London Transports by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online

How could she or I think that any skirt of hers would fit me?
    She opened the door of a cheaply furnished, but neat and bright, apartment. Two small and very pig-tailed girls sat on a big cushion looking at a big colour telly.
    “This is Miss that I work with,” said Rita.
    “Hallo, Miss,” they chorused, and went back to looking at bionic things on the screen.
    We walked into a bedroom also very neat and bright, and Rita opened a cupboard. She took out what looked like two yards of material with a ribbon around the top.
    “It’s a wrap-around skirt, it fits any size,” she said. I got out of the dirty dishcloth I was wearing, and wrapped it around, and tied the ribbon. It looked fine.
    “Thank you very much indeed, Rita,” I said, trying at the same time to take in every detail for the telling tomorrow in the pub, while Rita would be sitting at her desk. There were big prints on the wall, Chinese girls, and horses with flying manes. The bed had a beautiful patchwork quilt, it looked as if it could sleep four people comfortably.
    “Are those your little girls?” I asked, a question brought on indirectly by the bed I suppose.
    “They’re Martie and Anna, they live here,” said Rita.
    I realized immediately she hadn’t told me whether they were her daughters, her sisters, her nieces, or her friends. And I also realized that I wasn’t going to ask any more.
    “You can leave the other skirt,” said Rita and then, for the very first time volunteering some information, she added, “Andrew has quite enough money to pay to have it dry-cleaned, and I’ll bring it into the office for you on Friday.”
    Oh, so he was called Andrew, the young beautiful boy, and he had plenty of money, oh ho. I was learning something anyway. I didn’t dare to ask her whether he was her boyfriend. It wasn’t that Rita was superior or distant, but she drew a shutter down like someone slamming a door, and didn’t find it rude or impolite. It left you feeling rude and impolite instead.
    I thanked her for the skirt. Martie and Anna said “Goodbye, Miss” without removing their eyes from the screen. Somehow
they
seemed so much at ease with the goings-on that it made me very annoyed with myself for feeling diffident because this was a black house and I was a white woman. Who creates these barriers anyway? I argued with myself, and, taking a deep breath, said to Rita on the stairs:
    “Why do they wear their hair in those tight little pigtails? They’d be much prettier if their hair was loose.”
    “Maybe,” Rita shrugged, as if I had asked her why she didn’t move the coffee percolator to another table in the office to give herself more room. “Yeah maybe,” she agreed.
    “Do you like them with their hair all tied up like that?” I asked courageously.
    “Oh it has nothing to do with me,” she said, and we were out on the street and into the pub again.
    Trudy had a face like thunder when I came back but she greeted Rita pleasantly enough, and asked her if she would like to join us.
    Rita shook her head. “This drunken baby has to be taken to bed,” she said enigmatically, and she frog-marched the handsome Andrew out the door without a good-bye. I ran to the window to see whether she was taking him up to her own flat, but they had gone too quickly. There was no way of knowing whether they had gone in her door or turned the corner, and I didn’t really want to run out into the street to check.
    Trudy wasn’t very interested in my speculation.
    “I don’t suppose I should have been so surprised to see her,” I reflected. “I knew she lived in Notting Hill. This is a very black area around here, too, I suppose.”
    “Quite a few white people live here as well,” said Trudy acidly, and I forgot that she had just paid what seemed like an enormous sum of money for a very small, very twee house around the corner.
    The others were interested at lunchtime the next day. They wanted to know what Andrew looked like.
    “Like that