The House by Princes Park (36 page)

If she stayed in, what did the evening ahead have to offer? Lord knows what time Pixie would leave. She was another who was coming to regard the house as a second home. If Pixie stayed, Heather would have a face on because she didn’t like the way she monopolised Greta and the children wouldn’t go to bed while Clint was still there.

She shuddered. A night out with almost anyone was preferable. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I’ll need a while to get ready.’ She must look a wreck.

He jumped off the bed with alacrity. ‘I’ll wait downstairs.’

Ruby looked in the wardrobe for a dress fit for a night on the town but, as expected, could find nothing. Along with all the other things she hadn’t done in years, she hadn’t bought much in the way of clothes. The only thing faintly suitable was the fuchsia dress she’d bought for the
girls’ weddings which was badly creased. She took it downstairs to the kitchen, set up the ironing board, and was just finishing when Heather came in looking sulky.

‘When’s
she
going?’ She nodded towards the lounge from which Pixie’s shrill voice could be heard above the even shriller chatter of the children.

‘I don’t know, love. Soon, I expect. Clint’s bound to be tired.’

Heather frowned. ‘Why are you ironing your frock?’

‘Matthew’s taking me out,’ Ruby said with a happy grin. She couldn’t wait to get away. Tonight, her daughters’ needs seemed second to her own.

‘And you’re leaving us by ourselves?’

Ruby put the iron down with a crash. ‘For goodness’ sake, Heather, you’re twenty-six years old. Do you really expect your mother to stay in with you at your age? Greta’s been so much better lately.’

‘Oh, and I suppose that’s all that matters!’ Heather’s sternly pretty face went red. ‘Greta’s better and there’s no need to worry about me. Have you ever cared about how
I
feel? My husband died too, you know.’ She burst into tears. ‘The minute she’s better, Greta doesn’t want me any more.’

So
that’s
what the tears were all about. Greta had been surprisingly thoughtless since Pixie had appeared on the scene. And it was an undoubted fact, Ruby thought guiltily, that no one had been overly concerned how Heather felt over the past five years. All their attention had been focused on Greta.

‘I’ve always been sidelined,’ Heather sobbed. ‘Greta’s everyone’s pet.’

Ruby put her arms around her younger daughter. This was serious. Heather was a stalwart and hardly ever cried, not even when she was a child and had hurt herself. ‘She wasn’t Rob’s, was she, love? Nor is she mine. It’s just that she’s always been so frail, she’s needed more attention.’

‘Just because I’m strong, it doesn’t mean I don’t want people to love me.’

Matthew appeared in the doorway. Ruby shook her head over her daughter’s heaving shoulders and he gave a reluctant nod of understanding. The night on the town was off.

‘There’s something burning,’ he remarked.

It was Ruby’s frock, branded for ever with the shape of the iron and completely ruined.

A few weeks later, Heather asked her mother if she minded if she went abroad.

‘Of course not, love,’ Ruby said, pleased. ‘A holiday would do you the world of good.’

‘I didn’t mean on holiday, Mam. I meant to work.’

Ruby didn’t answer immediately. ‘How long for?’

‘I’m not sure. These two girls in the office are planning to hitch-hike around Europe getting jobs wherever they can. They might only be away weeks, but it could be months. They said I could go with them.’

‘That sounds awfully dangerous, Heather.’

‘It won’t be, not with the three of us.’

‘What about Daisy?’ She already knew what the answer would be.

Heather squirmed uncomfortably. ‘I can’t take her, can I? Anyroad, she won’t miss me. She’s fonder of you than she is of me. Oh, Mam!’ Her voice rose. ‘The idea of getting away from everything seems like heaven. I can’t stand it here any more. I had this stupid idea in me head that once Greta was herself again, it’d be like it was before, that we’d be best friends, go shopping together, to the pictures. But that’s not going to happen, is it? Pixie’s taken my place and things won’t ever be the same again.’

Greta was entirely unrepentant when Ruby accused her of behaving disgracefully with her sister. ‘You’ve driven her
away from home. Heather’s always thought the world of you, but all of a sudden you’ve dropped her like a hot brick.’

‘Huh!’ Greta snorted. ‘Our Heather’s always been far too possessive, so Pixie ses. She treats me like a child, not her older sister. In fact,
everyone
treats me like a child. No one seems to realise I’m a grown woman with two children.’

‘You’re not acting like a grown woman now. In fact, you never have.’ It was the first time ever that Ruby had snapped at the daughter who’d always been such an agreeable little thing. ‘I wouldn’t expect the twins to come out with such a load of rubbish. What’s got into you, Greta? You sound awfully hard.’

‘I’m going to be hard from now on. Pixie ses being soft gets you nowhere.’

‘Since when has Pixie been such a fount of wisdom. Oh!’ Ruby got up and left the room. What a stupid thing to say. What was the matter with everyone? Were her daughters having teenage tantrums ten years too late? Maybe it was time she indulged in a few tantrums herself.

Pixie Shaw turned out to be a fickle friend. Six months later Greta was dropped for someone else as unceremoniously as she’d dropped her sister. Ruby found it hard to be sympathetic. She would never forget the way Greta had behaved, and if she’d done it once, she could do it again.

Clint continued to come and play after school. Ruby was glad. Although Daisy didn’t appear to be missing her mummy, she clung to her gran as if worried she might also go away. Clint and Daisy got on well, though Ellie did her best to pry them apart.

‘Oh, Mam, when’s our Heather coming back?’ now became Greta’s constant cry.

‘Who knows!’ Postcards arrived reguarly, there was the occasional letter. Heather was washing dishes in France,
working as a chambermaid in an Italian hotel, cleaning lavatories in Germany, harvesting fruit in Spain. Over Christmas, she worked in a restaurant in a ski resort in Austria. ‘It doesn’t matter that I only speak English because almost everyone else is foreign.’ The card was posted in Innsbruck.

Ruby followed her progress in the atlas that had once been Max Hart’s. His name was printed childishly in red crayon inside the tattered cover. She thought about him whenever she opened it and wondered what had happened to the brave, young airman who’d made love to her so desperately that first Christmas of the war.

She’d never imagined that all these years later she’d still be living in his mother’s old house, doing the same things that she’d resented doing then. She’d had dreams, once, of doing other things, but every time there’d seemed a chance the dreams would come true, something happened to prevent it. Perhaps it would have helped if she’d known what the dreams were, but all she’d ever had was vague, airy-fairy ideas about studying something or other, starting her own business – the first woman-only decorating company, she remembered with a smile.

Heather came home the following summer. She’d been away nine months. When she reached Lime Street station, she telephoned to say she was about to catch the bus.

It was the most perfect of August days, brilliantly sunny, the air scented with flowers. The children were halfway through the summer holidays. Ruby left the front door open and every now and then someone would look to see if Heather was coming. It was her intention to let Daisy go first to welcome her mummy home.

‘She’s here,’ Moira shouted, but Ruby had scarcely turned round to look for Daisy, before Greta was running down the path, flinging her arms around her sister, kissing her, crying, ‘Oh, it’s so good to have you back.’

‘It’s good to
be
back, sis,’ replied a surprised and extremely delighted Heather.

A fortnight later, Greta started work as a receptionist with a firm of accountants in Victoria Street, not far from the solicitors where Heather had returned to work. They met each other at lunchtime, went shopping together on Saturday afternoons. They put their names down at night school for shorthand and typing so that one day they would get better-paid jobs.

Ruby wrote a long letter to Beth and told her of the events of the last few months. ‘Greta is her old self again and she and Heather are back in each others’ pockets, the best of friends. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. They’re not likely to meet another Larry and Rob, which means they’re stuck with each other, and I’m stuck in this bloody house. Sometimes, I feel like doing a Heather and disappearing for nine months, but fat chance! What would happen to poor little Daisy? I’m the only one who seems to notice she’s alive. There’s
always
a reason to stay.
Always
.’

She put down the pen, then took it up again and added another paragraph. ‘I shouldn’t complain. Despite everything, I’m happy. It’s a lovely house to be stuck in and I laugh far more than I cry. My granddaughters are a joy, my girls seem content, we’re not exactly poor. On the whole, life is good.’

Beth was also content at last. Things had marginally improved in Little Rock. She’d joined a black–white integration group, and had been appointed secretary, ‘Only because no one else wanted to do it.’ A year ago, she’d gone to Washington and had shaken hands with President Jack Kennedy only weeks before he was tragically killed and all America had gone into mourning. Daniel disapproved of her activities. ‘He wants black supremacy, not equality.’ They argued all the time. ‘But he
respects me at last. He’s suddenly realised I’ve got a brain, and my awful mother-in-law has now decided she quite likes me, after all.’

Jake was married and Beth would shortly become a grandmother. Ruby shivered. The years were racing by with frightening speed.

Olivia Appleby came in September, late one Monday morning when the children were at school and the girls at work. Ruby only saw her mother four or five times a year and then it was for just a few hours. Her children, her
other
children, she would stress, would want to know where she was if she stayed overnight.

‘They don’t know about you or your father. It’s a secret I’ve always kept close to my heart. I couldn’t bear to talk about him to anyone else, only you.’

It seemed to Ruby that, as the years took her further and further away from Tom O’Hagan, the more clearly Olivia remembered him. His face she described in specific detail, and she could repeat the conversations they had word for word. She was only now recalling long forgotten things, such as railway lines glinting, ‘like silver wire in the moonlight’, the strange smell – ‘it was just the other day I realised what it was, a mixture of night flowers and burnt flesh’.

When she came, Olivia asked if they could go into the garden. The day wasn’t particularly warm, a weak sun appeared occasionally from behind pearly grey clouds. They sat in deck chairs under the trees that were just beginning to turn gold, Olivia a melancholy figure in her pale, linen suit and large framed hat, smoking the inevitable cigarette.

‘I’ve brought you something,’ she said in a whispery voice that Ruby could hardly hear. She seemed tired today, washed out. ‘It’s in my bag in the house.’

‘Oh, what?’ Ruby tried to sound enthusiastic. She was
unable to describe exactly how she felt about her mother’s visits; a mixture of resentment, embarrassment, and guilt – mostly guilt. She didn’t doubt that Olivia would prefer to have found a far more loving daughter than herself.

‘It’s a matinée jacket, the only item of baby clothes I kept. I didn’t even buy it, Madge did, but I thought you’d like to have it as a memento.’

‘I’ll treasure it for ever.’

The colourless lips twisted in a smile. ‘My dear Ruby, you try so hard, but you’re not a good enough actress to deceive. You find me a pain, don’t you?’

‘Of course not!’ Ruby protested.

‘Yes, you do, dear. Not that I blame you. It was selfish of me to come bursting into your life nearly forty years too late, but once I’d discovered where you lived, I
had
to get to know Tom’s daughter.’ She looked curiously at Ruby. ‘Don’t you ever wonder how your life would have gone if he hadn’t been killed?’

Ruby shook her head. ‘It seems a waste of time.’

‘I’ve wasted an awful lot of time thinking about what might have been,’ Olivia said with a sigh. ‘I wish I were strong like you.’

‘It’s not a question of being strong.’ The circumstances of her birth had been entirely beyond her control. It was pointless trying to imagine how it would be had things gone differently. ‘It would have been nice, living in America, being part of a big family,’ she said, hoping this would please Olivia.

‘It would have been more than nice. It would have been perfect. I used to think of contacting Tom’s family, even going to see them. She smiled thinly. ‘I was too nervous, though. I would have felt like an intruder. Then I met my husband and by the time he died it was too late.’

‘Would you like more tea?’

‘I’d love some, dear.’

‘I won’t be a minute.’

‘Do you think you’ll ever get married again?’ Olivia enquired when Ruby returned.

‘I don’t know. It’s something else I don’t think about. I’ve got my hands full as it is.’

‘I’d like to see you settled before...’ she broke off. ‘It’s a pity that Chris turned out to be such a fool.’

‘A fool?’ Chris Ryan had always seemed eminently sensible.

‘Fancy giving you up for loving your girls too much! Did he expect to have taken their place in your heart?’ She angrily flicked the ash off her cigarette. ‘What conceit some men have. Have you heard from him since?’

‘I’ve seen him lots of times – he’s Ellie White’s brother. We’ve talked a bit, but never about anything intimate. He’s getting married soon, but I haven’t met the woman.’

‘What about that Matthew I seem to meet whenever I come to your house?’

Ruby laughed. ‘Why are you so anxious to see me married?’

‘I told you, I’d like to see you settled. Matthew seems very nice. He’s also very rich, so I’ve been given to understand.’