Dangerous Encounters

Chapter 7 Ruth overcomes her past and love prevails - eventually

"Is Howard your given surname?" 

"Oh, yes, I'm divorced, and use my parents' name." 

"So working backwards you've had five years as a professional protester, three where you've been a parent figure for Mandy and Pat. Before that you had two years fighting free of your hellish marriage. So how long were you married to him before you rumbled his ways?" 

"Three years." 

"No kiddies?" 

"No, fortunately we both worked at our careers."

"Ah, what was yours?" 

"Creative artist in an advertising studio."

"Oh - interesting - do you draw? paint? what?" 

"Oh, of course you haven't seen inside the other caravan. The little one." 

"I assumed it was a store or something." 

"No when the tourist season starts we run a little shop selling my pictures and protest literature and such, Amanda's good with string things like bags and flower pot holders. That's why this winter's been so lean, we budgeted on having the benefit, so we sold what we thought was enough. In the quiet moments I'm doing a lot more work this winter." 

"I'd, love to see some. Did you bring anything here?" 

"My sketch book."- 

"Don't waste another instant, I must see this." 

She brought an A4 sketch book. Inside were exquisite studies of birds, small mammals, farm animals, flowers, and trees in pencil and water colour, and charcoal. There were a number of studies of the girls as portraits or doing things like reading or sewing. 

"Oh, that's how you saw me." 

She'd drawn me as I might have appeared when I picked her from the ground in front of the truck on Monday. I had a kind enough expression on my face if somewhat formal under the construction helmet, but aligned with me were the huge truck, and a team of workmen, together looking intimidating. 

That was the last she'd done. I went through it all again.  "These are exquisite."  

"Thank you." 

"Presumably this is your record and you pick elements and make saleable items of them." 

"Yes. The trouble is, I only make about a pound an hour doing them individually." 

"So at twenty seven we find you in an advertising studio getting married. So how long did you have him around you before you said yes to his proposal?" 

"A year" 

"Now you're twenty six" 

"I joined that studio in York when I was twenty five. Let me start from the other end now. I was born in Epsom, my mother and father were well off. It was the stockbroker end of Epsom." 

"I went to a private primary school, then a grammar school." 

"I had my first fumbly sex at sixteen which I didn't like, and restricted myself to kissing 'till I married, and then I made up for lost time for a while. 

"At eighteen I went to the St Martins School of Art in London. I had lots of fun 'till I was twenty one. Got my qualification. Got a job. Then Daddy left Mummy and she fell on hard times, so she moved back to her home town of York. I lived with her till she died of a heart attack. Then I married." 

"Why the protest industry?" 

"I really would have liked to be a mother and make some good human beings, or at least try. But I felt contaminated by the marriage and couldn't face another man to get a baby. I wanted to do something more worthwhile than help sell chocolate bars or ride-on mowers or squirrel-proof peanut feeders for birds. So I bought the small caravan and lived entirely alone for two years. Then I met Pat and Amanda, and decided to be parent for them, so I bought the bigger 'van as well, and that was my capital gone."