The Little House Read online

  Three

  RUTH AND ELIZABETH were to go down to the cottage together, to measure for curtains and carpets, and discuss colour schemes. The builders had all but finished, the new kitchen had been built, the new bath plumbed in. Elizabeth had tirelessly supervised the workmen, ascertaining Ruth’s wishes and chivvying them to do the work right. Nothing would have been done without her, nothing could have been finished as quickly without her. Patrick, absorbed in setting up the documentary unit at work, had been no help to Ruth at all. Without her mother-in-law she would have been exhausted every day by a thousand trivial decisions.

  Ruth had planned to walk down to the cottage in the morning, when she felt at her best. But Elizabeth had been busy all morning and the time had slipped away. It was not until after lunch that she said, ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. Shall we go down to the cottage now? Or do you want your nap?’

  ‘We’ll go,’ Ruth decided. In her fifth month of pregnancy she felt absurdly heavy and tired, and the mid-afternoon was always the worst time.

  ‘Shall I drive us down?’ Elizabeth offered.

  ‘I can walk.’ Ruth heaved herself out of the low armchair and went out into the hall. She bent uncomfortably to tie the laces of her walking boots. Elizabeth, waiting beside her, seemed as lithe and quick as a young girl.

  Tammy, the dog, ran ahead of them, through Elizabeth’s rose garden to the garden gate and then down across the fields. Ruth walked slowly, feeling the warmth of the April sunlight on her face. She felt better.

  ‘I should walk every day,’ she said. ‘This is wonderful!’

  ‘As long as you don’t overdo it,’ Elizabeth warned. ‘What did the doctor say yesterday?’

  ‘He said everything was fine. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Did he check your weight?’

  ‘Yes – it’s OK.’

  ‘He didn’t think you were overweight?’

  ‘He said it didn’t matter.’

  ‘And did you tell him how tired you’re feeling?’

  ‘He said it was normal.’

  Elizabeth pursed her lips and said nothing.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Ruth repeated.

  Elizabeth smiled at her. ‘I know you are,’ she said. ‘And I’m just fussing over you. But I hate to see you so pale and so heavy. In my day they used to give us iron tablets. You look so anaemic.’

  ‘I’ll eat cabbage,’ Ruth offered. She climbed awkwardly over the stile into the next field.

  ‘Careful,’ Elizabeth warned.

  The two women walked for a little while in silence. In the hedge the catkins bobbed. Ruth remembered the springs of her American childhood, more dramatic, more necessary, after longer and sharper winters.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Patrick rang this morning while you were in the bath. He said he has to go up to London this afternoon for a meeting and it’ll probably go on late. He said he’d stay up there.’

  Ruth felt a pang of intense disappointment. ‘Overnight?’ She hated being in Patrick’s parents’ house without him. She felt always as if she were some unwanted refugee billeted on kindly but unwilling hosts.

  ‘Possibly Tuesday as well,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You can have a nice early night and a lie-in without him waking you in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll ring him when we get home,’ Ruth said.

  ‘He’s out of touch,’ she said. ‘In his meeting, and then on the train to London.’

  ‘I wish I’d spoken to him,’ Ruth said wistfully.

  Elizabeth opened the gate to the garden of the cottage and patted Ruth on the shoulder as she went through. ‘Now then,’ she said briskly. ‘You can live without him for one night.’

  ‘Didn’t he ask to speak to me?’

  ‘I said you were in the bath.’

  ‘I would have got out of the bath, if you had called me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you,’ Elizabeth declared. ‘Not for a little message that I can take for you, darling. If you want a long chat with him you can save it all up until he comes home the day after tomorrow.’

  Ruth nodded.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there? Nothing that you need him for?’

  ‘No,’ Ruth said shortly.

  Elizabeth had the front-door key; she opened the door and stepped back to let Ruth go in. ‘Don’t cling, dear,’ she said gently. ‘Men hate women who cling. Especially now.’

  Ruth turned abruptly from her mother-in-law and went into the sitting room. Elizabeth was undoubtedly right, which made her advice the more galling. There was still a large patch of damp beside the French windows, which not even the previous summer had dried out.

  ‘Now,’ Elizabeth said, throwing off her light jacket with energy. ‘You sit down on that little stool and I’ll rush round and take all the measurements you want.’

  From the pocket of the jacket she pulled a notebook and pen and a measuring tape. Ruth sulkily took the notebook while Elizabeth strode around the room calling out the measurements of the walls and the window frames.

  ‘Fitted carpets, I think, don’t you?’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘So much warmer. And good thick curtains for the winter, and some lighter ones for summer. Perhaps a pale yellow weave for summer, to match the primrose walls.’

  ‘I thought we’d paper it. I want the paper we had in the hall at the flat,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Oh, darling!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. ‘Not William Morris willow again, surely!’

  ‘Didn’t you like it?’

  ‘I loved it,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But don’t you remember what Patrick said? He said he kept seeing faces in it. You don’t want it in your sitting room, with Patrick seeing faces peeping through the leaves at him every evening.’

  Ruth reluctantly chuckled. ‘I’ll have it in the hall then,’ she said.

  ‘And this room primrose yellow,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘I have some curtain material that will just do these windows, and the French windows too. Old gold they are. Quite lovely.’

  Ruth nodded. She knew they would be lovely. Elizabeth’s taste was infallible, and she had trunks of beautiful materials saved from her travels around the world. ‘But we shouldn’t be taking your things, we should be buying new.’

  Elizabeth, on her knees before the French windows, scratching critically at the damp plaster, looked up, and smiled radiantly. ‘Of course you should have my old things!’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see my curtains up at your windows and the two of you – no, the three of you – happy and settled here.’ She looked back at the damp plaster. ‘I shall get someone out to see to this at once,’ she said. ‘Mr Willis warned me it might be a specialist job.’

  They moved to the kitchen, the dining room, and then to the three upstairs bedrooms. Elizabeth carried around the little stool from the sitting room, and insisted on Ruth’s sitting in the middle of each room, while she bustled with the tape measure, calling out numbers.

  Empty of furniture, but with new kitchen units in pale pine and with a remodelled bathroom upstairs the cottage did look pretty. Ruth felt her spirits rising. ‘If they hurry up with the decorating we should get in before the baby’s born.’

  Elizabeth, stretching across the bedroom window, nodded. ‘I’m determined to see that you are,’ she said. ‘Cream cotton at all the upstairs windows, I think, and then it matches whatever colour walls you choose. But that nice Berber-weave carpet I told you about all through the top floor.’

  ‘In the flat we had varnished boards,’ Ruth said. ‘I liked them.’

  ‘Weren’t they wonderful?’ Elizabeth reminisced. ‘Georgian pine. And you did have them beautifully done.’ She recalled herself to the present. ‘So we’ll have the biscuit-colour Berber carpet all around the upstairs floor, and pastel walls. We can choose the colours at home. I’ve got the charts.’

  ‘All right,’ Ruth said, surrendering her vision of clean waxed floorboards without an argument. She felt suddenly very weary. ‘The sooner we choose it and order