“I’ll consider looking for a house in Grantham after the new baby is born,” Mark said, with the air of somebody making a huge concession.
The baby was born in January 1954, and it was a girl. They called her Helen Elizabeth, after Tricia’s mother and Elizabeth Burchell, and perhaps the new queen. The order of names was at Tricia’s insistence. She was again very pulled down after the birth, and her mother again came to stay. Doug was jealous of the new baby and of his mother and grandmother’s attention to her. He had been toilet trained for more than a year, but he began to deliberately soil himself. Tricia found this so distressing that she broke down in tears every time it happened. She still had to wash everything by hand herself. Mark dealt with it by spanking Doug, much against Tricia’s desires. “He’s too little,” she insisted. “He doesn’t really understand. It’s just because of Helen. He’ll be fine again soon.”
“Haven’t you seen the look on his face? It’s deviltry and he’s doing it on purpose.”
“Well, he is, but he doesn’t understand.” Tricia was furious with Doug herself, but she couldn’t condone hitting a child so young. Mark, however, was implacable, and as his methods worked and Doug gave up his rebellion it made it more difficult for her to continue to insist the next time he wanted to punish his son for naughtiness. This seemed to happen more and more frequently. Mark’s book had been rejected by the publisher after long deliberation, and while he had sent it to another he was angry about it and took it out on Tricia and Doug. He did not hit Tricia, but he did not need to—sarcasm was always a sufficient weapon to reduce her to misery.
At Easter they visited the Burchells in Oxford. Tricia still didn’t care for them, but she welcomed anything like a change in her routine. Mark wanted to talk to them about what to do with his book. Tricia was so delighted to see Oxford again that tears came into her eyes as they drove past Blackwell’s. She took the children for walks, pushing Helen in the pram and holding tightly to Doug’s hand. It was vacation, but there seemed to be plenty of undergrads around, running and bicycling and laughing in the spring sunshine. They took no notice of Tricia even when she smiled at them, and she realized she was invisible to them. When she had been an undergraduate, a woman with a pram would have been invisible to her, too.
The second evening, Mark went out with the Burchells, leaving Tricia to babysit her own two children and the Burchells’ four. The youngest Burchell child, Paul, was a few months older than Helen, and when he woke screaming Tricia could do nothing to calm him. Eventually, feeling almost as if she were committing adultery, she gave him her breast. He quieted at once, as Helen would have. It was a strange intimacy to have with somebody else’s child.
The next year Tricia had another stillbirth and they did move, not because of her ultimatum but because Mark had found a better job. They moved to Woking, in London’s commuter belt, to a suburban house with a washing machine. It belonged to them, or as Mark said, to the bank. It was a long but possible walk from the library and the shops, and while the house was ugly and identical to its neighbors, and Tricia would never have chosen it, she was happier there than she had been isolated outside Grantham. She made friends with other mothers of small children, and haunted the library with desperation, burying herself in books, the longer the better. She read Middlemarch and found it almost too painful, seeing herself in Dorothea and Mark in Casaubon. She read aloud to Doug and Helen and to herself compulsively in every spare moment.
Mark joined the golf club and she joined the Peace Pledge Union and the Labour Party.