The Little House. Philippa Gregory
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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