Philippa Gregory - The Little House

They were in an awkward situation. Like many wealthy parents, Frederick and Elizabeth had given the newlyweds a home as their wedding present. Ruth and Patrick had chosen the flat, but Frederick and Elizabeth had bought it for them. Ruth dimly knew that shares had been sold, and sacrifices made, so that she and Patrick should start their married life in a flat that they could never have afforded, not even on their joint salaries. House prices might be falling after the manic boom of the mid-eighties, but a flat in Clifton would always have been beyond their means. Her gratitude and her sense of guilt showed itself in her sporadic attempts at good housekeeping, and her frenzied efforts to make the place look attractive when Frederick and Elizabeth were due to visit.

She had no investment of her own to balance against their generosity. Her parents had been classical musicians – poorly paid and with no savings. They had left her nothing, not even a home; their furniture had not been worth shipping to the little girl left in England. Patrick’s family were her only family, the flat was her first home since she had been a child.

Frederick had never delivered the deeds of the flat to Patrick. No one ever mentioned this: Patrick never asked for them, Frederick never volunteered them. The deeds had stayed with Frederick, and were still in his name. And now he wanted to sell the flat, and buy somewhere else.

‘I’ve loved that cottage ever since I was a boy,’ Patrick volunteered, breaking the silence. They were driving down the long sweeping road towards Bristol, the road lined with grey concrete council housing. ‘I’ve always wanted to live there. It’s such luck that it should come up now, just when we can take it.’

‘How d’you mean?’ Ruth asked.

‘Well, with my promotion coming up, and better hours for me. More money too. It’s as if it was meant. Absolutely meant,’ Patrick repeated. ‘And d’you know I think we’ll make a killing on the flat. We’ve put a lot of work in, we’ll see a return for it. House prices are recovering all the time.’

Ruth tried to speak. She felt so tired, after a day of well-meaning kindness, that she could hardly protest. ‘I don’t see how it would work,’ she said. ‘I can’t work a late shift and drive in and back from there. If I get called out on a story it’s too far to go; it’d take me too long.’

‘Oh, rubbish!’ Patrick said bracingly. ‘When d’you ever get a big story? It’s a piddling little job, not half what you could do, and you know it! A girl with your brains and your ability should be streets ahead. You’ll never get anywhere on Radio Westerly, Ruth, it’s smalltime radio! You’ve got to move on, darling. They don’t appreciate you there.’

Ruth hesitated. That part at least was true. ‘I’ve been looking…’

‘Leave first, and then look,’ Patrick counselled. ‘You look for a job now and any employer can see what you’re doing, and how much you’re being paid, and you’re typecast at once. Give yourself a break and then start applying and they have to see you fresh. I’ll help you put a demo tape together, and a CV. And we could see what openings there are in Bath. That’d be closer to home for you.’

‘Home?’

‘The cottage, darling. The cottage. You could work in Bath very easily from there. It’s the obvious place for us.’

Ruth could feel a dark shadow of a headache sitting between her eyebrows on the bridge of her nose. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said. ‘I haven’t said I want to move.’

‘Neither have I,’ Patrick said surprisingly. They were at the centre of Bristol. He hesitated at a junction and then put the car into gear and drove up towards Park Street. The great white sweep of the council chamber looked out over a triangle of well-mown grass. Bristol cathedral glowed in pale stone, sparkled with glass. ‘I would miss our little flat,’ he said. ‘It was our first home, after all. We’ve had some very good times there.’

He was speaking as if they were in the grip of some force of nature that would, resistlessly, sell their flat, which Ruth loved, and place her in the countryside, which she disliked.

‘Whether I change my job or not, I don’t want to live in the back of beyond,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s OK for you, Patrick, it’s your family home and I know you love it. But I like living in town, and I like our flat.’

‘Sure,’ Patrick said warmly. ‘We’re just playing around with ideas; just castles in the air, darling.’

On Monday morning Ruth was slow to wake. Patrick was showered and dressed before she even sat up in bed.

‘Shall I bring you a cup of coffee in bed?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘No, I’ll come down and be with you,’ she said, hastily getting out of bed and reaching for her dressing gown.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing Ian South this morning, about the job.’

‘Oh.’

‘And I’ll ring the estate agent, shall I? See what sort of value they’d put on this place? So we know where we are?’

‘Patrick, I really don’t want to move…’

He shooed her out of the room and down the hallway to the kitchen ahead of him. ‘Come on, darling, I can’t be late this morning.’

Ruth spooned coffee and switched on the filter machine.

‘Instant will do,’ Patrick said. ‘I really have to rush.’

‘Patrick, we must talk about this. I don’t want to sell the flat. I don’t want to move house. I want to stay here.’

‘I want to stay here too,’ he said at once, as if it were Ruth’s plan that they move. ‘But if something better comes up we would be stupid not to consider it. I’m not instructing an estate agent to sell, darling. Just getting an idea of the value.’

‘Surely we don’t want to live down the lane from your parents,’ Ruth said. She poured boiling water and added milk and passed Patrick his coffee. ‘Toast?’

He shook his head. ‘No time.’ He stopped abruptly as a thought suddenly struck him. ‘You don’t imagine that they would interfere, do you?’

‘Of course not!’ Ruth said quickly. ‘But we would be very much on their doorstep.’

‘All the better for us,’ Patrick said cheerfully. ‘Built-in baby-sitters.’

There was a short silence while Ruth absorbed this leap. ‘We hadn’t even thought about a family,’ she said. ‘We’ve never talked about it.’

Patrick had put down his coffee cup and turned to go, but he swung back as a thought suddenly struck him. ‘I say, Ruth, you’re not against it, are you? I mean, you do want to have children one day, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ she said hastily. ‘But not…’

‘Well, that’s all right then.’ Patrick gave his most dazzling smile. ‘Phew! I suddenly had the most horrid thought that you were going to say that you didn’t want children like some ghastly hard-bitten career journalist. Like an awful American career woman with huge shoulder pads!’ He laughed at the thought. ‘I’m really looking forward to it. You’d be so gorgeous with a baby.’

Ruth had a brief seductive vision of herself in a brod-erie anglaise nightgown with a fair-headed, round-faced, smiling baby nestled against her. ‘Yes, but not for a while.’ She trailed behind him as he went out to the hall. Patrick shrugged himself into his cream-coloured raincoat.

‘Not till we’ve got the cottage fixed up as we want it and everything, of course,’ he said. ‘Look, darling, I have to run. We’ll talk about it tonight. Don’t worry about dinner, I’ll take you out. We’ll go to the trattoria and eat spaghetti and make plans!’

‘I’m working till six,’ Ruth said.

‘I’ll book a table for eight,’ Patrick said, dropped a hasty kiss askew her mouth, and went out, banging the door behind him.