The Little House Read online

  ‘I don’t know the jargon!’

  ‘No,’ Clare agreed.

  ‘I’m saying she’s unstable!’

  ‘If you mean neurotic – she’s not that either.’

  ‘She needs help,’ Patrick insisted.

  ‘I think she is getting help,’ Clare said mildly. ‘Regular therapeutic help.’

  ‘She needs more than that,’ Patrick said. ‘She needs supervision. I want you to tell her that she would be best looked after at home with our family.’

  ‘No,’ Clare said decidedly. ‘I cannot tell her any such thing.’

  ‘But I just explained …’

  ‘You explained why you think she should be looked after at home by your family. But I don’t have enough facts to judge.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Indeed, on what I have seen of your wife, and on what you have told me, I think she would do better to live in her own house.’

  Patrick felt his temper flare. ‘I have told you she would do better to stay where she is! But you won’t listen!’

  There was a complete silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Patrick said. ‘I’m under terrible stress. I must ask you to overlook that. I can’t tell you how worried and unhappy I have been about her … and it has been months of worry.’

  ‘Of course,’ Clare said pleasantly.

  ‘I just want to know that she and the baby are safe,’ Patrick said in his gentlest, most engaging voice, ‘while I am at work and cannot keep an eye on them.’

  ‘I am certain that she is perfectly safe with the baby,’ Clare said. ‘I am convinced that she can look after him perfectly well. And if there were to be any trouble at all, then you would have plenty of warning, and time to devise strategies for coping with any emerging problem.’

  ‘I would feel easier if she were being cared for by my mother,’ Patrick said.

  Clare nodded. ‘Perhaps you would,’ she said. ‘But that is not the issue, as I understand it.’

  ‘I would prefer it if she stayed with my parents,’ Patrick said again, as if emphasis could achieve his wishes.

  ‘I think you should follow her preference in this,’ Clare said levelly. ‘Has she said what she would like to do?’

  ‘No,’ Patrick lied quickly. ‘No. Not at all.’

  Clare heard the lie at once. ‘Then I suggest you ask her,’ she said simply.

  ‘Will you advise her to stay with my parents, if she asks you tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ Clare said firmly. ‘I will advise her to do what she wants to do. I think her best interests lie in determining her own life.’

  ‘Thank you for talking to me then, Ms Leesome,’ Patrick said. He emphasized the ‘Ms’ slightly; it made him feel better. It named her as an eccentric, as a feminist, as a troublemaker. ‘I assume that this conversation has all been in confidence?’

  ‘Very well,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Patrick said. ‘Good-bye.’ He waited until he heard the click of the telephone before he crashed the handset down into the receiver. ‘Snotty bitch,’ he said aloud. ‘Snotty know-all bitch.’

  Thirteen

  DAVID WAS LATE at the Black Bull pub, and when he arrived Ruth was sitting at a corner table with a mineral water before her. He waved to her, bought himself a pint of lager, and then threaded his way through the tables, which were busy with shoppers and businessmen eating sandwiches.

  ‘You look fabulous!’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.’ He sat down beside her and scanned her face. ‘Lost weight,’ he commented. ‘Pink cheeks, bright eyes – looks like a good place, your clinic.’

  ‘Health farm,’ Ruth said promptly. ‘Cold showers and cucumber face masks. Actually, that’s what they’re telling everyone.’

  David looked puzzled. ‘What?’

  ‘Patrick’s family – well, his mother mostly – when anyone asked after me she told them I had gone to a health farm to recuperate from the effort of childbirth. Just as well for her that I’ve come back looking well.’

  ‘Why does she tell people that?’

  Ruth giggled, and it was her old reckless giggle. ‘The shame, darling! She seems to think that I was completely bonkers and we must make sure the neighbours don’t know.’

  David nodded. ‘The stigma of mental illness,’ he said pompously. ‘I shall do a programme on it.’

  ‘It’s a real problem for her,’ Ruth said more seriously. ‘And it’s funny because she was the one to see that things were going badly, and she did the most to help. But when it comes to naming names she’d rather look the other way. According to her I was overtired, and now I am nicely rested.’

  David nodded. ‘She was really concerned about you when I met her.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘She is nice,’ she said. ‘And she’s all-of-a-piece, you know? In the way that modern women aren’t. She knows her job – which is home and support and child care – and she does it really well. She has no ideas about feminism or freedom or career or any of that stuff. And it makes her very powerful. The home is completely hers, and it is run without a hitch. She aims at perfection and she gets very close.’

  David nodded. ‘The sort of woman a successful man needs to have behind him. Would she marry me?’

  She took a sip and shook her head. ‘Oh, no! Women like her are very careful with their choices. They know that they are choosing a career as well as a husband. They choose a successful man, and then they get behind him. I can’t see you getting the gold-spoon treatment in the same way.’

  ‘And what about her husband? Your father-in-law?’

  Ruth smiled. ‘He’s rather a sweetie,’ she said. ‘He’s very quiet compared to her. But he’s solid, you know? He’s dependable. I could tell you what he thinks about every single thing. You know where you are with him.’

  ‘And where are you with him?’

  A shadow crossed her face. ‘Well, I was Patrick’s girlfriend, which made me a pretty young thing …’ almost unconsciously she had mimicked Frederick’s staccato speech. David grinned, hearing it. ‘And then I was his wife, so I became the daughter-in-law, outside comment, above reproach. And then I had Thomas, so I was a lovely girl, and a wonderful mother. And then I had my breakdown, so I was a jolly poor show. And now I’m better, and I think I’m becoming a plucky little thing.’

  David laughed aloud. ‘A plucky little thing?’

  She grinned at him. ‘Yes. But you can see why I like him so much. You don’t have to do much to earn his approval. You just have to stay inside a boundary of good behaviour – and it’s quite a wide boundary.’

  ‘But what if you crossed it?’ David asked curiously. ‘What if you did drugs, or had an affair, or abandoned the baby and Patrick? What would happen then?’

  ‘Oh I’d drop off the edge of the world!’ she said gaily. ‘I’d become a jolly poor show, and he’d never talk about me ever again.’

  David nodded. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘It’s a world I know nothing about. My family don’t have that sort of confidence.’ He thought for a moment and then he smiled. ‘And we bear grudges,’ he said. ‘Nobody drops out of our world for bad behaviour; we resurrect them every Christmas and have the quarrel all over again.’

  She chuckled. A waiter came to the table and they ordered two rounds of sandwiches.

  ‘So what are you doing today, without Thomas and all?’ David asked.

  ‘I see a therapist on Thursdays,’ Ruth said. He liked how she told him without hesitation. She had caught none of her mother-in-law’s shame. ‘She’s just round the corner from here.’

  ‘What d’you do?’

  ‘Nothing really. From the outside it looks completely boring. I talk, and she listens, and every now and then she says something. And it’s completely illuminating, and I see things in a quite different way.’

  He shifted uneasily. ‘I’d hate you to change.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m changing already,’ she said. ‘There were always two of me – the confident one at work, and the dependent baby-me