My Real Children (31 page)

Flora had another baby in March 1988, Cenk Michael. “It’s pronounced Jenk,” she said. “It was Mohammed’s father’s name.”

“It’s lovely,” Pat said, diplomatically. “So easy to say.”

Philip had composed a piece of music for baby Sammy, and he composed another for Cenk. He graduated and began a life of standing in for people in orchestras while working on his compositions. He and Sanchia and Ragnar continued to live together as best they could with their careers, and to come to Florence for at least part of every summer.

Jinny qualified as an architect. Her senior year project for a small but beautiful house won a European design award. She immediately became a junior partner in a firm in Florence. Her designs went into use almost at once. “Ginevra could make a lot of money if she went into designing for our richer clients,” a senior partner told Pat at a party.

“It’s not what she wants,” Pat said, proudly. Jinny now lived at the Florentine house permanently and paid the property taxes on it. Pat and Bee still came out every summer, and Philip and his household for part of every summer. Flora and Mohammed had only been there once since their wedding.

“We should make a new will and give Jinny the Florentine house,” Pat said. “We haven’t made wills since they were tiny and we were worried about social workers.”

“And dear old Michael promised to marry whichever of us was left,” Bee said, smiling.

They made new wills. “We want to leave the Florentine house to Jinny and the Harston house and the remainder of our estates to the other two equally,” Pat said.

“That’s not possible,” the solicitor explained. “You own these properties between you, and that makes it more complicated.”

They eventually decided to give Jinny the Florentine house now and leave the Cambridge house to whichever of them survived the other, and then divided between the other children. “Are you sure that’s fair?” Bee asked.

“They’ll sell our Harston house and use the money. Jinny will live in the Florentine house,” Pat said. “That makes it fair, even if it is worth more.”

“There will be death duties,” the solicitor said. “There wouldn’t be if you were married, but as things are.”

“It makes my blood boil,” Bee said.

They also filled out powers of attorney in case of incapacity, naming each other, remembering how they couldn’t sell Pat’s mother’s house. “These wouldn’t necessarily hold up,” the solicitor said. “Not if anyone challenged them.”

“Does
anyone
in that sentence mean our children or the government?” Bee asked. “Our children wouldn’t, but the government is another thing.”

“It certainly wouldn’t hold up under a government challenge. But it’s better than nothing.”

On their way back home from the solicitor’s Bee started to laugh. “I was just thinking how grown up all that made me feel,” she said. “I’m sixty-one!”

The next March Pat had a heart attack in the early hours of the morning. She knew at once what it was, a pain in her left arm and chest. She managed to waken Bee before she passed out, and Bee called an ambulance. She woke up in the Addison, alone.

She struggled to press the button to ring for the nurse. “Is my friend waiting?” she asked.

“Try to relax,” the nurse said, taking her pulse professionally. “Don’t worry about anything.”

“I’ll worry myself into another heart attack this minute if you don’t let my friend in. She’s in a wheelchair.”

Bee was waiting, and they let her in. “They wouldn’t tell me how you were,” she said, wheeling herself right up to the bed and taking Pat’s hand.

“I had to threaten to have another heart attack to get you in,” Pat said. “You wouldn’t believe how much good it’s doing my heart to see you.”

“I called the kids, and Philip’s on his way. Flora said she’d come first thing in the morning, and I told her Philip was coming and we’d get in touch if it was really serious.”

“Having grown-up children who know what we want as next of kin is such a relief,” Pat said.

“He should be here any minute. He was in Glasgow.”

“Of course, it would help if they weren’t so far away.”

The Addison assured Pat that it was a minor heart attack. They gave her stacks of pills, a diet sheet that didn’t allow her to eat anything she liked, and instructions to exercise. “I get loads of exercise,” she complained.

“Get more,” Bee said, unsympathetically. “I can’t have your heart packing in on us.”

“Do you think I should ask them if the prohibition on ice cream includes gelato?”

“No,” Philip said. “Because you’re going to eat it anyway, so you might as well not ask. All this low-fat stuff is going to be hard. You love fat. You never cook anything that doesn’t have half a bottle of olive oil in it.”

“Except when I’ve run out of olive oil, and then it has half a pound of butter,” Pat said. “Though I have noticed that Sainsbury’s do a very decent olive oil these days.”

She took the pills regularly and tried to walk more. “I used to love rowing, but I haven’t done it since we moved out here. I’ll walk in Italy.”

“You’ll walk now. You can push me if you like, that’ll be good exercise.”

“Slavedriver,” Pat said.

The news was terrible, as usual. There was a massacre in China, repression in the Soviet countries, and yet another assassination of the president in the US. The war between Uruguay and Brazil threatened to go nuclear, and the Americans said that they’d regard any intervention from Russia or Europe as a hostile act against their hemisphere. “Well, keep peace in your hemisphere, then,” Bee snarled at the television. “No more nukes!”

That summer in Italy Pat found that she couldn’t remember Italian words she knew perfectly well. She’d launch herself into a sentence and come to a dead stop when the words weren’t there. She’d never had that experience before and it confounded her. “Do you think it might be your tablets?” Jinny asked.

Back in Cambridge she asked her doctor and had her prescription changed. She couldn’t tell if it had helped, she wasn’t speaking Italian. The next summer things didn’t seem to be any better. Pat noticed that she was sometimes forgetting words in English too.

“I’m afraid I’m going like my mother,” she confessed to Bee in the dark.

“You’re only sixty-four,” Bee said, holding her tight. “Don’t cry now, Pat love. Hush. You’ll be all right.”

30

Twins: Trish 1994–1999

George rang up one morning in the spring of 1994. “I was wondering if I could ask you to do me a big favor,” he said.

“Yes, of course, what?” Trish answered, looking frantically for her glasses, her notebook and her pen so that she could note down whatever the favor was before she forgot.

“They want us back on the moon, and it would be for a year,” George said, as she found the notebook on the counter and her glasses on their beaded chain around her neck. Tamsin had given her the chain for Christmas. “At least a year, maybe two. It’s really important for Sophie that she go.”

“But what about the twins?” Trish asked. “You can’t take them, can you?”

“Medical opinion thinks it wouldn’t be good for growing bones to be in gravity that low. That’s the favor. We wondered if you could take them. There’s room, and they always love visiting you. We could ask Sophie’s parents, but they’re getting old. Well, they’re younger than you are, but they’re somehow resigned to being old and sort of mummifying in it, not like you. I always feel I have to tiptoe in their house—whereas your house is always lively.”

“Of course I will,” Trish said, sitting down at the kitchen table and fumbling with the notepad. “When would you have to go?”

“Sophie would go almost immediately, but I’d stay here until the end of the school year. Then they could come to you for the summer and start school up there in September.”

“You seem to have it all sorted out,” Trish said. “I should really check with Bethany before disrupting her this way.”

“I thought they could go to my old school,” George said, disregarding this. “That’s another plus to them being in Lancaster. The schools in Aberystwyth are very dull. But Lancaster has great schools, it always has had. I know the Grammar School has gone comprehensive, but from what I hear everyone’s getting an excellent education up there.”

“The schools are doing fine. And so is the university. We saved the market. And we’re even keeping the old swimming pool open instead of opening a stupid new one in the middle of nowhere,” Trish said, well briefed on local issues by Bethany. “But why are you talking about the grammar school? How old are the twins now, exactly?”

“They were six in February,” George said. “Too young for the grammar school for a while yet!”

After she had put the phone down she found her pen and wrote firmly TWINS, JUNE and put it on the fridge. Then she wrote it down on all her other lists.

Bethany helped her get rooms ready for Rhodri and Bronwen. They got a man to come and help move beds and paint, and they bought new duvets—one with dolphins and one with dinosaurs. “That wouldn’t have been my top choice to say boy or girl,” Bethany said, shaking the covers on.

“They’re very pink dinosaurs, and the alternative was yachts or houses,” Trish said. “Boy and girl stuff doesn’t matter the way it used to anyway. Things are much less gendered than they were when my kids were small, or even when Tamsin and Alestra were.”

“It’s great really,” Bethany said. “Huge strides for women. Dinosaurs!”

George arrived with the twins on a rainy Sunday morning. “We’ve brought masses of books and toys and clothes,” he said, proceeding to unload the car and dash inside with armfuls of things. “But buy them whatever they need. I’ve opened an account for you to draw on.” He handed her a checkbook and a bank card. “The pin number is the year of your birth, change it when you get the chance.”

Trish wrote the number down on her pad. “I’ll change it,” she said.

“Would you really forget it?” George asked.

“Things fall out of my head like water sometimes,” she admitted. “And I never know which things.”

“You won’t forget to collect the children from school?” he asked anxiously.

“Bethany’s here to help,” Trish said.

“That’s a relief!”

The children had vanished into the house. “Helen’s coming over later with her kids so they can all play,” Trish said. “How long are you staying?”

“Just tonight I’m afraid. Tomorrow morning I’m flying from Manchester to Miami and from there to Kennedy. I’ll be on the moon before next Sunday.”

“Amazing,” Trish said.

“Thanks for doing this, Mum. It makes all the difference knowing they’ll be looked after properly.”

Rhodri and Bronwen ended up staying for two years on that visit. Trish enjoyed having children around again. She cut down her evening classes to one a week, for which Helen babysat. She taught two adult education classes in the afternoons, which she did not enjoy as much—they were basic literacy classes. At her evening classes she had the fun of seeing people who had never had the chance to appreciate literature learning how to do it. Here she was teaching adults to read, which she admitted was necessary, but more of a slog.

She spent more time with Helen than she had for years. Helen worked while her children were at school. She did some programming for businesses where Don sold systems, and some time working in the shop selling computers and games and other programs. She stopped work every day at three and collected the children from school. Often now she collected all four children and brought them back to Trish’s house for a few hours.

“It reminds me of when Tamsin and Alestra were young,” Trish said, listening to the children chase each other around the garden.

Tamsin was in the third year of a professional nursing program in Manchester. Alestra was about to graduate from university.

“Not when all of us were young?” Helen asked.

“I was exhausted all the time when all of you were young,” Trish said. “It was no fun at all. I don’t know how I kept my head above water. And your father—and I was pregnant all the time.”

“You never found anyone else, after David Lin,” Helen said.

“I never had the opportunity,” Trish said. “You’re still happy with Don?”

“Yes, except that he’s so totally predictable. I know what he’ll say about everything all the time. He never surprises me. He’s very dependable, and I think that’s what I wanted when I first met him. But that’s all he is.”

“He’s a good man and he loves you,” Trish said.

“I know.” Helen put her tea mug down. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. It’s probably just working together as well as being married.”

One day in the winter of 1995 Bethany came home very excited. “I have a recording contract!” she said. “I can’t believe it. At my age! I’ve finally been discovered!”

Trish was thrilled and asked all about it.

The next day when Bethany mentioned it she had forgotten all about it. “A recording contract! How wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did tell you,” Bethany said, looking devastated.

“I’m sorry!”

“Not your fault, and it’s not important. I’ll tell you about it again. But I am worried about your memory.”

“So am I,” Trish said.

“We sell a kind of tea called ginkgo that’s supposed to help with memory.”

Trish bought some and drank it every day, even though it tasted disgusting. She couldn’t see any improvement.

George and Sophie came back from the moon in June 1996 and the twins went home with them. “This may happen again,” Sophie said when they came to collect them. “I’m going to be in Cambridge for a year, but after that would you be prepared to have them again?”

“Of course,” Trish said. She had got used to them and felt bereft without them. She was seventy that year and her family made a big fuss, with a cake and a party. She would have preferred to ignore the occasion. She didn’t like to think of herself as old, still less old and senile.

When the twins came back in the summer of 1998 they were nine, nearly ten. They were both wonderful with computers. Rhodri persuaded Trish to buy a new computer, from Don and Helen of course, a Mac. It was expensive, but Trish had enough money. Doug had left half his money to AIDS charities, but the half he had left to Trish made her more comfortable than she had ever been. She bought a new car every few years and could afford the Mac without asking herself how much money she had.