The Little House. Philippa Gregory

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      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.

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