My Real Children

by Jo Walton

“Thyroid cancer. Anaplastic, just the same as poor Lorna. There’s no point him trying the chemo. I told him so. It works for breast cancers and liver cancers, but not for that. Do you think he should come here to die?”

  “Yes,” Pat said. “Or we should all go to Florence, perhaps? But what about Philip? He has O Levels this year. How long has Michael got?”

  “Months,” Bee said. “Probably not a year. I think he should come here. Philip’s O Levels aren’t all that important to him. He’s already taken Grade 8 in music in all his instruments, and music is clearly what’s going to be his thing.”

  “His passion,” Pat said. “You’re right. Yes, call Michael and tell him we’ll take care of him.”

  “A lot of it will fall on you,” Bee said.

  “The bedpans,” Pat said, and rolled her eyes. “How easily it all comes down to bedpans. You know I don’t mind.”

  “Michael’s ten years younger than me and twelve years younger than you. We were all together on the morning of Kiev,” Bee said.

  “You said then that the radioactivity wouldn’t get here for days,” Pat said, who remembered that with a burning clarity. “Days later we were here and he was in London, or who knows where, taking pictures.”

  “I’m a biologist, why would you think I know anything about radioactivity or fallout?”

  “But—” Pat stared open mouthed. “You’re a scientist. You sounded so confident. You were standing right there when you told me.”

  “You were pregnant and panicking,” Bee said. “Everything I know about radioactivity is on a cellular level.”

  Michael drove down the next day. “You remember we wanted to start our own Renaissance? We’re not going to have one,” he said to Pat.

  “We got the Seven Wonders going,” she said. “That’s something. And you have taken some wonderful pictures.”

  A burst of Albioni came through the open window of Philip’s room above the front door. “And there are the children,” Michael said. “Maybe they’ll do better with the world than we have.”

  In the sitting room Bee was talking to one of her old students, Sophie Picton, who was briefly visiting Cambridge, and indeed Earth, from Galileo, the European space station. She had brought Bee some cuttings from space, and was taking some of Bee’s plants back up with her. “These should make the air smell a lot better,” she said.

  “I’ll keep working on it,” Bee said.

  “You should come up and work on it,” Sophie said. “In zero gravity you’d be able to move about as well as anyone else. Better, because your arms are strong.”

  “Oh, that’s a tempting thought,” Bee said. “But I have my responsibilities here.”

  Pat brought everybody some fruitcake and tea and Philip came down to join them and they chatted until Sophie left. Then they settled Michael into Jinny’s old room at the front of the house. Most of Jinny’s things were in Florence, and Pat moved the rest into the spare room.

  “What we need to think is not that you’re here to die but that you’re here to celebrate while you can,” Bee said.

  “Champagne every night?” Philip asked.

  “Good things while we can have them anyway,” Pat said. “Flora’s going to come down at the weekend.”

  “I want to take a series of pictures of you two and the children and the house and garden,” Michael said. “Nothing posed, just the way you go about your routine.”

  “All right,” Pat said, exchanging looks with Bee. “My favorite picture of yours is still the one you took of Bee in Florence when the girls were babies.”

  “Though your second favorite is St. Mark’s Square taken from ground level,” he said.

  “It was the way you didn’t care at all if you completely ruined your clothes,” Pat said.

  They put the news on after dinner, but after a few minutes Bee switched it off. “Nothing but violence and explosions and men posturing,” she said.

  “Do you really want to go to space?” Pat asked Bee the next morning when she was dressing for work.

  “No,” Bee said. “Well, yes. I always have loved science fiction and I’d love to go to space. But the way it is now with nobody sharing what they’re doing it’s anti-science. I’d be happy to give cuttings to the Americans and the Russians, but that’s not the way we do things any more. I hate that. Working on what I work on it’s not so bad, but if I were to really go into the space stuff it would stifle me not to be able to share freely.” Bee stopped. “Besides, we have to make choices. I used to think we had time to do anything we wanted, but we can only do some of the things in any one lifetime.”

  “But at my back I always hear time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near. And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity,” Pat said.

  “Deserts of vast eternity,” Bee echoed. “What’s that from?”

  “Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress,’” Pat said. “It often comes into my mind. It’s about doing things while you can.”

  “A good sentiment,” Bee said, wheeling herself towards the stairlift.

  It took Michael eight months to die, and so he died in Florence at the end of August.

  He had taken his series of photographs of them—of Bee swinging between the wheelchair and her green chair, and hauling herself up off the bed; of Pat cooking, and pushing her hair back impatiently as she typed; of Jinny pulling on her boots, and laughing with her head thrown back, looking exactly like Bee; of Philip playing the oboe, and clearing plates from the table; of Flora arranging flowers, looking like a goddess, and scrunching up her face at the thought of asparagus. He had kept photographing them right up to the end, the last of them were still in his camera. He had not been able to speak for the last two weeks, the growth in his throat was too much. He had written down detailed instructions for how the photographs were to be processed.

  When they had driven down to Florence in late June, as soon as Philip’s exams were over, they had discussed Michael’s funeral. “There’s a Jewish cemetery in Florence,” Michael said. His voice was hoarse already.

  “It’s some kind of ancient monument,” Pat said. “I don’t think it’s still used.”

  “What kind of a guidebook writer are you?” Michael teased. “There’s a modern Jewish cemetery to the north of the city just out of town. I’ll talk to the rabbi and sort it out.”

  “You don’t speak Italian,” Bee said.

  “The rabbi speaks Hebrew.”

  “Do you speak Hebrew?” Philip asked in astonishment.

  “Of course I speak it,” Michael said. “I’m Jewish. And I spent a year in Israel after university. I’ve met the rabbi of Florence. I’ve been to the synagogue.”

  “I’ve seen it, I’ve never been inside,” Pat said. “They built it in the nineteenth century in the thought that they’d make something Jewish but worthy of Florence. Certainly the outside does that.”

  “The inside is lovely too. It had more treasures, but the Nazis destroyed them,” Michael said. “They used it as a garage and tried to blow it up when they left, but the Florentines defused the bombs.”

  “Good for them. The Florentines also refused to blow up the Ponte Vecchio or Michelangelo’s bridge,” Pat said.

  “I think it was the German in charge who refused to blow up the historical bridges,” Michael said.

  “Am I half Jewish?” Philip asked suddenly.

  “No,” Michael said. “Nobody is half Jewish. You’re either Jewish or you’re not, and you’re not, because it goes by the mother. But you’re Jewish enough by the Law of Return that you could have an Israeli passport if you wanted one.”

  “You’re not—I mean you eat pork,” Philip said.

  “I may be a bad Jew, but I’m a Jew. The rabbi in Florence will bury me, don’t worry.”

  When he died, it was by suffocation—the tumor in his throat grown too big for him to breathe around. “If they operated to remove it, it would just drag the process out and be more agonizing,” Bee said. Until the last two weeks of silence and
pain the process had not been too bad. He had drunk granita even when he could swallow nothing else. All three children were in Florence—Flora had come down alone by train to join the rest of them at the end of her term. But only Bee and Pat were with him when he breathed his last.

  “We never meant to be a family when we invited him to be a sperm donor,” Bee said as Pat closed Michael’s eyes. “Isn’t it funny how things happen?”

  “There’s no word for what he was to us,” Pat said, weeping. “He was the father of our children, and our intermittent lover, and most of all he was our very good friend.”

  He was buried in the Jewish cemetery with Jewish rites. It was the first Jewish ceremony Pat had ever seen, and she found it much more moving than the other funerals she had attended.

  Two years later, in 1984, Philip went to music college and Flora graduated from Lancaster. Jinny still had another year of her four-year course to go. Flora had met a young man in her first weeks in Lancaster and they both moved on to take the PGCE, the qualification necessary now to teach. When they graduated from that they announced that they were getting married.

  “She’s so young!” Bee said.

  “Well, Mohammed seems nice enough,” Pat said.

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to his name,” Bee said.

  “Turkey’s in Europe now,” Pat reminded her. “I know it hasn’t been in Europe since the Roman Empire, but now it’s back. They’re going there on honeymoon, and stopping to see us in Florence on the way back.”

  They had the wedding reception in their garden. Flora carried roses and geraniums she had planted herself and looked radiant. Philip gave her away, looking very grown up in his suit, and afterwards played a composition of his own as she and Mohammed walked through the guests to be photographed. “I wish Michael could have photographed her now,” Bee said.

  “Does Mohammed know that Michael was Jewish?” Jinny asked.

  “Does Mohammed know Michael was Flora’s father?” Pat asked in return. “Does Mohammed know that Flora has two mothers? We don’t know and we haven’t asked. He seems nice, but such a conventional young man, not to mention from a culture we don’t know much about.”

  “I’m glad she’s keeping her own name,” Jinny said.

  “You’re not planning on getting married then?” Bee asked. “No beautiful Italian men?”

  “Plenty of beautiful Italian men, but I’m not planning on getting married any time soon. But I do have an exciting offer of sharing a studio. Not making copies of classical works, doing our own thing.”

  “Henry Moore? Neo-Impressionism? What is your own thing?” Pat asked.

  “Neo-Renaissance? That’s what you’d like.” Jinny laughed. “You’ll have to wait and see. Also, I’m taking a course in museum work, so that I can earn some money while I wait to be discovered.”

  “Sensible and practical,” approved Bee.

  “Flora’s the practical one, she’s got a job teaching already,” Jinny said.

  “And Philip has got really good,” Bee said. “I hadn’t noticed, because he’s always been good at playing, but his composing has improved no end. That was like real music today.”

  “They’re all growing up,” Pat said. “It seems like yesterday that they were babies, and now—”

  “I can’t believe you said that!” Jinny said. “That’s such a cliché! I can’t believe those words actually came out of your mouth! Flora! Pat said it seems like yesterday that we were babies!”

  Flora came over and kissed them, carefully, so as not to mess her dress. “I love you,” she said. “Thank you for giving me this wedding, and thank you for giving me my childhood.”

  “It’s old cliché week in the garden,” sighed Jinny.

  28

  Getting Old Is a Terrible Thing Trish 1989–1993

  Trish didn’t remember the heart attack or collapsing in the classroom, just the struggle to breathe afterwards. From the time she woke in the Infirmary and was reassured that it had been a small heart attack and she was going to be fine, it never felt as if she had enough air. Helen was there, and Cathy came, and George was in space and sent a message—in many ways it felt like an action replay of Mark’s stroke, except that Doug came and brought huge bouquets of lilac and sat blubbering at her bedside. She thought it excessive, considering that they’d told her she was going to be fine. They let her out with prescriptions, diet sheets and an exercise program.

  It was March of 1989. She was sixty-three. She took early retirement from teaching—it felt early to her, though standard retirement age was sixty and many people retired at fifty-five. Trish didn’t feel ready to stop teaching. Fortunately, she still had her adult education work, which she expanded. She also retired from the council, because her doctor said she should avoid stress, and she could not deny that the council was stressful. It didn’t help much with stress, as Bethany was still on the council and talked about it at home so Trish’s blood still boiled regularly.

  She swam every morning, and walked down to the Kingsway and home again, close to a mile. She resolutely ate low fat foods. She took her pills. She read to Mark. She helped Alestra and Tamsin, now fourteen, study for their O Levels. She babysat for Donna and Tony. She saw her other grandchildren when she either visited them or they visited her.

  In June, peaceful protests in China led to a shooting in Tiananmen Square. An unarmed girl was shot by a soldier—images went around the world, immediately iconic. The world reacted in horror. World leaders contacted the Chinese immediately—President Frank of the US was first to deplore the violence, followed by President Jahn of Germany and then by the leaders of every other country, and the United Nations. The Russian Premier, Gorbachev, happened to be in London discussing the open frontier project, so he was interviewed on the BBC. Trish was watching in Mark’s room, as she often did. Television tended to quiet him, and she felt sharing it with him was companionable. Listening to Gorbachev saying how unthinkable it was for the state to condone violence in that way and China should apologize, she spoke aloud to Mark.

  “Do you remember when the Russians were the big enemy and we were all afraid of them? First they were our friends, in the war, Uncle Joe, and then in the Fifties they were built up as the villain, the Iron Curtain and all that nonsense. It was nonsense. There’s no difference between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, really, we all care about the same things, a social safety net, individual liberty, prosperity.”

  Mark bellowed, and Trish patted his hand. “Are you trying to say Stalin purged people in the Thirties?” she asked. “That was a long time ago. Look at Germany. They were even more evil in the Thirties, and they’re reunited now, and everything is all right.”

  The Chinese apologized and extended the freedoms the students had been protesting for, and everyone relaxed.

  In September Mark died. It was another stroke which came in his sleep. Trish found him in the morning breathing heavily and impossible to rouse. She called the doctor, and he died in the Infirmary a couple of hours later. Trish went home and sat in his empty room, still full of the clutter of his last years—bedpans, pajamas, the television, his tablets, the hospital bed. It was hard to believe he was really gone.

  “Nobody else would have taken him in like that,” Bethany said when she came home.

  They cremated him and scattered his ashes with Trish’s mother’s in the garden. All the children and grandchildren came to the funeral, even Doug. Elizabeth and Clifford Burchell came, and Elizabeth spoke about the importance of Mark’s work. Their son Paul was with them because Mark had been his godfather. He was a doctor, and looked very dignified. Trish remembered putting him to her breast when he was a baby.

  Trish did not speak. She found it hard to know what she felt. She was relieved, but also much sadder than she would have imagined.

  “What are you going to do with those rooms now?” Bethany asked.

  “Well, I need them when the children are all home,” Trish said.

  “We c
ould make it into a little flat and let it,” Bethany said. “There are always students looking for places.”

  “I don’t want to live with strangers,” Trish said.

  “Alestra and I could move up there and we could let the basement, which is almost self-contained.”

  Trish shook her head. She redecorated the room as a library.

  The whole family came for Christmas, as usual. Doug wasn’t looking well. His happiness was clearly faked. He had bought expensive presents for all the children, but watching them opening presents he almost cried. On Boxing Day as Trish bundled up to go out for her walk he grabbed his jacket and said he would come too.

  They walked along the canal bank in silence for a while. “What’s wrong?” Trish asked.

  “I’m not sure whether I should tell you.”

  “You should definitely tell me,” Trish said. “Whatever it is. I’m your mother.”

  “I have AIDS,” Doug said. “It’s so unfair. I was clean. I got off the smack, you know I did, I came here to do it. But sometime back then, sharing needles…” he trailed off.

  Trish could hardly take it in. “I thought it was a gay plague,” she said, and thought at once of Mark. She had never told any of the children about that. It felt like an invasion of Mark’s privacy.

  “It’s passed through blood, apparently, and if you share needles you can get it that way.” Doug stared out over the gray water. A brightly painted canal barge passed them, moving slowly north. A little white terrier on the deck barked at them.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m on drugs that are supposed to help, but they just seem to make me sicker. It’s an immune deficiency, which means that if I catch anything at all it could just kill me, like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Oh Doug!” Trish opened her arms and hugged him. “What a horrible thing. What are you going to do? Do you want to come home?”

  “I want to write songs for AIDS awareness, and raise money for helping people who have it, and for a cure,” he said. “If I have time. While I can. If I—when I get sick, I’d like to come home.”