Bee eased the spaghetti into the water. “I’d rather stay here if I can.”
Pat stared fixedly down into the leeks. “The thing is that I’m afraid. I’m not afraid of where you’ll work or any of that, I’m afraid we’ll make plans together and intertwine our lives and then you’ll want to have babies and find some man to marry and leave me alone.”
Bee slid a big handful of washed mushrooms into the pan with the leeks and rested her head on Pat’s shoulder. She hadn’t chopped the mushrooms, but Pat didn’t say anything. “I do want babies,” Bee said after a moment. “But I want you—our life—I’m not going to go off and live with some man.”
“I just keep thinking you’ll wake up and want something more real,” Pat said, not looking around, still stirring.
“This is real,” Bee said. “I wish one of us was a man so that we could get married and make it feel real to the rest of the world. Our friends, your mother, my family. But this is real for me. I’m not going to give it up.”
“Give me the bacon, or the spaghetti will be boiled to mush,” Pat said gruffly, because her throat was thick with tears.
They bought a seventeenth-century cottage in Harston, six miles outside Cambridge. It came with a long thin acre of land, Saxon field pattern, stretching back from the road. There was a little flower garden in the front and then it stretched back and back behind the house. Farthest away from the house was an orchard, where Bee immediately began to graft apples. They lived there in the academic year and in Florence in the summers, paying Bee’s students to look after the garden when they were away. “We always miss the best of the fruit,” Bee lamented. But she accompanied Pat to Italy and went with her around the sites, seldom complaining.
At Harston they had two cats, chickens, and a hive of bees, from which Bee gathered honey. “They never sting you,” Pat said, rubbing her hand.
“They recognize a fellow bee,” Bee laughed. “But the truth is that you move too quickly and startle them.”
They held parties in Harston, but more often than before went into Cambridge for other people’s parties, driving home afterwards. They still knew mixed groups of people. There were more Italians in Cambridge now that the Economic Community allowed free access to education in all member countries, and they became another strand of Pat’s web of friendships. “I never know who I’ll meet at your parties,” Pat’s head of department said at a party celebrating their first apple harvest.
“I hope that’s good,” Pat said. She felt more confident about people at school knowing about her and Bee, now that she knew they could be financially independent without her needing to teach. She liked teaching, but she liked it better knowing she was free to stop. She liked the girls, liked seeing them open up to literature in the same way she had herself. She planned the curriculum to encourage this process. Nobody from school ever asked about her relationship with Bee—two friends sharing digs was common enough to need no explanation. They were known as a couple in the homosexual community, and also to some of Pat’s more broad-minded birder friends.
Pat began researching for the Rome book immediately after they moved. It took her all of both summers to complete. Going to Rome with Bee did soften her memories of going there brokenhearted with Marjorie, and by the end she felt she loved Rome almost as much as Venice, though never as much as Florence. “Rome has all these layers, all this history folded over almost stratigraphically,” she said to Bee. “Florence is all of one piece, and that’s what I love about it. It all fits together so perfectly.”
Constable launched the Rome book with a wine and cheese party in London in March 1960. Pat agonized about what to wear, and eventually went in a black cocktail dress adorned with a Roman coin pendant that Bee had bought for her in Rome. She had her hair done, but the hairdresser complained that it was too short to do anything with. Bee wore her interview suit. (“Nobody’s going to be looking at me!” she insisted.) Few people had known that “P. A. Cowan” was a woman, and the fact drew some attention. Pat was interviewed by the Times. “I just wanted there to be better guidebooks, because when I first went to Italy and didn’t know about anything I wanted to find out. I wanted there to be guidebooks for ordinary people that would tell them about what they were seeing, and also where to eat,” she said.
Her photograph was grainy, but Bee cut out the article and pasted it into a scrapbook. Pat’s mother telephoned in great excitement to say that she had seen it.