34

Choices: Patricia 2015

“Very Confused Today” her notes read.

She lay face down on the bed, her eyes buried by the pillow. If she sat up and looked around she might see something to anchor her in one life or the other, her MacTop, or her photograph album, Doug’s gold disk or her framed picture of Bee with the babies. Lying like this she could hold herself between them, hold all the memories, both lives, both worlds. The life where she had married Mark and the life where she had lived happily with Bee for forty years. The life where she had been Tricia and then Trish, and the life where she had been Pat. It occurred to her as she lay there that in the world where she had been Trish she could have married Bee, there had been marriage equality there from the early Eighties onwards. That was so deeply and bitterly unfair that she could hardly bear to think of it.

In the world where she married Mark, she could have married Bee. If she had ever met Bee in that world. She couldn’t make it make sense. Bee had been in both worlds, though she hadn’t realized it. Sophie had worked with her in both worlds. Bee’s work on plants for space had been the same—but in one world it had been for an international space station and moonbase, and in the other it had been for a European one, hostile to the Russians and the Americans. She could remember both things at the same time, as if both things were true, but they couldn’t be. How could it be possible?

Could Bee still be alive, in Trish’s world? A Bee who had never known Pat, a Bee who still had her legs? There hadn’t been a Kiev bomb so there wouldn’t be any thyroid cancer. She was two years younger than Pat. But even if she was there, and alive, and if there was a way to contact her, she wouldn’t know who Trish was. And she knew there was no way somebody as wonderful as Bee wouldn’t have found another partner.

A nurse came in and disturbed her, giving her medication—the same medication in both worlds, the stuff that kept her traitor heart beating evenly. She took her glasses off and put them on the bedside table. That way she couldn’t see anything that would tip her into one world or the other. “Lie down and try to sleep now,” the nurse said.

She lay down obediently. The nurse switched off the light as she left, leaving only the little nightlight by the door, enough for her to see if she needed to go to the bathroom. Was it to the left or the right? She was perpetually confused about that.

She had been so happy as Pat. Even with everything, her life had been so good. Despite the nuclear wars and the violence and the tyranny. As well as having Bee in her life, she had had Florence. Though of course Florence must have existed in the other world as well, except that she hadn’t known except in the most abstract terms. In the one world she had known Italy well, written books about it, even spoken Italian, and driven regularly through France and Switzerland. In the other she had only been out of Britain twice, once to Majorca and the other time to Boston. There was no comparison, when it came to the richness of her own life. She had no desire to be Trish, when she could be Pat. Pat and Trish both had Donne and Eliot and Marvell, but Pat had Bee and Botticelli as well.

Then she thought about her children. Which were her real children? Poor Doug and dear Helen and brilliant George and troubled Cathy? Or sensible Flora and wonderful Jinny and talented Philip? Was Sammy or Rhodri her favorite grandchild? Only one set of them could possibly be real, but which? She loved them all, and there was no real difference in the quality of her love for them. She remembered Helen nursing Tamsin and Philip asking Michael whether he was half Jewish. She loved them all and worried about them all. If she had favorites, and what mother didn’t, then she had favorites in both sets.

It was when she thought about the world that she wept. Trish’s world was so much better than Pat’s. Trish’s world was peaceful. Eastern and Western Europe had open frontiers. There had been no nuclear bombs dropped after Hiroshima, no clusters of thyroid cancer. There had been very little terrorism. The world had become quietly socialist, quietly less racist, less homophobic. In Pat’s world it had all gone the other way.

She tried to imagine why. She couldn’t imagine that anything she had done had changed anything. In Pat’s world she had started Seven Wonders, but in Trish’s world, which still had the United Nations, they had their own program like that. She had marched for peace in both worlds. She had written more letters as Trish, but surely that couldn’t have achieved anything? She hadn’t been important, in either world, she hadn’t been somebody whose choices could have changed worlds.

But what if she had been?

What if everyone was?

She remembered years ago when George had been a boy reading science fiction, he had talked about tiny events having huge effects. A butterfly flapping its wings in Lancaster could cause a hurricane in China. He had flapped his wings like a butterfly and she had sent him out into the garden. What if her actions had been like that butterfly’s wings? What if by marrying Mark she had tipped the world into peace and prosperity? Perhaps the price of the happiness of the world was her own happiness?

She groped to her feet and went over to the window. She could see the moon through the branches. Which moon was it? Were George and Sophie there, happily working on science together? Or was it the other moon, the one with the deadly cargo of rockets ready to rain down on the planet? She rested her forehead against the cold glass and tried to think. She knew she was confused. She wanted to ask somebody for help, but she knew that even the most sympathetic listener would assume she was crazy. She couldn’t be sure she wasn’t crazy, except that what she remembered was so completely contradictory. She remembered the United Nations calming everyone down over Suez, and she remembered the Suez war coming almost to the nuclear brink. Those things couldn’t both be true. And she did get confused and she did forget things, but she didn’t remember extra things.

She was just an old woman with memory problems. Or maybe two old women with memory problems. She laughed to herself. She was herself, whether she was Pat or Trish. They knew different things and cared about different people, but she was the same person she had always been. She was the girl who had stood before the sea in Weymouth and in Barrow-in-Furness, the woman who had stood before Botticelli and before hostile council meetings. It didn’t matter what they called her, Patricia or Patsy or Trish or Pat. She was herself. She had loved Bee, and Florence, and all her children.

Could she slide the worlds closer together? Get rid of the wars? Or would one world end and the other go on? Would Pat’s world end in fire and she would forget it and go on as Trish? Would she forget Bee and Flora and Jinny and Philip and the sky over the Palazzo Vecchio and the taste of gelato? She wondered who owned her house in Florence in Trish’s world, and whether they loved it as much as she and Bee had. The door wouldn’t have been widened for the wheelchair, and there wouldn’t be rails in the bathroom. For that matter, who owned her Lancaster house in Pat’s world? It wouldn’t have her mother’s ashes in the garden, or Doug’s or Mark’s. She felt herself drifting. She leaned harder against the cold glass to hold herself there.

As Trish she had lost all faith in God. As Pat she had gone on believing. Now she didn’t know what she thought. She didn’t believe in Providence, in a loving God who did what was best for everyone. That wasn’t compatible with the facts. But she did remember both worlds. Maybe God, or something, wanted her to choose between them, make one of them real.

She had made a choice already, one choice that counted among the myriad choices of her life. She had made it not knowing where it led. Could she made it again, knowing?

She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and looked up at the blur that was one moon or the other. How many worlds were there? One? Two? An infinite number? Was there a world where she could have both happiness and peace?

All those deaths, all that destruction, all those cancers, and also that slide to the right, that selfish dangerous pattern. Or the open world, the world with hope and possibilities and Google.

Mark. Those letters. How had she been so young, so naive? How had she been taken in by him? Mark or Bee. No choice, except that she wasn’t choosing only for herself. And whichever way she chose she’d break her heart to lose her children. All of them were her real children.

But she took a breath and smelled again that corridor in The Pines, the smell of summer sweat, of chalk, of hot dust and iodine disinfectant. She saw the late evening sun coming in through the little window at the end and catching all the dust in its beam. She felt her strong young body that she had never appreciated when she had it, constantly worrying that she didn’t meet standards of beauty and not understanding how standards of health were so much more important. She bounced a little on her strongly arched young feet. She felt again the Bakelite of the receiver in her hand and heard Mark’s voice in her ear. “Now or never!”

Now or never, Trish or Pat, peace or war, loneliness or love?

She wouldn’t have been the person her life had made her if she could have made any other answer.