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.