My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “What are you going to call her?” her nurse asked. “We just put Baby Cowan, because your mother didn’t know.”

  “Florence Beatrice,” Pat replied, and as she said it her eyes filled with tears. “Can I have visitors in here?”

  “Your mother and your friend are waiting. They haven’t seen the baby yet.”

  “Please let them in, if that’s all right,” Pat said.

  “Just for a minute then, and then they can come back at proper visiting time.”

  Pat lay with the sleeping baby on her chest and her eyes glued on the door, waiting to show Bee their baby.

  14

  The Feminine Mystique: Tricia 1966–1968

  Immediately before she left for Lancaster, Sylvia gave her a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. She took it with a little roll of her eyes at her friend. “Women’s Lib?”

  “Women need to be liberated just as much as slaves did,” Sylvia replied.

  “Liberated from what?”

  “Low pay and our children and the kitchen and our husbands’ demands. Don’t you want to actually use your degree for something?”

  Tricia took the book because she did like Sylvia, but although she read all the time it really wasn’t the kind of book she liked.

  They moved. Mark wanted a house in the country outside Lancaster, but she insisted that the children had to be able to walk to school. Doug was sixteen, and would be beginning A levels at the Boys’ Grammar. Helen, at twelve, would be going to the Girls’ Grammar. Both of these schools were in the city. The younger ones would need a primary school, which could have been managed in a village.

  “The older ones can take buses,” Mark protested.

  “If we live in the country I need to learn to drive. I’m not being stuck in the middle of nowhere the way I was outside Grantham.”

  “I don’t want to take a bus,” Helen said.

  Mark walked away from the argument, but a few days later he announced that he had bought a Victorian house on the southern edge of the city.

  At fifty thousand people, Lancaster barely qualified as a city in Tricia’s opinion. Even if you counted Morecambe, the decayed seaside town to the west, it didn’t add up. Lancaster itself was largely an eighteenth-century town, like a decayed northern version of Bath. Some of the best buildings were in a very sad state. It did have a thriving indoor market, with farm cheeses, fresh meat and vegetables, a Finefare supermarket, a Marks and Spencer, and several excellent shops selling fresh bread. The new university was built on a greenfield site three miles out of town to the south, and there was some apprehension in the town as to what the university would mean.

  The house Mark bought was positioned to make it easy for him to drive on to campus. It had four floors, though the “garden floor” was barely habitable as yet. Making the house nice was a huge job, which Tricia threw herself into. Doug enjoyed painting and carpentry, and to her own surprise so did Tricia. For once she felt close to her difficult older son as they worked together to paint and furnish the rooms. Nine-year-old George involved himself too, taking instruction from his brother and looking up to him. Helen declared that the whole thing made her sick, and took long exploratory walks around the town. Six-year-old Cathy mixed paints and sanded edges. She and Doug argued about colors—both of them had strong feelings about them.

  Tricia let each of the children choose the colors of their own room, and otherwise let Doug choose. Mark, who was settling in to his new office at the university, didn’t seem to care. When he first saw the terracotta walls of the kitchen he started to speak, then clearly thought better of it. Tricia had seldom seen him back away from a battle, and she smiled as he walked away in silence. She loved her big terracotta kitchen. She arranged all the china on open shelves, leaving room for her mother’s things. That was a battle for another day. And perhaps, like this one, she could win it by acting first without asking permission.

  She was unpacking books onto the shelves in the sitting room when she found The Feminine Mystique again. She glanced through it and found herself unable to put it down. It was difficult not to castigate herself as she read. How had she been so accepting of so much for so long?

  She went into town to find the library to seek out more books on the subject. She found the library easily, a charming dark Victorian building next to the original Town Hall, now a museum. They both faced onto Market Square, a depressing space with smelly public toilets in the center. The library had a little entrance hall, with a noticeboard covered in little notices. She saw signs for The Mikado and an art exhibition, for piano and guitar lessons, for help with home computers, for meetings of the CND and the Socialist Workers Party. She wrote down the times of the CND meetings and the numbers for the guitar and piano lessons. Maybe Helen would like to play an instrument.

  The library was comfortably old-fashioned inside. She joined it immediately and was welcomed to the town by the young librarian. It was well stocked with fiction but low on the kind of thing she was looking for. She settled for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, along with her usual stack of fiction.

  Helen wasn’t interested in piano lessons, but George was. Doug jumped on the idea of learning the guitar. He was also letting his hair grow, to his father’s loudly voiced disgust. Tricia quite liked it.

  It was late to be planting a garden, and Tricia knew nothing about it. She took a book out of the library and tried to enlist the children. Helen took it up with enthusiasm and they planted bulbs. George took on the task of mowing the lawn. They had lots of picnics in the garden that summer, but not when Mark was home, as he hated eating outside, declaring it barbarous.

  The children all started in their new schools in September. Mark started lecturing, and Tricia began again supply teaching, filling in here and there. She also began to take driving lessons, without mentioning it to anyone. Doug had problems with the school—they demanded he cut his hair, and she had to insist that he do so. He kept it at the maximum length the school would allow, just touching his collar. In October Tricia took her driving test and failed by forgetting to signal before turning onto a roundabout. She took it again in early December and passed—which she announced to the whole family at Sunday dinner. Doug congratulated her enthusiastically. Mark was clearly taken aback, but he choked out a “Well done” after all the children had.

  She and Doug went down to Twickenham on the train the next weekend and fetched her mother up for Christmas. They had been working on the garden floor and had a bedroom and bathroom there ready for her mother, painted in lilac and dove gray. “Do you like it, Grandma?” Cathy asked. Her mother stood looking at it in confusion.

  “It’s very nice, thank you, darling,” she said. Tricia woke in the night to hear her mother moving around downstairs. When she went down she found her standing by the sink.

  “What’s wrong, Mum?” she asked.

  “Oh, there you are, Patsy. I got up to use the loo and I just wasn’t sure where I was,” her mother said. “I think I’ll go home now.”

  It wrung her heart. “You’re in my house in Lancaster, and I think it would be a good idea if you stayed here tonight. Let me show you where your bedroom is, and your little bathroom.”

  All the children were old enough now to understand that their grandmother wasn’t remembering things. George found it funny. The others tried their best to help. Doug wasn’t patient enough with her, Tricia thought, but he was ideal at getting her turned around and back to her room. He had a way of putting a gentle arm around her shoulders that always worked. Tricia wondered if it reminded her mother of her father. She always seemed to relax when she saw Doug. “Do you remember when Doug was born?” she asked one evening.

  “Patsy, you speak as if you thought there was something wrong with my memory,” her mother said. “I remember perfectly. You were living in that horrid little cottage in Lincolnshire.”

  “Hard to believe he’ll be seventeen in March,” Tricia sa
id.

  He had a girlfriend, Sue, who back-combed her hair. They were starting a band with another friend, Joe Pole, always known as Poley. They practiced in one of the unfinished rooms on the garden floor at times when Mark was on campus. One day Mark came home earlier than expected and heard them.

  “What is that row?” he asked, bursting into the kitchen where Tricia and her mother were polishing the cutlery. Tricia had discovered that if she got her mother started on some domestic task she would remember how to do it and get on with it happily, often while talking about the old days. Tricia had heard a lot of the stories of the old days, but she didn’t mind hearing them again if it kept her mother happy.

  “It’s just Doug and his friends practicing some folk music,” Tricia said. “You won’t hear them if you’re in your study.”

  Mark’s study, also his bedroom, was at the very top of the house. “I could hear it half way down the road,” Mark protested. “I’m going to tell them to stop.”

  Mark stormed off down the stairs, and the sound of music stopped shortly afterwards.

  Tricia saw Doug before dinner. “Was everything all right?” she asked.

  Doug grinned and pushed a lock of hair back off his forehead. “Yes—we have a new band name.”

  “I meant with your father?”

  “I know, so did I. He called us Philistines. So we were thinking that might make a good name, but it was too soft for what we’re doing. So we’re going for the biggest Philistine of them all and calling the band Goliath.”

  “Lovely,” Tricia said. “Try not to fight with your father over Christmas?”

  “I won’t fight with him if he doesn’t pick fights with me.”

  Tricia sighed. “I suppose that’ll have to be good enough.”

  Christmas went well—the turkey was neither raw nor burned. Her mother had been a real help in the kitchen and taught Cathy how to make gingerbread. Mark gave Tricia a scarf, as he usually did. There were a few little squabbles but no big fights.

  On Boxing Day, Mark asked when Tricia’s mother was going home. “She can’t manage at home,” Tricia said. “She’ll be all right here. I think she should sell her house in Twickenham and stay with us. You’ve hardly noticed her being here, really. She won’t be in the way. It’s our Christian duty to take her in. And you’ve seen what she’s like.”

  Mark drew breath to protest, and let it go again. “Maybe she should be in an old folks’ home,” he said, reasonably gently.

  “Maybe she’ll get that bad later, but she’s not that bad now. I can look after her here. And she had too much money for a NHS home, and when you have to pay for them those homes are very expensive. Better for her to be here.”

  “What about when you’re teaching and the kids are in school?” Mark asked.

  “She’s not so bad that she can’t be on her own for a few hours like that. She just can’t really look after herself properly. She won’t remember to buy food or eat it or do the cleaning. But she’ll be all right with us.”

  “If you think so,” Mark said, and shrugged. “I’m working on a new book on Wittgenstein. When will you have time to type the first chapter?”

  “I’ll do it tonight,” Tricia said, delighted that he had agreed so easily.

  Tricia had difficulty making her mother understand about selling her house. She drove down alone one weekend in February and cleared it out, bringing back with her what she thought her mother would want. It was the first long drive Tricia had ever made, and she had been apprehensive beforehand. In the event she thoroughly enjoyed it, going south into the spring, able to stop whenever she wanted. Her mother was pleased to see her things, and enjoyed arranging her china on Tricia’s kitchen shelves. She signed papers for the sale, and her house went on the market.

  That spring, 1967, Doug’s band Goliath started to play in local venues—upstairs at the Yorkshire House, in the King’s Arms, and once on campus. Tricia bought Doug a new guitar for his birthday, one he had chosen from a music shop on King Street.

  “Waste of money,” Mark growled.

  “I like to see him really caring about something,” Tricia said.

  “Be better if he cared about his school work,” Mark said. “By the way, I’ll be late tonight. I’ll eat on campus, don’t save dinner for me.”

  “All right,” Tricia said. Mark often worked late now, and she appreciated it when he warned her. She stood a moment looking after him as he walked away, wondering how they had come to this. They were familiar sarcastic strangers, dealing with each other unkindly, working around each other. She had loved him once, she knew she had. Now she loved the children and her mother, and Mark was an obstacle she knew how to get around.

  During the Easter holidays her mother’s house sold, and she had to go down to Twickenham to do the final clear-out. She considered taking her mother, but in the end she took Helen. Helen was thirteen and just on the edge of puberty. Her periods had started, and she was beginning to grow breasts. A spot on her nose had recently so blighted her that she demanded to be allowed to miss school on its account. On other days she lapsed back into babyhood and played with Cathy’s dolls. Tricia thought it would do them good for the two of them to have some time together.

  Seeing her old family house finally sold made Tricia sad, but Helen was indifferent. Helen didn’t seem to care about anything except her looks. “Did you notice how the estate agent looked at me?” she asked her mother.

  The money was safely banked and they drove home. “I liked my friends in Woking, but I like our house in Lancaster better,” Helen said, as they got back into the car after stopping for lunch in Evesham. Tricia realized how much her daughter’s conversation was focused on herself, all “I”. Had she been like that at thirteen? She tried to remember.

  “I was your age the year the war started,” Tricia said.

  “Mum! That’s ancient history!”

  “Recent history,” Tricia said, and drove on northwards.

  She had made some local friends by now, mostly through CND and teaching and the parents of other children. She joined a society to preserve and restore Lancaster, and was soon elected secretary. They campaigned for a one-way system with a ring road, with the whole town center to be pedestrianized. “It’s the latest thing,” the chairman said. Tricia wanted the toilets in the square replaced with a fountain.

  Goliath got more local gigs that summer and autumn, and became locally popular. Tricia went to hear them play several times and noticed the crowds increasing, and the size of the venues. They began to sing more of their own songs, written by the three of them. Just after the New Year of 1968, they were, astonishingly, offered a record contract. Tricia had to sign, as Doug wouldn’t be eighteen until March. “And there’s no use asking Dad,” Doug said. Once she had signed, he told her he was going to be dropping out of school.

  “I think you’ll be sorry if you don’t finish your A Levels and go on to university,” Tricia said. “I’ve told you what fun I had at Oxford.”

  “But music is what I want to do, and this opportunity might never come again. Goliath could be big. We could be the next Beatles.”

  The fight with Mark was spectacular and never seemed to stop—it smouldered away constantly whenever Mark and Doug were in the house together. She was glad Mark was working so hard and absent so often. Goliath put out a single immediately, which went to number 36 in the charts. In March, the moment Doug was eighteen, he moved to London with his girlfriend, to work on recording Goliath’s first album.

  Tricia’s CND friends were excited about events in Czechoslovakia, the “Prague Spring” movement. “It’s happening everywhere,” Tricia said. “Young people want different things from what we wanted when we were young. They’re not going to put up with what we put up with.”

  “But what if the Russians send the tanks in?” David asked.

  “They didn’t in Hungary, they won’t do it now. We should start a letter writing campaign in support of Czech freedom.”

&n
bsp; “It’s not nuclear,” David said. David was an Aldermaston veteran, and he credited himself with getting US missiles out of Britain, practically single-handedly to hear him talk about it. He didn’t want to widen the peace mission.

  “Having peace in Europe is the best way to avoid nuclear war,” Tricia said firmly.

  In May, Paris erupted in student riots. In July, Doug’s album was released, and a single from it went into the top ten. The Americans landed a man on the moon, fulfilling President Kennedy’s brother’s dream. In September there were elections in France and a communist government was elected. Mark was disapproving, but Tricia couldn’t see why it mattered. There had been several communist governments in Italy, and Britain had a socialist government. The Czechs had a liberal government. Tricia’s mother slowly became vaguer and started forgetting the names of everyday items.

  15

  Journeys: Pat 1963–1967

  They did not go to Italy that summer. It was the first time since 1949 that Pat had spent a whole summer in England. They let the Florentine house through an agency. They had wanted to go, despite everything, but Pat had to acknowledge that she just wasn’t well enough. She spent most of June hardly moving from bed, doing nothing but caring for the baby. They called her Flossie, or the Little Tyrant, and joked that she had been born knowing only the imperative mood.

  They worried about fallout. Milk from hill regions was condemned after checking for radioactivity. “At least they’re checking,” Bee said. “Some of my friends are buying home Geiger counters, but I think that’s paranoid. But maybe we could think about getting a cow. It would be nice to be self-sufficient. In case.”

  Pat fed Flossie herself. Her breasts, which she had always felt were embarrassingly small, were still smaller than Bee’s even when swollen, but she had no shortage of milk. Pictures of evacuated children from the Ukraine were on television—both women wept when they saw them. “Damn hormones,” Bee said, wiping her eyes. “I’d have been upset, but I’d never have cried, before.”