My Real Children (28 page)

“When he’s well enough to come out of hospital I think I’ll put him in his study.”

“It shouldn’t all fall on you, Mum,” George said.

“Who else is there?” Trish asked. She didn’t want Mark, but she felt she couldn’t just abandon him.

Mark was released from hospital in October, by which time Trish had his study ready for an invalid. He still couldn’t speak, but he could make noises and call out. Doug, home for Christmas as usual, took one look at Mark and turned his back. “He’s like an animal.”

“You’d feel sorry for him if he was an animal,” Trish said. As she had done with her mother, she found a woman to come in and take care of Mark while she was at work. This one was called Carol. She had been a nurse and stopped when she had children, and now did private nursing.

Trish’s life settled into a routine again. She continued to teach at the school, and to teach her evening classes. Mark—paralyzed, incontinent, bellowing—was a burden she had to deal with. She tried not to let it grind her down. She didn’t know if he was alert and angry inside his head, or how much the stroke had wiped away. Was he trapped in inarticulacy, did he long to be sarcastic and unkind as he had always been? Or was he really the animal he seemed? She sat and read to him sometimes on evenings when she was at home, trying to convince herself he was quieter when she did that. She fed him and cleaned him up, like a huge baby.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Bethany said.

“I couldn’t expect the children to do it. And those nursing homes are terrible places. I go sometimes to visit my old headmistress. The smell—disinfectant over stale urine. I couldn’t send him there. And a private home would be so expensive.”

“He has his pension from the university. Or Doug could pay it without noticing. And George and Cathy are doing well.” Bethany shook her head. “You’re too nice.”

“Maybe I want to have him in my power,” Trish joked, and then she wondered if it was true. But she didn’t feel as if the thing in the bed was really Mark; more that it was a shell Mark had left behind, a shell that needed tending. “He’s just another baby, but one who won’t grow up.”

Bethany stayed downstairs, a tower of strength. On Trish’s suggestion she stood for the council, and won, which now gave the Preservationist Independents a bloc of six, which as they tended to caucus with the Greens gave them a reasonable say in what got done. The days when Trish could overhear the mayor saying that global warming meant it was a waste to put money into Morecambe were over. She found the work was often frustrating when established interests refused to consider things that she thought were good sense. There was a huge battle that year over moving the market. It had been on its present site since 1660, not long enough for it to be considered traditional, according to some of the council who wanted to sell the land for a mall. The Preservationists resisted them fiercely and won. The market was revamped and made fireproof and given ramps, but stayed where it was.

Helen had another baby, a boy, Anthony, in September 1986. Cathy continued to be a banker and a single mother, but in 1986 she began dating another woman in her bank, Caroline. By winter they had moved in together and she brought her home for Christmas. Trish did not take to Caroline, who treated her as if she knew nothing about feminism and needed to be educated. She tried not to be relieved when she and Cathy broke up before the next Christmas.

George and Sophie came home from the moon, and had a party to celebrate their wedding with their Earth friends in Sophie’s family home in Aberystwyth. Trish couldn’t make it because of Mark, so she held another party for them in Lancaster. They settled down in Cambridge and had twins, Rhodri and Bronwen, born in February 1988. “We didn’t want to risk having babies on the moon,” Sophie said. George went back into space soon after, to the big international space station, Hope. He was there for several months at a time, then back in Cambridge for a few months. Sophie was working in Cambridge on the Mars terraforming project and on hydroponics for the planned domes.

“Will you go to Mars?” Trish asked, apprehensively.

“Not on the first mission,” George said. “But maybe eventually. When the twins are big enough. Mars will be a proper home one day.”

27

Time’s Wingéd Chariot: Pat 1978–1985

Philip went to the King’s College and worked seriously on his music. Pat and Michael began the Seven Wonders Foundation, which eventually grew entirely out of their control. Soon they had lists of seven wonders on each continent, though Pat never felt that any of the American ones could possibly really count. “New York’s skyline, indeed,” she muttered to Bee. “I’m glad to have anything protected, but how can that be considered artistic or historical?”

“They’ll be moving all their weapons in there,” Bee warned.

All the countries of United Europe and the USA and the USSR signed the Seven Wonders Pledge, along with Israel and Egypt and China and India, which made Pakistan the only nuclear power holding out, and Michael felt confident that the Shah of Iran would help put pressure on them.

When they came home from Italy in the autumn of 1980 it was to terrible news from Lorna. “Thyroid cancer,” she said.

They visited Lorna in hospital where she was starkly bald from chemotherapy and so thin her bones showed. “If only it did some good,” she said.

“She’s only fifty-two,” Bee said, afterwards as she wheeled herself back to the car. “My age.”

“Is it radiation?” Pat asked.

“Maybe. It could just be one of those things. There have always been cancers. But thyroid—could be. Could well be. Not likely Delhi, but it could be Kiev. That was such a thoughtlessly placed bomb. Poor Lorna.”

“She was the first lesbian I knew well,” Pat said.

“Me too. The first lesbian I ever knowingly met. At one of your parties in that flat on Mill Road.” Bee levered herself into the driving seat.

“She was the person I asked what women do together, when I first realized I was falling for you.” Pat wiped her eyes and heaved the wheelchair into the car.

“Really? I never knew that. I didn’t ask anyone. I just sort of went on instinct.” Bee shook her head as Pat sat down and did up her seatbelt.

“Poor Lorna. Well, she may pull through.”

“No,” Bee said. “Not with anaplastic thyroid cancer. Don’t get your hopes up. We can cure AIDS and leukemia, but not this kind of cancer.”

Lorna died before Christmas. They went to her funeral on a bitterly cold day. Although they hadn’t belonged to a choir in years, Lorna’s partner Sue asked Pat and Bee to sing “Gaudete.” “Lorna used to talk about you singing that at a party years ago,” Sue said. Pat sang it, and remembered the party, before Suez or the Cuban Exchange, before the children, when she and Bee had only just met. Bee’s voice was as powerful and true as ever. “We really did know Lorna for a long time,” she said to Bee on their way home.

Bee’s mother also died that winter, at a great age. They all went up to Penrith for the funeral. There was a bit of trouble as Bee’s brother Donald tried to put Bee and Jinny in the first car and the rest of the family in their own car. Pat would have let it be, but Bee insisted fiercely that her family were staying together. In the end they drove their own car and left immediately from the graveside. “Why did he have to be like that?” Bee asked. “I hate it when people won’t acknowledge my family as real. All of us.”

The girls took their A Levels that summer, 1981. Flora did well but not spectacularly and took up a place at Lancaster. She had grown out of the flower goddess phase and chose to study computer science. Jinny did brilliantly. She was accepted at Pat’s old college, St. Hilda’s, to read English, but in Italy that summer she changed her mind. “I want to study here,” she said. “My student loans are good for anywhere in Europe, aren’t they?”

“They are,” Pat said. “But are you sure?”

“What could be more blissful than studying sculpture in Florence?” Jinny asked. “Can I live in the house?”

“There will be some students living here, but there should be room for you as well. Is sculpture your passion then, Jinny-Pat?”

On the day of the Indo-Pak crisis Jinny had been a plump teenager with long black hair, and now she was a willowy girl with a short crop that curled over her ears, but the look she gave Pat was exactly the same. “I still don’t know. But it’s closer.”

“We might all fly out for Christmas,” Bee said when they told her. “I’ve always wanted to do Christmas in Florence.”

They did that, and discovered the lack of insulation in their house. “It was built to catch drafts,” Jinny said. “Thank you for bringing all my warm clothes!”

In Italy, instead of presents being brought by St. Nicholas at Christmas they are brought by La Befana, the Epiphany witch. “More like Halloween than Christmas!” Philip said.

Bee was enchanted with the tiny objects on sale for nativity sets. “Baskets of mushrooms!” she said. “Prosciutto!”

“You’re buying all the toy food, and we don’t actually have a Nativity set,” Jinny said.

“I’m going to give them to Flora,” Bee said. “Look, a tiny salami! And a wild boar!”

Flora arrived on Christmas Eve and was enchanted with the miniature food. “They’d be wonderful for a doll’s house,” she said.

“I knew you’d like them,” Bee said.

“But it’s freezing! I had no idea it was cold in Italy in the winter!”

“It’s one of Italy’s best-kept secrets,” Jinny said. “I suggest you sleep with two hot water bottles.”

Michael, being Jewish, did not celebrate Christmas. When he visited in the middle of January he was delighted to eat Pat’s truffle pasta with the wild boar salami they had brought home. Philip at fifteen, the only child still at home, ate three helpings.

“You’re looking tired,” Bee said to Michael when they had finished dessert. “Have you been working too hard?”

“I’ve been feeling a bit run down. And I keep falling asleep. And I’ve had a sore throat that doesn’t seem to go away. I may see the doctor about it.”

“You do that!” Pat said.

Two weeks later when Pat came home from school she found Bee crying into her geraniums in the greenhouse. Pat crouched before the chair and put her arms around Bee. “What’s wrong?”

“Michael has it.”

“What?” Pat asked.

“Thyroid cancer. Anaplastic, just the same as poor Lorna. There’s no point him trying the chemo. I told him so. It works for breast cancers and liver cancers, but not for that. Do you think he should come here to die?”

“Yes,” Pat said. “Or we should all go to Florence, perhaps? But what about Philip? He has O Levels this year. How long has Michael got?”

“Months,” Bee said. “Probably not a year. I think he should come here. Philip’s O Levels aren’t all that important to him. He’s already taken Grade 8 in music in all his instruments, and music is clearly what’s going to be his thing.”

“His passion,” Pat said. “You’re right. Yes, call Michael and tell him we’ll take care of him.”

“A lot of it will fall on you,” Bee said.

“The bedpans,” Pat said, and rolled her eyes. “How easily it all comes down to bedpans. You know I don’t mind.”

“Michael’s ten years younger than me and twelve years younger than you. We were all together on the morning of Kiev,” Bee said.

“You said then that the radioactivity wouldn’t get here for days,” Pat said, who remembered that with a burning clarity. “Days later we were here and he was in London, or who knows where, taking pictures.”

“I’m a biologist, why would you think I know anything about radioactivity or fallout?”

“But—” Pat stared open mouthed. “You’re a scientist. You sounded so confident. You were standing right there when you told me.”

“You were pregnant and panicking,” Bee said. “Everything I know about radioactivity is on a cellular level.”

Michael drove down the next day. “You remember we wanted to start our own Renaissance? We’re not going to have one,” he said to Pat.

“We got the Seven Wonders going,” she said. “That’s something. And you have taken some wonderful pictures.”

A burst of Albioni came through the open window of Philip’s room above the front door. “And there are the children,” Michael said. “Maybe they’ll do better with the world than we have.”

In the sitting room Bee was talking to one of her old students, Sophie Picton, who was briefly visiting Cambridge, and indeed Earth, from Galileo, the European space station. She had brought Bee some cuttings from space, and was taking some of Bee’s plants back up with her. “These should make the air smell a lot better,” she said.

“I’ll keep working on it,” Bee said.

“You should come up and work on it,” Sophie said. “In zero gravity you’d be able to move about as well as anyone else. Better, because your arms are strong.”

“Oh, that’s a tempting thought,” Bee said. “But I have my responsibilities here.”

Pat brought everybody some fruitcake and tea and Philip came down to join them and they chatted until Sophie left. Then they settled Michael into Jinny’s old room at the front of the house. Most of Jinny’s things were in Florence, and Pat moved the rest into the spare room.

“What we need to think is not that you’re here to die but that you’re here to celebrate while you can,” Bee said.

“Champagne every night?” Philip asked.

“Good things while we can have them anyway,” Pat said. “Flora’s going to come down at the weekend.”

“I want to take a series of pictures of you two and the children and the house and garden,” Michael said. “Nothing posed, just the way you go about your routine.”

“All right,” Pat said, exchanging looks with Bee. “My favorite picture of yours is still the one you took of Bee in Florence when the girls were babies.”

“Though your second favorite is St. Mark’s Square taken from ground level,” he said.

“It was the way you didn’t care at all if you completely ruined your clothes,” Pat said.

They put the news on after dinner, but after a few minutes Bee switched it off. “Nothing but violence and explosions and men posturing,” she said.

“Do you really want to go to space?” Pat asked Bee the next morning when she was dressing for work.