The Little House Read online

  For a moment he looked as if he might refuse.

  ‘I really want to,’ Ruth prompted.

  ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘It just seems a bit odd.’

  They walked in step for a few paces. ‘It is odd,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s not odd going to look at it, it’s odd that we don’t live in it.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Patrick discouragingly. ‘Doesn’t Thomas love his bouncy thing!’

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth said. ‘But we don’t have a hook for it in our house, and they have a hook in the farmhouse.’

  ‘We can put up a hook!’ Patrick said bracingly. ‘There’s no problem with that!’

  Ruth hesitated. The wine she had drunk at lunchtime, and the example of Miriam’s open defiance of her mother, made her feel reckless. She felt ready to force the issue. ‘Or we could not bother,’ she said. ‘We could stay in the farmhouse forever and never live in our own house.’

  He checked. ‘What?’

  ‘You obviously don’t want to go, and your mother obviously wants us to stay there. Shall we decide now that we all live together, and you and I never have a home of our own again?’

  ‘No,’ Patrick said instantly. ‘No one lives like that. It would look so odd … like Argentinian peasants or something.’

  ‘It is odd,’ Ruth agreed, stretching her strides to keep pace with his.

  ‘And I like our house,’ Patrick said as the trim front garden came into view around the curve of the drive. ‘I like living here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth.

  ‘The stay in the farmhouse has just dragged on a bit,’ Patrick said thoughtfully. ‘First you being ill, and then I was worried about you, and then I really wanted to move at Christmas, but the heating was off … it’s just been one thing after another.’

  ‘I can’t make us move,’ Ruth said simply. They had reached the garden gate, and she swung around to face him. Her face was flushed from the walk, her eyes bright and clear. He felt a sudden straightforward desire for her. In that moment he stopped seeing her as a sick woman, as a mad woman. Suddenly he saw her for what she was: young, sexual, desirable. ‘I can’t make us move,’ Ruth said again. ‘It has to be your decision. I’ve done all I can, and I can’t make it happen. If you don’t put your foot down, we’re going to be there forever.’

  She turned from him and went to the front door. ‘I don’t have a key,’ Patrick said.

  She took it out of her pocket and opened the door. ‘No,’ she said. ‘This is your mother’s key. You have to decide, Patrick, whether this is their house or ours. You have to decide whether we will live here or not.’

  He stepped into the hall. The dry, dusty smell of an unused house was like a reproach.

  Ruth went ahead of him into the sitting room. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she said. ‘A Christmas drink in our own home.’

  He smiled, attracted by the clandestine sense of an assignation. ‘I’ll see what we have.’

  Ruth struck a match and put it to the kindling in the grate. At once the firelight made the room look warm and friendly. She drew the curtains against the red setting sun.

  Patrick came back with a bottle of port and a couple of glasses. ‘The cupboard’s a bit bare,’ he said. ‘This is all I could find.’

  Ruth smiled at him, her face lit by firelight, the room warming up. There was an intimacy about being alone in their house, like a newly married couple when the last of the wedding guests have finally gone, and the bawdy jokes are over, and there is silence.

  ‘It’s silly,’ Patrick remarked. ‘I’d forgotten what a nice house this is.’

  He poured the wine and looked around. ‘We’ll move back, shall we? As soon as the heating is fixed?’

  Ruth raised her glass to him. ‘And start again,’ she said as if it were a toast. ‘I’m sorry that it went wrong before, Patrick. I am quite different now.’

  He sat beside her on the sofa and kissed her gently. ‘It’s been a tough year,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t all the help I should have been. We’ll do better next year.’

  She turned to him and Patrick put down his glass and kissed her again. With a sense of delightful discovery Patrick slid his hands under her blouse and felt her warm, soft skin. Ruth sighed with relief and welcomed Patrick into her body.

  Elizabeth knew.

  As they came in the door, pink-cheeked and breathless from walking quickly home up the darkening drive, she took one swift look from one to another and knew that they had been to their own house and made love.

  Ruth saw the glance and had an immediate impression of Elizabeth’s disapproval. For a moment she thought that the older woman was shocked at her son’s sexuality – sneaking out in the afternoon like a teenager – but then she had a sense of something deeper and more serious, something like envy, something like a challenge.

  ‘You were a long time,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’m surprised you could see your way home.’

  Patrick looked embarrassed. ‘It’s only dusk,’ he said.

  ‘We went to our house,’ Ruth said. She looked Elizabeth in the eye. ‘We lit the fire in the sitting room and had a glass of port to celebrate Christmas. It was lovely.’

  Elizabeth smiled but she looked strained. ‘I’m surprised the chimney drew,’ she said. ‘It’s been cold for so long.’

  They went into the sitting room. Thomas was on his play mat on the carpet; when he saw his mother he crowed with delight, and his arms and legs waved. Ruth picked him up and turned to her mother-in-law, with her son’s head against her cheek.

  ‘We’ve missed it,’ she said firmly. ‘We’ll move back next week, as soon as the heating is fixed.’

  Elizabeth slid a conspiratorial glance at Patrick, but he did not see. He was looking at his wife and son. ‘I’ll go over tomorrow and put up a hook for his bouncer,’ he said.

  On Boxing Day it somehow turned into a family walk. They all went to the little house together. Elizabeth and Frederick walked down the drive with them, Ruth pushing Thomas in his pram. ‘We’ll bring Thomas away when he’s had enough,’ Frederick said.

  ‘It’s too cold for him down there without heating,’ Elizabeth remarked. ‘Heaven knows how we managed in the old days. The only warm rooms ever were the kitchen and the drawing room. The stairs and the hall were draughty and cold, and the bedrooms were like ice.’

  Frederick nodded. ‘I used to have chilblains every winter when I was a child,’ he said. ‘And chapped hands. You hardly ever hear about chilblains now.’

  Patrick was half listening. ‘It would make quite a nice little film,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The medical side of recent progress. People not getting chilblains any more because the houses are warmer, but getting more asthma.’

  Elizabeth laughed and slipped her hand in her son’s arm. ‘Fleas,’ she said. ‘If you dare to mention them. Now that we have centrally heated houses fleas don’t die off in winter. The vet was telling me they breed all the year round. It’s a real problem. There’s a mini epidemic.’

  ‘And house mites,’ Frederick said cheerfully, coming up on the other side of Elizabeth. ‘That’s the cause of your extra asthma if you ask me. Not enough fresh air.’

  Ruth, lagging behind, pushing the pram, saw the three of them, walking in step in the happy unity that seemed so easy for them to achieve. But it was Elizabeth and not Patrick who glanced back towards her and called, ‘What about you, Ruth? Are you one of the post-central heating children? Or was your home cold?’

  Ruth shook her head. Her aunt’s house had never been a home, and she could scarcely remember her childhood home. But then she had a sudden sharp recollection of her home in the States, before the death of her parents. They had rented a small white clapboard house, cool in summer and snug in winter. When Ruth was in bed at night, she could hear the comforting gabble from her parents’ television downstairs. The warmth from the furnace in the cellar spread through the house. In autumn her father used to put up storm windows and go up on the roof to check the shingles. Her mothe