My Real Children (12 page)

“I just keep thinking you’ll wake up and want something more real,” Pat said, not looking around, still stirring.

“This is real,” Bee said. “I wish one of us was a man so that we could get married and make it feel real to the rest of the world. Our friends, your mother, my family. But this is real for me. I’m not going to give it up.”

“Give me the bacon, or the spaghetti will be boiled to mush,” Pat said gruffly, because her throat was thick with tears.

They bought a seventeenth-century cottage in Harston, six miles outside Cambridge. It came with a long thin acre of land, Saxon field pattern, stretching back from the road. There was a little flower garden in the front and then it stretched back and back behind the house. Farthest away from the house was an orchard, where Bee immediately began to graft apples. They lived there in the academic year and in Florence in the summers, paying Bee’s students to look after the garden when they were away. “We always miss the best of the fruit,” Bee lamented. But she accompanied Pat to Italy and went with her around the sites, seldom complaining.

At Harston they had two cats, chickens, and a hive of bees, from which Bee gathered honey. “They never sting
you,
” Pat said, rubbing her hand.

“They recognize a fellow bee,” Bee laughed. “But the truth is that you move too quickly and startle them.”

They held parties in Harston, but more often than before went into Cambridge for other people’s parties, driving home afterwards. They still knew mixed groups of people. There were more Italians in Cambridge now that the Economic Community allowed free access to education in all member countries, and they became another strand of Pat’s web of friendships. “I never know who I’ll meet at your parties,” Pat’s head of department said at a party celebrating their first apple harvest.

“I hope that’s good,” Pat said. She felt more confident about people at school knowing about her and Bee, now that she knew they could be financially independent without her needing to teach. She liked teaching, but she liked it better knowing she was free to stop. She liked the girls, liked seeing them open up to literature in the same way she had herself. She planned the curriculum to encourage this process. Nobody from school ever asked about her relationship with Bee—two friends sharing digs was common enough to need no explanation. They were known as a couple in the homosexual community, and also to some of Pat’s more broad-minded birder friends.

Pat began researching for the Rome book immediately after they moved. It took her all of both summers to complete. Going to Rome with Bee did soften her memories of going there brokenhearted with Marjorie, and by the end she felt she loved Rome almost as much as Venice, though never as much as Florence. “Rome has all these layers, all this history folded over almost stratigraphically,” she said to Bee. “Florence is all of one piece, and that’s what I love about it. It all fits together so perfectly.”

Constable launched the Rome book with a wine and cheese party in London in March 1960. Pat agonized about what to wear, and eventually went in a black cocktail dress adorned with a Roman coin pendant that Bee had bought for her in Rome. She had her hair done, but the hairdresser complained that it was too short to do anything with. Bee wore her interview suit. (“Nobody’s going to be looking at me!” she insisted.) Few people had known that “P. A. Cowan” was a woman, and the fact drew some attention. Pat was interviewed by the
Times.
“I just wanted there to be better guidebooks, because when I first went to Italy and didn’t know about anything I wanted to find out. I wanted there to be guidebooks for ordinary people that would tell them about what they were seeing, and also where to eat,” she said.

Her photograph was grainy, but Bee cut out the article and pasted it into a scrapbook. Pat’s mother telephoned in great excitement to say that she had seen it.

Two weeks later, at Easter, Pat went down to Twickenham to see her mother. Bee was busy with some grafting in the lab, so Pat drove down alone. Her mother was pleased to see her. “You should have said you were coming!” she said.

“I did say,” Pat protested, but her mother ignored it. Over the course of the weekend there were more and more tiny things that made Pat realize that her mother was losing her memory. She had entirely forgotten about the interview in the
Times.
She kept losing words. Pat’s bedroom was deep in dust, her mother had clearly forgotten to clean it. Peeping through the door to Oswald’s old room she saw that it was the same. Pat drove home deeply worried and told Bee about it.

“She’s all right for now, but what if she gets worse? How is she going to manage?”

“We’ll have to have her here,” Bee said, and made a face. “Oh I don’t want to and you don’t want to either, but there’ll be nothing else for it if it comes to that.”

“What about Italy?” Pat asked.

“Maybe it won’t come to that,” Bee said. “But you’re the only one left and I’m the only girl, and they see us as single women, so we’re going to be the ones to have the burdens for all our parents as they get old.” Bee’s parents were sheep farmers in Penrith. Pat liked them well enough, but found them dull. Their conversation seemed to be exclusively about sheep diseases and new automatic shearing machines, which was naturally more interesting for Bee than Pat.

“My mother isn’t old. She’ll be sixty this year.”

“For the time being, maybe we could get her some help. Somebody to go in and see that she’s eating, and maybe clean a bit. Maybe give her a bit of companionship. Being alone so much can’t help. We could afford that if she can’t. As I remember when my grandfather’s second wife went senile, it was a long slow process.”

Pat began writing a guide to Pompeii and Naples. That year, 1961, Bee was given a permanent position as a lecturer at the New College. “They have a wonderful computer,” she told Pat. “It fills a whole room, but it’s terrifically reliable. We’re using it to store data and match patterns. It’s amazing.”

“Good,” Pat said.

“And it’s so fast,” Bee went on. “All the departments want them.”

Then one beautiful day in May of 1962, Bee came home from work with an astonishing idea.

“Have you heard of artificial insemination?” she asked Pat.

“Only when you were going on about those rabbits the year I first met you,” Pat said. “What, are you back to animals? I thought your heart was given to plants?”

“My heart is given to you,” Bee said, kissing her. “In the US they have successfully done artificial insemination with humans, and it has been considered legal there, though the children are considered to be illegitimate. They’re doing it in Scotland with infertile couples.”

It took Pat a moment. “Then we could have—”

“Lesbians all over the world will be so happy when this becomes generally available,” Bee said, nodding. “But you’re thirty-four and I’m thirty-two, so we don’t have any time to waste.”

“Where would we get the sperm?”

“Find a donor. The same one. So our children would be siblings.” They hugged each other in excitement.

“How could we possibly ask somebody?” Pat asked, then saw the answer at once. “One of our homosexual friends?”

“Precisely,” Bee said. “Alan would do it, or Piers. But from what I can find out, we’d need somebody who knows the procedure, and they’re only doing it for infertile couples.”

“How about if we went to the US?” Pat asked. “Though of course, even apart from the expense of that the US seems like an awful place.” The failed Bay of Pigs invasion was on the news every night, and the strength of the McCarthyist movement was horrifying.

“I think it would be even worse—I mean, there are more people there doing it, but they’d want even more in the way of identity, and apparently they only do it in cases where the husband is provably infertile. I was wondering if I might find somebody professionally who’s doing it with animals. It can’t be that different.”

“I suppose not,” Pat said, a little repelled at the thought of being operated on by a vet.

Bee laughed at her expression. “We’re all mammals together!” Then she grinned. “We’re really going to do this? If we can? You really want to?”

“I’ll take a leave of absence from teaching. You’ll have to carry on working, of course. It’ll be marvellous. Imagine teaching them about the world! Imagine teaching them birding and Shakespeare, and how to graft pears onto apples, and Botticelli and Bach!”

“It’s not that easy. As far as the school and the college are concerned we’d have had illegitimate children. They’d be shocked. It might count as gross moral turpitude.”

“Minor moral turpitude, at most,” Pat murmured, as she always did when she heard that expression.

“I think it would be best if you resigned and I just didn’t tell the college. If we timed it right, I could give birth in the long vacation, and they’d never know.”

“They’re biologists, Bee! They’d be sure to notice!”

Bee laughed and shook her head. “They’re plant biologists. They know nothing about mammalian reproduction. And they don’t want to know about human reproduction. They like me because I work hard and do good work and keep up with all the teaching they give me, and because I can teach the first years how to graft and don’t mind getting my hands stained.” Bee’s hands were so permanently stained with dyes used for staining cells that Pat had come to think of it as normal. “They won’t ask questions if I don’t say anything, but if I do say anything they’ll be forced to get rid of me. And while you like teaching, you could get a job teaching anywhere. Biological research isn’t like that. And we couldn’t all four live on your guidebook income and what we make selling eggs and honey.”

“All four,” Pat said, her eyes moist. “Do you really think we could do it?”

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Bee said.

It was a month later and they were almost ready to leave for Italy when Bee gave up trying to find a way to do it. The legitimate possibilities were closed off immediately. No doctor would prescribe AI for two single women, either in Britain or the US. The procedure wasn’t available at all in Italy, where Bee suggested that outright bribery would probably have worked to get them on the list. Nor would any of the vets she knew who were doing it routinely with cows agree to try it on humans. “I don’t want to give up, but it would seem almost easier to do it the old-fashioned way,” Bee said as they were sitting down to dinner.

“I’ve never—” Pat hesitated, looking at her plate. “I mean, with a man.”

“Not with Mark when you were engaged?” Bee asked.

“Oh, I was so naive in those days. And Mark was so religious. I really don’t think either of us knew what we were doing. We barely kissed. I had no idea really what people did. I’m still a little hazy on what men and women do. I assume it’s pretty much the same only with the man putting his thing inside when he’s ready to orgasm?”

Bee looked away. “It’s not the same at all,” she said. “I had some unpleasant experiences when I was evacuated. The father of the family where I was billeted came into my room. It went on and on.”

“Do you think that’s why you’re a lesbian?” Pat asked.

Bee frowned, then very deliberately ate a carrot, chewing it hard. “I don’t think so,” she said, putting her fork down. “I mean that was repulsive, and he was a horrible man, making me promise not to say anything to his wife, saying I’d tempted him and it was all my fault. It took me a long time to realize that I hadn’t done anything different on the days when he came in than on the days when he didn’t. But it wasn’t the sex itself that was so awful. The worst thing was the guilt and all of that, not what he actually did. It wasn’t all that important. I think it would be giving it too much importance to say that it made me a lesbian. He was just—a thing that happened. As if I’d got caught in the rain and caught a chill. It would be ridiculous to say that’s why I love you. I’d have loved you anyway, no matter what happened before.”

“I think the same,” Pat said. “No matter what happened we’d have found each other.” She put her hand on Bee’s. “Do you think you could go through with that again, to have a baby?”

“I think so,” Bee said, uncertainly. “How about you?”

“I suppose so,” Pat said. “Do you think we should try and find somebody in Italy, or wait until we come home in the autumn?”

“Oh, wait until we come home!” Bee said immediately. “Italian men all think they’re God’s gift to women anyway, and even the nicest of our friends in Florence would behave as if everything he’d ever thought about lesbians really wanting men had been confirmed if we asked him.”

Pat shuddered.

“The other thing I thought was maybe you could ask Donald.” Bee picked up her fork again.

“Donald? Your brother Donald?”

“I’d really be related to your baby then,” Bee said.

“If only Oswald hadn’t been killed,” Pat said, immediately seeing the advantages. “It really is so unfair of biology to be organized this way so that we can’t just have each other’s babies the way we want to.”

“I sometimes think I should have been a man,” Bee agreed.

“I wouldn’t want you to be any different. You wouldn’t be you if you were a man.”

“Would you want to be a man, if you could just change?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so.” Pat hesitated. “Being paid more and everything being so easy—getting a mortgage and jobs and being respected without needing to struggle. But I do like being me.”

“Yes, me too,” Bee said.

12

Feudalism: Tricia 1963–1966

By the autumn of 1963, Tricia had four children, aged from thirteen to three. Although she’d never been away from them except when she was in hospital giving birth, she found it difficult to understand how she had come to be in this position. They were people, and they had become people while she wasn’t paying attention, while she was mired in toilet training and morning sickness and bitter resentment of their father.

Doug was thirteen. He attended Woking Grammar School, where he frequently got into trouble for fighting and belligerence. She was afraid he was becoming a bully—certainly she frequently had to stop him bullying the other children. Mark bullied Doug and Doug took it out on the others. He was protective of her against his father, and she frequently had to stop him from making things worse. Tricia worried about him, about what trouble he might get into, and about how he would grow up.