AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Reaching over, his mother took his hands in hers and smoothed her thumbs over the skin, stroking his wrists, and the pulse which had started to beat double time.
Suddenly, he felt like crying, too. For a guy who was not emotional and tended to shun any kind of melodrama, it was not a good feeling. Especially in the presence of his mom, who would never let him forget it.
‘Would you do me one favour Luke?’
‘I guess, as long as it isn’t illegal,’ he said.
She laughed again, the sound bright and full-bodied, suddenly reminding him of all the times during his childhood when she’d been the one to make it better.
How had he managed to forget that, too?
For all of her irresponsibility and her selfishness, his mother, like Ruby, was an irrepressible optimist. She was always willing to see the good, the bright, the best in any disastrous situation.
The fact that Helena Devlin had been the cause of most of those disasters didn’t seem to matter so much anymore.
‘Don’t nit-pick and over-analyse this situation,’ she said. ‘Just tell her how you feel and take your chances. You’re actually quite a catch, you know. Ruby has already figured that out, now all you have to do is figure it out, too.’
‘Five minutes to curtain, Ms Devlin.’ The loud rap on the door and the shout from the stage manager startled them both.
His mother smiled and shook her head, then released his hands.
He missed the connection instantly.
‘Now scoot,’ she said, as she nudged him out of her chair. She sat down and lifted a powder puff to finish off her make-up.
He planted his hands back into his pockets. ‘So you won’t front the deal to save The Royale?’ he asked, remembering why he’d come.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Of course not, darling. That would be dishonest,’ she said. ‘And anyway, it’s not the theatre Ruby needs, now is it?’
He wanted to say more, to push her, to beg if necessary. Still not entirely convinced he could be enough, not without The Royale. But he could see from the stubborn tilt of her chin she wasn’t going to budge on this. And he’d been trained never to distract her when she had only minutes until curtain-up.
He headed towards the door. ‘Break a leg, Mom, I’ll see you around.’
His mother lifted her hand in a dismissive wave, but as he shut the door, he heard her murmur: ‘Listen to your heart, Luke. Everything else is white noise.’
Chapter 21
‘Oh. My. God. I love this bit of the movie,’ Jacie whispered to Ruby as Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye shouted above the thunderous sound of the waterfall to Cora about staying alive and not giving up no matter what occurred.
Ruby nodded in the darkness. She had always loved this part of the movie too because she’d believed, like Hawkeye, that Cora could survive anything.
But as she watched the drama unfold on the screen, The Royale packed with all of their regulars, the community Matty had made and she’d nurtured for so long as riveted as she would once have been, Hawkeye’s declaration didn’t seem quite so magnificent anymore.
He was abandoning Madeline Stowe’s Cora, quite possibly to a fate worse than death. And while that was empowering for Cora, it also sucked.
Survival was tough enough without the man you loved beside you.
And as nuts and delusional as it was, she had fallen in love with Luke Devlin. Because if he had stayed – if he was here right now, beside her – surviving the end of The Royale would be so much easier to bear.
As Hawkeye and his adopted father and brother dived into the waterfall and disappeared and Magua and his angry band arrived to capture Cora and her sister and the dull British guy, Ruby didn’t feel empowered, she felt scared and inadequate and so far out of her depth it wasn’t even funny.
Would losing The Royale really have been easier with Luke here? Probably not, but the truth was that somehow, in a ridiculously short space of time, he’d come to mean so much more to her than the theatre. She hadn’t wanted the theatre, if she couldn’t have him. It was as simple as that. Which she supposed was a powerful lesson to learn and an important one.
The Royale had never been what gave her life meaning. Or any of the films she had adored watching within its walls.
It had been her friendship with Matty, with Jacie and Gerry and Tozer and Beryl and Brynn and everyone else in the community they’d built.
But even if she’d been able to keep the theatre, Matty would still be dead and eventually everyone else here would have drifted away too. Because they all had a life outside it, unlike her. Jacie had her granddad Errol and her mum and a huge circle of friends from school and college who she hung out with when she wasn’t working. To Jacie this was a job she enjoyed, but it was still just a job. Brynn had his bar – not to mention his partner Thérèse. Beryl had her children and grandchildren and all of her fellow septuagenarian film buffs at the Pensioners’ Club screenings. And so on and so forth with every other person here. If nothing else, Luke had opened her eyes to the truth, that she’d spent too much of her life hiding.
