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
