The Little House

by Philippa Gregory

  If Ruth locked the back door – which meant locking the pram outside – Elizabeth checked Thomas in the pram and then strolled around to the front door and tried it. If it was locked, she might ring the bell or she might open it with her own key. She had no sense at all that the little house was not her own property, that she should await an invitation to enter. When Ruth complained to Patrick, he merely shrugged and said, ‘Well, they do own it legally, darling.’ When she asked Elizabeth to use the front door, and to leave the pram in the back garden alone, Elizabeth just laughed and said, ‘But I do so love to see him asleep.’

  Ruth did not complain to Frederick. In the months that passed after his warning that he would take Thomas away from her and commit her to an asylum, she took great care not to offend Frederick, and to deny Elizabeth nothing. She never forgot that she was living at home, and caring for her son, with their permission.

  In March and April the daffodils came out. As Elizabeth had predicted, Ruth had spoiled the show in the back garden, but the ones at the farmhouse were superb. Elizabeth brought armfuls down every day and filled the little house with them. She walked across the fields on every fine day, and came in the back gate. Ruth would watch her from one of the bedroom windows, her light step, her carefree proprietorial glance at their fields, at their hedges, at their drive, and then at their little house. Ruth’s hands would tighten as she watched Elizabeth come into the garden, and then, every time, every single time, Elizabeth would lean over the pram, rocking the handle slightly with her hand, and whisper to Thomas as he lay asleep.

  One time Ruth ran downstairs and flung open the kitchen door as Elizabeth turned to the house. ‘I’ve asked you a thousand times to leave the pram alone!’ she snapped.

  Elizabeth was quite unmoved. ‘I just like to say hello,’ she said.

  ‘Why do you have to speak to him?’ Ruth demanded. ‘You do it every time.’

  Elizabeth walked past her, fetched a vase, and filled it with water for the flowers. ‘I just say hello,’ she said pleasantly. It was as if she did not care what her daughter-in-law thought, as if Ruth’s anger and resentment were as much a part of an otherwise agreeable world as clouds and late frosts.

  ‘The grass will need cutting as soon as the daffodils have died back,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And the daffodils will need a little feed. I’ll ask Frederick to bring down the mower, and I have some fertilizer ready to do our daffodils.’

  ‘We can buy our own mower,’ Ruth said at once.

  Elizabeth laughed again. ‘Don’t be so absurd!’ she said. ‘We hardly use it, it’s just a little electric mower for the front lawn around the roses, but it will do your patch of lawn. Frederick can mow it for you when he comes down.’

  ‘I will do it,’ Ruth said stubbornly.

  Elizabeth turned. ‘Are you quite well, Ruth?’ she asked with concern. ‘You seem rather irritable. Should you have a little rest this afternoon?’

  Ruth looked from her mother-in-law’s radiant face to the bright yellow trumpets of the daffodils and back to Elizabeth’s unwavering smile. ‘I’m going shopping,’ she said sulkily.

  ‘Don’t hurry back!’ Elizabeth called. ‘We’ll be fine!’

  Frederick brought down the mower in his car the next day. ‘This is not to be used until I’ve put a trip switch on the cable,’ he said. ‘I had no idea that I’d ever used it without one. With a trip switch, if you slice the cable by accident, then the power cuts out automatically and you don’t get a shock.’

  ‘Would it be a bad shock?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘Oh! Quite lethal!’ Frederick said cheerfully. ‘You’d get the full 240 volts! That’d make your hair stand on end! A number of people die every year. But the trip switch will do it. I’ll pop into Bath and buy one this afternoon when Elizabeth is with you.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to come down,’ Ruth said. ‘You could go to Bath together.’

  He looked away. ‘It’s how she likes it,’ he said briefly. ‘We’re in a nice routine now.’

  ‘But when will it change?’ Ruth pressed him. ‘You can’t want to come down every morning and afternoon, and all through the summer as well! When will it change?’

  He picked up the mower and went towards the little shed at the side of the garden. ‘When he goes to school, I suppose,’ he threw over his shoulder. ‘When he’s off our hands, a bit.’

  ‘School?’ Ruth repeated blankly.

  Thomas, who had been kicking his feet in his pram, struggled to sit up and gave a little shout. Frederick instantly came out of the garden shed and took hold of the pram. ‘We’ll go up the lane and see if we can see some birds’ nests,’ he promised. He reached behind the baby and propped him up, so that he could see the passing scenery. He tipped his hat to Ruth. ‘See you later, my dear,’ he said.

  ‘Do you and Patrick and Elizabeth think that we are going on like this forever?’ Ruth demanded. ‘Until Thomas is old enough to go to school? For four years?’

  Frederick manoeuvred the pram out through the back gate and gave her a smile. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘It suits us all so very well.’

  Ruth put a hand out to delay him. ‘Am I never to have my baby to myself?’

  His smile was kind. ‘Steady the Buffs,’ he said comfortably. ‘Let’s not get dramatic. We’re doing very nicely as we are.’

  Ruth’s hand dropped from his sleeve, and she stepped back and watched him go up the drive, pushing Thomas’s pram, and chatting to him. She thought that she would stand thus, by the garden gate, watching her son taken away from her, every day for four years. Then, when he was old enough to go to school, it would not be the school of her choice; and she would not be waiting for him at the school gate every afternoon. He would be sent to a school that Patrick and his parents preferred, and several times a week they would collect him. Most likely, it would be Patrick’s old school, where his mother and father were still friends with the staff. When Thomas was seven – or at the very latest eleven years old – they would send him to go to boarding school, Patrick’s old school, and she would not see him at all, from one holiday to another. He would never be her little boy, just as he had never been her baby.

  Up the lane, every now and then Frederick would stop the pram and hold a leaf for Thomas to see, or incline the pram so that the baby could peep into the hedge. Ruth felt as if they might never come back to her, as if Thomas was slowly, slowly going away, and that nothing she could do, neither rage nor docility, would regain him. As Frederick said, it was a routine that suited them all very well. Ruth could see that nothing would change it.

  She turned away from the garden gate and went into the garden. In one corner was the new garden shed, where Patrick kept his new tool kit – a moving-in present from his father. She took out a large reel of extension cable, and took it to the kitchen. Carefully, she took the screwdriver and removed the set of sockets from the end of it, leaving the cables bare. Two cables she wrapped in insulating tape. One – the brown live-power cable – she held with the pliers and cut and stripped the insulation away to expose a good length of copper wires. Then she put the cable and the tool box out of sight, in the cupboard under the stairs.

  When Frederick brought Thomas home she smiled and thanked him for taking Thomas for his walk, lifted the baby from the pram, and showed Frederick out of the house. She gave Thomas his lunch and laid him down to sleep – not in his pram, but in his cot. Thomas watched the mobile hanging from his nursery ceiling, and fell asleep.

  When his eyes closed and his breathing was steady and regular, she went down to the garden, plugged in Frederick’s mower, and mowed two and a half rows, taking great care with the cable. She stopped mowing the grass at the point where the pram was usually left for Thomas’s afternoon nap, and then she unplugged the mower and took it back to the shed. She wheeled the empty pram out into the garden, placing it where the cut grass abruptly ended, and bundled the blankets, so it looked as if a baby were asleep inside.

  Ruth stepped back to admire the ill
usion of a sleeping baby in the pram, then she went back into the house and fetched the extension cable from under the stairs. She took the stripped live wire, twisted it around the shiny chrome frame of the pram, and then spooled the cable out, running it back towards the house, in through the back door, and plugged it into the socket at the kitchen worktop, but left it switched off. She went back out to the garden and looked again at the pram. The cable was almost completely hidden by the long uncut grass and by the drooping leaves of the dying daffodils. Ruth picked up handfuls of leaves and mown grass and scattered them along the line of the cable until it could not be seen from any angle.

  She went to the garden shed and unwound the bright orange cable of the electric mower. She took down a pair of garden shears from the hook Frederick had made for them. Two yards from the end of the cable of the mower she snipped it cleanly in half and examined the cut. It was a good clean cut, as a mower running at full speed would make.

  She left it in the shed and went back out to the garden, checking the run of the cable once again, and the connection with the pram. She went into the house and switched on. She realized she was holding her breath, waiting for something to happen, as if she would be able to see the lethal 240 volts snaking down the cable to the pram. She took up Frederick’s gift to Patrick of the live-wire tester and went out to the pram. Half thinking that none of this was real, and certain that none of it would work, she laid the metal end of the little screwdriver on the pram. At once the red bulb in the handle lit up. The pram was live.

  Ruth went back to the house and flicked off the switch. It was five minutes to two. Elizabeth would arrive at any moment.

  ‘It’s up to her,’ Ruth said. Her mouth was curiously stiff, as if her body, like her consciousness, was slowly solidifying, freezing into horror at what she was doing. ‘It’s not up to me, it’s completely up to her.’

  The garden gate banged. Through the window Ruth saw Elizabeth walk in the garden gate without invitation, as she always did, looking around her with pleasure, as she always did, at her garden and her little house. She strolled up to the pram, put both hands on the pram handle, and leaned in, as she had been asked – so many times – not to do.

  ‘There you are, then,’ Ruth remarked inconsequentially, and switched on.

  There was a sudden movement as Elizabeth was flung several feet backwards from the pram. Her legs kicked, her arms flailed, and then she was still: completely still.

  With dreamlike slowness Ruth unplugged the extension cable and wound it up towards the pram. The live wire had seared a small dark mark on the metal. Ruth rubbed it with her finger. It hardly showed. She took the cable to the garden shed, and tried to replace the set of sockets on the end. Her hands were useless: they were trembling too much, and her fingers were slack and uncontrollable. She pushed the wires into the sockets and left them till later. She took the electric mower out of the shed and put it precisely at the end of the cut grass, where the pram had been. She wheeled the pram into the house. There were a few tiny grass clippings that had come in on the wheels. Ruth got down on her hands and knees and cleaned the wheels of the pram, and wiped the floor from hall to back door, to catch every single spot of green.

  She went back out to the garden. Elizabeth was lying where she had fallen; Ruth did not even look at her. She put the severed mower cable under the still blade of the mower, and ran the rest of the cable into the house and plugged it in.

  She looked around the kitchen. Everything was back in its place, where it should be. Only then did she walk cautiously out to the garden and look into Elizabeth’s face, as she lay on her back in the grass.

  Elizabeth gazed up at Ruth, her eyes open. Ruth recoiled with an exclamation of horror. Elizabeth had seen this, had seen all of it, had lain there, watching. Ruth stepped back, but Elizabeth did not rise up from the grass and come, accusingly, after her. She lay as she had fallen, her hands clenched as they had been wrenched from the pram handle, her palms scalded. Ruth stepped a little closer again. Elizabeth’s open eyes were sightless. The woman was dead. Ruth stared down into Elizabeth’s blanched face as if, at the end, there might have been some reconciliation. She paused for no more than a moment, then she screamed, as loudly as she could, and raced back into the house. She snatched up the phone and telephoned 999. The operator was calm, Ruth babbled about an accident, her mother-in-law cutting the grass, and managed to give the address. Then she telephoned Frederick at the farmhouse. The phone rang and rang before he answered.

  ‘Ruth!’ he said. ‘I was just getting the car out to go to Bath …’

  ‘Come at once! Oh, come at once!’ She was weeping, hysterical.

  ‘Is it Thomas? What have you done?’

  At that one question Ruth felt a leap of extraordinary, liberating joy. Frederick’s first thought had been that she might have hurt her child. ‘No! No!’ she said, her voice high and light. ‘It’s Mother! It’s Mother!’

  He slammed down the phone and she pictured him running to the car. In moments he was pulling up at the front door and running up the path.

  ‘She got the mower out before I could stop her!’ Ruth exclaimed. ‘I was upstairs and I came running downstairs as soon as I heard the noise of the mower. But when I got out there it was –’

  She broke off, Frederick brushed past her into the garden, flung himself down beside his dead wife. Ruth, very still, watched from the kitchen window as he gathered her into his arms and held her very close. Then Ruth sighed and turned away. Very carefully and tidily, she started to tie back the kitchen curtains as they ought to be.

  There had to be an inquest. Ruth gave her evidence in a thin, shocked voice, and Frederick and Patrick sat on either side of her and held her hands.

  The funeral was a few days later, the village church filled with mourners and bright with spring flowers, as Elizabeth would have wanted. The arrangements were not quite as she would have done them, but Ruth was learning from one of the flower rota ladies how they should be done.

  The lunch was provided by a catering company, although Ruth had wanted to do it all herself. She had supervised the layout of the buffet, and it was Ruth who had insisted that they change the paper napkins for proper linen ones.

  When everyone had gone home, Ruth and Patrick did not want to leave Frederick alone in the echoing house. ‘We’ll stay tonight,’ Ruth decided. ‘I’ll make a quiche and salad, and we’ll all have an early night.’

  Next morning Elizabeth’s cleaning lady, Mrs M, came in as usual, and had to come to Ruth for instructions. Together they cleared and cleaned the dining room of the remains of the buffet, and dusted and vacuumed the drawing room. Together they put fresh sheets on the upstairs beds, while Thomas struggled along the floor, practising crawling. Ruth sent Patrick down to the little house to pack their clothes for a stay of several days. ‘We can’t leave your father on his own,’ she said. ‘And I have so much to do here.’

  When Patrick came back there was a light lunch on the table, and Ruth and Frederick were having a glass of sherry while Mrs M fed Thomas in the kitchen.

  ‘I should go in to work this afternoon,’ Patrick said hesitantly. ‘Unless you need me here?’

  Ruth shook her head. ‘Will you be home at six?’ she asked.

  Patrick nodded.

  ‘Dinner at eight then,’ she said.

  Patrick kissed her cheek and felt her breath warm against his ear.

  He came home on time and heard Thomas splashing in the bath while his grandfather supervised. Ruth came out of the kitchen wearing his mother’s apron, carrying two glasses of gin and tonic with ice and lime.

  ‘Will you take one up to Frederick?’ she asked. ‘He’s standing in for you!’

  Patrick took the two iced glasses without a word. This was a new Ruth; he did not want to comment until he had the measure of her.

  ‘I’ll come up in a moment,’ she promised. ‘I just have to turn the joint. We’re having roast beef tonight.’

  Frederick and
Patrick together persuaded Thomas out of the bath and into his pyjamas, then Ruth appeared with his night-time bottle and rocked him to sleep. When she came down again, it was ten to eight and dinner was ready. Frederick carved the meat. It was perfectly done.

  Twenty

  THEY AGREED to stay for a fortnight, until Frederick should be able to cope on his own. But when Patrick mentioned at breakfast one morning that they should return to the little house, Ruth shrugged.

  ‘It seems so convenient,’ she said. ‘If Father wants us, that is?’

  Frederick smiled, spooning homemade marmalade onto his plate. ‘No doubt about that,’ he said. ‘But I’ll understand if you want to get back. I’ll have to adapt, that’s all.’

  ‘No, why?’ Ruth interrupted charmingly. ‘There’s so much to do here, Patrick, you don’t know the half of it. There’s the garden to see to, and the house, and the baking, and the flowers. I don’t think I can possibly manage it, coming up every day.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all,’ Patrick said uncertainly. ‘I thought you’d want to go home, that’s all, to our house.’

  She poured him another cup of fresh coffee. ‘I never really liked it,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘It is a bit cramped,’ Frederick acknowledged.

  ‘And I can’t possibly run two houses …’

  ‘Do you want to stay here?’ Patrick demanded.

  She slid him a look from under half-closed eyelids. ‘If Father wants us,’ she said. ‘I should have thought it was the ideal solution.’