My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  Over those years Patty imperceptibly became Pat. It began with the birders and spread from there through the parties, eventually coming back to the staff room. It was a more grown-up form of her name, and she had never really cared for Patty, which had been her name at boarding school. Her mother still called her Patsy, her childhood name. She went to her mother’s at Twickenham dutifully for Christmas, and occasionally for a day or so at the end of the summer. She and her mother were formal with each other. They had one spat when her mother asked wistfully about her marriage plans. Pat felt she had put all that behind her.

  She began to work on a guidebook to Florence, aimed at British people going there for the first time without any background in the history or art, the way she had. She sent it to Constable, who to her astonishment accepted it immediately, and with hardly any revision. It was published in the spring of 1955, and her editor asked her if she would write a similar book about Venice.

  She thought about using the advance for the book to buy a flat in Cambridge, a flat like the flat she rented, but which would be her own. It wasn’t sufficient, of course, it would have covered perhaps half of what she needed. She approached the bank about a mortgage, and was informed that they did not lend to single women. A building society told her that they did lend to single women over thirty who had had accounts with them for at least five years. She was twenty-seven, so she opened a savings account with them. Then, the next summer, in Venice doing research for her guidebook, she looked at house prices and realized that she had enough to buy a house there. She felt drunk on the idea, even after she remembered currency controls made it impossible. She went around daydreaming about houses she could have afforded if she could have taken her money out of Britain. At that time the maximum that could be taken abroad was twenty-five pounds, which was barely enough to live on for a month.

  She worked on the Venice book in Italy and back at home. Pat felt life was going smoothly for her, until she fell unexpectedly in love.

  Bee was just finishing a Ph.D. in biology. She was two years younger than Pat. They met in choir, and what first drew Pat was Bee’s soaring voice. She befriended her, invited her to parties, and discovered that Bee had original and fascinating ideas. They became close and spent a great deal of time together. It took Pat much longer than it should have to realize that it was something more than simple friendship. It was the summer that made her realize. She was in Italy as usual, in Venice putting the finishing touches on her book, and then in Florence, which increasingly felt as much like home as Cambridge did. But that summer for the first time since she had first seen it, Italy wasn’t enough. She missed Bee. She wanted to show everything to her, and know how Bee felt about it. Sitting below Cellini’s Perseus, watching the sky darken above the Palazzo Vecchio and wanting to share it with Bee, she realized with a shock that this was love.

  It was a very different love from the love she had had for Mark. There she had felt Mark was far above her, but also that he had chosen her. She had felt privileged to be the object of his choice. With Bee it was all different; she was the one who had chosen. Pat sat staring at the windows of the Palazzo, one of which had been Machiavelli’s office. They reflected the darkening sky and were now a luminous twilight blue against the pale stone. Pat had never considered being a lesbian herself, had never thought about it personally. It was her sense of injustice that had led her to take up Marjorie’s cause, and then go to the meeting with her. She wasn’t sure if what she felt for Bee was even physical. She was, at thirty, still very naive and entirely lacking in sexual confidence. She had no idea what Bee felt, except that she knew Bee admired her, as she admired Bee. It would probably be best never to say anything about anything else, when she wasn’t sure. There was so much else in the world that was so beautiful, and their friendship was a wonderful thing. She felt glad to have identified what she felt, even if she could never talk about it. Perhaps next year Bee would agree to let her show her Florence. Meanwhile the windows and the sky darkened together, and Pat felt happy because the world had Bee in it.

  Bee met her on the station platform on her return to Cambridge. “You shouldn’t have come all the way out here!” Pat said as they hugged each other.

  “I have bought a car,” Bee said, proudly. “You don’t need to drag all the way into town on the bus when you’re tired and I can drive you.”

  “A car!”

  “Yes, and taken lessons and passed my test.”

  “You told me about that in your letters, but not about buying a car.” Pat felt shy with Bee, knowing that she loved her, especially as Bee had taken her heavy bag and was swinging it as they walked along the platform. She looked sideways at Bee’s square face and slightly stooped shoulders, unable to suppress a grin.

  “What are you smiling at?”

  “I’m just so pleased to see you,” Pat said, honestly. “It’s so lovely to be met.”

  “It’s easy with a car. And I needed one. I’ve got the fellowship. So I’ll be going out to the countryside all the time to research, and a car seemed like a sensible investment. It’s second hand, but it runs. And now you can learn to drive too.” Bee was bubbling with enthusiasm.

  “You’ve got the fellowship?” Pat’s grin spread even wider.

  “Yes, it just came through.” Bee looked a little self-conscious.

  “That’s marvellous. After all we’ve talked about with women in science, it really is a triumph that you should have got it.”

  Bee smiled.

  “There’s a Botticelli painting in Florence where the Virgin Mary has exactly that smile,” Pat said, before she could stop herself.

  “I feel just as smug about the fellowship as she did about her baby,” Bee said.

  Every weekend that autumn Bee took Pat out for a driving lesson. Together they explored the countryside around Cambridge. They watched birds, and Bee showed Pat the patterns of hedgerow growth she was studying. Pat never said anything about what she felt for Bee, though now she was quite sure she did want to touch her. She asked Lorna in strict confidence what it was that women did, and was surprised and enlightened by the answer.

  Then, at the end of October, Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt to take back the Suez Canal. Cambridge was full of anti-war protesters, Bee and Pat among them. There was a march through the town center, with chants and banners. The two of them went back to Pat’s flat afterwards, chilled by the wind and the events. “Let’s get the news,” Pat said. They huddled together on the sofa drinking tea. As the newsreader appeared and tapped his papers together, Bee said, “He knows already. He’s read what he’s going to read us, and we don’t know yet.” There wasn’t any real new news, except that the Russians had invaded Hungary to crush the protests there. “And what can we say? We’re as bad as they are,” Pat said.

  Then Bee turned and clung to her, and Pat hugged her back, and they were kissing. “Are you sure,” she said, when they drew breath. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  “If it’s what you want,” Bee said.

  “It’s what I want,” Pat said. She had kissed before, had kissed Mark, but it had always been awkward and frightening. This wasn’t awkward, and she was dizzy with excitement but not afraid. They kissed while the newsreader told them of deaths in Suez and deaths in Hungary, until Pat got up and turned it off and then they went into the bedroom.

  She was glad she had talked to Lorna, but she felt that it wouldn’t have been necessary. It was a case of touching and paying attention and asking what felt good. Afterwards she was so proud to have made Bee happy that what she felt herself was secondary to that, and yet what she felt was momentous, was unlike anything else. Later in the dark she felt that Bee was crying. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m so lucky,” Bee said.

  “No, I’m the one who’s lucky,” Pat replied.

  They paid almost no attention to how the Suez crisis unfolded, nor to the horrible things happening in Hungary. The US intervention and the return o
f the troops seemed to be happening in counterpoint to the unfolding of their love. All her interests took a back seat to Bee. They told a few friends, but most of them did not make any assumptions at seeing two women constantly together. Pat felt replete, her joy in Bee’s existence redoubled by Bee’s return of love, and transmuted entirely by the happy glow of sexual satisfaction they shared.

  Pat’s Venice book came out in the spring. Only in the classroom was she entirely focused on something that was not Bee. When Britain joined France, Germany and Italy in a new European Economic Community, signing the Treaty of Rome, Pat only paid enough attention to realize that now she would be able to buy her house in Italy.

  She and Bee drove down the length of Europe in June 1957, stopping to eat and explore wherever they wanted to. In Florence Pat felt she would explode as she showed Bee everything, until Bee protested laughing that she could not take it all in at once. They stayed in Pat’s usual pensione but had a double room, both saying to the landlady that they didn’t mind at all about sharing a bed. Pat introduced Bee to her Florentine friends.

  They looked at houses and flats for sale, which in itself would have made an entertaining hobby. Pat would have bought an apartment at the top of a twelfth-century tower near Orsanmichele, but Bee wanted a garden. With the help of Pat’s friend Sara, who taught English at the university, they eventually found a house. It was just south of the Arno, outside the old city walls, which Mussolini, the barbarian, had pulled down. It was in walking distance of the Uffizi, and it had running water and a fig tree. They planned to find students to rent it during the academic year, and to live in it themselves in the summers. “We can plant rosemary,” Bee said. All their plans were “we,” and Pat thrilled to it every time.

  “I can probably help you find students,” Sara said. “This year I might be interested in living there myself. My lease is about to run out, and it is a lovely house.”

  “That would be perfect,” Pat said.

  One day they saw a family walking across the Ponte Vecchio with the father reading aloud from Pat’s guidebook. Bee nudged Pat, and Pat stared hard at the statue of Cellini in the middle of the bridge, blinking tears out of her eyes. “It’s really helping people,” she said, when they had gone on in the direction of the Pitti Palace. “I saw it on the shelves, but I didn’t really believe people would use it.”

  “Why did you write it then?” Bee teased. “It’s real. It’s a real achievement. You can be proud. I’m proud of you.”

  Pat glowed.

  On their last day in Italy Pat went into the Duomo alone and went down on her knees to thank God for Bee.

  “I am bringing you my joy, Jesus, as I was taught as a child. Thank you for Bee. Thank you for making her, thank you for letting me find her, thank you for making me worthy of her. Thank you for our house in Florence, for her fellowship, for my teaching. Thank you for our lives, our love. And if this is all there is, if she decides she wants a man later, wants to marry and have children, then so be it. Thank you for giving us this time to be together and be happy,” she prayed. She felt God heard her and looked down on her in kindness. When she stood up again in the perfect harmony of the Duomo she had tears of joy in her eyes.

  10

  Babies: Tricia 1952–1961

  Tricia’s second baby was born dead. The birth was as hard a struggle as Doug’s had been, two days of labor with nothing to show for it at the end. The dead child was a girl. Mark had her baptized Hilary. Tricia was too ill herself to have any say in the matter. It took her a long time to recover from that birth. Her mother came down to care for Doug while she was in hospital, and remained for a few months afterwards, during which Tricia felt constantly exhausted. It was the most she could do to eat and talk to Doug. Going to the bathroom left her needing to rest for an hour. Her mother went home in October. Tricia’s doctor prescribed exercises and a tonic. She slowly regained her strength. At the time of the Coronation, in June, Mark again brought home a bottle of wine and left it sitting on the sideboard. Tricia saw it as she came in from the kitchen and almost without thinking picked it up and smashed it in the fireplace. The plummy scent of red wine rose immediately into the air, and she stood staring at the green glass shattered all over the grate.

  Her rebellion did no good, of course. Mark, coming in, looked at her and the broken bottle patiently. Her violence had put him in the right, made her into the child and him the adult. It bought her one night, for which she had to pay with reduced housekeeping money the following week, for he stopped the price of wine out of it.

  This pettiness astounded her. Where was the man she had thought she was marrying? Or forget that, where was normal human decency? She would not do that to a dog. She told Mark she was pregnant almost immediately, before she could possibly have been sure, but he did not question her. She hated lying, but she had come to the end of her resources. She had loved him, and even after she had stopped loving him she had tried to make the marriage work, and this was what it had come to. She made a desperate plan to run away to her mother in Twickenham—a journey requiring a bus and two trains and most of a day, no easy trip with a three-year-old. She reached her mother’s house after six at night, to her mother’s astonishment. She took them in and put Doug to bed at once. Then she insisted on telephoning the Lincolnshire neighbor who was prepared to take messages for Mark and Tricia.

  “He’ll be so worried about you,” she said, dialling. No matter what Tricia said, her mother insisted on treating it as a temporary problem. “All marriages have these little blips,” she said. Mark agreed that Tricia should stay until the weekend and then he would fetch her back. She felt her mother conspired with him to make her again the child, the misbehaving child.

  “I want to leave Doug with you and take a teaching post,” Tricia said to her mother. “I’ll be able to send you money for his keep.”

  “Married women can’t teach!” her mother said.

  “They can now,” Tricia said. “That law has been changed. Or if I can’t teach I’ll get secretarial work. Goodness knows typing Mark’s book has taught me something.”

  But her mother wouldn’t hear of it. “Your place is with your husband. I know you took losing the baby badly, but the best thing for that is to have another baby as soon as possible. I lost a baby between Oswald and you. It’s natural to hate Mark for putting you through all that pain, but it isn’t his fault really.”

  She tried to tell her mother about the way he had burned the letters and his pettiness with the housekeeping but she couldn’t make her understand. She made light of everything and kept repeating that all marriages had these problems. When Tricia cried, her mother said she was run down, and made her cups of Bovril.

  On the Saturday morning Mark arrived in the car, Doug was delighted to see him. Tricia was too busy being sick to care. She tried to blame the Bovril, but she knew she really was pregnant again.

  In the car she tried to make an ultimatum as Doug ran about the back seat pointing out cows and horses excitedly. “We have to move into town. I can’t stay there in the village where there’s nothing. It’s driving me mad. I never talk to an adult. I’m completely trapped. There isn’t even a library.”

  “I’ll consider looking for a house in Grantham after the new baby is born,” Mark said, with the air of somebody making a huge concession.

  The baby was born in January 1954, and it was a girl. They called her Helen Elizabeth, after Tricia’s mother and Elizabeth Burchell, and perhaps the new queen. The order of names was at Tricia’s insistence. She was again very pulled down after the birth, and her mother again came to stay. Doug was jealous of the new baby and of his mother and grandmother’s attention to her. He had been toilet trained for more than a year, but he began to deliberately soil himself. Tricia found this so distressing that she broke down in tears every time it happened. She still had to wash everything by hand herself. Mark dealt with it by spanking Doug, much against Tricia’s desires. “He’s too little,” she insisted. “He do
esn’t really understand. It’s just because of Helen. He’ll be fine again soon.”

  “Haven’t you seen the look on his face? It’s deviltry and he’s doing it on purpose.”

  “Well, he is, but he doesn’t understand.” Tricia was furious with Doug herself, but she couldn’t condone hitting a child so young. Mark, however, was implacable, and as his methods worked and Doug gave up his rebellion it made it more difficult for her to continue to insist the next time he wanted to punish his son for naughtiness. This seemed to happen more and more frequently. Mark’s book had been rejected by the publisher after long deliberation, and while he had sent it to another he was angry about it and took it out on Tricia and Doug. He did not hit Tricia, but he did not need to—sarcasm was always a sufficient weapon to reduce her to misery.

  At Easter they visited the Burchells in Oxford. Tricia still didn’t care for them, but she welcomed anything like a change in her routine. Mark wanted to talk to them about what to do with his book. Tricia was so delighted to see Oxford again that tears came into her eyes as they drove past Blackwell’s. She took the children for walks, pushing Helen in the pram and holding tightly to Doug’s hand. It was vacation, but there seemed to be plenty of undergrads around, running and bicycling and laughing in the spring sunshine. They took no notice of Tricia even when she smiled at them, and she realized she was invisible to them. When she had been an undergraduate, a woman with a pram would have been invisible to her, too.

  The second evening, Mark went out with the Burchells, leaving Tricia to babysit her own two children and the Burchells’ four. The youngest Burchell child, Paul, was a few months older than Helen, and when he woke screaming Tricia could do nothing to calm him. Eventually, feeling almost as if she were committing adultery, she gave him her breast. He quieted at once, as Helen would have. It was a strange intimacy to have with somebody else’s child.