My Real Children (16 page)

Goliath got more local gigs that summer and autumn, and became locally popular. Tricia went to hear them play several times and noticed the crowds increasing, and the size of the venues. They began to sing more of their own songs, written by the three of them. Just after the New Year of 1968, they were, astonishingly, offered a record contract. Tricia had to sign, as Doug wouldn’t be eighteen until March. “And there’s no use asking Dad,” Doug said. Once she had signed, he told her he was going to be dropping out of school.

“I think you’ll be sorry if you don’t finish your A Levels and go on to university,” Tricia said. “I’ve told you what fun I had at Oxford.”

“But music is what I want to do, and this opportunity might never come again. Goliath could be big. We could be the next Beatles.”

The fight with Mark was spectacular and never seemed to stop—it smouldered away constantly whenever Mark and Doug were in the house together. She was glad Mark was working so hard and absent so often. Goliath put out a single immediately, which went to number 36 in the charts. In March, the moment Doug was eighteen, he moved to London with his girlfriend, to work on recording Goliath’s first album.

Tricia’s CND friends were excited about events in Czechoslovakia, the “Prague Spring” movement. “It’s happening everywhere,” Tricia said. “Young people want different things from what we wanted when we were young. They’re not going to put up with what we put up with.”

“But what if the Russians send the tanks in?” David asked.

“They didn’t in Hungary, they won’t do it now. We should start a letter writing campaign in support of Czech freedom.”

“It’s not nuclear,” David said. David was an Aldermaston veteran, and he credited himself with getting US missiles out of Britain, practically single-handedly to hear him talk about it. He didn’t want to widen the peace mission.

“Having peace in Europe is the best way to avoid nuclear war,” Tricia said firmly.

In May, Paris erupted in student riots. In July, Doug’s album was released, and a single from it went into the top ten. The Americans landed a man on the moon, fulfilling President Kennedy’s brother’s dream. In September there were elections in France and a communist government was elected. Mark was disapproving, but Tricia couldn’t see why it mattered. There had been several communist governments in Italy, and Britain had a socialist government. The Czechs had a liberal government. Tricia’s mother slowly became vaguer and started forgetting the names of everyday items.

15

Journeys: Pat 1963–1967

They did not go to Italy that summer. It was the first time since 1949 that Pat had spent a whole summer in England. They let the Florentine house through an agency. They had wanted to go, despite everything, but Pat had to acknowledge that she just wasn’t well enough. She spent most of June hardly moving from bed, doing nothing but caring for the baby. They called her Flossie, or the Little Tyrant, and joked that she had been born knowing only the imperative mood.

They worried about fallout. Milk from hill regions was condemned after checking for radioactivity. “At least they’re checking,” Bee said. “Some of my friends are buying home Geiger counters, but I think that’s paranoid. But maybe we could think about getting a cow. It would be nice to be self-sufficient. In case.”

Pat fed Flossie herself. Her breasts, which she had always felt were embarrassingly small, were still smaller than Bee’s even when swollen, but she had no shortage of milk. Pictures of evacuated children from the Ukraine were on television—both women wept when they saw them. “Damn hormones,” Bee said, wiping her eyes. “I’d have been upset, but I’d never have cried, before.”

“Me too,” Pat agreed, and they laughed at themselves.

“Mind you, I hated being evacuated,” Bee said.

“I just went with the school. It wasn’t too bad,” Pat said. “But we didn’t have to go to new countries. Those poor kids, going away to East Germany and Hungary and Russia.”

Bee’s baby was born in September. She was a girl. Pat could not be with her for the birth, and she waited at home with baby Flossie. They had already discussed names.

“If it’s a girl, Marie Patricia,” Bee said. “After Marie Curie, of course.”

“And if it’s a boy?” Pat asked. She was lying in bed, with Flossie sucking hard at her breast and clenching and unclenching her fists as she did it, which always made both her mothers smile.

“I don’t know. Patrick sounds so Irish.”

“Not Patrick,” Pat agreed. “If Floss had been a boy I was thinking of Marsilio.”

“Marsilio!” Bee hesitated. “It would do in Italy, and of course Ficino, but in England? Maybe as his second name?”

“It’s up to you,” Pat said.

“Philip Marsilio?” Bee tried. “Philip Marsilio Dickinson. What do you think?”

“Lovely,” Pat said. “Why Philip?”

“After Dr. Harrington,” Bee said. “He got me that fellowship and took a chance on me, and not just me. He believes women should be in science. And he loves plants. And he has arranged the calendar so that I get the sabbatical to write the plant disease book this autumn, without ever saying a word about why.”

“I thought you said plant people took no notice of mammalian biology?” Pat teased, moving Flossie to the other nipple.

“That’s his way of taking no notice in a quietly supportive way,” Bee said.

So Pat was expecting Marie, and was astonished when Bee told her instead that the baby, nine pounds two ounces, was Jennifer Patricia. “What happened to Marie Curie?” she asked.

“Jennifer, after the midwife,” Bee said. “She was amazing. She held my hand while I was pushing. If only you could have been there to hold my other hand! Jennifer is a good name, look at her. Doesn’t she look like a Jenny to you?”

“Of course she does,” Pat said, again overwhelmed with tenderness and love.

Bee and Jenny came home from the hospital. Pat drove and Bee sat in the passenger seat, with both babies in carry cots wedged into the back seat. “We may need a bigger car,” Pat said when they got home and levered the carry cots out. Her incision barely hurt now, though at first she had been almost incapacitated by it.

It was hard having two babies on different schedules. They both fed both babies indiscriminately—their plan to each feed their own didn’t outlast Jenny’s first day at home when Pat automatically put her to her breast while Bee was sleeping exhaustedly. Neither of them ever had enough sleep. “We should have scheduled this better,” Bee said, getting out of bed in the middle of the night as one crying baby woke the other.

“It’s terrible,” Pat agreed. “But it’s also wonderful.”

Bee laughed and padded off, coming back with a baby under each arm. “Flossie’s getting heavy,” she said.

“And Jenny always was heavy,” Pat agreed.

Bee finished her book on plant viruses, and Pat corrected the copyedits and proofs of her Naples book. Their house grew messy around the edges. Washing piled up and floors went unswept. Bee arranged for the summer gardeners to come every week and save the garden from neglect. Denmark and Greece joined the European Economic Community. A computer beat a man at chess, and they saw their friend Alan Turing sounding shyly confident about it on the BBC.

Bee began lecturing again after Christmas. Pat found it terribly hard at first to be home with both babies. They worked out a routine where when Bee came in she spent an hour and a half with the babies upstairs while Pat had a rest and made dinner uninterrupted. She loved the babies, but she looked forward desperately to this break, in which she often just read quietly. That and the very early mornings with Bee were her favorite times of day. The babies always woke when the cock crowed and were fed, but they both readily went back to sleep after that dawn feed. Pat and Bee would lie awake and talk, or make love, or just cuddle together quietly until it was time for Bee to go to work.

Cambridge was not a town friendly to babies. There were few parks and no indoor playgrounds. Besides, Harston was six miles outside the city, and Bee needed the car to go to work. If Pat and the babies went in with her they were stuck there for the whole day, or they had to take a long slow bus ride home. This was exacerbated by how difficult it was to do anything with the babies—cafes and restaurants frowned on them, and even the librarians looked disapproving when Pat wheeled the double pram in. Most of their friends had no children, and while they were delighted to fuss over the babies when they had time, they worked during the day. More and more she stayed at home, looking after the babies and working whenever naps coincided. They dropped out of choir, and she made only a few birding expeditions that spring. They could seldom make parties, and Pat felt her horizons shrinking. At the same time she was overwhelmed with things that needed doing. She made endless lists and checked things off on them. One day Bee picked up a list and started laughing. “The first item on this list is ‘Make list’!”

Pat’s editor at Constable wanted her to write about Athens, but she turned him down and counter-proposed doing three new books about Rome—one on visiting ancient Rome, one on Renaissance Rome, and one on modern Rome. He agreed enthusiastically, and suggested color photographs. She told him how happy she had been with Michael’s work, and he arranged for Michael to go out to Italy again that summer.

At the end of term Pat and Bee packed up their new larger car for the long trip across Europe with the babies. They had not been further with them before than Pat’s mother’s house at Twickenham. They had to stop frequently, and the nights in
pensiones
on the way were appalling, as neither child would settle to sleep. What surprised them was how once they crossed into Mediterranean France, suddenly everyone was tolerant and delighted, nothing was too much trouble. A waiter at a cafe in Dijon carried their thermos and blankets to the car for them. A maid at the
pensione
sang to the babies in French, and soothed them into amazed peace. As soon as they were over the Alps the proprietor of a restaurant where they had stopped before made some special baby pasta for Flossie, which she ate with more enthusiasm than she had ever yet shown for anything but breast milk. “Bella piccola Firenza,” he said, enthusiastically, when she threw some on the stone floor. After Cambridge, where nothing and nobody catered for babies, this stunned both women.

“We should live here year round,” Pat said, after a neighbor they had never seen before came around with eggs “for the babies” and cooed over Jenny.

“If I didn’t have to work,” Bee said.

“There’s a university here…”

“I don’t speak Italian well enough, and they probably don’t have anything in my field. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to look.” She looked around at the garden. “We really could get a cow. If we needed to be self-sufficient, if civilization collapsed, we’d be better off here.”

“Do you think it might?” Pat asked. “I mean with the new European alliance everything seems a bit more stable?”

“It doesn’t stop the Americans and the Russians glaring at each other above our heads,” Bee said. “No, Flossie, don’t eat that!”

The children were much too young to appreciate Florence, apart from the food, which they appreciated with gusto. “I was the same when I first went to Italy,” Pat said, watching Jenny guzzling zucchini flowers.

When Michael came, he stayed in Florence for a few days, then despite the inconvenience and the expense, every day for a week he and Pat went to and fro to Rome on the train and worked hard at photographing what she wanted for all three new books. “I’ll do the Ancient and Renaissance books first, and then the modern one after next summer, because that’s the one that’ll need most checking.”

“I don’t know how you manage at home on your own,” Bee said when they came back on the third day. “Even here, where we can walk into town and everyone fusses over them, it’s driving me mad.”

“Do you want me to take a day off and stay tomorrow?” Pat asked.

“No, get it done and out of the way while Michael’s here.”

Michael was shy with the babies, in a way they had already seen with some of their Cambridge friends. Flossie was already saying words, and Jenny was babbling syllables. It took Michael a week to join in and behave naturally with them. “Do you think they look like him?” Bee asked in one of their early morning conversations.

“Jenny’s ears are just like his. And Flossie has his feet and hands.”

“I’ve noticed that too,” Bee said. “It’s strange how it does and doesn’t matter.”

“Because they’re ours,” Pat said, and kissed her.

Sometime that summer as Flossie’s words grew more distinct, “Jenny” became “Jinny” to all of them. As Flossie was sometimes Florrie-Bee, Jenny was Jinny-Pat. These were their special in-family-only nicknames.

Pat took them into the Baptistery and held them up to see the gold ceiling, which they pointed at excitedly. She wished she could have them baptized there, but she wasn’t going to make any promises to bring them up in the faith. Nevertheless, she thanked God for them, there, and in the Duomo, and in San Lorenzo, and indeed several times every day whenever she thought of it. She went alone to the Uffizi—churches were different, but they really were too young for an art gallery—and stood before Botticelli’s
Madonna of the Magnificat
and thought about Mary, the Annunciation, and how differently she felt about all that now that she had a baby. Before, her attention had mostly been on Botticelli’s angels. Now she concentrated on the mother and baby. The smile really did remind her of Bee. She bought a good copy of it in the gift shop.

Bee talked to Sara about the prospects of teaching and researching in Florence, and reluctantly gave up the idea. “The whole way academia is organized here is crazy,” Sara said.

The drive back home through Europe felt even more epic an adventure than driving down had been. As they went north Pat felt sad, as she always did leaving Italy. “It’s not just the food and the art and that it has given me a way of making a living,” she said. She was sitting on the back seat with the babies while Bee drove. “And it’s not just that everyone loves children, which English people really don’t. There really is something about it.”