by Jo Walton
“Nonsense. I thought you’d be pleased. You always hated Woking. And far from what? We’ll all be there.”
“I am pleased,” Tricia said. She could not say far from her friends or her volunteer work, because he did not know about that. “But it’s a long way from my mother. You know she’s been getting—”
“She’s nothing but an old nuisance,” Mark said. “You baby her. You baby everyone.”
“If the time comes when she can’t cope on her own, we’ll have to have her with us. In Lancaster if that’s where we are.”
“And what about my parents?”
Mark’s parents were well and strong and continued to look down their noses at Tricia. “If they needed it, we’d have them too, obviously,” she said.
“Well that’s not the case now,” Mark snapped. “Lancaster. A real job for me. Try to like it.” He stormed out of the room.
Tricia was shaking. She needed to know when they’d be going, and whether he’d thought about schools for the children. She could get Helen to ask him about that. Lancaster. She remembered the station very well, Baronial style, a Victorian castle, and the little train to Barrow-in-Furness, and the kindness she had found there. People in the North were kind. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe she’d be able to find a proper job there.
13
“If the World’s Still Here”: Pat 1962–1963
They did not have to wait until they came back from Italy to find somebody. Constable planned to do new updated editions of the Florence and Venice books, this time daringly with color photographs. They sent a young photographer out to Italy to take the pictures. His name was Michael Jacobs, and he was just beginning to make a name for himself. He saw this job as an opportunity to become better known and get more magazine work; and also, as he said, to have the chance to take photographs of some beautiful things. It was his first time out of England. He stayed in their house in Florence. He was the first overnight guest they had had, and they had to buy a pillow for him. Pat liked him, liked what he did with the camera, and liked his enthusiasm for Florence, and for Venice when they went there. He lay flat on the cobbles to take a photograph of St. Mark’s, heedless of the damage to his clothes. He was also entirely understanding about their relationship—he treated Pat and Bee as a couple, without being either embarrassed about it, or trying, as people so often did, to make one of them into the man and the other into the woman.
In the Pitti Palace, trying to find a good angle to photograph the fresco of Lorenzo de Medici welcoming the exiled muses to Florence, he suddenly turned to Pat with tears in his eyes. “It makes you realize they were just people, people who were excited about art and making things and sharing it with other people who cared about it.”
“Yes,” Pat said, gesturing at the next fresco, Lorenzo pointing out the young Michelangelo. “I always call that one ‘Let’s Have a Renaissance’.”
“I wish people felt like that now,” Michael said. “I mean it’s fashionable to be cynical and jaded about everything, but when I look at the passion those Renaissance people had, that clarity of … of caring about things, I envy them.”
“That’s what I’ve always felt here,” Pat said. “That’s what first drew me to Florence in particular. It’s why I wanted to write about it, to explain that to other people. I’m not an art historian, or any kind of historian really. My degree is in English. But I came here and I responded to the beauty and I wanted to know more about it.”
Near the end of his two-week stay, Pat and Bee sat down together to discuss him. It was early in the morning, and they sat at the wrought iron table on the patio eating terrible Florentine unsalted bread with wonderful fresh mozzarella and some of Bee’s honey.
“He seems ideal in many ways,” Bee said. “My only hesitation is that he’s rather homely looking.”
“Neither of us is anything special to look at,” Pat protested.
“Exactly,” Bee countered. “I was hoping to give the babies a bit of a leg up there. But he’s intelligent and creative and he has no genetic issues—his parents are alive, and his grandparents were killed in the Blitz, which is hardly hereditary!”
Pat laughed. “I hope not!”
“He’s Jewish of course, but I don’t see that making any difference.”
“Considering the Holocaust, I think if anything it’s a good thing,” Pat said.
“So it’s just the difficulty of asking him,” Bee said.
They did find it very difficult to open the subject. They tried and failed to find good openings all day, and eventually Bee came straight out with it over dinner in Bordino’s. “We want to have babies, and we were wondering if you might help?”
Michael choked on his truffle pasta. Pat slapped him on the back. When he was recovered he looked from her to Bee. “I’m terribly flattered of course, but what are you suggesting?”
“Because of the way biology is arranged, we can’t give each other babies, but we want to have children,” Pat said. “We need a man who will cooperate with that and not make a fuss afterwards. And we’d like it to be one man, so they can be real siblings.”
He took a long draft of red wine. “What would my role be? Just a sperm donor?”
“Well, we hope you’ll continue to be our friend, which means you could be a kind of uncle to the babies. But we’d be the parents,” Bee said firmly.
The waiter came by to take their pasta plates and they were all silent for a moment. “I don’t know how to put this,” Michael said. “But have you ever—” he trailed off.
“I have, Pat hasn’t,” Bee said. “Look, it’s perfectly all right if you don’t want to. We can find somebody. I know we’re a lot older than you are, and it’s a strange kind of relationship to enter into. But we both like you. If you want to think about it, or if you just want to turn us down, no hard feelings.”
“I do want to think about it, it’s a lot to take in,” Michael said. “Would you be able to manage—I mean, financially?”
“Yes,” Pat said. “We’ve thought that all through, don’t worry. We wouldn’t be asking anything from you except a bit of time.”
“And genetic material,” Bee added.
Michael laughed nervously. “This is the strangest proposition anyone has ever put to me.”
They finished their dinner, and the bottle of wine Michael and Bee had split between them, and went home, still discussing it.
Back in the house, the three of them went into the bedroom where Pat and Bee always slept, the shutters latched for privacy but the window open to catch the breeze. “It might not work the first time,” Bee warned. “Sometimes people try for years.”
“I could come down to Cambridge if necessary,” Michael offered, taking off his socks.
“We hope you’ll come down to visit in any case,” Pat said. “We’ll want to see all the pictures, not just the ones they end up using in the book.”
In bed it was strange and awkward having a third person present. Pat felt shy and uncertain.
“I don’t know if I can manage it with both of you tonight,” Michael said, embarrassed.
“You should try first,” Bee said to Pat, putting her hand on her arm. “I should really wait until November or December so I could have the baby in the Long Vacation.”
“You’re talking as if it’s entirely under control and works every time,” Pat said.
“It’s strange, but I feel like that even though I know better.” Bee laughed. “Well, we’re both in the middle of our cycle. There’s a good chance.”
“Will I bleed?” Pat asked.
“Maybe,” Bee said. “But maybe not, you’ve been stretched slowly over a long time when we’ve made love.”
“This is just so weird! It’s the strangest thing I have ever done,” Michael said. “It’s very nice of you to ask me, but I want you to remember that I find this extremely peculiar.”
Michael’s hands were rougher than Bee’s hands, but Bee was there as well. Michael’s penis felt strange,
and she would have liked to have examined it better—she hadn’t seen one since she had been a small child on the beach and bathing with her brother. It felt like a little animal, damp-nosed and snub. The sensation of having it inside her was peculiar but not unpleasant, but quite different from fingers. Michael’s weight on top of her as he rocked to and fro was the least familiar thing. She was so glad that Bee was there too.
She felt wet and sticky afterwards, and did not wash immediately because she was afraid of washing out all the sperm. There was no blood.
The next day Michael went back to London. They had an arrangement for him to come and visit them in Cambridge for a weekend at the end of October.
Within a couple of weeks Pat was feeling queasy in the mornings and feeling a bloating in her breasts. “Some people really do get pregnant the very first time,” she said to Bee. She worked hard on the revisions to her books but felt almost breathless with excitement. She counted months in her head. The baby would be born in May, and Easter was late, so she should arrange to stop teaching at Christmas. She ate fresh fruit and vegetables and fish, which she found more digestible than meat. She went down to Naples and did the research for a new guide book which she planned to write in the spring after she stopped teaching but before the baby was born.
On their last day in Florence before returning to England for the new academic year, Pat again went alone to the Duomo and gave thanks. Most of the church was open to visitors, with just one small section reserved for prayer. As she got up from her knees she noticed a memorial on the wall nearby with a familiar sculpted head. It was the tomb of Marsilio Ficino, the translator of Plato, the librarian of the Laurentian Library, the tutor of Lorenzo di Medici, one of the central figures of Renaissance Florence. “If the child is a boy, I will call him after Ficino,” she vowed.
They went back to England for the new academic year. Bee had a heavy research and teaching load and was kept busy in her spare time writing papers for journals. Pat saw her doctor, an elderly man, who confirmed her pregnancy. “Do you have plans to marry, Miss Cowan?” he asked.
“No.” It took a lot of effort for Pat not to soften that negative, but she did not.
“Are you happy about the pregnancy?” the doctor went on.
Abortion was illegal, but possible, she had always known that. “Yes, I am very happy about it. This was a planned baby.”
The doctor looked at her sharply and shook his head. “Then we’ll be wanting to make monthly appointments with the midwife and to decide on a hospital for the birth. I recommend the Mill Road Maternity Hospital. May, you say? I’ll also give you a diet sheet. And you’ll want to start ante-natal classes in a month or so. Meanwhile, try to get enough exercise—swimming is good.”
She saw the headmistress and gave her notice for after Christmas. “If you ever want to come back we’d be happy to have you,” the headmistress said. “We’d have strongly encouraged you to apply for the Head of Department post next year when Miss Martin retires.”
At the end of October, Michael came down as arranged. “I told my mother I was going to photograph Cambridge in the hope of a newspaper assignment, so I’ve brought my cameras,” he said.
“Not the best time of year for the garden,” Bee said. There was an icy wind blowing, stripping the leaves from the silver birch and the willow that stood at the sides of their gate.
“Nor politically,” he said.
“Politically?” Pat asked. She hadn’t been paying any attention to the news. What was going on inside her seemed so absorbing it was the most she could do to keep up with marking. Besides, the copyedits on the new editions had arrived the week before, and she had been swamped.
“The Americans and the Russians, over Cuba,” Michael explained, when he saw that she really didn’t know what he meant. “I thought the whole world was on the edge of their seats about that.”
“It’s just saber-rattling,” Bee said. “They’ll back down, surely.”
“It’s a dangerous world to be having a baby in,” Pat said, hugging her stomach.
Michael looked at her. “You really are having a baby then?”
“I really am.”
He insisted on watching the news that night. Everything seemed terrible. It was a relief to go to bed, even to a fraught bed that had Michael making love to Bee. Pat felt unnecessary and uncomfortable, but stayed, because she remembered what a comfort it had been to her to have Bee there. Afterwards, Michael went to sleep in the spare room and Pat and Bee curled up together as they did every night. “Imagine them growing up together,” Bee whispered, her hand on Pat’s belly where she had just begun to feel the baby moving.
“If the Russians and Americans leave us a world for them to grow up in,” Pat said.
The next morning it appeared that they would not. There had been what the BBC called “a limited nuclear exchange” in the night. Kennedy and Khruschev were reported to be talking.
“Oh, now they’re talking!” Bee said. “What was wrong with talking yesterday before all those people were killed?”
Pat found it hard to take in. The Russians had bombed Miami from their Cuban bases and the Americans had retaliated with a strike on Kiev, from a base in Turkey. “What does it mean?” Pat asked.
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Fallout. Radiation poisoning. And maybe it will be the all-out Armageddon we’ve all been expecting. It can’t be over. I should go back to my parents.”
“Thank you for coming. If the world’s still here, we’ll let you know whether we’d like you to come down next month. And of course, you’d be welcome to visit at any time just to visit.” Pat hugged him.
Bee drove Michael back to the station and Pat washed dishes in the kitchen, listening to the radio. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead in Miami, but the fallout seemed to be carried out into the Atlantic rather than polluting the rest of the US. She wasn’t sure where Miami was, so she looked it up on an old Penguin atlas of Bee’s. Florida. On the coast. Quite near Cuba, really. Britain was in a state of preparedness for war, the BBC announced. In the event of a nuclear attack, citizens should take shelter. Where, Pat wondered, in the cellar? She remembered the bomb shelters in the war. The world was so beautiful and so fragile. They really shouldn’t risk it this way.
When she thought of bombs falling it wasn’t Kiev or Miami she saw, or even Cambridge, but Florence. Sharp hot tears burned in her eyes as she thought of Florence vanished in a flash, or, almost worse, full of deadly radiation and empty of people, all the art crumbling and neglected. Cellini’s Perseus would last if it was anything but a direct hit, and Michelangelo’s David. Marble and bronze survived, but would anybody ever look at them again and understand what they were? She so much wanted to show Florence to her baby, and to Bee’s baby, and to future generations.
Then suddenly she was afraid for her baby. Was deadly radiation already filtering down through the bright sky? When she came back Bee could dispel that fear at least. “It would be days before it reached us. And depending on the weather it might never reach us. Stop crying, what good does that do?” Bee took her in her arms and rocked her.
“It’s the hormones,” Pat said, sniffing. “I thought of Florence—”
“I keep thinking of all those people in Miami and Kiev. So many people. Like the Blitz ten times over and all at once. Men! You’d think Hiroshima would have been enough to let anyone know how terrible a weapon it is. How could they have used it? How could they?”
At six o’clock it was announced that Khruschev and Kennedy had bowed to the Secretary General of the United Nations and would make peace. The Russians would withdraw their missiles from Cuba, and the Americans from Turkey. They regretted the loss of life.
“Regretted!” Bee snorted.
Kennedy’s recorded image addressed them from the screen, looking tear-stained and broken, ten years older than when she had last seen him. “He looks guilty enough,” Pat said.
“For what good that does.”
“The world has come to the brink of destruction,” Kennedy said. “We have stepped back from the abyss.”
“Can the world just go back to normal, after that?” Pat asked. “I mean, is it possible? People always talked about The Bomb, with capital letters, as if dropping one meant dropping them all. Doomsday.”
It was surprising how quickly it could go back to normal. The Cuban Exchange was soon just another incident. But Pat never again became completely absorbed in herself and her family. She kept listening to the radio and watching the news on TV. She and Bee began to go again to anti-war demonstrations. She stopped teaching at Christmas, and Michael visited again, as Bee had not become pregnant. This time it worked. Pat began to write her Naples book. Whenever she thought about Pompeii it seemed like a metaphor for the modern world, people unwittingly living their lives next to an active volcano.
In May Pat went into labor. Her mother came to be with her, vague but full of stories about childbirth and babies. She kept asking who the father was and where he was, and forgetting that she had asked, and asking again. Pat wished Bee could be there, but Bee, herself five months pregnant, had no standing to be at the birth. After six hours the doctor insisted that she needed a caesarean section. “Giving birth vaginally could kill you and the baby,” he said sternly.
When Pat came around after the anaesthetic wore off, she had a huge incision across her belly. She was in a ward full of women. There was a button on the table beside her. She pressed it, and after a while a nurse came. “Where’s my baby?” she asked, her voice cracking. The nurse held a glass of water to her lips, and Pat gulped it gratefully. Then the nurse went to inquire, and at last came back wheeling a bassinet containing a sleeping baby tinier than Pat had ever imagined a baby could be, with a screwed-up face and a shock of black hair. “Isn’t she beautiful?” cooed the nurse, lifting her out, still asleep and wrapped in a blanket.
“She’s so tiny!”
“Seven pounds, perfectly average,” the nurse said, settling her on Pat’s breasts. Pat put her arm around her, wincing a little as she felt the stitches pulling. She looked down into the little face, and loved her immediately and without reservation.