That autumn a publisher bought Mark’s book, so clearly it was not Causaubon’s sterile Key to All Mythologies after all. That night Mark visited Tricia’s bedroom after a bath but without any wine. The sexual act seemed to be over faster, which she approved, and he did not apologize afterwards. She did not become pregnant, nor did she the month after, but by February she could not keep food down and she knew she was in for it again.
They visited the Burchells again that summer, 1956. All the political talk was about Nasser seizing the Suez Canal. Elizabeth Burchell compared him to Hitler and Tricia felt cold inside. Surely it would not be war again, so soon? She looked at Doug, who was six now, happily playing with the Burchell children, and imagined him marching off at eighteen and never coming back. It was hard enough for her to bear Mark disciplining him; she could not endure the thought of him being killed in battle. The Peace Pledge Union started a letter writing campaign and urged her to write to her MP, begging Britain to keep out of it. She did, and it must have worked, for the whole thing blew over in a solution brokered by the US and the UN. People stopped saying Nasser was as bad as Hitler. Egypt kept control of the canal but let everyone go through, even the Israelis. During this period Tricia became a devotee of the BBC radio news, and even after Mark bought them a small television it was the radio she used in the kitchen that kept her up to date.
On that trip to Oxford Mark and the Burchells decided to “be received,” meaning joining the Roman Catholic church, and on their return to Woking Mark began to take instruction. Tricia flat-out refused to join him. She no longer believed in a loving God, and stuck to that, whatever Mark said. She realized one day as he was lecturing her that he not only treated her as if she were stupid, but genuinely believed she was. He treated her as a baby machine, and she felt as if she almost was one. What was her degree for, when all the reading she did now was to escape from her own intolerable life?
In October of 1956 she suffered yet another stillbirth, during the Hungarian Crisis. She had been glued to the radio hearing about the Soviet troops poised to go into Budapest, and the brave Hungarians defying them by massing peacefully in the city squares. She wanted to give the baby a Hungarian name, but Mark named it Matthew while she was still unconscious and undergoing an operation to stitch up her womb. Poor dead Matthew had torn her insides in some way. The doctor was unsure whether she would be able to have more children.
“Surely two is enough,” she said tentatively to Mark. “It’s not as if either of us enjoys it.”
“God will decide,” he said, and by that she had no choice but to abide. It was some comfort to her that the Soviets had backed down on Hungary and were allowing a greater measure of democracy, both there and in the rest of the Iron Curtain countries. Both the Soviets and the Americans were pushing ahead into space, in a kind of competition. The BBC was excited to report the first photographs of the dark side of the moon.
Mark was received into the Catholic faith and took it very seriously. He insisted the children be instructed, and although they had been baptized in the Church of England he insisted on having their baptisms repeated, or “conditionally repeated” as nobody was sure whether the first baptisms had counted. Tricia let him take Doug to church with him, but usually kept Helen home with her. “She’s too young to sit through the service,” she said, and Mark agreed. Doug, who had just started school, said church was boring, but only to Tricia. He was wary of his father, though more likely to be pushed into rage and defiance than fear.
Tricia’s life in Woking was just beginning to settle down into something she could endure when Mark again brought home wine. His book had been published and was getting some attention, or so he said. She lay and endured his attentions and naturally she became pregnant again. Her doctor looked grave and told her to rest, but of course rest was impossible. Doug had to be taken to and from school and Helen was a very active three-year-old. She was sure this baby would die like the last two, but to her surprise it survived. They called it George Ludwig. Tricia protested the Ludwig, but only feebly. Her mother again came to stay and help with the baby, but Tricia found her less use than on previous occasions. She seemed vaguer, less sure of herself. She kept forgetting the names of things. When Tricia asked her about it she said that she needed to change the prescription of her blood pressure tablets because they made her forgetful.
“She’s only fifty-eight,” Tricia said to Mark after her mother had left. “She can’t be getting senile already, surely?”