My Real Children (2 page)

The indisputable fact was: she was confused. She lost track of her thoughts. She had difficulty remembering things. People told her things and she heard them and reacted and then forgot all about them. She had forgotten that Bethany had been signed by a record label. That she was just as delighted the second time Bethany told her didn’t matter. Bethany had been crushed that she had forgotten. Worse, she had forgotten, unforgivably, that Jamie had been killed. She knew that Cathy was wounded that she could have forgotten, even though she had said that she wished she could forget herself. Cathy was so easily hurt, and she wouldn’t have hurt her for anything, especially after such a loss, but she had, unthinkingly, because her brain wouldn’t hold the memory. How much else had she forgotten and then not even remembered that she had forgotten?

Her brain couldn’t be trusted. Now she imagined that she was living in two different realities, drifting between them; but it must be her brain that was at fault, like a computer with a virus that made some sectors inaccessible and others impossible to write to. That had been Rhodri’s metaphor. Rhodri was one of the few people who would talk to her about her dementia as a problem, a problem with potential fixes and workarounds. She hadn’t seen him for too long. Perhaps he was busy. Or perhaps she had been in the other world, the world where he didn’t exist.

She picked up a book. She had given up on trying to read new books, though it broke her heart. She couldn’t find where she had put them down and she couldn’t remember what she had read so far. She could still re-read old books like old friends, though she knew that too would go; before the end her mother had forgotten how to read. For now, while she could, she read a lot of poetry, a lot of classics. Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Cranford
came to her hand now, and she opened it at random to read about Miss Matty and her financial difficulties back in the time of King William. “The last gigot in England had been seen in Cranford, and seen without a smile.”

After a while she let the book drop. It had grown dark outside, and she got up and tottered over to draw the curtains. She made her way carefully, hanging onto the bed and then the wall. They didn’t like her to do it without the quad cane but she was safe enough, there wasn’t room to fall. Though she had fallen once on her way to the toilet and forgotten that she had a button to call for help. The curtains were navy blue, although she was quite sure there had been a pale green blind the last time. She leaned on the window sill, looking out at the bare branches of a sycamore moving in the breeze. The moon was half-obscured by a thin veil of cloud. Where was this place? Up on the moor? Or was it somewhere along the canal? There might be birds in the branches in the morning. She must remember to come and look. She had her binoculars somewhere. She remembered insisting on holding on to them and Philip saying gently that she wouldn’t have any use for them in the nursing home and Jinny saying in her gruff way that she might as well bring them if she wanted them. They must be here somewhere, unless that was in the other world. It would be very unfair if the binoculars were in one world and the tree were in the other.

If there were two worlds.

If there were two worlds, then what caused her to slide between them? They weren’t two times as they were for Charlotte. It was the same year, whichever year it was. It was just that things were different, things that shouldn’t have been different. She had four children, or three. There was a lift in the nursing home, or there was only a stairlift. She could remember things that couldn’t simultaneously be true. She remembered Kennedy being assassinated and she remembered him declining to run again after the Cuban missile exchange. They couldn’t both have happened, yet she remembered them both happening. Had she made a choice that could have gone two ways and thereafter had two lives? Two lives that both began in Twickenham in 1926 and both ended here in this nursing home in 2014 or 2015, whichever it was?

She shuffled back and looked at her notes, clipped to the end of the bed. It was February 5th 2015, and she was VC. That was definite, and good to know. She sat down but did not take up the book. It would be suppertime soon, she could hear the trolley moving down the corridor. They’d feed her and then it would be time for bed. This was the same whatever world she was in.

If she had made a choice—well, she knew she had. She could remember as clearly as she could remember anything. She had been in that little phone box in the corridor in The Pines and Mark had said that if she was going to marry him it would have to be now or never. And she had been startled and confused and had stood there in the smell of chalk and disinfectant and girls, and hesitated, and made the decision that changed everything in her life.

2

Adam: 1933

It was July 1933 and Patsy Cowan was seven years old and they were in Weymouth for two glorious weeks. There was a band in the bandstand, and sculptures of animals made of sand, and donkeys to ride and the sea to swim in, and they were building a sand pulpit for Mr. Price to preach from in the evening. She was wearing a brown cotton bathing suit, though most of the younger children and some of the other seven-year-olds still went bare. She could remember running bare when she had been a mere child, but she liked the bathing suit. Her fine brown hair was tied into bunches on both sides of her head, and when she shook her head hard she could make them slap her cheeks. She didn’t do it though, because Oswald said it made her look stupid, shaking her head for nothing. Oswald was just ten, she envied his summer birthdays. He wore long striped swimming shorts, down to his knees, and he was beginning to tan already.

They had come down by the late train on Friday night and today was Sunday, only the second whole day of the holiday, with twelve more whole days to go. They wouldn’t all twelve be this glorious, Patsy knew that. The sun couldn’t shine all day every day even on holiday, there was bound to be at least one rainy day. But on a rainy day Dad would take them to the museum or to an interesting old church or castle, which might not be as wonderful as a day on the beach but it was still fun. There would also be one afternoon when Dad would take Oswald to see football—“Sorry old girl, this is a boys’ afternoon out, just us men!” Dad would say, as he said every year. It did no good to argue that she loved football, or that if Oswald was going to have Dad to himself for an afternoon she should have the same. Dad had pointed out last year that she was having an afternoon with just Mum, and of course even then when she’d been only six she had known better than to complain.

They dug the pulpit with spades and with their hands. The spades had wooden handles and metal blades, and they were just like real spades except for the size. Hers was red and Oswald’s was blue, and Mum said that if they lost them they needn’t think they were getting any more. Mum was sitting reading on a deck chair she had paid for at the top of the beach, but Dad was right there with them, organizing all the church children building the pulpit. Patsy loved the feeling of sand between her toes and the way sand was so easily shaped and manipulated. She loved making a mark and rubbing it out. Sand was hot on top and cool underneath when you dug, and it was clean, it brushed off, or if it didn’t you could easily wash it off if you went down to bathe. Sand wasn’t like dirt at home. You could get as sandy as you liked and just run into the water and be all clean again.

Best of all was coming down to the beach early in the morning when the tide had washed away all the marks of the day before, and running on the hard-packed sand making footprints. The first morning Dad had brought them down, they had followed the tracks of a man and a dog, the little paw prints running in and out of the edge of the sea, until at last they caught up with them and saw that the dog was a white and black terrier and the man was just a man who said “Good morning” politely to Dad. But this morning coming down before church they had been the very first, and they had run across the great flat sand in the early morning light, “the lone and level sands stretch far away” as it said in the poem, with the waves lapping with little white edges and beyond them the sea stretching out even further away, stretching all the way to America. Dad walked along the edge of the sea looking for shells and seaweed, but the children ran barefoot and free. Patsy could run as fast as Oswald, even though he was two and a half years older. She could run faster than any of the other seven-year-olds. One day later in the week Dad would organize athletics on the beach, he had promised, and she would win, she knew she would. She could do a handstand every time and a cartwheel twice out of three times.

“This is going to be the best pulpit ever!” she said, digging enthusiastically. “Better than last year. And Mr. Price will give the best sermon ever and convert all the heathens!”

“That’s right, old girl,” Dad said. “But don’t throw your sand out behind you without looking, you’re getting it on people.”

She looked around guiltily, but he was laughing, not angry, although her sand had spattered his legs. It was so nice to spend whole days with Dad like this. It only ever happened in the summer and perhaps for a day or two at Christmas. He worked so hard selling wirelesses and mending them for people. He went off on his bike before she was up in the morning and sometimes didn’t come back until after she was in bed. On Sundays he didn’t work, but he was usually so tired that Mum made her and Oswald tiptoe around after they came back from church. Sometimes he would rouse himself in the afternoon and take them out for a walk, or organize a ball game in the park. Then she would catch a glimpse of her summer father, the man who loved to play. He had the older children running down to the sea now with buckets, to bring water to wet the sand to shape it. Patsy dug more carefully.

“Why aren’t you a minister, Dad, like Mr. Price?” she asked.

“God didn’t call me that way,” he replied, talking to her the way she liked, as if she were an equal.

“And He did call you to be a wireless installer?”

“Well, I learned about radio in the war, and so when I was demobbed it seemed like a good choice,” he said.

That didn’t seem as grand as God calling him. “Didn’t God—” she began.

“Why do you want me to be a minister anyway, Miss Patsy?” Dad interrupted.

“Ministers only work on Sundays,” she said. “You’d be home with us the rest of the time.”

For a moment she was afraid from the look on Dad’s face that she’d said something naughty, or worse, blasphemous. Her mother shut her in the cupboard when she said anything blasphemous, though she never meant to. She knew thoughts about God and ministers had the potential to get to dangerous places. Then he threw back his head and laughed so much that all the other children laughed too, even though they hadn’t been listening and didn’t know what he was laughing about, and other groups on the beach, people they didn’t know at all, turned their heads and looked at them. Patsy hadn’t meant to be funny, but she was so relieved she had been funny by mistake and not blasphemous by mistake that she laughed too, but hers wasn’t a real laugh or the infectious hilarity of the other children.

“I must tell Mum that,” Dad said. “How she’ll laugh! I dare say she’d not like it if I was under her feet six days a week instead of only one!”

Oswald was back with a bucket almost full of sea water. He must have been carrying it very carefully so as to avoid spilling. “Tell Mum what?” he asked.

“Patsy wants me to be a minister so I’ll only have to work on Sundays!”

Oswald didn’t laugh. “I’m not sure Mum would find that funny,” he said.

“No, maybe you’re right,” Dad agreed.

“Patsy’s not a baby any more. She should know that ministers work hard visiting the sick and … writing their sermons and…” it was clear that Oswald’s imagination was at an end.

Dad laughed again. “It’s all right old boy. I won’t say anything to Mum. You’re probably right that she wouldn’t see the funny side.”

“It’s just that she wants us to be like Lady Leverside’s children,” Oswald said.

Dad pulled Patsy onto his lap and patted the sand for Oswald to sit next to him, which he did, setting down the heavy bucket. “She wants the best for you,” he said. “For both of you. That’s why she wants you to dress nicely and speak properly and all of that. Your Mum worked for Lady Leverside before we were married, and that’s where she learned to take care of children. So that’s how she knows how to make bathing costumes and recite poetry and all that. I didn’t have the advantages you’re getting. Your Gran didn’t know any of the things you’re having the chance to learn from your Mum.”

Patsy smiled at the thought of comfortable old Gran reciting poetry. Gran cooked on the fire and made the best toffee in the world, but she wasn’t a poetry sort of person somehow.

“But, while it’s good that you have those advantages, this is very important, I want you to know that you’re just as good as Lord Leverside’s children, as good as any children in the world. You can do as much as they can, more. You can do better than them. You can go far and achieve great things.”

“But they’re honourable children,” Patsy said. “The Honourable Letitia and the Honourable Ralph. We’re not like them. Mum says we’re not.”

“She says she doesn’t want us to be common,” Oswald said.

“Like when you were playing football with the boys and you came home and said—” Patsy started eagerly, but Oswald punched her arm.

“It’s not fair repeating tales,” he said.

Dad looked at him reproachfully. “It’s better than hitting a girl, and one three years younger than you. That’s just the kind of thing I’m talking about, where you have the chance to learn better and you should take it.”

“Sorry,” Oswald said. “But honestly, Dad, she shouldn’t repeat things like that.”

“No, Patsy, your brother is right. If he said something he shouldn’t and Mum punished him, then that should be the end of it.”

“Sorry,” Patsy said. “I didn’t mean to sneak.” She put out her hand to Oswald to shake, which he did.

“But coming back to the other thing,” Dad said, “The fact that they’re The Honourable and you’re just Master and Miss means nothing. You’re every bit as good as they are, and you can go as far as they can. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”