Under His Roof

He was fifty-two, he had told her on the second phone call, as though it were a defect in the survey.

Nell drove up from Worcester on the Sunday evening, the way she always did, so that the first morning of a booking would not also be the first time she had seen the house. One case, one crate of her own kit, and the coat on the passenger seat. Sixty miles of wet A-road, the bypass, a roundabout with a Faircloth & Sons board leaning in the verge, and then the town itself: a market square shut up for the night, a church tower lit from below, a lane that dropped off the far side of everything towards the river.

The house was where he had said it would be, and it did not look like anything else in Marlcaster. Dark brick on the lane side, almost blank, one slot of a window and a black front door. She knew before she had the boot open that the other side would be all glass. Men who built their own houses always put the money where the view was.

He had the door open before she reached it.

"Miss Rendall. You found it." He came down the two steps and took the crate out of her hands without asking, which she let him do because it was heavy and he was plainly a man who needed something to carry. "Roderick Larkin. We spoke on the phone. Twice. Three times." He stopped. "Come in. You'll want to see the room before you see anything else."

He was taller than his voice had suggested, six foot and some, broad through the shoulders under a black rollneck that fitted him the way expensive things fit, without seeming to try. Thick grey hair, darker at the sides and gone to silver at the front, pushed back off his forehead. Close grey stubble. A face that had spent thirty years outdoors and had a line cut deep between the brows that looked permanent. He was polite and he was frightened, and he was doing a very good job of looking like neither.

She hung her coat on a peg he pointed to and followed him up an open oak stair. On the landing he put the crate down outside a door, put his hand on the handle, and then, oddly, waited, as if there should be a ribbon.

"I did it myself," he said. "Most of it."

The nursery was beautiful. She would give him that and then she would give him nothing else. It ran the full depth of the house, white walls, pale oak floor, and the whole of the river end was one sheet of glass from the floor nearly to the ceiling, so that the room seemed to stop at the trees. The light had gone, but she could see the water below, moving, and a pair of lights on a bridge further down. In front of the glass, exactly central, as if it were the altar in a chapel conversion, stood a white cot.

To the left, a long changing table, oak, on a pair of trestles, at a height that would have suited him nicely. To the right, a chest of drawers with nothing on it. In the corner by the door, still in its box, still in its cellophane, a steriliser.

"Right," Nell said, and pushed her sleeves up to the elbow.

She moved the cot first. It was on castors, which was something. She walked it backwards off the glass and along the inside wall to the corner farthest from the window and nearest the door, and turned it so the long side faced the room.

"It was meant to look at the river," he said.

"He's going to look at the ceiling. For about three months, mostly." She tested the mattress with the flat of her hand, pressing to the corners. "It's March. That's a lot of glass."

"It's triple glazed. The U-value's better than the wall's."

"Then you'll know better than me that there's still a fall of cold air off a pane that size at four in the morning. You'll have drawn it with little arrows." She did not look round. "And when the sun comes up over those trees in May it'll be straight in his eyes at half past five, and he'll be awake, and so will I. He goes where it's draught-free and dim and I can reach him from the door without turning on a light."

There was a pause behind her. She had learnt, on four years of a neonatal unit and every year since in other people's houses, to leave a pause alone.

"Yes," he said. "All right."

The changing table next. She stood at it and put her hands flat on the top, and it came up to just under her ribs. "Whose height is this?"

He had the grace to look at it as if he had never seen it before. "Mine, I suppose."

"Who changes him at three in the morning?"

"You do."

"I do. Every night for twelve weeks, eight or nine times a day in the first fortnight. If my back goes in week two, nothing in this house works." She bent to look at the trestles. They had been made properly, pegged rather than screwed, with a column of holes drilled down each leg. "You made it adjustable."

"I make everything adjustable. Kellow's made the trestles to my drawing." He said it with a small, reluctant pride, and she liked him for it.

"Then adjust it. Two holes down." She stood back. "And you'll stoop when you do it, and that's fine, because it'll remind you to keep one hand on him."

He took his reading glasses off the neck of the rollneck, put them on, looked at the pegs, took them off again and knelt. He did as he was told. It took him four minutes and he did not say a word, and when it was done she leant on it and it was right. Then she had him move it to the wall beside the cot, so that every nappy, every muslin and every vest was in reach of one hand while the other stayed where it should be, and he did that too, without asking why, because she had already told him.

She knelt and slit the cellophane off the steriliser with her thumbnail.

"I meant to do that," he said.

"He's home tomorrow afternoon, and he's on formula, and he'll want feeding within the hour of getting through the door. Everything he puts in his mouth goes through this for the first six months." She lifted the thing out of its moulded cardboard and read the base. "This lives in the kitchen, not up here. Bottles are made downstairs, by the kettle, where the water is. Up here is for sleeping and changing and nothing else, and then he learns the difference."

"I thought it should be up here. To save the stairs at night."

"That's a good reason," Nell said, and meant it. "It's just not as good as mine."

He laughed then, once, surprised out of himself, and the crease between his brows emptied completely for a second, and then came back.

Her own crate she unpacked onto the chest of drawers in the order she always unpacked it: digital thermometer, a stack of muslins she had washed in her own non-bio, two bottle brushes, a box of nitrile gloves, nail scissors, a nightlight with a red bulb, and a hardback A4 notebook with nothing on its cover. He picked up the notebook and opened it to blank ruled pages.

"Feeds, volumes, times, nappies, sleep," she said. "Everything, from tomorrow. The health visitor will want it and it'll tell me things before he does."

"In pen."

"In pen."

He put it back on the drawers, exactly where it had been.

Her room was across the landing, plain and good, with its own small bathroom and a window onto the lane, and he left her at the door of it with the air of a man who had been told by somebody once that you should leave a woman at a door. She unpacked the case into a wardrobe of pale oak that slid without a sound. Jeans, rollnecks, fitted black tees. Her boots. And at the back, on its own hanger, the dark-green silk slip dress that came to every booking with her and had never once been worn on one. She did not know why she packed it. She had stopped asking. It hung there and caught what light there was, a deep, cool, wet sort of green, and she shut the door on it.

Downstairs the kitchen ran the length of the house, as she had guessed, a long oak table down the middle of it and the glass at the river end gone black with night. He had made soup. He had made it, she suspected, so that there would be something to do in the hour before she arrived, and he watched her eat it with his own spoon going still. On the table between them lay the contract, two pages, the one she had written herself four years ago and changed twice. He had signed it already, and initialled each page, and somebody had read it closely enough to have run a pencil down the margin by the clause about Sundays.

"You've read it," she said.

"Twice. It's very clear."

"It's meant to be."

"Sunday's yours," he said. "All of it. I'll manage."

"You'll manage because I'll have shown you how by then." She finished the soup. "Not this one. This one I'm here."

He went to Hereford on the Monday morning in a dark car with a new car seat clicked into the back of it, and rang her from the hospital car park at twenty past one to say they were leaving, and again from the roundabout on the bypass to say they had nearly arrived. She was at the open door with the hall warm and the steriliser done and two bottles made up and cooling, and the kettle filled fresh.

He carried the car seat in like a man carrying a model of a building he had been told was worth more than the building. Tom was four days old and asleep, a crumpled red face under a white hat, one fist up by his ear. Nell felt the familiar thing she always felt, which was not softness but attention, everything in her going quiet and exact.

"Bring him up," she said. "Don't wake him. Let's see how you hold him."

In the doorway of the nursery he unbuckled the straps with fingers that were too big for the clips, and lifted his son out, and held him the way men who are afraid of breaking something hold it: straight out in front of him on two flat hands, like a tray.

"Stop there," Nell said. "Don't move."

She came up close, close enough to smell the hospital still on the baby and the cold air on Roderick's coat, and put her hands over his.

"This hand goes under his head and neck. Spread your fingers. More. He's got nothing in that neck yet; you're it." She moved his left hand. "Now bring him in. Not up. In. Against you." He brought him in, and the rigid line of his arms bent, and the little body came to rest high on his chest under his chin. "Right forearm under his bottom. Take the weight on the bone, not the wrist. There."

He was holding his breath. She could see it in his throat.

"Breathe," she said. "He can feel it if you don't. He's been listening to a heartbeat for nine months and yours is the one he's going to get. Let him hear it."

Roderick let the breath go. The baby turned his face, rooting blindly into the black wool, and settled, and his fist uncurled against his father's collarbone.

"Oh," Roderick said, very quietly.

"That's it. That's how." She stepped back and left him to it, because the worst thing anybody could do to a new father at that moment was keep their hands on him. "Ten minutes like that, then he'll want his feed, and you're doing it."

"Am I?"

"You are. I'll be standing next to you."

He did the feed in the nursing chair by the cot, with Nell telling him the angle of the bottle and when to stop and sit Tom up and how to wind him, flat hand, steady circles, no thumping. Tom brought up wind with a noise out of all proportion to his size, and Roderick looked at her over the top of the white hat as if he had personally laid a foundation stone. She wrote it in the book: 2.40 p.m., 60 ml, good wind, settled. Then she put Tom down in the cot in the corner where it belonged, on his back, feet to the foot, and Roderick stood over him for a long minute with one hand on the rail.

She went out ahead of him, and was halfway down the oak stair when he spoke behind her.

"Nell."

She turned. He was two steps up, so that for once she had to look a long way up at him, and he was pushing his hair back off his forehead with one hand.

"There's bread and cheese and ham on the table and a pot of tea. Sit down and eat it. All of it. You drove sixty miles last night and you've been up since six this morning; I heard you on the landing. He'll sleep till five. If you don't eat now you'll be eating at midnight standing up, and you'll be worse at two."

He did not wait to see whether she would. He went back up to the nursery door and stood in it.

Nell went down into the long kitchen. The light had come round on the river and the glass at the end was full of grey water and bare trees. The pot of tea was under a cosy that looked older than the house. She sat, and pulled the plate towards her, and ate the first half of the bread and ham and most of the second, and drank the tea, and it was only when she reached for the cheese that she understood she had been sitting at that table for five minutes because a man had told her to.

She had not decided to. She had simply done it, and it had been the right thing, and he had said why.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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