The Little House Read online

  If Ruth locked the back door – which meant locking the pram outside – Elizabeth checked Thomas in the pram and then strolled around to the front door and tried it. If it was locked, she might ring the bell or she might open it with her own key. She had no sense at all that the little house was not her own property, that she should await an invitation to enter. When Ruth complained to Patrick, he merely shrugged and said, ‘Well, they do own it legally, darling.’ When she asked Elizabeth to use the front door, and to leave the pram in the back garden alone, Elizabeth just laughed and said, ‘But I do so love to see him asleep.’

  Ruth did not complain to Frederick. In the months that passed after his warning that he would take Thomas away from her and commit her to an asylum, she took great care not to offend Frederick, and to deny Elizabeth nothing. She never forgot that she was living at home, and caring for her son, with their permission.

  In March and April the daffodils came out. As Elizabeth had predicted, Ruth had spoiled the show in the back garden, but the ones at the farmhouse were superb. Elizabeth brought armfuls down every day and filled the little house with them. She walked across the fields on every fine day, and came in the back gate. Ruth would watch her from one of the bedroom windows, her light step, her carefree proprietorial glance at their fields, at their hedges, at their drive, and then at their little house. Ruth’s hands would tighten as she watched Elizabeth come into the garden, and then, every time, every single time, Elizabeth would lean over the pram, rocking the handle slightly with her hand, and whisper to Thomas as he lay asleep.

  One time Ruth ran downstairs and flung open the kitchen door as Elizabeth turned to the house. ‘I’ve asked you a thousand times to leave the pram alone!’ she snapped.

  Elizabeth was quite unmoved. ‘I just like to say hello,’ she said.

  ‘Why do you have to speak to him?’ Ruth demanded. ‘You do it every time.’

  Elizabeth walked past her, fetched a vase, and filled it with water for the flowers. ‘I just say hello,’ she said pleasantly. It was as if she did not care what her daughter-in-law thought, as if Ruth’s anger and resentment were as much a part of an otherwise agreeable world as clouds and late frosts.

  ‘The grass will need cutting as soon as the daffodils have died back,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And the daffodils will need a little feed. I’ll ask Frederick to bring down the mower, and I have some fertilizer ready to do our daffodils.’

  ‘We can buy our own mower,’ Ruth said at once.

  Elizabeth laughed again. ‘Don’t be so absurd!’ she said. ‘We hardly use it, it’s just a little electric mower for the front lawn around the roses, but it will do your patch of lawn. Frederick can mow it for you when he comes down.’

  ‘I will do it,’ Ruth said stubbornly.

  Elizabeth turned. ‘Are you quite well, Ruth?’ she asked with concern. ‘You seem rather irritable. Should you have a little rest this afternoon?’

  Ruth looked from her mother-in-law’s radiant face to the bright yellow trumpets of the daffodils and back to Elizabeth’s unwavering smile. ‘I’m going shopping,’ she said sulkily.

  ‘Don’t hurry back!’ Elizabeth called. ‘We’ll be fine!’

  Frederick brought down the mower in his car the next day. ‘This is not to be used until I’ve put a trip switch on the cable,’ he said. ‘I had no idea that I’d ever used it without one. With a trip switch, if you slice the cable by accident, then the power cuts out automatically and you don’t get a shock.’

  ‘Would it be a bad shock?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘Oh! Quite lethal!’ Frederick said cheerfully. ‘You’d get the full 240 volts! That’d make your hair stand on end! A number of people die every year. But the trip switch will do it. I’ll pop into Bath and buy one this afternoon when Elizabeth is with you.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to come down,’ Ruth said. ‘You could go to Bath together.’

  He looked away. ‘It’s how she likes it,’ he said briefly. ‘We’re in a nice routine now.’

  ‘But when will it change?’ Ruth pressed him. ‘You can’t want to come down every morning and afternoon, and all through the summer as well! When will it change?’

  He picked up the mower and went towards the little shed at the side of the garden. ‘When he goes to school, I suppose,’ he threw over his shoulder. ‘When he’s off our hands, a bit.’

  ‘School?’ Ruth repeated blankly.

  Thomas, who had been kicking his feet in his pram, struggled to sit up and gave a little shout. Frederick instantly came out of the garden shed and took hold of the pram. ‘We’ll go up the lane and see if we can see some birds’ nests,’ he promised. He reached behind the baby and propped him up, so that he could see the passing scenery. He tipped his hat to Ruth. ‘See you later, my dear,’ he said.

  ‘Do you and Patrick and Elizabeth think that we are going on like this forever?’ Ruth demanded. ‘Until Thomas is old enough to go to school? For four years?’

  Frederick manoeuvred the pram out through the back gate and gave her a smile. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘It suits us all so very well.’

  Ruth put a hand out to delay him. ‘Am I never to have my baby to myself?’

  His smile was kind. ‘Steady the Buffs,’ he said comfortably. ‘Let’s not get dramatic. We’re doing very nicely as we are.’

  Ruth’s hand dropped from his sleeve, and she stepped back and watched him go up the drive, pushing Thomas’s pram, and chatting to him. She thought that she would stand thus, by the garden gate, watching her son taken away from her, every day for four years. Then, when he was old enough to go to school, it would not be the school of her choice; and she would not be waiting for him at the school gate every afternoon. He would be sent to a school that Patrick and his parents preferred, and several times a week they would collect him. Most likely, it would be Patrick’s old school, where his mother and father were still friends with the staff. When Thomas was seven – or at the very latest eleven years old – they would send him to go to boarding school, Patrick’s old school, and she would not see him at all, from one holiday to another. He would never be her little boy, just as he had never been her baby.

  Up the lane, every now and then Frederick would stop the pram and hold a leaf for Thomas to see, or incline the pram so that the baby could peep into the hedge. Ruth felt as if they might never come back to her, as if Thomas was slowly, slowly going away, and that nothing she could do, neither rage nor docility, would regain him. As Frederick said, it was a routine that suited them all very well. Ruth could see that nothing would change it.

  She turned away from the garden gate and went into the garden. In one corner was the new garden shed, where Patrick kept his new tool kit – a moving-in present from his father. She took out a large reel of extension cable, and took it to the kitchen. Carefully, she took the screwdriver and removed the set of sockets from the end of it, leaving the cables bare. Two cables she wrapped in insulating tape. One – the brown live-power cable – she held with the pliers and cut and stripped the insulation away to expose a good length of copper wires. Then she put the cable and the tool box out of sight, in the cupboard under the stairs.

  When Frederick brought Thomas home she smiled and thanked him for taking Thomas for his walk, lifted the baby from the pram, and showed Frederick out of the house. She gave Thomas his lunch and laid him down to sleep – not in his pram, but in his cot. Thomas watched the mobile hanging from his nursery ceiling, and fell asleep.

  When his eyes closed and his breathing was steady and regular, she went down to the garden, plugged in Frederick’s mower, and mowed two and a half rows, taking great care with the cable. She stopped mowing the grass at the point where the pram was usually left for Thomas’s afternoon nap, and then she unplugged the mower and took it back to the shed. She wheeled the empty pram out into the garden, placing it where the cut grass abruptly ended, and bundled the blankets, so it looked as if a baby were asleep inside.

  Ruth stepped back to admire the ill