My Real Children

by Jo Walton

  “Computers and space,” Trish said. “My children are so futuristic.”

  “And a pop star and a banker,” Helen reminded her.

  “I could never have imagined any of that,” Trish said.

  25

  Different News: Pat 1978

  When she was fourteen, Flossie announced that she wished to be known as Firenza in Italian and Flora in English. Her mothers did their best to comply. She also took to doing her hair like the statue of the goddess Flora and to being more enthusiastic about flower gardening than vegetable gardening. Bee found this amusing and encouraged the flower growing, with the result that the garden was a mass of blooms that year. Jinny, meanwhile, was getting top marks in school and affected to care nothing about her appearance. Philip had just passed his eleven plus and was learning to play the oboe. He sang in the church choir. The girls played popular music as many teenagers did, enjoying Italian pop and the new “Volga beat” songs that everyone seemed to be dancing to. Philip turned up his nose at all of that and played Vivaldi and Stravinsky when it was his turn to use the music center.

  “Are we driving to Italy this year or what?” Jinny asked one June Sunday as they were just finishing lunch.

  Pat and Bee looked at each other. “Driving, I think,” Pat said. “They’ve been bombing trains again, and now we can take turns driving it’s cheaper and more practical again.”

  “Can we stop in Menton and see the gardens?” Flora asked.

  “It depends on whether it makes sense, but I should think we can go that way and stop there,” Bee said. “I’d like to see them too. They have the oldest olive trees in Europe.”

  “They have water hyacinths,” Flora said.

  Pat looked at Jinny, whose turn it was to clear the table. Jinny obediently began to gather up plates. Pat got up to fetch dessert—a strawberry cake she had made. In the kitchen she automatically switched on the radio. “Not known yet whether the blast was nuclear,” the announcer was saying.

  Jinny put the plates down with a clatter. “Nuclear?” she said.

  “There has as yet been no official Pakistani response. United Europe has asked China for clarification.”

  “What’s happening?” Bee called.

  Pat took the cake through into the dining room. “It looks as if China has intervened in the Indo-Pak war. They don’t know if it’s nuclear.”

  “What are we doing?” Bee asked.

  “Asking for clarification, apparently.” Pat switched the television on.

  “Geiger counters as far away as Tehran are confirming that the strike on Delhi was definitely nuclear,” it said as the tubes warmed up.

  “What should we do?” Flora asked.

  “It’s just like before you were born, the Cuban Missile Exchange,” Bee said. “It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world and that everyone will push the buttons just because somebody has.”

  “They could, though,” Philip said. “It could be the end of the world.”

  The phone rang, and they all jumped. Bee wheeled over to answer it. Pat switched off the television and everyone listened. “Yes, we’re all here, yes, we’re all safe, yes, we have heard the news. It doesn’t seem as if there’s anything we can do about it, so we’re going to have some cake. I’m glad you’re safe. Well don’t go any nearer! In fact, come home if you can. I understand that. Well, stay safe. We’ll see you in Florence. We love you.” She put the receiver down. “Michael. He’s in Jerusalem.”

  “Does he think it’ll be the end of the world?” Philip asked.

  “No,” Bee said crisply. “If he thought that he’d have asked to speak to all of you. He just wanted to make sure we knew what was happening.”

  “Is Jerusalem a target?” Flora asked.

  “It might be, if the whole Middle East goes up. But they seem to prefer suicide bombs and assassinations to all-out war these days,” Pat said.

  “That’s a comfort!” Bee said.

  Pat switched the television on again. They ate the cake without tasting it and later drank a pot of tea without tasting that. Jinny kept switching the channel. “Do you think you’ll get different news on ITV?” Flora sniped.

  “I wish we could just switch channels and have different news,” Bee said.

  “I wish we had any news and not just the same thing repeated over and over and people speculating about what it means,” Philip said. “I’m going to go upstairs and practice. If it’s going to be Armageddon that’s what I want to be doing, and if not I’ll need to be in practice for the concert next week.”

  “That’s a really good way of looking at it. We’re not doing any good sitting here,” Pat said. She got up and went into the kitchen to wash the dishes, but she switched the radio on and kept listening to people saying nothing about the nuclear exchange.

  When she went back in to the dining room the television was on but only Jinny was there. “Bee and Flora decided that if it was the end of the world they wanted to be grafting geraniums in the conservatory,” Jinny explained.

  “What do you want to do?” Pat asked.

  “I don’t know yet.” Jinny started to cry. “I’m only fourteen. I don’t want to die. I haven’t found my passion yet.”

  “I didn’t find mine until I went to Florence when I was—” Pat counted on her fingers. “Twenty-four. I loved English literature too. I always have loved it.”

  “But Florence was your passion?”

  Pat sat down next to Jinny. The television was still on, interviewing people in India and Pakistan and giving no new information. She turned it down so the voices were a quiet background but loud enough for them to hear and turn it up again if there was anything new. “Florence, the Renaissance, yes.”

  “I don’t know what mine will be!”

  “You’ve got plenty of time to find out,” Pat said. “Sometimes it’s harder for people who are very intelligent and talented in lots of directions. I’ve noticed that with girls in school. It takes longer to see what’s important.”

  “Unless they blow the world up before I can find out,” Jinny said. “Or the IRA get me, or a car crossing the road.”

  Pat hugged Jinny to her and rocked her. “Those things could happen, but we have to live as if they won’t. Or if they do we have to find ways to cope and follow our passion anyway, like Bee has.”

  “I wish I knew already, like Flora and Philip,” Jinny gulped.

  “They may not know. They’re so young. They may be wrong.” Pat gave Jinny a tissue. “Blow your nose.”

  Jinny did. “I want to do something to make the world a better place.”

  “It’s so hard to know whether you have,” Pat said. “I mean, I write my guide books, and people use them, but it’s a very little thing.”

  “If the Chinese were going to nuke Florence now, would you want to be there?” Jinny asked.

  “Yes,” Pat said immediately, and then directly afterwards contradicted herself. “No. What good would it do? I wish I were there right now so that I could go and stare at the Botticellis the way Philip’s playing his oboe and Bee’s grafting. But if it has to die what good would it do me to die with it? It would be better to live on and tell people how it used to be.”

  “Now it’s my turn to tell you to blow your nose,” Jinny said.

  “I’m sorry—wait.”

  The television had cut back to the announcer, who was looking grave. They froze, but it was only news about the fallout from the Delhi bomb.

  “Numbers that big become meaningless. They’d do better to show us one child who will die,” Pat said. “Look, it’s not doing us any good to watch this.”

  “But there might be some news,” Jinny protested. “At any minute, there might.”

  “I know.” Pat smiled through her tears. “But we can listen to the radio in the kitchen. Let’s make dinner. If we were going to eat one last thing, what would you want it to be.”

  “Gelato!” wailed Jinny, choking on the word.

  “Well, if the world�
��s still here we’ll be in Florence in three weeks,” Pat said. “Meanwhile I think it’s time to get out the pasta maker. I have one tin of truffle butter that I was saving, but I think we could have it today. Come and help.”

  Pat called the others for supper at six o’clock. “Come and eat. Italian dinner tonight. We have homemade pasta with herbs from the garden and truffle butter, followed by gammon and eggs, then fresh raspberries and cream.”

  “You picked the raspberries?” Bee asked.

  “Jinny picked them,” Pat said.

  “Well, I suppose we might as well,” Bee said. She wheeled out of the conservatory. “You’ve made a feast!”

  There were flowers on the table, Bee’s grandmother’s lace tablecloth and Pat’s mother’s best china plates. “It seemed appropriate,” Pat said.

  Philip came down and was appropriately enthusiastic about dinner. “I was wondering if I could go to choir school,” he said, as he came back from clearing the pasta plates. “I might be able to get a scholarship. A boy from choir did.”

  “If it’s what you really want,” Bee said.

  “I really think it is.” Philip hesitated. “What I’d really like would be to go to choir school in Italy.”

  “Do they even have choir schools in Italy?” Pat asked.

  “There’s one in Rome and one in Milan,” he said. “Or there’s Wells. Wells is the best one in England, everyone says.”

  “There’s King’s College right here in Cambridge,” Pat said. “Going away to school costs a lot of money, and also we’d miss you.”

  “I’d miss you too,” Philip admitted.

  After dinner they switched the television on again, and were rewarded with some actual news. It was announced that in a joint communication from Moscow and Brussels that the USSR and United Europe had informed the governments of India, Pakistan and China that no more nuclear strikes would be tolerated.

  “Does that mean it’s over?” Flora asked.

  “I have no idea,” Pat said. “It might. Or it might mean that if those countries won’t listen, then we—or the Russians—would hit them from the moon. That could mean the end of everything.”

  “What are the Americans doing?” Jinny asked.

  “Splendid isolation,” Bee said. “Always their default policy. It’s what they do best.”

  They went to bed and woke the next morning to a world that, as after the Cuban Exchange, seemed determined to carry on as if nothing had happened. The millions dead in China and India, the millions more predicted to suffer radiation and cancer deaths, were not exactly forgotten but swept under the carpet. The mood was that of having dodged a bullet. The girls in Pat’s classes the next day seemed on the edge of hysteria, needing very little to tip them into either laughter or tears. It was almost exam time, and she read poetry to them, couching it in terms of revision.

  Three weeks later the family were in Florence. Pat went alone into the Duomo and quietly gave thanks to God for the world still being there. She went with the children to the Sunday morning service and prayed for the preservation of Florence.

  On Monday morning Michael joined them. The children were off with their friends, and the three adults bought gelato in Perche No! and went to sit in the piazza to watch the sky darken behind the Palazzo Vecchio. Pat kept dissolving into tears. “We have to do something to stop this all being on a knife edge,” she said.

  “What can we do?” Bee asked.

  “Your books help people appreciate what they’re looking at when they see it,” Michael said.

  “I was wondering whether I could use the semi-demi-fame I have from the books to start a movement to say that some places just shouldn’t be harmed. But I’m sure everyone would agree and then not take any notice.”

  “Maybe we could start an organization,” Michael said. “Get the paper behind us.”

  “Maybe. But it would need to be international to do any good.” Pat stared out across the square where Florentines and tourists were mingling on the ancient cobblestones in the twilight. “And why would China care about Florence? And the US left the United Nations, they don’t care about anything, but they have all those nukes.”

  “The problem is that we say using nukes at all is barbarous and unthinkable and nobody should do it, and then we do it. If we said there were certain places that were sacrosanct then it would be tantamount to admitting that using them was acceptable,” Bee said.

  Pat leaned down and put her hand on Bee’s shoulder. “But people are using them. The Americans and the Russians, and now the Indians and the Chinese. People will carry on using them to end arguments. And it’s all very well if the Russians will act with Europe, the way they did this time, but what if it’s us against them next time? In space and on Earth? All those bombs in orbit and on the moon?”

  “There might not even be plants left,” Bee said. “But that doesn’t mean we can condone using them at all in any circumstances.”

  “You sound like CND.”

  “Maybe we should join CND,” Bee said. “We used to go on peace marches, not that it did any good.”

  “We just live our lives and hope history doesn’t notice us,” Michael said. “But we could try to start up a list of places so precious they shouldn’t be harmed. An international list. The Great Wall of China. Angkor Wat. Machu Picchu. Florence.”

  “The seven wonders of the world,” Bee said.

  26

  In Sickness and in Health Trish 1982–1988

  Trish flew to Boston to see George get his Ph.D. “We’re going to the moon, Mum,” he said, when he met her at Logan airport.

  “Because of the song?” she asked.

  “Well, it probably helped, and we are going to be the first people to get married there, but really it’s because of our work.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said.

  “When we come back we’ll have another wedding on Earth. We don’t want you to miss it, or Sophie’s parents either. But it does seem like a wonderful opportunity.”

  “How long will you be on the moon?” she asked. “On the moon. Amazing to think of it.”

  “A year or two, maybe more,” George said.

  She stayed with George and Sophie for a few days. She watched George’s ceremony, and she visited MIT and Harvard and the Mary Baker Eddy Library with its stained glass globe big enough for a group to walk inside. Then she spent a blissful weekend in a hotel with David Lin. They all had dinner together in a Japanese restaurant where the food was so beautifully presented it was the most Trish could do to eat it.

  Back at home, both of her daughters had news. Helen was moving in with Don, which of course meant that Tamsin was also going. This made a huge difference to Trish’s daily life, even though they only lived in Scotforth, between Lancaster and the university. She saw them often, but they were no longer part of her everyday life. Cathy surprised her even more. She came home for a weekend, alone.

  “I wanted to tell you that I’m having a baby,” she said. They were in the kitchen, and by chance Cathy was sitting in the same chair Helen had sat in years before when she had asked Trish how she had known she was pregnant.

  “Are you and Richard getting married then?” Trish asked, feeling déjà vu.

  “No. In fact, we’ve broken up. He doesn’t want children, and we had a huge fight about it.” Cathy stared out of the window as she spoke. “I thought—well, never mind. But he accused me of trying to trap him, and so of course we couldn’t possibly keep on being friends after that. What actually happened was that we were on holiday in Hungary and his contraceptive shot had worn off and then we ran out of condoms and he said that hundreds of times nothing happens. But of course it did.”

  “Is he going to support the baby?”

  Cathy turned back to her in surprise. “I can support the baby perfectly well myself.”

  “Are you going to move back home? There’s plenty of room, and we managed with Tamsin so—”

  Cathy laughed, an uncomfortable laugh
that sounded on the edge of tears. “Why would I move home? What would I do in Lancaster? I’m not Helen, Mum. I’m not a teenager. I’m almost twenty-three. I have a good job in London.”

  “Twenty-three is still very young to be on your own with a baby. I’ll do anything you want me to to help, whatever you want.”

  “I’ll get a nanny,” Cathy said.

  Cathy’s baby, James Marcus Anston, was born in April 1983 in London. Trish was there for the birth, she had been there for the whole Easter holiday. He was born by caesarean, as the doctors felt it might be dangerous for Cathy to try to deliver him. Trish bit her tongue on her own stories of giving birth so many times. She admired Jamie, and admired too Cathy’s organization. She took only the statutory eight weeks fully paid maternity leave, and thereafter had two nannies, one for day and one for night.

  Helen and Don opened a shop in the middle of Lancaster to sell computers to businesses and individuals. They sold Trish a word processor with a green screen, which she used for making notes for her classes. She found it much easier than the typewriter because she could go back to correct errors.

  George and Sophie went to the moon, and were married there. It was international news, and the song got revived and played everywhere again. Doug’s career was in a down phase again, but the publicity sent his records soaring up the charts. He came home for a few months to detox. “I have to get off the smack, Mum,” he said. “Heroin is terrible stuff.”

  “Anything I can do to help.”

  “I’ll just stay here and work on writing new songs and go cold turkey.”

  It wasn’t that easy, of course. He did manage to give up the heroin, but he kept on smoking and drinking. He filled the house with musicians and instruments and mess. Bethany, who had long since stopped even pretending to pay rent, but who took care of the house instead, protested at the mess, the noise, and the cigarette butts. He countered by mocking at Bethany’s flute music, and she grew furious with him. “It’s not your kind of music and you know nothing about it,” she said. Trish tried to mediate, but found it very difficult when Doug was so clearly in the wrong. Eventually he moved out in anger in the spring of 1984.