My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  The next year Tricia had another stillbirth and they did move, not because of her ultimatum but because Mark had found a better job. They moved to Woking, in London’s commuter belt, to a suburban house with a washing machine. It belonged to them, or as Mark said, to the bank. It was a long but possible walk from the library and the shops, and while the house was ugly and identical to its neighbors, and Tricia would never have chosen it, she was happier there than she had been isolated outside Grantham. She made friends with other mothers of small children, and haunted the library with desperation, burying herself in books, the longer the better. She read Middlemarch and found it almost too painful, seeing herself in Dorothea and Mark in Casaubon. She read aloud to Doug and Helen and to herself compulsively in every spare moment.

  Mark joined the golf club and she joined the Peace Pledge Union and the Labour Party.

  That autumn a publisher bought Mark’s book, so clearly it was not Causaubon’s sterile Key to All Mythologies after all. That night Mark visited Tricia’s bedroom after a bath but without any wine. The sexual act seemed to be over faster, which she approved, and he did not apologize afterwards. She did not become pregnant, nor did she the month after, but by February she could not keep food down and she knew she was in for it again.

  They visited the Burchells again that summer, 1956. All the political talk was about Nasser seizing the Suez Canal. Elizabeth Burchell compared him to Hitler and Tricia felt cold inside. Surely it would not be war again, so soon? She looked at Doug, who was six now, happily playing with the Burchell children, and imagined him marching off at eighteen and never coming back. It was hard enough for her to bear Mark disciplining him; she could not endure the thought of him being killed in battle. The Peace Pledge Union started a letter writing campaign and urged her to write to her MP, begging Britain to keep out of it. She did, and it must have worked, for the whole thing blew over in a solution brokered by the US and the UN. People stopped saying Nasser was as bad as Hitler. Egypt kept control of the canal but let everyone go through, even the Israelis. During this period Tricia became a devotee of the BBC radio news, and even after Mark bought them a small television it was the radio she used in the kitchen that kept her up to date.

  On that trip to Oxford Mark and the Burchells decided to “be received,” meaning joining the Roman Catholic church, and on their return to Woking Mark began to take instruction. Tricia flat-out refused to join him. She no longer believed in a loving God, and stuck to that, whatever Mark said. She realized one day as he was lecturing her that he not only treated her as if she were stupid, but genuinely believed she was. He treated her as a baby machine, and she felt as if she almost was one. What was her degree for, when all the reading she did now was to escape from her own intolerable life?

  In October of 1956 she suffered yet another stillbirth, during the Hungarian Crisis. She had been glued to the radio hearing about the Soviet troops poised to go into Budapest, and the brave Hungarians defying them by massing peacefully in the city squares. She wanted to give the baby a Hungarian name, but Mark named it Matthew while she was still unconscious and undergoing an operation to stitch up her womb. Poor dead Matthew had torn her insides in some way. The doctor was unsure whether she would be able to have more children.

  “Surely two is enough,” she said tentatively to Mark. “It’s not as if either of us enjoys it.”

  “God will decide,” he said, and by that she had no choice but to abide. It was some comfort to her that the Soviets had backed down on Hungary and were allowing a greater measure of democracy, both there and in the rest of the Iron Curtain countries. Both the Soviets and the Americans were pushing ahead into space, in a kind of competition. The BBC was excited to report the first photographs of the dark side of the moon.

  Mark was received into the Catholic faith and took it very seriously. He insisted the children be instructed, and although they had been baptized in the Church of England he insisted on having their baptisms repeated, or “conditionally repeated” as nobody was sure whether the first baptisms had counted. Tricia let him take Doug to church with him, but usually kept Helen home with her. “She’s too young to sit through the service,” she said, and Mark agreed. Doug, who had just started school, said church was boring, but only to Tricia. He was wary of his father, though more likely to be pushed into rage and defiance than fear.

  Tricia’s life in Woking was just beginning to settle down into something she could endure when Mark again brought home wine. His book had been published and was getting some attention, or so he said. She lay and endured his attentions and naturally she became pregnant again. Her doctor looked grave and told her to rest, but of course rest was impossible. Doug had to be taken to and from school and Helen was a very active three-year-old. She was sure this baby would die like the last two, but to her surprise it survived. They called it George Ludwig. Tricia protested the Ludwig, but only feebly. Her mother again came to stay and help with the baby, but Tricia found her less use than on previous occasions. She seemed vaguer, less sure of herself. She kept forgetting the names of things. When Tricia asked her about it she said that she needed to change the prescription of her blood pressure tablets because they made her forgetful.

  “She’s only fifty-eight,” Tricia said to Mark after her mother had left. “She can’t be getting senile already, surely?”

  “She never was especially intelligent, she won’t miss it,” Mark responded. He was busy writing another book, which he expected as a matter of course that Tricia would type for him, chapter by chapter, and then again with corrections. Georgie was a fussy baby, fussier than either of the others. He did not nurse well, and she had to give him bottles to keep up his weight.

  Tricia asked the sympathetic doctor about Malthusian belts. He laughed, and explained that there were contraceptives and he could prescribe them for her, but there was nothing she could use without her husband’s knowledge. She endured another pregnancy that ended in a stillbirth, and another that resulted in a baby—Catherine Marian, born in November of 1959. When she visited after this birth there was no denying that Tricia’s mother was becoming forgetful.

  The doctor told Mark that he was endangering Tricia’s life by insisting on more children. All the same he persisted, and she had another stillbirth in the autumn of 1960. In the summer of 1961 the doctor prescribed Tricia the new contraceptive pill. She told Mark it was a tonic and he believed her. Childbirth was over.

  11

  Real: Pat 1957–1964

  Pat’s editor wanted her to write a guide to Rome. She found the letter on the mat when she came in on a chilly November evening. She turned on both bars of the electric fire and sat down next to it, removing only one glove to open the letter. The brindled cat, Dante, came up and rubbed against her ankles, then flopped down on her feet in the circle of the fire’s heat.

  Rome was the logical next step after Florence and Venice, the editor said. The books were selling extremely well, and Constable were certainly interested in producing new and updated editions as she had suggested. They saw no reason why the books couldn’t remain in print in the long term, being updated from time to time as necessary. They understood that Rome wasn’t (ha ha) built in a day, and that the book would take her some time, but they wished she would start planning it with a completion date of September 1958 for publication in spring 1959, or September 1959 for publication in spring 1960. Then came the offer—three times as much as for either of the other books.

  Pat was still sitting staring at the letter when Bee came in and snapped the light on, startling her.

  “What’s wrong?” Bee asked, immediately coming over to the sofa and putting an arm around Pat.

  “Nothing’s wrong. They want me to write a guide to Rome.” Pat relaxed against the rough wool of Bee’s coat.

  “That sounds like a logical next step,” Bee said.

  “That’s what they say. It’s just—Rome. Rome is so immense. I could write three books the length of my Venice one and har
dly scratch the surface. And I don’t know it well. It would be so much work. And we’ve just got our house in Florence. But—” she hesitated and looked into Bee’s capable, interested face. “The truth is that the one time I went to Rome I was so unhappy. It was right after I broke it off with Mark. Even though that trip was when I discovered Italy, all the Roman sites seem drenched in misery in my memory.”

  Bee hugged her more tightly. “Then we should go back together and make some new memories.”

  Pat felt tears pricking behind her eyes. “You’re right, of course,” she said.

  “And you should face up to your fears instead of letting them chase you into corners. It does no good in the end.”

  “I’m going to tell them it will take two years,” she said, turning the letter over in her hands. “The other thing is the advance. It would be enough to buy a house in Cambridge, or out in the country if you prefer that, where we could grow things.”

  “They don’t give mortgages to unmarried women,” Bee said.

  “Without a mortgage, just buying it outright, the same as we did in Italy.” Pat straightened the letter. “The other books are selling well, I’m making royalties. They think they’ll do new editions when they sell out.”

  Bee frowned slightly. “You know, if we owned a house near Cambridge we could both live on what I earn and your royalties. You could write guidebooks more rapidly if you weren’t teaching.”

  “But I love teaching,” Pat said.

  “Oh well then. It was just a thought. We should get started on dinner if we’re going to eat before the concert.”

  Bee took off her coat and hung it on the hook beside the door, then without looking put out her arm for Pat’s coat.

  As she chopped leeks, Pat thought about what Bee had said about facing her fears. “There are things I love about teaching, but there are also things that would be good about writing guidebooks full time,” she said as she slid the leeks into the pan, where they immediately began to sizzle in the olive oil.

  “I don’t know if they’ll keep me here at the end of this fellowship. I’d like to stay in Cambridge, but with a research career it can be difficult.”

  “Especially for a woman,” Pat said, stirring the leeks. “The water’s boiling.”

  Bee eased the spaghetti into the water. “I’d rather stay here if I can.”

  Pat stared fixedly down into the leeks. “The thing is that I’m afraid. I’m not afraid of where you’ll work or any of that, I’m afraid we’ll make plans together and intertwine our lives and then you’ll want to have babies and find some man to marry and leave me alone.”

  Bee slid a big handful of washed mushrooms into the pan with the leeks and rested her head on Pat’s shoulder. She hadn’t chopped the mushrooms, but Pat didn’t say anything. “I do want babies,” Bee said after a moment. “But I want you—our life—I’m not going to go off and live with some man.”

  “I just keep thinking you’ll wake up and want something more real,” Pat said, not looking around, still stirring.

  “This is real,” Bee said. “I wish one of us was a man so that we could get married and make it feel real to the rest of the world. Our friends, your mother, my family. But this is real for me. I’m not going to give it up.”

  “Give me the bacon, or the spaghetti will be boiled to mush,” Pat said gruffly, because her throat was thick with tears.

  They bought a seventeenth-century cottage in Harston, six miles outside Cambridge. It came with a long thin acre of land, Saxon field pattern, stretching back from the road. There was a little flower garden in the front and then it stretched back and back behind the house. Farthest away from the house was an orchard, where Bee immediately began to graft apples. They lived there in the academic year and in Florence in the summers, paying Bee’s students to look after the garden when they were away. “We always miss the best of the fruit,” Bee lamented. But she accompanied Pat to Italy and went with her around the sites, seldom complaining.

  At Harston they had two cats, chickens, and a hive of bees, from which Bee gathered honey. “They never sting you,” Pat said, rubbing her hand.

  “They recognize a fellow bee,” Bee laughed. “But the truth is that you move too quickly and startle them.”

  They held parties in Harston, but more often than before went into Cambridge for other people’s parties, driving home afterwards. They still knew mixed groups of people. There were more Italians in Cambridge now that the Economic Community allowed free access to education in all member countries, and they became another strand of Pat’s web of friendships. “I never know who I’ll meet at your parties,” Pat’s head of department said at a party celebrating their first apple harvest.

  “I hope that’s good,” Pat said. She felt more confident about people at school knowing about her and Bee, now that she knew they could be financially independent without her needing to teach. She liked teaching, but she liked it better knowing she was free to stop. She liked the girls, liked seeing them open up to literature in the same way she had herself. She planned the curriculum to encourage this process. Nobody from school ever asked about her relationship with Bee—two friends sharing digs was common enough to need no explanation. They were known as a couple in the homosexual community, and also to some of Pat’s more broad-minded birder friends.

  Pat began researching for the Rome book immediately after they moved. It took her all of both summers to complete. Going to Rome with Bee did soften her memories of going there brokenhearted with Marjorie, and by the end she felt she loved Rome almost as much as Venice, though never as much as Florence. “Rome has all these layers, all this history folded over almost stratigraphically,” she said to Bee. “Florence is all of one piece, and that’s what I love about it. It all fits together so perfectly.”

  Constable launched the Rome book with a wine and cheese party in London in March 1960. Pat agonized about what to wear, and eventually went in a black cocktail dress adorned with a Roman coin pendant that Bee had bought for her in Rome. She had her hair done, but the hairdresser complained that it was too short to do anything with. Bee wore her interview suit. (“Nobody’s going to be looking at me!” she insisted.) Few people had known that “P. A. Cowan” was a woman, and the fact drew some attention. Pat was interviewed by the Times. “I just wanted there to be better guidebooks, because when I first went to Italy and didn’t know about anything I wanted to find out. I wanted there to be guidebooks for ordinary people that would tell them about what they were seeing, and also where to eat,” she said.

  Her photograph was grainy, but Bee cut out the article and pasted it into a scrapbook. Pat’s mother telephoned in great excitement to say that she had seen it.

  Two weeks later, at Easter, Pat went down to Twickenham to see her mother. Bee was busy with some grafting in the lab, so Pat drove down alone. Her mother was pleased to see her. “You should have said you were coming!” she said.

  “I did say,” Pat protested, but her mother ignored it. Over the course of the weekend there were more and more tiny things that made Pat realize that her mother was losing her memory. She had entirely forgotten about the interview in the Times. She kept losing words. Pat’s bedroom was deep in dust, her mother had clearly forgotten to clean it. Peeping through the door to Oswald’s old room she saw that it was the same. Pat drove home deeply worried and told Bee about it.

  “She’s all right for now, but what if she gets worse? How is she going to manage?”

  “We’ll have to have her here,” Bee said, and made a face. “Oh I don’t want to and you don’t want to either, but there’ll be nothing else for it if it comes to that.”

  “What about Italy?” Pat asked.

  “Maybe it won’t come to that,” Bee said. “But you’re the only one left and I’m the only girl, and they see us as single women, so we’re going to be the ones to have the burdens for all our parents as they get old.” Bee’s parents were sheep farmers in Penrith. Pat liked them well enough, but found t
hem dull. Their conversation seemed to be exclusively about sheep diseases and new automatic shearing machines, which was naturally more interesting for Bee than Pat.

  “My mother isn’t old. She’ll be sixty this year.”

  “For the time being, maybe we could get her some help. Somebody to go in and see that she’s eating, and maybe clean a bit. Maybe give her a bit of companionship. Being alone so much can’t help. We could afford that if she can’t. As I remember when my grandfather’s second wife went senile, it was a long slow process.”

  Pat began writing a guide to Pompeii and Naples. That year, 1961, Bee was given a permanent position as a lecturer at the New College. “They have a wonderful computer,” she told Pat. “It fills a whole room, but it’s terrifically reliable. We’re using it to store data and match patterns. It’s amazing.”

  “Good,” Pat said.

  “And it’s so fast,” Bee went on. “All the departments want them.”

  Then one beautiful day in May of 1962, Bee came home from work with an astonishing idea.

  “Have you heard of artificial insemination?” she asked Pat.

  “Only when you were going on about those rabbits the year I first met you,” Pat said. “What, are you back to animals? I thought your heart was given to plants?”

  “My heart is given to you,” Bee said, kissing her. “In the US they have successfully done artificial insemination with humans, and it has been considered legal there, though the children are considered to be illegitimate. They’re doing it in Scotland with infertile couples.”

  It took Pat a moment. “Then we could have—”

  “Lesbians all over the world will be so happy when this becomes generally available,” Bee said, nodding. “But you’re thirty-four and I’m thirty-two, so we don’t have any time to waste.”

  “Where would we get the sperm?”

  “Find a donor. The same one. So our children would be siblings.” They hugged each other in excitement.