My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “It could be a while. But now you’re here maybe if you want I can get them to send me to the Addison in Cambridge, which is just as good.” Bee bit her lip. “I didn’t know if they’d let you in. We told them Michael was—”

  “I know. It was a good idea. Michael told them I’m his sister. If you move you to Cambridge we can tell them I’m your sister.”

  “Hate having to lie,” Bee said. “It isn’t illegal, for women.”

  “No, but no point getting into trouble. The children. I had a hard time bringing Jinny into the country. She was very good, she said just the right thing.”

  “How are they?” Bee asked, and her face crumpled.

  “They’re wonderful. We came back on the train and they were all three really good. They’re longing to see you, but there’s no hope of getting them in here.”

  “You do still—I mean, I’m going to be useless. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to work. I don’t want—”

  “Bee, you wouldn’t be useless even if you were just a head in a jar,” Pat said. “And I still want you. I wish this hadn’t happened because it’s a horrible thing to happen to you, but I love you as much as ever, more than ever.”

  “I’ll ask about the move to the Addison, then,” Bee said. “I think—it could be months before I’m out. And at the moment it’s all bedpans, and it might always be bedpans.”

  “I can cope,” Pat said. “If it has to be bedpans, you’re worth it.”

  Then a bell rang for the end of visiting time, and she had to leave.

  20

  “It’ll Change Everything”: Trish 1973–1977

  George took his O Levels in the summer of 1973 and passed everything with flying colors—seven As and two Bs, far better marks than Doug or Helen had ever brought home. He elected to do sciences at A Level—Maths, Physics and Chemistry. “I want to do space science, Mum,” he said. Tricia remembered his enthusiasm for the moon landing and smiled.

  “You still want to be an astronaut?”

  George blushed. “Not an astronaut. A scientist who works in space. They have Hope Station now, and they’re starting to set up the moonbase. That’s the most likely way for me to get up there.”

  “Whatever makes you happy,” Tricia said.

  Tricia didn’t understand her children. She never had. Doug was a minor but significant pop star. Goliath was in the process of breaking up—they kept getting back together and then breaking up again, as Doug’s relationship with Sue went through the same process. Doug was working on an album with Peter Gabriel. Helen drifted from casual job to casual job, and from boyfriend to boyfriend. She was nineteen and the beauty she had had as a child had flowered into something so lovely that Tricia was almost afraid for her. Helen’s face and figure were perfect, and she knew it. She talked from time to time about modeling or acting, which Tricia encouraged, because it would have been a way for her to become independent, but in the end she always accepted another job waitressing or in a bar. Now George was going into science with a goal of space. Only Cathy seemed like an ordinary adolescent—at nearly fourteen she worried about schoolwork and boys. Cathy always craved approval. Tricia blamed Mark, who had never taken much notice of her, and still did not, even now when she was the only one of the children who seemed to care about him.

  Her mother was still at home, still with Marge coming in every day to look after her while Tricia was at work. She was deteriorating visibly—fearful and afraid of anyone new, any change. She forgot even ordinary words and would spit out accusations if anything went wrong. Tricia was horrified how judgemental and unkind her mother could become at those times, though she tried to put herself into her place and understand that really she was afraid. She liked her routine, and slept a great deal of the time.

  Tricia was working full time in the Grammar School in Morecambe, which was due to become comprehensive and merge with the local secondary modern school next year. She was also teaching two evening classes, working with the two local preservation societies and with CND, which was contemplating changing its name to the Campaign for Peace, as nuclear disarmament seemed like a won battle. Her life was busy and fulfilling. Her house was always full of friends—the children’s friends, her friends from the campaigns or from classes, people she knew who were thinking of starting a whole food co-op and cafe in town, friends from the women’s group, and colleagues. People were always popping in for a moment and staying for hours. It sometimes made it difficult for her to get marking done—she started getting up early to do marking before school rather than counting on doing it in the evenings. She didn’t miss Mark at all, indeed she felt relieved of a weight since he had left. Although he was still at the university she seldom saw him. He came almost every Sunday to take George and Cathy out for lunch and was punctilious about informing her if he wasn’t going to be able to do that.

  With all this new bustle and press of things in her life came a new name. It came first from the women’s group, where almost all the women used shortened forms of their names as part of their reimagination of themselves. “But Tricia is already a shortening,” she said, when Barb said something. “It’s Patricia really.”

  “You should be Trish,” Barb said.

  Tricia thought about it and decided she liked it, and soon she was Trish to everyone except Mark, who continued to call her Tricia, and her mother, who still called her Patsy when she recognized her.

  That summer, 1974, Doug paid for the whole family to have a holiday in Majorca. Trish didn’t like the heat or the hotel, which was full of other British holidaymakers. She worried about her mother, who was spending the fortnight in a nursing home in Morecambe. She didn’t like the oily food or the flies on the beach, and wished they’d gone to Cornwall instead. To her astonishment, in the second week she ran into Marjorie from Oxford, whom she had not seen since her wedding. Marjorie was married and had twins. They caught up, but found they no longer had much in common, if they ever had. When Doug joined them for a few days at the end she found the reactions of the other holidaymakers to his fame uncomfortable. Marjorie could hardly believe that Trish had a son who was a pop star and became tongue-tied in his presence. Sue wasn’t with him, and when Trish asked him he said that they’d broken up permanently this time and Goliath was over.

  Just after the New Year of 1975 Helen came in late one night from a night out with a boyfriend while Trish was washing coffee cups after a meeting of the Lancaster Preservation Society.

  “Hi Mum,” Helen said. “Have a nice evening?”

  “Very successful. We think they’re going to go ahead with the one-way system and the pedestrianized zone. There won’t be any cars in the middle of town except handicapped and emergency vehicles.”

  “Great,” Helen said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

  “Shall I put the kettle on?” Trish asked.

  “Thanks, Mum.” Trish put the kettle on and dried her old brown teapot. “Could we have peppermint?”

  “Is your stomach upset?” Trish asked, putting peppermint teabags into the pot.

  “A little bit … Mum?”

  “Yes?” Trish put two mugs on the table.

  “How did you know you were pregnant?”

  Trish sat down and stared at her daughter. “I knew when I skipped a period. But before that I felt sick, almost from the beginning, and my breasts were tender. That was the sign with all my pregnancies. Why are you asking?”

  The kettle shrilled and she automatically turned to pour boiling water into the pot. When she turned back, Helen still hadn’t spoken.

  “What do you want to do?” Trish asked. “Do you know who the father is?”

  “Not for sure,” Helen said, looking down at her empty mug. “It could be Martin, or it could be Phil.”

  “You’re not planning to get married then?”

  Helen shook her head. “Absolutely not. I thought I was safe because I was on the pill, but then I had those antibiotics for my throat around the time of Cathy’s birthday, r
emember? And Gaynor says those could have stopped it working. I’ve missed two periods, and my breasts are sore, and I never feel like eating anything.”

  “Then you should go to the doctor and find out for sure,” Trish said. “It does sound as if you’re pregnant though. Do you want to have it?”

  “It’ll spoil everything,” Helen said, and began to cry.

  Trish poured out the tea. “Well, babies are people. I didn’t understand that for a long time, but it’s true. If you have this baby it’ll certainly change everything. But you do have a choice.” Trish knew all about this from the women’s group. “Abortion is legal now. If you go to the doctor and tell her you really can’t face going through with it, as a single mother, and you’re so young, very likely you’d be able to have a termination at the Infirmary. You’d have to have counseling, but they’d do it. Two periods—eight or ten weeks? It should be quite simple.”

  “I don’t know if I could kill it, though,” Helen said, putting both her hands around her mug for warmth. “Babies are people, and if you’d done that we wouldn’t be here. I’d like to have a baby. And doesn’t having an abortion mess you up so you can’t have babies later, when you want to?”

  “No,” Trish said, firmly, taking a sip of her own tea. “That’s a myth.”

  “Even so. I’d like to have it, but I don’t know how I could.” Helen looked up at her.

  “You can keep on living here and have it, and I’ll help as much as I can, but I’m not going to stop working and take charge of it for you so you can keep on living your life the way you do now,” Trish said. “I’ll help out financially as much as I can, but you know I don’t have all that much money. Gran might be prepared to help too—well, you know she won’t understand, but I think we could use some of her money to help and she would want to do that if she could understand. We can probably manage. But it will be a struggle, and your life is going to have to change a lot. Is that really what you want? It’s a lot of work having a baby. I found it overwhelming when I had Doug.”

  “But I won’t have to put up with Dad as well,” Helen said.

  “You’ll have to tell your father he’s going to be a grandfather, if he is. If you decide to have it. Oh my goodness, I’m going to be a grandmother!” Trish got up and hugged Helen. “I have to say that’s a very exciting thought.”

  “Thank you, Mum,” Helen said, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Thank you for being so helpful, and thank you for saying that.”

  In April, George took the Oxbridge entrance exams, and in June he took his A Levels. He got his three As and was duly accepted into New College Cambridge. “I did think of Oxford because of you and Dad, but this is the best place for what I want to work on,” he said.

  In mid-August Helen had her baby, a girl. She gave birth easily, in six hours, without any of the complications Trish had gone through. Trish was with her the whole time. She called the baby Tamsin. “Why did you pick that name?” she asked, after they filled out the birth certificate, with the blank for “father” marked defiantly “unknown.”

  “I thought it was pretty,” Helen said.

  “It is pretty,” Trish agreed. “And so is the baby, she looks just like you.”

  “I’d rather she was clever like you and George,” Helen said. “Pretty doesn’t get you anywhere.”

  Tamsin came home and thrived. Her great-grandmother held her and sang old lullabies to her, though they didn’t leave her alone with the baby. Trish, coming home one day after school, heard Helen and Marge laughing downstairs with her mother. The washing machine was spinning down there too, and she thought how much easier it was for Helen being home with Tamsin than it had been for her in Grantham with Doug.

  George came home at Christmas and Easter, but spent the summer of 1976 at MIT in Boston on a work/study program. “I think I’ll do my Ph.D. there,” he said when Trish asked him how he liked it. “Space is American now, whether we like it or not. And we’re America’s allies, even if they do think we’re all pinkos.”

  “Pinkos!” Trish said. “What an old-fashioned word!”

  “I heard people over there using it about the proponents of the new state health system. But it passed, so I don’t suppose they meant anything all that bad.” George laughed. “After Cambridge where they think my accent’s awfully northern it was funny to be in America where they all think it’s cute! And they all kept asking me if I’d met Prince Charles and Princess Camilla—for Republicans they’re awfully keen on hearing about our royalty!”

  One Sunday late that summer Trish had a picnic in the garden with a lot of friends. Tamsin was toddling around from one person to another, holding on to legs indiscriminately. Trish had made a huge salad and Helen had made bread and other people had brought other things to share. She was practically a vegetarian now, as were many of her friends, but one of the younger men from the peace group had brought a cold roast chicken and carved it neatly with Trish’s mother’s antique carving knife and fork. “I think Gran might like to see that,” Cathy said.

  “No, she doesn’t like new people,” Helen replied, before Trish could say anything.

  “I’ll go and take her some chicken and tell her about it,” Cathy said.

  When Cathy came back she seemed subdued. “Is Gran all right?” Trish asked.

  “Yes,” Cathy said. “She’s sitting in the sun by the window. She was pretending to read, but she had the book upside down. She liked the chicken. But she said the strangest thing. She said she couldn’t remember who I was, but she did remember that she loved me.”

  “Oh Cathy!” Trish hugged her.

  Trish’s mother caught a bad chill that autumn and never really recovered. Doug and George both came home at Christmas and saw her for the last time. She didn’t know them. By that time she wasn’t sure of anyone. Her days of singing with Tamsin were over, she was afraid all the time. She was incontinent and wept at everything, plucking at her blankets and her clothes as if she wanted to tear them off but did not have the strength. She had gone beyond knowing she loved people and was afraid of all of them. It broke Trish’s heart when her mother cowered away from her, or fought against her. The doctor suggested that she should go into a hospice, and Trish agreed, but before a place opened up she died, in February of 1977, and was cremated. Doug and George came home for the funeral. But on the day in April it was just the girls and Trish who dug her ashes into the garden. Cathy planted rosebushes over the place.

  “Let’s try to remember her as she was,” Trish said, and then realized that for the children she had always been forgetful. It had been such a long slow decline. She felt exhausted to think how long. Little Tamsin was playing in the dirt, and Trish knew that one day even she, the youngest of them, would die and somebody as yet unborn would mourn. She hoped she wouldn’t go through what her great-grandmother had—she hoped none of them would.

  That summer Cathy took her A Levels and passed them, doing respectably but not as brilliantly as George. “It seems to me that not having their father at home is better for children’s education,” Trish said to Barb. Cathy went off to Bristol to study history. Trish drove her down with all her books and clothes filling the Beetle. Helen held two-year-old Tamsin up to wave as they went.

  “All the rest of us are making our own way,” Cathy said as she settled back into the seat.

  “Helen’s doing all right,” Trish said, stung. “But of course I’m very proud of you, darling.”

  21

  Better to Risk Falling: Pat 1971

  Even after the initial shock was over, everything continued to be awful. It wasn’t just Bee’s injuries, though they were terrible enough. She had lost both legs above the knee—on the left two inches above and on the right four inches. It was the constant grind of lying to be able to see Bee, and coping with all of the children. There were still four weeks of the summer holidays left before the children went back to school, and she had nobody to leave them with even for a moment. Pat was used to being at home w
ith the children, but she was used to Bee coming in and giving her a break. Beyond that she had to cope with trying to see Bee, and the children’s constant desire to see Bee. No hospital would allow children to visit. Things were further exacerbated by the fact that either Bee’s elderly mother or her brother Donald was her next of kin, and Pat was not allowed to make any decisions for her. Even when Bee was moved to Cambridge it was difficult for Pat to visit. She drafted all her friends to watch the children while she saw Bee.

  Once the operations were over she thought Bee would be able to come home, but first the house had to be made ready for her. Everything took forever and cost money. The healthcare itself was still free, thank goodness. The government was talking about privatizing the NHS and replacing it with an insurance based system, but this had not yet happened. There was even a government award to Bee for her injuries and loss of earnings—as she insisted she would be able to work and New College agreed that she would, this was for six months’ salary. It paid for the stairlift that was essential for Bee to be able to get upstairs, and for the extra wheelchair that they would have to keep up there for her. Pat had to pay to have the doors widened to wheelchair width, and for a downstairs bathroom big enough for a wheelchair. Having the work done meant workmen constantly underfoot, as well as holes into which Philip fell and the girls poked. Pat sold the Mini and bought a new station wagon, the only car large enough to fit a wheelchair as well as the five of them. At the end of this her finances were considerably depleted, and she began to worry that she had not done the research for the Bologna book.

  She had to keep paying the students whom she had hastily retained to look after the garden, the hens, and the bees. Bee had usually done it all herself with help from the children, and Pat didn’t know where to start. From feeling comfortably well off, she felt as if money was draining away and she didn’t know how it would be replenished.

  It was November before Bee came home, delivered by ambulance. A young female social worker had been to inspect the house beforehand. She approved the doorways and the bathroom and the ramp down into the garden and into the garage. She was pleased with the stairlift, but horrified when she saw the double bed in Pat and Bee’s bedroom. Too late, Pat realized she should have dissembled. There were four bedrooms—the girls shared one, and she should have pretended that she slept in what was the guest room. She remembered that meeting Marjorie had spoken at so long ago, and the way people would ignore things if not brought to their attention. She decided to brazen it out.