by Jo Walton
“That’s exactly the problem, isn’t it? But I don’t think anyone would think that, or even know. So many people are homosexual, and everyone knows, but it’s still illegal and they can get into trouble for it if anyone wants to make trouble. It shouldn’t be that way.”
The meeting was well attended. Marjorie spoke well. The other speaker was a man who explained that the best policy was to keep quiet. “We all know what happened to Wilde, and that is still the law. But as long as we don’t give anybody incontrovertible evidence and keep on denying any allegations, it’s very hard for the police to move against us. It’s not as if people want to know. If we’re quiet, we’re safe.”
An undergraduate stood up and asked if the meeting thought it would be possible for homosexuality to be legalized in their lifetimes, and there was much debate.
A tall stooping man came up to Patty and Marjorie afterwards. “I liked what you said,” he said. “I hadn’t really realized before that there was this kind of problem. What happened to your friend was really unfair.”
“Thank you,” Marjorie said. When he had gone she turned to Patty. “Who was that?”
“Some crazily brilliant mathematician, I think,” Patty said. “I’ve seen him around. He goes to concerts. Turner, or something like that. No, Turing. He’s not a don. I’m not sure what he does.”
A week or so later, as the pussywillows were just beginning to come out on the banks of the Cam, Patty met one of the girls who had been at the meeting as she was coming back from rowing. The girl had short hair as Patty still did. “Hello,” she said. “I recognize you from the meeting.”
Patty felt her heart beating unaccountably fast. “Hello. I’ve been on the river.”
“I’m just going on the river,” the girl said. “It’s such a good way to start the day.”
“Even at this time of year,” Patty agreed.
“Would you like to row together sometime? Maybe on Saturday?”
Patty hesitated. “I would. But you should know that I’m not a lesbian. Not a … a homosexual. I was just at the meeting because I think the way they treat you is wrong.”
The girl laughed. “We usually do say lesbian. But it’s not a requirement to row with me,” she said.
“I just didn’t want to be on false pretenses,” Patty said, stiffly.
“Understood,” the girl said. “Well if you’d care to meet me here this time on Saturday morning, I’d still be happy to row with you. My name’s Lorna Matthews.”
“Patty Cowan,” Patty said, and they shook hands.
Lorna and Patty began to row together weekly, and Lorna would sometimes invite Patty to parties, and she would sometimes go. She felt she was developing a wider circle, a more bohemian circle, and she liked the idea. She began to make other friends too, in school and in choir. Her contract was renewed for the next year and she looked forward to coming back to Cambridge after the long vacation.
That year Marjorie went to the south of France and Patty went back to Florence alone. She stayed in a tiny pensione and did all the things she had done the year before. Some of the waiters recognized her, as did the staff at the gelateria “Perche No!” where she felt almost like a regular. As she walked into the Raphael room at the Uffizi she felt a great sense of homecoming, as if this could really be her life and that it could be good, a life without love but with work and friendship and summers in Italy. She still missed Mark, she was sure she would always miss him, but she had passed beyond his horizon and felt capable again of being happy.
8
Blood: Tricia 1950–1952
Nine months and two days after the wedding, on March 15th 1950, Tricia gave birth to a ten pound baby son in Grantham General Hospital. They had previously agreed on a name for a boy, Douglas Oswald—Douglas after Mark’s father, not after General MacArthur, who later that summer made headlines in the war in Korea. She looked at the thin threads of pale hair on little Doug’s scalp as he lay sleeping in the cot beside her bed, and felt a rush of love so strong that she almost thought she would be physically sick with it. This made everything worthwhile, she thought, putting out a finger to touch his cheek. He opened his dark blue eyes at her touch, then began to cry. She picked him up and he soothed at once, looking at her with what she felt sure was curiosity. “You’re like a miracle,” she said to him. “You’re wonderful. You’re amazing. You’re mine.”
She had been sick a great deal throughout the pregnancy, and she had found keeping house difficult. Before her marriage Tricia had spent ten years living in institutions, schools and colleges, and before that she had been a child. It did not help that they had so little money. Mark’s teaching job was not well paid, and her own savings, which had after all been intended for marriage, quickly vanished into furnishing their little house. The house was not in Grantham but in a little village outside it. There was a shop and a church and a post office but nothing else. It was an hour’s walk to Grantham, or there was a bus that ran every two hours. Mark had a car, but she could not drive and he used it to go to work every day, leaving her stranded at home. He would drive her to Grantham on a Saturday to use the library and to shop, but he regarded it as a chore and a favor he did for her.
Mark, it turned out, had extremely firm ideas of what to expect in a wife. He wanted her to wash clothes and keep the house clean and provide food, to bear children and not complain. Tricia had very little idea of cooking, even when she was sufficiently well to eat herself. Her mother had given her Mrs. Beeton, which became her bible in keeping house. There were lots of mistakes at first, at which she ceased to laugh once she realized Mark did not find them at all funny.
Coal was delivered, but it was a constant struggle to light fires, essential all year round as they provided hot water as well as heating. Mark would carry in coal from the shed, but otherwise he regarded the whole thing as Tricia’s department, raking out the old coals and laying and setting the fire. It was challenging, but he was sarcastic if she could not manage it and he came home to find the fire out. On several occasions in the first months before she got the trick of it she resorted to begging her next-door neighbor for help.
There was a gas stove, on which she cooked, or more often burned, dinner. All washing had to be done by hand, put through the mangle to wring out water, then dried on the line in the garden, or in front of the fire if it rained. It rained a lot in flat Lincolnshire. Tricia could not have afforded domestic help even if there had been any available, but there was not. In 1950 in the newly democratic Britain where there were opportunities for everyone, nobody wanted to be a servant. Tricia struggled with everything and did her best. Mark came in tired mentally and physically from a day’s teaching and said he was perplexed at how little she had achieved in the home.
He would not talk to her about teaching, and refused to see that her experience there was in any way parallel. “Spoilt girls in a private school, what do you know about it?” he asked. The boys in Grantham gave him a great deal of disciplinary trouble. He was also trying to write a book, a treatise on philosophy. He shut himself up in his room after dinner on most nights to work on it. He refused to discuss it with her, though he expected her to type his handwritten chapters on his heavy typewriter, though she could type no better than he could. He would tell her what a word was if she couldn’t make out his handwriting, even spell it out if it were some obscure German technical term, but he would never tell her what it meant. He laughed at her ignorance, as he would not laugh at the domestic failures where she would have been able to laugh too.
Whenever Mark was especially harsh and sarcastic, or when he seemed to treat her like a bad servant, she would turn to his old letters to remind herself that he did love her really, however he behaved. She did not do it too often, but it unfailingly worked. Even a few lines from one of the letters would reassure her, would fill her with renewed confidence to keep going at her drudgery. He might not seem to appreciate her, but he had written these things to her, had opened his heart. He might do so
again one day when things were better, when he was over his disappointment, if she tried hard enough. She tried hard to love him. Sometimes he would accept her love and unfold and be friendly towards her. Other times she felt that he was judging her for not loving him enough.
Mark had not paid her any more conjugal visits after their wedding night. Their house had three bedrooms, and they had arranged without any discussion that they would have one each. Mark’s was officially his “study” but he inevitably slept there. She did not enter it except to clean it, change the sheets on his bed, and put away his clean clothes. She never entered it when he was home.
In their first weeks in the house she had quickly discovered that she had become immediately pregnant, and she imagined that this would confirm everyone’s prejudices about her hasty wedding. The memory of her wedding night came back as she was giving birth, which also hurt and stretched her and took her to that place without shame where she cried out in pain and anguish and terror.
Her mother came to stay after Doug was born and was immensely helpful in showing Tricia how to care for a newborn. She had also made him many tiny clothes, to supplement those Tricia had made. She brought Tricia her sewing machine. “You’ll need it more than I will now.” Tricia was touched; she remembered her mother teaching her to sew and how to make clothes when she and Oswald had been children. Caring for small children was her mother’s one real skill, and Tricia was glad to be able to learn it from her. They became close for the first time since Tricia was herself a small child, united in their love for Doug, or “Douglas Oswald” as her mother always called him.
There was room in the cottage, as Doug slept in Tricia’s room for now. Tricia’s mother lived alone and was lonely in Twickenham. There was no reason why she should not have stayed on indefinitely, helping out in their newfound closeness. But Mark grew impatient with his mother-in-law. Tricia realized that he was jealous of both her mother and the baby. She persuaded her mother to go back to her own house.
Despite the fashion for using formula and bottles, Tricia chose to feed Doug herself. She liked doing it, liked the animal closeness, liked feeling she was providing for him from her own resources. She even liked the tug of his lips on her breast and the feeling of relief as the fullness was drained.
Rationing was finally over, and at last she could buy all the milk and eggs she wanted. She continued to cook chops and vegetables for Mark’s dinners, but she ate little herself; mostly milk and eggs and fruit.
When Doug was nine months old, Mark came home with a bottle of wine. “We want more children,” he said.
“We do,” Tricia agreed, her heart sinking. It was not the birth she dreaded but the conception. She put Doug to bed in the third room and that night, after a bath, she heard Mark tap on her door. The process of their wedding night was repeated—the wine, the jabbing, the awkwardness, the whimpering and pleading, the muttered apology. This time was better because Mark had his own room to go back to and she had hot water to wash herself with. She did not become pregnant, and the process was repeated twice more in the following months before there were results.
Tricia loved being a mother and loved Doug beyond reason, but she had been very unwell in her first pregnancy and now found herself even more unwell and with a toddler to deal with. Doug was a year old, crawling, beginning to talk, totally demanding of his mother’s attention. Tricia was constantly queasy and easily exhausted. She miscarried in August 1951, in her fifth month, waking in the night to a tide of blood which terrified her. Mark left Doug with a neighbor and called an ambulance. In the hospital they could not help her until she had expelled the fetus, for fear of being considered accomplices to abortion. She felt sure she was dying, and demanded to see Mark to make him promise to have her mother bring up Doug. Of course Mark was not there. She wrote him an incoherent bloodstained letter, which she destroyed the next morning. She survived, but had to be given a transfusion. Two days later, back at home, she fainted when alone with Doug, but fortunately he was strapped into his high chair and did not come to any harm.
Two months later, in October, Mark brought home a bottle of wine once more. Nothing was said, but she heard his footsteps approach her door with dread. “Please, no,” she said when he came in.
“It is our duty to God,” Mark replied. “We don’t want too big a gap.”
His book was finished and sent off to a press. They heard nothing for some time. Tricia was pregnant again. Doug was eighteen months old and more demanding than ever.
Seven months into this pregnancy, at the end of the academic year of 1952 and with nothing heard about the book, Mark snapped at her when she asked about it. Tricia was nauseated and tired. She had entertained Doug all day and made a meal for Mark. “Why will you never talk to me about it?” she asked. “You used to talk about philosophy in your letters. I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Oh, you throw that in my face now, do you?” Mark spluttered.
“What?” Tricia asked, genuinely confused.
“My Third, when you had an Upper Second. It doesn’t make you better than me or cleverer than me.”
“I never thought it did!” Tricia protested. “The thought never crossed my mind. Mark, you’re clearly brilliant and the Third was a fluke. Everyone knows it. Elizabeth said so.”
“You shouldn’t discuss me with Elizabeth Burchell,” he said, but he seemed mollified.
“You’re a brilliant original thinker,” she said. “I’m nowhere in your league.”
“Well as long as you know that,” he said, leaning forward to stir the fire.
“I do. And the parts of the book I could understand really showed your brilliance. I wish I could have understood more of it so that we could talk about it. I could help you in more ways than just typing it. You know we used to discuss these things. In your letters—”
“I wish I’d never written you those letters,” Mark said. “You constantly bring them up in this way and throw them in my face. I believe you care more about them than you do about me. What did I say in them anyway? I can hardly remember them. Go and get them.”
Tricia could not believe that he really couldn’t remember them, but she made her ungainly way upstairs to retrieve them from the drawer where she kept them. She took off the ribbon which she used to tie them, a pink ribbon given her by little Rosemary Burchell on her wedding morning. She didn’t want him to scoff at her sentimentality. She did feel sentimental about them. They were the best part of Mark, so fluent, so passionate, so beautifully expressed.
Going downstairs with the letters under her arm, two years’ worth of letters, in careful chronology, she began to believe that they would melt his heart. They were the real Mark, she knew that. Surely seeing them again he would remember how he loved her, over all the everyday irritations of living together and being married, and Doug crying in the night and the fire smoking and dinner being burned or undercooked again.
He took the bundle from her without remark and drew one letter out from the center of the pile at random. He read a few lines, and she saw his face relax into a half smile. Then he looked up and saw her, there in front of him, her distorted belly making her stand awkwardly. “No, I should never have written these things to you,” he said, and thrust the whole bundle of letters into the heart of the fire.
Tricia stood gaping as the papers blackened and then caught flame and flared up. For a moment she couldn’t believe what he’d done, then she was weeping, on her hands and knees scrabbling at the fire with the poker trying to rescue any fragment she could. Mark watched her, bemused.
“They shouldn’t have meant that much to you,” he said, pulling her away from the fire. “Come on now, you’ll hurt yourself. You’ll hurt the baby.”
“I can never forgive you for this,” she said.
She looked at him, this terrible smug man she had bound herself to, Doug’s father and the father of her unborn child, her only financial support. He did not love her, he never had. She had loved him, but he had des
troyed her love. He had burned her letters and she hated him for it.
9
Delight: Pat 1952–1957
When she came back from Italy after the summer of 1952, Patty moved out of her digs and took a small furnished flat. She delighted in having her own kitchen and bathroom, as well as a sitting room and tiny bedroom. It was the ground floor of a Victorian house on Mill Road, within walking distance of school and the town center. She sent her washing out to a laundry, but she cleaned for herself and began to learn to cook, trying to re-create Italian food with inadequate British ingredients. She had parties, bringing together her friends from the different spheres of her life—boating friends, birding friends, choir friends, fellow teachers, Lorna and her friends from the homosexual community. To her surprise, after initial awkwardness they always seemed to mix well. Her parties were popular and people began to ask when she would have another. One of her work colleagues mentioned that she admired Patty for knowing such an interesting range of people.
She had a party for the Coronation which filled the flat and spilled over onto the stairs. She had bought a television for the occasion, but she was so busy talking to her friends and providing snacks that she hardly watched it. Late at night Lorna and Jim, an old man from the RSPB, helped her clear up. “A new Elizabethan age,” Jim said, skeptically.
“At least rationing is over,” Patty said, scraping a plate.
“Who knows what we’re heading for,” Lorna said. “But it’s nice to have a queen instead of a king. A young woman instead of an old man.”
“He wasn’t old,” Jim protested. “Middle aged. Young to die. The strain of being king killed him.”
“It’s still nice to have a new young queen, though,” Patty said.
They all murmured assent. The figure of the queen had been tiny in the small screen of the television, but unexpectedly moving when she made her vows and was crowned. “She doesn’t make any real difference, but it does seem like moving into a new era,” Patty went on.
