Philippa Gregory - The Little House

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.