10

Babies: Tricia 1952–1961

Tricia’s second baby was born dead. The birth was as hard a struggle as Doug’s had been, two days of labor with nothing to show for it at the end. The dead child was a girl. Mark had her baptized Hilary. Tricia was too ill herself to have any say in the matter. It took her a long time to recover from that birth. Her mother came down to care for Doug while she was in hospital, and remained for a few months afterwards, during which Tricia felt constantly exhausted. It was the most she could do to eat and talk to Doug. Going to the bathroom left her needing to rest for an hour. Her mother went home in October. Tricia’s doctor prescribed exercises and a tonic. She slowly regained her strength. At the time of the Coronation, in June, Mark again brought home a bottle of wine and left it sitting on the sideboard. Tricia saw it as she came in from the kitchen and almost without thinking picked it up and smashed it in the fireplace. The plummy scent of red wine rose immediately into the air, and she stood staring at the green glass shattered all over the grate.

Her rebellion did no good, of course. Mark, coming in, looked at her and the broken bottle patiently. Her violence had put him in the right, made her into the child and him the adult. It bought her one night, for which she had to pay with reduced housekeeping money the following week, for he stopped the price of wine out of it.

This pettiness astounded her. Where was the man she had thought she was marrying? Or forget that, where was normal human decency? She would not do that to a dog. She told Mark she was pregnant almost immediately, before she could possibly have been sure, but he did not question her. She hated lying, but she had come to the end of her resources. She had loved him, and even after she had stopped loving him she had tried to make the marriage work, and this was what it had come to. She made a desperate plan to run away to her mother in Twickenham—a journey requiring a bus and two trains and most of a day, no easy trip with a three-year-old. She reached her mother’s house after six at night, to her mother’s astonishment. She took them in and put Doug to bed at once. Then she insisted on telephoning the Lincolnshire neighbor who was prepared to take messages for Mark and Tricia.

“He’ll be so worried about you,” she said, dialling. No matter what Tricia said, her mother insisted on treating it as a temporary problem. “All marriages have these little blips,” she said. Mark agreed that Tricia should stay until the weekend and then he would fetch her back. She felt her mother conspired with him to make her again the child, the misbehaving child.

“I want to leave Doug with you and take a teaching post,” Tricia said to her mother. “I’ll be able to send you money for his keep.”

“Married women can’t teach!” her mother said.

“They can now,” Tricia said. “That law has been changed. Or if I can’t teach I’ll get secretarial work. Goodness knows typing Mark’s book has taught me something.”

But her mother wouldn’t hear of it. “Your place is with your husband. I know you took losing the baby badly, but the best thing for that is to have another baby as soon as possible. I lost a baby between Oswald and you. It’s natural to hate Mark for putting you through all that pain, but it isn’t his fault really.”

She tried to tell her mother about the way he had burned the letters and his pettiness with the housekeeping but she couldn’t make her understand. She made light of everything and kept repeating that all marriages had these problems. When Tricia cried, her mother said she was run down, and made her cups of Bovril.

On the Saturday morning Mark arrived in the car, Doug was delighted to see him. Tricia was too busy being sick to care. She tried to blame the Bovril, but she knew she really was pregnant again.

In the car she tried to make an ultimatum as Doug ran about the back seat pointing out cows and horses excitedly. “We have to move into town. I can’t stay there in the village where there’s nothing. It’s driving me mad. I never talk to an adult. I’m completely trapped. There isn’t even a library.”

“I’ll consider looking for a house in Grantham after the new baby is born,” Mark said, with the air of somebody making a huge concession.

The baby was born in January 1954, and it was a girl. They called her Helen Elizabeth, after Tricia’s mother and Elizabeth Burchell, and perhaps the new queen. The order of names was at Tricia’s insistence. She was again very pulled down after the birth, and her mother again came to stay. Doug was jealous of the new baby and of his mother and grandmother’s attention to her. He had been toilet trained for more than a year, but he began to deliberately soil himself. Tricia found this so distressing that she broke down in tears every time it happened. She still had to wash everything by hand herself. Mark dealt with it by spanking Doug, much against Tricia’s desires. “He’s too little,” she insisted. “He doesn’t really understand. It’s just because of Helen. He’ll be fine again soon.”

“Haven’t you seen the look on his face? It’s deviltry and he’s doing it on purpose.”

“Well, he is, but he doesn’t understand.” Tricia was furious with Doug herself, but she couldn’t condone hitting a child so young. Mark, however, was implacable, and as his methods worked and Doug gave up his rebellion it made it more difficult for her to continue to insist the next time he wanted to punish his son for naughtiness. This seemed to happen more and more frequently. Mark’s book had been rejected by the publisher after long deliberation, and while he had sent it to another he was angry about it and took it out on Tricia and Doug. He did not hit Tricia, but he did not need to—sarcasm was always a sufficient weapon to reduce her to misery.

At Easter they visited the Burchells in Oxford. Tricia still didn’t care for them, but she welcomed anything like a change in her routine. Mark wanted to talk to them about what to do with his book. Tricia was so delighted to see Oxford again that tears came into her eyes as they drove past Blackwell’s. She took the children for walks, pushing Helen in the pram and holding tightly to Doug’s hand. It was vacation, but there seemed to be plenty of undergrads around, running and bicycling and laughing in the spring sunshine. They took no notice of Tricia even when she smiled at them, and she realized she was invisible to them. When she had been an undergraduate, a woman with a pram would have been invisible to her, too.

The second evening, Mark went out with the Burchells, leaving Tricia to babysit her own two children and the Burchells’ four. The youngest Burchell child, Paul, was a few months older than Helen, and when he woke screaming Tricia could do nothing to calm him. Eventually, feeling almost as if she were committing adultery, she gave him her breast. He quieted at once, as Helen would have. It was a strange intimacy to have with somebody else’s child.

The next year Tricia had another stillbirth and they did move, not because of her ultimatum but because Mark had found a better job. They moved to Woking, in London’s commuter belt, to a suburban house with a washing machine. It belonged to them, or as Mark said, to the bank. It was a long but possible walk from the library and the shops, and while the house was ugly and identical to its neighbors, and Tricia would never have chosen it, she was happier there than she had been isolated outside Grantham. She made friends with other mothers of small children, and haunted the library with desperation, burying herself in books, the longer the better. She read Middlemarch and found it almost too painful, seeing herself in Dorothea and Mark in Casaubon. She read aloud to Doug and Helen and to herself compulsively in every spare moment.

Mark joined the golf club and she joined the Peace Pledge Union and the Labour Party.

That autumn a publisher bought Mark’s book, so clearly it was not Causaubon’s sterile Key to All Mythologies after all. That night Mark visited Tricia’s bedroom after a bath but without any wine. The sexual act seemed to be over faster, which she approved, and he did not apologize afterwards. She did not become pregnant, nor did she the month after, but by February she could not keep food down and she knew she was in for it again.

They visited the Burchells again that summer, 1956. All the political talk was about Nasser seizing the Suez Canal. Elizabeth Burchell compared him to Hitler and Tricia felt cold inside. Surely it would not be war again, so soon? She looked at Doug, who was six now, happily playing with the Burchell children, and imagined him marching off at eighteen and never coming back. It was hard enough for her to bear Mark disciplining him; she could not endure the thought of him being killed in battle. The Peace Pledge Union started a letter writing campaign and urged her to write to her MP, begging Britain to keep out of it. She did, and it must have worked, for the whole thing blew over in a solution brokered by the US and the UN. People stopped saying Nasser was as bad as Hitler. Egypt kept control of the canal but let everyone go through, even the Israelis. During this period Tricia became a devotee of the BBC radio news, and even after Mark bought them a small television it was the radio she used in the kitchen that kept her up to date.

On that trip to Oxford Mark and the Burchells decided to “be received,” meaning joining the Roman Catholic church, and on their return to Woking Mark began to take instruction. Tricia flat-out refused to join him. She no longer believed in a loving God, and stuck to that, whatever Mark said. She realized one day as he was lecturing her that he not only treated her as if she were stupid, but genuinely believed she was. He treated her as a baby machine, and she felt as if she almost was one. What was her degree for, when all the reading she did now was to escape from her own intolerable life?

In October of 1956 she suffered yet another stillbirth, during the Hungarian Crisis. She had been glued to the radio hearing about the Soviet troops poised to go into Budapest, and the brave Hungarians defying them by massing peacefully in the city squares. She wanted to give the baby a Hungarian name, but Mark named it Matthew while she was still unconscious and undergoing an operation to stitch up her womb. Poor dead Matthew had torn her insides in some way. The doctor was unsure whether she would be able to have more children.

“Surely two is enough,” she said tentatively to Mark. “It’s not as if either of us enjoys it.”

“God will decide,” he said, and by that she had no choice but to abide. It was some comfort to her that the Soviets had backed down on Hungary and were allowing a greater measure of democracy, both there and in the rest of the Iron Curtain countries. Both the Soviets and the Americans were pushing ahead into space, in a kind of competition. The BBC was excited to report the first photographs of the dark side of the moon.

Mark was received into the Catholic faith and took it very seriously. He insisted the children be instructed, and although they had been baptized in the Church of England he insisted on having their baptisms repeated, or “conditionally repeated” as nobody was sure whether the first baptisms had counted. Tricia let him take Doug to church with him, but usually kept Helen home with her. “She’s too young to sit through the service,” she said, and Mark agreed. Doug, who had just started school, said church was boring, but only to Tricia. He was wary of his father, though more likely to be pushed into rage and defiance than fear.

Tricia’s life in Woking was just beginning to settle down into something she could endure when Mark again brought home wine. His book had been published and was getting some attention, or so he said. She lay and endured his attentions and naturally she became pregnant again. Her doctor looked grave and told her to rest, but of course rest was impossible. Doug had to be taken to and from school and Helen was a very active three-year-old. She was sure this baby would die like the last two, but to her surprise it survived. They called it George Ludwig. Tricia protested the Ludwig, but only feebly. Her mother again came to stay and help with the baby, but Tricia found her less use than on previous occasions. She seemed vaguer, less sure of herself. She kept forgetting the names of things. When Tricia asked her about it she said that she needed to change the prescription of her blood pressure tablets because they made her forgetful.

“She’s only fifty-eight,” Tricia said to Mark after her mother had left. “She can’t be getting senile already, surely?”

“She never was especially intelligent, she won’t miss it,” Mark responded. He was busy writing another book, which he expected as a matter of course that Tricia would type for him, chapter by chapter, and then again with corrections. Georgie was a fussy baby, fussier than either of the others. He did not nurse well, and she had to give him bottles to keep up his weight.

Tricia asked the sympathetic doctor about Malthusian belts. He laughed, and explained that there were contraceptives and he could prescribe them for her, but there was nothing she could use without her husband’s knowledge. She endured another pregnancy that ended in a stillbirth, and another that resulted in a baby—Catherine Marian, born in November of 1959. When she visited after this birth there was no denying that Tricia’s mother was becoming forgetful.

The doctor told Mark that he was endangering Tricia’s life by insisting on more children. All the same he persisted, and she had another stillbirth in the autumn of 1960. In the summer of 1961 the doctor prescribed Tricia the new contraceptive pill. She told Mark it was a tonic and he believed her. Childbirth was over.