The House By Princes Park

by Maureen Lee

  ‘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.

  Chapter 3

  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 magn
ificent: 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.

  It was going to be another scorching day, already hot as Ruby ran along the edge of the fields planted with an assortment of crops. Mr Humble’s farm wasn’t big, more a smallholding. He had a few cows, a few sheep, a few pigs, quite a lot of hens, a plough horse called Waterloo, a downtrodden wife, five grown-up children who had left home – ‘And who could blame them?’ said Emily – and a farmhand called Jacob whom Ruby found quite interesting, mainly because he was the only other young person she knew.

  Jacob Veering was eighteen, not enormously tall, but broad and solid, with hair a lovely buttery shade and eyes the colour of bluebells. He was very dirty, very handsome, and also, said Emily, a bastard. ‘Just like you, I expect,’ she added.

  Ruby had looked up ‘bastard’ in the dictionary. It meant ‘illegitimate’, so she looked that up, and it meant ‘out of wedlock’. Wedlock meant, ‘in a wedded state’. By this time, Ruby had rather lost track and given up.

  Jacob’s mother lived in a little cottage opposite Kirkby church. Her name was Ruth, and she was a ‘fey creature’, according to Emily, supporting herself by making coloured candles that were sold in big shops like George Henry Lee’s and Henderson’s. She wasn’t interested in Jacob, and he’d lived on Humble’s Farm over Waterloo’s stable since he was twelve.

  ‘Is Jacob a Catholic?’ Ruby enquired. ‘So I can talk to him?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Ruby, dear. You can talk to Jacob if he’s a heathen, which I suspect he is.’

  Mrs Humble was collecting eggs when Ruby arrived, out of breath having run all the way. Everywhere in the area of the farmyard was thick with dirt and smelled strongly of manure, particularly when it was hot. Ruby dreaded to think what it would be like in winter when it might smell less, but the caked dirt would turn to mud.

  ‘The usual?’ Mrs Humble asked in her sad, beaten voice. She was as bent as an old woman, yet only forty-nine. She wore a frayed shawl, holding the ends together with a gnarled, red hand.

  ‘Yes, please. Six eggs and a jug of milk.’

  ‘Jacob’s doing the milking right now.’

  ‘I’ll just say good morning.’

  Ruby approached the cowshed on tiptoe, though wasn’t sure why. Unusually for her, she felt nervous around Jacob. He was polite, but a bit reserved, and she always got the feeling she was in the way. She reached the door and said shyly, ‘Hello.’

  Jacob wore grubby corduroy trousers tied up with a rope and a frayed collarless shirt with half the sleeves cut off. His arms and face were very brown and his unlaced boots were planted in the straw, as if he’d grown there like a tree. He didn’t look up from the task of pulling expertly at the teats of a black and white cow, each teat squirting a thin stream of creamy milk into a metal bucket.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, in a voice that wasn’t exactly friendly, but wasn’t unfriendly, either.

  ‘It’s a nice morning.’

  ‘Known few better,’ he grunted.

  Ruby searched her mind for something to say. Jacob never started a conversation, only speaking when he was spoken to. ‘Do you ever listen to the wireless?’ she enquired.

  ‘Haven’t got one,’ Jacob replied.

  ‘We’ve got one in the house. And a gramophone, too.’

  ‘Have you, now.’

  ‘They play music. Do you like music?’

  ‘Music’s all right,’ Jacob conceded.

  ‘You can come and listen, if you like. Come on Saturday, after six o’clock. Emily’s going to the theatre – that’s a place that puts on plays,’ she added, in case Jacob didn’t know.

  Jacob showed no sign of having known or not. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

  Mrs Humble came in with a ladle, scooped milk from the bucket and poured it into Ruby’s jug. ‘The eggs are ready,’ she said dully.

  ‘Ta.’ Ruby looked anxiously at Jacob. ‘See you Saturday?’

  ‘You might.’ He still didn’t look up.

  Ruby sighed and made her way slowly back to Brambles, where Mrs Arkwright, the cook, was just hoisting her stout, perspiring body off her bike.

  ‘Got the eggs and milk,’ Ruby announced.

  ‘Have you, now,’ Mrs Arkwright replied, tight-lipped, before wheeling the bike round to the back. Ruby followed. The two didn’t get on. Months ago, on Ruby’s first visit to the kitchen, she had helpfully pointed out the ham currently boiling on the stove would taste better with the addition of a bay leaf – something she had learnt in the convent – and Mrs Arkwright immediately saw her as a threat, intent on taking over her job if she wasn’t careful. From thereon, Ruby was discouraged from entering the kitchen.

  The clea
ner, Mrs Roberts, was just as discouraging. She was old and weary and made it obvious that Ruby’s constant chatter got on her nerves.

  At least Ernest, the gardener, was friendly, even if he couldn’t hear a word she said, being totally deaf. He’d thrown a rope over one of the apple trees to make a swing.

  Ruby was badly in need of a friend. She found the countryside very dull. There was plenty to do, but she would have liked someone to do it with – she got no satisfaction from playing in the orchard by herself. Tennis was frustrating when there was no one to hit the ball back. She wondered if it was too late to agree to school, though she’d like to bet it was full of posh girls whom she wouldn’t like and she’d regret it straight away. If only Emily would make her go. There was a world of difference between being made to do something you didn’t want, and taking the decision yourself. If it turned out horrid you had someone else to blame.

  She went through the kitchen, deposited the eggs and milk on the table and made a face at Mrs Arkwright’s disapproving back.

  For the next half hour, she studied the dictionary in Emily’s late husband’s study. Edwin Dangerfield had been a solicitor specialising in conveyancing which meant transferring things, usually property – Ruby had looked it up. The dictionary was her favourite book and every day she learnt six useful words. Last week, she’d reached ‘B’. She was wondering if there was any point in remembering ‘bacterium’, when she heard Mrs Arkwright make her heavy way upstairs with her employer’s morning coffee. She put the book away and, as soon as the cook came down, she flew up the stairs to see Emily.

  ‘Oh, Gawd!’ Emily groaned when Ruby put her smiling face around the door. ‘You look inordinately cheerful and so bloody young! You make me feel at least a hundred. What’s it like outside? I told Arky not to open the curtains. My head’s splitting from last night.’ Last night, the Rowland-Graves had held a dinner party.

  ‘It’s nice outside, sunny and warm.’

  Emily winced. ‘I’d prefer it dull and cold.’

  ‘I thought we could go shopping,’ Ruby said hopefully as she sat on the edge of the bed.