My Real Children (7 page)

Patty looked to Mark for help, but he was laughing with the others and did not see it. “My full name is Patricia if you prefer that,” Patty said, with what dignity she could manage.

“That sounds like a girl who rides to hounds,” Elizabeth said.

Clifford snorted with laughter. “And it means a female member of the Roman upper classes. I can hardly imagine how it came to be a name at all.”

“Tricia isn’t so bad,” Mark said, seeing her distress. “I think I’ll call you Tricia. Would you like that?”

“Oh yes, much better,” Elizabeth said, cutting off Patty. “And tomorrow we must find you something to wear. Do you have any coupons?”

Patty made herself a dress on Elizabeth’s sewing machine, white cotton, short and very simple. She intended to dye it a more serviceable color later and wear it for a summer dress, but she resisted Elizabeth’s suggestions of buying colored fabric. If there was white fabric available she intended to get married in white. It was the only part of the whole process where she managed to make her own decision stick. Mark, Clifford and Elizabeth had decided everything else. She spent most of her time in the Burchell house looking after the little girl, Rosemary.

“Children are a bore,” Elizabeth said frankly, after she and Patty had bathed Rosemary and put her to bed one night. “You’re not in the family way, are you?”

“No,” Patty said, indignantly. She gathered her courage together. “I wanted to ask you about that.”

“Oh yes, I am, about four months along and due in November if I’ve counted right,” Elizabeth said. “You are a funny girl, making a mystery about that. I hope it’s a boy this time.”

Then she opened the door to the sitting room, where Clifford was reading, and Patty could not explain what she had really wanted to ask.

On her wedding morning she felt awkward in her wedding dress. She looked at herself critically in Elizabeth’s huge Victorian mirror. There was something about the shape of the neck that didn’t flatter her. But what did it matter anyway? She carried pink roses from the Burchells’ garden bound together with a ribbon Rosemary had given her. She wore her tiny gold confirmation cross and remembered her father giving it to her.

Her mother came up from Twickenham for the occasion, wearing an enormous hat that Patty remembered from before the war. She looked ridiculous, but it made Patty feel terribly fond of her. She looked sharply at Patty’s waistline but did not ask, as Elizabeth had, whether she was expecting. Patty tried not to mind the look. What was anyone to think, with them getting married at such speed? Clifford gave Patty away and Cledwyn Jones was best man. Mark’s family did not attend. Marjorie, surprisingly, did.

St. Thomas the Martyr was High Church, and there was incense, as well as candles and splendid vestments. Patty did not mind them on that occasion and in the medieval building. She did find herself resenting the words of the marriage service, St. Paul’s admonitions and her requirement to obey Mark. She promised meekly, and Mark Timothy Anston took Patricia Anne Cowan and they were pronounced man and wife in the sight of God and of the congregation.

Marjorie was the first to kiss Patty afterwards. “I’m on my way to Rome, but I’ve waited to wish you joy,” she said. “I hope you’ll be very happy.” She didn’t sound confident of it.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Anston,” Elizabeth said.

“You congratulate the groom and felicitate the bride,” Patty’s mother said sharply. “Felicitations, Mrs. Anston, congratulations, Mark.”

“Oh, of course, felicitations, Tricia,” Elizabeth said.

Mark was looking over her head. Patty had been thinking that everything would be all right once they were actually married, that it would change everything. Once the ring was on her finger, she realized how idiotic that assumption had been, how it was magical thinking, and how Mark would despise her for it.

They had very little money, but the Burchells had insisted they spend their first night in a hotel—and from what Mark said, Patty assumed that they had paid for it. The Oriel Guest House was right in the middle of Oxford but had little else to be said in its favor. It had threadbare carpets and a pervasive smell of overcooked vegetables. They ate dinner together, awkwardly, talking about the wedding. She felt disloyal laughing with Mark at her mother’s hat, but it had been so absurd. “Mothers are supposed to dream about their daughters’ weddings.”

“This one can’t have been what she dreamed.”

“She would have dreamed my father and my brother there,” Patty said.

Mark looked at her for what felt like the first time since she had come to Oxford, and put his hand on hers. “I’m so sorry they couldn’t be there for you, Tricia,” he said.

She realized he had been calling her Tricia ever since Elizabeth suggested it, and that he really liked it, preferred it to Patty. She thought of protesting, but it seemed such a terrible time, when he was actually paying attention to her and being kind. Anyway, what did it matter, she was changing her surname, she might as well go the whole hog and change her first name too. It was part of her name, anyway, always had been. And maybe Elizabeth was right; perhaps it was a more sophisticated name, more appropriate for her new life. Perhaps as Tricia she would be armored a little against whatever was going to happen upstairs.

Mark ordered two hot baths, first for her and then for him. She had bathed that morning at the Burchells’, but did not protest. She took off the wedding dress and bathed again, thinking that when next she bathed she would be a woman. Then she shivered in their room. She owned two nightdresses, one red flannel and one striped blue and white cotton, which she had chosen as being newer and more summery. It was July and should not have been cold. The hotel room seemed to be all drafts.

It was not a large room. It had a double bed with a scratchy brown blanket, a rickety chest of drawers, a table by the window, and one overstuffed horsehair armchair. The blackout had been taken off the windows and replaced with limp chintz curtains. Mark’s brown leather suitcase stood open next to her tweed grip, bursting with alien male clothes. On the wall there was a Doré etching of the damned in Dante’s
Inferno.
She had brought nothing to read, and had nothing to do while she waited but stare at it, thinking of Sayers’s translation of Dante and then of Sayers’s
Gaudy Night
, which extolled the virtues of female intellectual work and yet ended with a kiss. Then there was that remark in
Busman’s Honeymoon
about shabby tigers …

Mark came in from his bath, wearing a brown wool dressing gown with his hairy legs visible beneath it. He was carrying a wine bottle and two glasses.

“I don’t drink,” Tricia said, shocked. “You know I don’t. You don’t either.”

“Clifford says it’s essential,” Mark said. “Have a glass of wine. It’s medicinal. It will relax you.”

She obediently drank down the red wine, which tasted like altar wine and made her feel as if she were blaspheming by drinking it at such a time. She did not feel at all relaxed. She tried to imagine Mark asking Clifford what to do. She had not imagined Mark’s previous experience, just assumed that of course men had some. But perhaps he had not? She felt fonder of him and less in awe. Mark drank his wine with an equal grim determination, then gathered up the glasses and set them on the table by the window. He drew the curtains and turned out the lights, making the room gloomy rather than completely dark. “Mark, I—” she began.

“Don’t talk,” he said, desperately. “Get into bed and don’t talk.”

It was done in the dark and in silence, as if it were something shameful. She could not relax, and he fumbled and battered away at her, with what she knew must be his male member, but which felt so strange. She had imagined it would be rigid like a truncheon, but it was evidently not. She would have liked to have touched it. She had seen Oswald’s and other little children’s when they had played on the beach. When she tried to put her hand out to it Mark pushed her away and then turned his back on her and seemed to be furiously whipping away at it, or at something. He had bound her to silence and she dared not inquire. He turned back and lay on top of her again, battering away between her legs again, clearly trying to force a way inside. She tried to keep completely still to help. At last he managed it—she bit her lip to stop herself whimpering, but it was no good, as the battering went on and on she could not stop herself crying or later from begging him to stop. There was no dignity left to her. This couldn’t be it, the thing all the poetry was about, this painful bestial thrusting? At last he climbed off her and got out of bed, leaving her to cry alone in the dark.

“Mark?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. Be quiet. I’m sorry.” She saw by the streetlight through the curtains that he had wrapped himself in the blanket and was settling himself into the chair. She thought she should sleep, but she was burning between her legs and desperately needed to relieve herself. She got up and made her way to the toilet. There was blood on her thighs and in her pubic hair, no worse than she might have from the first day of a period, but stickier. No matter how she wiped herself she couldn’t seem to get clean. She ran cold water into the basin and washed as best she could. She wished Mark had ordered her bath for afterwards instead of before. She tried not to think about it, about him. She should have asked Elizabeth, even if Elizabeth would have laughed. But what good would knowing have done her? No wonder they kept it so secret when it was so unpleasant. She washed herself over and over with cold water until the door to the bathroom rattled and an unpleasant male cough came from outside. Then she checked for any signs she might have left, and made her way up the stairs to their room.

Mark was fast asleep in the chair. She got into bed under the thin sheet, bitterly cold. She would have appreciated the blanket, if not her husband’s presence. She hugged herself to try to get warm. She feared she had made a terrible mistake, but thought again of Mark’s letters, all that love and devotion. He needed her. He really did, however he appeared. He was snoring a little. She would be a good wife to him, and mother to his children. She knew he wanted children, they had talked about it in their letters. Even if she had to go through
that
to get them. Perhaps she would grow accustomed to it, though she couldn’t imagine how.

“And tear our pleasures with rough strife, through the iron gates of life,” she thought. Plenty of tearing, and plenty of rough strife, but where were the pleasures? Andrew Marvell had a lot to answer for.

7

Heartbreak: Patty 1949–1951

“… Never!”

Patty was sorry the second she had spoken, but Mark seemed almost relieved that she had decided to relinquish him. She stood in the little phone box for a moment after she had put the receiver down, trying to feel noble but wanting to cry. She made it back to her room before the tears spilled out of her eyes. She locked the door and flung herself down on her old patchwork quilt to sob. She wanted to re-read his letters but could remember them quite well enough. For the last two years he had been the focus of her life, and before that she had hardly been more than a child. She could hardly bear to resign herself to a future that had no Mark in it, coloring everything with his beautiful words and ideas. She forced herself with grim determination through her forty-five exam papers, feeling she was being unfair to the girls and pointing out every childish mistake. As soon as they were done she cried herself to sleep and woke to a misty Cornish morning and at once knew herself bereft.

It reminded her of hearing that Oswald had died, and she was immediately furious at the comparison. Mark was lost to her, but not dead. She had given him up because it would be better for him. They could still be friends, perhaps. He had said so on the telephone, but his voice had been falsely hearty. She was shocked at herself for comparing it to losing Oswald. It made her feel cheapened. All the same, she had the same lump in her throat getting dressed and going down to the classroom.

It was two weeks to the end of term. She wrapped up her engagement ring and sent it back to him with a note that took her hours to write. When she took it to the post office she found herself reluctant to let go of the parcel. It felt like her last link with Mark. She flung herself into her work, the examinations and final marking. She volunteered to take the girls for walks, and took long cliff walks alone. She could not help compulsively checking her pigeonhole for mail, even though she knew he would never write again, not even to acknowledge the return of the ring. She had renounced him for his own good, but how could he possibly forgive her? She could hardly forgive herself. On the day before term ended she saw an envelope waiting and felt her heart race, only to be dashed as she saw the handwriting. It was a letter from Marjorie, inviting her to go with her to Rome. She read it twice. This thin future was what she had instead of the rich future with Mark. She would never have love or marriage, never have children. She would take holidays with female friends and live for her work.

She replied to Marjorie and said she would go. She had plenty of savings, after all, now that she was not intending to marry. She had never been out of Britain. She might as well see the world. If she was to live without Mark, it would be good to get away from places where Mark had been. She could be miserable in Rome just as well as in Twickenham. She wrote to her mother telling her of her changed plans, and felt a sense of relief when that letter was posted.

She met Marjorie in London. “I don’t know that I have the right clothes for Italy,” she said.

“Nobody will care,” Marjorie said.

“Italy…” she said.

“It’s not like going to Germany,” Marjorie said decisively.

On the boat from Dover Patty thought the gulls sounded different from the gulls in England, greedier, with a different accent. She wondered if they really were different. For the first time in a long time she remembered her book of birds that Stan and Flo had given her. She wondered if their son Martin had come home from the war, and if he had been very changed.