The Little House

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.