The Little House

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.’