The Little House

‘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.’