Read Online The House by Princes Park by Maureen Lee - Free Book Online Page A

shoes she already had. She’d said it in an attempt to persuade Emily to take her shopping. And it had worked better than she’d hoped. It was nice being on her own, able to go where she pleased, not having to keep retreating to the Adelphi Hotel for coffee and a cigarette, as Emily felt the need to do.
    Emerging from Lewis’s, she stood on the busy pavement, buffeted by the crowds, breathing in the choking fumes and the various smells that she liked better than those of the country, wondering where to go next. Not back to Kirkby, it was too early.
    She wandered along, starry-eyed, looking in shop windows – window-shopping Emily called it. Blacklers had a display of frocks and one in particular caught Ruby’s eye: navy blue with bold red spots, it had a frilly neck with a red bow and flared sleeves like little skirts, and was only one and elevenpence, about a quarter of what Emily usually paid. It was a lady’s frock, not a child’s, but Ruby was tall enough to wear it. She went inside and tried it on, twirling around in front of the cubicle mirror.
    ‘It looks the gear on you, luv,’ the assistant said.
    ‘I’ll take it.’ The frock was calf-length, whereas all her others came to just below the knees. She thought it made her look very adult. She handed the assistant half a crown which was sent whizzing high across the shop in a little tube attached to a wire towards a woman in a glass case who removed the tube and, a minute later, Ruby’s changewhizzed back with the bill. She never ceased to be facinated by this process.
    Outside again, she decided to wear the frock on Saturday in case Jacob came. She crossed the road, dodging through the traffic, and just missed being mown down by a tramcar with Number 1 and its destination, Dingle, on the front.
    ‘Dingle’. She said the word aloud. It sounded pretty, like something out of a fairy-tale. She noticed that the tram had stopped and people were getting on. It took barely a second for Ruby to decide to get on with them. She’d always wanted to ride on a tram. She climbed to the top and sat on the hard front seat, which gave a perfect view.
    The tram set off, clicking noisily along the lines, swerving round bends, breaking suddenly, when a queue appeared, waiting to board. Ruby clutched her parcels with one hand, and held on to the edge of her seat with the other, worried she might be thrown through the window as the tram rocked dangerously from side to side. They passed the soaring tower of the Protestant cathedral which had been started in the last century but still wasn’t finished.
    The conductor came. Ruby bought a penny ticket which would take her all the way to the Dingle. ‘Will you tell me when we get there?’ She’d heard him shouting the names of the stops.
    ‘You’ll know, luv. We don’t go no further than the Dingle.’
    The tram was rolling along a long, colourful and very busy road, full of traffic and lined with every conceivable sort of shop, interrupted frequently by little streets of terraced houses. Groups of men lounged outside the pubs that seemed to be on every corner, hands in pockets, idle. Women chatted eagerly over their bags of shopping,children hanging on to their skirts or chasing each other up and down the pavements, in and out of the shops.
    Ruby’s eyes were everywhere, taking it all in, the way the women were dressed, some almost as smart as Emily, some with shawls over their heads like poor Mrs Humble. There were men in suits and bowler hats, and jackletless men with braces showing, no collars to their shirts, tieless. She saw scrubbed, neatly dressed children, glowing with health, and felt a surge of pity when she saw the scabby-faced mites with bare, dirty feet who were much too thin.
    It was like being at the very hub of the universe and Ruby, clutching the seat, knew with utter certainty that this was where she belonged: amid people, noise, and city smells. She felt at home in the clutter of the busy streets in a way