by Jo Walton
“Bathrooms in Italy are going to be a real problem,” Pat said.
“Oh well, we brought the bedpan if it comes to that,” Bee said.
The flight terrified Pat and Jinny, who clung to the arms of their seats at every bump, but the others enjoyed it. The stewardesses were especially solicitous of Bee, and they brought the children so much juice that their mothers feared they would be sick.
“I should have flown back last year,” Pat said. “It never crossed my mind.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Bee said.
From Rome they took the train to Florence. The children got excited as it rushed in and out of tunnels so that hills and medieval towns appeared for a few seconds. “It’s so warm,” Bee said.
“Italy!” the children chorused, striking up acquaintance with the other passengers on the train in rapid Italian. This was useful when the train stopped in Florence and Pat needed help getting Bee’s chair down. A middle-aged man the children had befriended lowered Bee down into it.
“We should have guessed from the way they are with babies and children that they’d be better with disability,” Bee said.
“Yes, better in an individual way, but there won’t be any proper official recognition. No ramps. All those cobbles. No toilets.”
“Stop fretting about toilets,” Bee said. “We’re in Florence! And Florence makes everything worthwhile!”
Even Bee was a little downcast when she found that the chair would not fit through the front door. She swung herself down and dragged herself in by her arms. Pat put the children to bed straight away, ignoring pleas for just one gelato. She made up a bed for the two of them on the floor in the kitchen. Then she helped Bee in the bathroom. “I’m sorry this puts so much on you,” Bee said, dragging herself over to the bed. The chair was parked under the vines by the table where they had eaten so many delicious Italian meals.
Pat was almost too tired to reply. She crawled into the pile of blankets beside Bee and hugged her close. “Of course it would have been better if the bomb had never got you, if you were still well. But it did happen. Random violence is just part of life. The Irish and the Algerians and the Basques and the Red Brigades blow people up, and they don’t care who they hurt. We can’t help that. It was like being struck by lightning. And I hate that you were struck by lightning, but I’m just so glad you’re alive.”
Michael came for two weeks, and while he was in Florence Pat finally managed to get the research done for the Bologna book, and another on Genoa. He helped Pat move the bed downstairs and set it up. “What you need is a slimline wheelchair for this house,” he said.
“And a stairlift,” Pat said. “Maybe when I’ve written these books and been paid for them. It’s so hard to get that kind of work done in Italy.”
“The bathroom first. Rails,” Bee said, from outside where she was sitting in her wheelchair.
Their finances gradually recovered. Pat wrote the guidebooks, and if they were not as thorough as the earlier ones nobody complained. Sales continued to be good. She kept on teaching, and Bee stayed on at New College. They often had student volunteers around the house and garden, in the orchard learning to graft or in the conservatory they built on where Bee crossbred plants and did much of her research. They redid the kitchen with low counters accessible from the wheelchair. They eventually managed to make the Florentine house tolerably accessible, widening the doorway, though they never managed to get a stairlift installed.
In 1974 the girls passed the eleven plus and started at Cambridge Girls’ Grammar school, where Pat had taught before they were born. Britain was wracked with strikes and reprisals. Violence seemed to be everywhere. The Red Brigades blew up trains and kidnapped politicians in Italy, and the IRA did the same in Britain. Meanwhile Europe moved closer and closer to political unity. Portugal was still embroiled in a vicious colonial war in Goa. The Americans were still fighting in Vietnam, and the French in Algeria. Britain’s African colonies were seething with rebellion. In space, the Russian and European space stations and moon bases glared at each other, and America tried belatedly to catch up and build their own space station. The Soviets crushed dissent in Poland as they had earlier in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
In 1975 Michael became the art director of the Observer newspaper. In 1976 Bee finally managed to get a car she could drive. The social worker kept calling twice a year. Bee and Pat tried to treat it as routine, but it always unnerved them. The threat of losing the children was always with them. The children grew up clever and confident, with Bee’s practicality and Pat’s love of words and Michael’s aesthetic sense. They continued to be bilingual in Italian, which delighted all their parents.
Pat’s mother deteriorated still more. She almost never knew Pat and was almost always afraid and savage. In the spring of 1977, she caught a chill and died. She was buried in Twickenham, next to Pat’s father and Oswald. It was a bitterly cold day with an east wind biting through their coats.
“Don’t put me here,” Pat said to Bee and the children as they walked back to the car. Flossie was pushing Bee’s chair. “I don’t care what you do with me, but not here.”
“That’s a really morbid thought, Mum,” Philip said.
24
Full Life: Trish 1980–1981
Trish taught full time, served as a councillor, taught two evening classes, was secretary of the two preservation societies, and attended her women’s group. Her calendar was always full and when anyone suggested anything she had to pull out a diary. Bethany took over most of the cooking and Helen did most of the cleaning. Sometimes the house had a neglected air, but Trish didn’t care. She usually took Tamsin and Alestra to school and Bethany, whose hours at the food co-op were flexible, picked them up. Cathy graduated in the autumn of 1980 and took a job at once in London, working at a merchant bank.
“What do you actually do?” Trish asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Cathy said. Cathy had had a girlfriend at university, worrying Trish and almost giving Mark apoplexy. Now she had a boyfriend, Richard, an accountant. They took a flat together in Kentish Town and played charmingly at domesticity.
“Your generation does much better at this kind of thing than mine did,” Trish said to Helen as they went home on the train after visiting Cathy and Richard.
“I don’t know,” Helen said. “I think it’ll be up to Tamsin’s generation to get it right. Look at Doug.”
Doug’s love life was a disaster, even as his career seemed to be rising again, despite the new punk trend. Trish grimaced. “Even so.”
“And I’m not doing so well,” Helen said. Men continued to be attracted to Helen’s undiminished beauty, but never anyone she could respect. “I sometimes wonder if it’s because I’m called Helen. If the name had an effect.”
“I don’t see how it could. We called you after Gran, and Gran wasn’t a beauty.”
“Well, much good it’s done me. Anyway, you shouldn’t give up on your generation because of Dad. You’re not too old to find somebody else.”
Trish laughed.
Helen worked hard on her computer course, and graduated to a computer degree at the university. “I saw Dad today,” she said one evening. “He was surrounded by students and pretended not to see me.”
“You were always his favorite,” Trish said, sadly.
The Saturday before Christmas they had a tree-decorating party, before the family arrived for the season. Lots of Tamsin’s friends from school came, and a surprisingly large number of the people Trish had randomly invited over the course of the week before. They ate Bethany’s mince pies, helped out by some from Marks and Spencer, and drank tea, Ribena, and a wine punch Helen made. When the tree was decorated and the children were in bed the last survivors of the party sat around in the kitchen drinking peppermint tea and eating bread and cheese. Kevin was missing, he had been spending a lot of time away from home recently in a way Trish tried not to see as ominous. The lingerers were Bethany, Helen, Dunca
n, Barb, Barb’s new partner Jack, and one of Helen’s tutors, a visiting American who had been introduced as Doctor Lin.
Trish found herself talking to Doctor Lin, who was about her own age. “I’m spending a year here as part of a faculty exchange program,” he said. “And before you ask, yes, this is my first time in Europe, and I like it very much.”
“Where do you usually teach?” she asked.
“Berkeley, near San Francisco,” he said.
“My son is at MIT.”
“I did my Ph.D. at MIT.”
Trish confessed that she had never been to America and would like to visit. “George keeps suggesting it, but it’s so far, and so expensive. I’ve never flown. There’s so much I’ve never done.”
“That’s sad,” he said. “I’m very much enjoying having new experiences.”
“Are you enjoying British food?” she asked.
He laughed. “I think the mince pies are wonderful. They remind me of Chinese food, sweet but not sweet, and spiced.”
“Chinese food is something else I’ve never had, except for takeaways. Are you Chinese?” she asked.
“I was born in New York. But my parents came from Hong Kong.”
In the New Year of 1981 Doctor Lin telephoned Trish and invited her to eat Chinese food with him at the Jade Garden restaurant which he thought the most authentic of the local possibilities. She recognized his voice at once. She pulled out her diary and arranged to do it on her next free evening.
“A date!” Bethany said, when Trish mentioned it.
“He’s a lonely American far from home, and he’s just being kind and friendly,” Trish said. Then she paused and looked at Bethany. “What should I wear, do you think?”
Bethany laughed. “When did you last go on a date?”
“I’m not sure I ever did in the sense you mean. Certainly no more recently than 1949.”
“Let’s look through your wardrobe.”
“I’ve got clothes that look like a schoolteacher and clothes that look like a town councillor and clothes that are only good for gardening and housework,” Trish said.
In the end she wore a skirt and a blouse that Bethany said went well together, with some jet beads that had belonged to her mother and now belonged to Helen. She was nervous waiting for him to arrive, but not at all nervous when he was there. He was shorter than she was, which was subtly reassuring. They didn’t run out of things to talk about, which had been one fear, nor did he talk endlessly about computers. The Chinese food was delicious, though it didn’t remind Trish at all of mince pies—it was much like the Chinese takeaways she had bought when the children had been teenagers and she had been too busy to cook. He showed her how to use chopsticks and asked her to call him David.
“Is that your real name?”
“It’s the English form of my name.”
“What is it really?”
“Da Wei,” he said. “Lin Da Wei. Chinese people put the surname first. But David is what I’m used to being called, so please call me that.”
The next week he took her to a concert at the university, and the week after that she invited him to Sunday lunch, a meal cooked by Bethany and attended by all of Trish’s household. Afterwards she and David went for a walk alone down the canal as far as the aqueduct. It was a brisk walk, because the air was cold.
“Is it much warmer than this in America?” Trish asked, looking at how he kept his hands in his pockets.
“In California it is,” he replied. “In New York where I grew up it’s much colder in winter. But this is a damp cold. It gets inside you.”
He admired the views from the aqueduct, which took the canal over the Lune river far below.
“When the spring comes we must go for some walks up to Silverdale, on the limestone. It’s a different landscape. And also you should see the Lake District before you go. It’s the most beautiful part of England. It would be a shame to come and only see Lancaster.”
“I don’t like driving on the wrong side of the road, so I haven’t been to many places.”
“I can drive you there,” she said.
Two weeks later he invited her to Manchester to see the celebrations of Chinese New Year. She had to miss a meeting of the peace group to make it. Manchester was about an hour away down the motorway. Trish drove. It was the year of the Rooster, and there were big pictures of brightly colored roosters displayed in Manchester’s Chinatown. Trish liked the dancing dragons and thoroughly enjoyed the food and the friendliness everyone showed. “We should have brought Tamsin, she’d have loved this,” she said.
On her next free evening they had dinner at Jade Garden again and when they were finishing David put his hand on hers. He had not touched her before, except to position her fingers on her chopsticks. “I like you very much, and I think that although your life is so busy there are ways you’re lonely. It’s the same for me. At the end of June I will be going back to San Francisco. My life is there, and so are my wife and family. But between now and then you and I could have fun together.”
Trish moved her hand away. “I don’t think—”
“Try something new,” he said.
“Your wife…”
“We have an agreement. She doesn’t mind what I do when I’m away. It doesn’t hurt anything between me and her. I won’t tell her anything except that I have found a friend—and I have told her that already. What you and I do before I go home to her can’t hurt her, and she can’t hurt you.”
So they became lovers, and it was a revelation. Trish had thought she would put up with the sex for the sake of his company, which she did enjoy. Instead for the first time in her life her body opened up to pleasure. Nothing could be more different from Mark. For one thing, David expected to stay in bed all night and cuddle, which was in itself very pleasant. They moved the double bed back to her room. For another he liked the light on when they made love. “I want to see you,” he insisted.
“I never was much to look at,” Trish protested, “And now I’m old, past menopause. I’m a grandmother.”
“And I’m a grandfather,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Fifty-five,” Trish admitted.
“I’m only fifty-two, old woman.”
He made love slowly, caressing her body. He taught her new acts and positions, some of them delightful. “Is this how Americans make love?” she asked.
“It’s how I do,” he said. Unlike Mark, he liked conversation in bed, he liked her to tell him what she was feeling and what she liked and what she wanted him to do.
“Even after four children and all those stillbirths I feel as if I might as well have been a virgin until I met you,” she said.
They continued to go out, for meals, to concerts, and as the weather improved driving up to the Lake District for picnics and walks. He was good with the whole family. Everyone liked him. She teased him that he’d have to give Helen good grades, and he said that there was no need, she was getting good grades on her own. Trish continued to do all her work, though more and more often she skipped the peace group and the women’s group, which seemed less relevant than they had. David wasn’t like the men they talked about.
He didn’t move in. He kept his room on campus and spent three or four nights a week with Trish. Time seemed to go very fast. When it was time for him to go back to the States she drove him to Manchester airport. “Will I ever see you again?” she asked.
“It doesn’t seem likely,” he replied. “I’m sorry, Trish. It’s been wonderful. But I don’t expect I’ll come back here, and if you came to San Francisco my wife wouldn’t like it.”
“How about Boston, when George graduates?”
“If you’re going to be in Boston write to me. I’m not there often, but it’s not impossible. I might be able to find an excuse. I can’t promise. We shouldn’t spoil what we’ve had. You always knew it was going to end now.” Trish kissed him for the last time when she dropped him off outside the airport. She drove home, tears running down her face.
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Helen tried to cheer her up. “Well now you know there are men who aren’t like Dad, maybe you can find another.”
“How on Earth do women tell?” Trish asked.
Helen laughed and shook her head.
“I wish I’d never met him,” Trish said to Bethany, down in the basement later. “I was happy being busy. I liked my life. I made room for him in it, and now he’s gone and I have this huge hole where he was.”
“I think Kevin has done the same,” Bethany said.
“I did notice that he hasn’t been around very much,” Trish said. “Has he really left you?”
“He’s left town, as best I can tell. He hasn’t told me anything. He’s just kind of oozed away, and now I don’t know where he is. I don’t know how I’m going to afford to pay rent on my own.”
“Never mind paying rent, we can manage,” Trish said, putting her arms around Bethany. “I should pay you for doing so much cooking. But how could he just leave that way?”
“When you’re not married you can just walk away,” Bethany said. “I might be able to make him pay something for Ally, if I could catch him and take him to court. But he doesn’t have anything—he’d consider it bourgeois to have enough money to pay for her—so probably that’s it. I’m sorry to drop this on you when you’re upset about David.”
“Troubles come not in single spies but in battalions,” Trish said.
Bethany blinked. “I’m sure that’s something very erudite?”
“Hamlet. It just felt appropriate. If Helen had just lost a man as well I’d think it was something in the stars over the house.”
“Helen has found a man, I think,” Bethany said. “But I’ll let her tell you about it.”
Trish wept alone for David and tried to put a good face on it before the world. She kept his business card on her bedside table. It said “David Lin” and underneath that his name in Chinese characters, and then his address in San Francisco. She looked up how much it cost to fly to Boston.
It took Helen a long time to tell her mother that she had a new boyfriend. “Boyfriend” didn’t feel like the right word, as it hadn’t for David. Helen’s new partner, Don, was divorced, and thirty-six. Helen was twenty-seven. “He’s serious, Mum,” Helen said. “Not like the others. Not just seeing my looks.” He was another mature student taking the same degree Helen was. “But he’s doing it part time. He has his own business, importing computers and selling them. He says he wants to know how they work so he can be better at that.”
