On their last day in Italy Pat went into the Duomo alone and went down on her knees to thank God for Bee.
“I am bringing you my joy, Jesus, as I was taught as a child. Thank you for Bee. Thank you for making her, thank you for letting me find her, thank you for making me worthy of her. Thank you for our house in Florence, for her fellowship, for my teaching. Thank you for our lives, our love. And if this is all there is, if she decides she wants a man later, wants to marry and have children, then so be it. Thank you for giving us this time to be together and be happy,” she prayed. She felt God heard her and looked down on her in kindness. When she stood up again in the perfect harmony of the Duomo she had tears of joy in her eyes.
10
Babies: Tricia 1952–1961
Tricia’s second baby was born dead. The birth was as hard a struggle as Doug’s had been, two days of labor with nothing to show for it at the end. The dead child was a girl. Mark had her baptized Hilary. Tricia was too ill herself to have any say in the matter. It took her a long time to recover from that birth. Her mother came down to care for Doug while she was in hospital, and remained for a few months afterwards, during which Tricia felt constantly exhausted. It was the most she could do to eat and talk to Doug. Going to the bathroom left her needing to rest for an hour. Her mother went home in October. Tricia’s doctor prescribed exercises and a tonic. She slowly regained her strength. At the time of the Coronation, in June, Mark again brought home a bottle of wine and left it sitting on the sideboard. Tricia saw it as she came in from the kitchen and almost without thinking picked it up and smashed it in the fireplace. The plummy scent of red wine rose immediately into the air, and she stood staring at the green glass shattered all over the grate.
Her rebellion did no good, of course. Mark, coming in, looked at her and the broken bottle patiently. Her violence had put him in the right, made her into the child and him the adult. It bought her one night, for which she had to pay with reduced housekeeping money the following week, for he stopped the price of wine out of it.
This pettiness astounded her. Where was the man she had thought she was marrying? Or forget that, where was normal human decency? She would not do that to a dog. She told Mark she was pregnant almost immediately, before she could possibly have been sure, but he did not question her. She hated lying, but she had come to the end of her resources. She had loved him, and even after she had stopped loving him she had tried to make the marriage work, and this was what it had come to. She made a desperate plan to run away to her mother in Twickenham—a journey requiring a bus and two trains and most of a day, no easy trip with a three-year-old. She reached her mother’s house after six at night, to her mother’s astonishment. She took them in and put Doug to bed at once. Then she insisted on telephoning the Lincolnshire neighbor who was prepared to take messages for Mark and Tricia.
“He’ll be so worried about you,” she said, dialling. No matter what Tricia said, her mother insisted on treating it as a temporary problem. “All marriages have these little blips,” she said. Mark agreed that Tricia should stay until the weekend and then he would fetch her back. She felt her mother conspired with him to make her again the child, the misbehaving child.
“I want to leave Doug with you and take a teaching post,” Tricia said to her mother. “I’ll be able to send you money for his keep.”
“Married women can’t teach!” her mother said.
“They can now,” Tricia said. “That law has been changed. Or if I can’t teach I’ll get secretarial work. Goodness knows typing Mark’s book has taught me something.”
But her mother wouldn’t hear of it. “Your place is with your husband. I know you took losing the baby badly, but the best thing for that is to have another baby as soon as possible. I lost a baby between Oswald and you. It’s natural to hate Mark for putting you through all that pain, but it isn’t his fault really.”
She tried to tell her mother about the way he had burned the letters and his pettiness with the housekeeping but she couldn’t make her understand. She made light of everything and kept repeating that all marriages had these problems. When Tricia cried, her mother said she was run down, and made her cups of Bovril.
On the Saturday morning Mark arrived in the car, Doug was delighted to see him. Tricia was too busy being sick to care. She tried to blame the Bovril, but she knew she really was pregnant again.
In the car she tried to make an ultimatum as Doug ran about the back seat pointing out cows and horses excitedly. “We have to move into town. I can’t stay there in the village where there’s nothing. It’s driving me mad. I never talk to an adult. I’m completely trapped. There isn’t even a library.”