The Little House Read online

  There was a silence. Frederick cleared his throat. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Everyone has a right to one mistake.’

  Ruth’s face lightened with sudden joy. ‘Frederick, you’re so straight!’ she exclaimed with pleasure. ‘Thank you.’

  Elizabeth recoiled slightly at Ruth’s easy use of his Christian name. ‘Of course, my dear,’ she said. ‘You know we wanted to help you with Thomas and we’ve been glad to do everything we can. I’m so pleased that you are home and completely cured.’

  Ruth hesitated at the word ‘cured’ with its implication of illness and a suffering patient, but she let it go. She was learning quickly that the outside world had retained its own codes and language even while she had been changing.

  ‘I’ll be a good mother to Thomas, and a good wife to Patrick,’ she promised. ‘And a good daughter-in-law to you.’ She looked from Frederick to Elizabeth.

  ‘Well, I’ll drink to that,’ Frederick said, robustly closing the conversation. He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to little Ruth coming home and looking like our pretty girl again.’

  The others raised their glasses to her, and Ruth – blushing slightly and smiling at the compliment – did not detect that she had been silenced.

  ‘Lunch is served,’ Elizabeth said, seeing Frederick had finished his sherry. ‘Only a casserole, I’m afraid. I didn’t know how long the journey would take you.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Ruth said.

  They ate in the dining room. The weather had turned wintry, and halfway through the meal Elizabeth put on the lights. The sky outside the windows was dark and brooding, and there was a sudden scud of rain on the panes.

  ‘I wanted to walk home,’ Ruth said in disappointment. ‘We’ll have to drive.’

  A sharp look of complicity passed between Elizabeth and her son. But neither of them spoke.

  ‘When will Thomas wake?’ Ruth asked. ‘I so want to see him.’

  Elizabeth glanced at her little gold watch. ‘In about half an hour,’ she said. ‘If he doesn’t wake, you can pick him up. He sleeps for about an hour and a half morning and afternoon now. Any more than that and he doesn’t go off at night.’

  ‘You’ll have to take me through his day,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m completely out of practice. And Patrick said you thought he might have had a tooth coming! I couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘It was a false alarm,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I don’t know how I came to mistake it. But one little cheek was scarlet and so hot! It must have been a little fever he had. It was all over within the day.’

  ‘Did you call the doctor?’

  Elizabeth smiled. ‘There was no need. I just gave him plenty to drink and kept an extra-special eye on him.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘And what’s his weight?’

  Elizabeth was vague. ‘Oh! I haven’t taken him to the clinic,’ she said. ‘Not since you went away.’

  ‘But you’re supposed to!’ Ruth exclaimed. ‘Every week!’

  Elizabeth’s smile was a little fixed. ‘They only weigh them and measure them,’ she said. ‘I could see myself that he was thriving.’

  ‘But they’re supposed to see him …’

  ‘It’s not so important after six weeks,’ Elizabeth said soothingly. ‘I’d have taken him if he’d gone off his food or anything. But he was obviously so well …’

  ‘I took him every week,’ Ruth exclaimed.

  Elizabeth had flushed slightly; she glanced at Patrick.

  ‘Well, Mother didn’t,’ he said flatly. ‘You can start again, now that you’re back.’

  Ruth looked from one to another, trying to read their expressions. ‘I don’t understand why not?’ she said, looking at Elizabeth. ‘Why didn’t you take him?’

  ‘I think I have explained,’ Elizabeth said. Her voice was slightly higher with irritation.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Ruth said again stubbornly.

  ‘I was embarrassed,’ Elizabeth said, forced into honesty. ‘I thought they would ask where his mother was, and I didn’t want to say that she was mentally ill, that she was in a home. I thought it would go down in his records if I said that, and he would be branded, for the rest of his life, as a boy whose mother was mad.’

  Ruth gasped. Frederick turned his attention to the rim of his water glass, and examined it minutely.

  ‘They wouldn’t write such a thing,’ Ruth stammered. ‘And I was not mad … and in any case, it’s in the notes, in my notes. I had postpartum depression, there’s nothing shameful in it …’

  ‘It’s in your notes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But I saw no reason for it to be in Thomas’s notes too. I saw no reason for him to have that mark against him. I didn’t want them to know unless it was absolutely essential. And it was not absolutely essential. I didn’t want the nurse to know, or the health visitor, or any passing social worker. I believe that private things should be kept private.’

  ‘So where does everyone think I have been?’ Ruth demanded.

  ‘On holiday,’ Elizabeth replied concisely. ‘Brighton. A health farm.’

  Ruth gasped. ‘But surely no one would believe such nonsense! I’m not the sort of woman who goes for a month to a health farm!’

  Elizabeth shrugged and glanced at Patrick, handing the whole difficult conversation over to him.

  ‘What did you want us to say?’ he asked. ‘With my position, the press would have been onto me, wanting to know about you, and about Thomas. The social workers might have wanted to take Thomas into care. We had to think all this through, and we did the best we could. It’s a bit rich coming back, all full of good intentions, and then telling us we’ve done everything wrong.’

  Ruth recoiled at once from his anger. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be critical.’

  ‘Well, you were critical,’ Patrick said. ‘And to Mother who has worked to make Thomas happy night and day since you went off, and keep the family together.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

  ‘And it’s all very well saying it should all have been done differently,’ Patrick continued, his voice rising. ‘But we might as well say that you shouldn’t have given in to it. If you felt ill you should have told us. Taking handfuls of Amitriptyline and going out and getting drunk wasn’t quite the way to cope with it.’

  Ruth could feel her heart beating faster, and tears coming to her eyes. She had forgotten about the pub, about her car abandoned in the parking lot, about being drunk and drugged in front of her in-laws. She looked down at her hands clenched tight in her lap and felt her cheeks burn.

  ‘If there’s going to be any criticism …’ Patrick started ominously.

  ‘Steady the Buffs,’ Frederick said simply. ‘Water under the bridge, I think. Spilt milk.’ He looked at Elizabeth. ‘What about some coffee, darling?’

  She rose automatically and started clearing the plates. Ruth got up too. ‘Let me help.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Elizabeth said coldly. She cleared the plates in silence and took them to the kitchen. Ruth sat at the table like a naughty child, her eyes downcast.

  ‘You’ll never believe the weather we’ve had,’ Frederick said kindly. ‘I think it’s rained every day since the middle of November. All my late roses were completely washed out, and the river has flooded further down the valley.’

  Ruth took a sip of water. ‘Really?’

  ‘The lane was running with water last Wednesday,’ Frederick said. ‘I warned them, when they wanted to build that new estate on the lower levels – you can work with Nature but you can’t beat her. They bricked in the riverbank, and now it’s completely overflowed and there will be water all through the ground floors of those new houses if it doesn’t stop raining soon.’

  ‘What a shame,’ Ruth said automatically. She pressed her lips together to restrain the sobs, holding in her anger and her pain.

  Elizabeth came in with the coffee and put a cup precisely before each of them, cream and brown sugar in the centre of the table.

  ‘Yes, you can wo