My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “How could we possibly ask somebody?” Pat asked, then saw the answer at once. “One of our homosexual friends?”

  “Precisely,” Bee said. “Alan would do it, or Piers. But from what I can find out, we’d need somebody who knows the procedure, and they’re only doing it for infertile couples.”

  “How about if we went to the US?” Pat asked. “Though of course, even apart from the expense of that the US seems like an awful place.” The failed Bay of Pigs invasion was on the news every night, and the strength of the McCarthyist movement was horrifying.

  “I think it would be even worse—I mean, there are more people there doing it, but they’d want even more in the way of identity, and apparently they only do it in cases where the husband is provably infertile. I was wondering if I might find somebody professionally who’s doing it with animals. It can’t be that different.”

  “I suppose not,” Pat said, a little repelled at the thought of being operated on by a vet.

  Bee laughed at her expression. “We’re all mammals together!” Then she grinned. “We’re really going to do this? If we can? You really want to?”

  “I’ll take a leave of absence from teaching. You’ll have to carry on working, of course. It’ll be marvellous. Imagine teaching them about the world! Imagine teaching them birding and Shakespeare, and how to graft pears onto apples, and Botticelli and Bach!”

  “It’s not that easy. As far as the school and the college are concerned we’d have had illegitimate children. They’d be shocked. It might count as gross moral turpitude.”

  “Minor moral turpitude, at most,” Pat murmured, as she always did when she heard that expression.

  “I think it would be best if you resigned and I just didn’t tell the college. If we timed it right, I could give birth in the long vacation, and they’d never know.”

  “They’re biologists, Bee! They’d be sure to notice!”

  Bee laughed and shook her head. “They’re plant biologists. They know nothing about mammalian reproduction. And they don’t want to know about human reproduction. They like me because I work hard and do good work and keep up with all the teaching they give me, and because I can teach the first years how to graft and don’t mind getting my hands stained.” Bee’s hands were so permanently stained with dyes used for staining cells that Pat had come to think of it as normal. “They won’t ask questions if I don’t say anything, but if I do say anything they’ll be forced to get rid of me. And while you like teaching, you could get a job teaching anywhere. Biological research isn’t like that. And we couldn’t all four live on your guidebook income and what we make selling eggs and honey.”

  “All four,” Pat said, her eyes moist. “Do you really think we could do it?”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” Bee said.

  It was a month later and they were almost ready to leave for Italy when Bee gave up trying to find a way to do it. The legitimate possibilities were closed off immediately. No doctor would prescribe AI for two single women, either in Britain or the US. The procedure wasn’t available at all in Italy, where Bee suggested that outright bribery would probably have worked to get them on the list. Nor would any of the vets she knew who were doing it routinely with cows agree to try it on humans. “I don’t want to give up, but it would seem almost easier to do it the old-fashioned way,” Bee said as they were sitting down to dinner.

  “I’ve never—” Pat hesitated, looking at her plate. “I mean, with a man.”

  “Not with Mark when you were engaged?” Bee asked.

  “Oh, I was so naive in those days. And Mark was so religious. I really don’t think either of us knew what we were doing. We barely kissed. I had no idea really what people did. I’m still a little hazy on what men and women do. I assume it’s pretty much the same only with the man putting his thing inside when he’s ready to orgasm?”

  Bee looked away. “It’s not the same at all,” she said. “I had some unpleasant experiences when I was evacuated. The father of the family where I was billeted came into my room. It went on and on.”

  “Do you think that’s why you’re a lesbian?” Pat asked.

  Bee frowned, then very deliberately ate a carrot, chewing it hard. “I don’t think so,” she said, putting her fork down. “I mean that was repulsive, and he was a horrible man, making me promise not to say anything to his wife, saying I’d tempted him and it was all my fault. It took me a long time to realize that I hadn’t done anything different on the days when he came in than on the days when he didn’t. But it wasn’t the sex itself that was so awful. The worst thing was the guilt and all of that, not what he actually did. It wasn’t all that important. I think it would be giving it too much importance to say that it made me a lesbian. He was just—a thing that happened. As if I’d got caught in the rain and caught a chill. It would be ridiculous to say that’s why I love you. I’d have loved you anyway, no matter what happened before.”

  “I think the same,” Pat said. “No matter what happened we’d have found each other.” She put her hand on Bee’s. “Do you think you could go through with that again, to have a baby?”

  “I think so,” Bee said, uncertainly. “How about you?”

  “I suppose so,” Pat said. “Do you think we should try and find somebody in Italy, or wait until we come home in the autumn?”

  “Oh, wait until we come home!” Bee said immediately. “Italian men all think they’re God’s gift to women anyway, and even the nicest of our friends in Florence would behave as if everything he’d ever thought about lesbians really wanting men had been confirmed if we asked him.”

  Pat shuddered.

  “The other thing I thought was maybe you could ask Donald.” Bee picked up her fork again.

  “Donald? Your brother Donald?”

  “I’d really be related to your baby then,” Bee said.

  “If only Oswald hadn’t been killed,” Pat said, immediately seeing the advantages. “It really is so unfair of biology to be organized this way so that we can’t just have each other’s babies the way we want to.”

  “I sometimes think I should have been a man,” Bee agreed.

  “I wouldn’t want you to be any different. You wouldn’t be you if you were a man.”

  “Would you want to be a man, if you could just change?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.” Pat hesitated. “Being paid more and everything being so easy—getting a mortgage and jobs and being respected without needing to struggle. But I do like being me.”

  “Yes, me too,” Bee said.

  12

  Feudalism: Tricia 1963–1966

  By the autumn of 1963, Tricia had four children, aged from thirteen to three. Although she’d never been away from them except when she was in hospital giving birth, she found it difficult to understand how she had come to be in this position. They were people, and they had become people while she wasn’t paying attention, while she was mired in toilet training and morning sickness and bitter resentment of their father.

  Doug was thirteen. He attended Woking Grammar School, where he frequently got into trouble for fighting and belligerence. She was afraid he was becoming a bully—certainly she frequently had to stop him bullying the other children. Mark bullied Doug and Doug took it out on the others. He was protective of her against his father, and she frequently had to stop him from making things worse. Tricia worried about him, about what trouble he might get into, and about how he would grow up.

  Helen was nine, and her father’s favorite. He spoiled her. Tricia found herself using this—using Helen to ask him for favors, for a visit to Grandma’s, a new record player, lights for the tree at Christmas. She did not like to see her child wheedling, but wheedling worked on Mark. Helen was pretty. She had Tricia’s fair hair, but with the thickness and body of Mark’s hair. Her features were regular. From babyhood, strangers had been cooing over her and admiring her. Tricia worried about spoiling her, and about other people spoiling her.

  George at six had
just started school. He was nervous of everything—he hated being left at the school gate, was afraid of the dark, cried when dogs barked and when his father shouted. Tricia would have given him a night light, but his father forbade it. She compromised by moving the boys’ room to the front where there was a streetlight outside, and allowing them to have the curtain open a crack. George was her secret favorite, because he clung to her and was loving.

  Cathy was three, an energetic toddler who liked to walk everywhere, no matter how much it slowed her mother down. They spent time in parks and at the library and at meetings. The Peace Pledge Union had been replaced by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Tricia longed to go on the Aldermaston Marches protesting the American missile sites on British soil, but Mark had forbidden it. However, he knew nothing about what she did in the daytime, and CND daytime meetings generally had other mothers with children and they traded childcare. Cathy seemed truly gregarious, and loved playing with other children while Tricia signed petitions, and even helped to draft petitions for circulation. CND were writing to the Russians, the French, and the Americans as well as the British. Their aim was nothing less than complete nuclear disarmament and a new era of world peace. Tricia’s typing ability was welcome. She began to make friends and feel as if she was making a difference.

  She had come back from an afternoon typing petitions on November 22nd. The six of them had dinner, all sitting down together and eating as Mark preferred. Tricia’s cooking had improved slightly through practice and with the availability of better ingredients, but she was unadventurous. That night they had pork chops with applesauce and mashed potatoes. Mark complained that the chops were overdone, which they usually were. Tricia was terrified of undercooking pork.

  There was a bottle of wine sitting on the sideboard. Tricia sighed when she saw it, but no longer feared this as she had. The act itself remained unpleasant, and Mark’s apologies remained painful, but as long as she took her pill every day there was no risk of pregnancy.

  After dinner she put Cathy to bed at six, George at seven, and Helen at eight. Doug was allowed to stay up until after the nine o’clock news. So the three of them were sitting together on the sofa watching the news, and they discovered together that the American President, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in Dallas.

  “The bomb is believed to have been hidden in the massed flowers below the banquet table,” the announcer read, visibly shaken. “President and Mrs. Kennedy were killed instantly, along with the Governor of Texas and—” Tricia looked at Mark, who was gaping at the screen.

  “Who could have done that?” she asked.

  “The Russians?” Mark suggested. “The Cubans?”

  “I know the CIA engineered a coup in Cuba in May, the way they did in Guatemala a few years ago, but surely they wouldn’t have the ability to do something like that?” The screen was showing them the Vice-President, Johnson, taking his oath of office.

  “He had Castro killed, why wouldn’t they try to kill Kennedy?” Mark asked. “But you’d think they’d have trouble getting a bomb into a reception in Texas. A Cuban would be conspicuous there. Or a Russian.”

  Bobby Kennedy was insisting vehemently that there would be a full investigation and that whoever was responsible would pay.

  “It doesn’t seem right having the President’s brother be one of the bosses,” Doug said.

  “He’s not one of the bosses. He’s Attorney General,” Mark said.

  “What does an Attorney General do?” Doug asked.

  Mark hesitated. “He’s in charge of legal decisions,” he said, sounding unsure.

  “That’s being one of the bosses, then,” Doug said. “Having the President’s brother be one of the bosses makes them seem like feudalism.”

  “This isn’t the moment, when Kennedy has just been killed,” Mark said, angrily. “Anyway, it’s time you were in bed.”

  Doug kissed Tricia goodnight and went upstairs. “I’ll come up and tuck you in in five minutes,” Tricia said.

  “You should stop babying him,” Mark said, as the scene of carnage played again on the black-and-white screen.

  The next day at the CND office everyone was talking about the assassination. Some of the people were quite well-informed. “There are lots of Latino people in Texas,” Sylvia said. “A Cuban could disguise himself as a waiter and get the bomb in on a tray, easily.”

  Tim, a one-legged veteran of the Great War, disagreed. “I think it was an internal thing. If it had been the Russians, or even the Cubans, something else would have happened by now. The President has been killed, but there’s been no attack.”

  “The Americans can’t think they can just do whatever they want anywhere in the world without making themselves unpopular,” Tricia said. “I mean sometimes it’s good, like stopping us from attacking Egypt over Suez, but all this sponsoring coups in countries because you don’t like their governments? It had to end in tears.”

  “I agree!” Sylvia said. “They have that awful Committee for Un-American Activities and they’re interfering in Vietnam. Maybe this will bring it home to them.”

  “Well, time will tell, when we see what comes of it,” Tim said. “Did we get that Vietnam petition out, by the way? Military advisors my foot.”

  “Yes, I did it Friday,” Tricia said. “Do you really think something else will happen?”

  “If it was the Russians it will,” Tim said. “Surely they’d have an attack ready to take out America while they’re all still reeling. They’ve declared a national day of mourning, all schools and everything closed. If the communists had real support there would be strikes and uprisings. Or if they don’t have that kind of thing because their leaders have all been imprisoned or suppressed, you’d expect a military attack.”

  “War?” Sylvia asked, shuddering.

  Tricia glanced at the peace symbol on the wall. “It feels closer than ever. The war that will end everything. I was tucking my little boy in last night and I wondered if we’d even see the morning.”

  Sylvia hugged her. “That’s how I feel every night!”

  No attacks followed the assassination. Things continued on, and the big war news was Johnson wanting to site more missiles in Britain, while sending more troops to Vietnam. Then in February, to everyone’s astonishment, Bobby Kennedy’s investigation into his brother’s death found evidence implicating Johnson in the purchase of the explosives. The evidence was by no means conclusive, and people were vehemently divided on the subject. Some thought Bobby Kennedy was trying to smear Johnson, and others were equally sure that Johnson was the real murderer.

  “Cui bono,” said Mark, as if he had always suspected the Vice-President of luring the President to Dallas so he could kill him and take his place.

  Though some called for impeachment, nothing came of it. Johnson, beaten down by the scandal, declined to run again. Bobby Kennedy, flanked by his brother’s children, declared his own candidacy for the 1964 election. There seemed little doubt he would be elected.

  “Feudalism,” muttered Doug under his breath.

  “I always thought that Johnson was a piece of work,” Sylvia said. “Not a trustworthy person. I’m glad he won’t be the one with his finger on the button any more.”

  “It’s as if they weren’t content with instigating coups abroad and had to have a coup at home,” Tim said, shaking his head. “Do you think Bobby will relent about those missiles that were coming here?”

  “My son says it’s feudalism,” Tricia said. “Bobby being JFK’s brother, I mean.”

  They laughed, uneasily. “It is like feudalism in a way,” Sylvia said.

  “Nothing wrong with having political families. We think family businesses are good. If you heard about a son inheriting his father’s shop, or a doctor whose two sons became doctors, you’d think that was splendid,” Tim said.

  “It’s different with power,” Sylvia protested.

  Tim threw up his hands. “It is different.”

  In the autumn of 19
64, Cathy got a place at nursery school. Tricia suggested to Mark one night when the children were in bed that she might go back to teaching, part-time or on supply at first.

  “I make enough to keep us,” Mark protested.

  “Of course you do, but a little extra might be nice, so we could afford a new car, or to get your new book professionally typed. But really it would be an interest to me, now that the children are growing up.”

  Mark grudgingly agreed, and Tricia began to work as a supply teacher, filling in for teachers who were ill. Sometimes it would just be a day or two, other times it would be for a few weeks. She continued to volunteer at the CND office in between. She also managed to get over to visit her mother every week. It took a little over an hour to get to Twickenham from Woking, depending on connections. Tricia’s mother was getting vaguer all the time. Tricia did her shopping and cleaned the house. She sometimes felt the most important thing she did was sitting and talking to her mother. If she asked what she had been doing her mother didn’t know, but they could have real conversations about her childhood, or her mother’s childhood. Her memories of times long ago were as clear as ever. Sometimes Tricia would really enjoy her mother’s stories—hearing how her parents met, or her mother’s work as a nursemaid. Sometimes she took the children, though they got so easily bored, and her mother could no longer remember their names.

  Bobby Kennedy was duly elected in his brother’s place, and the British election in the spring brought in a progressive Labour government. She and Mark did not discuss their votes. She did not want to confirm her fear that he might have voted Tory. Mark’s new book came out and was well received. Mark visited the Burchells, and came home looking very pleased with himself. “There’s a possibility I may be offered a lectureship at a new university next year,” he told Tricia.

  “Where?” Tricia asked, her heart sinking at the thought of relocating all of them, and just before Doug’s School Certificates.

  “Lancaster,” Mark said.

  To Tricia it was still no more than a distant station with no trains going in the direction she wanted to go. “That’s so far,” she said.