The house Mark bought was positioned to make it easy for him to drive on to campus. It had four floors, though the “garden floor” was barely habitable as yet. Making the house nice was a huge job, which Tricia threw herself into. Doug enjoyed painting and carpentry, and to her own surprise so did Tricia. For once she felt close to her difficult older son as they worked together to paint and furnish the rooms. Nine-year-old George involved himself too, taking instruction from his brother and looking up to him. Helen declared that the whole thing made her sick, and took long exploratory walks around the town. Six-year-old Cathy mixed paints and sanded edges. She and Doug argued about colors—both of them had strong feelings about them.
Tricia let each of the children choose the colors of their own room, and otherwise let Doug choose. Mark, who was settling in to his new office at the university, didn’t seem to care. When he first saw the terracotta walls of the kitchen he started to speak, then clearly thought better of it. Tricia had seldom seen him back away from a battle, and she smiled as he walked away in silence. She loved her big terracotta kitchen. She arranged all the china on open shelves, leaving room for her mother’s things. That was a battle for another day. And perhaps, like this one, she could win it by acting first without asking permission.
She was unpacking books onto the shelves in the sitting room when she found The Feminine Mystique again. She glanced through it and found herself unable to put it down. It was difficult not to castigate herself as she read. How had she been so accepting of so much for so long?
She went into town to find the library to seek out more books on the subject. She found the library easily, a charming dark Victorian building next to the original Town Hall, now a museum. They both faced onto Market Square, a depressing space with smelly public toilets in the center. The library had a little entrance hall, with a noticeboard covered in little notices. She saw signs for The Mikado and an art exhibition, for piano and guitar lessons, for help with home computers, for meetings of the CND and the Socialist Workers Party. She wrote down the times of the CND meetings and the numbers for the guitar and piano lessons. Maybe Helen would like to play an instrument.
The library was comfortably old-fashioned inside. She joined it immediately and was welcomed to the town by the young librarian. It was well stocked with fiction but low on the kind of thing she was looking for. She settled for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, along with her usual stack of fiction.
Helen wasn’t interested in piano lessons, but George was. Doug jumped on the idea of learning the guitar. He was also letting his hair grow, to his father’s loudly voiced disgust. Tricia quite liked it.
It was late to be planting a garden, and Tricia knew nothing about it. She took a book out of the library and tried to enlist the children. Helen took it up with enthusiasm and they planted bulbs. George took on the task of mowing the lawn. They had lots of picnics in the garden that summer, but not when Mark was home, as he hated eating outside, declaring it barbarous.
The children all started in their new schools in September. Mark started lecturing, and Tricia began again supply teaching, filling in here and there. She also began to take driving lessons, without mentioning it to anyone. Doug had problems with the school—they demanded he cut his hair, and she had to insist that he do so. He kept it at the maximum length the school would allow, just touching his collar. In October Tricia took her driving test and failed by forgetting to signal before turning onto a roundabout. She took it again in early December and passed—which she announced to the whole family at Sunday dinner. Doug congratulated her enthusiastically. Mark was clearly taken aback, but he choked out a “Well done” after all the children had.
She and Doug went down to Twickenham on the train the next weekend and fetched her mother up for Christmas. They had been working on the garden floor and had a bedroom and bathroom there ready for her mother, painted in lilac and dove gray. “Do you like it, Grandma?” Cathy asked. Her mother stood looking at it in confusion.
“It’s very nice, thank you, darling,” she said. Tricia woke in the night to hear her mother moving around downstairs. When she went down she found her standing by the sink.
“What’s wrong, Mum?” she asked.
“Oh, there you are, Patsy. I got up to use the loo and I just wasn’t sure where I was,” her mother said. “I think I’ll go home now.”
It wrung her heart. “You’re in my house in Lancaster, and I think it would be a good idea if you stayed here tonight. Let me show you where your bedroom is, and your little bathroom.”
All the children were old enough now to understand that their grandmother wasn’t remembering things. George found it funny. The others tried their best to help. Doug wasn’t patient enough with her, Tricia thought, but he was ideal at getting her turned around and back to her room. He had a way of putting a gentle arm around her shoulders that always worked. Tricia wondered if it reminded her mother of her father. She always seemed to relax when she saw Doug. “Do you remember when Doug was born?” she asked one evening.
“Patsy, you speak as if you thought there was something wrong with my memory,” her mother said. “I remember perfectly. You were living in that horrid little cottage in Lincolnshire.”