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

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 thedressing 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 whatto 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