My Real Children (17 page)

The epic car journeys became a feature of their lives, and at length they all blurred together—the one where Jinny nearly fell off the cross-Channel ferry, the one where Pat nearly fell asleep on an Alpine road and forgot what side to drive on and almost hit a lorry, the one where Flossie refused to stop speaking Italian, the one where Bee went off to pee on an Alp and found a gentian, the one where Pat was pregnant and kept having to stop to be sick and the children found it hilarious. Pat wrote the three Roman books, then a guide to Siena and the small towns of Tuscany. Bee’s book on plant diseases was republished in America. Spain and Portugal joined the European Economic Community, and elections were held for the new European parliament. President Rockefeller visited China and was given a panda. Bee and the children shared a great longing to see the panda and Pat teased them all about it. They bought toy pandas for both girls for Christmas.

In November of 1966 there was a flood in Florence, killing six people and damaging some property. Fortunately the weather computers had predicted it well in advance, so most people had evacuated and most works of art were moved to safety. Some frescos were damaged. Pat wrote articles about their restoration and sat on a committee to raise money for it.

In January of 1967, when the girls were four and three and a half and Pat was seven months pregnant, she had to go to London to meet her editor for a meeting about the Tuscany book. It all went well, and the editor agreed to use a picture of her that Michael had taken, with her head and shoulders against the stairs of the Bargello. (Pat’s favorite of Michael’s photographs was one of Bee sitting in the garden with both babies on their first summer in Florence. She had an enlargement of that in a silver frame on the mantelpiece in Cambridge. She had the
Madonna of the Magnificat
in a matching frame next to it.) As she made her way out of the lift into the lobby of the Constable offices, she was astonished to run into Mark.

Mark looked older and a little less prosperous than Pat remembered him. His hair was receding and graying, and while his clothing style was still academic dinginess, it suited him less. To her astonishment he didn’t seem to notice her at all. He just walked past towards the lift.

“Mark!” she said. “How are you?”

He paused, looked at her, and blinked. She realized that he really hadn’t recognized her. “Patty!” he said. “My goodness.”

“Are Constable your publishers too?” she asked.

“They’re bringing out a book of mine on philosophy, yes,” he said. “Too? They’re publishing you?”

“Oh, just a series of guide books to Italy I write,” she said, and was instantly furious with herself for deprecating her work before Mark, of all people.

“You’re P. A. Cowan?” Mark asked. “I wondered if it could be some relation. I didn’t know you knew anything about Italy.”

“I didn’t when I knew you,” Pat said. “What are you doing now?”

“Oh, lecturing. I’m at Keele. Are you still teaching? Or—I see you’ve married.” He gestured vaguely at the obvious bulge under her good wool coat.

“I gave up teaching four years ago when I was having a baby,” Pat said, sidestepping the question. “Fortunately I could carry on with the writing.”

“Yes, very nice,” Mark said. “I have to go, I have a meeting in five minutes. Are you free afterwards? We could have some lunch or something, catch up on old times.”

Pat looked at her watch. “I have to get back to Cambridge,” she said. “I—my—it’s complicated, but I have to get back for my children.”

“Well it was nice to see you, and I’m glad you’ve found happiness.” Mark hesitated for a moment and then leaned forward and kissed her cheek before going in to the lift.

She thought about him all the way back on the train, and when Bee met her at the station she told her about it immediately. They couldn’t talk about it then, because the children were in the back seat and Bee needed to get into college before her class. Pat dropped her off and then took the children home. After they were in bed, stories read and songs sung and the light turned emphatically off, she went down to pour it all out to Bee over a cup of tea.

“Once, my heart turned over whenever I saw him, and there wasn’t a shred of that left. I felt sorry for him. He had a neglected air. He didn’t say, but I’m sure he wasn’t married.”

“Chalk dust,” Bee said. “It must be horrid being at Keele when he wanted to be at Oxford. I’m bending over backwards to be fair to him, when really I hate him for abandoning you and making you sad.”

“It was me who abandoned him. He gave me the choice. And I’m sure I made the right choice. But it was so strange. I wanted to tell him about you, about us, about my life. But on the other hand I was glad I was wearing gloves so he couldn’t see that I wasn’t married even though I’m so very visibly pregnant.”

“Did you give him our address or phone number or anything?”

“No.” Pat put her free arm around Bee and snuggled close. “I didn’t think of it. And even if time hadn’t been so short with getting back before your class, I don’t think I would have had lunch with him. I don’t really want him back in my life. It was just so strange running into him like that.”

Pat’s baby was born in April, again by caesarean section, this time planned in advance. He was a boy, and she called him Philip Marsilio, as they had agreed.

16

Liberation: Tricia 1968–1972

To Tricia’s complete surprise, Doug became a minor but significant figure in the pop world. Goliath released albums and toured, and Doug, Sue and Poley were names people knew. Mark tried to ignore it, and kept saying that Doug would soon have enough of it and go to university. With the proceeds from one of his hit records, Doug bought his mother a car, a green Volkswagen Beetle, for Christmas 1968. Mark said nothing. He had given her a scarf, as usual.

Tricia saw a poster in the library asking for volunteers for adult education. “I think I’ll apply,” she said. “I could teach literature to adults.”

“It’s the most you can do to teach it to children part time,” Mark sneered. “Why do you think adults would want to listen to you? What do you have to bring them?”

She gave up the idea.

Mark was home less and less, leaving for work immediately after breakfast and seldom returning before the late evening. On weekends he was usually on campus. Now that Tricia had her own car she could accept supply teaching further away, and was working almost all the time. It was a good way to get to know the schools and the county. If she was driving past a bus stop with a mother and small child waiting, she would stop and offer them a lift. She sometimes did it when she saw a mother and child walking slowly along. She remembered all too well what it was like being stuck like that. The mothers received her offers with mixed feelings. Some accepted, some refused. Of the ones who accepted, almost all of them asked her why she was doing it, and many seemed skeptical of her answers. She became aware that her voice was a severe disadvantage to her, as it was in the classroom. She sounded Southern, posh, stuck up. She tried to change her voice, but then it just sounded unnatural.

“I sound stuck up,” she lamented to her mother.

“You sound very nice, Patsy,” her mother said. “Refined.”

“No, Gran, Mum’s right. She does sound stuck up,” Cathy said. Cathy was ten now, in her last year of junior school.

“It’s ridiculous for people to think I’m stuck up. My father mended wirelesses and my mother was a nursemaid.”

“But you went to Oxford and married Dad,” George said. “Try to talk more Lancashire. I do in school, and people like me better.”

But Tricia couldn’t deliberately change the way her voice came out of her mouth. Instead she tried to find things to talk about to them that cut across barriers. Childcare, illness and her mother’s senility worked for this, as her chilblains had long ago in Oxford.

In 1969 homosexuality and marijuana were legalized by the Labour government, and the death penalty was abolished. Mark saw the first of these as signs of the forthcoming apocalypse, but Tricia was delighted about all three. The Americans broke ground on a moonbase. Tricia watched the men walking on the lunar surface and wondered what use it was to anyone. George went briefly astronaut mad and spent his pocket money on magazines and books about space and trips to the moon.

In January of 1970 Helen turned sixteen. She took her O Levels in June and did well. Nevertheless she insisted that she was not returning to school. “I’ll get a job,” she said. When her father raved at her she threatened to move to London and stay with Doug. Helen had always been her father’s favorite, and he seemed devastated that she was abandoning his ideals, as he put it. He blamed Tricia, although she disapproved of Helen’s decision as much as he did, if more quietly.

Helen got a job in a coffee bar in town. She back-combed her hair and bought tie-dyed clothes. She looked like a hippie princess. She found boyfriends and spent a lot of time out with them. Tricia wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or horrified that she went through them so fast, and always had two or three of them ready to take her out. Tricia took her to the doctor and begged her to prescribe the pill for Helen. Tricia still took her own pill every night, though it had been a long time since Mark had brought home a bottle of wine. She thought about that as she walked back from the surgery with Helen. Perhaps Mark believed she was too old for more children? Perhaps he would leave her alone now?

Tricia worried about Doug, worried about drugs and the price of early success. She went to London, or somewhere he was playing, every few months and saw him, and he always came home for Christmas. He and Sue were as settled as a married couple, although they were not married and there was no suggestion of marriage. Mark refused to countenance the relationship, but Tricia saw no point in closing her eyes to it. Sue wasn’t what she’d have chosen for her son, but she was clearly his choice. She wrote the music for their songs and Doug wrote the lyrics.

Back at home, Tricia was working at Morecambe Grammar School for a few months as the English teacher was on maternity leave. She enjoyed teaching the same girls over a period of time, and they seemed to like her. She liked Morecambe out of season, the deserted sea front with the clacking flagpoles, the distant water, even the way the sea came in sideways over the sands. She had always loved the sea. She didn’t like the way the place was decaying. She suggested that the Lancaster Preservation Society take an interest in it, and found herself alone. You could walk from Lancaster to Morecambe in an hour, but they were worlds apart emotionally, and the people of Lancaster wanted nothing to do with it. Undeterred, Tricia started a Morecambe Preservation Society by putting up a notice in Morecambe Library announcing the first meeting and then seeing who showed up. She served as secretary for that society too.

The teacher was supposed to return from maternity leave in September, but the headmistress took Tricia aside one day and told her that she wouldn’t be coming back. “We’re going to advertise the post, of course. We have to. But if you applied we’d look very favorably on your application.” Tricia could take a hint; when the post was advertised she applied for it and was duly taken on permanently for the new academic year of 1971. At the same time she found a woman called Marge who lived nearby to come in and care for her mother in the daytime, as now she really couldn’t be left. She felt she was underpaying Marge, who was endlessly patient with the old woman.

One Saturday that autumn when she and George were at the library returning and collecting books, she spotted a new notice on the noticeboard: “Women’s Consciousness Raising Group, Thursday evening 7:30 pm, upstairs, Ring O’ Bells.” It was the same pub where CND met. Tricia showed up, uncertainly, not sure if she wanted her consciousness raised or what that really meant. What she found was a group of women like her, mostly housewives or women returned to work after children, women who had read
The Feminine Mystique
and
The Female Eunuch,
and wanted something better than the lives they were offered. Tricia tried to persuade Helen to go to the next meeting, but she rolled her eyes and said she was meeting a boyfriend that night.

Tricia’s attitude to Women’s Liberation was that it had come too late for her. It could have made a huge difference to her life if it had come along ten years before, but as it was she had mostly freed herself. She had a job and a car and the children were older. Mark had stopped bothering her for sex. But listening to these women talk she did feel that they were, as they said, sisters. They had shared experiences she had never been able to talk about with anyone before. It meant so much to be able to talk about these things. And she wanted things to be better for the next generation, for Helen and Cathy to have the chances she had not had.

At Easter 1972, Tricia, George and Cathy came back from a visit to Doug in London to find a note from Helen: “Gran in Infirmary. Please come.” Tricia rushed around to the Infirmary, which was just around the corner, close enough that they heard ambulances so often that they didn’t look up at a siren any more. “My mother,” Tricia said. “Helen Cowan?”

They directed her through the Victorian building to a newly built ward where her mother was strapped into a bed and unconscious. Helen was there looking exhausted, her hair a mess. “She fell,” Helen said. “I came home and found her. Well, I didn’t find her at once. She was downstairs. I came in late and was going to bed, but I heard something. I thought a cat had got in. I went down and she was on the floor outside her room, in a pool of pee. I didn’t know what to do. I called the doctor and they sent an ambulance. They say she’s broken her hip.”

“Have you been here since last night?” Tricia asked, hugging Helen. “How marvellous of you. I’m here now, and I’ll stay with her. You go home and get some sleep, and see that the little ones eat something if you don’t mind. Where’s Dad?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t there. Last night. It was gone eleven.” Helen flushed a little. Eleven was her curfew, which Mark had insisted on while she lived at home. “It was closer to midnight. And of course I thought he must be in bed and went to wake him. I thought he’d know what to do. I wasn’t sure whether to try to move her. She was whimpering, oh it was horrible, Mum. But Dad wasn’t there. No sign of him. I knocked, and then I opened the door, and the bed was made and empty. I looked in your room too, in case, but of course he wasn’t there.”