The Little House Read online

  ‘Well, I am,’ the health visitor said baldly. ‘And I want her to see the doctor.’

  Ruth ate breakfast cereal on her own in the quiet kitchen. Elizabeth had been right in seeing the potential of the cottage. In the autumn morning sunshine the little house glowed. Ruth looked around the new kitchen fittings and the bright pale walls as if they were the walls of a prison. She ate spoonful after spoonful of muesli and tasted nothing. She drank a cup of instant coffee, then she put her head down on the kitchen table and crouched quite still.

  She nearly dozed off, sliding from despair into sleep, but she roused herself and went up the stairs, her bare feet warmed by the thick carpet that Elizabeth had chosen. Their bedroom was untidy with cast-off clothes. Ruth walked to the bed, seeing neither the mess nor the pretty view from the bedroom window, which looked over the little garden up the hill to the farmhouse. She climbed into bed and pulled the duvet over her shoulders and closed her eyes. She was asleep in moments.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon when she jerked awake with a gasp of terror. There had been a dream in which Thomas had been missing. She had been looking for him and looking for him. She had been searching the path all the way from the little house to Manor Farm House, and everywhere she looked she could hear his cry, just ahead of her. At Manor Farm, Elizabeth had been in the garden, pruning shears in hand. She had paused in pruning the roses and asked Ruth what was wrong. Ruth had been weeping with distress, but when Elizabeth asked her what she was searching for, she could not remember Thomas’s name. She knew she was looking for her baby, but the name had completely gone. She just stared at Elizabeth, speechless with anxiety, knowing that Thomas was missing and she could not remember how to call him back to her.

  Ruth gave a little gasp at the shock of the dream and then looked around her bedroom in surprise. The light was wrong for early morning, Patrick was not there, then slowly she remembered that Elizabeth was caring for Thomas, and that she had promised to fetch him from the farmhouse.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said softly and jumped out of bed, reaching for the bedside telephone. She dialled the number from memory and waited anxiously.

  ‘Manor Farm.’ It was Frederick’s voice.

  ‘Oh! It’s me!’ Ruth said. ‘I overslept, I’m so sorry. I’ll come up straightaway.’

  ‘Hold tight,’ he said. Elizabeth had told him that the health visitor thought that Ruth was depressed. He was not surprised, believing that all women were prone to anger and tears and unexplained grief. ‘Steady the Buffs.’

  ‘But I said I would come up … I thought I’d be with you before lunch …’

  ‘So when you weren’t I took him out for a little walk, he had his sleep, and now he’s out shopping with Elizabeth,’ Frederick said. ‘Nothing to worry about at all.’

  Ruth found that she was gasping with anxiety. ‘I just feel so awful …’

  ‘Steady the Buffs,’ he repeated. ‘We’ve had a lovely day with him. Elizabeth adores him. We’ll pop him down to you when they come home. No trouble at all.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ruth said weakly. ‘I was so tired I just slept and slept …’

  ‘Good thing too,’ he said kindly. ‘Best medicine in all the world.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ruth said again. She could feel her eyes watering at the kindness in his tone. ‘I’ll wait for them to come home.’

  ‘You do that,’ Frederick said, and put down the telephone.

  As he did so, Elizabeth’s car drew up outside the front door, and he went out to help her with the shopping.

  ‘Ruth called,’ he said. ‘Apparently she’s only just woken.’

  Elizabeth paused, about to lift Thomas from his seat. ‘Shall I take Thomas down there? How did she sound?’

  Frederick hesitated. ‘A bit fraught,’ he said.

  Elizabeth unbuckled Thomas from his car seat. ‘I’ll take him down later,’ she said. ‘At bedtime. There’s simply no point in Ruth having him if she can’t cope.’

  Frederick held out his arms for his grandson. ‘Hello, young chap,’ he said lovingly. ‘Here for the duration, eh?’

  Ruth made the appointment to see the doctor, thinking that it was a routine check-up for Thomas, as the health visitor had advised. Elizabeth insisted that Patrick drive Ruth to the health centre and go in with her. After a cursory look at Thomas, Dr MacFadden suggested that Patrick take Thomas outside – ‘while I have a word with Mum.’

  Ruth flinched slightly at being called ‘Mum’, but she let Patrick and Thomas go.

  Dr MacFadden glanced at his notes. He was a young man, newly married and childless. He had endured sleepless nights himself when he was a young doctor on attachment to a busy hospital, but he did not think that dreary blending of night and day, that sea of fatigue in which all colours became grey and all emotions melted into weariness, was similar to the experience of caring for a small sleepless baby. After all, one was work and directed to a goal while the other was part of a natural process. He knew that women with new babies were always tired. He did not think of them as being sick with lack of sleep. He looked for another cause for Ruth’s white face and dark-ringed eyes.

  ‘And how are you?’ he asked gently.

  Ruth felt her face quiver. ‘I’m fine,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Tired.’

  He glanced down at his notes. He had not seen her during pregnancy, she had gone to the hospital for her antenatal care. He had seen her and Thomas only once before, at their six-week check-up, and had thought then that she looked ill and depressed.

  ‘Feeling a bit down?’ he suggested.

  ‘A bit,’ Ruth said unwillingly.

  ‘Are you sleeping all right?’

  She looked at him as if he were insane. ‘Sleeping?’ she repeated. ‘I never sleep. It feels as if I just never sleep at all.’

  ‘Baby keeping you up all night?’

  ‘I never get more than a couple of hours together.’

  ‘A lively one,’ Dr MacFadden said cheerfully. ‘Does Father take a turn with you?’

  ‘No,’ Ruth said. ‘He’s very busy at work …’

  He nodded.

  ‘Are you a bit weepy?’

  She turned her face away. ‘I’m miserable,’ she said flatly.

  ‘I think we can do something to help with that,’ he said. ‘I expect you feel a bit distant from the baby, do you? It’s perfectly normal.’

  Ruth turned her face back to him, questioning. ‘Is it? I just keep thinking how unnatural it is.’

  ‘No, no, lots of mothers can’t bond with their babies straightaway. It takes a bit of time.’

  ‘He just seems …’ Ruth broke off at the impossibility of explaining how Thomas – who had been born on his own and preferred to feed without her, and who now crowed and gurgled at the sight of his grandmother or his grandfather, or his father, without apparent preference – seemed so utterly independent of her and remote from her. ‘It’s as if he weren’t my baby at all,’ she said very quietly. ‘As if he belonged to someone else but I’m …’ she paused ‘… I’m stuck with him.’

  Dr MacFadden nodded as if none of this was so very dreadful. ‘I expect you resent having to care for him?’

  Ruth nodded. ‘Sometimes,’ she whispered. ‘At the start of the day when Patrick goes, and Thomas is awake and I look ahead and it just goes on and on forever. I never know whether he’ll go to sleep or not. And if he does sleep during the day I can’t rest. I’m always listening for him to wake up. And sometimes he only sleeps for a few moments anyway, so just when I’ve gone back to bed and I’m dozing off he wakes up and I have to get up again, and then he cries and cries and cries,’ her voice rose. ‘And there are times when I could just murder him!’ She clapped her hand to her mouth and looked aghast. ‘I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean to say that. I’d never hurt him. Never!’

  ‘A lot of mothers feel like this,’ Dr MacFadden said gently, retaining a sympathetic smile and holding his voice steady. ‘It’s perfectly normal, and it’s very good