My Real Children (33 page)

“I don’t want to be like my mother,” Pat said.

“You’re going to be seventy next year, and you’re a million times better than she was at that age,” Bee said.

Jinny’s wedding took place in Santa Maria Novella, a wonderful Renaissance church near the railway station in Florence. Jinny had gone through the forms of conversion to Catholicism especially so that she could get married there. (“Though I don’t mind promising to bring the children up in the faith if it means they can be baptized in the Baptistery,” she had said quietly to her mothers the night before.) She piled her dark hair up on top of her head, which made her look very like Bee. Jinny had the same plain square friendly face. Francesco was bringing all the beauty, Pat thought, and hoped Jinny wasn’t bringing absolutely all the brains. Philip gave Jinny away as he had given Flora away. Sanchia, visibly pregnant, and Ragnar were there. Sammy, twelve years old now, was a bridesmaid, along with three of Francesco’s nieces. Flora was matron of honor. Mohammed looked proud of her. It was the first time either of them had been in Florence since their honeymoon.

Pat prayed for Jinny and Francesco, and for Flora and Mohammed, and for Philip and Sanchia and Ragnar, and for all her grandchildren born and unborn. She thanked God for them and for Bee, and prayed that Bee might be cured by a miracle. Looking up at Botticelli’s nativity scene, anything seemed possible. “Come on, God, you can do it,” Pat prayed. “St. Zenobius, patron of Florence, you healed a dead elm tree, and Bee loves elm trees. You could heal her, couldn’t you?”

They had the reception in the garden of their house, though it was a crush with all of Jinny’s Florentine friends. She had built houses for half of them, it seemed. They were going to honeymoon on the Adriatic coast.

“This will probably be the last time the whole family will be together,” Bee said, hoarsely, when she made her toast. Pat remembered how wonderful Bee’s singing voice had been. “It’s not the whole family, of course, without Michael, but he’s buried here so that’s as close as we can come. I’d like to propose a toast to our family, while we still can.”

Pat had never forgotten that Bee was dying. She wished she could forget it. Instead she woke in the night remembering it, overcome by a sense of dread.

Jinny and Francesco departed for their honeymoon. The rest of them stayed on in the Florentine house for a few weeks.

Pat walked around Florence with Sammy and Cenk, telling them stories and showing them things. She fed them gelatos and granitas. She took them to the Uffizi, which had finally installed a lift. Bee could see the Botticellis again. “You’re the one who cares about them,” Bee muttered, but she did not turn down the opportunity to go up and see them.

She told Sammy and Cenk about Cellini as they looked at his statue of Ganymede in the Bargello. She told them that the torso was Roman and he had made the rest of it, the head and arms and legs and the eagle, and how it was a microcosm of the Renaissance, taking the Roman core and building on the rest in their own imagination. “How can she remember all this when she can’t remember where to meet us for lunch?” Flora asked Bee.

“She’s known all this forever,” Bee rasped.

Sammy and Cenk took to Florence as the children always had. Before long they were begging Flora to let them stay longer and for just one more gelato. “They can stay for the summer with us, if you like,” Pat offered.

“If there’s room for me to stay as well,” Flora said. Mohammed went home, and Ragnar went off to his engagement in Finland, but the rest of them stayed. Jinny and Francesco came home, and Flora took the children back to England for the new school term. Philip and Sanchia left, and eventually one evening as they sat on the patio alone after Jinny had gone to bed Bee told Pat that it was time for them to be going.

“I want to die at home. I’ve only been lingering because I just can’t bear the thought that it’s the last time you’ll ever see Florence. I tried to get Flora and Philip to promise to bring you but they wouldn’t. You can forget that if you like. In fact it’s better if you do. If you think you’ll be back next year like always.”

“I could come back,” Pat said. “Unless I forgot about changing trains somewhere.”

“Somebody would need to go with you,” Bee said. Her voice was very hoarse now. “Look, I know you’ll probably forget, but I do want you to know this even if you can’t hold on to it. I’ve arranged for what’s going to happen to you after I die. You’re going to go into a home in Lancaster, near Flora. I tried to get something here but you won’t believe the prices in Italy. And you’ve forgotten Italian and the nurses wouldn’t speak English, so England is probably better.”

“Near Flora,” Pat said. “Not so far from Philip too. It won’t be so bad.”

“Jinny has promised to come over and help you move,” Bee said. She scrubbed away a tear. “I could keep on looking after you at home and bringing you here every summer forever if it wasn’t for this stupid stupid cancer. It’s the worst thing about dying. I’ve had a good life, with you and the children and my work. It would have been better if I’d kept my legs, but I’ve managed without. I made the serum for the elm trees. I made plants that are being used in space.”

“You’ve done a lot, accomplished really important things,” Pat said. “And we’ve been so happy.” She reached across and took Bee’s hand, Bee gripped it firmly.

“We have been happy,” Bee said.

“And I know you’d have kept on looking after me,” Pat said. “Couldn’t we just … drive the car off a cliff somewhere on the way home? Wouldn’t it make more sense? For both of us?”

“I wish we could,” Bee said. “But we flew, remember? And Cambridge is rather lacking in cliffs.”

“But I could linger on for years,” said Pat, appalled.

“I know. I’m sorry. Look, tomorrow is our last day. You should do all your special Florence things. We both should. For the last time.”

“Yes, we must, all our special things,” Pat said. Then she was quiet for a while, though she kept her grip on Bee’s hand. “Bee? I hope I forget.”

32

Google: Trish 1998–2015

The next time George and Sophie came home from the moon they took the twins back permanently. The twins were eleven, ready to start secondary school. She had hoped they might go to the excellent local schools in Lancaster, but George had heard from Cathy and didn’t regard her as really capable of looking after the twins any more. “I’ve found schools for them in Cambridge where they can go in as day pupils when we’re home and board when we’re not. They can come here, or to Helen’s, for holidays.” George was being brisk with her and the children. He was probably right that she wasn’t capable. “I know it’s been a lot to ask of you, Mum,” meant that. She was being punished for forgetting about Jamie by losing the twins. Or maybe she was imagining it, maybe this would have happened anyway.

“They will come to see me?” she asked, hearing herself sounding pathetic and cutting herself off.

“Of course, Mum, we’ll all come to see you.”

“How will you manage, Gran?” Rhodri asked as his father was taking an armload of bags to the car.

“I’ve got the Mac all set up,” she said. “And Bethany will be here. Your dad’s right, you shouldn’t really be helping me.”

“We liked it,” Rhodri said.

With that she had to be content. She wrote it down in the diary program on the Mac so she could remember it, or at least look at it and see it again. She emailed Rhodri and Bronwen, and they emailed her—at first frequently and then less often as they settled into their new schools and got used to living with their parents again.

The Mac and Bethany mostly kept her on track, but she got caught out now and then. She’d be told something, write it down, and forget to transfer it to the computer. Then she’d forget all about it. Helen was used to her, but Cathy and George only visited occasionally and were shocked.

They might have let her carry on living at home if it hadn’t been for the university expansion. The government were funding extra places at all universities, and Lancaster was taking advantage of that to build new libraries and lecture theaters and halls. Bethany was planning officer of the new Green-dominated council, and she told Trish all about it, sometimes several times. The problem was that the university didn’t have enough space in the halls of residence for all the new students. They hadn’t even had enough room for all the students they’d had before. Students had always lived in town, and in Morecambe, and in the countryside around. But now there was a new influx, and housing was in demand. House prices rocketed. Trish’s house, which they had bought in 1968, had been fully paid off since 1988. It had always been too big for most people, but it was now worth a fortune to the developers.

“Have you thought of moving somewhere smaller, Mum?” Helen asked.

“Where would I put my teapots?” Trish asked, looking at her mother’s china on the open shelves.

Cathy came up and tried. “This house has appreciated a great deal. You could move somewhere small and comfortable and free up a great deal of capital.”

“Anyone would know you were a banker,” Trish said.

“So how about it?”

“I like this house.”

Eventually the three children ganged up on her. They all sat around the kitchen table and proposed it again. “But where will Bethany go?” she protested.

“That’s Bethany’s problem,” Cathy said.

“Bethany is part of this family too. She’s been looking after me all this time. She helped bring up Tamsin and the twins.”

“We’re very grateful to Bethany,” George said. “But she’s not part of this family, and if she’s hoping to gain any financial benefit beyond all the years she’s been living here rent-free—”

“That’s not what I meant at all,” Trish said. “You twist me around.”

“You sold Gran’s house in Twickenham without even really asking her,” Helen said. “I remember when we went down there.”

“I do too,” Trish said. She looked at Helen. When had she stopped being beautiful? It wasn’t anything she did. She was just effortlessly lovely, all the time, until one day she just wasn’t. She was the same person with the same face, but no longer a beauty. It was 2004, and Helen, her oldest surviving child, was fifty.

“You should be in a home,” Cathy said.

She managed to put them off until the next weekend, and talked to Bethany. “They want to sell this house and throw you out. Is it too late for me to give it to you?”

Bethany laughed bitterly. “They’d easily find doctors to say you weren’t in your right mind if you did. In fact, it would be quite hard to find anyone to say you were!”

“They don’t need the money. Cathy’s rich, and George is very well paid, and Helen is all right.”

“Helen could do with the money. You’ve forgotten that Don’s divorcing her.” Bethany poured Trish more tea. “Remember? He found out she was having an affair with that customer in Quernmore?”

Trish didn’t remember. “At her age?”

“I’m the same age as she is,” Bethany said. “And you were older when you got involved with that Chinese American, what was his name?”

“Lin Da Wei,” Trish said. “But we called him David. He still sends me Christmas cards, lovely American ones. He was such a nice man. Wonderful in bed.”

Bethany smiled. “Good. I’m glad somebody was.”

“Did I tell you about Mark?”

“You did. Please don’t tell me again, I just ate.”

Trish laughed. “Will you be all right?”

“I’ve got the money from the record, remember? It’s not much, but it’s my little savings. You know the food co-op only pays peanuts and the council only pays grifters. I could pay rent somewhere. There are lots of co-op houses that I’d fit into, or even communes. We don’t all have to be as bourgeois as your children.”

“I could give you some money without them knowing. You deserve it. I’d really give you the house if I could, so we could stay here as we have been.”

Bethany looked uncomfortable. “Helen says your mother got incontinent at the end, and also terrified and aggressive.”

“She did. But it was only right at the end. Oh God, I don’t want to end up like that!” Trish wailed.

“You’re nothing like that,” Bethany said. “I don’t want them to shove you in a home, but there’s nothing I can do about it. You’re not my mother—and my own mother I wouldn’t cross the road to shake hands with. She threw me out when I was pregnant with Alestra.”

“I hate to ask, considering what they’re doing to you, but will you come and visit me in the place they’re making me go?” Trish asked.

“I’ll come as long as you keep recognizing me,” Bethany said.

“That will be a long time.”

Trish walked slowly and carefully down to the bank the next day and drew out a thousand pounds, the maximum withdrawal. She put it in an envelope and pushed it under Bethany’s door. She did the same on each of the next six days, writing “ATM” on her lists so she wouldn’t forget. When Cathy asked her the next weekend what she had done with the money she said that she couldn’t remember. It was the first time she had ever used her forgetfulness as an excuse. Usually she tried to cover it up if she had forgotten. Now she knew perfectly well what she had done but Cathy had no way to know that.

The worst thing about going into the home was that they wouldn’t let her take the Mac. “I need it. I need it more than anything else,” she said.

Cathy wouldn’t listen. “Nonsense, Mum, what do you want with that old thing?”

“I send email to Rhodri and Bronwen.”

“You can send them cards when it’s their birthdays.”

“It helps me remember things,” she begged. “My pills. I’ll never remember my blood pressure pills without the Mac.”

“The nurses will remind you,” Cathy said.

She let her take books and clothes. Trish kept pleading for the computer. She called Helen, who she hoped might understand. Helen listened to her for a while then asked to speak to Cathy. Trish waited in anxious hope, but Cathy snapped the phone shut and tossed it down on the counter when she had finished.

“If Helen wants, she can get you a new computer. A laptop. This one with the big monitor is bigger than they’ll let you have.”

“But I won’t know how to use the new computer,” Trish said. “I understand this one.”