The House by Princes Park (6 page)

‘I’d never have guessed,’ Emily said drily. She started up the engine and they drove away. ‘Aren’t you sad?’ she enquired.

‘A little bit,’ Ruby conceded, taking the brown ribbon off her hair and tossing it loose. ‘But it’s silly to feel sad over something that can’t be helped.’

‘Very sensible, but not a concept that can be taken literally throughout one’s entire life.’

‘What’s a concept? And what does “literally” mean?’

‘I’ll give you a dictionary when we get home and you can look it up for yourself.’

‘What’s a dictionary?’

‘You’ll see when you get one.’

At first, Ruby found going fast exciting, but a bit scary. She tensed whenever another car came towards them, convinced they’d crash, but the cars easily passed and she quickly forgot her fear. She said little, but her eyes sparkled with interest, even if the countryside they drove through was the same as that she’d been used to all her life: vast green fields, undulating hills, untidy hedges full of birds. They came to the occasional village that looked dull compared to Abergele.

‘We’re in England now, dear, Cheshire,’ Emily said – she’d been told to call Mrs Dangerfield ‘Emily’. ‘We’ve just crossed the border.’

‘You mean we’re in another country!’ Ruby was impressed.

‘Yes. In a few years, people won’t have to drive such a long way round to Liverpool. There’s a tunnel under the River Mersey, but it isn’t ready for cars yet.’

‘Reverend Mother said I was going to live in Liverpool. It’s where Sister Frances comes from. She said it’s bigger than Abergele.’

‘Much, much bigger, but it isn’t exactly Liverpool where you’ll live. My house is on the outskirts, a place called Kirkby. Tomorrow, we’ll go to town and buy you some clothes. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to get out of that ugly brown frock.’

‘Clothes from a shop?’

‘Of course, Ruby. Where else?’ Emily thought the girl’s naivety utterly delightful.

‘I’ve always wanted to go in a shop.’ Ruby gave a blissful sigh.

‘I must warn you, dear, that Liverpool is terribly noisy. There’s loads of traffic and crowds of shoppers. You mustn’t be frightened. Cities are very busy places.’

‘I’m never frightened,’ Ruby said stoutly, having forgotten her recent fear that the car might crash. ‘Are we nearly there?’

‘We’ve still got some way to go.’

Ruby snorted and began to twiddle her thumbs, bored. England looked exactly the same as Wales. She visibly perked up when the scenery became more industrialised and squealed with delight when they reached Runcorn and the car drove on to the transporter bridge and they were carried across the shimmering Mersey on a metal sling, a process that Emily always found daunting.

They drove through a forest of tall chimneys spewing
black smoke into the blue sky. ‘They look ugly,’ Ruby opined.

Emily nodded agreement. ‘This is Widnes.’

‘Ugly, but interesting. Everything’s interesting. Are we nearly at Kirkby?’ she said impatiently.

‘Not far.’

The countryside became flatter, houses more frequent. Ruby bobbed up and down at Emily’s side, exclaiming at every single thing, asking so many questions that Emily’s head began to spin.

‘What’s that little boy doing?’

‘He’s riding a scooter.’

‘I’ve never seen a scooter before. What’s that building there?’

‘A church, dear.’

‘It’s
big
. The church in the convent was only little. Can I go there to Mass on Sunday?’

‘No, Ruby, it’s too far away, and it’s not a Catholic church.’

‘What was it then?’

‘I didn’t notice,’ Emily said desperately. ‘A Protestant church of some sort.’

Ruby screamed. ‘Look! What’s wrong with that man’s face?’

‘Nothing. He’s got a beard.’

‘He looks like an animal. Are we nearly there, Emily?’

‘In a minute.’

Emily gave a sigh of relief when she turned the car into the drive of Brambles, the house that wasn’t hers any more, but belonged to her sons. If it hadn’t been for that she would have sold up the minute Edwin died and moved somewhere more exciting: London, Brighton, or even abroad, Paris, or Berlin which was said to be fascinating, although this Hitler business was worrying. Edwin had left her well provided for, but she was scared to give up the
security of her home and rent a place – the sort she aspired to would eat up a goodly portion of her income.

‘Is this it?’

‘Yes, Ruby, this is it.’ Emily opened the car door and got out. Ruby collected her parcel and followed.

‘It’s not as big as the convent,’ she said, a touch disparagingly Emily thought.

‘Maybe not,’ she said defensively, ‘But it’s bigger than most houses. It has twelve rooms, six upstairs and six down, that’s not counting the kitchen and two bathrooms. Let’s go inside so you can see.’

It was a relief to enter the empty house accompanied by another human being – the staff had all gone home by now. Emily felt grateful for Ruby’s loud cries as she ran in and out of the rooms, admiring the furniture, the ornaments, ending up back in the hall, where she examined herself critically, from top to toe, in the full-length mirror, twisting and turning, peering over her shoulder at her back.

‘We didn’t have mirrors in the convent.’ She glanced pertly at Emily. ‘We used to look at ourselves in the windows when it went dark. The nuns got cross if they saw us. Vanity is a sin, they said.
I
said, surely God wouldn’t mind a person wanting to look nice.’

‘And what did they say then?’ Emily asked, interested.

‘They said it was one thing to look nice, but quite another to dwell on it. I still think that’s rubbish, but they got annoyed if I argued too much.’ She pointed. ‘What’s that?’

‘A telephone, dear. I’ll show you how to use it one day.’

‘Can I see where I’ll sleep?’

Upstairs, Emily threw open the door of the pretty white and yellow room she’d had prepared next to her own bedroom. ‘This is yours.’

Ruby flung herself joyfully on to the bed, oohed and aahed over the yellow flowered curtains that matched the
dressing table skirt, and had another hard look at herself in the wardrobe mirror.

‘Will you mind sleeping by yourself ?’ Emily asked. ‘You’re used to a dormitory, aren’t you?’

‘I
hate
dormitories,’ Ruby said with feeling. ‘We were made to go to bed awful early and had to be quiet even if we couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t so bad in summer, ’cause you could read under the covers, but when it was dark and they took the paraffin lamp away, you couldn’t see a thing.’ She smiled cajolingly at Emily. ‘Will you let me have a lamp to read in bed? After all, I’m your
friend
.’

Emily laughed. ‘You can read to your heart’s content, Ruby. And you don’t need a lamp, you switch the light on here, just inside the door.’

‘Jaysus, Mary and Joseph!’ Ruby gasped when the already bright room was flooded with more light. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s electricity, and please don’t ask me to explain it to you, dear. You can look it up in the encyclopaedia. That’s a book, and you’ll find it with the dictionary in the room that used to be my husband’s study,’ she added quickly when Ruby opened her mouth to ask what an encyclopedia was. ‘Shall we go down and see what Mrs Arkwright has left for tea?’

On her way to bed that night, Emily paused outside Ruby’s door, her hand on the knob, about to go in and make sure the child was all right after the day’s upheaval. But say if she
wasn’t
all right. She might be upset, even crying. She’d never known how to comfort people, not even her own boys when they were little. A nursemaid had carried out the task on her behalf until her sons went to boarding school at the age of seven. If they required sympathy of any sort during the holidays, they’d never said. Even when Edwin was dying, she hadn’t known what
to say. Emily removed her hand from the knob and hurried into her own room.

Unusually, that same night Reverend Mother couldn’t sleep for the worry that bobbed about in her mind, like a yacht in a stormy sea. A memory surfaced, of when Emily was eight and she was ten. It was Christmas and they each found a doll beside their bed when they woke up, huge dolls, bigger than a real baby and dressed as an adult, in bunchy, silk, lace-trimmed frocks, frilly bonnets, under-clothes, and even tiny necklaces. Emily’s doll was blonde, its clothes pink, Cecilia’s had dark hair and wore blue.

Emily had glanced from one doll to the other and announced in a weepy, whining voice that she wanted the blue one. Cecilia had held out, wanting her own, but gave in eventually, preferring a quiet life to a blue doll on Christmas Day. Anyway, the pink doll was quite nice. They swapped dolls, Emily calmed down, and the girls played happily with their presents throughout the day.

Nanny was putting them to bed, when Emily burst into tears and said she preferred the pink doll after all. This time Cecilia refused, having grown quite fond of the doll which she had christened Victoria after the Queen. Emily screamed, Nanny pleaded, ‘After all, it’s the one she was given, Cecy, dear.’

‘All right, she can have them both. I don’t want the blue one back.’

Emily had played with the pink doll all Boxing Day, then abandoned it for something else. The dolls had been put in a cupboard and Cecilia couldn’t remember having seen them again.

The same thing had happened on numerous other occasions, but none stuck in her mind quite so clearly as the case of the two dolls. Emily wanted things to the exclusion of everything else, but once she got them, used them, played with them for a while, she lost all interest.

Reverend Mother had no idea what time it was when she eventually fell into a restless sleep. She woke with a start when Sister Angela knocked on the door at five o’clock, interrupting a vivid dream. The dolls, she’d been dreaming about the dolls, the blue one and the pink one. Emily had thrown them away in the little woods not far from where they lived and Cecilia had gone to rescue them. She’d found them face down at the foot of a tree amid a pile of rotting leaves and when she turned them over both dolls had the thin, pale face of Ruby O’Hagan.

The nun got out of bed, knelt on the hard stone floor, and began to pray.

Ruby always woke up long before Emily. She would sit up straight away, stretch her arms, and look to see if the sun was shining through the yellow curtains. Whether it was or not, she would leap out of bed, get washed – she actually had her own little sink in the corner – and put on one of the frocks Emily had bought for her in Liverpool or Southport.

Of these places, Ruby preferred Liverpool. She liked the big, crowded shops, the bustle and noise. She loved the tramcars – there seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of them trundling along the metal lines making a terrible din and throwing off showers of sparks. She envied the occupants of these wonderful vehicles and longed to ride in one – Emily went everywhere by car. Liverpool buildings were magnificent: the Corn Exchange, the Customs House, the Town Hall, and her favourite, St George’s Hall which, according to Emily, was famous throughout the world for its elegant design.

Emily preferred Southport, which Ruby thought all right, quite pretty, but very limited, and a bit too posh. She couldn’t take to posh people, which Emily said was due to the way she’d been brought up.

‘What do you mean?’ Ruby demanded.

‘The convent made sure you didn’t have ideas above your station,’ Emily explained. ‘The girls weren’t encouraged to have ambitions beyond becoming head cook or
marrying the butler. You can’t take to posh people, as you call them, because they make you feel inferior.’

‘No, they don’t,’ Ruby argued. ‘I just don’t like the way they look down their noses at people who aren’t as posh as themselves. I had no intention of being a cook, or marrying a butler come to that.’

Emily had merely shrugged, which Ruby took to mean her argument was inescapable. She considered herself as good as anyone in the world.

One morning, when Ruby had been living in Kirkby for just over three months, she woke to find the August sunshine dancing through the window of her room, turning it into a grotto of golden light. She scrambled out of bed, drew back the curtains, and surveyed the back garden, which consisted of a vast square lawn surrounded by neat flower borders, an orchard, a tennis court, and a vegetable patch tucked away at the bottom. Everywhere was surrounded by birch trees with silver leaves which she’d been told would turn gold in the autumn. There wasn’t another house in sight, the nearest was over a mile away.

What would she do today?

A few weeks ago, Emily had suggested she might like to go to school in September. At some schools, girls could stay until they were sixteen or even eighteen. Ruby had made a face and said she’d learnt enough, thanks all the same. Emily said she could do whatever she liked, it was up to her.

Emily didn’t mind if she did, or didn’t do, all sorts of things. She could stay up as late as she liked, read all night if she wanted, not eat her vegetables, have two helpings of pudding if there was enough, go out to play, or come back, whenever she pleased. Ruby found this a tiny bit unsettling and she quite missed the rules she’d been so fond of breaking at the convent. It was as if Emily didn’t
care
, a suspicion that grew as the weeks passed and Emily
seemed to lose all interest in taking her out, whether to go shopping or just for a ride. She’d made new friends, the Rowland-Graves, who’d just come back from India to live a few miles away in Knowsley. The Rowland-Graves threw loads of parties: bridge parties, cocktail parties, theatre parties, and parties that could go on all night. Emily was forever getting her hair done and buying new clothes, going out almost daily, draped in furs, even when it was hot. Despite this, she was always very glad Ruby was there to talk to when she came home.

Ruby decided to go to Humble’s Farm for the milk and eggs, to save Mr Humble delivering them. She put on what Emily called a housefrock: red cotton patterned with big white flowers and white piping on the collar and sleeves. Emily said her taste was garish and she hoped she’d grow out of it one day. She liked flowery patterns too much. ‘Plain clothes are so much more tasteful, Ruby.’ Even so, she was allowed to have whatever caught her eye. She pulled on white ankle socks, pushed her feet into sandals, and collected a jug and basin from the kitchen.