My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “It’s ridiculous for people to think I’m stuck up. My father mended wirelesses and my mother was a nursemaid.”

  “But you went to Oxford and married Dad,” George said. “Try to talk more Lancashire. I do in school, and people like me better.”

  But Tricia couldn’t deliberately change the way her voice came out of her mouth. Instead she tried to find things to talk about to them that cut across barriers. Childcare, illness and her mother’s senility worked for this, as her chilblains had long ago in Oxford.

  In 1969 homosexuality and marijuana were legalized by the Labour government, and the death penalty was abolished. Mark saw the first of these as signs of the forthcoming apocalypse, but Tricia was delighted about all three. The Americans broke ground on a moonbase. Tricia watched the men walking on the lunar surface and wondered what use it was to anyone. George went briefly astronaut mad and spent his pocket money on magazines and books about space and trips to the moon.

  In January of 1970 Helen turned sixteen. She took her O Levels in June and did well. Nevertheless she insisted that she was not returning to school. “I’ll get a job,” she said. When her father raved at her she threatened to move to London and stay with Doug. Helen had always been her father’s favorite, and he seemed devastated that she was abandoning his ideals, as he put it. He blamed Tricia, although she disapproved of Helen’s decision as much as he did, if more quietly.

  Helen got a job in a coffee bar in town. She back-combed her hair and bought tie-dyed clothes. She looked like a hippie princess. She found boyfriends and spent a lot of time out with them. Tricia wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or horrified that she went through them so fast, and always had two or three of them ready to take her out. Tricia took her to the doctor and begged her to prescribe the pill for Helen. Tricia still took her own pill every night, though it had been a long time since Mark had brought home a bottle of wine. She thought about that as she walked back from the surgery with Helen. Perhaps Mark believed she was too old for more children? Perhaps he would leave her alone now?

  Tricia worried about Doug, worried about drugs and the price of early success. She went to London, or somewhere he was playing, every few months and saw him, and he always came home for Christmas. He and Sue were as settled as a married couple, although they were not married and there was no suggestion of marriage. Mark refused to countenance the relationship, but Tricia saw no point in closing her eyes to it. Sue wasn’t what she’d have chosen for her son, but she was clearly his choice. She wrote the music for their songs and Doug wrote the lyrics.

  Back at home, Tricia was working at Morecambe Grammar School for a few months as the English teacher was on maternity leave. She enjoyed teaching the same girls over a period of time, and they seemed to like her. She liked Morecambe out of season, the deserted sea front with the clacking flagpoles, the distant water, even the way the sea came in sideways over the sands. She had always loved the sea. She didn’t like the way the place was decaying. She suggested that the Lancaster Preservation Society take an interest in it, and found herself alone. You could walk from Lancaster to Morecambe in an hour, but they were worlds apart emotionally, and the people of Lancaster wanted nothing to do with it. Undeterred, Tricia started a Morecambe Preservation Society by putting up a notice in Morecambe Library announcing the first meeting and then seeing who showed up. She served as secretary for that society too.

  The teacher was supposed to return from maternity leave in September, but the headmistress took Tricia aside one day and told her that she wouldn’t be coming back. “We’re going to advertise the post, of course. We have to. But if you applied we’d look very favorably on your application.” Tricia could take a hint; when the post was advertised she applied for it and was duly taken on permanently for the new academic year of 1971. At the same time she found a woman called Marge who lived nearby to come in and care for her mother in the daytime, as now she really couldn’t be left. She felt she was underpaying Marge, who was endlessly patient with the old woman.

  One Saturday that autumn when she and George were at the library returning and collecting books, she spotted a new notice on the noticeboard: “Women’s Consciousness Raising Group, Thursday evening 7:30 pm, upstairs, Ring O’ Bells.” It was the same pub where CND met. Tricia showed up, uncertainly, not sure if she wanted her consciousness raised or what that really meant. What she found was a group of women like her, mostly housewives or women returned to work after children, women who had read The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch, and wanted something better than the lives they were offered. Tricia tried to persuade Helen to go to the next meeting, but she rolled her eyes and said she was meeting a boyfriend that night.

  Tricia’s attitude to Women’s Liberation was that it had come too late for her. It could have made a huge difference to her life if it had come along ten years before, but as it was she had mostly freed herself. She had a job and a car and the children were older. Mark had stopped bothering her for sex. But listening to these women talk she did feel that they were, as they said, sisters. They had shared experiences she had never been able to talk about with anyone before. It meant so much to be able to talk about these things. And she wanted things to be better for the next generation, for Helen and Cathy to have the chances she had not had.

  At Easter 1972, Tricia, George and Cathy came back from a visit to Doug in London to find a note from Helen: “Gran in Infirmary. Please come.” Tricia rushed around to the Infirmary, which was just around the corner, close enough that they heard ambulances so often that they didn’t look up at a siren any more. “My mother,” Tricia said. “Helen Cowan?”

  They directed her through the Victorian building to a newly built ward where her mother was strapped into a bed and unconscious. Helen was there looking exhausted, her hair a mess. “She fell,” Helen said. “I came home and found her. Well, I didn’t find her at once. She was downstairs. I came in late and was going to bed, but I heard something. I thought a cat had got in. I went down and she was on the floor outside her room, in a pool of pee. I didn’t know what to do. I called the doctor and they sent an ambulance. They say she’s broken her hip.”

  “Have you been here since last night?” Tricia asked, hugging Helen. “How marvellous of you. I’m here now, and I’ll stay with her. You go home and get some sleep, and see that the little ones eat something if you don’t mind. Where’s Dad?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t there. Last night. It was gone eleven.” Helen flushed a little. Eleven was her curfew, which Mark had insisted on while she lived at home. “It was closer to midnight. And of course I thought he must be in bed and went to wake him. I thought he’d know what to do. I wasn’t sure whether to try to move her. She was whimpering, oh it was horrible, Mum. But Dad wasn’t there. No sign of him. I knocked, and then I opened the door, and the bed was made and empty. I looked in your room too, in case, but of course he wasn’t there.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have been,” Tricia said, absently. “I wonder where he was? Had you seen him in the morning?”

  “No, nor the night before. I hadn’t seen him since Friday morning, when after you left he asked me if I was going to church with him and then stormed off when I said no, I was working.”

  “I hope he’s all right,” Tricia said. “If he’d collapsed or anything they’d have telephoned, and nobody would have answered.” Just then her mother moaned from the bed, and Tricia went over and took her hand. “I’m here, Mum, you’re in hospital, but everything is all right.”

  “Patsy?” her mother said.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right, Helen. You go home. We’ll sort out the mystery of where your father is later. I’m sure there’s some perfectly sensible explanation.” She wondered what on earth it could be.

  The doctors had set her mother’s broken hip, but they wouldn’t let her go home. “She shouldn’t have been left alone,” one of them said, a young Pakistani man.

  “She wasn’t. A woman comes in to be wit
h her when I’m in work, and the rest of the time I’m there. She can only have been alone for a few hours. And I thought my husband would be there.” Tricia felt guilty, and yet she seldom left her mother. “I took the younger children to London to see my oldest son, who lives there.” Now she felt she was explaining too much, and that the doctor was judging her.

  “Well she can’t return yet in any case,” he said.

  “Mammy! Mammy!” Tricia’s mother called from the ward. “Where are you?”

  “She’s calling for her mother,” the doctor said. “Everyone does that in the end.”

  “Her mother died in 1930,” Tricia said. “Wait. Do you mean that she’s dying?”

  “Oh no. There’s nothing organically wrong with her, except the broken hip. People can live a long time with dementia.”

  Tricia left her mother in the hospital for the night and went home. Helen had fed the younger children fish and chips and put them to bed. The papers were all over the kitchen table. Tricia cleared them up automatically while making a cup of tea. Then Mark came in, whistling a hymn, his briefcase in his hand and a bag over his shoulder.

  “You’re home already,” he said.

  “Where have you been?” Tricia asked.

  She guessed at once, because he immediately looked guilty.

  “You’ve been with a woman, haven’t you?”

  Mark hesitated for a moment, expressions passing over his face—guilt, belligerence, suspicion, and at last his normal arrogance. “Our marriage is a nonsense, it has been for years. You know that. You don’t want me and you never have. You’d see that if you looked at it calmly.”

  “I’m perfectly calm,” Tricia said, and she was. The kettle boiled and she poured the water onto the teabag in her cup. “What are you going to do?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Are you going to leave us? Do you want a divorce so you can marry this woman?”

  “You forget, I’m a Catholic, I can’t have a divorce. And we could hardly have this marriage annulled with four children to show for it.”

  “You’re such a hypocrite, Mark,” Tricia said, still standing with one hand on the handle of the kettle. “Adultery is all right, betrayal of marriage vows is all right, but divorce, oh no, unthinkable. You write all the time about ethics and virtue and logic, but I think you might apply some of those things to your own behavior.”

  “You’re acting like a child,” Mark said, always his accusation. Usually he made her feel like a child, but not tonight.

  “I think you should leave. Go back to her, or go somewhere, but leave the house. I don’t want to see you here.”

  “All right, I will.” Mark was flushed with anger now. “You don’t know anything about making a man happy. You never did. I stayed with you from duty, I supported you all these years.”

  “Just go away!” Tricia shouted. “Now.”

  He drew a breath and turned his back and walked down the stairs and out of the front door.

  When he had gone she sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the shelves of china against her terracotta walls. When she tried to drink her tea she realized she was shaking when she spilled it all over her hands. She had called him a hypocrite. She had told him to go, and he had gone. Her mother was in hospital. Helen had thought about somebody who wasn’t herself and coped just like an adult. She picked up the mug in both hands and carried it to her mouth.

  17

  Three Is Enough: Pat 1967–1969

  The moon landing took Pat by surprise, as it did most people. Of course she’d noticed Sputnik, and Gagarin, but somehow reaching the moon seemed more significant. In the BBC’s translation of Leonov’s words the Russians claimed the moon for all the peoples of the Earth, but she felt it ominous that they were there, and even more ominous later when they went back and began building a base. She looked up at the full moon from their garden in Harston and felt it brooded over them.

  Bee felt completely differently. “It’s a triumph for science. Didn’t you ever read science fiction? Donald and I used to read Astounding whenever we could get it. The moon’s the first step. It doesn’t matter who got there first. It’s part of our future in space. I wonder what they’ll do with hydroponics in their moon base. I’d love to work on that.”

  “They could drop bombs from there,” Pat said.

  “They can hurl missiles up from Earth just as easily,” Bee said, and frowned. “Did you see the cancer cluster figures? I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s because of Kiev fallout. Children with thyroid cancer, that’s appalling. The Americans weren’t thinking about us at all when they dropped that bomb. We have our own space agency. I’d like to see some Europeans up there too.”

  There was an election in the spring of 1968 in which Airey Neave led the Conservatives to victory. He made a speech talking about closer ties with Europe. There was a feeling in Italy too that Europe should become more of a political unit, a third force to stand against both the USA and the USSR. Neave talked about “Neoliberal” economics and monetarist policy. He began a program of returning nationalized industries to private control, while selling shares to the public. This was immensely popular. Pat was astonished to hear Bee’s parents when they visited talking about their shares and the money they had made, in addition to their usual sheep-based conversation.

  Pat unexpectedly had a letter from Marjorie. They had been on each other’s Christmas card lists, but hadn’t caught up in person for years. She was getting married to a man she had met in Portugal. Pat, Bee and the children went to the wedding in London. Marjorie had dieted herself gaunt for the occasion, and the white dress was not kind to her complexion, but she was delighted to see all of them. “I hope you enjoy Portugal,” Pat said. They gave her a chopping board and a set of good kitchen knives made from the new much touted “space metals.”

  Ireland wanted to join Europe, just as Europe was talking about political unity and a combined truly independent nuclear deterrent. This led to a renewed wave of Irish terrorist violence in Britain and Ulster, as the IRA feared joining Europe meant being more closely bound to the UK. When Pat and Bee were in Florence that summer they read with horror about a bombing campaign in London.

  The weekend after they came home from Italy, they all went to see Pat’s mother in Twickenham. She was vaguer than ever, recognizing Pat but uncertain of all the others and seeming overwhelmed by them. Pat talked to the nurse she had been paying to care for her mother and was alarmed. “She’s eating like a bird, I can hardly get her to take anything,” she said. “Some days she doesn’t recognize me. I worry about leaving her at night. She should really be in a home.”

  “We need to talk about that,” Bee said.

  Back in the sitting room, her mother was accusing Jinny of having stolen her glasses.

  “I haven’t seen your stupid glasses!” Jinny said, furious and indignant. “Why would I take them?”

  “You’ve probably put them down somewhere, Helen,” the nurse said, soothingly. “Ah, here they are on the windowsill. How did they get there I wonder?”

  “She stole them. She’s a wicked girl!”

  “I did not!” Jinny said, crying now. “I’m not wicked. You shouldn’t say so!”

  Pat hugged Jinny and looked over her head at Bee.

  “Let’s all have a cup of tea,” Bee said. “Who wants to help me make it? Jinny? Flossie? Let’s see if we can find any biscuits.”

  “We could afford a nice home for her where they’d look after her properly,” Pat said, when they were in the car headed home, with all three children asleep in a heap on the back seat.

  “She wouldn’t know where she was and it would make her worse,” Bee said. “We should have her with us.”

  “Oh Bee, you’re so much nicer than I am. I don’t know if I could face it. She’s never really approved of me, and to have that disapproval around all the time, with the confusion—I don’t know. And with the girls about to start school I was looking forward to having mo
re time to work. That’s just selfishness. But worst of all, she really upset Jinny, and she’d keep on doing things like that. I don’t think it would be good for the children for her to be with us.”

  “Would you want our children to pack us into homes when we get old?” Bee asked.

  Pat thought about it as she negotiated a roundabout and turned onto a new road. “It’s so difficult. I think I would, rather than have them disrupt their lives, especially if I was that difficult. She always used to say I was wicked when I’d done anything wrong when I was a child. She used to shut me in the cupboard in the dark when she thought I’d blasphemed. I don’t want her saying that the girls are wicked. It’s a terrible thing to say. If I was like that—but I don’t know. It’s easy to say that now, when I’m not helpless. What I’d really want is for them to love us and want us, and I’d really like to love Mum and want to have her to live with us, but I don’t. We’ve never been close.”

  Bee was quiet for a while. “Old age is terrifying,” she said. “And senility is the worst of all, I think.”

  “Maybe we could find a good home in Cambridge where I could visit her frequently,” Pat said.

  “Maybe that would be best,” Bee said.

  They looked at homes, and at last found one in Trumpington, not too far, and clean. It was expensive, but not all that much more than they had been paying for the nurse and the cleaners in Twickenham. Pat drove alone to collect her mother one fine September Saturday. She didn’t understand where she was going. As they drove off, with bags packed with what Pat imagined her mother might want, she realized that she was going to have to clear out and sell her mother’s house. Pat had been born there, and had been going back there dutifully all her life.

  Her mother liked the home at first, she enjoyed being shown around and told Pat how kind the nurses were. She admired the garden and was gracious to the other patients. But when Pat got up to go, congratulating herself on how easy it had been, her mother got up too. “I’ll just get my coat, Patsy,” she said. “This has been lovely, but I’m tired and I can’t say I’ll be sorry to be home.”