision as she was.

  Of course it wasn’t to be. Ruby’s vision left Stella distinctly underwhelmed. She dismissed it with a languid wave of her exquisitely manicured hand and explained that she had something far more grand in mind. She then outlined her own idea, which was to fill the shop with Flanders lace christening robes and monstrously expensive dry-clean-only baby clothes. She was convinced that trying to compete with a national mass-market corporation like Mothercare was ridiculous and that the only way they could make a go of the business was to go small and exclusive.

  By the end of that first meeting, Ruby had decided there would be no point pursuing a business relationship with Stella. They had a completely different image in mind for the business. On top of that, Stella was a snob and the kind of person who would want her own way all the time. The whole thing would end up a disaster.

  But as the days went by, Ruby couldn’t quite bring herself to phone Stella and tell her she didn’t want to go into partnership with her. The truth was that although she had a bit of capital, she didn’t have enough to take a lease on a shop, decorate it and fill it with stock. When she contacted her bank they agreed to lend her only a fraction of what she required because she didn’t have five years’ worth of accounts. (Ruby had only got around to taking on an accountant and keeping proper sets of accounts in the last two or three years.)

  It also occurred to her that Stella’s plan for the business did make financial sense. As for the woman’s none too appealing personality, Ruby decided that the way to handle her was to avoid conflict, go along with her and to slowly introduce her own ideas. It was a case of compromise or carry on with the market stall. In the end Ruby decided to compromise.

  The new business struggled for a few months. Mainly through snobbery and habit, women tended to stay loyal to the old established Chelsea and Kensington mother and baby shops. But gradually things picked up and since by now Stella and her husband had moved to New York where Stella was busy with other business projects, Ruby felt confident enough to introduce a few dream catchers here and there and the odd Peruvian hat with the long flaps at the sides, as well as the Guatemalan dresses and romper suits. They walked off the shelves.

  The day before Stella’s twice-yearly visits from across the pond, all ethnic items were secreted away in the stockroom. From time to time, Ruby considered telling her about her experiment and how successful it had been, but she knew this would mean having to face a huge amount of flak. Even if Stella could see that the ethnic merchandise was making the company money, it wouldn’t stop her getting livid with Ruby for going behind her back and demanding they be removed. She would insist that Ruby was alienating the rich and stylish Les Sprogs clientele and encouraging instead the namby-pamby-friends-of-the-ozone-layer brigade. She would go on to argue no doubt, that since the latter didn’t possess anything like the wealth of the typical Les Sprogs customers, the business would be in the hands of the receiver within six months. Ruby, loath to jeopardize her relationship with Stella, saw no need to rock the boat.

  “BEFORE I TAKE a smear, I’m just going to examine you internally,” Dr. Double Barrel said. His voice was pretty matter-of-fact, but as she turned to look at him, she couldn’t help noticing he had managed to raise the corners of his mouth. She was on the verge of making a nervous joke about her cervix with a smile, but thought better of it. “OK,” she replied. She was staring at the ceiling again, playing her word game. There it was. Finally. The snap of the rubber glove. She felt his fingers inside her. Even though he’d warned her of what he was about to do, the suddenness made her flinch. “Ceps,” she blurted.

  “Sorry?” Double Barrel said vaguely. His mind was clearly on what he was feeling rather than what he was hearing. “What did you say?”

  God, how did she go about explaining her speculum word search and that ceps was her latest discovery?

  “Ceps,” she repeated. “So, er, do you like ceps, doctor?”

  Double Barrel’s head shot up from between her legs. His face had turned pink. “Do I like sex? Look, maybe I should call in a nurse to chaperone.”

  “No, no,” Ruby cried out, the color on her face now matching his. “I said ‘cèpes.’ They’re mushrooms. They’re my favorite. I was just wondering if you liked them, that’s all.”

  His frown caused the doctor’s bushy eyebrows to knit. Judging by his expression he was clearly wondering if she was quite all there.

  “Not really. No,” he said.

  As she watched his head disappear again, she gave a faint, nervous laugh and mumbled something about them not being to everybody’s taste.

  “So, er…” she began, desperate to engage him in conversation since she couldn’t think of any more speculum words, “…what do you do when you’re not being a doctor?”

  “I like to play a bit of squash,” he said.

  She had no idea what to say next, since she knew nothing about squash.

  “So, are you any good?” she ventured.

  “I get by. I was much better when I was younger.”

  She winced again as she felt the pressure of his fingers pushing and turning inside her.

  “So you like to keep your hand in,” she said. No sooner had the words left her lips than her hand flew to her mouth. Fabulous. On top of the cèpes faux pas, she was now suggesting to the male gynecologist, who was at this very moment examining her cervix, that he liked to keep his “hand in.”

  “No, er, that came out wrong. What I meant to say was…”

  But DB didn’t appear to have noticed her blunder. He simply continued his excavation. “Umm, that’s most odd,” he muttered after a few seconds.

  “What’s odd?” She was starting to feel edgy. “Is there something wrong?”

  “Hmm, this is certainly a first,” Double Barrel continued. His tone was curious rather than panicky, which Ruby found a relief. Then again, doctors never panicked. At least not British ones. American doctors were all: “OK, we have to get you into the OR stat or you’re gonna die.” British ones took a much more gung-ho line, believing that bravado gave hope and lessened the blow. Consequently, they would regard you over their pince-nez, and employ a string of cricketing analogies to indicate that things were looking less than hunky-dory.

&nbs
p; As she waited to hear DB announce that from an interuterine perspective she was up against a rather sticky wicket, she turned to look at him. It took a few seconds for her eyes to focus on the tweezers he was holding and what was contained between them. The horror of what she could see being displayed in front of her, combined with all the caffeine she’d consumed in the waiting room, was causing her pulse to skyrocket. Her heart seemed to be beating out a tachycardic Morse code that said, “Get me out of here. Please, just get me out of here.”

  She let out a feeble “Oh dear” as her mind spun back to her last visit to the waiting room loo. She remembered the empty loo roll and how she’d had to use tissue from her bag. Clearly there had been something stuck to the tissue. That something had come off on her and must have somehow worked its way up inside her.

  Double Barrel regarded the tweezers and raised a bushy eyebrow. “Extraordinary place to find a postage stamp,” he said.

  Chapter 2

  Ruby’s heart carried on beating out its tachycardic Morse code: A stamp. In my vagina. My gynecologist just found a stamp in my vagina. Omigod, I cannot believe this is happening.

  The worst part was that she had to lie there for a few more minutes, saturated in embarrassment, while Double Barrel did the Pap test. She thought she ought to explain to him how the stamp got inside her, but when she tried, all that came out was a garbled, strangulated mess of half-sentences. After three faux pas in ten minutes, her humiliation was complete and she could barely put one word in front of another.

  To her surprise, DB handled the situation rather well. He patted her hand in a paternal way, told her not to worry and that these things happen. But she could tell from his concerned, patronizing smile that frankly these things didn’t happen, and any remaining doubts he may have had that she was a basket case had vanished.

  All Ruby wanted to do was get the hell out of DB’s consulting room. The moment he left her alone behind the curtain, she grabbed her underwear and skirt. She had them on in seconds. Her tights were going to be too much of a fiddle so she rammed them into her bag. In less than a minute she was striding out toward the door.

  “Er, Miss Silverman, before you go,” DB called to her from behind his desk, forcing her to turn round and offer him a smile. “I just want to let you know that everything seems fine. You should get the results of your Pap test in the next few days, but your cervix looks perfectly healthy and I don’t anticipate any problems.” He stood up and extended his hand toward her. “So, we’ll see you again in a year.”

  Barely able to look him in the eye, Ruby took his hand. “Absolutely,” she said, forcing her face onto full beam. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  As she closed the door, she found herself glancing at the name plate. Of course, she remembered now. That was who he was: Dr. Steven Babbington-Gore.

  DECIDING SHE WAS in desperate need of some water and a sit-down, Ruby made a beeline for the drink machine in the hospital foyer. As she started rooting in her purse for the right change, her mobile rang. Grappling with her bag, purse and phone, she dropped a handful of coins onto the floor. Somehow, she managed to press “connect.”

  “Hi, it’s me.” It was her best friend, Fiona. “I just wanted to say thank you again for the pirate outfit. Ben absolutely adores it. Last night after you’d gone he refused to take it off. He even insisted on going to bed in it.”

  Ben was Fi’s oldest son. Her second, Connor, was a month old. Yesterday had been Ben’s third birthday. Ruby knew that his grandparents were buying him the Playmobil pirate ship and she thought he might like a pirate outfit to go with it.

  “I feel so guilty,” Fi went on, “because it’s already filthy.”

  “He’s a little boy,” Ruby said from the floor, where she was on her knees gathering up coins. “It’s bound to get filthy.”

  “Rubes, you sound a bit tense. You all right?”

  Ruby shuffled across the floor in order to gather up a couple of pound coins. “As all right as I can be, having just experienced the most humiliating twenty minutes of my entire life.”

  “Blimey, what happened?”

  “OK—you know I had an appointment this morning for my annual gyne checkup…”

  Fi gasped. “Omigod, your gynecologist made a pass at you.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember—your gynecologist is a woman.” She paused. “Bloody hell. She made a pass at you!”

  “No, it’s nothing like that—but as it happens, Dr. Anderson was away and I did end up seeing a man. Anyway…”

  “Oops, hang on a tick, Ben says he needs to do a wee…That’s it, darling, off you go and fetch your potty…OK, so go on. I’m all ears.”

  “Right, so there I am with my legs in stirrups when…”

  “No, sausage, when you sit on the potty, you have to tuck your willy in, or the pee will go everywhere. Here, let me show you. Soppy Grandma bought you a girl’s potty without a guard at the front, didn’t she? Hang on a sec, Rubes, I have to go and rearrange my son’s penis.”

  By now Ruby was on her feet and brushing floor dust from her skirt.

  “Sorry about that.” Fi came back, slightly breathless.

  “Since Connor arrived, Ben’s completely regressed. He’s back in nappies at night and I’ve had to start potty training him all over again. Found a turd under the kitchen table this morning.”

  “Wow! Lucky old you.” Ruby laughed.

  “The visiting nurse says it’s because he’s feeling jealous. Apparently it’s quite normal for children to go on a dirty protest after a new sibling arrives. It’s wearing me out, though, because I’m having to watch him all the time to check he doesn’t pop a poo into the cutlery drawer or my handbag…OK, so you were saying.”

  This time Ruby got to the end of her story. “And you’ll never guess what Double Barrel was holding.”

  “Good God—what?…Oops, hang on a minute, Ben’s just brought me his potty…Clever boy! That’s a lovely wee for Mummy. And only a tiny bit went on the sofa. Well done…So what was he holding?”

  “A stamp. Can you believe it? The doctor pulled a postage stamp out of my vagina.”

  “You are kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “My God. You must have been mortified.” She paused.

  “But I suppose it’s reassuring to know you’ve got a first-class vagina.” Fi had started to giggle.

  “Ha, ha. Very funny,” Ruby came back.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist it. Look, don’t worry about the stamp. Doctors get to see all sorts of weird stuff. I read this article recently about how mothers have to be careful because little girls are always sticking pebbles and bits of Lego up them.” At this point Fi said there was something else she needed to talk to Ruby about, but needed to hang up because the cat was sniffing round the potty full of pee and the baby had woken up. “I’ll call you later.”

  “OK,” Ruby said.

  “And don’t forget what I said about little girls.”

  “Yes, but I’m not two,” Ruby said. “I’m thirty-two. I’m a thirty-two-year-old woman who had a postage stamp in her vagina.” But Fi was gone.

  As Ruby pressed “end” she looked up to see a man dressed in blue surgical scrubs standing next to her. She found herself taking in the trendy ultrashort dark hair and long sideburns, the nut-brown eyes set into the gentle smiling face, the fact that he was about her own age…the fact that if he had been standing there for more than two seconds, he must have overheard her conversation with Fi and known about the stamp in her vagina.

  “Pardon me,” came an American accent, “but I was wondering if you were planning on getting anything from the drink machine. The thing is, you’ve been here awhile and I was kinda hoping to get a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh, God, yes of course,” she blurted, her face prickling with beet-red blush. “You go ahead. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Sure?”

  She nodded and waved him in front of her.

  “Thanks,
” he said. He smiled again, only this time she noticed. She couldn’t tell if he was just being polite or stifling laughter about her vaginal stamp. She decided he was probably laughing and that a few minutes from now her recent predicament would be the subject of canteen hilarity. Unless of course Double Barrel had already blabbed, but since he hadn’t struck her as having much of a sense of humor, he was unlikely to be the bantering, joke-telling type. On top of that he had come across as the kind of doctor who took patient confidentiality very seriously.

  She wasn’t convinced that the young American doctor standing in front of her was quite so lacking in the humor department. She decided she had to convince him that he hadn’t heard what he thought he’d heard.

  The doctor took a steaming polystyrene cup from the dispenser, smiled at her again and started to move away.

  Shuffling from foot to foot, Ruby nodded toward her phone, which she was still holding: “I, er…I was chatting to my best friend just then. She’s…she’s a stand-up comic. And…” And what? God, where was she planning to take this? “And…er…some executives at the post office have asked her to do a gig at the end of their annual conference next month. I’ve been helping develop some new material.”

  “Really?” he said. “Sounds great. Very original.”

  It was possible he believed her, Ruby thought, but it seemed more likely that he was simply going along with the story to save her blushes. Not that it had worked, since her face was still burning with embarrassment. Suddenly his pager went. His hand shot to the waistband of his hospital scrubs.

  “Sorry, gotta go,” he said. He took a hurried sip of his coffee. Then he placed the cup on top of the drink machine, alongside all the other barely touched cups of coffee, clearly abandoned by colleagues whose pagers had also cut short their coffee breaks.

  She watched him turn and begin striding out toward X-ray. For a moment her embarrassment subsided as she noticed the way the blue cotton of his scrubs outlined his perfect rear.