Dying Fall

message. Sender unknown.
    Don’t come to Pendle if you know what’s good for you.

CHAPTER 5
    Shona lives in King’s Lynn, near Sandra the childminder, so Ruth drops in on her way home. Kate loves children younger than herself and has developed a convincingly patronising attitude towards them. ‘Baby,’ she says as soon as she sees Louis.
‘Little
baby.’
    ‘Yes,’ says Shona admiringly. ‘But you’re a big girl, aren’t you?’
    Kate looks pleased at this description but Ruth, who is also sometimes called a ‘big girl’, is rather more ambivalent.
    But Louis really isn’t that little. In fact, he seems to have grown since Ruth saw him a few days ago. He dominates Shona’s stylish sitting room, surveying the world from his bouncy chair like his namesake, the Sun King himself. Toys and baby clothes cover every surface, nursery rhymes play on a manic loop in the background. Ruth is reminded of the time when Shona looked after Kate, then only a few months old. Kate had screamed the entire time, and in minutes Shona’s beautiful sanded wood floors hadbecome covered in toys, books, tapes, bottles of milk – evidence of abortive attempts to placate her – and when Ruth had arrived, all she had to do was take her baby in her arms and the crying had stopped immediately. Ruth remembers that day well. It was the first time she had really felt like a mother.
    Shona still doesn’t look like a mother. She is too slim for one thing, having miraculously regained her pre-pregnancy figure. ‘It’s the breast-feeding,’ she says smugly, floating away to put the kettle on. She is also too well dressed. Ruth spent her entire maternity leave in tracksuit bottoms; Shona is wearing a short flowery dress, and high-heeled sandals tied with ribbon. She has even done her hair, though, as usual, it looks artfully dishevelled. It is only when Ruth sees her close up that she notices the shadows under the mascara’d eyes.
    ‘How are you?’ asks Ruth, when Shona reappears with tea, and juice for Kate.
    ‘OK. Knackered.’
    ‘They are tiring, the first months,’ says Ruth. ‘I remember it well.’
    Louis starts to bang his rattle on the table in front of him.
    ‘Noisy baby,’ says Kate, primly sipping her juice.
    ‘When are you going back to work?’ asks Ruth. Shona teaches English at the university, which is how they first met.
    Shona pulls a face as she reaches down to pick up Louis’ dropped rattle.
    ‘I’m not sure I want to go back.’
    Ruth stares at her friend. She remembers the emotional intensity of those months alone with your baby. She remembers the feeling that work was another world, one that you are no longer equipped to enter. But not to go back at all?
    ‘I remember feeling like that,’ she says. ‘But, when I went back, it felt great. I felt like I was a person again.’
    She had almost cried with happiness when she saw her office again, but she’s not going to tell Shona that.
    ‘I don’t know,’ says Shona. ‘I just love being with Louis. I’m so enjoying him.’
    Maybe it’s different if you have another adult at home, thinks Ruth. Mind you, that other adult is Phil.
    ‘What does Phil think?’ she says.
    ‘Oh,’ says Shona dismissively. ‘He thinks I should go back. He says we need the money. He says we should get a childminder. He’s always going on about how well you cope.’
    ‘He is?’
    Part of Ruth is gratified to hear this. She has tried hard not to let her motherhood intrude on her work or to burden her colleagues with excuses about illness or child-minding problems. But on the other hand –
cope
? How many men are complimented on how well they ‘cope’ with fatherhood?
    ‘Well, you’ve got a while to decide,’ says Ruth. ‘You can take a year now if you want.’
    ‘But you only get paid maternity leave for six months,’says Shona. ‘Honestly, I never knew Phil was such an old woman about money.’
    But Shona didn’t know Phil that well at all, thinks Ruth, until she moved in with him. They had been lovers for some time but, as we all know, lovers are more attractive than husbands or boyfriends. Phil probably made efforts to disguise his chronic stinginess (a standing joke in the department) when he was only seeing Shona twice a week, stolen hours in a country pub or in the office after dark. Even so, Ruth bets that he kept the receipts.
    ‘Louis is gorgeous, though,’ says Ruth, retreating to a safer topic. ‘I can see why you don’t want to leave