My Real Children (11 page)

On the Saturday morning Mark arrived in the car, Doug was delighted to see him. Tricia was too busy being sick to care. She tried to blame the Bovril, but she knew she really was pregnant again.

In the car she tried to make an ultimatum as Doug ran about the back seat pointing out cows and horses excitedly. “We have to move into town. I can’t stay there in the village where there’s nothing. It’s driving me mad. I never talk to an adult. I’m completely trapped. There isn’t even a library.”

“I’ll consider looking for a house in Grantham after the new baby is born,” Mark said, with the air of somebody making a huge concession.

The baby was born in January 1954, and it was a girl. They called her Helen Elizabeth, after Tricia’s mother and Elizabeth Burchell, and perhaps the new queen. The order of names was at Tricia’s insistence. She was again very pulled down after the birth, and her mother again came to stay. Doug was jealous of the new baby and of his mother and grandmother’s attention to her. He had been toilet trained for more than a year, but he began to deliberately soil himself. Tricia found this so distressing that she broke down in tears every time it happened. She still had to wash everything by hand herself. Mark dealt with it by spanking Doug, much against Tricia’s desires. “He’s too little,” she insisted. “He doesn’t really understand. It’s just because of Helen. He’ll be fine again soon.”

“Haven’t you seen the look on his face? It’s deviltry and he’s doing it on purpose.”

“Well, he is, but he doesn’t understand.” Tricia was furious with Doug herself, but she couldn’t condone hitting a child so young. Mark, however, was implacable, and as his methods worked and Doug gave up his rebellion it made it more difficult for her to continue to insist the next time he wanted to punish his son for naughtiness. This seemed to happen more and more frequently. Mark’s book had been rejected by the publisher after long deliberation, and while he had sent it to another he was angry about it and took it out on Tricia and Doug. He did not hit Tricia, but he did not need to—sarcasm was always a sufficient weapon to reduce her to misery.

At Easter they visited the Burchells in Oxford. Tricia still didn’t care for them, but she welcomed anything like a change in her routine. Mark wanted to talk to them about what to do with his book. Tricia was so delighted to see Oxford again that tears came into her eyes as they drove past Blackwell’s. She took the children for walks, pushing Helen in the pram and holding tightly to Doug’s hand. It was vacation, but there seemed to be plenty of undergrads around, running and bicycling and laughing in the spring sunshine. They took no notice of Tricia even when she smiled at them, and she realized she was invisible to them. When she had been an undergraduate, a woman with a pram would have been invisible to her, too.

The second evening, Mark went out with the Burchells, leaving Tricia to babysit her own two children and the Burchells’ four. The youngest Burchell child, Paul, was a few months older than Helen, and when he woke screaming Tricia could do nothing to calm him. Eventually, feeling almost as if she were committing adultery, she gave him her breast. He quieted at once, as Helen would have. It was a strange intimacy to have with somebody else’s child.

The next year Tricia had another stillbirth and they did move, not because of her ultimatum but because Mark had found a better job. They moved to Woking, in London’s commuter belt, to a suburban house with a washing machine. It belonged to them, or as Mark said, to the bank. It was a long but possible walk from the library and the shops, and while the house was ugly and identical to its neighbors, and Tricia would never have chosen it, she was happier there than she had been isolated outside Grantham. She made friends with other mothers of small children, and haunted the library with desperation, burying herself in books, the longer the better. She read
Middlemarch
and found it almost too painful, seeing herself in Dorothea and Mark in Casaubon. She read aloud to Doug and Helen and to herself compulsively in every spare moment.

Mark joined the golf club and she joined the Peace Pledge Union and the Labour Party.

That autumn a publisher bought Mark’s book, so clearly it was not Causaubon’s sterile
Key to All Mythologies
after all. That night Mark visited Tricia’s bedroom after a bath but without any wine. The sexual act seemed to be over faster, which she approved, and he did not apologize afterwards. She did not become pregnant, nor did she the month after, but by February she could not keep food down and she knew she was in for it again.

They visited the Burchells again that summer, 1956. All the political talk was about Nasser seizing the Suez Canal. Elizabeth Burchell compared him to Hitler and Tricia felt cold inside. Surely it would not be war again, so soon? She looked at Doug, who was six now, happily playing with the Burchell children, and imagined him marching off at eighteen and never coming back. It was hard enough for her to bear Mark disciplining him; she could not endure the thought of him being killed in battle. The Peace Pledge Union started a letter writing campaign and urged her to write to her MP, begging Britain to keep out of it. She did, and it must have worked, for the whole thing blew over in a solution brokered by the US and the UN. People stopped saying Nasser was as bad as Hitler. Egypt kept control of the canal but let everyone go through, even the Israelis. During this period Tricia became a devotee of the BBC radio news, and even after Mark bought them a small television it was the radio she used in the kitchen that kept her up to date.

On that trip to Oxford Mark and the Burchells decided to “be received,” meaning joining the Roman Catholic church, and on their return to Woking Mark began to take instruction. Tricia flat-out refused to join him. She no longer believed in a loving God, and stuck to that, whatever Mark said. She realized one day as he was lecturing her that he not only treated her as if she were stupid, but genuinely believed she was. He treated her as a baby machine, and she felt as if she almost was one. What was her degree for, when all the reading she did now was to escape from her own intolerable life?

In October of 1956 she suffered yet another stillbirth, during the Hungarian Crisis. She had been glued to the radio hearing about the Soviet troops poised to go into Budapest, and the brave Hungarians defying them by massing peacefully in the city squares. She wanted to give the baby a Hungarian name, but Mark named it Matthew while she was still unconscious and undergoing an operation to stitch up her womb. Poor dead Matthew had torn her insides in some way. The doctor was unsure whether she would be able to have more children.

“Surely two is enough,” she said tentatively to Mark. “It’s not as if either of us enjoys it.”

“God will decide,” he said, and by that she had no choice but to abide. It was some comfort to her that the Soviets had backed down on Hungary and were allowing a greater measure of democracy, both there and in the rest of the Iron Curtain countries. Both the Soviets and the Americans were pushing ahead into space, in a kind of competition. The BBC was excited to report the first photographs of the dark side of the moon.

Mark was received into the Catholic faith and took it very seriously. He insisted the children be instructed, and although they had been baptized in the Church of England he insisted on having their baptisms repeated, or “conditionally repeated” as nobody was sure whether the first baptisms had counted. Tricia let him take Doug to church with him, but usually kept Helen home with her. “She’s too young to sit through the service,” she said, and Mark agreed. Doug, who had just started school, said church was boring, but only to Tricia. He was wary of his father, though more likely to be pushed into rage and defiance than fear.

Tricia’s life in Woking was just beginning to settle down into something she could endure when Mark again brought home wine. His book had been published and was getting some attention, or so he said. She lay and endured his attentions and naturally she became pregnant again. Her doctor looked grave and told her to rest, but of course rest was impossible. Doug had to be taken to and from school and Helen was a very active three-year-old. She was sure this baby would die like the last two, but to her surprise it survived. They called it George Ludwig. Tricia protested the Ludwig, but only feebly. Her mother again came to stay and help with the baby, but Tricia found her less use than on previous occasions. She seemed vaguer, less sure of herself. She kept forgetting the names of things. When Tricia asked her about it she said that she needed to change the prescription of her blood pressure tablets because they made her forgetful.

“She’s only fifty-eight,” Tricia said to Mark after her mother had left. “She can’t be getting senile already, surely?”

“She never was especially intelligent, she won’t miss it,” Mark responded. He was busy writing another book, which he expected as a matter of course that Tricia would type for him, chapter by chapter, and then again with corrections. Georgie was a fussy baby, fussier than either of the others. He did not nurse well, and she had to give him bottles to keep up his weight.

Tricia asked the sympathetic doctor about Malthusian belts. He laughed, and explained that there were contraceptives and he could prescribe them for her, but there was nothing she could use without her husband’s knowledge. She endured another pregnancy that ended in a stillbirth, and another that resulted in a baby—Catherine Marian, born in November of 1959. When she visited after this birth there was no denying that Tricia’s mother was becoming forgetful.

The doctor told Mark that he was endangering Tricia’s life by insisting on more children. All the same he persisted, and she had another stillbirth in the autumn of 1960. In the summer of 1961 the doctor prescribed Tricia the new contraceptive pill. She told Mark it was a tonic and he believed her. Childbirth was over.

11

Real: Pat 1957–1964

Pat’s editor wanted her to write a guide to Rome. She found the letter on the mat when she came in on a chilly November evening. She turned on both bars of the electric fire and sat down next to it, removing only one glove to open the letter. The brindled cat, Dante, came up and rubbed against her ankles, then flopped down on her feet in the circle of the fire’s heat.

Rome was the logical next step after Florence and Venice, the editor said. The books were selling extremely well, and Constable were certainly interested in producing new and updated editions as she had suggested. They saw no reason why the books couldn’t remain in print in the long term, being updated from time to time as necessary. They understood that Rome wasn’t (ha ha) built in a day, and that the book would take her some time, but they wished she would start planning it with a completion date of September 1958 for publication in spring 1959, or September 1959 for publication in spring 1960. Then came the offer—three times as much as for either of the other books.

Pat was still sitting staring at the letter when Bee came in and snapped the light on, startling her.

“What’s wrong?” Bee asked, immediately coming over to the sofa and putting an arm around Pat.

“Nothing’s wrong. They want me to write a guide to Rome.” Pat relaxed against the rough wool of Bee’s coat.

“That sounds like a logical next step,” Bee said.

“That’s what they say. It’s just—Rome. Rome is so immense. I could write three books the length of my Venice one and hardly scratch the surface. And I don’t know it well. It would be so much work. And we’ve just got our house in Florence. But—” she hesitated and looked into Bee’s capable, interested face. “The truth is that the one time I went to Rome I was so unhappy. It was right after I broke it off with Mark. Even though that trip was when I discovered Italy, all the Roman sites seem drenched in misery in my memory.”

Bee hugged her more tightly. “Then we should go back together and make some new memories.”

Pat felt tears pricking behind her eyes. “You’re right, of course,” she said.

“And you should face up to your fears instead of letting them chase you into corners. It does no good in the end.”

“I’m going to tell them it will take two years,” she said, turning the letter over in her hands. “The other thing is the advance. It would be enough to buy a house in Cambridge, or out in the country if you prefer that, where we could grow things.”

“They don’t give mortgages to unmarried women,” Bee said.

“Without a mortgage, just buying it outright, the same as we did in Italy.” Pat straightened the letter. “The other books are selling well, I’m making royalties. They think they’ll do new editions when they sell out.”

Bee frowned slightly. “You know, if we owned a house near Cambridge we could both live on what I earn and your royalties. You could write guidebooks more rapidly if you weren’t teaching.”

“But I love teaching,” Pat said.

“Oh well then. It was just a thought. We should get started on dinner if we’re going to eat before the concert.”

Bee took off her coat and hung it on the hook beside the door, then without looking put out her arm for Pat’s coat.

As she chopped leeks, Pat thought about what Bee had said about facing her fears. “There are things I love about teaching, but there are also things that would be good about writing guidebooks full time,” she said as she slid the leeks into the pan, where they immediately began to sizzle in the olive oil.

“I don’t know if they’ll keep me here at the end of this fellowship. I’d like to stay in Cambridge, but with a research career it can be difficult.”

“Especially for a woman,” Pat said, stirring the leeks. “The water’s boiling.”

Bee eased the spaghetti into the water. “I’d rather stay here if I can.”

Pat stared fixedly down into the leeks. “The thing is that I’m afraid. I’m not afraid of where you’ll work or any of that, I’m afraid we’ll make plans together and intertwine our lives and then you’ll want to have babies and find some man to marry and leave me alone.”

Bee slid a big handful of washed mushrooms into the pan with the leeks and rested her head on Pat’s shoulder. She hadn’t chopped the mushrooms, but Pat didn’t say anything. “I do want babies,” Bee said after a moment. “But I want you—our life—I’m not going to go off and live with some man.”