The Little House
Philippa Gregory

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

ON SUNDAY MORNING, on almost every Sunday morning, Ruth and Patrick Cleary drove from their smart Bristol flat to Patrick’s parents’ farmhouse outside Bath. They had only been married for four years and Ruth would have preferred to linger in bed, but this Sunday, as almost every Sunday, they had been invited for lunch at one o’clock prompt.

Patrick always enjoyed returning to his home. It had once been a dairy farm, but Patrick’s father had sold off the land, retaining only a little wood and circle of fields around the house: an eighteenth-century manor farm of yellow Bath stone. While never being so vulgar as to lie, the Clearys liked to suggest that their family had lived there forever. Patrick’s father liked to imply that he came from Somerset yeoman stock and the farm was their ancestral home.

Patrick’s mother opened the door as they came up the path. She was always there when they arrived, ready to fling open the door in welcome. Once Ruth had teased Patrick, saying that his mother spent her life peeping through the brass letterbox, so that she could throw open the door as her son arrived, wrap him in her arms, and say, ‘Welcome home, darling.’ Patrick had looked offended, and had not laughed.

‘Welcome home, darling,’ his mother said.

Patrick kissed her, and then she turned and kissed Ruth’s cheek. ‘Hello, dearest, how pale you look. Have you been working too hard?’

Ruth was surprised to find that immediately she felt exhausted. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Freddie, they’re here!’ Ruth’s mother called into the house, and Patrick’s father appeared in the hall.

‘Hello, old boy,’ he said lovingly to Patrick. He dropped an arm briefly on Patrick’s shoulder and then turned to Ruth and kissed her. ‘Looking lovely, my dear. Patrick – saw you on television last night, the piece on the commuters. Jolly good. They used a bit of it on News at Ten. Good show.’

Patrick grimaced. ‘It didn’t come out how I wanted,’ he said. ‘I had a new film crew and they all had their own ideas. I might be the reporter, but none of them want to listen to me.’

‘Too many chiefs and not enough Indians,’ Frederick pronounced.

Ruth looked at him. He often said a sentence, like a little motto, that she had never heard before and that made no sense to her whatsoever. They were a playful family, sometimes quoting family jokes or phrases of Patrick’s babytalk that had survived for years. No one ever explained the jokes to Ruth; she was supposed to laugh at them and enjoy them, as if they were self-explanatory.

‘That’s shoptalk,’ Patrick’s mother said firmly. ‘Not now. I want my assistant in the kitchen!’

It was one of the Sunday rituals that Patrick helped his mother in the kitchen while Ruth and Frederick chatted in the drawing room. Ruth had tried to join the two in the kitchen once or twice and had glimpsed Patrick’s indispensable help. He was perched on one of the kitchen stools, listening to Elizabeth and picking nuts from a bowl of nibbles she had placed before him. When Ruth had interrupted them, they had looked up like two unfriendly children and fallen silent. It was Elizabeth’s private time with her son; she did not want Ruth there. Ruth was sent back into the sitting room with the decanter of sherry and instructions to keep Frederick entertained. She learned that she must wait for Patrick to put his head around the door and say, ‘Luncheon is served, ladies and gents.’ Then Frederick could stop making awkward conversation with her and say, ‘I could eat a horse! Is it horse again?’

Elizabeth served roast pork with crackling, apple sauce, roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, peas and carrots. Ruth wanted only a little. In Bristol in the canteen of the radio station where she worked as a journalist, she was always hungry. But there was something about the dining room at the farmhouse that made her throat close up. Patrick’s father poured red wine and Ruth would drink two or three glasses, but she could not make herself eat.

Patrick ate a good lunch, his plate favoured with the crunchiest potatoes and the best cuts of meat, and always had seconds.

‘You’ll get fat,’ his father warned him. ‘Look at me, never gained a pound till I retired from the army and had your mother’s home cooking every day.’

‘He burns it all up,’ Elizabeth defended her son. ‘His job is all nerves. He burns it all up with nervous energy.’

They both looked at Ruth, and she managed a small uncomfortable smile. She did not know whether to agree that he would get fat, which would imply an unwifely lack of admiration, or agree that he lived on his nerves, which would indicate that she was not protecting him from stress.

‘It’s been a devil of a week,’ Patrick agreed. ‘But I think I may be getting somewhere at last.’

There was a little murmur of interest. Ruth looked surprised. She did not know that Patrick had any news from work. She wondered guiltily if her own work, which was demanding and absorbing, had made her neglect his ambition. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said.

He smiled his wide, handsome smile at her. ‘I thought I’d wait to tell you until it was shaping up,’ he said.

‘No point in counting chickens,’ his father agreed. ‘Spill the beans, old boy.’

‘There’s talk of a new unit, to do specialist local film documentaries,’ Patrick said. ‘It’ll be headed by a news producer. The best news producer we’ve got.’ He paused, and smiled his professionally modest smile. ‘Looks like I’m in line for the job.’

‘Good show.’

‘Wonderful,’ Patrick’s mother said.

‘What would you do?’ Ruth asked.

‘Regular hours!’ Patrick replied with a little chuckle. ‘That’s the main thing! I’d still do reports to camera but I wouldn’t be on call all the time, and I’d not be running around out of hours. I’d have more control. It’s an opportunity for me.’

‘Is this a bubble-size celebration?’ Patrick’s father demanded of Ruth.

She looked at him blankly. She simply had no idea what he meant.

‘Champagne, darling,’ Patrick prompted. ‘Do wake up!’

‘I suppose it must be.’ Ruth stretched her mouth in a smile, trying to be bright and excited. ‘How wonderful!’

Patrick’s father was already on his way to the kitchen. Elizabeth fetched the special champagne glasses from the sideboard.

‘He’s got a bottle already chilled,’ she said to Patrick. Ruth understood that this was significant.

‘Oh ho!’ Patrick said as his father came back into the room. ‘Chilled already?’

His father gave him a roguish wink and expertly opened the bottle. The champagne splashed into the glasses. Ruth said, ‘Only a little please,’ but no one heard her. She raised her full glass in a toast to Patrick’s success. It was a very dry wine. Ruth knew that dry champagne was the right taste; only inexperienced, ill-educated people liked sweet champagne. If she continued to make herself drink it, then one day she too would like dry champagne and then she would have an educated palate. It was a question of endurance. Ruth took another sip.

‘Now I wonder why you were keeping a bottle of champagne on ice?’ Patrick prompted his father.

‘I have some grounds for celebration – but only if you two are absolutely happy about it. Your mother and I have a little proposition to put to you.’

Ruth tried to look intelligent and interested but the taste of the wine was bitter in her mouth. The taste for champagne, they had assured her, was acquired. Ruth wondered if she would ever like it.

‘It’s Manor Cottage,’ Frederick said. ‘On the market at last. Old Miss Fisher died last week and, as you can imagine, I was onto her lawyer pretty quick. She left her estate to some damnfool charity…cats or orphans or something…’ He broke off, suddenly embarrassed, remembering the orphan status of his daughter-in-law. ‘Beg pardon, Ruth. No offence.’

Ruth experienced the usual stab of pain at the thought of her lost parents, and smiled her usual bright smile. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

‘Well, anyway,’ said Frederick, ‘the house will be sold at once. I’ve waited for years to get my hands on it. And now, with you getting into more regular hours, it’s ideal.’

‘And the land?’ Patrick asked.

‘The garden, and the field, and that copse that joins our bit of wood. It rounds off our land to perfection.’

‘Pricey?’ Patrick asked.

Frederick laid his finger along his nose to indicate inside knowledge. ‘Her lawyer is the executor. And the charity won’t be putting it up for auction. They’ll want a quick, simple sale. The lawyer will take the first reasonable offer.’

‘Who’s the lawyer?’ Patrick asked.

Frederick grinned – this was the punch line. ‘My lawyer,’ he said. ‘As it happens. By happy coincidence. Simon Sylvester.’

Patrick chuckled. ‘We could sell our flat tomorrow.’

‘We should make a handsome profit on it,’ his father concurred. ‘You could stay here while the cottage is being done up. Couldn’t be better.’

‘If Ruth agrees,’ Elizabeth reminded them.

Both men turned at once to her. ‘I don’t quite…’ Ruth said helplessly.

‘Manor Cottage is on the market at last,’ Patrick said. ‘Come on, darling, the little house at the end of the drive. The one I’ve always had my eye on.’

Ruth looked from one bright impatient face to another. ‘You want to buy it?’

‘Yes, darling. Yes. Wake up!’

‘And sell our flat?’

They nodded.

Ruth could feel that she was being slow, and worse than that, unwilling.

‘But how would I get to work? And we like our flat.’

‘It was only ever a temporary base,’ Frederick said. ‘Just a little nest for you two young lovebirds.’

Ruth looked at him, puzzled.

‘A good investment is only worth having if you’re ready to capitalize,’ he said firmly. ‘When the time is right.’

‘But how would I get to work?’

Elizabeth smiled at her. ‘You won’t work forever, dearest. You might find that when you have a family-sized house in the country you feel like giving up work altogether. You might have something else to keep you busy!’

Ruth turned to Patrick.

‘We might start a family,’ he translated.

Frederick gave a shout of laughter. ‘Her face! Dear Ruth! Have you never thought about it? We could be talking Chinese!’

Ruth felt her face stiff with stupidity. ‘We hadn’t planned…’ she said.

‘Well, we couldn’t really, could we?’ Patrick confirmed. ‘Not while we were living in town in a poky little flat, and my hours were all over the place, and you were working so hard. But promotion, and Manor Cottage, well, it all comes together, doesn’t it?’

‘I’ve always lived in town,’ Ruth said. ‘And my job means everything to me. I’m the only woman news producer on the station – it’s a real responsibility, and this week I broke a national story –’ she glanced at Patrick. ‘We scooped you,’ she reminded him.

He shrugged. ‘Radio is always quicker than telly.’

‘We were going to travel…’ she reminded him. It was an old promise. Ruth was an American child – her father a concert pianist from Boston, her mother an Englishwoman. They had died in the quick brutality of a road accident on a winter visit to England when Ruth was only seven years old. Her mother’s English family had taken the orphaned girl in, and she had never seen her home again. When Ruth and Patrick had first met, he had found the brief outline of this story almost unbearably moving and had promised Ruth that they would go back to Boston one day, and find her house. Who knew – her childhood toys, her books, her parents’ things might even be in store somewhere, or forgotten in an attic? And part of the chasm of need that Ruth always carried with her might be filled.

‘We still can,’ he said quickly.

‘We’ll finish this bottle and then we’ll all go down and look at Manor Cottage,’ Frederick said firmly. ‘Take my word for it, Ruth, you’ll fall for it. It’s a little peach. Bags of potential.’

‘She’s not to be bullied,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘We might think it paradise to have the two of you on our doorstep, but if Ruth doesn’t want to live so close to us, she is allowed to say “no”.’

‘Oh, it’s not that!’ Ruth said quickly, fearful of giving offence.

‘It’s just the surprise of it,’ Patrick answered for her. ‘I should have warned her that you’ve had your eye on that for years and you always get your own way.’

‘Amen to that!’ Frederick said. The father and son clinked glasses.

‘But I like our flat,’ Ruth said.

Ruth borrowed a pair of Elizabeth’s Wellington boots for the walk, and her waxed jacket and her headscarf. She had not come prepared, because the after-lunch walk was always Frederick’s time alone with Patrick. Usually Elizabeth and Ruth cleared the lunch table, stacking the plates in the dishwasher, and then sat in the living room with the Sunday papers to read and Mozart on the hi-fi. Ruth had once gone with the men on their walk, but after a few yards she had realized her mistake. They strode along with their hands buried deep in their pockets, shoulder to shoulder in a silent enjoyable communion. She had delayed them at stiles and gates because they had felt bound to hold her hand as she clambered over them, or warn her about mud in gateways. They had kept stopping to ask if they were going too fast for her or if she was tired. Their very generosity to her and concern for her had told her that she was a stranger, and unwelcome. They wasted no politeness on each other. For each other they shared a happy, wordless camaraderie.

The next Sunday Frederick announced: ‘Time for my constitutional,’ and then he had turned to Ruth: ‘Will you come with us again, Ruth? It looks like rain.’

As she had hesitated, Elizabeth said firmly, ‘You two run along! I won’t have my daughter-in-law dragged around the countryside in the rain! Ruth will stay here with me and we can be cosy. We’ll kick our shoes off and gossip.’

After that, the two men always walked alone after lunch and Ruth and Elizabeth waited for them to return. There was no kicking off shoes. Elizabeth was a naturally formal woman, and they had no mutual friends for gossip. Ruth punctiliously asked after Miriam, Patrick’s elder sister, who was teaching in Canada. But Miriam was always well. Elizabeth inquired about Ruth’s work, which was filled with drama and small triumphs that never sounded interesting when retold, and asked after Ruth’s aunt, who had brought her up after the death of her parents. Ruth always said that she was well, but in truth they had lost contact except for Christmas cards and the occasional phone call. Then there was nothing more to say. The two women leafed through the newspapers together until they heard the dog scrabbling at the back door and Elizabeth rose to let him in and put the kettle on for tea.

Ruth knew that Manor Cottage mattered very much to everyone when she was invited on the walk, especially when Elizabeth walked too.

They went across the fields, the men helping the women over the stiles. They could see the Manor Cottage roof from two fields away, nestling in a little valley. The footpath from the farmhouse led to the back gate and into the garden. The drive to the farmhouse ran past the front door. There was a stream that ran through the garden.

‘Might get a trout or two,’ Frederick observed.

‘As long as it’s not damp,’ Elizabeth said.

Frederick had brought the key. He opened the front door and stepped back. ‘Better carry her over the threshold,’ he said to Patrick. ‘Just for luck.’

It would have been awkward and ungracious to refuse. Ruth let Patrick pick her up and step over the threshold with her and then put her down gently in the little hall and kiss her, as if it were their new house, and they were newlyweds, moving in.

The old lady’s rickety furniture was still in the house and it smelled very faintly of damp and cats’ pee. Ruth, with a strong sense of her alien childhood, recognized at once the flavour of a house that the English would call full of character, and that her American father would have called dirty.

‘Soon air out,’ Frederick said firmly. ‘Here, take a look.’

He opened the door on the sitting room, which ran the length of the cottage. At the rear of the cottage were old-fashioned French windows leading to a muddy garden, desolate under the November sky. ‘Pretty as a picture in summer,’ he said. ‘We’d lend you Stephens. He could come over and do the hard digging on Tuesdays. Mow the lawn for you, trim the hedges. You’d probably enjoy doing the light stuff yourself.’

‘So relaxing,’ Elizabeth said, with a nod to Ruth. ‘Very therapeutic for Patrick!’

They turned and went into the opposite room. It was a small dark dining room, which led to the kitchen at the back overlooking the back garden. The back door was half off its hinges, and damp had seeped into the walls. There was a large old-fashioned china sink, with ominous brown stains around the drain hole, and an enormous ash-filled, grease-stained coal-burning range. ‘Oh, you’ll have such fun with this!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. ‘Ruth, how I envy you! It’s the sweetest little room, and you can do so much with it. I can just imagine a real farmhouse kitchen – all pine and stencils!’

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 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.

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 bulletin 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.’

At two minutes to eleven the disc jockey’s voice cut into her rehearsal. ‘News coming up! Are you there and conscious, Ruth?’

‘Ready to go,’ Ruth said.

‘Thank the Lord for a happy voice from the newsroom. What’s up with you guys today?’

‘Nothing,’ Ruth said frostily, instantly loyal to her colleagues.

‘We hear of massive cutbacks, and journalists out on the streets,’ the DJ said cheerfully.

‘Do you?’

‘So who’s got the push?’

‘I’m busy now,’ she said tightly. ‘I’ll pop down and spread gloom and anxiety in a minute. Right now I’m trying to read a news bulletin.’

He switched off his talkback button. Ruth had a reputation at the radio station for a quick mind and a frank turn of phrase. Her headphones were filled with the sound of the record – the Carpenters. ‘We’ve only just begun…’ Ruth felt her temper subside and she smiled. She liked romantic music.

Then the disc jockey said with his carefully learned mid-Atlantic accent: ‘Eleven o’clock, time for Radio Westerly news with Ruth Cleary!’

He announced her name as if there should have been a drumroll underneath it. Ruth grinned and then straightened her face and assumed her solemn news-reading voice. She read first the national news, managing the Ural Mountains without a hitch, and then the local news. At the end of the bulletin she read the local weather report and handed back to the DJ. She gathered the papers of the bulletin and sat for one short moment in the quiet. If David had been sacked then it was unlikely that they would be keeping her on. They had joined at the same time from the same college course, but David was probably the better journalist. Ruth straightened her back, opened the swing door, and emerged into the noise of the newsroom. She passed the script of the bulletin to the copy girl for filing and tapped on the news editor’s door.

James Peart looked so guilty she knew at once that he would make her redundant. He did.

‘This is a horrible job,’ James said miserably. ‘David and you, and one other. It’s a foul thing to have to do. But I have suggested to David that he look at freelancing and I was going to suggest to you that you look at putting together some light documentary programmes. We might have a slot for some local pieces: family interest, animals, children, local history, that sort of thing in the afternoon show. Nothing too ambitious, bread-and-butter stuff. But it’s the sort of thing you do rather well, Ruth. If you can’t find full-time work, you could do that for us. We’d lend you the recording equipment, and you could come in and use the studio. And you’d get paid a fee and expenses, of course.’ He broke off. ‘I know it’s not much but it would keep your hand in while you’re looking round.’

‘Bread-and-butter?’ Ruth asked. ‘Sounds more like slop.’

James grimaced. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, Ruth,’ he said.

‘Who shall I shoot then?’ she said. ‘Who’s responsible for putting me, and David, and someone else out of a job?’

He shrugged. ‘Market forces?’ he offered.

‘This is rubbish,’ she said firmly. ‘Why didn’t you tell them that you couldn’t run the newsroom understaffed?’

‘Because my job’s on the line too,’ he said frankly. ‘I did tell them that we should keep the staff, but if I make too many waves then I’m out as well. I can’t lose my job for a principle, Ruth.’

‘So I lose mine for the lack of one?’

He said nothing.

‘We should have had a union,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or better contracts, or better management, or more profits. But those days are gone, Ruth. I’m sorry.’

She was silent.

‘Look, there’s nothing I can do but offer you freelance work,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my best to take everything you do. You’re a good journalist, Ruth, you’ll make it. If not here, then London. And I’ll give you good references. The best.’

Ruth nodded. ‘Thanks,’ she said shortly.

‘Maybe Patrick knows of something in television,’ James suggested. ‘He might be able to slot you in somewhere. That’s where the money is, not radio.’

‘He might,’ Ruth said.

James got up and held out his hand. ‘You’ll work till the end of the week, and then take a month’s salary,’ he said. ‘I do wish you luck, Ruth. I really wish this hadn’t happened. If things look up at all then you’ll be the first person I’d want to see back on the staff.’

Ruth nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘If there’s anything at all I can do to help…’ he said showing her towards the door.

Ruth thought of her inability to pay the bills on time and run the flat as it should be run, of Patrick’s legitimate desire for a meal when he came home after working all day, of Patrick’s pay rise and the ascendancy of his career. Maybe a period of freelance work would be good for them both.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. It looks like it’s all falling into place.’

She rang to leave a message for Patrick that she would meet him at the restaurant, and she ran through the rain to the pub. Although it was barely opening time, David was sitting up at the bar and was smiling and lightly drunk.

‘Flying start,’ he said genially. ‘I took the sensible course of a vodka tea.’

‘Gin and tonic,’ Ruth said, hitching herself up onto the barstool. ‘Double.’

‘You got the push too?’

‘I did.’

‘What did he suggest? Freelancing for Panorama? Career opportunities on News at Ten? Or you could go back to the States and run CNN?’

‘It’s odd,’ Ruth said with mock thoughtfulness. ‘He didn’t mention any of them. Probably thought they were beneath me.’

David made a face. ‘Poor bastard’s doing his best,’ he said. ‘He promised me if I went freelance they’d use my pieces, and I could come into studio to edit for free.’

Ruth nodded. ‘He offered me the same. Suggested I do local bread-and-butter stuff for the afternoon programme.’

‘It’s a great business, the media!’ David said with sudden assumed cheeriness. ‘You’re never out of work. You’re either resting or freelancing. But you’re never unemployed.’

‘Or taking time out to start a family,’ Ruth said. She screwed her face up at him in an awful simper. ‘I think the first few years are so precious! And I can always come back into it when the baby starts school.’

‘Boarding school,’ David supplemented. ‘Stay home with him until he sets off for boarding school. Just take eleven years off. What’s that, after all? It’ll pass in a flash.’

‘No child of mine is boarding! I think a mother should stay home until the children are grown,’ Ruth said earnestly. ‘University age at least.’

‘First job,’ David corrected her. ‘Give them a stable start. You can come back to work twenty-one years from now.’

‘Oh, but the grandchildren will need me!’ Ruth exclaimed.

‘Ah, yes, the magic years. So you could come back to work when you’re…perhaps…sixty?’

Ruth looked thoughtful. ‘I’d like to do a couple more months before I retire,’ she said. ‘I really am a career girl, you know.’

They broke off and smiled at each other. ‘You’re a mate,’ David said. ‘And you’re a good journalist too. They’re mad getting rid of you. You’re worth two or three of some of them.’

‘Last in, first out,’ Ruth said. ‘You’re better than them too.’

He shrugged. ‘So what will you do?’

Ruth hesitated. ‘The forces are massing a bit,’ she said hesitantly. She was not sure how much to tell David. Her powerful loyalty to Patrick usually kept her silent. ‘Patrick’s parents have a cottage near them that has come up for sale. Patrick’s always wanted it. He’s getting promoted, which is more money and better hours. And we have been married four, nearly five years. There is a kind of inevitability about what happens next.’

David had never learned tact. ‘What d’you mean: what happens next? D’you mean a baby?’

Ruth hesitated. ‘Eventually, yes, of course,’ she said. ‘But not right now. I wanted to work up a bit, you know. I did want to work for the BBC. I even thought about television.’

‘You always said you were going to travel,’ he reminded her. ‘Research your roots. Go back to America and find your missing millionaire relations.’

‘If I’m freelance that’ll be easier.’

‘Not with a baby,’ David reminded her.

Ruth was silent.

‘I suppose there is such a thing as contraception,’ David said lightly. ‘A woman’s right to choose and all that. We are in the nineties. Or did I miss something?’

‘Swing back to family values,’ Ruth said briskly. ‘Women in the home and crime off the streets.’

He chuckled and was about to cap the joke but stopped himself. ‘No, hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘I don’t get this. I never thought you were the maternal type, Ruth. You don’t really want a baby, do you?’

Ruth was about to agree with him, but again her loyalty to Patrick silenced her. She nodded to the barman to give them another round of drinks and busied herself with paying him. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Patrick’s got this very established conventional sort of family, and he’s a very conventional sort of man…’ She looked to see if David was nodding in agreement. He was not.

‘They’re very influential,’ she said weakly. ‘It’s very difficult to argue with them. And of course they want us to move house, and of course, sooner or later, they’ll expect a baby.’

‘Come on,’ David said irritably. ‘It’ll be you that expects it, and you that gives birth. If you don’t want to have a baby, you must just say no.’

Ruth was silent. David realized he had been too abrupt. ‘Can’t you just say no?’

She turned to look at him. ‘Oh, David,’ she said. ‘You know me as well as anybody. I never had any family life worth a damn. When I met Patrick and he took me home, I suddenly saw somewhere I could belong. And they took me in, and now they’re my family. I don’t want to spoil it. We see them practically every Sunday…’

‘D’you know what I do on Sunday mornings?’ David interrupted. ‘I don’t get up till eleven. I take the papers back to bed with me and read all the trivial bits – the travel sections and the style sections and the magazines. When the pubs open I walk across the park to The Fountain and I have a drink with some people there. Then I take a curry back home, and I read all the papers, and watch the telly. Then if I feel energetic I go for a jog. And if I feel lazy I do nothing. And in the evening I go round to see someone I like, or people come round and see me. I can’t imagine having to be polite all day to someone’s mum and dad.’

‘They’re my mum and dad,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘No, they’re not.’

He saw, as she turned away from him, that he had gone too far. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He shifted his barstool closer and put his hand on her knee. ‘Tell you what, come back to my flat with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll read last Sunday’s papers to you.’

Ruth gave him a wan smile, picked up his hand, and dropped it lightly in his lap. ‘Married woman,’ she said. ‘As you well know.’

‘Wasted on matrimony,’ he said. ‘That sexy smile of yours. I should have taken my chance with you when I had it, when you were young and stupid, before you found Prince Charming and got stuck in the castle.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I’m very happy.’

David bit back the response. ‘Well, we both are!’ he said, lapsing into irony again. ‘What with our vivid emotional lives and our glittering careers! Speaking of which – what about our glittering careers? What will you do?’

‘I’ll look round,’ she said. ‘And I’ll do some local pieces for James. I can keep my hand in and they won’t look bad on a CV. What about you?’

‘I need a job,’ David said. ‘I can freelance for a week or so, but when the money runs out I need a pay cheque. I’ll be sweeping the streets, I reckon.’

Ruth giggled suddenly, her face brightening. ‘Walking them more like,’ she said. ‘A tart like you. You could pop down to the docks.’

David smiled back at her. ‘I try to keep my self-respect,’ he said primly. ‘But if you know any rich old women I could be tempted. What about your mother-in-law? Would she fancy a fling with a young gigolo? Is she the toyboy type?’

Ruth snorted into her drink. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘You could pop out on Sunday afternoons and rendezvous in that bloody cottage!’

Two

RUTH WAS LATE at the restaurant, and her high spirits evaporated when she saw Patrick’s sulky face over the large menu.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ she said as she slipped onto the bench seat opposite him. ‘I went out for a drink with David and I didn’t watch the time.’

Patrick’s bright blue eyes widened in surprise. ‘Well, thanks very much,’ he said. ‘I hurried here to be with you and then I sit here on my own while you go boozing with some guy from work.’

‘He’s just been made redundant,’ Ruth said. ‘And I was too.’

Patrick, who had been about to continue his complaint, was abruptly silenced. ‘What?’

‘I’ve been made redundant,’ Ruth said. ‘Me and David and someone else. We’re all out at the end of the week with a month’s pay in hand. They offered us freelance work.’

Patrick’s face was radiant. ‘Well, what a coincidence!’ he said. ‘Aren’t things just working out for us?’

‘Not exactly,’ Ruth said rather tartly, fired by David and by two double gins. ‘I wanted to keep my job; and if I left it I wanted to go somewhere better. I didn’t want to get the sack and have a baby as second best.’

Patrick quickly summoned the waiter. ‘D’you want spaghetti, darling? And salad?’

‘Yes.’

Patrick ordered and poured Ruth a glass of wine. ‘You’re upset,’ he said soothingly. ‘Poor darling. How disappointing. Don’t feel too bad about it. We’ll look round. We’ll find you another job. There must be people who would snap you up. You’re so bright and a damn fine journalist.’

Ruth’s mouth quivered. ‘I liked it there!’ she said miserably. ‘And I was doing some really good stories. I even scooped your lot a couple of times.’

‘You’re an excellent journalist,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m so confident you’ll find work at once somewhere else…if you want it.’

As Ruth lifted her head to protest, he held up his hand. ‘Not another word!’ he said. ‘You’ve had a shock. We won’t talk plans tonight. Not a word about jobs or flats or cottages. Not a word! Let me tell you about the interview I did with Clark today – you’ll die.’

Patrick told Ruth a story and she laughed politely. Their food came and Patrick continued to lay himself out to please her. He was witty and he could be charming. Ruth, enjoying the mixture of red wine and gin, found herself laughing at his stories and capping them with stories of her own. It was midnight before they left the restaurant, and Patrick put his arm around her as they walked home together.

‘I love you,’ he said softly in her ear as they opened the front door and went into the warm hall.

They went upstairs together and Ruth turned to embrace him in the bedroom. Patrick held her close and kissed her with warm, seductive kisses. It was so unusual for them to make love during the week that Ruth was slow to respond. She stayed in his arms, content to be kissed, her eyes closed.

‘Into bed with you, Mrs Cleary,’ Patrick said and gave her a little push towards the bed. Ruth lay back and stretched luxuriously. Patrick dropped his head and nudged sexily at her breasts, his hands pushing up her skirt until he found the waistband of her tights.

‘Patrick!’ Ruth said. She half sat up. ‘Perhaps I had better go to the bathroom!’ she said. She meant that she needed to put in her diaphragm, their only contraception.

‘I want you,’ he said urgently. ‘I want you right now.’

Ruth gasped with surprised delight at his urgency. He was stripping down her tights and panties, and kicking off his own shoes. Ruth giggled drunkenly, delightedly.

‘I have to go,’ she protested.

Patrick shucked off his trousers and pants in one swift movement and swarmed up over her, kissing her neck and her ears. His hand reached behind her back and undid her bra, slid his hand under the lace and caressed her breast. Ruth felt her desire rising, felt herself careless, sexy, urgent.

‘Come on, Ruth,’ he whispered. ‘Like when we were first lovers. Let’s take a chance. Let’s take a sexy chance, Ruth. I want to be right inside you with nothing between us. Come on, darling, I want to.’

His fingers stroked insistently between her legs. Ruth, drunk on wine and drunk with desire, protested inarticulately but could not bring herself to stop. In a small sober part of her mind she was watching him, calculating the days from her last period, fearing the sudden rush of his desire, terrified of pregnancy.

He rolled on top of her, moving steadily and deliciously, Ruth opened her legs and felt her desire rise and rise to match his, but then her caution chilled her. ‘Patrick, we shouldn’t…’ she started to say.

With a sudden delighted groan he came inside her.

Ruth’s routine changed little after her week’s notice expired and she became freelance. She left home at the usual time and she came home, if anything, later than usual. It was as if she were afraid that any slackening would prompt Patrick to exploit her unemployment.

‘You could take it easy,’ he said on the first Monday.

‘Better not,’ Ruth said. ‘I want to show them I’m serious about getting work.’

Patrick had not pursued his theme—that Ruth could rest, or could tidy the flat, or could visit his mother and see the cottage. He had kissed her and left for work. He was in less of a hurry now in the mornings. He strolled to his car and let the engine warm and the light frost melt from the windscreen before he drove away. He no longer had to be in at the television newsroom first; he now had status. He had a parking slot of his own outside the building and a secretary who had to be in before him to open his post. Patrick’s stock had risen dramatically, and his timekeeping could decline. Some mornings in November it was Ruth who was up first and Patrick who lured her back to bed. On at least two mornings they made love without contraception. Patrick had been urgent and seductive and Ruth could not refuse him. She was flattered by his desire and enchanted by its sudden urgency. One morning she was half asleep as he slid inside her and she woke too slowly to resist. One morning she acquiesced with a sleepy smile. Escaping pregnancy the first time, she was becoming reckless.

In mid-December she felt sick in the mornings and felt tired at work. She was trying to persuade the afternoon show producer to commission a series on local Bristol history.

‘Something about industry,’ she suggested. ‘From shipbuilding to building Concorde at Filton. We could call it Bristol Fashion.’

‘Sounds a bit earnest,’ he criticized.

‘It could be fun,’ she said. ‘Some old historical journals. I could read them. And some old people talking about working on the docks and in the aircraft industry before the war. There’s loads of stuff at the museum.’

He cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘Are you sure? Oh, well, maybe. See what you can dig up. But nothing too dreary, Ruth. Nothing too historical. Bright and snappy. You know the kind of thing.’

She closed his office door quietly behind her and went to the ladies’ room. She ran the cold-water tap and splashed cold water on her face and rinsed her mouth.

One of the newsroom copy takers, combing her hair before the mirror, glanced around. ‘Are you all right, Ruth? You look as white as a sheet.’

‘I feel funny,’ Ruth said.

The woman looked at her a little closer. ‘How funny?’

‘I feel really sick, and dreadfully tired.’

The woman gave her a smiling look, full of meaning. ‘Not up the spout, are you?’

Ruth shot her a sudden wide-eyed look. ‘No! I can’t possibly be.’

‘Not overdue?’

‘I don’t know…I’d have to look…I’m a bit scatty about it…’

The woman, with two children of her own at school, shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s just something you ate,’ she said.

‘Probably,’ Ruth said hastily. ‘Probably that’s all.’

The woman went out, leaving Ruth alone. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her dark, smooth bobbed hair framed her pale face, her large dark eyes. She looked scared, she looked sickly. Ruth shook her head. She could not see herself as a woman who might be pregnant. She had an image of herself as a girl too young, too unready for a woman’s task of pregnancy.

‘It’s something I ate,’ Ruth said to her reflection. ‘It’s bound to be.’

She bought a pregnancy test kit on the way home from work and locked herself in the bathroom with it. There were two little test tubes and a collecting jar for urine and immensely complicated instructions. Ruth sat on the edge of the bathtub and read them with a sense of growing panic. It seemed to her that since she could not understand the instructions for a pregnancy test then she must, therefore, be totally unfit to be pregnant. She hid the test, tucking it behind the toilet cleaner, secure in the knowledge that Patrick would never have anything to do with cleaning the toilet, and brushed her teeth, splashed water on her face, and pinned on a bright smile for Patrick’s arrival home from work.

She woke in the night, in the shadowy bedroom, and found that she was holding her breath, as if she were waiting for something. When she saw the grey-orange of the sky through the crack in the curtains she knew it was morning, and she could do the test. She slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Patrick, and went to the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and took the pregnancy test from its hiding place. She lifted her nightgown and peed in the toilet, clumsily thrusting the collecting jar into the stream of urine for a sample. Then she poured urine and test powder into the little test tube, corked it, shook it, wrapped herself in a bath towel for warmth, and waited.

She had to wait ten minutes before the test was completed. Ruth made herself look away from the tube, fearful that the strength of her wishing would make the results go wrong. She was longing with all her heart for the liquid to stay its innocent pale, pale blue. She did not want to be pregnant, she did not want to have conceived a child. She turned her mind away from Patrick’s new insistent lovemaking. She had thought their marriage had taken a sudden turn for the better; she had seen it as a renewal of desire. She had explained his new demanding sexiness as being a relief from the stress of his job as a reporter, a celebration of his new status as a manager. She did not want to think that he had been aiming for this very dawn, for Ruth sitting on the cold floor of the bathroom waiting for the result of a pregnancy test to tell her that she was no longer a free woman with a multitude of choices before her.

She glanced at her watch: eleven minutes had gone by. She looked at the test tube. In the bottom of the tube it had formed a sediment: a bright, strong dark blue. It was unmistakably a positive test. She screwed up her eyes – it made no difference. She took it closer to the light over the mirror. It was the bright blue that meant pregnancy. Ruth folded up the instructions and put the test pack away behind the toilet cleaner again. She was supposed to retest within a week, but she knew she would not bother to do it. She had known this yesterday morning, when the woman in the ladies’ room had asked her if she was up the spout. She had recognized the information as soon as it was spoken. She was pregnant. Patrick and his parents had got what they wanted.

She did not tell Patrick of her pregnancy until Boxing Day morning, when he was hungover from his father’s best Armagnac, which they had drunk on Christmas afternoon, and liverish with the richness of his mother’s Christmas cooking. Some resilient piece of spite made her withhold the information from the assembled family on Christmas Day. She knew that they would have fallen on her with delight; she knew they would have said it was the best Christmas present they had ever had. Ruth did not want them unwrapping her feelings. She did not want them counting on their fingers and predicting the birth. She did not want her own small disaster of an unplanned pregnancy being joyously engulfed by the whole Christmas myth of baby Jesus and the speech by the Queen, who was not her queen, and carols, which were not her carols.

Spitefully, Ruth kept the precious news to herself, refused to spread exuberant delight. Throughout Christmas lunch, when they had skirted around the subject of the cottage and the proposed sale of the flat now that Ruth had nothing to keep her in Bristol, she refused to give them the gilt on the gingerbread of their plans. She ate only a little and drank only one glass of champagne. When the men drank Armagnac and snoozed before the television in the afternoon, Ruth defiantly walked in the cold countryside on her own.

‘Pop down and see the cottage,’ Elizabeth recommended. ‘Get a feel for it without the men breathing down your neck. It’s you that needs to fall in love with it, not them.’

Ruth nodded distantly at Elizabeth’s conspiratorial whisper. She knew that she could tell Elizabeth that she was pregnant and be rewarded with absolute discreet delight. Elizabeth would tell no one until Ruth gave permission. Elizabeth was always ready to bond with Ruth in an alliance of women against men, but Ruth would not join in. She hugged the small embryo to herself as she hugged the secret. She would not crown their day. The baby was a mistake, but it was her private mistake. She would not have it converted into a Cleary celebration.

Patrick emerged blearily from under the bedcovers. ‘God, I feel dreadful,’ he said. He sat up in bed, his eyes half closed. ‘Could you get me an Alka-Seltzer?’ he asked. ‘Too much brandy and too much cake.’

Ruth went down to the kitchen and fetched him a glass of water and two tablets. As they foamed she waited. Only at the exact nauseating moment of his first sip did she say, ‘I’m pregnant.’

There was a silence. ‘What?’ Patrick said, turning towards her.

‘I’m pregnant,’ Ruth repeated.

He reached forward but then recoiled as his head thudded. ‘Oh! Damn! Ruth, what a time to tell me! Darling!’

She sat out of arm’s reach on the window seat.

‘Come here!’ he said.

She went, slowly, to the bed. Patrick drew her down and wrapped his arms around her. ‘That’s wonderful news,’ he said. ‘D’you know you couldn’t have given me a better Christmas present! When did you know?’

‘Three weeks ago,’ Ruth said unhelpfully. ‘Then I went to the doctor to make sure. It’s true. I’m due in the middle of August.’

‘I must phone Mother,’ Patrick said. ‘Oh, I wish you’d told me yesterday. We could have had a real party.’

Ruth disengaged herself from the embrace, which was starting to feel heavy. ‘I didn’t want a real party,’ she said.

He tried to twinkle at her. ‘Are you feeling shy, darling?’

‘No.’

‘Then…?’

‘I didn’t particularly want a baby,’ she said. ‘I didn’t plan to get pregnant. It’s an accident. So I don’t feel like celebrating.’

Patrick’s indulgent gleam died and was instantly replaced by an expression of tenderness and concern. Gingerly he got out of bed and put his arm around her shoulders, turning her face in to the warmth of his chest. ‘Don’t,’ he said softly, his breath sour on her cheek. ‘Don’t talk like that, darling. It just happened, that’s all. It just happened because that’s how it was meant to be. Everything has come right for us, and when you get used to the idea I know you’ll be really, really happy. I’m really happy,’ he said emphatically, as if all she needed to do was to imitate him. ‘I’m just delighted, darling. Don’t upset yourself.’

Ruth felt a sudden bitterness at the ease with which Patrick greeted the news. Of course he would be happy – it would not be Patrick whose life would totally change. It would not be Patrick who would leave the work he loved, and who would now never travel, and never see his childhood home. For a moment she felt filled with anger, but his arms came around her and his hands stroked her back. Ruth’s face was pressed into the warm, soft skin of his chest and held like a little girl’s. She could feel herself starting to cry, wetly, emotionally, weakly.

‘There!’ Patrick said, his voice warm with love and triumph. ‘You’re bound to feel all jumbled up, my darling. It’s well known. It’s your hormones. Of course you don’t know how you feel yet. There! There!’

‘She’s very wound up at the moment,’ he whispered to his mother on the telephone. Ruth was taking an afternoon nap after a celebration lunch in the pub. ‘I didn’t dare call you earlier. She didn’t want you to know.’

Elizabeth’s face was radiant. She nodded confirmation to Frederick as he registered the news and stood close to Elizabeth to overhear their conversation. ‘Wait a moment,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Your father wants a word.’

‘Do I hear right? A happy event?’ Frederick exclaimed.

Patrick chuckled. ‘I have to whisper!’ he said. ‘She’s asleep and she swore me to secrecy.’

‘Wonderful!’ Frederick said. ‘Clever girl! And congratulations, old man!’

There was a brief satisfied silence.

‘Bring her over,’ Frederick said. ‘We’ll crack a bottle on the baby’s head. Can’t celebrate over the phone.’

‘I can’t,’ Patrick said again. ‘I tell you, I am sworn to utter secrecy. She doesn’t want anyone to know yet. She’s all of a state. A bit weepy, a bit unsure. I don’t want to rush her.’

‘Oh, don’t talk to me about weepy!’ Frederick said comfortably. ‘Your mother cried every day for nine months. I thought she was miserable, but then she told me she was crying for happiness.’ He gave a slow, rich, satisfied chuckle. ‘Women!’ he said.

Patrick beamed into the phone. He very much wanted to be with his father. ‘I’ll come to see you this evening,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some excuse. I won’t bring her, we’ll have our celebration drink, and next time we come she can tell you herself, and you can both be absolutely amazed.’

‘I’ll put a bottle on ice,’ his father said.

‘Patrick?’ his mother asked as she came back on the phone. ‘Ruth is quite all right is she?’

‘It’s all a bit much for her, that’s all,’ Patrick said. ‘And you know how much her job meant to her. It’s a big shock.’

‘But she does want the baby?’ Elizabeth confirmed. ‘She is happy about it?’

‘She’s over the moon,’ Patrick said firmly. ‘She’s happier than she knows.’

As Ruth’s pregnancy progressed, she found that Patrick’s determination to move from the flat was too powerful to resist. In any case, the flat belonged to his father, and his father wished to sell. There was little Ruth could do but mourn their decision and pack as slowly and unwillingly as possible. Most days she did not go into the radio station, taking calls and preparing work at home. On those days the estate agent might telephone and send potential buyers to look at the flat. Ruth would show them around without enthusiasm. She did not actively draw their attention to the defects – the small-ness of the spare bedroom, the inconvenience of the best bathroom being en suite with their bedroom – but she did nothing to enhance their view of the flat.

It could not work. They were selling at a time of rising prices and rising expectations, and there were many people prepared to buy. Indeed, by playing one couple off against another Patrick and Frederick managed to get more than the asking price and a couple of months’ delay before they had to move out.

‘But the cottage isn’t even bought yet,’ Ruth said. ‘Where are we going to live?’

‘Why, here of course,’ Elizabeth exclaimed. She reached across the Sunday lunch table and patted Ruth’s unresponsive hand. ‘It’s not ideal, my dear, I know. I’m sure you would rather be nest building. But it’s the way it has worked out. And at least you can leave the cooking and housework to me and just do as much of your radio work as you want. As you get more tired you might find that a bit of a boon, you know.’

‘And she’ll eat properly during the day,’ Patrick said, smiling lovingly at Ruth. ‘When I’m not there to keep an eye on her, and when she doesn’t have a canteen to serve up lunch, she just snacks. The doctor has told her, but she just nibbles like a little mouse.’

‘I don’t feel like eating,’ Ruth said. The tide of their goodwill was irresistible. ‘And I’m gaining weight fast enough.’ Against the waistband of her skirt her expanding belly was gently pressing. At night she would scratch the tight skin of her stomach until she scored it with red marks from her fingernails. It felt as if the baby were stretching and stretching her body, her very life. Soon she would be four months into the pregnancy and would have nothing to wear but maternity clothes. Already the rhythm of trips to the antenatal clinic was becoming more and more important. Her conversations with Patrick were dominated by discussions about her blood pressure, the tests they wanted their baby to have, or, as now, her food. Even her work had taken second place. Only the project about the early industry of Bristol was still interesting. Ruth was reading local history for the first time, and looking at the buildings around her, the beautiful grand buildings of Bristol built on slave-trade money.

‘Don’t nag her, Patrick,’ Elizabeth said. ‘No one knows better than Ruth what she wants to eat and what she doesn’t want.’

Ruth shot Elizabeth a brief grateful look.

‘And you will be absolutely free to come and go as you wish while you stay here,’ Elizabeth said. ‘So don’t be afraid that I will be fussing over you all the time. But a little later on you might be glad of the chance to rest.’

‘I do get tired now,’ Ruth admitted. ‘Especially in the afternoon.’

‘I think I slept every afternoon as soon as Patrick was conceived,’ Elizabeth remembered. ‘Didn’t I, Frederick? We were in South Africa then. Frederick was on attachment. All that wonderful sunshine and I used to creep into a darkened room and sleep and sleep.’

‘You were in Africa? I never knew.’

‘Training,’ Frederick said. ‘I used to go all over the world training chaps. Sometimes I could take Elizabeth, sometimes they were places where I was better off alone.’

‘You were working for the South African government?’ Ruth asked.

Frederick smiled at her. ‘It was a wonderful country in those days. The blacks had their place, the whites had theirs. Everyone was suited.’

‘Except the black homelands were half desert, and the white areas were the towns and the goldmines,’ Ruth said.

Frederick looked quite amazed: it was the first time Ruth had ever contradicted him. ‘I say,’ he said. ‘You’re becoming a bit of a Red in your condition.’

‘Oh, Ruth’s full of it,’ Patrick volunteered, taking the sting from the conversation. ‘She’s researching for a programme on early Bristol industry, and she’s gone back and back. I told her she’ll be at the Garden of Eden soon. She’s got her nose in these books from morning till night.’

‘Clever girl,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You’ll need a little study when you move in. I could convert the small bedroom for you to work.’

‘Thank you,’ Ruth said. ‘But I will have finished quite soon.’

‘And anyway, she should be putting her feet up,’ Patrick said. ‘She’s been reading far too much, and spending half the day in the library.’

‘And what about you, old boy?’ Frederick asked. ‘How’s the new post?’

Patrick smiled his charming smile. ‘Can’t complain,’ he said, and started to tell them about his secretary, and his office, his reserved car space and his management-training course. Ruth watched him. She felt as if she were a long way away from him. She watched him smiling and talking: a favourite child of applauding parents, and as she watched them their faces blurred and their voices seemed to come from far away. Even Patrick, beloved, attractive Patrick, seemed a little man with a little voice crowing over little triumphs.

Three

RUTH AND ELIZABETH were to go down to the cottage together, to measure for curtains and carpets, and discuss colour schemes. The builders had all but finished, the new kitchen had been built, the new bath plumbed in. Elizabeth had tirelessly supervised the workmen, ascertaining Ruth’s wishes and chivvying them to do the work right. Nothing would have been done without her, nothing could have been finished as quickly without her. Patrick, absorbed in setting up the documentary unit at work, had been no help to Ruth at all. Without her mother-in-law she would have been exhausted every day by a thousand trivial decisions.

Ruth had planned to walk down to the cottage in the morning, when she felt at her best. But Elizabeth had been busy all morning and the time had slipped away. It was not until after lunch that she said, ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. Shall we go down to the cottage now? Or do you want your nap?’

‘We’ll go,’ Ruth decided. In her fifth month of pregnancy she felt absurdly heavy and tired, and the mid-afternoon was always the worst time.

‘Shall I drive us down?’ Elizabeth offered.

‘I can walk.’ Ruth heaved herself out of the low armchair and went out into the hall. She bent uncomfortably to tie the laces of her walking boots. Elizabeth, waiting beside her, seemed as lithe and quick as a young girl.

Tammy, the dog, ran ahead of them, through Elizabeth’s rose garden to the garden gate and then down across the fields. Ruth walked slowly, feeling the warmth of the April sunlight on her face. She felt better.

‘I should walk every day,’ she said. ‘This is wonderful!’

‘As long as you don’t overdo it,’ Elizabeth warned. ‘What did the doctor say yesterday?’

‘He said everything was fine. Nothing to worry about.’

‘Did he check your weight?’

‘Yes – it’s OK.’

‘He didn’t think you were overweight?’

‘He said it didn’t matter.’

‘And did you tell him how tired you’re feeling?’

‘He said it was normal.’

Elizabeth pursed her lips and said nothing.

‘I’m fine,’ Ruth repeated.

Elizabeth smiled at her. ‘I know you are,’ she said. ‘And I’m just fussing over you. But I hate to see you so pale and so heavy. In my day they used to give us iron tablets. You look so anaemic.’

‘I’ll eat cabbage,’ Ruth offered. She climbed awkwardly over the stile into the next field.

‘Careful,’ Elizabeth warned.

The two women walked for a little while in silence. In the hedge the catkins bobbed. Ruth remembered the springs of her American childhood, more dramatic, more necessary, after longer and sharper winters.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Patrick rang this morning while you were in the bath. He said he has to go up to London this afternoon for a meeting and it’ll probably go on late. He said he’d stay up there.’

Ruth felt a pang of intense disappointment. ‘Overnight?’ She hated being in Patrick’s parents’ house without him. She felt always as if she were some unwanted refugee billeted on kindly but unwilling hosts.

‘Possibly Tuesday as well,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You can have a nice early night and a lie-in without him waking you in the morning.’

‘I’ll ring him when we get home,’ Ruth said.

‘He’s out of touch,’ she said. ‘In his meeting, and then on the train to London.’

‘I wish I’d spoken to him,’ Ruth said wistfully.

Elizabeth opened the gate to the garden of the cottage and patted Ruth on the shoulder as she went through. ‘Now then,’ she said briskly. ‘You can live without him for one night.’

‘Didn’t he ask to speak to me?’

‘I said you were in the bath.’

‘I would have got out of the bath, if you had called me.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you,’ Elizabeth declared. ‘Not for a little message that I can take for you, darling. If you want a long chat with him you can save it all up until he comes home the day after tomorrow.’

Ruth nodded.

‘There’s nothing wrong, is there? Nothing that you need him for?’

‘No,’ Ruth said shortly.

Elizabeth had the front-door key; she opened the door and stepped back to let Ruth go in. ‘Don’t cling, dear,’ she said gently. ‘Men hate women who cling. Especially now.’

Ruth turned abruptly from her mother-in-law and went into the sitting room. Elizabeth was undoubtedly right, which made her advice the more galling. There was still a large patch of damp beside the French windows, which not even the previous summer had dried out.

‘Now,’ Elizabeth said, throwing off her light jacket with energy. ‘You sit down on that little stool and I’ll rush round and take all the measurements you want.’

From the pocket of the jacket she pulled a notebook and pen and a measuring tape. Ruth sulkily took the notebook while Elizabeth strode around the room calling out the measurements of the walls and the window frames.

‘Fitted carpets, I think, don’t you?’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘So much warmer. And good thick curtains for the winter, and some lighter ones for summer. Perhaps a pale yellow weave for summer, to match the primrose walls.’

‘I thought we’d paper it. I want the paper we had in the hall at the flat,’ Ruth said.

‘Oh, darling!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. ‘Not William Morris willow again, surely!’

‘Didn’t you like it?’

‘I loved it,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But don’t you remember what Patrick said? He said he kept seeing faces in it. You don’t want it in your sitting room, with Patrick seeing faces peeping through the leaves at him every evening.’

Ruth reluctantly chuckled. ‘I’ll have it in the hall then,’ she said.

‘And this room primrose yellow,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘I have some curtain material that will just do these windows, and the French windows too. Old gold they are. Quite lovely.’

Ruth nodded. She knew they would be lovely. Elizabeth’s taste was infallible, and she had trunks of beautiful materials saved from her travels around the world. ‘But we shouldn’t be taking your things, we should be buying new.’

Elizabeth, on her knees before the French windows, scratching critically at the damp plaster, looked up, and smiled radiantly. ‘Of course you should have my old things!’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see my curtains up at your windows and the two of you – no, the three of you – happy and settled here.’ She looked back at the damp plaster. ‘I shall get someone out to see to this at once,’ she said. ‘Mr Willis warned me it might be a specialist job.’

They moved to the kitchen, the dining room, and then to the three upstairs bedrooms. Elizabeth carried around the little stool from the sitting room, and insisted on Ruth’s sitting in the middle of each room, while she bustled with the tape measure, calling out numbers.

Empty of furniture, but with new kitchen units in pale pine and with a remodelled bathroom upstairs the cottage did look pretty. Ruth felt her spirits rising. ‘If they hurry up with the decorating we should get in before the baby’s born.’

Elizabeth, stretching across the bedroom window, nodded. ‘I’m determined to see that you are,’ she said. ‘Cream cotton at all the upstairs windows, I think, and then it matches whatever colour walls you choose. But that nice Berber-weave carpet I told you about all through the top floor.’

‘In the flat we had varnished boards,’ Ruth said. ‘I liked them.’

‘Weren’t they wonderful?’ Elizabeth reminisced. ‘Georgian pine. And you did have them beautifully done.’ She recalled herself to the present. ‘So we’ll have the biscuit-colour Berber carpet all around the upstairs floor, and pastel walls. We can choose the colours at home. I’ve got the charts.’

‘All right,’ Ruth said, surrendering her vision of clean waxed floorboards without an argument. She felt suddenly very weary. ‘The sooner we choose it and order it the sooner the house is ready, I suppose.’

‘You leave it to me!’ Elizabeth said with determination. ‘I’ll have it ready by August, don’t fret. In fact I’ll leave you to have your rest when we get home, and I’ll zip into Bath and come back with some fabric samples. You can choose them this evening and we can order them tomorrow. I’ll order the carpets at the same time.’

‘And tiles or vinyl for the kitchen,’ Ruth said wearily. ‘But I haven’t chosen them yet. Patrick was going to take me into town tonight.’

‘Would you trust me to choose it for you?’ Elizabeth offered. ‘I can look when I’m ordering the carpets. They’ve got a wonderful selection there.’

Ruth got up from the stool. Her back ached and there was a new nagging twinge in the very bones of her pelvis. The walk home over two hilly fields seemed a long, long way.

Elizabeth broke off, instantly attentive. ‘Shall I fetch the car, darling?’ she asked gently. ‘Have you overdone it a bit?’

‘I can walk,’ Ruth said grimly.

‘Or I could run home and fetch the car for you,’ Elizabeth repeated. ‘I could be back in a moment. You perch on your little stool and I’ll have you home in a flash.’

Ruth resisted for no more than a moment. ‘Thank you,’ she said gratefully. ‘I’d like that.’

Elizabeth threw her a swift smile and slipped down the stairs. Ruth heard the front door bang and her quick footsteps on the path. She sat on her own in the quiet cottage and felt the friendly silence gather around her. ‘It’ll be all right when we’re in here,’ she said to herself, hearing her voice in the emptiness of the house. ‘As long as we get in here in time for the baby. The last thing in the world that matters is who chooses the wallpaper.’

Elizabeth, half running across the fields, fuelled with energy and a sense of purpose, reached the house and picked up the ringing telephone. It was the builder, calling about Manor Farm cottage and the damp around the French windows.

‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘My cottage. You must get that damp problem cured at once, Mr Willis. My cottage must be ready by August. I have promised my son and daughter-in-law that I’ll have it ready for them by then.’

It was not ready by August. The damp under the French windows was caused by a faulty drain. The flagstones of the path outside had to be cut back and a little gravel-filled trench inserted. None of it seemed very complicated to Ruth, and she wished they would hurry the work; but in the final month of her pregnancy she found a calmness and a serenity she had not known before.

‘The work will be finished this week,’ Elizabeth said worriedly. ‘But then that room will have to dry out and be decorated. I’ve got the curtains ready to hang, and the carpet fitters will come in at a moment’s notice, but if Junior is born on time he’ll just have to come home to Patrick’s old nursery here.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ruth said calmly.

‘Bit of a treat really,’ Patrick said. He was eating a late supper. Frederick had already gone up to bed. Elizabeth and Ruth had waited up for Patrick, who had been delayed at work by someone’s farewell party. Elizabeth had made him an omelette and he ate it, watched by the two women. ‘I like to think of him in my nursery.’

‘But I wanted to make the cottage ready for you,’ Elizabeth pursued. ‘I am disappointed.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ruth repeated. She had a curious floating feeling, as if everything was bound to be all right. She smiled at Elizabeth. ‘I’ll be five days in hospital anyway; maybe it will be finished in time.’

Elizabeth shook her head disapprovingly. ‘In my day they kept you in for a fortnight,’ she said. ‘Especially a new mother who was completely inexperienced.’

‘We have to start somewhere,’ Patrick said cheerfully. ‘And we’ve done the classes, or at least Ruth has. I’ll have on-the-job training.’

‘If you so much as touch a nappy I’ll be amazed,’ Elizabeth said.

‘He certainly will,’ Ruth replied. ‘He’s promised.’

Patrick grinned at the two of them. ‘I am a new man,’ he pronounced, slightly tipsy from the drinks at work and the wine with his supper. ‘I’ll do it all. Anyway, even if I miss the nappy stage I’ve already bought him a fishing rod. I’ll teach him fishing.’

‘And what if it’s a girl?’ Elizabeth challenged.

‘Then I’ll teach her too,’ Patrick said. ‘There will be no sexism in my household.’

Ruth got to her feet; the distant floaty feeling had become stronger. ‘I have to go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’m half asleep here already.’

Patrick pushed his plate to one side and was about to leave the table to go upstairs with Ruth.

‘I was just making coffee,’ Elizabeth remarked. ‘I thought I’d have a coffee and a cognac before bed.’

‘Oh, all right,’ Patrick said agreeably. ‘I’ll stay down and have one with you. All right, Ruth?’

She nodded and bent carefully to kiss his cheek.

‘I won’t disturb you when I come up,’ he promised. ‘I’ll creep in beside you. And I’ll be up early in the morning too. I’ll slip out without waking you.’

‘I won’t see you till tomorrow night then,’ Ruth said. Despite herself her voice was slightly forlorn.

‘Unless tomorrow is the big day and he has to come dashing home,’ Elizabeth said cheerfully. ‘Patrick, you must leave a number where we can reach you all day, remember.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I’ll write it down now.’

‘On the pad beside the telephone in the sitting room,’ Elizabeth instructed.

‘Night, darling,’ Patrick said cheerfully and went to write down his telephone number as his mother had told him to do.

Ruth lay in her bed. The floating feeling grew stronger as she closed her eyes. The sounds of the countryside in summer breathed in through the half-open windows. They still sounded strange and ominous to Ruth, who was used to the comforting buzz of a city at night. She flinched when she heard the sudden whoop of an owl, and the occasional bark from a fox, trotting along the dark paths under the large white moon.

Ruth slept. Inside her body the baby turned and settled.

Between two and three in the morning, she woke in a pool of wetness, a powerful vice closed on her stomach. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said. ‘Patrick, wake up, the baby’s coming.’

He took a moment to hear her, and then he leaped from the bed, as nervous as a father in a comedy film. ‘Now?’ he demanded. ‘Are you sure? Now? Should we go to the hospital? Should we telephone? Oh, my God! I’m low on petrol.’

Ruth hardly heard him; she was timing her contractions.

‘I’ll get Mother,’ Patrick said, and fled from the bedroom and down the corridor.

As soon as Elizabeth appeared in the doorway in her cream corduroy dressing gown she took complete charge. She sent Patrick to get dressed in the bathroom and helped Ruth change from her nightgown into a pair of trousers and a baggy top.

‘Everything ready in your suitcase?’ she confirmed.

‘Yes,’ Ruth said.

‘I’ll phone the hospital and tell them you’re on your way,’ Elizabeth said.

‘No petrol!’ Patrick exclaimed, coming in the door, his jumper askew and his hair unbrushed. ‘God! I’m a fool! I’m low on petrol!’

‘You can take your father’s car. Get it out of the garage and bring it round to the front door,’ Elizabeth said calmly. ‘And don’t speed. This is a first baby; you have plenty of time.’

Patrick shot one anxious look at Ruth and dived from the room.

‘The suitcase,’ Elizabeth reminded him.

‘Suitcase,’ he repeated, grabbing it and running down the stairs.

The two women exchanged one smiling look. On impulse Elizabeth bent down and kissed Ruth’s hot forehead. ‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘It’s not that bad, really. Don’t be frightened. And there’s a beautiful baby at the end of it.’

She helped Ruth to her feet and down the stairs. At the front door the Rover was waiting, Patrick standing at the passenger door. Ruth checked as a pain caught her, and Elizabeth held her arm, and then guided her into the car.

‘Drive carefully,’ she said to Patrick. ‘I mean it. You have plenty of time.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you.’

She stepped back from the car and waved until it was out of sight. ‘Dear little Ruth,’ she said lovingly. ‘At last.’

She closed the front door and went up the stairs to her bedroom. Frederick was still asleep. Nothing ever woke him. Elizabeth tapped him gently on the shoulder. ‘They’ve gone to the hospital,’ she said softly, thinking that the news might penetrate his dreams. ‘Dear little Ruth has gone to have our baby.’

The childbirth course which Ruth had completed, and Patrick had attended twice, had laid great emphasis on the bonding nature of birth for the couple. There had been exercises of hand-holding and back rubbing, and little questionnaires to discover each other’s preferences and fears about the birth. Patrick, who was not innately a sensual man, had been embarrassed when he was asked to massage Ruth’s neck and shoulders in a roomful of people. His touch was light, diffident. The teacher, a willowy ex-hippy, had suggested that he grasp Ruth’s hand, arm, shoulder, until he could feel the bones, and massage deeply, to get in touch with the core of Ruth’s inner being.

‘As if you were making love,’ she urged them. ‘Deep, sensual touching.’

Patrick, horribly embarrassed, had made gentle patting gestures. Next week there was an urgent meeting at work and he missed the class altogether.

Ruth conscientiously brought home notes and diagrams, and discussed the concept of active birth. She and Patrick were sitting on the sofa while Elizabeth and Frederick watched television. Ruth kept her voice low but Elizabeth, overhearing, had laughed and remarked: ‘I only hope he doesn’t disappoint you by dropping down in a dead faint. He’s always been dreadfully squeamish.’

‘In our day fathers were completely banned,’ Frederick said. He turned to Elizabeth. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted me there, would you?’

‘Certainly not!’ she said. ‘I gave birth to two children in two different countries, and never had a class in my life.’

‘I want to have a completely natural childbirth,’ Ruth said firmly. ‘I want to do it all by breathing. That’s what the classes are for. And I am counting on Patrick to help me.’

‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ Elizabeth reassured her. ‘And, Patrick, you know all about it, do you?’

‘Not a thing!’ Patrick said with his charming smile. ‘But Ruth has given me a book. I’ll bone up on it before the day. I just can’t get on with the class, and a roomful of people watching me.’

‘I should think not!’ Frederick said. ‘It’s a private business, I should have thought.’

‘And it’s more difficult for me,’ Patrick said, warming to his theme. ‘Everyone knows me, they’ve all seen me on the telly. I could just see them watching me trying to massage Ruth and dying to rush home and telephone their friends and say, “We saw that Patrick Cleary give his wife a massage”.’

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t,’ Ruth said. ‘They’re all much too interested in their own wives and babies. That’s what they’re there for, not to see you.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Frederick. ‘Fame has its disadvantages too.’

‘But I’ll read the book,’ Patrick promised. ‘I’ll know all about it by the time it happens.’

But Patrick had not read the book. It was in his briefcase on a journey to and from London. But he had bought a newspaper, to look for news stories for the documentary unit, and then there were notes to make, and things to think about, and anyway the journey was quite short. The book, still unread, was in his pocket as he helped Ruth into the maternity unit of the hospital.

As soon as the nurse admitted Ruth it was apparent that something was wrong. She called the registrar and there was a rapid undertone consultation. Then he turned to them. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to do a section,’ he said. ‘Your baby is breeched and his pulse rate is too high. He’s rather stressed. I think we want him out of there.’ He glanced at Ruth. ‘It’ll have to be full anaesthesia. We don’t have time to wait for Pethidine to work.’

The words were unfamiliar to Patrick, he did not know what was going on, but Ruth’s distress was unmistakable. ‘Now wait a minute…’ he said.

‘We can’t really,’ the doctor said. ‘We can’t wait at all. Do I have your permission?’

Ruth’s eyes filled with tears and then she drew in a sharp breath of pain. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose so…Oh, Patrick!’

‘Permission for what?’ Patrick asked. ‘What’s going on?’

The registrar took him by the arm and explained in a quick undertone that the baby was in distress and that they wanted to do a Caesarean section at once. Patrick, out of his depth, appealed to the doctor, ‘But they’ll both be OK, won’t they? They’ll both be all right?’

The doctor patted him reassuringly on the back. ‘Right as rain,’ he said cheerily. ‘And no waiting about. I’ll zip her down to surgery and in quarter of an hour you’ll have your son in your arms. OK?’

‘Oh, fine,’ Patrick said, reassured. He looked back at Ruth lying on the high hospital bed. She had turned to face the wall; there were tears pouring down her cheeks. She would not look at him.

Patrick patted her back. ‘It’ll all be over in a minute.’

‘I didn’t want it to be over in a minute,’ Ruth said, muffled. ‘I wanted a natural birth.’

The nurse moved swiftly forward and put an injection in Ruth’s limp arm. ‘That’s the pre-med,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You’ll feel better now, and when you wake up you’ll have a lovely baby. Won’t that be wonderful? You go to sleep like a good girl now. You won’t feel a thing.’

Patrick stood back and watched Ruth’s dark eyelashes flutter and finally close. ‘But I wanted to feel…’ she said sleepily.

They took the bed and wheeled it past him. ‘What do I do?’ he asked.

The nurse glanced at him briefly. ‘There’s nothing for you to do,’ she said. ‘You can watch the operation if you like…or I’ll bring the baby out to you when it’s delivered.’

‘I’ll wait outside,’ Patrick said hastily. ‘You can bring it out.’

They went through the double swing doors at the end of the brightly lit corridor. Patrick suddenly felt bereft and very much alone. He felt afraid for Ruth, so little and pale in the high-wheeled bed, with her eyelids red from crying.

He had not kissed her, he suddenly remembered. He had not wished her well. If something went wrong…he shied away from the thought, but then it recurred: if something went wrong then she would die without him holding her hand. She would die all on her own, and he had not even said, ‘Good luck’, as they took her away from him. He had not kissed her last night, he had not kissed her this morning, in the sudden panic of waking. Come to think of it, he could not remember the last time he had taken her in his arms and held her.

The book in his pocket nudged his hip. He hadn’t gone to her antenatal classes, he hadn’t even read her little book. Only two nights ago she had asked him to read a deep-breathing exercise to her when they were in bed, and he had fallen asleep by the third sentence. He had woken in the early hours of the morning with the corner of the book digging into his shoulder, and he had felt irritated with her for being so demanding, for making such absurd requests when everyone knew, when his mother assured him, that having a baby was as natural as shelling peas, that there was nothing to worry about.

And there were other causes for guilt. He had moved her out of the flat she loved and taken her away from Bristol and her friends and her job. He hadn’t even got her little house ready for her on time. He hadn’t chosen wallpaper or carpets or curtains with her. He had left it to his mother, when he knew Ruth wanted him to plan it with her. He felt deeply, miserably, guilty.

The uncomfortable feeling lasted for several minutes, and then he saw a pay phone and went over to telephone his mother.

She answered on the first ring; she had been lying awake in bed, as he knew she would. ‘How are things?’ she asked quickly.

‘Not well,’ he said.

‘Oh! My dear!’

‘She’s got to have a Caesarean section, she’s having it now.’

‘Shall I come down?’

‘I don’t know…I’m waiting in the corridor…I feel at a bit of a loose end…It’s all a bit bleak.’

‘I’ll come at once,’ Elizabeth said briskly. ‘And don’t worry, darling, she’ll be as right as rain.’

Elizabeth leaped from her bed and pulled on her clothes. She shook Frederick’s shoulder. He opened one sleepy eye. ‘Ruth’s gone to have her baby. I’m going down there,’ she said. There was no need for him to know more. Elizabeth never lied but she was often sparing with information. ‘I’ll telephone you with any news.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Three in the morning. Go back to sleep, darling, there’s nothing you can do. I’ll call you when I know more.’

He nodded and rolled over. Elizabeth sped downstairs and put the kettle on. While it came to the boil she made sandwiches with cold lamb from last night’s joint, and prepared a thermos of strong coffee. She put everything in a wicker basket and left the house, closing the front door quietly behind her.

It was a wonderful warm midsummer night; the stars were very bright and close and a harvest moon broad and yellow leaning on the horizon. Elizabeth started her little car and drove down the lane to the hospital at Bath, and to her son.

His face lit up when he saw her. He was sitting on a chair outside the operating theatre, very much alone, looking awkward with his jumper askew over his shirt collar. He looked very young.

‘No news yet?’ she asked.

‘They’re operating,’ he said. ‘It’s taking longer than they said it would. But a nurse came out just now and said it was quite routine. She said there was nothing to worry about.’

‘I brought you some coffee,’ she said. ‘And a sandwich.’

‘I couldn’t eat a thing,’ he said fretfully. ‘I keep thinking about her…I didn’t even kiss her goodnight, she was asleep by the time I got to bed last night, and I didn’t kiss her before she went in.’

Elizabeth nodded and poured him a cup of coffee and added plenty of brown sugar. He took the cup and wrapped his hands around it.

‘I didn’t go to her classes either,’ he said. ‘Or read her book.’

‘Well, they didn’t do much good,’ Elizabeth said. ‘As things have turned out.’

He brightened at that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘All those breathing exercises and in the end it’s full anaesthetic.’

Elizabeth nodded and offered him a sandwich. He bit into it, and she watched the colour come back into his cheeks.

‘I suppose she’ll be all right?’ he said. ‘They said it was quite routine.’

‘Of course she will be,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Some women choose to have a Caesarean birth. It’s much easier for the baby, and no pain at all for the mother. She’ll be fine.’

Patrick finished his cup of coffee and handed it back to his mother just as the theatre doors opened. A nurse in a green gown, wearing a ballooning paper hat over her hair and a white paper mask over her nose and mouth, came through the door with a small bundle in a blanket.

‘Mr Cleary?’ she asked.

Patrick got to his feet. ‘Yes?’

‘This is your son,’ she said. ‘And your wife is fine.’

She held the baby out to him and Patrick rubbed his hands on his trousers and reached out. He was awkward with the baby; she had to close his hands around the little bundle. ‘Hold him close,’ she urged. ‘He won’t bite!’

Patrick found himself looking into the tiny puckered face of his sleeping son. His mouth was pursed in mild surprise, his eyelids traced with blue. He had a tiny wisp of dark hair on the top of his head and tiny hands clenched into tiny bony fists.

‘Is he all right?’ Patrick asked. ‘Quite all right?’

‘He’s perfect,’ she assured him. ‘Seven pounds three ounces. They’re just stitching your wife up now and then you can see her in Recovery.’

Elizabeth was at Patrick’s shoulder looking into the baby’s face. ‘He’s the very image of you,’ she said tenderly. ‘Oh, what a poppet.’

The baby stirred and Patrick nervously tightened his grip.

‘May I?’ Elizabeth asked. Gently she took the baby and settled him against her shoulder. The damp little head nodded against her firm touch.

‘Shall I take you in to see your wife?’ the nurse asked. ‘She’ll be coming round in a little while.’

‘You go, Patrick,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’ll look after Cleary Junior here.’

Patrick smiled weakly at her and followed the nurse. He still could not take in the fact that his baby had been born. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right.’

Elizabeth had already turned away. She was walking slowly down the length of the corridor, swaying her hips slightly as she walked, rocking the baby with the steady, easy rhythm of her pace. ‘And what shall we call you?’ she asked the little sleeping head. She put her lips to his ear. It was perfectly formed, like a whorled shell, surprisingly cool. Elizabeth inhaled the addictive scent of newborn baby. ‘Little love,’ she whispered. ‘My little love.’

It was nearly midday before Ruth woke from her sleep and nearly two o’clock before the baby was brought to her. He was no longer the scented damp bundle that Elizabeth had walked in the corridor. He was washed and dried and powdered and dressed in his little cotton sleep suit. He was not like a newborn baby at all.

‘Here he is,’ the nurse said, wheeling him into the private room in the little Perspex cot.

Ruth looked at him doubtfully. There was no reason to believe that he was her baby at all; there was nothing to connect him and her except the paper bracelet around his left wrist, which said, ‘Cleary 14.8.95.’ ‘Is it mine?’ she asked baldly.

The nurse smiled. ‘Of course it’s yours,’ she said. ‘We don’t get them mixed up. He’s lovely, don’t you think?’

Ruth nodded. Tears suddenly coming into her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said weakly. She supposed the baby was lovely. But he looked very remote and very isolated in his little plastic box. He looked to her as if he had been assembled in the little box like a puzzle toy, as if he were the property of the hospital and not her baby at all.

‘Now what’s the matter?’ the nurse asked.

‘I bought that suit for him,’ Ruth said tearfully. ‘I bought it.’

‘I know you did, dear. We found it in your case and we put it on him as soon as he had his bath. Just as you would have wanted it done.’

Ruth nodded. It was pointless to explain the sense of strangeness and alienation. But she felt as if the little suit had been bought for another baby, not this one. The little suit had been bought for the baby that she had felt inside her, that had walked with her, and slept with her, and been with her for nine long months. It was for the imaginary baby, who had an imaginary birth, where Ruth had breathed away all the pains, where Patrick had massaged her back and held her hand and talked to her engagingly and charmingly through the hours of her labour, and where, after he had been triumphantly born, everyone had praised her for doing so well.

‘You want to breast-feed him, don’t you?’

Ruth looked at the sleeping baby without much enthusiasm. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Well, I’ll leave him here with you, and when he wakes up you can ring your bell and I’ll come and help you get comfy. After a Caesarean you need a bit of help.’

‘All right,’ Ruth said.

The nurse gave her a kind smile and left the room. Ruth lay back and looked at the ceiling. Unstoppably the tears filled her eyes and ran out under her eyelids, hot and salty. Beside her, in his goldfish-bowl cot the baby slept.

In half an hour the nurse came back. She had hoped that Ruth would have broken the hospital rules and put the baby in bed beside her, but they were as far apart as ever.

‘Now,’ she said brightly. ‘Let’s wake this young man up and give him a feed.’

He was not ready to wake. His delicate eyelids remained stubbornly closed. He did not turn his head to Ruth even when she undid the buttons of her nightgown and pressed her nipple to his cheek.

‘He’s sleepy,’ the nurse said. ‘He must have got some of your anaesthetic. We’ll give him a little tickle. Wake him up a bit.’

She slipped his little feet out of the sleep suit and tickled his toes. The baby hardly stirred.

‘Come along now, come along,’ the nurse said encouragingly.

She took him from Ruth and gave him a little gentle jiggle. The baby opened his eyes – they were very dark blue – and then opened his mouth in a wail of protest.

‘That’s better,’ she said. Quickly and efficiently she swooped down on Ruth, propped the little head on Ruth’s arm, patted his cheek, turned his face, and pressed Ruth’s nipple into his mouth.

He would not suck. Four, five times, they repeated the procedure. He would not latch onto the nipple. Ruth felt herself blushing scarlet with embarrassment and felt the ridiculous easy tears coming again. ‘He doesn’t want to,’ she said. She felt her breasts were disgusting, that the baby was making a wise choice in his rejection.

‘He will,’ the nurse reassured her. ‘We just have to keep at it. But he will, I promise you.’

The baby had dozed off again. His head lolled away from her.

‘He just doesn’t want to,’ Ruth said.

‘We’ll give it another try later on,’ the nurse said reassuringly. ‘Shall I leave him in with you for now? Have a little cuddle.’

‘I thought he had to go into his cot?’

She smiled. ‘We could break the rules just this once.’

Ruth held him out. ‘It hurts on my scar,’ she said. ‘Better put him back.’

Four

PATRICK came at visiting time at four in the afternoon with a big bouquet of flowers. He kissed Ruth and looked into the cot.

‘How is he?’

‘He won’t feed,’ Ruth said miserably. ‘We can’t make him feed.’

‘Isn’t that bad? Won’t he get hungry?’

‘I don’t know. The nurse said he was sleepy from my anaesthetic.’

‘Did she seem worried?’

‘How should I know?’ Ruth exclaimed.

Patrick saw that she was near to tears. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look at your lovely flowers. And dozens of bouquets at home – it looks like a florist’s shop. They sent some from my work, and my secretary told Radio Westerly and they sent some.’

Ruth blinked. ‘From Westerly?’

‘Yes. A big bunch of red roses.’

‘That was nice.’

‘And your little chum.’

‘Who?’

‘That David.’

‘Oh,’ she said. It seemed like years since she had last seen David.

‘And how are you, darling?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘My stitches hurt.’

‘Mother said they would. She said that we would all have to look after you especially well when you come home.’

Ruth nodded.

‘She said she would come down later if that was all right with you. She didn’t want to crowd us this afternoon. But she and the old man will come down this evening if you’re not too tired.’

‘Perhaps tomorrow?’ Ruth suggested.

‘They’re very keen to see the grandson,’ Patrick prompted. ‘Dad especially.’

‘All right, then.’

‘They asked me what we would be calling him. I said that we’d probably stick with Thomas James.’

Ruth glanced towards the cot. She had imagined Thomas James as a fair-haired boy, not this dark-headed little thing. ‘I never thought he’d be so small,’ she said.

‘Tiny, isn’t he?’ Patrick said. ‘Shall I pick him up?’

‘Better let him sleep,’ Ruth said.

They both gazed at the sleeping baby. ‘Tiny hands,’ Patrick said again.

‘I never thought of him like this,’ Ruth said.

‘I never really imagined him at all. I always kind of jumped ahead. I thought about teaching him how to fish, and taking him to cricket and things like that. I never thought of a tiny baby.’

‘No.’

They were silent.

‘He is all right, isn’t he?’ Patrick asked. ‘I mean he seems terribly quiet. I thought they cried all the time.’

‘How should I know?’ Ruth exclaimed again.

‘Of course, of course,’ Patrick said soothingly. ‘Don’t get upset, darling. Mother will be down this evening and she’ll know.’

Ruth nodded and lay back on her pillows. She looked very small and wan. Her dark hair was limp and dirty, her cheeks sallow. There were dark shadows under her eyes.

‘You look all in,’ Patrick said. ‘Shall I go and leave you to have a sleep?’

Ruth nodded. He could see she was near to tears again.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘See you tonight then.’ He bent over the bed and kissed her gently. She did not respond, she did not even turn her face to him. She let him touch her cheek as if she were sulking after some injury. He had a flash of irritation, that he should be behaving so beautifully, with such patience and forbearance, and she should be so limp. In the films he had seen of such situations as these, the young mothers had sat up in bed in pretty beribboned bed jackets, and smiled adoringly at their husbands and gazed devotedly at their babies. Patrick was too intelligent to mistake Hollywood images for reality, but he had expected something more than Ruth’s resentful apathy.

He straightened up and turned to the cot. ‘See you later, Thomas James,’ he said quietly, and went from the room.

Ruth slept for only half an hour. At five o’clock the nurse woke her with dinner. Ruth, hungry and chilled, was confronted with a tray of grapefruit juice, Spam salad with sliced white bread and butter, followed by violently green jelly. As she drew the unappetizing dishes towards her, the baby stirred in his cot and cried.

Ruth’s stitches were still too painful to let her move. Shifting the tray and picking up the baby was an impossibility. She dropped a forkful of icy limp salad and rang the bell for the nurse. No one came. The baby’s cries went up a notch in volume. He went red in the face, and his little fists flailed against the air.

‘Hush, hush,’ Ruth said. She rang the bell again. ‘Someone will come in a minute,’ she said.

It was incredible that a baby so small could make so much noise, and that the noise should be so unbearably penetrating. Ruth could feel her own tension rising as the baby’s cries grew louder and more and more desperate.

‘Oh, please!’ she cried out. ‘Please don’t cry like that. Someone will come soon! Someone will come soon! Surely someone will come!’

He responded at once to the panic in her voice, and his cry became a scream, an urgent, irresistible shriek.

The door opened and Elizabeth peeped in. She took in the scene in one rapid glance and moved forward. She put down the basket she was carrying, picked up the baby, and put him firmly against her shoulder, resting her cheek on his hot little head. His agonized cries checked at once at the new sensation of being picked up and firmly held.

‘There, there,’ Elizabeth said gently. ‘Master Cleary! What a state you’re in.’

She looked over his head to Ruth, tearstained in the bed. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said gently. ‘The first days are always the worst. You finish your dinner and I’ll walk him till you’re ready to feed him.’

‘It’s disgusting,’ Ruth whispered. ‘I can’t eat it.’

‘I brought you a quiche and one of my little apple pies,’ Elizabeth offered. ‘I didn’t know what the food would be like in here, and after I had Patrick I was simply starving.’

‘Oh! That would be lovely.’

Holding the baby against her neck with one casual hand, Elizabeth whipped a red-and-white-checked cloth off the top of the basket with the other, and spread it on Ruth’s counterpane, followed by the quiche in its own little china dish. It was still warm from the oven, the middle moist and savoury, the pastry crisp. Ruth took the miniature silver picnic cutlery from the basket and ate every crumb, while Elizabeth wandered around the room humming lullabies in the baby’s ear. She smiled when she saw the empty plate.

‘Apple pie?’

‘Please.’

Elizabeth produced a little individual apple pie and a small punnet of thick cream. Ruth ate. The apple was tart and sharp, the pastry sweet.

‘Better now?’ Elizabeth asked.

Ruth sighed. ‘Thank you. I was really hungry, and so miserable.’

‘The quicker we get you home and into a routine the better,’ Elizabeth said. ‘D’you think you could feed him now? I think he’s awake and hungry.’

‘I’ll try,’ Ruth said uncertainly.

Elizabeth passed the little bundle to her. As Ruth leaned forward to take him, her stitches pulled and she cried out with pain. At the sharp sound of her voice and the loss of the rocking and humming, Thomas opened his eyes in alarm and shrieked.

‘There,’ Elizabeth said, hurrying forward. ‘Now tuck him in tight to you.’ Expertly she pressed the baby against Ruth. ‘I’ll pop a pillow under here to hold him close. You lie back and make yourself comfortable.’ She arranged the baby, head towards Ruth, but Thomas cried and cried. Ruth, half-naked, pushed her breast towards his face, but he would not feed.

‘It’s no good!’ Ruth was near tears. ‘He just won’t! I can’t make him! And he’ll be getting so hungry!’

‘Why not give him a bottle just for now?’ Elizabeth suggested. ‘And feed him yourself later on when you feel better?’

‘Because they say you have to feed at once, as soon after the birth as possible,’ Ruth said over a storm of Thomas’s cries. The baby, more and more distressed, was kicking against her and crying. ‘If he doesn’t take to it now he’ll never learn.’

‘But a bottle…’

‘No!’ Ruth cried out, her voice drowned out by Thomas’s anguished wails.

The door opened and the nurse came in. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get down before,’ she said. ‘Are you all right in here?’

‘I think the baby should have a bottle,’ Elizabeth said smoothly. ‘He’s not taking to the breast.’

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.

‘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.

During the day, Thomas slept well. Ruth could put him in the pram and wheel it out into the little back garden.

‘That’s when you should sleep,’ Elizabeth reminded her. ‘Sleep when the baby sleeps, catch forty winks.’

But Ruth could never sleep during Thomas’s daytime naps. She was always listening for his cry, she was always alert.

‘Leave him to cry,’ Elizabeth said robustly. ‘If he’s safe in his cot or in his pram he’ll just drop off again.’

Ruth shot her a reproachful glance. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said.

‘But if you’re overtired and need the sleep…’ Elizabeth said gently.

‘She’s determined,’ Patrick said. ‘It’s in the book.’

‘Oh, the book,’ Elizabeth said and exchanged a small hidden smile with Patrick.

Ruth stuck to the book, which said that the baby should be fed on demand and never left to cry, even though it meant that she could never settle to anything during the day, and never slept at night for more than a couple of hours at a time. She saw many dawns break at the nursery window before Thomas finally dozed off to sleep and she could creep back into bed beside Patrick’s somnolent warmth. Then it seemed to be only moments before the alarm clock rang out, and Patrick yawned noisily, stretched, and got out of bed.

‘Be quiet!’ Ruth spat at him. She was near to tears. ‘He’s only just gone off to sleep. For Christ’s sake, Patrick, do you have to make so much noise?’

Patrick, who had done nothing more than rattle the clothes hangers in the wardrobe while taking his shirt, spun around, shocked at the tone of her voice. Ruth had never spoken to him like that before.

‘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?’

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