My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  She had no idea what she would be able to say to Mark when she saw him. Pity might be worse for him than outrage. And was she going to tell the children? Doug and Helen but not the younger ones? Or should she keep it from all of them forever?

  She was forty-six and she had spent half her life in a marriage that was a sham. She looked back at the years since she had married Mark as she walked briskly up the hill and tried to think what had been real. The children, yes. The stillbirths and miscarriages too. The work she had done for CND and her other groups. Her teaching, even the supply teaching. Looking after her mother. Her friends, here and in Woking. It hadn’t all been straws in the wind, however it seemed. Her marriage had never been her whole life. Donne was wrong about that as so much else.

  She opened the front door and went in. “I’m home!” she called, and heard Cathy and her mother reply from their own corners of the house.

  Miss Montrose was efficient, and the divorce moved forward quickly. Mark did not dispute the adultery, and he agreed to everything Miss Montrose suggested financially. “His solicitor probably told him he’s lucky we’re not asking more,” Miss Montrose said, with a tight-lipped smile. Mark never talked to her about the nature of the evidence, though he must have known she knew. She would have liked to talk to him about what he had been thinking, all those years, making everything her fault, but despite that she didn’t feel she could torture him that much. Helen had been right to call him a hypocrite, but Tricia understood that to strip a hypocrite of his hypocrisy can be a real wound.

  Tricia’s divorce was made absolute in October 1972. In the same month she began teaching an evening class in Feminist Literature in the Workers Education Authority. So many people signed up that it was completely full. She stood up in front of a class of adults, mostly women but with a few men.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, her old remedy against nerves. “Some people say women have never achieved anything great,” she said, as she opened her eyes. “This class is going to demonstrate that women have achieved great things over and over again, but they’ve been patronized and ignored whenever they have. Women making art isn’t anything new, though there is some wonderful new stuff being done that we’re going to get to in due course. I’m going to ask you to read and think, but I’m not going to ask any background knowledge from you, anything beyond what we’re bringing to this class. I don’t expect you to know it all already. I want us to explore together. And I’m going to begin by reading you a translation of a poem written by Sappho in the Sixth Century before Christ.”

  19

  “I Wish I’d Gone by King’s X” Pat 1970–1971

  Everything went on much the same through 1970. The girls were in school, Pat visited her mother weekly, the Como guide book came out, and in Italy in the summer she began working on one for Bologna.

  In 1971 Bee began to work on a fungal immunization for elm trees. A new more virulent form of Dutch Elm Disease had come in to Britain from the continent and was killing trees. It could be controlled by lopping infected branches, but something better was needed. “But could you immunize all the trees in the country?” Pat asked when Bee was telling her about it.

  “We probably could, but it looks as if we might need to do it every year, which would be a huge job. There’s a European agency being set up for crop diseases and improvement, and they might let us have a grant towards paying people to do that, but it’s hard to define elm trees as a crop.”

  “I suppose they sort of are, in a way,” Pat said. “I mean, timber?”

  “Let’s develop the cure before we start worrying about that,” Bee said. She was working long hours at it, and teaching and all her other work. She resented needing to take a morning off in April when their turn came to get new identity cards. As they already had passports it was really only a formality. The children were on their mother’s passports so Bee and Pat had to produce their birth certificates and have photographs taken. Most difficult was Pat’s mother—not only did they have to fill in the forms for her but Pat had to go to Twickenham to find her mother’s birth certificate. “We really should do something about putting her house on the market,” she said when she came back.

  “We should go down one weekend and clear it out,” Bee agreed.

  The identity card photographs were as unflattering as such pictures always were. Philip was squinting, Flossie was scowling, and Jinny’s eyes were screwed up. Bee looked fierce and Pat looked resigned. Only her mother looked natural.

  “All this red tape, and for what?” Pat asked, looking through the packet when they arrived. “Just to make us look a pack of fools.”

  “So the government knows who everybody is all the time,” Bee said briskly. “Such nonsense. I’m sure it won’t stop the terrorists for a moment.”

  A few weeks later they were having a picnic lunch in their garden on a warm May Sunday. “Just think, in six weeks we’ll be doing this in Florence,” Pat said.

  “Six weeks!” Jinny said.

  “Italy, Italy, Italy!” the children all chorused.

  Bee looked serious and put her hand on Pat’s knee. “Pat, love—I’ve been thinking, I don’t think I can spend the whole summer in Italy this year. With the fungus and everything. I need to be here to get ahead on work while there isn’t any teaching. And there’s that conference at ICL at the beginning of August, and they want me to present. I thought I’d come out with you and have a couple of weeks, and come back here on the train. Then I’d come out again at the end of the summer for another couple of weeks.”

  “Of course, if that’s what you need,” Pat said.

  “It’s not what I want. I’d much rather be in Florence with the family. But…”

  “It’s your career,” Pat said.

  “Not even that, it’s the elm trees,” Bee said. “I know it’s ridiculous, but there it is. I do want to save them if I can.”

  “I could not love you dear, so much, loved I not elm trees more?”

  Bee laughed, then looked guilty, and Pat laughed with her. “It’s all right,” she said. “I love you loving the elm trees.”

  So after just over a week in Florence Bee returned to Cambridge, leaving the rest of the family to enjoy their usual summer. Pat missed Bee constantly. They wrote each other long letters, not exactly love letters, but letters full of love and caring. Letters were delivered only erratically in Florence, so Pat collected hers from the post office, a charming building completed only the year before, in the style of the Vasari Corridor.

  After she had the mail she would stop with the children at a little gelateria on a nearby corner for a chocolate gelato. They had a game where they could have two gelatos or a gelato and a granita every day if they were absolutely silent while eating the first one, so the three of them sat in a row swinging their legs and solemnly licking their cones while Pat read her letters.

  Reading Bee’s laconic descriptions and jumbled thoughts she felt as if she could hear her voice:

  “The hens are laying well, but they miss the girls collecting the eggs. Saw your mother. She was very gracious, so she clearly didn’t know me, but she seemed in good form otherwise. She told me about how she met your father, a sweet story which I expect you have heard. The new fungus seems to be doing well in vitro, still waiting to hear on the vivo test. If it’s good I may come to you a week early, because it’s hard to be without you so long. I’m going to borrow your old green silk scarf to wear with my suit for the ICL thing if that’s all right, it seems to make me look a bit smarter and it smells reassuringly like you. Kiss the children from me, and kiss yourself if you can think of a way to do it. I think of you all every day, and especially when I come home to the empty house. The gooseberries are ripe and I have picked them all. I can’t be bothered with making jam so I am putting up a rum pot with the fruit—it will make Christmas presents for everyone we know.”

  Finishing the letter she would have tears in her eyes, and the girls would hug her. “Mamma sends love to
all of you especially,” she said, and then told them the bits of news. When she wrote she put in notes and drawings from the children. Flossie wrote letters several pages long about what they had been doing. Jinny drew copies of the shields inside the Bargello, and even Philip drew scribbles that he said were pictures of their garden, or of the Piazza della Signoria, and which Pat labelled. Bee wrote that she was putting them all up in the kitchen.

  When she didn’t hear for few days she wasn’t especially concerned. It was when Bee had been due to go to London for the conference. She did begin to worry when it was five days without anything. When a letter did come, she was surprised how thin it was. She didn’t open it until the children were sitting with their gelato.

  “Dearest Pat, I seem to have got myself caught up in a silly bomb. I hope you haven’t heard and worried. It was in Liverpool Street Station—wish now I’d gone home by King’s X! I’m all right, except my legs seem to be pretty much shattered and the docs are talking wheelchairs. Donald came down, and Michael has been a godsend, actually, but I think—I hate to ask, and I don’t even know how you’re going to manage it, but I think it would be best if you come home when you can. Love ever, Bee.”

  She didn’t realize she had made a sound until the children were hugging her legs fiercely. “What is it?” Flossie asked in Italian.

  “Mamma—Mamma’s hurt her legs,” Pat said. “We have to go home. We have to go home right now.”

  The children started to cry, and Pat bent down and hugged them all.

  “But we have four Italy weeks left,” Jinny said. “And Mamma’s coming back for the last two or even three.”

  “We have to change the plan,” Pat said. She was trying to make a new plan as she spoke. Could she drive all that way alone? It would be faster to take the train, but then the car would be here. It was possible to take cars on trains, but could you do that from Italy to England? She had no idea.

  “Don’t want to go home,” Philip said. But even as he spoke he was patting her arm gently. “Mamma come here?”

  “Mamma’s hurt her legs. Remember when you fell down and cut your knees? Mamma’s in hospital in London and she needs us. We have to go and help her get better.” Bee wouldn’t have said the doctors were talking about wheelchairs if it wasn’t serious. Wheelchairs. How were they going to manage? She tried to imagine what could be wrong. Shattered could mean anything—would Bee’s legs ever heal?

  “Let’s go home and pack up,” she said, and looked down into three desolate faces. Flossie’s lip was quivering as she tried to hold back her tears. “Let’s go to Perche No! and have one last gelato and then go home and pack.”

  In Perche No! she ordered all Bee’s favorite flavors, watermelon and white mint and raspberry. The children ordered for themselves, even four-year-old Philip. Eva, the girl at the counter, had known the children for years and spoke to them as old friends. Flossie told them that their Mamma had hurt her legs and they had to go home. “Beatrice?” she said. Pat had always loved the Italian way of pronouncing Bee’s full name, but now it was all she could do to stay calm hearing it.

  “Give your sister my love,” the girl said to Pat, in Italian. “I would send her a gelato if it were possible.”

  “I’ll tell her you thought of her,” Pat said. Her sister. It was a misapprehension they never corrected. She looked up at Verrocchio’s sad Christ, opening his wound to Thomas, and sent up a prayer for strength and help and healing for Bee.

  She picked up an English paper at the little kiosk and found news of the bomb. Six people had been killed and nine injured, three severely. They did not give names, but there was a black and white photograph of the damage to the station. What possible good had it done the cause of a united Ireland to blow up a station in London, to kill six people and smash up Bee’s legs? Pat hated the IRA for their casual disregard for other people’s lives. Why couldn’t they just let Ireland join the rest of Europe and stop making a fuss?

  As she walked across the Ponte Vecchio she ran into Sara, one of her oldest friends in Florence. “What’s wrong?” Sara asked immediately. The children blurted it out before Pat could speak.

  “We have to go back immediately. Bee wouldn’t have asked unless it was really important,” Pat said.

  “How are you going?” Sara asked.

  “I think I have to drive, though it will take so long doing it alone. But if we take the train the car will be here, and we’ll need it there.”

  “Why not sell your car here and buy another when you reach England?” Sara asked.

  “That’s audacious, but I don’t think I have time to sell it.”

  “I will sell it for you,” Sara announced. “I’ll come with you now and you can give me the papers.”

  So later that afternoon Pat found herself with three children and a thrown-together set of luggage in a sleeper car on the express train to Paris.

  The train proved to be a good idea. None of the children had taken a long train trip before, whereas they were accustomed to the drive. On the drive they would all have missed Bee at every moment. On the train everything was new. They loved their sleepers. The girls had the two top bunks, one on each side, and Pat took Philip in with her underneath Jinny. Besides, it was much faster. With only one driver the drive would have taken days. On the train they did not have to stop for meals or bathroom breaks. “I’m sure we’ve left half of what we need in Florence,” Pat said, putting pajamas on the children.

  “Maybe we’ll go back soon,” Flossie said. “Maybe we’ll get Mamma and all go back next week.”

  “I think it’ll take Mamma longer than that to get well,” Pat said, and she thought “wheelchairs” and wondered if they would ever be able to go back.

  At Dover, the immigration officials gave her a hard time over Jinny. “What is your relationship to this child?”

  There wasn’t a simple answer. Bee had always been there before. “She’s my best friend’s daughter. We were all on holiday in Italy. There was a family emergency and she had to come home, and now we’re all joining her.”

  The man looked at Jinny suspiciously, then at her identity card. “She should have a passport.”

  “She’s on her mother’s passport,” Pat said. “We didn’t think.” At the Swiss and French borders they had barely glanced at their papers. Borders within Europe were growing less important. Only Britain still maintained its moat.

  “Well, next time think,” the man said. “Where’s your mother?” he asked Jinny.

  “In London,” Jinny said, with a quick glance at Pat.

  “All right then. You’re lucky you’re all British and you’ve only been in Europe, or you could be in real trouble.”

  “Thank you so much, officer,” Pat said, and gave the cringing smile she hated giving. She hated getting in because she was white and had the right kind of voice, too, but she wasn’t going to start any fights. She shepherded the children away.

  By the time they reached London it was early evening and they had been travelling for twenty-four hours without a break. All of them except Philip were exhausted. Philip had an amazing capacity to sleep in any circumstances, which he had not lost when he left babyhood. Pat took a taxi to the hospital, with the children and the luggage. At reception she asked for Bee, and was told that only relatives could visit and that children were not admitted under any circumstances. She could have sat down and wept, and perhaps the woman on the desk recognised her distress. “Her fiancé is with her. I’ll send somebody to see if you can speak to him.”

  “Her fiancé?” Pat blinked.

  “Yes.”

  After a long wait, Michael came out, and Pat understood. “Oh Pat, thank goodness you’re here.” The children ran to him and he bent down and made a fuss of them.

  “They won’t let me see Bee,” Pat said, over their heads.

  “Let me talk to them. Wait.” Michael went up to the desk and argued with the receptionist. Pat tried to keep Philip still. Flossie started to cry. After a while
Michael came back. “They’ll let you in for just a minute. I’ll stay with the children. You should have said you were her sister. I told them you were my sister, and she’s stretching a point.”

  “And you told them you’re Bee’s fiancé?”

  “That was Bee’s idea. Otherwise they’d only talk to Donald, and he had to go back up to Penrith, the sheep needed him. You have to be a relative, in hospital. Friends aren’t anything.” He patted her shoulder. “Go in and see her and then I’ll talk to you.”

  Pat followed the directions and found herself in a big ward full of women in beds. All the beds had tight white covers pulled over them. At the end of the room was a television, blasting out a soap opera. Most of the beds had visitors. When Pat saw Bee she couldn’t understand how the shape she made under the covers was so small. She was wearing a hospital gown but had Pat’s old green silk scarf wound around her neck. She bent down and embraced her. They were both weeping. “Oh Pat,” Bee said. “I feel like such a fool.”

  “I’m just so glad you’re alive,” Pat said. “I kept thinking how you could have been killed.”

  “Might have been better,” Bee said. “No, I don’t mean that. But I’ve had six operations, and they’ve given up on trying to save the knees. I’ll never walk again. I’m going to be in a wheelchair forever, no two ways about it.”

  “We’ll find ways to cope,” Pat said. “I love you so much. I couldn’t have managed without you.”

  “Good to see you too,” Bee said, and smiled. “Everyone’s looking at us.”

  “I don’t care,” Pat said. “Will it hurt you if I sit down on the bed?”

  “Yes,” Bee said. “Everything hurts me. I’ll have to get used to that. And goodness knows how I’m going to manage in the lab.”

  Pat sat on the chair by the bed and took Bee’s hand in hers. “When are they going to let you out of here?”