The Little House Read online

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, for Christ’s sake do you have to make so much noise? I’ve been up all night with him. He’s only this minute gone off.’

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ Patrick said reasonably. ‘I heard him cry out at about four, and I listened for him. I was going to get up, but he went back to sleep again.’

  ‘He was awake at one, for an hour, and then again at three. He didn’t go back to sleep at four, it was you that went back to sleep at four. He woke up and I had to change him and give him another bottle, and I was up with him till six, and I can’t bear him to wake again.’

  Patrick looked sceptical. ‘I’m sure I would have woken if you had been up that often,’ he said. ‘You probably dreamed it.’

  Ruth gave a little shriek and clapped her hand over her mouth. Above her own gagging hand, her eyes glared at Patrick. ‘I couldn’t have dreamed it.’ She was near to tears. ‘How could I have dreamed anything? I’ve been awake nearly all night! There was no time to dream anything, because I’ve hardly ever slept!’

  Patrick pulled on his shirt and then crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, touching her gently on the shoulder. ‘Calm down, darling,’ he said. ‘Calm down. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d had a bad night. Shall I call Mother?’

  ‘I don’t want your mother,’ Ruth said fretfully. ‘I want you to be quiet in the mornings so you don’t wake him again. I want you to get up without waking me. And I want you to come home early so you have him this afternoon and I can sleep then.’

  Patrick got up and briskly pulled on his trousers. He hated demanding women, having had no experience of them. ‘No can do, I’m afraid. I’ve got a meeting at six. I was going to be late home anyway. I’ll call Mother as I go out. You get your head down and get some sleep. She’ll be down straightaway and she can get Thomas up and dressed and take him up home for the day.’

  ‘I don’t want your mother,’ Ruth insisted. ‘I want you to look after Thomas. Not her. He’s your son, not hers.’

  Patrick smoothed the lapels of his jacket down over his chest and glanced at the pleasing reflection in the mirror. ‘I can’t be in two places at once,’ he said. ‘Be reasonable, Ruth. I’m doing my best, and I’m working all the hours God sends to make a go of this documentary unit. If I get the pay rise I’ve been promised we could get some help, perhaps a girl to come in and look after Thomas a couple of mornings a week.’

  ‘I don’t want a girl,’ Ruth said. ‘I want us to look after our son. Not a girl, not your mother: you and me.’

  Patrick said nothing. The silence seemed to be on his side.

  ‘So I’ll call Mother, shall I?’ he asked, as if she had not spoken.

  The temptation of a morning’s sleep was too much for Ruth.

  ‘All right,’ she said ungraciously. ‘I suppose so.’

  Five

  ‘IT’S RUTH,’ Patrick said without preamble when his mother answered the phone. ‘She’s not up to managing Thomas this morning, and I have to go to work. Can you have him?’

  ‘Of course,’ Elizabeth said easily. ‘You know how I love him.’

  ‘Weren’t you doing something today? Isn’t it your day at the church for flowers or something?’ Patrick asked with belated politeness.

  ‘Yes, but Thomas can come too. He’s so good. He’s no trouble at all.’

  Patrick felt himself relax. The sense of permanent crisis that eddied around the little house was calmed by his mother’s competence. ‘I wish you could teach Ruth how to handle him,’ he said suddenly. ‘We don’t seem to be getting on at all.’

  There was a diplomatic silence from his mother.

  ‘She can’t seem to settle him at night, and then she’s tired all day. She wanted me to come home early from work and I simply can’t.’ Patrick realized he was sounding aggrieved and at once adjusted his tone. ‘I suppose we’re beginners at this,’ he said, the good humour back in his voice. ‘Apprentices.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Apart from her being tired?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just wondered if she was perhaps a little depressed. Baby blues or something?’

  Patrick thought for a moment. If he had been honest he would have known that Ruth had been unhappy from the moment the pregnancy had been confirmed, from the moment she gave up her job. She had been unhappy at the move to the little house, she had been unhappy at living so close to his parents. And now she was unhappy with being left alone all day, every day, with a new restless baby.

  ‘She seems to be making very heavy weather of it all,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t know if she’s depressed. She’s certainly making a meal of it.’

  ‘I’ll come down at once,’ Elizabeth said. ‘See what I can do.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Patrick said with real gratitude. Then he put the receiver down, picked up his car keys, and drove to work with the agreeable sense of having done all that a man could be expected to do for his wife and child.

  Elizabeth tapped on the front door very gently, and when there was no reply let herself in with her own key. In the kitchen Patrick’s morning cup of coffee was cooling on the table. Someone had forgotten to switch on the dishwasher the night before and the plates were still dirty. The kitchen curtains were closed, and the room looked shadowy and hungover. Elizabeth drew the curtains back and fastened them with their tiebacks. She moved around, easily, confidently, clearing up and wiping the worktops, admiring the colour scheme, which she had chosen. The sitting room was reasonably tidy, but it had the neglected appearance of a room that was seldom used. Elizabeth picked up the evening paper and put it in the log basket for lighting the fire, put the Radio Times tidily beside the television. She plumped up the cushions on the sofa and moved the coffee table into place. There were no flowers in the room, just a dying African violet in a pot with browning leaves and dry petals. Elizabeth frowned slightly, fetched a glass of water and dribbled it onto the thirsty soil.

  She heard a movement and a little cry from the nursery upstairs and went soft-footed up the stairs. The Berber-twist carpet she had chosen went well with the William Morris wallpaper, which Ruth had insisted on using. Elizabeth took it all in with the pleasure of a house owner.

  The cry from the nursery grew louder as Thomas woke.

  ‘Coming! I’m coming!’ There was an exasperated yell from the bedroom, and then the bedroom door was flung open and the two women suddenly faced each other.

  Ruth was in a dingy maternity nightgown, her body, still fat with the weight of pregnancy, only partly masked by its folds. Her feet were bare, her hair limp, her face a mask of tiredness, dark shadows deeply etched under her eyes. She looked exhausted and unhappy. Elizabeth was trim in grey wool slacks with a pale cashmere jumper. She had a light-coloured scarf pinned at her neck by a small expensive brooch; she wore the lightest of makeup. Her perfume, as usual, was Chanel No 15.

  ‘Oh,’ Ruth said blankly.

  ‘Patrick phoned me to come. He said you wanted to sleep.’

  The wails from the nursery grew louder. Both women checked a move to go, deferring to each other with careful courtesy.

  ‘I was up all night,’ Ruth said. To her own ears she sounded as if she were making excuses to a strict teacher.

  ‘Of course, my dear, and I love to have him.’

  ‘I wanted Patrick to come home early …’

  ‘Well, men have to work.’ Elizabeth stated an inarguable fact. ‘And I’m just up the road doing nothing. Let me get him up and give him his bottle and get him dressed, and I’ll take him up to the farm with me. And when you’ve had a good sleep, and a bath’ (and washed your hair, she mentally added) ‘then you can come up to the farm and fetch him, or I’ll bring him back.’

  ‘I don’t like to impose,’ Ruth said awkwardly.

  ‘Nonsense. If it were your mother within walking distance, she would be caring for you both.’

  At the mention of her absent m
other Ruth’s face changed at once. Her eyes filled with ready tears. ‘Yes,’ she said miserably.

  ‘So let me. At least Thomas has one granny. And Frederick can take him out for a walk in the pram this afternoon. The exercise and the fresh air will do them both good.’

  Ruth nodded.

  Elizabeth turned for the nursery and went in. The room smelled sickly sweet from the bin of dirty nappies. Thomas, rosy-cheeked and bawling, was kicking in his cot. His nappy, sleep suit, even his bedding were soaked through with urine.

  ‘What a little terror!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. She took a towel from the changing table and wrapped him as she picked him up. Thomas, feeling the security of being held firmly and confidently, settled down to a little whimper of hunger. Elizabeth held him close to her neck, and he snuffled against her warm skin and familiar perfume.

  ‘You go back to sleep,’ Elizabeth said kindly to Ruth. ‘You look all in. Shall I bring you up a cup of tea and some breakfast?’

  ‘No!’ Ruth said, repelled at the thought of Elizabeth in her bedroom. ‘I’ll get something, it’s all right.’

  ‘I’ll sort out this young man and take him up to the house, then,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He can come into the garden while I pick some flowers and then we’ll go down to the church. It’s my day for the flowers.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Ruth suddenly remembered. ‘It’s clinic day. He has to go to be weighed.’

  Elizabeth smiled. ‘They surely can’t think he needs weighing every week,’ she said. ‘He eats like a horse.’

  ‘He has to go,’ Ruth said. ‘They fill in his weight chart to make sure he gains steadily. He has to go every week.’

  Elizabeth suppressed her opinion of clinics and weight charts when anyone holding this armful of wet kicking baby could know that they had a perfectly fit child in their arms. ‘I’ll take him, then,’ she said.

  ‘I have to,’ Ruth said. She was looking increasingly anxious. ‘I have to go with him.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘What do they do – weigh him? and write up his chart? I can take him on my way in to church.’

  The thought of someone dropping in to the baby clinic while en route for somewhere else quite stunned Ruth. To her it was a target to aim for all morning. The clinic, with the other screaming babies and the frighteningly competent staff, the brisk unfriendliness of the nurse, and the cliquish circle of other mothers, was a place she dreaded. Thomas had to be weighed naked, so she had the task of undressing him and then dressing him again, while the other mothers watched her incompetent fumblings. He screamed all the time as she struggled with the intricate fastenings, and she thought that the staff despised her for her inability to care for her child. Other mothers had toddlers in tow as well, and they managed to control both babies and small children while Ruth was obviously defeated by just one.

  ‘It’s awfully hard,’ she said. ‘You have to undress him to be weighed, and they fill in the card, and then you have to dress him again.’

  ‘I should think I could manage that,’ Elizabeth said.

  Ruth looked at her curiously. Elizabeth was smiling gently, humorously, as if the task were genuinely an easy one. It was obvious to Ruth that Elizabeth found the nightmarishly difficult task of caring for Thomas both natural and enjoyable. She felt her throat tighten; she turned to go to her bedroom before Elizabeth saw her cry. ‘All right then,’ she said.

  ‘Will you come to the house when you are ready?’ Elizabeth asked the closing door.

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth said, her voice muffled. The door clicked shut.

  Elizabeth faced the closed door, Thomas snug against her shoulder. ‘I’ll look after him till you come then,’ she said, contentedly.

  The clinic was held in the health centre in the Babies Room. When Elizabeth tapped on the door and walked in with Thomas strapped into his plastic carrier, the noise hit her like a wall of sound. Half a dozen babies were crying and the mothers were shouting comments and gossip over the noise. The health visitor on duty and the one clinic clerk wore expressions of stolid patience. Elizabeth went up to the desk.

  ‘Thomas James Cleary,’ she said.

  The clerk found the form. ‘Undress over there,’ she said. ‘The health visitor will call you.’

  Elizabeth looked at the cold plastic changing mat on the high narrow shelf with disfavour. Instead she sat on one of the low chairs and undressed Thomas on her knee, wrapping him in a shawl when he was naked.

  ‘Thomas Cleary,’ the health visitor said. ‘Oh! It’s Thomas’s grandma, isn’t it?’

  Elizabeth rose. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am Mrs Cleary.’

  ‘Mother not well?’ the health visitor asked as they watched the red arrow of the scales tip over at sixteen pounds.

  ‘Overtired,’ Elizabeth said.

  The health visitor nodded. ‘Moved into her new house, then? I should have called in, really. Doing all right is she?’

  Elizabeth allowed a shadow of doubt. ‘It’s very hard work,’ she said. ‘Coping with everything. Especially with a first child.’

  The health visitor passed the form to the clinic clerk, who entered the weight carefully in the appropriate column. Elizabeth, who had raised two healthy children without benefit of scales or health visitors, tried to look appropriately respectful. Unseen, the health visitor flipped through her notes. She remembered Ruth when she found the note she had written about the mother and baby failing to bond, and now here was the grandmother turning up at the clinic.

  ‘Let’s have a little sitdown and a chat,’ she invited.

  Elizabeth sat in the chair and started to put a new nappy on Thomas. The health visitor noted her easy competence with him. ‘None of my mothers can do that,’ she said. ‘They all dress them on changing mats.’

  ‘We didn’t have changing mats in my day,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I always feel safer with him on my knee.’

  ‘Is Mother all right?’

  Elizabeth hesitated. ‘She’s very overtired.’

  ‘Bit depressed?’ the health visitor offered.

  Elizabeth shrugged. ‘I try not to interfere. I’m only here today because my son asked me to have Thomas for the morning.’

  ‘And do you have him often?’

  ‘Whenever I am asked.’

  The health visitor felt a certain unease at Elizabeth’s patrician reserve. She was not confiding. It was hard to know how to ask the next question.

  ‘Are mother and baby on good terms?’ she asked clumsily. ‘Getting to know each other? Lots of play and tickling?’

  Elizabeth shot her a guarded look, which spoke volumes. ‘I think so.’

  The health visitor looked at her notes. Thomas was well-dressed and clean; he was gaining weight; there was no reason to fear that there might be anything wrong at home. But she remembered Ruth’s sleepy uninterest in the baby at the farmhouse and how every time she had called, the baby had been with his grandmother. Now the grandmother was bringing him to the clinic. When Ruth had come she had looked stressed and anxious, roughly pulling the baby’s clothes over his head, bundling him into his carry cot. She had forgotten to bring a spare nappy on one visit and she had been near tears. The child should not be at risk, with this extended family around him, and yet … and yet …

  ‘D’you think it’s a bit too much for her?’ she asked. ‘New baby, new house, and her husband must work all hours, doesn’t he?’

  Elizabeth warmed at the mention of Patrick’s fame. ‘He’s terribly busy.’

  ‘Does Mother need a bit more support perhaps?’

  ‘Well, we do all we can,’ Elizabeth said, a slight edge to her voice. ‘Every time I’m asked I have Thomas for her. She knows she only has to pick up the phone.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ the health visitor asked boldly.

  Elizabeth slid her a swift sideways glance as she straightened Thomas’s tiny socks. ‘Not the maternal type,’ she whispered. It was like admitting a crime.

  ‘Not?’

  ‘Not.’


  The two women sat in conspiratorial silence for a moment. ‘I thought not,’ the health visitor said. ‘She just didn’t seem to take to him.’

  ‘He was a Caesarean, and she couldn’t feed him. She didn’t stick at it so it never happened, and now she just seems quite incapable of getting up to him in the night or waking up in the morning.’

  ‘Is she depressed?’

  Elizabeth checked an impatient response. ‘I don’t know,’ she said carefully. ‘I wouldn’t know. We’ve never had any depression in our family, or anything like that.’

  ‘Perhaps the doctor should see her, have a word.’

  Elizabeth shrugged. ‘We can always care for Thomas,’ she said. ‘I’m free all day, and he can come with me for all my little chores. We’re going to do the church flowers now, I’ve got a car full of Michaelmas daisies.’

  ‘Lovely,’ the health visitor said. ‘Will you make an appointment for your daughter to see the doctor then?’

  Elizabeth hesitated. ‘She’s my daughter-in-law,’ she emphasized. ‘It makes it a little difficult.’

  The health visitor nodded, thinking. ‘What about her mother?’

  ‘Both her parents are dead,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And there’s no family to speak of. She’s very alone in the world. It’s a mercy we are here to care for her.’

  The health visitor hesitated. Her first impression of a young mother struggling to cope with a new baby and to deal with continual interference was changing. In the light of Elizabeth’s discreet emphasis, she thought now that Ruth was sliding into depression despite the help of her family.

  ‘Could your son bring her in to see the doctor?’

  Elizabeth shook her head. ‘It would look so strange. She would wonder what was going on.’

  ‘I know,’ the health visitor said. ‘Tell her that the doctor wants to see her and Baby for an eight-week check. Absolutely routine, and I’ll see that Dr MacFadden knows that we are concerned.’

  ‘I’m not concerned,’ Elizabeth said carefully. ‘Not exactly concerned.’