The House by Princes Park (9 page)

Fifteen minutes later, Jacob came, drawn to the light like a moth to a flame.

Ruby had been at Brambles for two years and would shortly be sixteen. ‘We should really have a party,’ Emily said the week before. ‘But you don’t know anyone, do you?’

‘Not a soul,’ Ruby said innocently. Only Jacob, scores of bus conductors, a barrow lady called Maggie Mullen from whom she regularly purchased an apple, Mrs First, who had a sweetshop in the Dingle, a girl her own age, Ginnie O’Dare, who worked by Exchange station and whom she often met on the train. There were loads more people she knew by sight. But none of these people could she ask to a party.

‘We can’t just let your birthday pass without doing something,’ Emily said. If she took her out to tea, as she had done last year, it wouldn’t interrupt her hectic social
life. Perhaps it was guilt that made her decide to splash out on an expensive gold watch for a present.

‘Can we go to the pictures?’ Ginnie O’Dare was always on about the pictures and Ruby was curious as to what they were like.

‘What a lovely idea! We’ll go to a matinée. There’s a Greta Garbo picture on in town,
Grand Hotel
. I’d love to see it.’

Unknown to Emily, Ruby went to see
Grand Hotel
another half a dozen times. She practised saying, ‘I vant to be alone,’ Greta Garbo style, in front of the mirror. She gave up tram rides for the cinema, sitting open-mouthed and totally absorbed in the cheapest seats during matinées in half-empty cinemas where she learnt more about human nature in the space of a few weeks than she’d done during her entire life. She discovered what treachery meant, jealousy and betrayal, and that she’d never realised people could so easily be provoked to murder. She learnt about love, how pure it could be, how good, yet sometimes very evil, driving people to do all sorts of terrible things in its name. Ruby knew the film stars were only acting out stories that had been written for them, yet they must be reflecting real life, the sort of life she hadn’t known existed.

After a while, she felt as if Bette Davies, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, were her friends. She fell in love with Van Heflin and would have liked Herbert Marshall for a dad.

It was about this time, a few months after Ruby’s sixteenth birthday, that Emily Dangerfield fell in love herself.

Bill Pickering was forty-three, the first American she had ever met, which only added to his warm, relaxed charm. Tall, slender, deeply tanned, with luxuriant blond, wavy hair and a full moustache, he had lived the last ten
years in Monte Carlo where he owned a chain of hotels. His clothes were well cut and expensive, extremely dashing, and he wore them with elegant grace. He had come to stay with his old friends, the Rowland-Graves, for the summer, feeling ever-so-slightly tired of Monte Carlo’s ritzy glamour, leaving the hotels in the care of experienced staff.

Emily was thrilled when he began to flirt with her, flattered that a man sixteen years her junior should find her attractive. And she wasn’t just imagining it. Mim Rowland-Graves had commented enviously that Bill was obviously smitten. Emily was already in love by the time he asked her out. ‘I think it’s time we got to know each other properly,’ he said in his light transatlantic drawl.

She invited him to Brambles for drinks and to sample Mrs Arkwright’s delicious miniature pork pies.

‘I didn’t know you had a daughter!’ he exclaimed in surprise when introduced to Ruby.

‘Ruby is my ward,’ Emily explained, flattered again that he thought her young enough to have a sixteen-year-old child–mind you, she had vaguely admitted to being forty-nine.

‘How do you do,’ Ruby said nicely, liking Bill Pickering on the spot. He had a lovely smile that crinkled the skin around his light brown eyes.

‘And how do
you
do. Ruby. Gee whizz, Em, this little lady will break a few hearts when she grows up,’ he said, thus pleasing Ruby with the compliment and Emily with the diminutive ‘Em’, which made her feel as if they were more than just friends.

Emily showed him around the house, which he found very impressive. ‘Great place, Em,’ he enthused. ‘Love the garden. Best house I’ve seen round these parts, in fact. Furnished with exquisite taste, as my old ma back in the States would say.’

‘Thank you.’ Emily blushed. ‘I chose everything myself.’

From then on, Bill Pickering appeared frequently at Brambles. He played tennis with Ruby and sometimes let her win. Emily, watching wistfully from a deckchair, tried hard not to feel old.

‘They’re potty about each other,’ Ruby told Jacob one night. ‘They kiss all the time. Sometimes they go into Emily’s bedroom and make the most peculiar noises.’ She looked at him coyly. ‘Have you ever wanted to kiss me?’

‘Yes,’ Jacob said daringly.

‘Shall we try it? See what it’s like?’

Before he could answer, she’d thrown herself on to his knee and pressed her mouth against his. For a few seconds he didn’t respond, but the light pressure of her lips was creating turmoil in his stomach. He pulled her down so that they were squashed together in the velvet armchair and his arms were wrapped around her as tightly as a fist. Her ribs were like a little delicate ladder under his splayed hand, her shoulder blades as sharp as knives. He was kissing her fiercely now, rubbing his thumb against her soft breasts. And to his joy and astonishment she was responding, curling her arms around his neck, caressing the nape, touching his ears.

It went on and on the kiss, on and on, until it felt as if they’d been kissing for hours, until Jacob, unable to help himself, slid his hand under her skirt. Ruby groaned and opened her legs and he moved her gently to the floor and crouched on top of her. He looked into her eyes which were huge and black and slightly scared, framed like a picture with long, smoky lashes.

He wanted to ask if it was all right to do what he was about to do, but then she might say no, and he couldn’t have borne it. Somewhere deep within the ferment in his brain he felt a tiny prick of conscience. He wondered how
much she knew. What had she been told in the convent? Had Mrs Dangerfield informed her of the facts of life?

Then Ruby said, ‘Don’t stop,’ and Jacob couldn’t have stopped to save his life, though he retained enough sense to withdraw at the proper time. It wouldn’t do for her to get pregnant.

Afterwards, she was unusually quiet and subdued. She looked puzzled, as if she wasn’t quite sure what had happened. They went into the kitchen and it was Jacob who made the tea. Ruby sat in a chair, kicking her heels against it absently, like a child.

‘Does this mean we’ll get married?’ she asked after a while.

Jacob’s heart did a somersault. ‘If you want,’ he replied.

‘I think I do. When?’

‘When you’re older,’ he said gruffly.

‘Where will we live?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nor did he care. To be with Ruby, he’d live on one of them tramcars she was always on about. He’d go anywhere, do anything, if they could be together.

She was sipping the tea, watching him over the cup with her dazzling black eyes. ‘Shall we go upstairs and do it again?’ she whispered.

‘I hope you’re not coming down with something,’ Emily said a few days later when it dawned on her that Ruby had been very quiet for several days.

‘I feel all right, thank you.’

‘Are you sure?’ Even the reply wasn’t quite like Ruby. Perhaps she was concerned what would happen to her when Emily and Bill got married – he had only hinted so far, but she was expecting a proposal any minute. ‘I think the confirmed bachelor will shortly be confirmed no more,’ Ronnie Rowland-Graves had said with a wink the other day. Ruby was smart and could no doubt sense the way the wind was blowing.

Bill was thinking of selling his hotels and living permanently in England. Emily was already making plans. They would live in Brambles at first, the house he so much admired, then look for a place in London. A flat in Mayfair or Belgravia would be ideal and perhaps a little hidey-hole in Paris, or even New York – they could travel to and fro on one of those great cruise liners which would be a holiday in itself. Whatever happened, once she became Mrs Pickering, there would be no more need for Ruby in her life.

Yet she couldn’t just abandon the girl. She had been wondering if Adrian in Australia would be willing to take her until she was eighteen? Or perhaps the Rowland-Graves could be persuaded, though they wouldn’t provide a particularly healthy atmosphere for someone so young.

She forgot about Ruby and concentrated on Bill, a less taxing way of occupying her mind. For the first time in her life she was properly in love. When she looked in the mirror she saw the lovely woman she’d once been. Her blissful happiness showed in her eyes and she could feel it in her heart. This coming weekend, Bill was taking her to the Lake District. She couldn’t wait. She began to plan what to wear. It was when she was deciding which nightdress to take that she remembered Bill would see her first thing in the morning when she looked a miserable wreck. She prayed she’d wake early so there’d be time for the massive preparations required to make herself presentable for when Bill himself woke up.

It was fine when they left Kirkby after tea on Saturday, a clear August day, warm but not muggy. But they’d gone only twenty miles when the sky began to cloud over, getting ominously dark. Spots of rain splattered on to the windscreen and in the blinking of an eye became a deluge. They were in Emily’s Jaguar as Bill couldn’t drive. ‘There
just doesn’t seem the need in Monte Carlo. I can easily walk to my hotels. Otherwise I use taxis.’

Emily hated driving in the rain. She reduced her speed and bent over the steering wheel clutching it tightly in both hands. A headache arrived as quickly as the rain and she could hardly see. The windscreen wipers didn’t seem to be working properly and were making her dizzy. The headlights were useless, the beam absorbed by the pelting rain. Beside her, Bill made encouraging noises, but after a while, Emily drew into a lay-by and announced she couldn’t go on. They’d travelled less than a quarter of the way, and at this rate they wouldn’t get there till midnight.

‘But, honey, the hotel’s booked,’ Bill cried.

‘I’m sorry, but we’ll just have to wait until the rain goes off. I’m no good at driving in this sort of weather.’

An hour later, the weather showed no sign of clearing.

‘Where are we?’ Bill asked.

‘I’ve no idea. In the middle of nowhere, I suspect. I wonder, darling, would you mind very much if we went home? This is bound to have cleared up by morning and we can start off early. If we turn round at least I’ll know where I’m going.’

‘I don’t mind a jot, hon.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘As long as I’m with you, that’s all I care.’

The journey back was hazardous, but it wasn’t long before she began to recognise the way and felt able to relax.

‘Well,’ Bill laughed when the Jaguar squelched to a halt outside Brambles. ‘That was quite an adventure, unexpected though it was.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Not quite ten.’

‘The house is in darkness. Ruby sometimes goes to bed early, but she always leaves a light on. I hope she’s all right.’

‘We’ll soon see, hon.’

Ruby appeared on the landing in response to Emily’s shout. She must have been about to get undressed as the buttons down the front of her frock were undone. There was something odd about her face. She looked uncomfortable. When she saw Bill, she drew the edges of her frock together – perhaps that was the reason.

‘You didn’t leave a light on, dear.’

‘I wasn’t expecting you back till Sunday.’

‘You’d forgotten that, hadn’t you, honey?’

Bill’s intervention made Emily feel doddery and vague. To her surprise he went over to the foot of the stairs, looked up. ‘Why don’t you come down. Rube? Join me and Emily for a drink?’

‘She’s only sixteen,’ Emily snapped. She had been thinking that now was a perfect time for him to propose, over drinks, rain lashing against the windows, lamps switched on instead of the central light, a romantic record on the gramophone... She would have lit a fire had she known how.

‘A little drop of sherry wouldn’t hurt,’ Bill smiled.

‘I don’t want any, thanks all the same,’ said Ruby, tossing her head.

Bill continued to stand by the stairs. An irritated Emily followed his upward gaze – and caught her breath! Ruby had grown up without her noticing. There was something about her stance, feet slightly apart – bare feet – the way her hands clutched the frock so that the material was pulled taut over the breasts that seemed to have happened overnight. She looked like a woman, a woman very much aware of her sexuality as she stared haughtily back at a transfixed Bill.

Emily broke the spell. ‘Would you like a bite to eat, darling?’ Mrs Arkwright had roasted a large joint of beef that morning, enough for several days. She’d slice some on a plate with tomato, pickles, and bread and butter, open some wine.

‘A bite to eat would be most welcome.’ Bill jumped, as if he’d forgotten she was there.

‘Would you mind putting on some music? I won’t be long.’

Upstairs, a door slammed. Ruby had gone into her room. Emily’s face was grim as she went into the kitchen. Pretty soon, Ruby would be gone for ever. No matter how much she loved the girl, there was no alternative. It was dangerous for her to stay.

She threw a lace cloth over a little occasional table and put it in front of the fireplace, lighting a candle for the centre. The dancing orange flame was reflected in the rose red wine so the bottle looked as if it was on fire. In the background, Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra were playing. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.

‘This is very nice.’ Bill seemed to have forgotten about Ruby and was eating the snack with boyish enjoyment. He winked. ‘You’ll make someone a wonderful wife one day, Emily.’

Emily fluttered her lashes. She had changed out of her tweed costume into a pair of Chinese silk lounging pyjamas in a stunning shade of yellow and felt rather daring. She was more than a little dismayed to hear him say ‘someone’. There was only one person whose wife she wanted to be and she had thought he felt the same.

But apparently he did. He reached across and took her hand. ‘And honey, I’d like that someone to be me.’