It was surprising how quickly it could go back to normal. The Cuban Exchange was soon just another incident. But Pat never again became completely absorbed in herself and her family. She kept listening to the radio and watching the news on TV. She and Bee began to go again to anti-war demonstrations. She stopped teaching at Christmas, and Michael visited again, as Bee had not become pregnant. This time it worked. Pat began to write her Naples book. Whenever she thought about Pompeii it seemed like a metaphor for the modern world, people unwittingly living their lives next to an active volcano.
In May Pat went into labor. Her mother came to be with her, vague but full of stories about childbirth and babies. She kept asking who the father was and where he was, and forgetting that she had asked, and asking again. Pat wished Bee could be there, but Bee, herself five months pregnant, had no standing to be at the birth. After six hours the doctor insisted that she needed a caesarean section. “Giving birth vaginally could kill you and the baby,” he said sternly.
When Pat came around after the anaesthetic wore off, she had a huge incision across her belly. She was in a ward full of women. There was a button on the table beside her. She pressed it, and after a while a nurse came. “Where’s my baby?” she asked, her voice cracking. The nurse held a glass of water to her lips, and Pat gulped it gratefully. Then the nurse went to inquire, and at last came back wheeling a bassinet containing a sleeping baby tinier than Pat had ever imagined a baby could be, with a screwed-up face and a shock of black hair. “Isn’t she beautiful?” cooed the nurse, lifting her out, still asleep and wrapped in a blanket.
“She’s so tiny!”
“Seven pounds, perfectly average,” the nurse said, settling her on Pat’s breasts. Pat put her arm around her, wincing a little as she felt the stitches pulling. She looked down into the little face, and loved her immediately and without reservation.
“What are you going to call her?” her nurse asked. “We just put Baby Cowan, because your mother didn’t know.”
“Florence Beatrice,” Pat replied, and as she said it her eyes filled with tears. “Can I have visitors in here?”
“Your mother and your friend are waiting. They haven’t seen the baby yet.”
“Please let them in, if that’s all right,” Pat said.
“Just for a minute then, and then they can come back at proper visiting time.”
Pat lay with the sleeping baby on her chest and her eyes glued on the door, waiting to show Bee their baby.
14
The Feminine Mystique: Tricia 1966–1968
Immediately before she left for Lancaster, Sylvia gave her a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. She took it with a little roll of her eyes at her friend. “Women’s Lib?”
“Women need to be liberated just as much as slaves did,” Sylvia replied.
“Liberated from what?”
“Low pay and our children and the kitchen and our husbands’ demands. Don’t you want to actually use your degree for something?”
Tricia took the book because she did like Sylvia, but although she read all the time it really wasn’t the kind of book she liked.
They moved. Mark wanted a house in the country outside Lancaster, but she insisted that the children had to be able to walk to school. Doug was sixteen, and would be beginning A levels at the Boys’ Grammar. Helen, at twelve, would be going to the Girls’ Grammar. Both of these schools were in the city. The younger ones would need a primary school, which could have been managed in a village.
“The older ones can take buses,” Mark protested.
“If we live in the country I need to learn to drive. I’m not being stuck in the middle of nowhere the way I was outside Grantham.”
“I don’t want to take a bus,” Helen said.
Mark walked away from the argument, but a few days later he announced that he had bought a Victorian house on the southern edge of the city.
At fifty thousand people, Lancaster barely qualified as a city in Tricia’s opinion. Even if you counted Morecambe, the decayed seaside town to the west, it didn’t add up. Lancaster itself was largely an eighteenth-century town, like a decayed northern version of Bath. Some of the best buildings were in a very sad state. It did have a thriving indoor market, with farm cheeses, fresh meat and vegetables, a Finefare supermarket, a Marks and Spencer, and several excellent shops selling fresh bread. The new university was built on a greenfield site three miles out of town to the south, and there was some apprehension in the town as to what the university would mean.