My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “Me too,” Pat agreed, and they laughed at themselves.

  “Mind you, I hated being evacuated,” Bee said.

  “I just went with the school. It wasn’t too bad,” Pat said. “But we didn’t have to go to new countries. Those poor kids, going away to East Germany and Hungary and Russia.”

  Bee’s baby was born in September. She was a girl. Pat could not be with her for the birth, and she waited at home with baby Flossie. They had already discussed names.

  “If it’s a girl, Marie Patricia,” Bee said. “After Marie Curie, of course.”

  “And if it’s a boy?” Pat asked. She was lying in bed, with Flossie sucking hard at her breast and clenching and unclenching her fists as she did it, which always made both her mothers smile.

  “I don’t know. Patrick sounds so Irish.”

  “Not Patrick,” Pat agreed. “If Floss had been a boy I was thinking of Marsilio.”

  “Marsilio!” Bee hesitated. “It would do in Italy, and of course Ficino, but in England? Maybe as his second name?”

  “It’s up to you,” Pat said.

  “Philip Marsilio?” Bee tried. “Philip Marsilio Dickinson. What do you think?”

  “Lovely,” Pat said. “Why Philip?”

  “After Dr. Harrington,” Bee said. “He got me that fellowship and took a chance on me, and not just me. He believes women should be in science. And he loves plants. And he has arranged the calendar so that I get the sabbatical to write the plant disease book this autumn, without ever saying a word about why.”

  “I thought you said plant people took no notice of mammalian biology?” Pat teased, moving Flossie to the other nipple.

  “That’s his way of taking no notice in a quietly supportive way,” Bee said.

  So Pat was expecting Marie, and was astonished when Bee told her instead that the baby, nine pounds two ounces, was Jennifer Patricia. “What happened to Marie Curie?” she asked.

  “Jennifer, after the midwife,” Bee said. “She was amazing. She held my hand while I was pushing. If only you could have been there to hold my other hand! Jennifer is a good name, look at her. Doesn’t she look like a Jenny to you?”

  “Of course she does,” Pat said, again overwhelmed with tenderness and love.

  Bee and Jenny came home from the hospital. Pat drove and Bee sat in the passenger seat, with both babies in carry cots wedged into the back seat. “We may need a bigger car,” Pat said when they got home and levered the carry cots out. Her incision barely hurt now, though at first she had been almost incapacitated by it.

  It was hard having two babies on different schedules. They both fed both babies indiscriminately—their plan to each feed their own didn’t outlast Jenny’s first day at home when Pat automatically put her to her breast while Bee was sleeping exhaustedly. Neither of them ever had enough sleep. “We should have scheduled this better,” Bee said, getting out of bed in the middle of the night as one crying baby woke the other.

  “It’s terrible,” Pat agreed. “But it’s also wonderful.”

  Bee laughed and padded off, coming back with a baby under each arm. “Flossie’s getting heavy,” she said.

  “And Jenny always was heavy,” Pat agreed.

  Bee finished her book on plant viruses, and Pat corrected the copyedits and proofs of her Naples book. Their house grew messy around the edges. Washing piled up and floors went unswept. Bee arranged for the summer gardeners to come every week and save the garden from neglect. Denmark and Greece joined the European Economic Community. A computer beat a man at chess, and they saw their friend Alan Turing sounding shyly confident about it on the BBC.

  Bee began lecturing again after Christmas. Pat found it terribly hard at first to be home with both babies. They worked out a routine where when Bee came in she spent an hour and a half with the babies upstairs while Pat had a rest and made dinner uninterrupted. She loved the babies, but she looked forward desperately to this break, in which she often just read quietly. That and the very early mornings with Bee were her favorite times of day. The babies always woke when the cock crowed and were fed, but they both readily went back to sleep after that dawn feed. Pat and Bee would lie awake and talk, or make love, or just cuddle together quietly until it was time for Bee to go to work.

  Cambridge was not a town friendly to babies. There were few parks and no indoor playgrounds. Besides, Harston was six miles outside the city, and Bee needed the car to go to work. If Pat and the babies went in with her they were stuck there for the whole day, or they had to take a long slow bus ride home. This was exacerbated by how difficult it was to do anything with the babies—cafes and restaurants frowned on them, and even the librarians looked disapproving when Pat wheeled the double pram in. Most of their friends had no children, and while they were delighted to fuss over the babies when they had time, they worked during the day. More and more she stayed at home, looking after the babies and working whenever naps coincided. They dropped out of choir, and she made only a few birding expeditions that spring. They could seldom make parties, and Pat felt her horizons shrinking. At the same time she was overwhelmed with things that needed doing. She made endless lists and checked things off on them. One day Bee picked up a list and started laughing. “The first item on this list is ‘Make list’!”

  Pat’s editor at Constable wanted her to write about Athens, but she turned him down and counter-proposed doing three new books about Rome—one on visiting ancient Rome, one on Renaissance Rome, and one on modern Rome. He agreed enthusiastically, and suggested color photographs. She told him how happy she had been with Michael’s work, and he arranged for Michael to go out to Italy again that summer.

  At the end of term Pat and Bee packed up their new larger car for the long trip across Europe with the babies. They had not been further with them before than Pat’s mother’s house at Twickenham. They had to stop frequently, and the nights in pensiones on the way were appalling, as neither child would settle to sleep. What surprised them was how once they crossed into Mediterranean France, suddenly everyone was tolerant and delighted, nothing was too much trouble. A waiter at a cafe in Dijon carried their thermos and blankets to the car for them. A maid at the pensione sang to the babies in French, and soothed them into amazed peace. As soon as they were over the Alps the proprietor of a restaurant where they had stopped before made some special baby pasta for Flossie, which she ate with more enthusiasm than she had ever yet shown for anything but breast milk. “Bella piccola Firenza,” he said, enthusiastically, when she threw some on the stone floor. After Cambridge, where nothing and nobody catered for babies, this stunned both women.

  “We should live here year round,” Pat said, after a neighbor they had never seen before came around with eggs “for the babies” and cooed over Jenny.

  “If I didn’t have to work,” Bee said.

  “There’s a university here…”

  “I don’t speak Italian well enough, and they probably don’t have anything in my field. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to look.” She looked around at the garden. “We really could get a cow. If we needed to be self-sufficient, if civilization collapsed, we’d be better off here.”

  “Do you think it might?” Pat asked. “I mean with the new European alliance everything seems a bit more stable?”

  “It doesn’t stop the Americans and the Russians glaring at each other above our heads,” Bee said. “No, Flossie, don’t eat that!”

  The children were much too young to appreciate Florence, apart from the food, which they appreciated with gusto. “I was the same when I first went to Italy,” Pat said, watching Jenny guzzling zucchini flowers.

  When Michael came, he stayed in Florence for a few days, then despite the inconvenience and the expense, every day for a week he and Pat went to and fro to Rome on the train and worked hard at photographing what she wanted for all three new books. “I’ll do the Ancient and Renaissance books first, and then the modern one after next summer, because that’s the one that’ll need most checking.” />
  “I don’t know how you manage at home on your own,” Bee said when they came back on the third day. “Even here, where we can walk into town and everyone fusses over them, it’s driving me mad.”

  “Do you want me to take a day off and stay tomorrow?” Pat asked.

  “No, get it done and out of the way while Michael’s here.”

  Michael was shy with the babies, in a way they had already seen with some of their Cambridge friends. Flossie was already saying words, and Jenny was babbling syllables. It took Michael a week to join in and behave naturally with them. “Do you think they look like him?” Bee asked in one of their early morning conversations.

  “Jenny’s ears are just like his. And Flossie has his feet and hands.”

  “I’ve noticed that too,” Bee said. “It’s strange how it does and doesn’t matter.”

  “Because they’re ours,” Pat said, and kissed her.

  Sometime that summer as Flossie’s words grew more distinct, “Jenny” became “Jinny” to all of them. As Flossie was sometimes Florrie-Bee, Jenny was Jinny-Pat. These were their special in-family-only nicknames.

  Pat took them into the Baptistery and held them up to see the gold ceiling, which they pointed at excitedly. She wished she could have them baptized there, but she wasn’t going to make any promises to bring them up in the faith. Nevertheless, she thanked God for them, there, and in the Duomo, and in San Lorenzo, and indeed several times every day whenever she thought of it. She went alone to the Uffizi—churches were different, but they really were too young for an art gallery—and stood before Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat and thought about Mary, the Annunciation, and how differently she felt about all that now that she had a baby. Before, her attention had mostly been on Botticelli’s angels. Now she concentrated on the mother and baby. The smile really did remind her of Bee. She bought a good copy of it in the gift shop.

  Bee talked to Sara about the prospects of teaching and researching in Florence, and reluctantly gave up the idea. “The whole way academia is organized here is crazy,” Sara said.

  The drive back home through Europe felt even more epic an adventure than driving down had been. As they went north Pat felt sad, as she always did leaving Italy. “It’s not just the food and the art and that it has given me a way of making a living,” she said. She was sitting on the back seat with the babies while Bee drove. “And it’s not just that everyone loves children, which English people really don’t. There really is something about it.”

  The epic car journeys became a feature of their lives, and at length they all blurred together—the one where Jinny nearly fell off the cross-Channel ferry, the one where Pat nearly fell asleep on an Alpine road and forgot what side to drive on and almost hit a lorry, the one where Flossie refused to stop speaking Italian, the one where Bee went off to pee on an Alp and found a gentian, the one where Pat was pregnant and kept having to stop to be sick and the children found it hilarious. Pat wrote the three Roman books, then a guide to Siena and the small towns of Tuscany. Bee’s book on plant diseases was republished in America. Spain and Portugal joined the European Economic Community, and elections were held for the new European parliament. President Rockefeller visited China and was given a panda. Bee and the children shared a great longing to see the panda and Pat teased them all about it. They bought toy pandas for both girls for Christmas.

  In November of 1966 there was a flood in Florence, killing six people and damaging some property. Fortunately the weather computers had predicted it well in advance, so most people had evacuated and most works of art were moved to safety. Some frescos were damaged. Pat wrote articles about their restoration and sat on a committee to raise money for it.

  In January of 1967, when the girls were four and three and a half and Pat was seven months pregnant, she had to go to London to meet her editor for a meeting about the Tuscany book. It all went well, and the editor agreed to use a picture of her that Michael had taken, with her head and shoulders against the stairs of the Bargello. (Pat’s favorite of Michael’s photographs was one of Bee sitting in the garden with both babies on their first summer in Florence. She had an enlargement of that in a silver frame on the mantelpiece in Cambridge. She had the Madonna of the Magnificat in a matching frame next to it.) As she made her way out of the lift into the lobby of the Constable offices, she was astonished to run into Mark.

  Mark looked older and a little less prosperous than Pat remembered him. His hair was receding and graying, and while his clothing style was still academic dinginess, it suited him less. To her astonishment he didn’t seem to notice her at all. He just walked past towards the lift.

  “Mark!” she said. “How are you?”

  He paused, looked at her, and blinked. She realized that he really hadn’t recognized her. “Patty!” he said. “My goodness.”

  “Are Constable your publishers too?” she asked.

  “They’re bringing out a book of mine on philosophy, yes,” he said. “Too? They’re publishing you?”

  “Oh, just a series of guide books to Italy I write,” she said, and was instantly furious with herself for deprecating her work before Mark, of all people.

  “You’re P. A. Cowan?” Mark asked. “I wondered if it could be some relation. I didn’t know you knew anything about Italy.”

  “I didn’t when I knew you,” Pat said. “What are you doing now?”

  “Oh, lecturing. I’m at Keele. Are you still teaching? Or—I see you’ve married.” He gestured vaguely at the obvious bulge under her good wool coat.

  “I gave up teaching four years ago when I was having a baby,” Pat said, sidestepping the question. “Fortunately I could carry on with the writing.”

  “Yes, very nice,” Mark said. “I have to go, I have a meeting in five minutes. Are you free afterwards? We could have some lunch or something, catch up on old times.”

  Pat looked at her watch. “I have to get back to Cambridge,” she said. “I—my—it’s complicated, but I have to get back for my children.”

  “Well it was nice to see you, and I’m glad you’ve found happiness.” Mark hesitated for a moment and then leaned forward and kissed her cheek before going in to the lift.

  She thought about him all the way back on the train, and when Bee met her at the station she told her about it immediately. They couldn’t talk about it then, because the children were in the back seat and Bee needed to get into college before her class. Pat dropped her off and then took the children home. After they were in bed, stories read and songs sung and the light turned emphatically off, she went down to pour it all out to Bee over a cup of tea.

  “Once, my heart turned over whenever I saw him, and there wasn’t a shred of that left. I felt sorry for him. He had a neglected air. He didn’t say, but I’m sure he wasn’t married.”

  “Chalk dust,” Bee said. “It must be horrid being at Keele when he wanted to be at Oxford. I’m bending over backwards to be fair to him, when really I hate him for abandoning you and making you sad.”

  “It was me who abandoned him. He gave me the choice. And I’m sure I made the right choice. But it was so strange. I wanted to tell him about you, about us, about my life. But on the other hand I was glad I was wearing gloves so he couldn’t see that I wasn’t married even though I’m so very visibly pregnant.”

  “Did you give him our address or phone number or anything?”

  “No.” Pat put her free arm around Bee and snuggled close. “I didn’t think of it. And even if time hadn’t been so short with getting back before your class, I don’t think I would have had lunch with him. I don’t really want him back in my life. It was just so strange running into him like that.”

  Pat’s baby was born in April, again by caesarean section, this time planned in advance. He was a boy, and she called him Philip Marsilio, as they had agreed.

  16

  Liberation: Tricia 1968–1972

  To Tricia’s complete surprise, Doug became a minor but significant figure in the po
p world. Goliath released albums and toured, and Doug, Sue and Poley were names people knew. Mark tried to ignore it, and kept saying that Doug would soon have enough of it and go to university. With the proceeds from one of his hit records, Doug bought his mother a car, a green Volkswagen Beetle, for Christmas 1968. Mark said nothing. He had given her a scarf, as usual.

  Tricia saw a poster in the library asking for volunteers for adult education. “I think I’ll apply,” she said. “I could teach literature to adults.”

  “It’s the most you can do to teach it to children part time,” Mark sneered. “Why do you think adults would want to listen to you? What do you have to bring them?”

  She gave up the idea.

  Mark was home less and less, leaving for work immediately after breakfast and seldom returning before the late evening. On weekends he was usually on campus. Now that Tricia had her own car she could accept supply teaching further away, and was working almost all the time. It was a good way to get to know the schools and the county. If she was driving past a bus stop with a mother and small child waiting, she would stop and offer them a lift. She sometimes did it when she saw a mother and child walking slowly along. She remembered all too well what it was like being stuck like that. The mothers received her offers with mixed feelings. Some accepted, some refused. Of the ones who accepted, almost all of them asked her why she was doing it, and many seemed skeptical of her answers. She became aware that her voice was a severe disadvantage to her, as it was in the classroom. She sounded Southern, posh, stuck up. She tried to change her voice, but then it just sounded unnatural.

  “I sound stuck up,” she lamented to her mother.

  “You sound very nice, Patsy,” her mother said. “Refined.”

  “No, Gran, Mum’s right. She does sound stuck up,” Cathy said. Cathy was ten now, in her last year of junior school.