The Little House Read online

  Ruth shot a look at Patrick. He folded his arms and leaned back.

  ‘How help?’

  ‘I’ll come down in the morning and take him out for his constitutional in his pram. Or if rain stops play, I’ll rock him in the hall or wherever, while you do your chores. Elizabeth will come down in the afternoon to give you a break. Patrick will be home at six every evening. So you have some support.’

  Ruth hesitated. ‘Is this an offer, or is it an order?’

  Frederick cleared his throat. Elizabeth was looking at her well-polished tan shoes. Patrick’s eyes were on his father’s face. Thomas cooed softly and Ruth offered him another toy.

  ‘You can take it as you wish,’ Frederick said. ‘It’s a description of what is going to happen.’

  ‘Forever?’

  ‘Until we are sure that you are well enough to care for him on your own.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’ she asked.

  Patrick stole a quick look at his wife. There was a hardness and a maturity about her that he had never seen before. A sharp brilliance in her look, as if she would face the worst truths in the world, and look them in the eye. She was many miles away now from the grateful ingenue he had married. There was something adult about her now, and rock hard. He was not sure if he liked her, but there was something undeniably erotic in the way she just nodded and moved coldly and intellectually to the next question. He nodded. She was out-manning the men. She had not come as a bereaved mother to weep and call for the return of her baby. She had come out as a lioness to fight until the death.

  ‘I hope you will see that this is for the best,’ Frederick said, avoiding the challenge.

  She smiled, a scornful, bitter smile, very beautiful on her face. ‘But if I do not see that? If I refuse?’

  Frederick nodded, accepting her challenge and showing his hand with all the deceptive honesty of the skilled poker player. ‘Then we keep Thomas here and you are welcome to live here with us again, or visit daily.’

  She looked to Patrick again but he was looking at the fire.

  ‘I could take Thomas right away,’ she said thoughtfully.

  Frederick shook his head. ‘We would not permit that,’ he said. ‘Thomas stays here, either with us or with you with our supervision.’ He hesitated. ‘Besides,’ he said. ‘You have nowhere to go, and no money. You have no friends who would take you in, and no family. It would not be fair to you or Thomas, and it’s not necessary, Ruth.’

  She shot a look at him. ‘Not necessary to be free?’

  ‘This is a brief difficult phase in a long, long life,’ Frederick said. He spoke solemnly, as if he were weighing her down with the wisdom of his experience. ‘In months, maybe in weeks, we will have half forgotten this, and by next year we will hardly remember it at all. Lots of families have difficulties in adjusting to a new baby. There is no reason why our family should be any different. Let us help you, Ruth, and take it in the spirit in which it is meant – because we love our son, and we love our grandson, and we love you.’

  There was a silence. Thomas was bored and started to cry in a fretful, inconsequential way. Ruth lifted him out of his bouncy cradle-seat and sat him on her lap. ‘Nearly time for his nap,’ she said.

  ‘He can go upstairs,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’ll make his bottle.’

  Ruth nodded, and rocked him gently, held firmly under her cheek against the comforting sound of her beating heart. Thomas’s downy little head was warm under her chin.

  ‘I have no choice,’ Ruth observed.

  Her father-in-law nodded. ‘That is correct,’ he said gently. ‘You have no choice.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘You force me to agree,’ she said simply.

  Elizabeth came back into the room with the bottle in her hand. ‘You agree?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ruth nodded dismissively towards Frederick. ‘He can come down in the morning and you can come down in the afternoon. The rest of the time Thomas is to be left with me.’

  Patrick suddenly realized that he had been sitting with his arms crossed and his shoulders hunched for what felt like all the morning. He released his grip and felt his muscles relax.

  ‘Well done, darling,’ he said gently. ‘And thank you.’

  Ruth looked at him with large dark eyes, which told him nothing. ‘I’ll put him to sleep in the nursery here,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring the pram up and you can wheel him down when he wakes. I want him brought down to me straight away, as soon as he wakes.’

  ‘I’ll do that for you,’ Frederick said quietly. He had to suppress a sense of triumph. It had been a long time since he had been faced with a situation of outright and damaging conflict. It had been something of a diplomatic pleasure as well as a duty to bring Ruth into line.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ Patrick offered. ‘Dad can come too and collect the pram. That’ll save you the walk.’

  Again she gave him the dark, unfriendly stare. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘When he’s asleep.’

  That day Ruth did as they wanted. Frederick pushed the pram down the drive as soon as Thomas had woken, and Ruth greeted them at the garden gate, drew the pram into the house, played with Thomas, and then gave him his lunch. After lunch, which he ate with relish – it was one of the brighter-coloured jars – Ruth took him upstairs to change his nappy and changed all his clothes as well. His morning clothes smelled of Elizabeth’s perfume.

  At about three o’clock, when Thomas started getting tired again, Ruth put him in his pram and rocked him until his eyelids slowly closed and his one waving foot fell back into the pram. Then she tucked him up and put the pram in the back garden, and started to wash the kitchen floor.

  Glancing out of the French windows, she saw Elizabeth, who had entered the garden by the bottom gate, bending over the pram, and gently rocking it with the handle. Ruth opened the back door.

  ‘I should like you to tell me when you arrive,’ she said abruptly. ‘Don’t go straight to the pram like that. He might have been just dozing off and you would have woken him.’

  Elizabeth straightened up and nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized. ‘I will in future.’

  She came into the kitchen, glancing around. ‘Would you like to go out?’ she asked. ‘Or have a rest? I can finish the chores while Thomas is sleeping.’

  ‘I’m in the middle of washing my kitchen floor. I hardly want to leave it and go out. Would you please go to the sitting room?’

  Elizabeth nodded, saying nothing, and went quietly through. Ruth mopped with silent resentment, wrung out the mop, poured away the dirty water, and put the mop and bucket away in the cupboard under the stairs.

  She put her head around the sitting-room door. ‘I need to do some shopping,’ she said abruptly. ‘I’ll be about an hour.’

  Elizabeth was sitting on the sofa, looking at the Guardian newspaper. ‘Of course,’ she said pleasantly. ‘If he wakes I’ll bring him in and play with him here.’

  ‘He is not to be taken out of this house,’ Ruth said flatly. ‘When I come back, he is to be here.’

  ‘Of course.’ Elizabeth gave her daughter-in-law a tentative smile. ‘Of course, Ruth. We’re all working together on this.’

  Ruth’s face was like a wall. ‘That’s not how I see it,’ she said. ‘You are not to give him his tea, you are not to bath him. I will do that when I come home.’

  ‘I will change his nappy,’ Elizabeth stipulated.

  Ruth hesitated. ‘All right,’ she said and turned and went out of the door.

  Elizabeth sat completely still until she heard the car drive away, and then she went through to the kitchen and glanced out of the window at the pram. As the noise of the engine died away down the lane she gave a little sigh, and her shoulders relaxed, as if a burden had slid away. She drew the curtains into the proper tiebacks. ‘Poor, dear, unhappy Ruth,’ she said softly. ‘Such a shame …’

  Then she went out into the garden to see Thomas.

  Ruth was back precisely within the hour, and she unloaded the shopping from