23

Orangutan: Pat 1971–1977

The electric wheelchair, built of lightweight space metals, was worth every penny. It was cumbersome and awkward but it gave Bee independence, especially in college. New College tried hard to be accommodating. They built ramps and installed a lift. Every year Bee had to fight the administration to have her classes scheduled in the rooms she could reach, but these were battles she always won. She went on teaching and researching where many people would have given up. “I wasn’t about to resign myself to bedpans,” she said. She designed long-handled gardening tools she could use from the wheelchair, and taught all the children to help her. She would also lower herself from the chair and work from the ground. She could move around on flat surfaces with her arms. She had first developed this technique on the bed and later extended it to the floors indoors and then at last into the garden. Pat said it was terrible for her clothes, but Bee joked that it cancelled out because of the savings on shoe leather.

They had to give up the bees because there was no way for Bee to lift the hives and nobody else could deal with them without being stung. That was the only sacrifice.

The first year everything was difficult, and money grew tight. “I think we may have to sell the Florentine house,” Pat said.

“Never!” Bee said. “It would break the children’s hearts.”

“I’d be very sad myself,” Pat said. “But the property taxes are more every year, and the value has appreciated more than I’d ever have imagined. If we sold it we could live comfortably. And I don’t know how you could manage there. You know what the plumbing’s like, and the doors are so narrow.”

“In the gym where I do my physio they have rings hanging from the ceiling. I was thinking we could put some of those in, and I could get around that way.”

“My orangutan,” Pat said, fondly. “But even if that worked it would be difficult. Italian workmen? If we sold the house—”

“Are we that short of money?” Bee asked.

“Well, I didn’t write the Bologna book. Constable are being very understanding, but they’re not going to pay me for a book I haven’t turned in. And all the work on this house has been expensive. And keeping my mother in the home. We’ll be all right, but it’s going to be tight. That money that came in for the French translation got us out of a hole, and the US royalties should come in a few weeks. But we are getting a bit hand-to-mouth.”

“We can’t sell the Florentine house. It would be crazy.” Bee frowned. “You could go to Bologna for a week and do the research and come home and write the book?”

“I can’t leave you!”

“I could manage,” Bee said.

“I’m sure you could,” Pat said, though in fact she was far from sure that Bee could. She couldn’t reach the stovetop or the kettle. Remodelling the kitchen was a plan, but they had put it off because of the expense. It was on Pat’s list of things they could do if they sold the Florentine house. “But I couldn’t manage without you. I’d be utterly miserable, even in Italy. Look what happened the last time I left you! Besides, what if that social worker comes sniffing around again?”

The social worker kept coming back. She wanted to check on Bee’s welfare, and on the children’s welfare, or so she said. They trod carefully. Pat moved some clothes into the guest room closet and was prepared to say she slept there. The social worker did not go upstairs again, but she questioned the children, which was a worry. It had seemed charming to them for the children to call them Mum and Mamma, but now they worried and tried to train them into calling them by their first names. The girls soon got into the habit, but Philip never did.

“They couldn’t really take the children, could they?” Pat asked.

“I don’t know,” Bee said. “This isn’t a situation they’ll have space for on their forms.”

At last Pat decided to put the family on a more secure financial footing by going back to teaching. Bee was back at work by then, at least part time. Their children were at the village school, an easy walk, and the girls could safely escort Philip. On days when Bee was going in, Pat drove her to New College and then went on to her own work, and at the end of the school day collected Bee and took her home. It worked out relatively smoothly. Pat’s old school had no vacancies, but there was an independent day school for girls desperate for somebody to teach English to the fifth and sixth forms. Pat had always enjoyed teaching and she enjoyed taking it up again. In addition to English she taught General Studies—which she turned into a course on Classical and Renaissance art and civilization. The pupils loved it.

She could no longer take her mother out for lunch, but her mother had never seemed to enjoy it much. She continued her weekly visits on Sundays, generally alone as Bee preferred to save her energy for things she enjoyed, and because her mother was generally so savage to the children. Sometimes she recognised Pat, greeting her as Patsy. Other times she was sunk into a world of her own. She would confide that the nurses and the other patients stole her things. She would ask for help in escaping so that she could get home. She often wept and seemed desperate.

Pat tried to sell her mother’s house that spring. The money would have been useful to maintain her mother in the home. They all drove down to Twickenham and cleared it out, taking carloads of things to the local charity shops. Then Pat visited an estate agent to get the house put on the market. Everything went smoothly until Pat told them that the house belonged to her mother. “Has she owned the house longer than five years?” the agent asked.

“She’s owned it since the 1920s,” Pat said. “I think my parents bought it when they married in 1925.”

“In that case there will be no certificate of ownership, and she will have to come in and authorize the sale herself,” the agent said.

“She’s very old, and in a nursing home in Cambridge,” Pat explained.

“Then she could fill out these forms and give them to you to bring back,” the agent said, producing a thick stack of forms.

“I have the deeds for the house,” Pat said.

“Even so, we need these forms,” the agent said.

“My mother won’t understand them,” Pat said.

“Well then you fill them in and just get her to sign.”

Getting the forms signed took a struggle that lasted for weeks. Pat’s mother was in a suspicious phase and refused to sign anything. When Pat caught her on a happier day, she seemed to have forgotten how to write and sat chewing on the end of the pen. At last she did sign, but she signed them “Love from Gran” in big sprawling writing. Pat visited the solicitor who had seen to the wills she and Bee had made setting up the guardianship of the children and asked what she could do. The solicitor was unhelpful. “You could set up a power of attorney so that you could do things on her behalf, but you should have done it before, when she was well enough to agree. If this comes before the courts as things are they will appoint somebody to advocate for her who will take control of her estate—a social worker and a financial planner.”

“But I’ve seen her will and she has left everything to me!”

“She’s still alive,” the solicitor pointed out. “If I were you I’d leave her house alone until it’s yours to sell.”

“I’m paying out of my own money to keep her in the home,” Pat said.

“You could put her somewhere cheaper if you chose.” But Pat couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her mother couldn’t be said to like the home in Trumpington, but she was at least used to it by now, and any change would be worse.

As the summer came they made preparations for Italy. “Should we drive or take the train?” Pat asked in one of their early morning conversations.

“I keep hearing about cars adapted to be driven by hand. Cars with automatic transmissions.” Bee devoured everything she could find on assisted technology for the handicapped.

“Here?”

“In the US,” Bee admitted.

“Well then, if we drive I have to drive the whole distance, which will mean it will take nearly a week. And our old car is still there. Sara said she’d sell it for us, but she overestimated the demand for right-hand-drive cars in Italy.”

“So we could drive back,” Bee said.

“We could. The kids loved the train. There was a compartment with four beds, two on each side. I think we could manage.”

“What was the bathroom like?”

“Tiny … you’d never get the chair in. I could help you.”

“I was wondering what chair to take. There’s no point taking the powered chair. The power’s different in Italy, it wouldn’t charge. And it’s so heavy to lift up and down onto trains. It might be sensible to take the folding one, which would fit into the car for coming home, and might fit through the doors, except that I can’t propel it. This upstairs one is probably best, if it’ll fit inside—and then there’s the whole issue of getting it home. It’s like that puzzle with the fox and the chicken and the sack of grain.” Bee laughed.

“We could go both ways on the train. That car’s pretty useless to us as it is now. If we need another car it should be an adapted one you can drive, when they start doing them here.”

“Or we could fly,” Bee said. “It’s expensive for all of us, but they know how to deal with wheelchairs and we wouldn’t be so tired when we got there.”

“I’ve never flown,” Pat said. “I’ll look into it. It might be an allowable expense, if I put information about it into the book.”

Despite the expense they flew from Gatwick to Rome. Bee had to be carried up the stairs onto the plane, and her chair travelled in the baggage compartment. “Thank goodness it’s not a long flight,” she said, and refused all drinks.

“Bathrooms in Italy are going to be a real problem,” Pat said.

“Oh well, we brought the bedpan if it comes to that,” Bee said.

The flight terrified Pat and Jinny, who clung to the arms of their seats at every bump, but the others enjoyed it. The stewardesses were especially solicitous of Bee, and they brought the children so much juice that their mothers feared they would be sick.

“I should have flown back last year,” Pat said. “It never crossed my mind.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Bee said.

From Rome they took the train to Florence. The children got excited as it rushed in and out of tunnels so that hills and medieval towns appeared for a few seconds. “It’s so warm,” Bee said.

“Italy!” the children chorused, striking up acquaintance with the other passengers on the train in rapid Italian. This was useful when the train stopped in Florence and Pat needed help getting Bee’s chair down. A middle-aged man the children had befriended lowered Bee down into it.

“We should have guessed from the way they are with babies and children that they’d be better with disability,” Bee said.

“Yes, better in an individual way, but there won’t be any proper official recognition. No ramps. All those cobbles. No toilets.”

“Stop fretting about toilets,” Bee said. “We’re in Florence! And Florence makes everything worthwhile!”

Even Bee was a little downcast when she found that the chair would not fit through the front door. She swung herself down and dragged herself in by her arms. Pat put the children to bed straight away, ignoring pleas for just one gelato. She made up a bed for the two of them on the floor in the kitchen. Then she helped Bee in the bathroom. “I’m sorry this puts so much on you,” Bee said, dragging herself over to the bed. The chair was parked under the vines by the table where they had eaten so many delicious Italian meals.

Pat was almost too tired to reply. She crawled into the pile of blankets beside Bee and hugged her close. “Of course it would have been better if the bomb had never got you, if you were still well. But it did happen. Random violence is just part of life. The Irish and the Algerians and the Basques and the Red Brigades blow people up, and they don’t care who they hurt. We can’t help that. It was like being struck by lightning. And I hate that you were struck by lightning, but I’m just so glad you’re alive.”

Michael came for two weeks, and while he was in Florence Pat finally managed to get the research done for the Bologna book, and another on Genoa. He helped Pat move the bed downstairs and set it up. “What you need is a slimline wheelchair for this house,” he said.

“And a stairlift,” Pat said. “Maybe when I’ve written these books and been paid for them. It’s so hard to get that kind of work done in Italy.”

“The bathroom first. Rails,” Bee said, from outside where she was sitting in her wheelchair.

Their finances gradually recovered. Pat wrote the guidebooks, and if they were not as thorough as the earlier ones nobody complained. Sales continued to be good. She kept on teaching, and Bee stayed on at New College. They often had student volunteers around the house and garden, in the orchard learning to graft or in the conservatory they built on where Bee crossbred plants and did much of her research. They redid the kitchen with low counters accessible from the wheelchair. They eventually managed to make the Florentine house tolerably accessible, widening the doorway, though they never managed to get a stairlift installed.

In 1974 the girls passed the eleven plus and started at Cambridge Girls’ Grammar school, where Pat had taught before they were born. Britain was wracked with strikes and reprisals. Violence seemed to be everywhere. The Red Brigades blew up trains and kidnapped politicians in Italy, and the IRA did the same in Britain. Meanwhile Europe moved closer and closer to political unity. Portugal was still embroiled in a vicious colonial war in Goa. The Americans were still fighting in Vietnam, and the French in Algeria. Britain’s African colonies were seething with rebellion. In space, the Russian and European space stations and moon bases glared at each other, and America tried belatedly to catch up and build their own space station. The Soviets crushed dissent in Poland as they had earlier in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

In 1975 Michael became the art director of the Observer newspaper. In 1976 Bee finally managed to get a car she could drive. The social worker kept calling twice a year. Bee and Pat tried to treat it as routine, but it always unnerved them. The threat of losing the children was always with them. The children grew up clever and confident, with Bee’s practicality and Pat’s love of words and Michael’s aesthetic sense. They continued to be bilingual in Italian, which delighted all their parents.

Pat’s mother deteriorated still more. She almost never knew Pat and was almost always afraid and savage. In the spring of 1977, she caught a chill and died. She was buried in Twickenham, next to Pat’s father and Oswald. It was a bitterly cold day with an east wind biting through their coats.

“Don’t put me here,” Pat said to Bee and the children as they walked back to the car. Flossie was pushing Bee’s chair. “I don’t care what you do with me, but not here.”

“That’s a really morbid thought, Mum,” Philip said.