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Retirement: Pat 1986–1990

Pat retired from teaching in 1986 when she was sixty. Sixty was still the official European retirement age for women, though they were talking about raising it to be sixty-five, the same as for men. Flora also stopped teaching that year to have a baby, Samantha Deniz, born in May. Pat and Bee went up to Lancaster as soon as they had the news that little Sammy had been born. They held her on her first day of life. “She looks exactly like you did when you were born, exactly,” Pat told Flora.

“All babies look alike,” Flora laughed. The birth had been difficult and she was exhausted but triumphant.

Philip came from Manchester, where he was studying music. “How disconcerting to suddenly be an uncle,” he said. “You should have warned me, Flo.”

“How could I have warned you?” Flora asked.

“I’ll compose a piece of music for her,” he said.

Bee and Pat drove Philip back to Manchester. “So I want to explain to you about my living situation,” he said from the back seat.

“You’re living with someone?” Bee asked.

“I’m living with two people.”

“We know that, you told us when you took the flat. But is one of them … significant?” Pat asked.

Philip laughed. “They’re both significant. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“He’s had to work hard to find a way to shock his lesbian mothers,” Pat said to Bee. “I mean we didn’t make it easy for him, poor boy. He couldn’t just be gay like any normal young man.”

“Why would it shock you, it’s what you two were doing with Michael all my life!”

“I was teasing,” Pat said. “Sorry.”

“You’re seriously romantically involved with two people?” Bee asked.

“Fairly seriously, yes,” Philip said. “Sanchia’s Dutch, she’s three years older than me, she’s an organist, making a living giving piano lessons. Ragnar’s Norwegian, he’s my age, he’s a flautist with the Symphony, and he also works part time in a bar.”

“Wow,” Pat said, trying to make up for her earlier joke. “They sound amazing. I can’t wait to meet them.”

“Do you have any other surprises?” Bee asked.

“Well, they call me Marsilio,” Philip said. “So if you wouldn’t mind? I’m going to use it professionally. So many people are called Philip. Marsilio—”

“Just you and Ficino,” Pat said. “So are you bringing them to Florence?”

“If there’s room. But just for a week or two, because I have an engagement for August, playing oboe for somebody who’s going to be on maternity leave. Babies seem to be breaking out all over.”

“We’d be delighted to have them in Florence,” Pat said. “Flora’s not going to be able to make it this year.”

Sanchia and Ragnar spoke perfect English, which was a relief. Ragnar looked like a Viking, huge with a curling beard and long hair. Sanchia was stunning, but she didn’t look Dutch. “My mother was from Indonesia,” she explained when Bee asked.

Driving back to Cambridge Pat and Bee discussed them. “Not many people get into a long-term relationship when they’re in college,” Pat said.

“No, but Philip is just the person to do it,” Bee said. “I liked them, especially her.”

“They all three seemed so comfortable together,” Pat said. “He seems happy with them. That’s what matters.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable calling him Marsilio,” Bee confessed. “I’m so used to him as Philip.”

Jinny came over from Italy the next week to see her new niece. She spent a day and a night in Cambridge while she was there. “I’m thinking I want to take a course in architecture next year,” she said.

“In Florence?” Pat asked.

“Oh yes. Because it’s in Florence I want to work. People keep building new houses around about. Suburbs. And they’re like the suburbs here. Between here and London it’s all suburbs. And you’ve seen Flora’s house. Somebody needs to be designing small houses for ordinary people to live in that are beautiful. I have the aesthetics, but I don’t have the technical qualifications. This is what I want to do.”

“You’ve found your passion at last,” Pat said, looking at Jinny’s face.

“I really do think I have,” Jinny said.

“Can you still get student loans or will you need some money?” Bee asked.

“I’m going to need some money. But I’ll pay you back.”

“Pay it forward,” Bee said. “Pay for your own children to follow their passion. Or for other friends you know who may need help.”

Pat was working on a guide to Trieste that summer. She missed Michael acutely whenever she worked with a different photographer and had to explain exactly what she wanted. She was also updating her Florentine guide and refused to change any of the photographs. “None of those things have changed,” she insisted to her editor.

“What about this gelateria?” he asked, pointing to a picture of Perche No! “Is that still there?”

“Exactly the same,” Pat assured him. “Just as wonderful as ever. The best gelato in the world, just as it says in the book.”

She took Ragnar and Sanchia around and was delighted to see them fall under the enchantment of Florence.

“They did this,” Ragnar said. “As well as the music. All this at the same time.”

“It’s possible,” Sanchia said, leaning back against Philip as she ate a gelato and stared at Orsanmichele, as Pat had done on her first visit to Florence. “I have to come back.”

“I’m so glad you see it this way,” Pat said. “Not everyone does. My daughter Flora’s husband just said how pretty it was. And some Italians just take it for granted.”

The next year, 1987, Bee retired. “I’ll keep on with my own research at home, but I’ll have done with all the going in to college and keeping office hours and marking,” she said. They had a ceremony for her retirement and gave her a specially designed electric wheelchair with tractor treads for use in the garden. “So much nicer than a gold watch,” she said.

Flora had another baby in March 1988, Cenk Michael. “It’s pronounced Jenk,” she said. “It was Mohammed’s father’s name.”

“It’s lovely,” Pat said, diplomatically. “So easy to say.”

Philip had composed a piece of music for baby Sammy, and he composed another for Cenk. He graduated and began a life of standing in for people in orchestras while working on his compositions. He and Sanchia and Ragnar continued to live together as best they could with their careers, and to come to Florence for at least part of every summer.

Jinny qualified as an architect. Her senior year project for a small but beautiful house won a European design award. She immediately became a junior partner in a firm in Florence. Her designs went into use almost at once. “Ginevra could make a lot of money if she went into designing for our richer clients,” a senior partner told Pat at a party.

“It’s not what she wants,” Pat said, proudly. Jinny now lived at the Florentine house permanently and paid the property taxes on it. Pat and Bee still came out every summer, and Philip and his household for part of every summer. Flora and Mohammed had only been there once since their wedding.

“We should make a new will and give Jinny the Florentine house,” Pat said. “We haven’t made wills since they were tiny and we were worried about social workers.”

“And dear old Michael promised to marry whichever of us was left,” Bee said, smiling.

They made new wills. “We want to leave the Florentine house to Jinny and the Harston house and the remainder of our estates to the other two equally,” Pat said.

“That’s not possible,” the solicitor explained. “You own these properties between you, and that makes it more complicated.”

They eventually decided to give Jinny the Florentine house now and leave the Cambridge house to whichever of them survived the other, and then divided between the other children. “Are you sure that’s fair?” Bee asked.

“They’ll sell our Harston house and use the money. Jinny will live in the Florentine house,” Pat said. “That makes it fair, even if it is worth more.”

“There will be death duties,” the solicitor said. “There wouldn’t be if you were married, but as things are.”

“It makes my blood boil,” Bee said.

They also filled out powers of attorney in case of incapacity, naming each other, remembering how they couldn’t sell Pat’s mother’s house. “These wouldn’t necessarily hold up,” the solicitor said. “Not if anyone challenged them.”

“Does anyone in that sentence mean our children or the government?” Bee asked. “Our children wouldn’t, but the government is another thing.”

“It certainly wouldn’t hold up under a government challenge. But it’s better than nothing.”

On their way back home from the solicitor’s Bee started to laugh. “I was just thinking how grown up all that made me feel,” she said. “I’m sixty-one!”

The next March Pat had a heart attack in the early hours of the morning. She knew at once what it was, a pain in her left arm and chest. She managed to waken Bee before she passed out, and Bee called an ambulance. She woke up in the Addison, alone.

She struggled to press the button to ring for the nurse. “Is my friend waiting?” she asked.

“Try to relax,” the nurse said, taking her pulse professionally. “Don’t worry about anything.”

“I’ll worry myself into another heart attack this minute if you don’t let my friend in. She’s in a wheelchair.”

Bee was waiting, and they let her in. “They wouldn’t tell me how you were,” she said, wheeling herself right up to the bed and taking Pat’s hand.

“I had to threaten to have another heart attack to get you in,” Pat said. “You wouldn’t believe how much good it’s doing my heart to see you.”

“I called the kids, and Philip’s on his way. Flora said she’d come first thing in the morning, and I told her Philip was coming and we’d get in touch if it was really serious.”

“Having grown-up children who know what we want as next of kin is such a relief,” Pat said.

“He should be here any minute. He was in Glasgow.”

“Of course, it would help if they weren’t so far away.”

The Addison assured Pat that it was a minor heart attack. They gave her stacks of pills, a diet sheet that didn’t allow her to eat anything she liked, and instructions to exercise. “I get loads of exercise,” she complained.

“Get more,” Bee said, unsympathetically. “I can’t have your heart packing in on us.”

“Do you think I should ask them if the prohibition on ice cream includes gelato?”

“No,” Philip said. “Because you’re going to eat it anyway, so you might as well not ask. All this low-fat stuff is going to be hard. You love fat. You never cook anything that doesn’t have half a bottle of olive oil in it.”

“Except when I’ve run out of olive oil, and then it has half a pound of butter,” Pat said. “Though I have noticed that Sainsbury’s do a very decent olive oil these days.”

She took the pills regularly and tried to walk more. “I used to love rowing, but I haven’t done it since we moved out here. I’ll walk in Italy.”

“You’ll walk now. You can push me if you like, that’ll be good exercise.”

“Slavedriver,” Pat said.

The news was terrible, as usual. There was a massacre in China, repression in the Soviet countries, and yet another assassination of the president in the US. The war between Uruguay and Brazil threatened to go nuclear, and the Americans said that they’d regard any intervention from Russia or Europe as a hostile act against their hemisphere. “Well, keep peace in your hemisphere, then,” Bee snarled at the television. “No more nukes!”

That summer in Italy Pat found that she couldn’t remember Italian words she knew perfectly well. She’d launch herself into a sentence and come to a dead stop when the words weren’t there. She’d never had that experience before and it confounded her. “Do you think it might be your tablets?” Jinny asked.

Back in Cambridge she asked her doctor and had her prescription changed. She couldn’t tell if it had helped, she wasn’t speaking Italian. The next summer things didn’t seem to be any better. Pat noticed that she was sometimes forgetting words in English too.

“I’m afraid I’m going like my mother,” she confessed to Bee in the dark.

“You’re only sixty-four,” Bee said, holding her tight. “Don’t cry now, Pat love. Hush. You’ll be all right.”