The Little House

by Philippa Gregory

  Ruth glanced towards the cot. She had imagined Thomas James as a fair-haired boy, not this dark-headed little thing. ‘I never thought he’d be so small,’ she said.

  ‘Tiny, isn’t he?’ Patrick said. ‘Shall I pick him up?’

  ‘Better let him sleep,’ Ruth said.

  They both gazed at the sleeping baby. ‘Tiny hands,’ Patrick said again.

  ‘I never thought of him like this,’ Ruth said.

  ‘I never really imagined him at all. I always kind of jumped ahead. I thought about teaching him how to fish, and taking him to cricket and things like that. I never thought of a tiny baby.’

  ‘No.’

  They were silent.

  ‘He is all right, isn’t he?’ Patrick asked. ‘I mean he seems terribly quiet. I thought they cried all the time.’

  ‘How should I know?’ Ruth exclaimed again.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Patrick said soothingly. ‘Don’t get upset, darling. Mother will be down this evening and she’ll know.’

  Ruth nodded and lay back on her pillows. She looked very small and wan. Her dark hair was limp and dirty, her cheeks sallow. There were dark shadows under her eyes.

  ‘You look all in,’ Patrick said. ‘Shall I go and leave you to have a sleep?’

  Ruth nodded. He could see she was near to tears again.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘See you tonight then.’ He bent over the bed and kissed her gently. She did not respond, she did not even turn her face to him. She let him touch her cheek as if she were sulking after some injury. He had a flash of irritation, that he should be behaving so beautifully, with such patience and forbearance, and she should be so limp. In the films he had seen of such situations as these, the young mothers had sat up in bed in pretty beribboned bed jackets, and smiled adoringly at their husbands and gazed devotedly at their babies. Patrick was too intelligent to mistake Hollywood images for reality, but he had expected something more than Ruth’s resentful apathy.

  He straightened up and turned to the cot. ‘See you later, Thomas James,’ he said quietly, and went from the room.

  Ruth slept for only half an hour. At five o’clock the nurse woke her with dinner. Ruth, hungry and chilled, was confronted with a tray of grapefruit juice, Spam salad with sliced white bread and butter, followed by violently green jelly. As she drew the unappetizing dishes towards her, the baby stirred in his cot and cried.

  Ruth’s stitches were still too painful to let her move. Shifting the tray and picking up the baby was an impossibility. She dropped a forkful of icy limp salad and rang the bell for the nurse. No one came. The baby’s cries went up a notch in volume. He went red in the face, and his little fists flailed against the air.

  ‘Hush, hush,’ Ruth said. She rang the bell again. ‘Someone will come in a minute,’ she said.

  It was incredible that a baby so small could make so much noise, and that the noise should be so unbearably penetrating. Ruth could feel her own tension rising as the baby’s cries grew louder and more and more desperate.

  ‘Oh, please!’ she cried out. ‘Please don’t cry like that. Someone will come soon! Someone will come soon! Surely someone will come!’

  He responded at once to the panic in her voice, and his cry became a scream, an urgent, irresistible shriek.

  The door opened and Elizabeth peeped in. She took in the scene in one rapid glance and moved forward. She put down the basket she was carrying, picked up the baby, and put him firmly against her shoulder, resting her cheek on his hot little head. His agonized cries checked at once at the new sensation of being picked up and firmly held.

  ‘There, there,’ Elizabeth said gently. ‘Master Cleary! What a state you’re in.’

  She looked over his head to Ruth, tearstained in the bed. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said gently. ‘The first days are always the worst. You finish your dinner and I’ll walk him till you’re ready to feed him.’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ Ruth whispered. ‘I can’t eat it.’

  ‘I brought you a quiche and one of my little apple pies,’ Elizabeth offered. ‘I didn’t know what the food would be like in here, and after I had Patrick I was simply starving.’

  ‘Oh! That would be lovely.’

  Holding the baby against her neck with one casual hand, Elizabeth whipped a red-and-white-checked cloth off the top of the basket with the other, and spread it on Ruth’s counterpane, followed by the quiche in its own little china dish. It was still warm from the oven, the middle moist and savoury, the pastry crisp. Ruth took the miniature silver picnic cutlery from the basket and ate every crumb, while Elizabeth wandered around the room humming lullabies in the baby’s ear. She smiled when she saw the empty plate.

  ‘Apple pie?’

  ‘Please.’

  Elizabeth produced a little individual apple pie and a small punnet of thick cream. Ruth ate. The apple was tart and sharp, the pastry sweet.

  ‘Better now?’ Elizabeth asked.

  Ruth sighed. ‘Thank you. I was really hungry, and so miserable.’

  ‘The quicker we get you home and into a routine the better,’ Elizabeth said. ‘D’you think you could feed him now? I think he’s awake and hungry.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Ruth said uncertainly.

  Elizabeth passed the little bundle to her. As Ruth leaned forward to take him, her stitches pulled and she cried out with pain. At the sharp sound of her voice and the loss of the rocking and humming, Thomas opened his eyes in alarm and shrieked.

  ‘There,’ Elizabeth said, hurrying forward. ‘Now tuck him in tight to you.’ Expertly she pressed the baby against Ruth. ‘I’ll pop a pillow under here to hold him close. You lie back and make yourself comfortable.’ She arranged the baby, head towards Ruth, but Thomas cried and cried. Ruth, half-naked, pushed her breast towards his face, but he would not feed.

  ‘It’s no good!’ Ruth was near tears. ‘He just won’t! I can’t make him! And he’ll be getting so hungry!’

  ‘Why not give him a bottle just for now?’ Elizabeth suggested. ‘And feed him yourself later on when you feel better?’

  ‘Because they say you have to feed at once, as soon after the birth as possible,’ Ruth said over a storm of Thomas’s cries. The baby, more and more distressed, was kicking against her and crying. ‘If he doesn’t take to it now he’ll never learn.’

  ‘But a bottle …’

  ‘No!’ Ruth cried out, her voice drowned out by Thomas’s anguished wails.

  The door opened and the nurse came in. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get down before,’ she said. ‘Are you all right in here?’

  ‘I think the baby should have a bottle,’ Elizabeth said smoothly. ‘He’s not taking to the breast.’

  The nurse responded at once to Elizabeth’s calm authority. ‘Certainly, but I thought that Mother …’

  Ruth lay back on her pillows, the baby’s insistent cry half deafening her.

  ‘Shall I take him?’ Elizabeth asked.

  ‘Take him,’ Ruth whispered.

  ‘And give him a bottle, get him fed, darling, and settled?’

  Miserably Ruth nodded. ‘All right! All right!’ she said with weak anger. ‘Just do what you want!’

  Elizabeth took the baby from her. ‘You have a nice rest,’ she said. ‘I’ll get him sorted out.’

  The nurse stepped back. ‘Aren’t you lucky to have your mum to help you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth said quietly, thinking of her own mother, so long dead, and distant and unhelpfully gone.

  Three weeks later Ruth and Thomas came home. Ruth had been proved right in one respect. Thomas, offered the bottle by Elizabeth and then dandled on Frederick’s knee, never breast-fed. Despite Ruth’s intentions, despite all the books, the good advice, and her resolutions, her baby had been born by Caesarean section and was fed from the start on powdered milk. He was a potent symbol of her failure to complete successfully the job she had not wanted to take on. Ruth
had not expected to be a good mother; but she had set herself the task of learning how to do it. Conscientious and intelligent, she had done her absolute best to master theories of childbirth and child raising. But Thomas was a law to himself. She felt that he had been born without her – simply taken from her unconscious body. She felt that he preferred to feed without her. Anyone could hold him while he had his bottle. He appeared to have no preferences. Anyone could comfort him when he cried. As long as he was picked up and walked, he would stop crying. But Ruth, exhausted and still in pain from the operation, was the only one who could not easily pick him up and walk with him.

  It was Elizabeth who cared for him most of the time. It was Elizabeth who knew the knack of wrapping him tightly in his white wool shawl, his little arms crisscrossed over his stomach, so he slept. It was Elizabeth who could hold him casually in the crook of her arm while she cooked one-handed, and it was Elizabeth’s serene face that his deep blue eyes watched, intently gazing at her as she worked, and her smile that he saw when she glanced down at him.

  While Ruth slept upstairs in the spare bedroom of the farmhouse, Elizabeth rocked Thomas in Patrick’s old pram in the warm midsummer sun of the walled garden. While Ruth rested, it was Elizabeth who loaded Thomas into her car in his expensive reclining baby seat and drove to the shops. Elizabeth was never daunted at the prospect of taking Thomas with her. ‘I’m glad to help,’ she told Patrick. ‘Besides, it makes me feel young again.’

  The health visitor came in the first week that Thomas and Ruth were home. ‘Aren’t you lucky to have a live-in nanny!’ she exclaimed facetiously to Ruth, but in her notes she scribbled a memo that Mother and child did not seem to have bonded, and that Mother seemed depressed. On her second visit she found Ruth surrounded by suitcases and languidly packing while Elizabeth was changing Thomas’s nappy in the nursery.

  ‘We’re moving to our house,’ Ruth said. ‘The builders have finished at last. I’m just packing the last of my clothes.’

  The health visitor nodded. ‘You’ll miss having your family around you,’ she said diplomatically, thinking that at last mother and baby would have some privacy. ‘Is your new house far away? I shall have to have the address. Is it still in my area?’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s just at the end of the drive,’ Ruth said. ‘The little cottage on the right, Manor Farm Cottage. We’re within walking distance.’

  ‘Oh,’ the health visitor hesitated. ‘Nice to have your family nearby, especially when you’ve got a new baby, isn’t it?’

  Ruth’s pale face was expressionless. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  They moved in the third week in September. Elizabeth had organized the arrival of their furniture from the store, and placed it where she thought best. Elizabeth had hung the curtains and they looked very well. She and Patrick went down to the cottage with the suitcases and unpacked the clothes and hung them in the new fitted wardrobe in the bedroom. Patrick had planned to make up the bed and prepare Thomas’s cot, but the new telephone rang just as they arrived in the house, with a crisis at work, and he stood in the hall, taking notes on the little French writing desk, which Elizabeth had put there, while his mother got the bedrooms ready and made the cot in the nursery with freshly ironed warm sheets.

  The gardener had started work, and the grass was cut and the flower beds nearest the house were tidy. Elizabeth picked a couple of roses and put them in a little vase by the double bed. The cottage was as lovely as she had planned.

  Patrick put the telephone down. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean you to do all this. I promised Ruth I would do it.’

  ‘You know I enjoy it,’ she said easily. ‘And anyway, I don’t like to see a man making beds. Men always look so forlorn doing housework.’

  ‘You spoil us,’ Patrick said, his mind on his work.

  ‘Will you go up to the house and fetch Ruth?’

  ‘I should really go in to work. There’s a bit of a flap on – a rumour that some Japanese high-tech company is coming in to Bristol. We had half a documentary about their work practices in the can, but if the rumour’s confirmed we should really edit it and run it as it is. I need to get in and see what’s going on.’

  Elizabeth was about to offer to fetch Ruth for him, but she hesitated. ‘I think you should make the time to bring her and Thomas down here, all the same,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’s feeling a bit neglected.’

  He nodded. ‘Oh, all right. Look. Run me back home and I’ll dash in, pick her up, whiz them down here, and settle them in, and then I’ll go in to the studio.’

  Elizabeth led the way to her car, and they drove the mile and a half up to the farmhouse.

  Ruth was rocking Thomas’s pram in the garden, her face incongruously grim in the late-summer sunshine, with the roses still in lingering bloom behind her. ‘Ssssh,’ she said peremptorily. ‘He’s only this minute gone off. I’ve been rocking and rocking and rocking. I must have been here for an hour.’

  ‘I was going to take you both down to the cottage. It’s all ready,’ Patrick whispered.

  Ruth looked despairing. ‘Well, I’m not waking him up. He’s only just gone. I can’t bear to wake him.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Patrick said. ‘He’ll probably drop off again if we just transfer him into his carry cot.’

  Ruth thought for a moment. ‘We could walk down, and push the pram down with us.’

  Patrick instinctively shrank from the thought of walking down the road, even his own parents’ private drive, pushing a pram. There was something so trammelled and domestic about the image. There was something very poverty-stricken about it too, as if they could not afford a car.

  ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘Anyway, I don’t have the time. I have to go in to work. I wanted to drop the two of you off.’

  ‘Not work again …’

  ‘It’s a crisis …’

  ‘It’s always a crisis …’

  ‘Why don’t the two of you go?’ Elizabeth interposed. ‘And leave Thomas here. Ruth can settle in, have a little wander around, have a bit of peace and quiet. I’ll keep Thomas here until you want him brought down. You can phone me when you’re ready. The phone’s working.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Ruth said, ‘but …’

  ‘It’s no trouble to me at all,’ Elizabeth assured her. ‘I have nothing to do this afternoon except a spot of shopping, and Thomas can come with me. He loves the supermarket. I’ll wait till he wakes and then take him out.’

  Ruth hesitated, tempted by the thought of an afternoon in her new house.

  ‘If I get away early I’ll come home in time for tea,’ Patrick offered. ‘We could have a bit of time together before we collect Thomas.’

  Elizabeth nodded encouragingly. ‘Enjoy your new house together,’ she said. ‘Thomas can stay with me as long as you like. I can even give him his bottle and bath him here.’

  Ruth looked directly at Patrick. ‘But I thought we were moving into our house, all together, this afternoon.’ She let the demand hang in the air.

  Elizabeth smiled faintly and moved discreetly out of earshot. Patrick slipped his arm around Ruth’s waist and led her away from the pram. ‘Why don’t you go down to our little house, run yourself a bath, have a little rest, and I’ll bring home a pizza or a curry or something and we’ll have dinner, just the two of us, and christen that bedroom?’

  Ruth hesitated. She and Patrick had not made love since the birth of Thomas. She felt a half-forgotten desire stir inside her. Then she remembered the pain of her stitches, and the disagreeable fatness of her belly. ‘I can’t,’ she said coldly. ‘It’s too soon.’

  ‘Then we’ll have a gentle snog,’ Patrick said agreeably. ‘Come on, Ruth, let’s take advantage of a good offer. Let’s have our first night on our own and fetch Thomas tomorrow. Mother will have him overnight for us; he’s got his cot here and all the things he needs. And they love to have him. Why not?’

  ‘All right,’ Ruth said, seduced despite herself. ‘All right.’


  Ruth had longed to be in her own house, and to settle into a routine with her own baby. But nothing was as she had planned. Thomas did not seem to like his new nursery. He would not settle in his cot. Every evening, as Patrick returned Ruth’s cooling dinner to the oven, Ruth went back upstairs, rocked Thomas to sleep again, and put him into his cot. They rarely ate dinner together; one of them was always rocking the baby.

  During the day, Thomas slept well. Ruth could put him in the pram and wheel it out into the little back garden.

  ‘That’s when you should sleep,’ Elizabeth reminded her. ‘Sleep when the baby sleeps, catch forty winks.’

  But Ruth could never sleep during Thomas’s daytime naps. She was always listening for his cry, she was always alert.

  ‘Leave him to cry,’ Elizabeth said robustly. ‘If he’s safe in his cot or in his pram he’ll just drop off again.’

  Ruth shot her a reproachful glance. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said.

  ‘But if you’re overtired and need the sleep …’ Elizabeth said gently.

  ‘She’s determined,’ Patrick said. ‘It’s in the book.’

  ‘Oh, the book,’ Elizabeth said and exchanged a small hidden smile with Patrick.

  Ruth stuck to the book, which said that the baby should be fed on demand and never left to cry, even though it meant that she could never settle to anything during the day, and never slept at night for more than a couple of hours at a time. She saw many dawns break at the nursery window before Thomas finally dozed off to sleep and she could creep back into bed beside Patrick’s somnolent warmth. Then it seemed to be only moments before the alarm clock rang out, and Patrick yawned noisily, stretched, and got out of bed.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Ruth spat at him. She was near to tears. ‘He’s only just gone off to sleep. For Christ’s sake, Patrick, do you have to make so much noise?’

  Patrick, who had done nothing more than rattle the clothes hangers in the wardrobe while taking his shirt, spun around, shocked at the tone of her voice. Ruth had never spoken to him like that before.