Two weeks later, at Easter, Pat went down to Twickenham to see her mother. Bee was busy with some grafting in the lab, so Pat drove down alone. Her mother was pleased to see her. “You should have said you were coming!” she said.
“I did say,” Pat protested, but her mother ignored it. Over the course of the weekend there were more and more tiny things that made Pat realize that her mother was losing her memory. She had entirely forgotten about the interview in the Times. She kept losing words. Pat’s bedroom was deep in dust, her mother had clearly forgotten to clean it. Peeping through the door to Oswald’s old room she saw that it was the same. Pat drove home deeply worried and told Bee about it.
“She’s all right for now, but what if she gets worse? How is she going to manage?”
“We’ll have to have her here,” Bee said, and made a face. “Oh I don’t want to and you don’t want to either, but there’ll be nothing else for it if it comes to that.”
“What about Italy?” Pat asked.
“Maybe it won’t come to that,” Bee said. “But you’re the only one left and I’m the only girl, and they see us as single women, so we’re going to be the ones to have the burdens for all our parents as they get old.” Bee’s parents were sheep farmers in Penrith. Pat liked them well enough, but found them dull. Their conversation seemed to be exclusively about sheep diseases and new automatic shearing machines, which was naturally more interesting for Bee than Pat.
“My mother isn’t old. She’ll be sixty this year.”
“For the time being, maybe we could get her some help. Somebody to go in and see that she’s eating, and maybe clean a bit. Maybe give her a bit of companionship. Being alone so much can’t help. We could afford that if she can’t. As I remember when my grandfather’s second wife went senile, it was a long slow process.”
Pat began writing a guide to Pompeii and Naples. That year, 1961, Bee was given a permanent position as a lecturer at the New College. “They have a wonderful computer,” she told Pat. “It fills a whole room, but it’s terrifically reliable. We’re using it to store data and match patterns. It’s amazing.”
“Good,” Pat said.
“And it’s so fast,” Bee went on. “All the departments want them.”
Then one beautiful day in May of 1962, Bee came home from work with an astonishing idea.
“Have you heard of artificial insemination?” she asked Pat.
“Only when you were going on about those rabbits the year I first met you,” Pat said. “What, are you back to animals? I thought your heart was given to plants?”
“My heart is given to you,” Bee said, kissing her. “In the US they have successfully done artificial insemination with humans, and it has been considered legal there, though the children are considered to be illegitimate. They’re doing it in Scotland with infertile couples.”
It took Pat a moment. “Then we could have—”
“Lesbians all over the world will be so happy when this becomes generally available,” Bee said, nodding. “But you’re thirty-four and I’m thirty-two, so we don’t have any time to waste.”
“Where would we get the sperm?”
“Find a donor. The same one. So our children would be siblings.” They hugged each other in excitement.
“How could we possibly ask somebody?” Pat asked, then saw the answer at once. “One of our homosexual friends?”
“Precisely,” Bee said. “Alan would do it, or Piers. But from what I can find out, we’d need somebody who knows the procedure, and they’re only doing it for infertile couples.”
“How about if we went to the US?” Pat asked. “Though of course, even apart from the expense of that the US seems like an awful place.” The failed Bay of Pigs invasion was on the news every night, and the strength of the McCarthyist movement was horrifying.
“I think it would be even worse—I mean, there are more people there doing it, but they’d want even more in the way of identity, and apparently they only do it in cases where the husband is provably infertile. I was wondering if I might find somebody professionally who’s doing it with animals. It can’t be that different.”
“I suppose not,” Pat said, a little repelled at the thought of being operated on by a vet.
Bee laughed at her expression. “We’re all mammals together!” Then she grinned. “We’re really going to do this? If we can? You really want to?”
“I’ll take a leave of absence from teaching. You’ll have to carry on working, of course. It’ll be marvellous. Imagine teaching them about the world! Imagine teaching them birding and Shakespeare, and how to graft pears onto apples, and Botticelli and Bach!”
“It’s not that easy. As far as the school and the college are concerned we’d have had illegitimate children. They’d be shocked. It might count as gross moral turpitude.”
“Minor moral turpitude, at most,” Pat murmured, as she always did when she heard that expression.
“I think it would be best if you resigned and I just didn’t tell the college. If we timed it right, I could give birth in the long vacation, and they’d never know.”