My Real Children (6 page)

Two days later, she left Oxford with an Upper Second degree. She spent the summer in Twickenham with her mother, who found fault with everything except Mark, when he visited. She even extended a little grudging approval of Patty for attaching him.

Patty saw Mark only twice that summer. The first time was that one occasion where he came to dinner at Twickenham to meet her mother, and the other time was in the buffet at Bristol Temple Meads, when she was on her way to Cornwall and he was on his way back to Oxford from a walking tour with some philosophers in the Scottish Highlands. He was in strange spirits on that occasion and kept talking about resisting temptation. He kept shifting in his seat and couldn’t relax, so that she was almost glad when her train was called and the hour was over.

She heard from him every week, however. He sent her long erudite letters, full of quotations from poets, full of passion and philosophy, conversations he had had and thoughts he wanted to share with her. It took her days to answer them, and she never felt she reached his level. Yet he poured out his heart to her on paper. His letters were the best she had ever seen—as good as Browning, she said to him. She had been bowled over by him on that night in Oxford, she truly fell in love with his letters.

She continued to receive them all that winter in Cornwall, another cold winter but not as cold as the year before, the first year of her teaching. Mark had sent her a green silk scarf for Christmas, and she wore it constantly against the Cornish winds. The Pines was a small school, exposed on top of a cliff. It was a fee-paying school, like the one she had attended, although only half the pupils boarded. It felt like regression after Oxford, being back to hockey matches and school reports and the smell of chalk. Oxford had continually stretched her mind; here she felt her horizons visibly shrinking. The girls did not much care for English literature, and she was working to a rigid curriculum set by the head of department. She was overwhelmed by their numbers and found it difficult to remember their names. She tried to keep up with the news and found it hard to care. India became independent, and Israel. They were both hot and far away.

She thought about leaving and taking a post at a grammar school where she would be teaching ordinary children. Mark argued against it, saying it wouldn’t be worth it when it would only be for a year or two. She timidly suggested that perhaps she could find a post somewhat nearer. He said the separation was their trial, and was so eloquent about it that she wept. The weekly arrival of his letters was the brightest spot in her routine.

The next summer he took her to Nottingham and introduced her to his parents, who were cold and disapproving and said, separately, that they hoped she realized that Mark had no money and she had to wait. She did not tell them that she was earning money and he was not or that she had saved more than half her salary from that first year teaching. She said to Mark that his parents seemed to be Victorian leftovers. He did not laugh, but assured her that they would warm to her once she gave them grandchildren. She did not tell him how much they seemed to dislike her. She was very relieved when the week was over and she went back to Twickenham.

Marjorie got in touch and suggested that the two of them spend a week in France, camping and seeing the country. Patty counted her money and reluctantly declined, though she had never been out of Britain and longed to go. She did spend a week with her mother by the sea at Hastings, where the beach was made of rocks and roared when the tide came in, and there were concrete blockhouses to prevent invasion. Nobody seemed interested in removing the defenses that had been assembled so rapidly, and Patty wondered if they would be left to crumble. Her father had taken her to see crumbled castles. She wondered if future fathers would take children to see crumbled blockhouses. Bombsites, bright with purple fireweed in summer, were everywhere, modern ruins that she now passed almost without noticing.

Back in Penzance, Patty found her second year of teaching easier. The rest of the staff had relaxed a little and even made overtures of friendship, so she was less lonely. She had made some tactful curriculum suggestions that had been accepted, so she was less immured in Hardy than she had been the previous year. She began to take long walks along the cliffs and discovered accessible bays where she could swim entirely alone. “Smugglers’ coves,” one of the other mistresses said when she mentioned them. From seeing Cornwall as bleak and friendless she began to like it. She liked it when the sea swept up wildly at the base of the cliffs, and she liked it when the sea was calm and she could go down on the sand. She kept a wary eye on the tide, which she knew could easily cut her off, and made sure one of the other mistresses knew where she had gone and when she should be back. When it grew too cold to swim she continued to walk on the cliff tops, and even to go down to the edge of the sea and watch the waves. By the sea she always felt that God loved her and cared about her. She returned refreshed and ready to see the best in everyone.

She began to develop a brisk classroom manner to which the girls responded. She reminded herself that there was something interesting about everyone and began to find it in her pupils. A company of actors came to the school and put on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
which was that year’s set play for GCE. They were good, and she managed to use the visit to find some real enthusiasm in the girls, especially the girls in the lower forms who hadn’t read the play beforehand. She petitioned for some gramophone records of Shakespeare, and the head of department agreed to consider it for the future.

All that year the highlight remained her weekly letters from Mark, the letters in which he felt so close. He was funny, passionate, fascinating—he told her everything and had suggestions about everything. When she told him, awkwardly, about feeling close to God by the sea, he expanded on the Romantic view of nature and then extended that to the created world. In person, when they managed to meet, at Christmas and Easter, he was awkward and seemed a little shy of her, but she told herself that when they were married it would be like the letters all the time. He addressed her as his “second self” and said that she would redeem him. She read them over and over until she knew them almost by heart.

At the end of the year on a day when she had been invigilating examinations all day and had forty-five papers to mark before the next morning, she was unexpectedly called to the telephone.

The telephone at The Pines had been installed in the Thirties, and stood in a corridor in a pine cabinet shaped much like a red post office telephone box. There was a modicum of privacy, but not much more—anyone walking down the corridor could hear you. It was not much used except in cases of emergency, and it had been installed largely for the benefit of anxious parents. Patty had called Mark once to tell him she couldn’t meet him in Bristol because the school was under quarantine for mumps. They had not used it for communication. They had their letters. As she hurried along she knew what it must be—his results were due, his long-awaited First, and he must want to tell her in person.

She hardly recognized his voice at first, it sounded so harsh through the long distance line. “I have a Third,” he said, in tones of tragedy.

She was astonished. “How could that happen?”

“I’ve not been working at English, I’ve been concentrating on philosophy instead. I assumed I’d just walk through. I always have before. My real work was with Wittgenstein, but that wasn’t how they saw it.”

“Of course it wasn’t.”

“What? What did you say?”

“I’m sorry. Can you—can Wittgenstein do anything?”

“Nobody can do anything for me now. My life is ruined.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” Patty said.

“I won’t get a fellowship. I’ll have to become a schoolmaster. I’m calling to say I want to release you from our engagement now that I have no prospects.” Hysteria rose in his tones.

“But that’s ridiculous. I’ll stand by you, you know I will. I’ll wait as long as you like.”

“I won’t let you down, I promised to marry you, but you’ll have to marry me now or never!” Mark said.

Patty felt faint, and the smell of chalk and cabbage and girls’ sweat rose up around her. She did not want to be a burden to Mark, to marry him when he could not afford to start a family. As a married woman she would not be permitted to teach, and what else did an English degree qualify her to do? Besides, if they married, she’d soon have a baby, and she’d be unable to work. Yet she couldn’t bear to give him up, to have his letters stop, for him to go out of her life.

“Oh Mark,” she said. “If it’s to be now or never then—”

6

What the Poetry Is About: Tricia 1949

“… now.”

It was two weeks before the end of term. At first Mark tried to insist that she come to Oxford right away, that day, that very moment. There wasn’t a train, and Patty knew they couldn’t be married for three weeks in any case. Mark reluctantly agreed that she could serve out the term while he took out a marriage license. Even as it was, Patty endured the withering scorn of the headmistress when she gave her notice—it sounded so absurd. Yet she couldn’t continue teaching. Married women were not permitted to teach. Patty felt very much that she was letting The Pines down. She left the headmistress’s room with a strong sense of burned bridges.

She marked her forty-five papers feeling she might as well be generous to the girls and give them marks for good intentions.

The rest of the term passed quickly. The other staff members gave her a leaving party, where she felt awkward and uncomfortable at their jokes. She did not hear from Mark during this time, neither by telephone, which she did not expect, nor by mail. She wrote and told him the train she would be taking but had no reply.

On the day before she left there was an envelope in her pigeonhole and her heart rose, only to fall when she found it was a letter from Marjorie, inviting her to join her on a trip to Rome. She wrote back at once, explaining and inviting Marjorie to the wedding “which will be in Oxford next week, I’ll let you know the details if there’s any chance you can come.”

It took all day to travel between Penzance and Oxford. There was a fine damp mist as she set off, and as the train rattled its way the length of Cornwall and then through Devon, she came to watery sunshine, and then once past Newton Abbott it unfolded into a beautiful day. She alternated between panic and exhilaration. She was to be married to Mark, and the clatter of the train seemed to sing this as a refrain “married to Mark, married to Mark.”

She changed in Bristol Temple Meads and bought a pallid sausage roll at the station buffet which she could hardly eat despite her hunger. She was afraid—of Mark, who had been so strange on the telephone and so silent since, of the new life she was plunging into, of marriage, and most of all of her wedding night. Everything she knew about sex came from literature and now came back to her—Shakespeare’s bawdy,
Roderick Random
, D. H. Lawrence,
Brave New World
. She wondered whether Malthusian belts existed in real life and where they could be obtained. Sex seemed to have an aura of the eighteenth century and the nineteen-twenties, of beauty patches and the Charleston. She stared out of the window at hay stooks in meadows as the train drew closer to Oxford, and thought of Andrew Marvell, painfully aware that she didn’t know what to do in bed. “A hundred years would go to praise thy lips and on thy forehead gaze. A hundred thousand for each breast…” Her own breasts were small. Would Mark be disappointed? “Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball…” But what did it mean, literally? She would have shrunk from any conversation with her mother on the subject, but she wished she had a married friend who might have advised her. What would Mark expect? She took one of his old letters from her handbag and re-read it and was comforted. His tone was so confident, so definite, and after all it was to her that he chose to address these intimate reflections.

It was late afternoon by the time she disembarked at Oxford. Mark wasn’t on the platform, and her heart sank. She telephoned him in his lodgings. He still sounded strange and distraught. “You came, then,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.”

“You can trust me to do what I say I will do,” she said.

He turned up at the station in half an hour, in a car borrowed from friends. He did not kiss her or embrace her as she had half hoped and half feared. He barely seemed to look her in the eye. She wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. “You’re going to stay with the Burchells for the next few days until we can be married on Wednesday. It’s extremely good of them and I hope you’ll be grateful.”

For a moment Patty resented his assumption that she needed to be told how to behave. Then she forgave him. He was under a strain, of course.

“Wednesday? I’ll write to my mother.”

“I suppose you have to.”

“What church?”

“St. Thomas the Martyr, in Osney.”

Elizabeth Burchell treated the entire thing as a joke. The only thing she took seriously was Mark’s Third, which she saw as tragic. “We’ll have to try to do something with him,” she said briskly. She was several years older than Mark and Patty, a philosopher with published books. Patty knew her only slightly. Her husband, Clifford, was a Classicist at Magdalen. They had a small daughter who seemed perpetually grubby and tearful.

Over gray sausages and watery cabbage she returned to the theme of Mark’s failure and future. Clifford had apparently found Mark a teaching job at a boys’ school in Grantham. “Until we can find something better,” he said.

“You know how much I appreciate it,” Mark said.

Patty would have appreciated being consulted as to where she would live, but she supposed there had hardly been time. The three of them clearly knew each other well and were well into making plans. Patty felt like a child, with her future being decided for her. This feeling intensified when after dinner Elizabeth, who had declined help, served watery coffee and stared at her over the cup. “You’re not a bad little thing, but I positively can’t call you Patty,” she said. “It makes you sound like a little pie.”