The Little House Read online

  ‘He can stay here with us.’

  ‘What does Patrick say?’

  ‘He agrees.’

  Ruth lay back on the pillows. ‘Where is Patrick?’ she asked at length.

  ‘He’s dressing Thomas in the nursery. He’ll come and see you in a minute, when you’re freshened up.’

  ‘How long do I have to go away for?’

  Elizabeth did not show that she had heard the defeated acquiescence in Ruth’s voice. ‘Not long,’ she said reassuringly. ‘And you can come home whenever you wish. But we all want to see you rested and well again.’

  ‘What did happen yesterday? How did I get here?’

  ‘You took too many of your pills, and you met David at the pub, and you drank too much. You passed out and he brought you here. You left the keys in your car and it was stolen overnight. We had to put you to bed. You slept all afternoon and all night.’

  Ruth felt a deep corrosive sense of shame. ‘David brought me?’

  ‘He had to carry you out of the pub.’

  ‘And Patrick was here?’

  ‘He had come for Thomas. None of us knew where you were. You just walked out of the little house; you left it unlocked.’

  Ruth dropped her head, her hair tumbled forward hiding the deep red of her cheeks. ‘My car …’

  ‘We’ve reported it missing. It may just have been taken by joyriders, it may turn up.’ Elizabeth hesitated. ‘It won’t be insured since you left the keys in it. I’m afraid you may have lost it.’

  Ruth pushed the tray to one side, Elizabeth put the bottle of pills on the bedside table, and took the tray away. ‘Be brave, darling,’ she said gently. ‘Dr Fairley is coming at ten. If he thinks he can help you, he has a wonderful house in Sussex where they can give you lots of rest, and make you well again. You can come back to Patrick and Thomas and make a fresh start.’

  Ruth turned her head away.

  ‘Unless you’d rather not …’ Elizabeth suggested.

  Ruth turned back. ‘Rather not what?’

  ‘Unless you’d rather start again somewhere else?’ Elizabeth said gently. ‘Your career is so promising … you could start a new life …’

  ‘Move away?’

  ‘If you wanted.’

  ‘With Patrick and Thomas?’

  Elizabeth met her eyes. The two women looked at each other. Elizabeth was serene and powerful, Ruth looked sick. ‘No, Patrick and Thomas will stay here,’ Elizabeth said firmly.

  Ruth nodded. ‘I see.’

  She said nothing more. It was as if Elizabeth’s calm assurance had set the tone of the whole day. Ruth hardly said a word to Patrick when he came in to see her, and answered the doctor in monosyllables. She did not ask for Thomas, who was, in any case, out for a long walk with his grandfather. Dr Fairley had come in his large comfortable car, and offered to drive her to Springfield Hall at once. Patrick produced a suitcase already packed, and put it in the boot. Elizabeth gave Dr Fairley an envelope containing a cheque with the fees for the first month. Ruth, wrapped in one of Elizabeth’s pale camel-hair coats, walked to the car and got in. She saw her feet going down the steps but she had no awareness of the hardness of the paving stones.

  ‘See you soon, darling,’ Patrick said, bending down to the car. ‘I’ll come down and see you at the weekend. And you can phone me.’

  ‘Will you be at home?’ she asked, meaning the little house.

  ‘Yes, I’ll stay here,’ he said, meaning the farmhouse. ‘It’ll be easier, and I’ll see more of Thomas.’

  She nodded.

  ‘When you’re better I’ll bring him down to see you,’ Patrick promised. ‘And soon you’ll be home.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ Ruth said dully.

  ‘Dr Fairley can deal with all of that,’ Patrick said reassuringly.

  ‘But if I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ Ruth’s brain was working slowly but stubbornly, through the haze of hangover and Amitriptyline, ‘if I don’t know what’s wrong, then how can I get better?’

  Patrick leaned forward and kissed her cheek. ‘Trust Dr Fairley,’ he urged. ‘He’s had a lot of experience. Mother says he’s the best in his field. Mother and Father are paying a packet for you to stay there. He’ll make you well again.’

  The doctor got into the car beside Ruth, and started the engine. Patrick stepped back and carefully shut the door. ‘I’ll call tonight,’ he said. ‘And every night. See you at the weekend!’

  Ruth stared past him, unseeing.

  The doctor put the car in gear and they moved smoothly off, down the drive. Ruth could just see, at the side of the house, Frederick pushing the pram around and around the garden, rocking Thomas to sleep and waiting for her to be gone. They had not wanted her to see her baby, in case she made a scene. Ruth lay back against the comfortable headrest and closed her eyes. She would never have been able to make a scene in Elizabeth’s house, she thought.

  ‘All right?’ Dr Fairley asked. He glanced sideways at her and saw that her eyes were shut but that tears were trickling from under her closed eyelids and running down her cheeks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything any more.’

  Nine

  AT NINE WEEKS, Thomas was too young to cry for his mother, but Elizabeth thought that he had noticed her absence. He was placid and happy, quick to laugh or coo with pleasure, but his brightest vitality seemed to drain away during the month that his mother was away.

  Elizabeth tried to ignore it, and she never mentioned it to either Frederick or Patrick. But she could not deny that – though he slept through the night, and ate well – Thomas was quieter and less joyful than when his mother had been, however incompetently, taking care of him. Elizabeth found herself strangely offended by his loyalty. She would have preferred him to forget Ruth as soon as he ceased to see her. But there was something loving and stubborn about little Thomas, and Elizabeth could see that when a door opened and he turned his head to the noise, a light died from his face when someone else came in, when it was not his mother.

  Elizabeth felt, rather resentfully, that she was being haunted by Ruth. Her daughter-in-law remained a worry. Patrick telephoned her every evening at seven o’clock, and drove cross-country to Sussex every Saturday morning to spend the day with her.

  He came back from these trips tired and silent, and his father made a habit of sitting with him late on Saturday night, with a bottle of malt whisky and a jug of still spring water between the two of them in companionable silence.

  On Sunday morning they all went to church and came back to Elizabeth’s Sunday roast, then in the afternoon they took Thomas for a walk. Elizabeth had bought a backpack for Thomas; Patrick would put it on, and Elizabeth lift Thomas onto his father’s back. With the dog at their heels they would walk across the fields and up to the hills, Frederick, Elizabeth, Patrick, and little Thomas, his head bobbing with every step.

  He often fell asleep on these walks, and would sometimes sleep all the way home, not stirring even when the pack was carefully set down on the sofa while Elizabeth made tea. Then they would read the Sunday papers – the Sunday Telegraph for Frederick, who mistrusted the sports coverage in any other paper, and the Sunday Times for Elizabeth and Patrick.

  When Thomas had slept for an hour, Elizabeth would wake him for his supper. He was no longer given jars of baby food or powdered mixes. Elizabeth had painstakingly cooked, puréed, and frozen a wide selection of adult meals to make tiny dinners just for him. Patrick always bathed him on a Sunday night, and put him to bed. When Patrick came downstairs, leaving Thomas asleep, Elizabeth would have a large gin and tonic ready for him, in a crystal goblet packed with sliced lime and ice.

  Patrick felt as if he had never left home, never married, but had somehow been miraculously joined by the next son and heir. He enjoyed being a father to Thomas in a way that he had not experienced before. Under Ruth’s care Thomas had been a problem, his sleeping – or lack of it – was a continual unspoken ar