“I make enough to keep us,” Mark protested.
“Of course you do, but a little extra might be nice, so we could afford a new car, or to get your new book professionally typed. But really it would be an interest to me, now that the children are growing up.”
Mark grudgingly agreed, and Tricia began to work as a supply teacher, filling in for teachers who were ill. Sometimes it would just be a day or two, other times it would be for a few weeks. She continued to volunteer at the CND office in between. She also managed to get over to visit her mother every week. It took a little over an hour to get to Twickenham from Woking, depending on connections. Tricia’s mother was getting vaguer all the time. Tricia did her shopping and cleaned the house. She sometimes felt the most important thing she did was sitting and talking to her mother. If she asked what she had been doing her mother didn’t know, but they could have real conversations about her childhood, or her mother’s childhood. Her memories of times long ago were as clear as ever. Sometimes Tricia would really enjoy her mother’s stories—hearing how her parents met, or her mother’s work as a nursemaid. Sometimes she took the children, though they got so easily bored, and her mother could no longer remember their names.
Bobby Kennedy was duly elected in his brother’s place, and the British election in the spring brought in a progressive Labour government. She and Mark did not discuss their votes. She did not want to confirm her fear that he might have voted Tory. Mark’s new book came out and was well received. Mark visited the Burchells, and came home looking very pleased with himself. “There’s a possibility I may be offered a lectureship at a new university next year,” he told Tricia.
“Where?” Tricia asked, her heart sinking at the thought of relocating all of them, and just before Doug’s School Certificates.
“Lancaster,” Mark said.
To Tricia it was still no more than a distant station with no trains going in the direction she wanted to go. “That’s so far,” she said.
“Nonsense. I thought you’d be pleased. You always hated Woking. And far from what? We’ll all be there.”
“I am pleased,” Tricia said. She could not say far from her friends or her volunteer work, because he did not know about that. “But it’s a long way from my mother. You know she’s been getting—”
“She’s nothing but an old nuisance,” Mark said. “You baby her. You baby everyone.”
“If the time comes when she can’t cope on her own, we’ll have to have her with us. In Lancaster if that’s where we are.”
“And what about my parents?”
Mark’s parents were well and strong and continued to look down their noses at Tricia. “If they needed it, we’d have them too, obviously,” she said.
“Well that’s not the case now,” Mark snapped. “Lancaster. A real job for me. Try to like it.” He stormed out of the room.
Tricia was shaking. She needed to know when they’d be going, and whether he’d thought about schools for the children. She could get Helen to ask him about that. Lancaster. She remembered the station very well, Baronial style, a Victorian castle, and the little train to Barrow-in-Furness, and the kindness she had found there. People in the North were kind. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe she’d be able to find a proper job there.
13
“If the World’s Still Here”: Pat 1962–1963
They did not have to wait until they came back from Italy to find somebody. Constable planned to do new updated editions of the Florence and Venice books, this time daringly with color photographs. They sent a young photographer out to Italy to take the pictures. His name was Michael Jacobs, and he was just beginning to make a name for himself. He saw this job as an opportunity to become better known and get more magazine work; and also, as he said, to have the chance to take photographs of some beautiful things. It was his first time out of England. He stayed in their house in Florence. He was the first overnight guest they had had, and they had to buy a pillow for him. Pat liked him, liked what he did with the camera, and liked his enthusiasm for Florence, and for Venice when they went there. He lay flat on the cobbles to take a photograph of St. Mark’s, heedless of the damage to his clothes. He was also entirely understanding about their relationship—he treated Pat and Bee as a couple, without being either embarrassed about it, or trying, as people so often did, to make one of them into the man and the other into the woman.