The Little House Read online

  A laurel bush slapped waxy green leaves against the kitchen window and dripped water mournfully on the panes. Ruth gave a little shiver against the cold.

  ‘Upstairs is very neat,’ Frederick observed, shepherding them out of the kitchen through the dining room and back into the hall. ‘Pop on up, Ruth. Go on, Patrick.’

  Ruth unwillingly led the way upstairs. The others followed behind her, commenting on the soundness of the stairs and the attractive banister. Ruth hesitated on the landing.

  ‘This is so lovely,’ Elizabeth said, throwing open a door. ‘The master bedroom, Ruth. See the view!’

  The bedroom faced south, down the valley. It was a pretty view of the fields, and in the distance a road and the village.

  ‘Sunny all the day long,’ Frederick said.

  ‘And here are two other bedrooms and a bathroom,’ Elizabeth said, gesturing to the other doors. She led Ruth to see each of them. ‘And this has to be a nursery!’ she exclaimed. The pretty little room faced over the garden. In the cold autumn light it looked grey and dreary. ‘Roses at the window all the summer long,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Look! I think you can just see our house!’

  Ruth obediently looked. ‘Yes.’

  She turned and led the way downstairs. While the others returned for a second look at the damp kitchen, Ruth went outside and waited in the cold front garden. When they emerged, all smiling at some remark, they looked at her expectantly, as if they were waiting for some pronouncement that would make them all happy, as if she should say that she had passed an exam, or that she had won the lottery. They turned bright, hopeful faces on her, and Ruth had nothing to offer them. She felt her shoulders lift in a little shrug. She did not know what they expected her to say.

  ‘You do love it, don’t you, darling?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘It’s very pretty,’ she said.

  It was the right thing to say. They looked pleased. Frederick closed the front door and locked it with the care of a householder. ‘Ideal,’ he pronounced.

  Patrick slipped his arm around her waist. ‘We could go ahead, then,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Put the flat on the market, make an offer on this place, move house.’

  Ruth hesitated. ‘I don’t think I want …’

  ‘Now, stop it, Patrick,’ Elizabeth said reasonably. ‘You’ve only just seen it. There’s lots to take into account. You have to have a survey done, and you have to have your own flat valued. Ruth needs time to get adjusted to the idea; it’s a bigger change for her than anyone!’ She smiled at Ruth conspiratorially: the two women in league together. ‘You can’t rush us and make a decision all in one afternoon! I won’t allow it!’

  Patrick threw her a mock salute. ‘All right! All right!’

  ‘It’s a business decision,’ Frederick supplemented. ‘Not simply somewhere to live. You and Ruth might have fallen in love with it, but you have to be sure it’s a good investment too.’ He smiled fondly at Ruth and tapped her on the nose with the house key before putting it into his pocket. ‘Now don’t turn those big eyes on me and tell me you have to have it, little Ruth. I agree, it looks like an excellent bargain for the two of you, but I shall let my head rule my heart on this one.’

  ‘Hark at him!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. She slipped her hand in Ruth’s arm and led her around the corner of the house to the back garden. ‘He’s determined to have the place, and he makes it sound like it is us who are rushing him. Come and see the garden! It’s just bliss in summer. A real old-fashioned cottage garden. You can’t plant borders like this in less than twenty years. They have to mature.’

  Ruth trailed after Elizabeth to the back garden and obediently admired the decaying, dripping wallflowers and the seedpods of stocks. At the back of the flower bed were the tall dead spines of delphiniums and before them were bloated pods of last season’s love-in-the-mist. The lawn was soggy with moss; the crazy-paved pathway was slick with lichen and overgrown with weeds.

  ‘Best way to see it,’ Frederick said. He picked a stick and switched at a nettle head. ‘See a property in the worst light and you know it. There’s no nasty shocks hidden away. You know what you’re getting. If you love it like this, little Ruth, then you’ll adore it in summer.’

  ‘I don’t think I could really …’ Ruth started.

  ‘Good gracious, look at the time!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. ‘I thought I was missing my cup of tea. It’s half past four already. Frederick you’re very naughty to drag us down here. Ruth and I are faint for tea!’

  Frederick looked at his watch and exclaimed in surprise. They turned and left the garden. Ruth plucked at Patrick’s sleeve as he went past her. ‘I can’t get to work from here,’ she said swiftly. ‘It’d take me hours to get in. And what about when I have to work late? And I like our flat.’

  ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Let them have their little plans. It doesn’t do any harm, does it? We’ll talk about it later. Not now.’

  ‘Here, Patrick!’ his father called. ‘D’you think this is a legal right of way? Can you remember, when you were a boy, was there a footpath here?’

  Patrick gave her a swift, encouraging smile and joined his parents.

  Ruth was quiet at tea, and when they finally pulled away from Manor Farm with a homemade quiche and an apple crumble in the usual Sunday box of home-cooked food on the back seat, she still said nothing.

  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 broderie 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.

  Ruth stood on her own in the hall and then shivered a little at the cold draught from the door. It was raining again; it seemed as if it had been raining for weeks.

  The letter flap clicked and a handful of letters dropped to the doormat. Four manila envelopes, all bills. Ruth saw that the gas bill showed red print and realized that once again she was late in paying. She would have to write a cheque this morning and post it on her way to work or Patrick would be upset. She picked up the letters and put them on the kitchen counter, and went upstairs for her bath.

  The newsroom was unusually subdued when Ruth came in, shook her wet coat, and hung it up on the coatstand. The duty producer glanced up. ‘I was just typing the handover note,’ he said. ‘You’ll be short-staffed today, but there’s nothing much on. A fire, but it’s all over now, and there’s a line on the missing girl.’

  ‘Is David skiving?’ she asked. ‘Where is he?’

  The duty producer tipped his head towards the closed door of the news editor’s office. ‘Getting his cards,’ he said in an undertone. ‘Bloody disgrace.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Cutbacks is what,’ he said, typing rapidly with two fingers. ‘Not making enough money, not selling enough soap powder, who’s the first to go? Editorial staff! After all, any fool can do it, can’t they? And all anyone wants is the music anyway. Next thing we know it’ll be twenty-four-hour music with not even a DJ – music and adverts, that’s all they want.’

  ‘Terry, stop it!’ Ruth said. ‘Tell me what’s going on!’

  He pulled the paper irritably out of the typewriter and thrust it into her hands. ‘There’s your handover note. I’m off shift. I’m going out to buy a newspaper and look for a job. The writing’s on the wall for us. They’re cutting back the newsroom staff: they want to lose three posts. David’s in there now getting the treatment. There are two other posts to go and no one knows who’s for the chop. It’s all right for you, Ruth, with your glamour-boy husband bringing in a fortune. If I lose my job I don’t know what we’ll do.’

  ‘I don’t exactly work for pocket money, you know,’ Ruth said crossly. ‘It’s not a hobby for me.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sorry. We’re all in the same boat. But I’m sick of this place, I can tell you. I’m off shift now and I’m not coming back till Wednesday – if I’ve still got a job then.’ He strode over to the coat rack and took his jacket down. ‘And it’s still bloody raining,’ he said angrily, and stormed out of the newsroom, banging the door behind him.

  Ruth looked over to the copy taker and raised her eyebrows. The girl nodded. ‘He’s been like that all morning,’ she said resignedly.

  ‘Oh.’ Ruth took the handover note to the desk and started reading through it. The door behind her opened and David came out, the news editor, James Peart, with him. ‘Think it over,’ James was saying. ‘I promise you we’ll use you as much as we possibly can. And there are other outlets, remember.’ He noticed Ruth at her desk. ‘Ruth, when you’ve got the eleven-o’clock bull
etin out of the way could you come and see me?’

  ‘Me?’ Ruth asked.

  He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said and went back into his office and closed the door.

  There was a brief, shocked silence. Ruth turned to her oldest friend. ‘What did he say to you?’ she asked David.

  ‘Blah blah, excellent work, blah blah, frontiers of journalism, blah blah, first-class references, blah blah, a month’s pay in lieu of notice and if nothing else turns up why don’t you freelance for us?’

  ‘Freelance?’

  ‘The new slimline Radio Westerly,’ David said bitterly. ‘As few people as possible on the staff, and the journalists all freelance, paying their own tax and their own insurance and their own phone bills. Simple but brilliant.’ He paused as a thought struck him. ‘Did he say you were to see him?’

  ‘After the eleven-o’clock,’ Ruth said glumly. ‘D’you think that means that I’m out too?’

  David shrugged. ‘Well, I doubt it means you’ve won the Sony Award for investigative journalism. D’you want to meet me for a drink after work? Drown our sorrows?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth said gratefully. ‘But perhaps I won’t have sorrows to drown.’

  ‘Then you can drown mine,’ David said generously. ‘I’d hate to be selfish with them.’

  Ruth rewrote the bulletin, one eye on the clock. At the desk behind her David made telephone calls to the police, the fire station, and the ambulance, checking for fresh news. He sounded genuinely interested; he always did. She remembered him from journalism college: when everyone else would groan at a news-gathering exercise, David would dive into little shops, greet shop assistants with enthusiasm, and plunge into the minutiae of local gossip.

  ‘Anything new?’ she threw over her shoulder.

  ‘They’re mopping up after the fire,’ he said. ‘There’s an update on the conditions from the hospital. Nothing too exciting.’

  She took the slip of copy paper he handed to her, and went into the soundproofed peace of the little news studio. The door closed with a soft hiss behind her, Ruth pulled out the chair and sat before the desk to read through the bulletin in a murmured whisper, marking on her copy the words she wanted to emphasize, and practising the pronunciation of difficult words. There had been an earthquake in the Ural Mountains. ‘Ural Mountains,’ Ruth whispered. ‘Ural.’