Lorna and Patty began to row together weekly, and Lorna would sometimes invite Patty to parties, and she would sometimes go. She felt she was developing a wider circle, a more bohemian circle, and she liked the idea. She began to make other friends too, in school and in choir. Her contract was renewed for the next year and she looked forward to coming back to Cambridge after the long vacation.
That year Marjorie went to the south of France and Patty went back to Florence alone. She stayed in a tiny pensione and did all the things she had done the year before. Some of the waiters recognized her, as did the staff at the gelateria “Perche No!” where she felt almost like a regular. As she walked into the Raphael room at the Uffizi she felt a great sense of homecoming, as if this could really be her life and that it could be good, a life without love but with work and friendship and summers in Italy. She still missed Mark, she was sure she would always miss him, but she had passed beyond his horizon and felt capable again of being happy.
8
Blood: Tricia 1950–1952
Nine months and two days after the wedding, on March 15th 1950, Tricia gave birth to a ten pound baby son in Grantham General Hospital. They had previously agreed on a name for a boy, Douglas Oswald—Douglas after Mark’s father, not after General MacArthur, who later that summer made headlines in the war in Korea. She looked at the thin threads of pale hair on little Doug’s scalp as he lay sleeping in the cot beside her bed, and felt a rush of love so strong that she almost thought she would be physically sick with it. This made everything worthwhile, she thought, putting out a finger to touch his cheek. He opened his dark blue eyes at her touch, then began to cry. She picked him up and he soothed at once, looking at her with what she felt sure was curiosity. “You’re like a miracle,” she said to him. “You’re wonderful. You’re amazing. You’re mine.”
She had been sick a great deal throughout the pregnancy, and she had found keeping house difficult. Before her marriage Tricia had spent ten years living in institutions, schools and colleges, and before that she had been a child. It did not help that they had so little money. Mark’s teaching job was not well paid, and her own savings, which had after all been intended for marriage, quickly vanished into furnishing their little house. The house was not in Grantham but in a little village outside it. There was a shop and a church and a post office but nothing else. It was an hour’s walk to Grantham, or there was a bus that ran every two hours. Mark had a car, but she could not drive and he used it to go to work every day, leaving her stranded at home. He would drive her to Grantham on a Saturday to use the library and to shop, but he regarded it as a chore and a favor he did for her.
Mark, it turned out, had extremely firm ideas of what to expect in a wife. He wanted her to wash clothes and keep the house clean and provide food, to bear children and not complain. Tricia had very little idea of cooking, even when she was sufficiently well to eat herself. Her mother had given her Mrs. Beeton, which became her bible in keeping house. There were lots of mistakes at first, at which she ceased to laugh once she realized Mark did not find them at all funny.
Coal was delivered, but it was a constant struggle to light fires, essential all year round as they provided hot water as well as heating. Mark would carry in coal from the shed, but otherwise he regarded the whole thing as Tricia’s department, raking out the old coals and laying and setting the fire. It was challenging, but he was sarcastic if she could not manage it and he came home to find the fire out. On several occasions in the first months before she got the trick of it she resorted to begging her next-door neighbor for help.
There was a gas stove, on which she cooked, or more often burned, dinner. All washing had to be done by hand, put through the mangle to wring out water, then dried on the line in the garden, or in front of the fire if it rained. It rained a lot in flat Lincolnshire. Tricia could not have afforded domestic help even if there had been any available, but there was not. In 1950 in the newly democratic Britain where there were opportunities for everyone, nobody wanted to be a servant. Tricia struggled with everything and did her best. Mark came in tired mentally and physically from a day’s teaching and said he was perplexed at how little she had achieved in the home.