33
The Last Gelato: Pat 1998–2015
They had their last day, on which they ate so much granita and gelato that Pat was almost sick. They went to the Uffizi and stared at the Botticellis and the Raphaels. They watched the sky fade from the Piazza della Signoria, and looked up at Machiavelli’s office window and the shape the Palazzo Vecchio made against the sky. Pat said goodbye to Cellini’s Perseus and to the copy of Michelangelo’s David. They ate dinner at Bordino’s with Jinny and Francesco, and told Francesco, who was nonplussed by the story, how they had decided to conceive Jinny right there. She said goodbye to the Duomo, and at Giotto’s tower Pat couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. They had one very last gelato on the way back.
The next day Jinny drove them to the airport and they flew home.
A week later Philip and Sanchia got married in a registry office in Cambridge, very quietly. “Did I know this was going to happen?” Pat asked Bee.
“No, this is new,” Bee reassured her.
“Stupid regulations,” Philip said. “Sanchia wouldn’t be entitled to any maternity leave or any benefits having a baby unless she’s married.”
“How did you decide which of you she was going to marry?” Bee asked.
“We did a DNA test to see who was the father, and it was Ragnar, so she’s marrying me,” Philip said. “That way we are all the parents.”
“This was difficult for us too,” Pat remembered. “Michael was wonderful.”
“I don’t think it’s any of the government’s business. All this regulation all the time. Cameras everywhere. Caring what goes on in people’s bedrooms. All this talk about vice.”
“The cameras are just trying to catch suicide bombers,” Sanchia said.
“And when they do catch them they execute them on TV,” Bee said, scratchily. “It makes me sick.”
“On TV?” Pat asked. “That’s awful. When did they start doing that?”
“That’s your memory being merciful,” Philip said.
Pat and Bee were the witnesses and the only people to attend the wedding. Afterwards the bride and groom went back to Manchester, where Sanchia had lessons to give and ante-natal classes to attend. “I would stay and look after you, but the baby’s due so soon, and I want to be there,” Philip said.
“I understand,” Bee rasped.
Bee was in too much pain from the cancer now for Pat to sleep in the same bed. Pat’s small movements in the night shook the bed and woke Bee, and then she would lie sleepless for hours. So they developed a routine where Pat would cuddle Bee until she fell asleep, then she would get up and sleep in Jinny’s old room. Pat managed the bedpans, under Bee’s direction. “Life always comes down to bedpans,” Pat said. “But it doesn’t matter when there’s love as well.”
“Love and bedpans and Florence, that’s you,” Bee croaked. “Give me one of my really strong painkillers now. That’s the right bottle, yes, the brown one, give it here. Plenty of them, more than enough to last.”
The doctor, an old friend, stopped in regularly to check up on them. When Bee stopped being able to eat the doctor insisted that she go into a hospice.
“You need to be properly looked after,” he said. “And a feeding tube. Don’t tell me Pat could manage that.”
“Call Jinny,” Bee said to Pat as soon as he had gone.
“Flora?” Pat suggested. “She’s so much nearer.”
“It has to be Jinny.” Jinny was Bee’s natural daughter, of course, her next of kin, the only one who could make decisions for her.
Pat called Jinny in Florence, and Jinny flew home right away. Bee went into the hospice, but Jinny and Pat visited her every day. She stopped being able to speak, but her eyes were alive. She squeezed Pat’s hand and Pat sat there talking to her, not knowing what she was saying really but knowing Bee was there, was listening.
Then Bee died, choking for breath, with both of them at her bedside. Pat’s own chest felt tight hearing it and her heart beat faster. Now would be a good time to have another heart attack, she thought at it, encouragingly, but her heart took no notice and kept on beating.
Jinny drove Pat home, and Pat went to bed. She couldn’t forget that Bee was dead, much as she would like to. She knew Bee had made a plan for what would happen next, though she couldn’t remember what it was. She stared into the dark. She had cried so much that her eyes burned but no more tears came. She got up, knocking into the little table they had brought in here when Bee had been sickest. She put the light on and fumbled about for her pills. She had her blood pressure pills, and there were also some of Bee’s strong painkillers left. She thought Bee might have been saving them for her, for now, making sure she knew which ones they were. She went downstairs and poured water into one of Bee’s wineglasses. She swallowed all of Bee’s pills and then all of hers. She sat down in Bee’s green armchair and waited, trying to think of the time she had sat in the Palazzo Vecchio watching the sky darken and realizing that she loved Bee. She took down the photograph Michael had taken of Bee and the babies. She wanted that to be the last thing she saw. She crashed into the mantelpiece and fell on the rug. The pills must be taking effect, she thought. Good.
Then Jinny came in, rumpled with sleep. “What are you doing banging about down here?” Then she saw her. “No. Oh no. Not you too.”
Pat tried to speak and say it was what she wanted, but Jinny took no notice. She was calling for an ambulance. Then it was hospital and a stomach pump.
When Pat woke, Philip and Jinny were arguing. “I can’t believe you did that,” Philip said. “It can’t have been easy for her, and it was so clearly what she wanted.”
“I didn’t know what had happened! I thought she needed help!”
For a moment she didn’t remember what had happened, and then she did. Bee was dead, and she had botched joining her. Thank you for nothing, St. Zenobius, she thought. She didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to be alive.
“I couldn’t lose them both like that,” Jinny said.
Pat opened her eyes and tried to smile.
They packed efficiently for her move to the home. “It’s near Flora,” Jinny said.
“I think I remember that,” Pat said.
“You broke the glass in this picture of Mamma and the girls,” Philip said. “I’ll have it mended.”
“Thank you.”
She took the album of pictures of all of them that Michael had taken when he was dying, and copies of her guide books. She took all her art books and boxes of English literature. She took her Life List and her birding books. She took the old green silk scarf, hardly more than a rag, that Mark had given her for Christmas in 1948, and which Bee had clung to in hospital after the accident. She let Jinny pack clothes and her mother’s china. She picked up her binoculars.
“You won’t want those, Mum,” Philip said. “What will you do with them in a home?”
“Watch birds,” Pat said.
“Oh, let her,” Jinny said. “She might as well bring them if she wants them.”
They drove north towards Lancaster. She told them about that time in the war when she had been held up in Lancaster and gone to Barrow-in-Furness. “Did I tell you this before?” she asked.
“Maybe when I was a little girl,” Jinny said.
“I don’t remember ever hearing about it,” Philip said. “It’s fascinating.”
“I can still remember that kind of thing. I just forget new things.”
“I know,” he said. “Look, it won’t be so bad. I’ll come and see you regularly. I’ll bring you anything you need. I’ll bring the baby to show you.”
“Has it been born yet?” she asked.
“Not quite yet,” Philip said. “Any day now. That’s why you’re giving me a ride to Manchester, so I can be home with Sanchia while it’s born.”
The home stood on the moor overlooking the town and the bay beyond. It seemed clean and the nurses were friendly. Flora met them there. Pat had a room to herself, with navy blue curtains, a hospital bed, an armchair, and a little bookshelf. Jinny arranged the books on the bookshelf and Pat arranged her mother’s china on the little knickknack shelf on the wall. “I want Michael’s photo of Bee there,” she said.
“It’s broken, remember? Philip’s mending it for you.”
“Oh yes.” Pat had forgotten. “I keep forgetting things.”
“We know,” Flora said.
“It’s all right,” Jinny said, and Pat dissolved in tears because Jinny sounded so much like Bee saying that.
“Put my little Madonna of the Magnificat on that shelf,” she said, when she had recovered.
“You didn’t bring it, Mum,” Jinny said. “But it’s in the book, isn’t it?”
Jinny found it in the Uffizi book and Pat looked at it, hardly able to see. How had she forgotten to bring the print?
“We’re going to sell the Cambridge house,” Flora said.
“Yes, and divide the money between you and Philip,” Pat said, absently. That was what they had agreed.
“Well, the money may go to keep you in here. This isn’t cheap,” Flora said. “There used to be state homes for old people, but not any more.”
“Bee’s insurance will help,” Jinny said. “I’ll put it into an account for this.”
“We’re grateful,” Flora said, stiffly, her back to Jinny. “It’s very good of you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jinny said. “Of course I want to help as much as I can.”
Jinny went over to Pat then and hugged her. “Now Pat, you remember where the bathroom is? Just outside here to the left.”
When they left Pat alone at last she sat down and wept. She couldn’t remember if there had been a funeral for Bee, but she couldn’t forget that she was dead. Maybe she could forget? Maybe she could pretend that she was here temporarily, that Bee would come and rescue her? But she knew that was dangerous, because it wasn’t true, and she was so unclear on what she remembered now that if she started to pretend things that weren’t true she could entirely lose her grip on reality. She found her notebook and her pen. She should make a list.
“Madonna of the Magnificat,” she wrote. “Photo of Bee. Philip will bring.”
She settled into the routine of the home. There were meals at regular times. She could see trees outside the window, and sometimes there were birds, when she could find her glasses and the binoculars at the same time. She read the chart on the end of the bed to see how confused they thought she was. She read her books, and books Flora brought her from the library. She made friends with the other residents, as best she could. She remembered her mother and tried hard not to be like that, not to attack people, not to scare them.
She became deaf and needed hearing aids, which were one more barrier to communication and one more thing for her to constantly lose. “You were lucky to be spared this,” she told the photograph of Bee.
Flora visited every week, occasionally bringing Mohammed and the children. Flora also took her out sometimes—to the park, or down to the shore, and at Christmas to Flora’s house. Sammy sometimes came alone, and Pat tried to be interesting when she did, telling her about Florence, showing her pictures and reminding her. Flora’s family went to Turkey most summers to see Mohammed’s family, but they never went back to Florence. She tried to encourage Sammy and Cenk to remember it, but she never knew how successful she was.
Sanchia’s baby was a boy, Karl Ragnar. The next baby, two years later, she thought might be Philip’s, but she didn’t ask. That was a girl, Anna Louise. She wrote the names down and tried hard to remember them. Philip brought her mended photograph back, and she put it in the center of the shelf. He came to visit every few months but he seldom brought the rest of the family. His career as a composer seemed to be taking off, but she found it hard to keep track. She had given up on the news entirely now, especially after the nuclear exchange in the Middle East.
“They got Tel Aviv and the Assam Dam, but they didn’t take out any of the Seven Wonders,” Sammy told her. “Mummy said that’s because of you and our grandfather.”
“Bee used to say using them at all was unconscionable,” Pat said. “And all the fallout.”
“Well, people have them, they’re going to use them,” Sammy said, shrugging. She showed Pat a photograph on her phone of a boy she liked at school. “Isn’t he smooth?”
Jinny had two children, a boy and a girl, Domenic Michael and Beatrice Patricia. She sent photographs of them, which Pat stuck in the back of her album with their names written on the back. It meant a lot to her that Bee had genetic descendants, however much they both had truly believed that all the children were all of theirs. Bee had been so interested in genetics—mostly plant genetics, true, but human genetics too. Jinny visited only very occasionally, because she had small children and Florence was a long way. She wrote often, and Pat treasured her letters. Jinny wrote that an elm tree had been planted in a dome on Mars in memory of Bee by one of her old pupils. Pat wrote that on all her lists so that she wouldn’t forget. She did forget, but she kept finding it again. (“Was that the best you could do, St. Zenobius? Well, I suppose it was better than nothing.”) Jinny sent her postcards of Florence, which she kept on her bedside table and looked at until they became crumpled and the nurses threw them away.
Sometimes she dreamed that Bee was dead and woke with a sense of relief that it had been a dream, and then remembered that it was true. She forgot that she had tried to kill herself and wondered why she had not. She beat her head on the pillow and bit her lips, and sometimes she called out for Bee, although she knew she would not come.