The Little House Read online

  In the farmhouse Thomas stirred in his pram. He opened his eyes and saw the comforting canopy of the pram and the little dancing toys that Elizabeth had strung from one handle of the hood to another. He made a shape with his mouth and moved his lips. A sound was coming, slowly, he could make a sound. ‘Ma,’ he said. ‘Ma.’

  That evening Ruth sat between Agnes and Peter when they ate their supper in companionable silence. When she turned towards her room, Peter said quietly: ‘You did well today,’ and Agnes looked up and smiled.

  ‘It’s hard,’ Agnes said. ‘But Pete’s right. You did do well today. In the end.’

  Ruth was aching with tiredness. ‘I’ve never felt so bad in my life,’ she said.

  Agnes nodded. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to get all the bad stuff out before you feel better. Don’t you feel better at all?’

  Ruth paused and thought. Somewhere there was a sense that a lie had been challenged, that a truth had been told. She thought of the pleasure she used to have as a journalist on the rare occasions when she had caught someone out in a deception. She felt as if she liked knowing the truth, and that for most of her marriage with Patrick she had been lying about herself, and that others had been lying too.

  ‘Yes,’ she said honestly. ‘I do feel better. I’ll do some more tomorrow.’

  ‘Good,’ Pete said.

  Another woman started the session the next day. Ruth watched and listened as another person’s pain unfolded before her, and saw how George and the group gently encouraged her to speak. She was the daughter of a wealthy family; she was addicted to drugs. She trembled with desire for the comfort of drugs even as she spoke of the damage they had done to her. Ruth thought of her own longing for the easy sleep given to her by Amitriptyline and shivered. When the other woman dissolved into tears and then wrapped her arms around her own thin body, shivered a little, and said, ‘I’m done,’ Ruth spoke.

  ‘You were right yesterday,’ she said to them generally. ‘The little house is not my home, it belongs to Frederick and Elizabeth.’ She took a breath. ‘And Patrick is my husband, but he was their son before he ever met me, and he is more their son than he is my husband.’ She looked round. ‘I’m not doing this very well,’ she said with a new humility. ‘I don’t know how to be honest about this.’

  ‘You’re being honest,’ George said.

  ‘He’s theirs,’ Ruth said. ‘He likes being in their house best. He likes being with them more than he likes being with me.’ It was a sharp, bitter truth she was telling. ‘It’s her. She makes him comfortable in a way that I don’t know how to. It’s not just cooking and furniture. He acts like he belongs there. At our home he acts like he is on a visit.’ She thought for a moment. ‘A working visit,’ she said. ‘It’s not a very nice place to stay.’

  She choked on the words for a moment, recognizing the little house in that damning phrase. ‘They don’t love me particularly,’ she said. She had a strange sense like diving into completely unknown deep water, which might wash her in any direction at all. ‘They love me because Patrick brought me to them and said he wanted me. If he had brought someone else it would have been her. Up to a point, it could have been anyone. If we were to separate,’ her voice shook slightly, ‘if he found someone else, they would like her just as much.’ She paused. ‘Possibly more. They hardly see me. In all the time I have known them, they only really saw me when I was pregnant. They cared for me then because it was important that Patrick’s child was well. It wasn’t me they cared about. It never has been.’

  She could hear the words spilling out as if it were someone else talking from far away, saying things that reversed her life like a negative instead of a print, when everything that should be white is black, and everything that should be black is white. But she recognized what the voice was saying, and there was a clear, clean honesty at last in what the voice was describing. And everything that had puzzled Ruth and hurt her in the past – Patrick’s ‘helping’ in his mother’s kitchen before Sunday lunch, Patrick’s private walk with his father after lunch – all made sense now. These were the techniques they were forced to use to share the joy of their son’s presence, and divide the task of entertaining his wife. Each of them wanted time alone with him, each of them had to pay for that pleasure by spending time alone with her.

  ‘I am a real burden to them,’ she said brutally. ‘What they want is Patrick – and now Thomas too. But they had to have me. They found all sorts of ways of managing me. But I never really fitted in.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘And is this a new way?’ Peter asked.

  George shot him a bright, acute look. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Is this a new way to manage you? Put you in a loony bin?’

  She recoiled. ‘They didn’t do it,’ she said positively.

  Peter raised an eyebrow. ‘Who pays?’

  ‘You always ask that!’ she said impatiently. ‘Who pays! Who pays! There are other things more important than money, you know! It doesn’t always matter who pays!’

  He nodded. ‘But it tells you a lot,’ he observed. ‘Who is paying for you to be here?’

  ‘Who’s paying for you?’ she retorted like a child.

  ‘My company,’ he said easily. ‘They know that the way they work drove me crazy. They know that if they had worked well I wouldn’t have had a breakdown. They know they did it. So they’re putting it right. Is that what’s happening for you?’

  Ruth was about to deny it but she paused. She thought of the little house, which she had never wanted, and the baby, which she had conceived and carried against her will. She thought of the remorseless good nature of Elizabeth and Frederick and their view of life, which accepted no argument, or even dissent. She thought that she could never have fitted into the mould of their daughter-in-law, that in the end something had to crack. The distance between the flat in Bristol and the farmhouse outside Bath had preserved their mutual privacy, but once Ruth was on the doorstep she was bound to be scrutinized, and once she was scrutinized they would have to see that she did not do things as Elizabeth did them, and that if they were not done as Elizabeth did them then they would be bound to be wrong. And anyone persisting in being wrong would be crazy to behave in such a way – crazy, mad, insane.

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth said quietly. ‘They did it to me. They didn’t mean to do it to me, and there was the birth, and being really tired, and all the hormones jumbled up as well, and Thomas not sleeping – but yes, living next door to them has driven me completely insane, and now they are trying to put it right.’

  ‘So you’re a loony, in the loony bin,’ Peter said cheerfully.

  The rest of the group smiled. It was like some form of initiation. ‘Yes,’ Ruth said, joining at last. ‘I am a loony in a loony bin, and I am going to get sane and get out.’

  Patrick arrived at the clinic on Saturday night looking tired. Ruth normally met him at the door and they went to her bedroom. This Saturday she was not waiting at the door, and he had to make his own way down the hall to her room. A woman came out of a door and stared at him without smiling. Patrick recoiled. He was accustomed to the curious gaze of the audience upon a minor celebrity, but there was nothing of that sycophantic half-smile from the woman. She gazed at him in quite a different manner. As if he were not important, as if she did not like him.

  ‘Evening,’ Patrick said pleasantly. He could not comprehend dislike at all.

  She looked through him and beyond him. She did not want to see him, and by very little effort she could make him transparent.

  ‘Evening,’ Patrick said again, but with less certainty, and dived into the relative safety of Ruth’s bedroom.

  He was surprised to find it was empty. At other visits Ruth had waited for him at the front door, and when he was ready to go he had left her lying, weeping silently, on the bed. He had thought that there was nowhere else for her to be but waiting at the door for him, or lying on the bed and grieving for his absence. He had not seen the