My Real Children (18 page)

“No, he wouldn’t have been,” Tricia said, absently. “I wonder where he was? Had you seen him in the morning?”

“No, nor the night before. I hadn’t seen him since Friday morning, when after you left he asked me if I was going to church with him and then stormed off when I said no, I was working.”

“I hope he’s all right,” Tricia said. “If he’d collapsed or anything they’d have telephoned, and nobody would have answered.” Just then her mother moaned from the bed, and Tricia went over and took her hand. “I’m here, Mum, you’re in hospital, but everything is all right.”

“Patsy?” her mother said.

“It’s all right. It’s all right, Helen. You go home. We’ll sort out the mystery of where your father is later. I’m sure there’s some perfectly sensible explanation.” She wondered what on earth it could be.

The doctors had set her mother’s broken hip, but they wouldn’t let her go home. “She shouldn’t have been left alone,” one of them said, a young Pakistani man.

“She wasn’t. A woman comes in to be with her when I’m in work, and the rest of the time I’m there. She can only have been alone for a few hours. And I thought my husband would be there.” Tricia felt guilty, and yet she seldom left her mother. “I took the younger children to London to see my oldest son, who lives there.” Now she felt she was explaining too much, and that the doctor was judging her.

“Well she can’t return yet in any case,” he said.

“Mammy! Mammy!” Tricia’s mother called from the ward. “Where are you?”

“She’s calling for her mother,” the doctor said. “Everyone does that in the end.”

“Her mother died in 1930,” Tricia said. “Wait. Do you mean that she’s dying?”

“Oh no. There’s nothing organically wrong with her, except the broken hip. People can live a long time with dementia.”

Tricia left her mother in the hospital for the night and went home. Helen had fed the younger children fish and chips and put them to bed. The papers were all over the kitchen table. Tricia cleared them up automatically while making a cup of tea. Then Mark came in, whistling a hymn, his briefcase in his hand and a bag over his shoulder.

“You’re home already,” he said.

“Where have you been?” Tricia asked.

She guessed at once, because he immediately looked guilty.

“You’ve been with a woman, haven’t you?”

Mark hesitated for a moment, expressions passing over his face—guilt, belligerence, suspicion, and at last his normal arrogance. “Our marriage is a nonsense, it has been for years. You know that. You don’t want me and you never have. You’d see that if you looked at it calmly.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” Tricia said, and she was. The kettle boiled and she poured the water onto the teabag in her cup. “What are you going to do?”

“How do you mean?”

“Are you going to leave us? Do you want a divorce so you can marry this woman?”

“You forget, I’m a Catholic, I can’t have a divorce. And we could hardly have this marriage annulled with four children to show for it.”

“You’re such a hypocrite, Mark,” Tricia said, still standing with one hand on the handle of the kettle. “Adultery is all right, betrayal of marriage vows is all right, but divorce, oh no, unthinkable. You write all the time about ethics and virtue and logic, but I think you might apply some of those things to your own behavior.”

“You’re acting like a child,” Mark said, always his accusation. Usually he made her feel like a child, but not tonight.

“I think you should leave. Go back to her, or go somewhere, but leave the house. I don’t want to see you here.”

“All right, I will.” Mark was flushed with anger now. “You don’t know anything about making a man happy. You never did. I stayed with you from duty, I supported you all these years.”

“Just go away!” Tricia shouted. “Now.”

He drew a breath and turned his back and walked down the stairs and out of the front door.

When he had gone she sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the shelves of china against her terracotta walls. When she tried to drink her tea she realized she was shaking when she spilled it all over her hands. She had called him a hypocrite. She had told him to go, and he had gone. Her mother was in hospital. Helen had thought about somebody who wasn’t herself and coped just like an adult. She picked up the mug in both hands and carried it to her mouth.

17

Three Is Enough: Pat 1967–1969

The moon landing took Pat by surprise, as it did most people. Of course she’d noticed Sputnik, and Gagarin, but somehow reaching the moon seemed more significant. In the BBC’s translation of Leonov’s words the Russians claimed the moon for all the peoples of the Earth, but she felt it ominous that they were there, and even more ominous later when they went back and began building a base. She looked up at the full moon from their garden in Harston and felt it brooded over them.

Bee felt completely differently. “It’s a triumph for science. Didn’t you ever read science fiction? Donald and I used to read
Astounding
whenever we could get it. The moon’s the first step. It doesn’t matter who got there first. It’s part of our future in space. I wonder what they’ll do with hydroponics in their moon base. I’d love to work on that.”

“They could drop bombs from there,” Pat said.

“They can hurl missiles up from Earth just as easily,” Bee said, and frowned. “Did you see the cancer cluster figures? I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s because of Kiev fallout. Children with thyroid cancer, that’s appalling. The Americans weren’t thinking about us at all when they dropped that bomb. We have our own space agency. I’d like to see some Europeans up there too.”

There was an election in the spring of 1968 in which Airey Neave led the Conservatives to victory. He made a speech talking about closer ties with Europe. There was a feeling in Italy too that Europe should become more of a political unit, a third force to stand against both the USA and the USSR. Neave talked about “Neoliberal” economics and monetarist policy. He began a program of returning nationalized industries to private control, while selling shares to the public. This was immensely popular. Pat was astonished to hear Bee’s parents when they visited talking about their shares and the money they had made, in addition to their usual sheep-based conversation.

Pat unexpectedly had a letter from Marjorie. They had been on each other’s Christmas card lists, but hadn’t caught up in person for years. She was getting married to a man she had met in Portugal. Pat, Bee and the children went to the wedding in London. Marjorie had dieted herself gaunt for the occasion, and the white dress was not kind to her complexion, but she was delighted to see all of them. “I hope you enjoy Portugal,” Pat said. They gave her a chopping board and a set of good kitchen knives made from the new much touted “space metals.”

Ireland wanted to join Europe, just as Europe was talking about political unity and a combined truly independent nuclear deterrent. This led to a renewed wave of Irish terrorist violence in Britain and Ulster, as the IRA feared joining Europe meant being more closely bound to the UK. When Pat and Bee were in Florence that summer they read with horror about a bombing campaign in London.

The weekend after they came home from Italy, they all went to see Pat’s mother in Twickenham. She was vaguer than ever, recognizing Pat but uncertain of all the others and seeming overwhelmed by them. Pat talked to the nurse she had been paying to care for her mother and was alarmed. “She’s eating like a bird, I can hardly get her to take anything,” she said. “Some days she doesn’t recognize me. I worry about leaving her at night. She should really be in a home.”

“We need to talk about that,” Bee said.

Back in the sitting room, her mother was accusing Jinny of having stolen her glasses.

“I haven’t seen your stupid glasses!” Jinny said, furious and indignant. “Why would I take them?”

“You’ve probably put them down somewhere, Helen,” the nurse said, soothingly. “Ah, here they are on the windowsill. How did they get there I wonder?”

“She stole them. She’s a wicked girl!”

“I did not!” Jinny said, crying now. “I’m not wicked. You shouldn’t say so!”

Pat hugged Jinny and looked over her head at Bee.

“Let’s all have a cup of tea,” Bee said. “Who wants to help me make it? Jinny? Flossie? Let’s see if we can find any biscuits.”

“We could afford a nice home for her where they’d look after her properly,” Pat said, when they were in the car headed home, with all three children asleep in a heap on the back seat.

“She wouldn’t know where she was and it would make her worse,” Bee said. “We should have her with us.”

“Oh Bee, you’re so much nicer than I am. I don’t know if I could face it. She’s never really approved of me, and to have that disapproval around all the time, with the confusion—I don’t know. And with the girls about to start school I was looking forward to having more time to work. That’s just selfishness. But worst of all, she really upset Jinny, and she’d keep on doing things like that. I don’t think it would be good for the children for her to be with us.”

“Would you want our children to pack us into homes when we get old?” Bee asked.

Pat thought about it as she negotiated a roundabout and turned onto a new road. “It’s so difficult. I think I would, rather than have them disrupt their lives, especially if I was that difficult. She always used to say I was wicked when I’d done anything wrong when I was a child. She used to shut me in the cupboard in the dark when she thought I’d blasphemed. I don’t want her saying that the girls are wicked. It’s a terrible thing to say. If I was like that—but I don’t know. It’s easy to say that now, when I’m not helpless. What I’d really want is for them to love us and want us, and I’d really like to love Mum and want to have her to live with us, but I don’t. We’ve never been close.”

Bee was quiet for a while. “Old age is terrifying,” she said. “And senility is the worst of all, I think.”

“Maybe we could find a good home in Cambridge where I could visit her frequently,” Pat said.

“Maybe that would be best,” Bee said.

They looked at homes, and at last found one in Trumpington, not too far, and clean. It was expensive, but not all that much more than they had been paying for the nurse and the cleaners in Twickenham. Pat drove alone to collect her mother one fine September Saturday. She didn’t understand where she was going. As they drove off, with bags packed with what Pat imagined her mother might want, she realized that she was going to have to clear out and sell her mother’s house. Pat had been born there, and had been going back there dutifully all her life.

Her mother liked the home at first, she enjoyed being shown around and told Pat how kind the nurses were. She admired the garden and was gracious to the other patients. But when Pat got up to go, congratulating herself on how easy it had been, her mother got up too. “I’ll just get my coat, Patsy,” she said. “This has been lovely, but I’m tired and I can’t say I’ll be sorry to be home.”

“But you’re staying here, Mum, and these people are going to look after you.”

“Nonsense! We’ve just been visiting them, and now it’s time to go. I couldn’t be expected to stay here!” She wept and raged at last, when nobody would agree that it must be a mistake. Pat was shaking when she got back into the car.

“How did it go?” Bee asked when she arrived home.

“Terrible,” Pat said. The girls were planting bulbs along the fence and Philip was asleep on a blanket. “It was all fine until she understood she had to stay, and then she was sure it was a mistake. It must be like a nightmare, being that confused.”

Bee put her arms around her. “Would it be better having her here after all?”

“No, I think it’s the right thing. But it was so awful.”

“We’ll all go and see her tomorrow,” Bee said. “We won’t just abandon her there.”

“No,” Pat agreed.

“And now I’ll put the kettle on. We thought we’d have a picnic tea. The girls have been working hard getting it ready. Come on, wash your hands, girls, it’s time for tea.”

The girls raced each other indoors. Close in age, they were often taken for twins. Both of them had Michael’s dark hair but were otherwise very different. Flossie was long legged and stalky. “A rower, like her mother,” Bee said. Jinny was shorter and more solid, with a square face and a turned-up nose like Bee’s. They both chattered in Italian as fluently as English, much more fluently than their mothers. Pat had worried about their starting school, about their different surnames and absent fathers. All the children had Michael written down as their father on their birth certificates, as the alternative was to say the father was unknown, which sounded awful. But although they saw Michael for a weekend every month or so and they knew he was their father, it was far from a usual situation. Pat was afraid the presence of two mothers and the absence of a father would be a social embarrassment to them in school. She needn’t have worried, at least not immediately, as the girls loved school and nobody seemed to have bothered them about their unusual family.

The girls continued in the village school, and Pat’s mother continued in the home in Trumpington. Pat got into the habit of visiting her mother with the whole family on a Sunday afternoon and taking her mother out to lunch in Cambridge on a Thursday. They had two cars now, the big Hillman and a sporty Mini. Her mother often wept and raged when she left, and often asked to go home. She generally recognized Pat, and sometimes the others. She frequently asked Pat where her father was, and even more frequently asked her who was the father of the children.

They went to Italy in the summer of 1969, just after the fuss of the European space launch. “We’ll get to the moon yet,” Bee said.

“To Italy, Mamma!” Flossie corrected her. To the children Bee was Mamma and Pat was Mum.

“Italy, Italy!” Philip chorused.

On the ferry, as the children ran up and down chasing seagulls and dodging in and out of the legs of other passengers, Bee took Pat’s hand. “You’re very quiet.”

“I keep feeling as if I’m abandoning my mother in the home. I tell myself she won’t know the difference, or won’t remember, and I want to go so much, even aside from needing to go to write a new book, but I feel guilty.”