27
Time’s Wingéd Chariot: Pat 1978–1985
Philip went to the King’s College and worked seriously on his music. Pat and Michael began the Seven Wonders Foundation, which eventually grew entirely out of their control. Soon they had lists of seven wonders on each continent, though Pat never felt that any of the American ones could possibly really count. “New York’s skyline, indeed,” she muttered to Bee. “I’m glad to have anything protected, but how can that be considered artistic or historical?”
“They’ll be moving all their weapons in there,” Bee warned.
All the countries of United Europe and the USA and the USSR signed the Seven Wonders Pledge, along with Israel and Egypt and China and India, which made Pakistan the only nuclear power holding out, and Michael felt confident that the Shah of Iran would help put pressure on them.
When they came home from Italy in the autumn of 1980 it was to terrible news from Lorna. “Thyroid cancer,” she said.
They visited Lorna in hospital where she was starkly bald from chemotherapy and so thin her bones showed. “If only it did some good,” she said.
“She’s only fifty-two,” Bee said, afterwards as she wheeled herself back to the car. “My age.”
“Is it radiation?” Pat asked.
“Maybe. It could just be one of those things. There have always been cancers. But thyroid—could be. Could well be. Not likely Delhi, but it could be Kiev. That was such a thoughtlessly placed bomb. Poor Lorna.”
“She was the first lesbian I knew well,” Pat said.
“Me too. The first lesbian I ever knowingly met. At one of your parties in that flat on Mill Road.” Bee levered herself into the driving seat.
“She was the person I asked what women do together, when I first realized I was falling for you.” Pat wiped her eyes and heaved the wheelchair into the car.
“Really? I never knew that. I didn’t ask anyone. I just sort of went on instinct.” Bee shook her head as Pat sat down and did up her seatbelt.
“Poor Lorna. Well, she may pull through.”
“No,” Bee said. “Not with anaplastic thyroid cancer. Don’t get your hopes up. We can cure AIDS and leukemia, but not this kind of cancer.”
Lorna died before Christmas. They went to her funeral on a bitterly cold day. Although they hadn’t belonged to a choir in years, Lorna’s partner Sue asked Pat and Bee to sing “Gaudete.” “Lorna used to talk about you singing that at a party years ago,” Sue said. Pat sang it, and remembered the party, before Suez or the Cuban Exchange, before the children, when she and Bee had only just met. Bee’s voice was as powerful and true as ever. “We really did know Lorna for a long time,” she said to Bee on their way home.
Bee’s mother also died that winter, at a great age. They all went up to Penrith for the funeral. There was a bit of trouble as Bee’s brother Donald tried to put Bee and Jinny in the first car and the rest of the family in their own car. Pat would have let it be, but Bee insisted fiercely that her family were staying together. In the end they drove their own car and left immediately from the graveside. “Why did he have to be like that?” Bee asked. “I hate it when people won’t acknowledge my family as real. All of us.”
The girls took their A Levels that summer, 1981. Flora did well but not spectacularly and took up a place at Lancaster. She had grown out of the flower goddess phase and chose to study computer science. Jinny did brilliantly. She was accepted at Pat’s old college, St. Hilda’s, to read English, but in Italy that summer she changed her mind. “I want to study here,” she said. “My student loans are good for anywhere in Europe, aren’t they?”
“They are,” Pat said. “But are you sure?”
“What could be more blissful than studying sculpture in Florence?” Jinny asked. “Can I live in the house?”
“There will be some students living here, but there should be room for you as well. Is sculpture your passion then, Jinny-Pat?”
On the day of the Indo-Pak crisis Jinny had been a plump teenager with long black hair, and now she was a willowy girl with a short crop that curled over her ears, but the look she gave Pat was exactly the same. “I still don’t know. But it’s closer.”
“We might all fly out for Christmas,” Bee said when they told her. “I’ve always wanted to do Christmas in Florence.”
They did that, and discovered the lack of insulation in their house. “It was built to catch drafts,” Jinny said. “Thank you for bringing all my warm clothes!”
In Italy, instead of presents being brought by St. Nicholas at Christmas they are brought by La Befana, the Epiphany witch. “More like Halloween than Christmas!” Philip said.
Bee was enchanted with the tiny objects on sale for nativity sets. “Baskets of mushrooms!” she said. “Prosciutto!”
“You’re buying all the toy food, and we don’t actually have a Nativity set,” Jinny said.
“I’m going to give them to Flora,” Bee said. “Look, a tiny salami! And a wild boar!”
Flora arrived on Christmas Eve and was enchanted with the miniature food. “They’d be wonderful for a doll’s house,” she said.
“I knew you’d like them,” Bee said.
“But it’s freezing! I had no idea it was cold in Italy in the winter!”
“It’s one of Italy’s best-kept secrets,” Jinny said. “I suggest you sleep with two hot water bottles.”
Michael, being Jewish, did not celebrate Christmas. When he visited in the middle of January he was delighted to eat Pat’s truffle pasta with the wild boar salami they had brought home. Philip at fifteen, the only child still at home, ate three helpings.
“You’re looking tired,” Bee said to Michael when they had finished dessert. “Have you been working too hard?”
“I’ve been feeling a bit run down. And I keep falling asleep. And I’ve had a sore throat that doesn’t seem to go away. I may see the doctor about it.”
“You do that!” Pat said.
Two weeks later when Pat came home from school she found Bee crying into her geraniums in the greenhouse. Pat crouched before the chair and put her arms around Bee. “What’s wrong?”
“Michael has it.”
“What?” Pat asked.
“Thyroid cancer. Anaplastic, just the same as poor Lorna. There’s no point him trying the chemo. I told him so. It works for breast cancers and liver cancers, but not for that. Do you think he should come here to die?”
“Yes,” Pat said. “Or we should all go to Florence, perhaps? But what about Philip? He has O Levels this year. How long has Michael got?”
“Months,” Bee said. “Probably not a year. I think he should come here. Philip’s O Levels aren’t all that important to him. He’s already taken Grade 8 in music in all his instruments, and music is clearly what’s going to be his thing.”
“His passion,” Pat said. “You’re right. Yes, call Michael and tell him we’ll take care of him.”
“A lot of it will fall on you,” Bee said.
“The bedpans,” Pat said, and rolled her eyes. “How easily it all comes down to bedpans. You know I don’t mind.”
“Michael’s ten years younger than me and twelve years younger than you. We were all together on the morning of Kiev,” Bee said.
“You said then that the radioactivity wouldn’t get here for days,” Pat said, who remembered that with a burning clarity. “Days later we were here and he was in London, or who knows where, taking pictures.”
“I’m a biologist, why would you think I know anything about radioactivity or fallout?”
“But—” Pat stared open mouthed. “You’re a scientist. You sounded so confident. You were standing right there when you told me.”
“You were pregnant and panicking,” Bee said. “Everything I know about radioactivity is on a cellular level.”
Michael drove down the next day. “You remember we wanted to start our own Renaissance? We’re not going to have one,” he said to Pat.
“We got the Seven Wonders going,” she said. “That’s something. And you have taken some wonderful pictures.”
A burst of Albioni came through the open window of Philip’s room above the front door. “And there are the children,” Michael said. “Maybe they’ll do better with the world than we have.”
In the sitting room Bee was talking to one of her old students, Sophie Picton, who was briefly visiting Cambridge, and indeed Earth, from Galileo, the European space station. She had brought Bee some cuttings from space, and was taking some of Bee’s plants back up with her. “These should make the air smell a lot better,” she said.
“I’ll keep working on it,” Bee said.
“You should come up and work on it,” Sophie said. “In zero gravity you’d be able to move about as well as anyone else. Better, because your arms are strong.”
“Oh, that’s a tempting thought,” Bee said. “But I have my responsibilities here.”
Pat brought everybody some fruitcake and tea and Philip came down to join them and they chatted until Sophie left. Then they settled Michael into Jinny’s old room at the front of the house. Most of Jinny’s things were in Florence, and Pat moved the rest into the spare room.
“What we need to think is not that you’re here to die but that you’re here to celebrate while you can,” Bee said.
“Champagne every night?” Philip asked.
“Good things while we can have them anyway,” Pat said. “Flora’s going to come down at the weekend.”
“I want to take a series of pictures of you two and the children and the house and garden,” Michael said. “Nothing posed, just the way you go about your routine.”
“All right,” Pat said, exchanging looks with Bee. “My favorite picture of yours is still the one you took of Bee in Florence when the girls were babies.”
“Though your second favorite is St. Mark’s Square taken from ground level,” he said.
“It was the way you didn’t care at all if you completely ruined your clothes,” Pat said.
They put the news on after dinner, but after a few minutes Bee switched it off. “Nothing but violence and explosions and men posturing,” she said.
“Do you really want to go to space?” Pat asked Bee the next morning when she was dressing for work.
“No,” Bee said. “Well, yes. I always have loved science fiction and I’d love to go to space. But the way it is now with nobody sharing what they’re doing it’s anti-science. I’d be happy to give cuttings to the Americans and the Russians, but that’s not the way we do things any more. I hate that. Working on what I work on it’s not so bad, but if I were to really go into the space stuff it would stifle me not to be able to share freely.” Bee stopped. “Besides, we have to make choices. I used to think we had time to do anything we wanted, but we can only do some of the things in any one lifetime.”
“But at my back I always hear time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near. And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity,” Pat said.
“Deserts of vast eternity,” Bee echoed. “What’s that from?”
“Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress,’” Pat said. “It often comes into my mind. It’s about doing things while you can.”
“A good sentiment,” Bee said, wheeling herself towards the stairlift.
It took Michael eight months to die, and so he died in Florence at the end of August.
He had taken his series of photographs of them—of Bee swinging between the wheelchair and her green chair, and hauling herself up off the bed; of Pat cooking, and pushing her hair back impatiently as she typed; of Jinny pulling on her boots, and laughing with her head thrown back, looking exactly like Bee; of Philip playing the oboe, and clearing plates from the table; of Flora arranging flowers, looking like a goddess, and scrunching up her face at the thought of asparagus. He had kept photographing them right up to the end, the last of them were still in his camera. He had not been able to speak for the last two weeks, the growth in his throat was too much. He had written down detailed instructions for how the photographs were to be processed.
When they had driven down to Florence in late June, as soon as Philip’s exams were over, they had discussed Michael’s funeral. “There’s a Jewish cemetery in Florence,” Michael said. His voice was hoarse already.
“It’s some kind of ancient monument,” Pat said. “I don’t think it’s still used.”
“What kind of a guidebook writer are you?” Michael teased. “There’s a modern Jewish cemetery to the north of the city just out of town. I’ll talk to the rabbi and sort it out.”
“You don’t speak Italian,” Bee said.
“The rabbi speaks Hebrew.”
“Do you speak Hebrew?” Philip asked in astonishment.
“Of course I speak it,” Michael said. “I’m Jewish. And I spent a year in Israel after university. I’ve met the rabbi of Florence. I’ve been to the synagogue.”
“I’ve seen it, I’ve never been inside,” Pat said. “They built it in the nineteenth century in the thought that they’d make something Jewish but worthy of Florence. Certainly the outside does that.”
“The inside is lovely too. It had more treasures, but the Nazis destroyed them,” Michael said. “They used it as a garage and tried to blow it up when they left, but the Florentines defused the bombs.”
“Good for them. The Florentines also refused to blow up the Ponte Vecchio or Michelangelo’s bridge,” Pat said.
“I think it was the German in charge who refused to blow up the historical bridges,” Michael said.
“Am I half Jewish?” Philip asked suddenly.
“No,” Michael said. “Nobody is half Jewish. You’re either Jewish or you’re not, and you’re not, because it goes by the mother. But you’re Jewish enough by the Law of Return that you could have an Israeli passport if you wanted one.”
“You’re not—I mean you eat pork,” Philip said.
“I may be a bad Jew, but I’m a Jew. The rabbi in Florence will bury me, don’t worry.”
When he died, it was by suffocation—the tumor in his throat grown too big for him to breathe around. “If they operated to remove it, it would just drag the process out and be more agonizing,” Bee said. Until the last two weeks of silence and pain the process had not been too bad. He had drunk granita even when he could swallow nothing else. All three children were in Florence—Flora had come down alone by train to join the rest of them at the end of her term. But only Bee and Pat were with him when he breathed his last.
“We never meant to be a family when we invited him to be a sperm donor,” Bee said as Pat closed Michael’s eyes. “Isn’t it funny how things happen?”
“There’s no word for what he was to us,” Pat said, weeping. “He was the father of our children, and our intermittent lover, and most of all he was our very good friend.”
He was buried in the Jewish cemetery with Jewish rites. It was the first Jewish ceremony Pat had ever seen, and she found it much more moving than the other funerals she had attended.
Two years later, in 1984, Philip went to music college and Flora graduated from Lancaster. Jinny still had another year of her four-year course to go. Flora had met a young man in her first weeks in Lancaster and they both moved on to take the PGCE, the qualification necessary now to teach. When they graduated from that they announced that they were getting married.
“She’s so young!” Bee said.
“Well, Mohammed seems nice enough,” Pat said.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to his name,” Bee said.
“Turkey’s in Europe now,” Pat reminded her. “I know it hasn’t been in Europe since the Roman Empire, but now it’s back. They’re going there on honeymoon, and stopping to see us in Florence on the way back.”
They had the wedding reception in their garden. Flora carried roses and geraniums she had planted herself and looked radiant. Philip gave her away, looking very grown up in his suit, and afterwards played a composition of his own as she and Mohammed walked through the guests to be photographed. “I wish Michael could have photographed her now,” Bee said.
“Does Mohammed know that Michael was Jewish?” Jinny asked.
“Does Mohammed know Michael was Flora’s father?” Pat asked in return. “Does Mohammed know that Flora has two mothers? We don’t know and we haven’t asked. He seems nice, but such a conventional young man, not to mention from a culture we don’t know much about.”
“I’m glad she’s keeping her own name,” Jinny said.
“You’re not planning on getting married then?” Bee asked. “No beautiful Italian men?”
“Plenty of beautiful Italian men, but I’m not planning on getting married any time soon. But I do have an exciting offer of sharing a studio. Not making copies of classical works, doing our own thing.”
“Henry Moore? Neo-Impressionism? What is your own thing?” Pat asked.
“Neo-Renaissance? That’s what you’d like.” Jinny laughed. “You’ll have to wait and see. Also, I’m taking a course in museum work, so that I can earn some money while I wait to be discovered.”
“Sensible and practical,” approved Bee.
“Flora’s the practical one, she’s got a job teaching already,” Jinny said.
“And Philip has got really good,” Bee said. “I hadn’t noticed, because he’s always been good at playing, but his composing has improved no end. That was like real music today.”
“They’re all growing up,” Pat said. “It seems like yesterday that they were babies, and now—”
“I can’t believe you said that!” Jinny said. “That’s such a cliché! I can’t believe those words actually came out of your mouth! Flora! Pat said it seems like yesterday that we were babies!”
Flora came over and kissed them, carefully, so as not to mess her dress. “I love you,” she said. “Thank you for giving me this wedding, and thank you for giving me my childhood.”
“It’s old cliché week in the garden,” sighed Jinny.