The Little House Read online

  There was a brief silence. Ruth blinked. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever learn to do it like her,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ Patrick said frankly. ‘And there’s no point in us trying to be like them. We’ll have to do things our way. I was a fool to wake him this morning anyway. If he’d stayed asleep we would have had loads of time.’

  Ruth poured boiling water on two tea-bags in mugs, added milk, and flipped the wet bags into the bin. ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘I married you,’ Patrick replied stoutly. ‘I could have chosen to stay at home and have real tea in a bone-china cup and a cooked breakfast every day of my life.’

  ‘But don’t you want both?’ Ruth asked.

  She saw it – the little flicker of greed that crossed his face, and his instantly smoothing it away. The momentary acknowledgment that yes, indeed, he did want someone to mother his child, and to be his lover, and to cook for him and care for him to the standard of his mother’s house.

  ‘No,’ Patrick said, as if he meant it.

  Ruth smiled. ‘Good,’ she said, as if she believed it.

  It seemed to take all morning to get Thomas dressed, and then she had to entertain him in one room after another, as she tried to get the household chores done. He had learned now to reach for something and grasp at it, and his favourite game was to be propped by pillows and offered one object after another to hold and then negligently drop. In the bathroom, while she dutifully cleaned the toilet, the sink, and the bath, Ruth passed him toothbrushes, flannels, and a box of dental floss. Thomas accepted them with pleasure and dropped them all, and looked around for something more. Ruth handed him the little duck from his bath toys, and his sponge. She was leaning over the bath, rinsing the suds away with the shower attachment, when she heard a muffled ominous choke.

  She spun around. Thomas had crammed most of the sponge into his mouth but was quite incapable of getting it out again. Yellow sponge bulged from his lips, his eyes were staring, his face flushed as he struggled for air.

  ‘My God!’ Ruth said and flew at him. She pulled the sponge from his mouth and Thomas whooped for breath, and then smiled. The incident had not disturbed him at all.

  ‘I could have killed him,’ Ruth said. ‘Oh, God.’

  She snatched him up and held him tight, and they walked downstairs together. Ruth saw her hand on the banister and it trembled so much that she could hardly feel the wood beneath her fingertips. She took Thomas into the sitting room and laid him on his back on the sofa, so that she could look into his inquiring face.

  ‘Oh, God, Thomas,’ she said. A sense of her passionate love for him set her trembling again. She took in his clear skin and his wide, innocent eyes. You could still see a little pulse in the top of his head; even his skull was vulnerable. ‘Such a little cough!’ she said, marvelling at the softness of it. ‘What if I hadn’t heard?’

  Behind her, the front door opened suddenly. ‘Hello!’ Elizabeth called. ‘Anyone at home?’

  ‘In here,’ Ruth said. She had a sudden instinct to hide Thomas, as if Elizabeth would know, just by looking at him, that Ruth could have suffocated him.

  ‘I was just passing –’ Elizabeth stopped dead. ‘Good Lord, Ruth, you’re white as a sheet! What’s wrong?’ At once she looked at Thomas with an expression like terror on her face. She went straight past Ruth and picked him up. Thomas crowed with delight at her touch, and she turned with him in her arms, as if she were rescuing him. ‘What happened?’ she demanded tightly.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  Ruth faced her mother-in-law and felt tears coming.

  ‘Did he fall down the stairs?’ Elizabeth demanded.

  ‘No,’ Ruth said in a low, shaky voice. ‘He choked.’

  ‘What on?’

  ‘His bath sponge.’ Ruth swallowed down her tears. ‘I didn’t think,’ she said. ‘I gave him his sponge to look at and when I turned round he had crammed it all in his mouth. I just pulled it out.’

  ‘All of it?’

  Ruth gasped at a new fear. ‘I didn’t look. I didn’t think to look in his mouth. Could he have swallowed some? Could it be stuck in his throat?’

  ‘Look at the sponge!’ Elizabeth snapped. ‘Fetch it now!’

  Ruth ran up the stairs and came down with Thomas’s sponge. It was cut in the shape of a little boat. It was complete and intact. The yellow keel made of sponge, the orange superstructure, and the little green sponge funnel on top.

  Elizabeth looked it all over carefully. ‘Thank God for that,’ she said, her voice carefully controlled. ‘Why weren’t you watching him?’

  Ruth answered Elizabeth as if the older woman had every right to cross-question her. She felt so miserably guilty that the hostile interrogation was almost a pleasure. ‘I was cleaning the bath,’ she said. ‘I was just giving him things to look at.’

  ‘You have to have a little box,’ Elizabeth said with weary patience. She put Thomas against her shoulder and stroked his back in gentle circular motions. ‘A little box with his toys for the day. You swap them around every night so he has different ones every day. You take the box around with you, wherever you go in the house, and when you need a moment to do something, you give him something from the box.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ruth said numbly. ‘I didn’t know.’

  It was as if there were too much to learn. Ruth would never grasp it all in time.

  Elizabeth nodded, with her lips pressed together. ‘He’s nearly asleep,’ she said. It was true. Thomas, inhaling the familiar scent of his grandmother and held firmly in her arms, with his back patted and her voice in his ear, was drifting off into sleep.

  Without asking, Elizabeth went out into the kitchen and put Thomas in his pram. ‘He’ll sleep now, and you can get your chores done and then supervise him properly when he wakes up,’ she said. She glanced out of the French windows to the little garden, where the winter sun was bright. ‘He can go out,’ she decided, opened the doors and trundled the pram into the garden.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ruth said.

  Elizabeth tucked the blankets closely around him, then put the waterproof cover on top, and pulled up the hood against the cold air.

  ‘Actually, I was just calling in to see if you wanted any shopping,’ she said.

  Ruth shook her head. ‘I’ll go later. I’ll take Thomas this afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll have Thomas while you shop,’ Elizabeth offered. ‘It’s hard work doing it all with a baby as well.’

  Ruth flared briefly. ‘I can do it,’ she said. ‘I am perfectly capable of shopping and caring for my baby at the same time.’

  Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said. ‘You know where I am if you change your mind. We’re both in this afternoon. It will be no trouble if you want to drop him off on your way out.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she felt forced to say.

  Elizabeth slid past her and out into the hall. ‘I shan’t say anything to Patrick,’ she promised. At once Ruth’s mistake seemed infinitely worse if it had to be concealed from her husband. ‘He’d only worry.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ruth said again. ‘I’ll probably tell him myself, anyway.’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be sympathetic. We’re all aware how hard you are trying …’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Ruth said defensively. ‘It must happen thousands of times a day.’

  Elizabeth smiled coldly. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘It never happened to either of my children.’

  Ruth took Thomas with her to the shop, but Elizabeth had been right – it was a struggle to cope with shopping and a baby as well. For the first half hour everything went well. Ruth parked in the mother-and-baby space, and put Thomas in the reclining seat on the top of the trolley, and he observed with interest the bright lights of the ceiling and his mother’s head coming and going. But after a while he became bored and started to cry.

  Ruth was only halfwa