My Real Children (8 page)

They took trains down through France and across the Alps. Patty found herself enchanted with everything—the long baguettes, the strong-tasting cheeses and patés, even the citron pressé, so different from English lemonade. Both of them had schoolgirl French, neither of them could make themselves understood, but it didn’t seem to matter. Once they were in Italy they could get by with Latin—written Italian was absurdly easy, and Italians seemed happy to go out of their way to try to understand. Of course the men wouldn’t leave them alone, but there were two of them, and Marjorie was good at getting rid of them, sometimes by appealing to the old women in black who always seemed to be around.

There was a lot of bomb damage, just like at home, and there was hot sunshine and wonderful simple food, which was very different. Patty ate pasta that was not macaroni, ate porcini mushrooms, ate pancetta and fresh mozzarella and pesto and delicious tiny zucchini. There were few tourists, even in Rome. They stayed in a cheap
pensione
, sharing a room, and saw all the ancient sites. Patty was amazed at how layered Rome was—modern ruins side by side with ancient ruins, a restaurant serving delicious Italian
pizza
, flatbread with toppings and cheese, in the old temple of Pompey, Renaissance and medieval buildings made from Roman bricks and marble. Even when she saw Mussolini’s name on a museum on the Palatine Hill, it was easy to forget that these friendly people had so recently been enemies, had been fascists, trying to kill them all.

In the Pantheon Patty looked up at the circle of blue sky at the center of the dome and saw three birds wheeling left to right across it. She knew that would have meant something to Agrippa and the Romans who had built this building. Augury. She did not know what it augured, but she felt it was something good. The clutter down below, the graves of modern kings and even the artist Raphael, seemed irrelevant to this purity of form, the grave splendor of the dome, the pillars, the circle through which the eye was drawn up to heaven, to God. She wept, and understood that she did not weep for herself. She knelt and prayed for help, opening her heart to Jesus as her father had taught her.

After that she began to heal from her heartbreak over Mark and to reconcile herself to life without him, as she had hoped. On the journey home she told Marjorie that she was no longer engaged, and Marjorie nodded sympathetically and did not ask more. They had a last continental meal in Calais, pooling the last of their francs. Currency controls had prevented them from taking much money out of England. They shared a citron pressé, taking alternate sips. “Let’s do this again next year,” Marjorie said.

Patty spent the rest of the summer with her mother, and returned to Penzance at the start of the new school year. It was another lonely year in which the absence of letters felt like a physical ache. She wrote to Mark once in care of his parents, asking how he was and saying that she was well, but she received no reply.

The Pines was so remote that it was hard for her to engage with life and avoid brooding. She threw herself into long walks, school activities and teaching, but all the things that had annoyed her about The Pines before seemed harder than ever now. Even the institutional food seemed unbearable now that she had tried something better. She tried to write poetry but was too severe a critic to continue what felt like an indulgence. She began to watch birds and try to identify them and to keep a “life list” as the book suggested, recording each species she saw that was new to her. She joined the RSPB and enjoyed their earnest publications. She bought binoculars and took them with her on her long walks along the cliffs. She decided to leave The Pines and move to somewhere with more life. She gave notice at Easter. She applied for and was given a position for the following year at a girls’ grammar school in Cambridge.

That summer, the summer of 1950, she went again to Italy with Marjorie, this time to Florence. There she fell completely in love with Renaissance art. She spent days alone in the Uffizi—one day was enough for Marjorie. Nobody bothered her when she stood in front of Botticelli’s
Madonna of the Magnificat,
or Raphael’s portraits of popes. There, in the gallery that had named the very concept of galleries, for the first time she saw man-made beauty that was as beautiful as the beauties of the natural world. She was unsophisticated in her tastes. Botticelli’s
Primavera
and
Birth of Venus
kept her spellbound for hours. Looking at portraits, she wanted to know the people in them. She bought books on art, on Florentine history. After seeing his
Ganymede
she bought Cellini’s autobiography in a cheap paperback translation with black and white photographs. She bought a book on Italian birds. Marjorie went home and she stayed on alone, visiting all the churches mentioned in her guidebook. She began to imagine a possibility of a life where she taught all year and spent her summers in sunlight with beautiful art. It was months since she had taken out Mark’s letters to cry over them. She could almost speak Italian, which in Florence was like sung Latin anyway.

She sat alone in restaurants, eating pasta and refusing wine. Men looked at her lecherously and occasionally tried to touch her, but Marjorie’s technique of appealing to old black-clad ladies continued to work. She spent her days looking at art and architecture, and eating gelato and drinking granita in a little place she had found near the church of Orsanmichele, called “Perche No!” Gelato was not ice cream but pure essence of frozen fruit, with flavors she could not have imagined—watermelon, lemon, strawberry. She thought she would never eat ice cream again. She sat eating it and staring at Verrocchio’s statue of Doubting Thomas poking at Christ’s wound in a niche outside the church. That was the Christian way to deal with doubt: open yourself up to being poked at. Not shut it in a cupboard, as her mother had done when her childish inquiries about religion crossed some invisible and unpredictable line.

All her life she had had inferior things, ersatz things, ice cream instead of gelato, prints instead of paintings, rationed tasteless British institutional food instead of delicious Italian food. Only nature and music and poetry had really touched her soul in England in the way that everything did here. They had brought her closer to God, but in Florence everything did, every stone in the narrow streets, every metal sconce on the houses, the golden roof on the Baptistery, the proportions of the church of San Lorenzo, the taste of melon and prosciutto, everything. It was as if she had been lifted up through that circle of sky in the dome of the Pantheon and was in heaven. She found that she was crying into her gelato.

At last, Patty ran out of money and had to go home. She spent the last of her lira on a print of Ghirlandaio’s
Last Supper
and went back hungry across Europe on the slow trains, third class. Early one morning, somewhere in France, an old lady shared her coffee and croissants with her. “I don’t know why British people don’t understand food,” she said, knowing nobody would understand her. “I never had food in my life until I came to Europe.” An old man in a Panama hat laughed, and translated her remarks to the others.

“At least you have food now,” he said, wiping his moustache. He then proceeded to tell her about his adventures in the Resistance until she had to change trains in Paris.

In Cambridge she was much happier than she had been in Cornwall. There was music, which she had always loved, and there was the Fitzwilliam museum, which could not compare to the Uffizi but was better than nothing. There were student plays and orchestras. She joined two choirs, one sacred and one secular, and enjoyed singing challenging music. She also had the opportunity to row regularly, which she discovered to her surprise that she had missed very much. She went rowing alone early every morning that the weather made it remotely possible. Often she had the river to herself, with no sound but her oars and the wind in the trees. She began to watch birds more seriously, continuing to enjoy the RSPB’s pamphlets but also attending their meetings. She took the train to Ely one Saturday to see the cathedral and watch birds on the marshes.

The grammar school was excellent and she liked her colleagues. She was no longer the most junior, and the head of department was open to her suggestions for curriculum improvements. The girls were hard-working and keen to improve themselves. She liked the fact that they were from ordinary backgrounds, and that in the new Britain they had every opportunity to go as far as their talent could take them. “As good as any children in the world,” she remembered her father saying, and now she understood what he had meant and told them. She taught Shakespeare and poetry and showed them pictures in her art book, which made her look forward to visiting Italy again. She read everything she could find on Florentine history and the Renaissance.

That winter, the winter of 1951, Marjorie wrote to her saying that she was going to a meeting in Cambridge and asking if she could stay the night. Patty asked her landlady’s permission and then wrote back cheerfully. She liked her digs. Rationing was finally over, and though food in Britain could still not compare to food in France or Italy, it was not as bad as it had been. Her landlady managed to get chicken for Marjorie’s visit.

“What’s the meeting?” Patty asked her friend.

“Oh, it’s a silly thing really. There’s a group of people trying to get people to know their rights. Homosexuals, you know.” Marjorie looked embarrassed. “Somebody knew what happened to me and they asked me to speak at the meeting in Oxford, and I did. What happened to me and Grace—and we hadn’t even done anything! Imagine if we had. People don’t know what’s legal and what isn’t and what the law can do and what the colleges can do. Then they asked me to speak at this meeting in Cambridge. I wouldn’t have been able to except for staying with you, so thank you for that.”

“I think I’ll come too,” Patty said.

“Oh really? You wouldn’t want people thinking—I mean, teaching, being with girls?”

“That’s exactly the problem, isn’t it? But I don’t think anyone would think that, or even know. So many people are homosexual, and everyone knows, but it’s still illegal and they can get into trouble for it if anyone wants to make trouble. It shouldn’t be that way.”

The meeting was well attended. Marjorie spoke well. The other speaker was a man who explained that the best policy was to keep quiet. “We all know what happened to Wilde, and that is still the law. But as long as we don’t give anybody incontrovertible evidence and keep on denying any allegations, it’s very hard for the police to move against us. It’s not as if people want to know. If we’re quiet, we’re safe.”

An undergraduate stood up and asked if the meeting thought it would be possible for homosexuality to be legalized in their lifetimes, and there was much debate.

A tall stooping man came up to Patty and Marjorie afterwards. “I liked what you said,” he said. “I hadn’t really realized before that there was this kind of problem. What happened to your friend was really unfair.”

“Thank you,” Marjorie said. When he had gone she turned to Patty. “Who was that?”

“Some crazily brilliant mathematician, I think,” Patty said. “I’ve seen him around. He goes to concerts. Turner, or something like that. No, Turing. He’s not a don. I’m not sure what he does.”

A week or so later, as the pussywillows were just beginning to come out on the banks of the Cam, Patty met one of the girls who had been at the meeting as she was coming back from rowing. The girl had short hair as Patty still did. “Hello,” she said. “I recognize you from the meeting.”

Patty felt her heart beating unaccountably fast. “Hello. I’ve been on the river.”

“I’m just going on the river,” the girl said. “It’s such a good way to start the day.”

“Even at this time of year,” Patty agreed.

“Would you like to row together sometime? Maybe on Saturday?”

Patty hesitated. “I would. But you should know that I’m not a lesbian. Not a … a homosexual. I was just at the meeting because I think the way they treat you is wrong.”

The girl laughed. “We usually do say lesbian. But it’s not a requirement to row with me,” she said.

“I just didn’t want to be on false pretenses,” Patty said, stiffly.

“Understood,” the girl said. “Well if you’d care to meet me here this time on Saturday morning, I’d still be happy to row with you. My name’s Lorna Matthews.”

“Patty Cowan,” Patty said, and they shook hands.

Lorna and Patty began to row together weekly, and Lorna would sometimes invite Patty to parties, and she would sometimes go. She felt she was developing a wider circle, a more bohemian circle, and she liked the idea. She began to make other friends too, in school and in choir. Her contract was renewed for the next year and she looked forward to coming back to Cambridge after the long vacation.

That year Marjorie went to the south of France and Patty went back to Florence alone. She stayed in a tiny
pensione
and did all the things she had done the year before. Some of the waiters recognized her, as did the staff at the gelateria “Perche No!” where she felt almost like a regular. As she walked into the Raphael room at the Uffizi she felt a great sense of homecoming, as if this could really be her life and that it could be good, a life without love but with work and friendship and summers in Italy. She still missed Mark, she was sure she would always miss him, but she had passed beyond his horizon and felt capable again of being happy.

8

Blood: Tricia 1950–1952

Nine months and two days after the wedding, on March 15th 1950, Tricia gave birth to a ten pound baby son in Grantham General Hospital. They had previously agreed on a name for a boy, Douglas Oswald—Douglas after Mark’s father, not after General MacArthur, who later that summer made headlines in the war in Korea. She looked at the thin threads of pale hair on little Doug’s scalp as he lay sleeping in the cot beside her bed, and felt a rush of love so strong that she almost thought she would be physically sick with it. This made everything worthwhile, she thought, putting out a finger to touch his cheek. He opened his dark blue eyes at her touch, then began to cry. She picked him up and he soothed at once, looking at her with what she felt sure was curiosity. “You’re like a miracle,” she said to him. “You’re wonderful. You’re amazing. You’re mine.”