My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “You could go out this afternoon,” George said. “I had no idea you rowed. Did you get your blue?”

  “My college blue,” Trish said. “In those days girls couldn’t row for Oxford.” The young people were suitably horrified. “You’ve got no idea of the battles we’ve already won, especially when you’re busy looking ahead to the battles we still have to fight.”

  “That’s very true,” Sophie said as they sat down on the grass by the river. “Professor Dickinson was talking the other day about how hard it was to be a woman in science when she was starting out, and it made me realize that even though it’s hard now it’s so much easier than it was twenty years ago.”

  “And are you enthusiastic about our future in space too?” Helen asked.

  “I certainly am,” Sophie said, exchanging looks with George. “I’ve been doing some work on hydroponics that I hope will be useful for the moonbase.”

  “And are you also going to MIT?” Trish asked.

  “Harvard,” Sophie said, and blushed.

  Trish laughed. “How well you are managing your lives!”

  “Dad doesn’t think so,” George said.

  “I think he’s jealous,” Sophie said, unexpectedly.

  “Jealous?” George asked.

  “I think Sophie’s right,” Trish said, remembering. “He got a Third you know, and he was expected to do brilliantly and become a star. It took him a long time to get accepted, to get back into academia. I don’t think he has ever really got over that. You’re doing what he wanted to do. He’s bound to resent it.”

  “I wish you’d stop making excuses for him,” Helen said. She looked at Tamsin, who was running in circles above them on the slope and making plane noises. “You always try to justify him when he’s just being a shit.”

  Trish laughed nervously.

  “No, you do, Mum,” George said. “Helen’s right.”

  “I suppose I spent so many years doing it to myself that I keep on doing it,” Trish said. “I’m sorry. I know I should have been a better mother.”

  “It’s not your fault that Dad’s the way he is,” George said. “Though I must say that one of the advantages of Boston is putting an entire ocean between me and him.”

  “Did you get married directly after Oxford?” Sophie asked.

  “I taught for two years,” Trish said. “Down in Cornwall. Why, are you thinking—”

  “Not until we have our doctorates and we’re financially in a better place,” George said. “We were thinking of it before Sophie was accepted at Harvard, so she’d be able to come to America, but as things are we don’t need to rush it.”

  “Well, whenever you decide to get married I’ll be delighted to have you as a daughter-in-law,” Trish said, and shook Sophie’s hand enthusiastically. Sophie pulled her into a hug.

  “Of course, our dream would be to get married in space,” George said, then laughed at Trish’s horrified expression. “No, I know you’d want to be there.”

  “I’ll never be an astronaut,” Trish said.

  That next autumn, after George and Sophie had left for America, Trish stood herself at the council election and was narrowly defeated. “I should have come down to campaign for you,” Doug joked when she met him in London. He had released two solo albums since Goliath had broken up, neither of them very successful, but he kept on writing songs and touring. He was also working with other musicians and talked about forming a new group. He always had a new girlfriend but never anyone serious. She told him about George and Sophie and how sweet they were together. “About time old George found somebody,” he said. “I think I’ll write a song for them and call it ‘Getting Married on the Moon.’”

  Helen decided to take night classes and catch up on her education. This meant Trish cutting back on some of her own evenings to babysit Tamsin, which she did reluctantly, acknowledging the necessity for Helen to have qualifications. She dropped the Peace Group, and abandoned plans to stand for the city council again.

  One day Helen came home with a suggestion. “Why don’t we sort out the basement and let it as a flat?”

  “I’m not sure I’d want strangers living there,” Trish said. “It has its own entrance, but that’s the only way into the garden. And the washing machine is down there.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of strangers. You always know a million people, and there would always be someone you know wanting to live there. Right now Bethany and Kevin and Alestra are looking for somewhere.”

  Bethany and Kevin worked at the whole food co-op. Alestra, their daughter, was a few months younger than Tamsin. “That’s an excellent idea,” Trish said.

  She and Helen spent the next weekend cleaning the basement and painting. They spent the next rearranging furniture. They bought an electric stove and a fridge. Then Helen invited Bethany and Kevin to come and look at it. They moved in the next day.

  Although Bethany was Helen’s age, she soon became much more Trish’s friend. She was passionate about food and often cooked enough for the whole household—vegetable soups, lentil bakes, chili with beans and rice. She played the flute and composed music, and again the house had music rising from the basement as it had when Doug lived at home. Kevin was quiet. “Not much about him,” Trish said to Helen, but she put up with him for Bethany’s sake. Alestra was neither as pretty nor as lively as Tamsin, to Trish’s biased eye, but she was a nice child, and the two of them played well together. Bethany’s family paid a low rent, which helped with household expenses, but best of all Bethany and Helen traded babysitting so that Trish was free in the evenings again.

  Before Tamsin was born, Trish had made Mark’s old study into a nursery, and Helen moved into the room next to it, which had been Doug’s. Trish maintained a bedroom for each of her children, though now they were seldom all at home except at Christmas.

  That Christmas, Sophie was coming to visit. Trish drafted Kevin to help move beds. There was a double bed in her room, which she wanted put in George’s room down the corridor, while George’s old single bed would do for her. Lifting her end of the double bed she felt a sharp pain in her chest and left arm and had to sit down. “I think I’ve strained something,” she said, weakly.

  “You’ve gone a funny color,” Kevin said. “Should I call the doctor?”

  “Just make me a cup of tea,” Trish said. He obliged, and after a cup of strong tea she felt much revived. They left the bed in the corridor until Doug arrived and helped Kevin move it into George’s room.

  “You shouldn’t overdo things, Mum,” Doug said.

  They had a lovely Christmas, with a tree and presents. Bethany cooked a delicious nut roast. On Boxing Day Mark came by for a mince pie and to see the children. Trish noticed how tentative he seemed, how uncomfortable with Sophie and Bethany, how falsely hearty with Kevin. The problem with Mark, she thought, was that he wasn’t her husband any more but he couldn’t ever be a stranger. He remained hung around her neck like an albatross, father of her children.

  After Christmas she saw the doctor and told him about the pain, which had not recurred. He said she should be careful of her heart and told her to exercise more and eat less fat. She looked around for some exercise that didn’t bore her and began swimming early every Sunday morning in the Kingsway baths.

  That autumn, 1979, Trish stood again for the City Council and was that time elected. She found the work an odd mixture of boring and vitally important. More than anything it was a case of getting to know people and their concerns and organizing them—work she was extremely familiar with from being secretary to so many organizations for so long.

  Tamsin started school, and Helen went into full-time adult education. She was learning to program computers, to Trish’s complete surprise.

  Doug’s song “Getting Married on the Moon” was released in the spring of 1980 and went to number three in the British charts and number eight on the US charts, his biggest hit ever. Nobody had yet been married on the moon, though the moonbase generally had a dozen sci
entists and astronauts on it at any given time. George and Sophie were interviewed by the papers about their dream, and the song was played over and over again on the radio, so that Trish heard it everywhere she went and was tired of being asked about it. “Will your son really get married on the moon?”

  “He’d certainly like to,” became her standard reply.

  23

  Orangutan: Pat 1971–1977

  The electric wheelchair, built of lightweight space metals, was worth every penny. It was cumbersome and awkward but it gave Bee independence, especially in college. New College tried hard to be accommodating. They built ramps and installed a lift. Every year Bee had to fight the administration to have her classes scheduled in the rooms she could reach, but these were battles she always won. She went on teaching and researching where many people would have given up. “I wasn’t about to resign myself to bedpans,” she said. She designed long-handled gardening tools she could use from the wheelchair, and taught all the children to help her. She would also lower herself from the chair and work from the ground. She could move around on flat surfaces with her arms. She had first developed this technique on the bed and later extended it to the floors indoors and then at last into the garden. Pat said it was terrible for her clothes, but Bee joked that it cancelled out because of the savings on shoe leather.

  They had to give up the bees because there was no way for Bee to lift the hives and nobody else could deal with them without being stung. That was the only sacrifice.

  The first year everything was difficult, and money grew tight. “I think we may have to sell the Florentine house,” Pat said.

  “Never!” Bee said. “It would break the children’s hearts.”

  “I’d be very sad myself,” Pat said. “But the property taxes are more every year, and the value has appreciated more than I’d ever have imagined. If we sold it we could live comfortably. And I don’t know how you could manage there. You know what the plumbing’s like, and the doors are so narrow.”

  “In the gym where I do my physio they have rings hanging from the ceiling. I was thinking we could put some of those in, and I could get around that way.”

  “My orangutan,” Pat said, fondly. “But even if that worked it would be difficult. Italian workmen? If we sold the house—”

  “Are we that short of money?” Bee asked.

  “Well, I didn’t write the Bologna book. Constable are being very understanding, but they’re not going to pay me for a book I haven’t turned in. And all the work on this house has been expensive. And keeping my mother in the home. We’ll be all right, but it’s going to be tight. That money that came in for the French translation got us out of a hole, and the US royalties should come in a few weeks. But we are getting a bit hand-to-mouth.”

  “We can’t sell the Florentine house. It would be crazy.” Bee frowned. “You could go to Bologna for a week and do the research and come home and write the book?”

  “I can’t leave you!”

  “I could manage,” Bee said.

  “I’m sure you could,” Pat said, though in fact she was far from sure that Bee could. She couldn’t reach the stovetop or the kettle. Remodelling the kitchen was a plan, but they had put it off because of the expense. It was on Pat’s list of things they could do if they sold the Florentine house. “But I couldn’t manage without you. I’d be utterly miserable, even in Italy. Look what happened the last time I left you! Besides, what if that social worker comes sniffing around again?”

  The social worker kept coming back. She wanted to check on Bee’s welfare, and on the children’s welfare, or so she said. They trod carefully. Pat moved some clothes into the guest room closet and was prepared to say she slept there. The social worker did not go upstairs again, but she questioned the children, which was a worry. It had seemed charming to them for the children to call them Mum and Mamma, but now they worried and tried to train them into calling them by their first names. The girls soon got into the habit, but Philip never did.

  “They couldn’t really take the children, could they?” Pat asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bee said. “This isn’t a situation they’ll have space for on their forms.”

  At last Pat decided to put the family on a more secure financial footing by going back to teaching. Bee was back at work by then, at least part time. Their children were at the village school, an easy walk, and the girls could safely escort Philip. On days when Bee was going in, Pat drove her to New College and then went on to her own work, and at the end of the school day collected Bee and took her home. It worked out relatively smoothly. Pat’s old school had no vacancies, but there was an independent day school for girls desperate for somebody to teach English to the fifth and sixth forms. Pat had always enjoyed teaching and she enjoyed taking it up again. In addition to English she taught General Studies—which she turned into a course on Classical and Renaissance art and civilization. The pupils loved it.

  She could no longer take her mother out for lunch, but her mother had never seemed to enjoy it much. She continued her weekly visits on Sundays, generally alone as Bee preferred to save her energy for things she enjoyed, and because her mother was generally so savage to the children. Sometimes she recognised Pat, greeting her as Patsy. Other times she was sunk into a world of her own. She would confide that the nurses and the other patients stole her things. She would ask for help in escaping so that she could get home. She often wept and seemed desperate.

  Pat tried to sell her mother’s house that spring. The money would have been useful to maintain her mother in the home. They all drove down to Twickenham and cleared it out, taking carloads of things to the local charity shops. Then Pat visited an estate agent to get the house put on the market. Everything went smoothly until Pat told them that the house belonged to her mother. “Has she owned the house longer than five years?” the agent asked.

  “She’s owned it since the 1920s,” Pat said. “I think my parents bought it when they married in 1925.”

  “In that case there will be no certificate of ownership, and she will have to come in and authorize the sale herself,” the agent said.

  “She’s very old, and in a nursing home in Cambridge,” Pat explained.

  “Then she could fill out these forms and give them to you to bring back,” the agent said, producing a thick stack of forms.

  “I have the deeds for the house,” Pat said.

  “Even so, we need these forms,” the agent said.

  “My mother won’t understand them,” Pat said.

  “Well then you fill them in and just get her to sign.”

  Getting the forms signed took a struggle that lasted for weeks. Pat’s mother was in a suspicious phase and refused to sign anything. When Pat caught her on a happier day, she seemed to have forgotten how to write and sat chewing on the end of the pen. At last she did sign, but she signed them “Love from Gran” in big sprawling writing. Pat visited the solicitor who had seen to the wills she and Bee had made setting up the guardianship of the children and asked what she could do. The solicitor was unhelpful. “You could set up a power of attorney so that you could do things on her behalf, but you should have done it before, when she was well enough to agree. If this comes before the courts as things are they will appoint somebody to advocate for her who will take control of her estate—a social worker and a financial planner.”

  “But I’ve seen her will and she has left everything to me!”

  “She’s still alive,” the solicitor pointed out. “If I were you I’d leave her house alone until it’s yours to sell.”

  “I’m paying out of my own money to keep her in the home,” Pat said.

  “You could put her somewhere cheaper if you chose.” But Pat couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her mother couldn’t be said to like the home in Trumpington, but she was at least used to it by now, and any change would be worse.

  As the summer came they made preparations for Italy. “Should we drive or take the train?” Pat asked in one of the
ir early morning conversations.

  “I keep hearing about cars adapted to be driven by hand. Cars with automatic transmissions.” Bee devoured everything she could find on assisted technology for the handicapped.

  “Here?”

  “In the US,” Bee admitted.

  “Well then, if we drive I have to drive the whole distance, which will mean it will take nearly a week. And our old car is still there. Sara said she’d sell it for us, but she overestimated the demand for right-hand-drive cars in Italy.”

  “So we could drive back,” Bee said.

  “We could. The kids loved the train. There was a compartment with four beds, two on each side. I think we could manage.”

  “What was the bathroom like?”

  “Tiny … you’d never get the chair in. I could help you.”

  “I was wondering what chair to take. There’s no point taking the powered chair. The power’s different in Italy, it wouldn’t charge. And it’s so heavy to lift up and down onto trains. It might be sensible to take the folding one, which would fit into the car for coming home, and might fit through the doors, except that I can’t propel it. This upstairs one is probably best, if it’ll fit inside—and then there’s the whole issue of getting it home. It’s like that puzzle with the fox and the chicken and the sack of grain.” Bee laughed.

  “We could go both ways on the train. That car’s pretty useless to us as it is now. If we need another car it should be an adapted one you can drive, when they start doing them here.”

  “Or we could fly,” Bee said. “It’s expensive for all of us, but they know how to deal with wheelchairs and we wouldn’t be so tired when we got there.”

  “I’ve never flown,” Pat said. “I’ll look into it. It might be an allowable expense, if I put information about it into the book.”

  Despite the expense they flew from Gatwick to Rome. Bee had to be carried up the stairs onto the plane, and her chair travelled in the baggage compartment. “Thank goodness it’s not a long flight,” she said, and refused all drinks.