“No, get it done and out of the way while Michael’s here.”
Michael was shy with the babies, in a way they had already seen with some of their Cambridge friends. Flossie was already saying words, and Jenny was babbling syllables. It took Michael a week to join in and behave naturally with them. “Do you think they look like him?” Bee asked in one of their early morning conversations.
“Jenny’s ears are just like his. And Flossie has his feet and hands.”
“I’ve noticed that too,” Bee said. “It’s strange how it does and doesn’t matter.”
“Because they’re ours,” Pat said, and kissed her.
Sometime that summer as Flossie’s words grew more distinct, “Jenny” became “Jinny” to all of them. As Flossie was sometimes Florrie-Bee, Jenny was Jinny-Pat. These were their special in-family-only nicknames.
Pat took them into the Baptistery and held them up to see the gold ceiling, which they pointed at excitedly. She wished she could have them baptized there, but she wasn’t going to make any promises to bring them up in the faith. Nevertheless, she thanked God for them, there, and in the Duomo, and in San Lorenzo, and indeed several times every day whenever she thought of it. She went alone to the Uffizi—churches were different, but they really were too young for an art gallery—and stood before Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat and thought about Mary, the Annunciation, and how differently she felt about all that now that she had a baby. Before, her attention had mostly been on Botticelli’s angels. Now she concentrated on the mother and baby. The smile really did remind her of Bee. She bought a good copy of it in the gift shop.
Bee talked to Sara about the prospects of teaching and researching in Florence, and reluctantly gave up the idea. “The whole way academia is organized here is crazy,” Sara said.
The drive back home through Europe felt even more epic an adventure than driving down had been. As they went north Pat felt sad, as she always did leaving Italy. “It’s not just the food and the art and that it has given me a way of making a living,” she said. She was sitting on the back seat with the babies while Bee drove. “And it’s not just that everyone loves children, which English people really don’t. There really is something about it.”
The epic car journeys became a feature of their lives, and at length they all blurred together—the one where Jinny nearly fell off the cross-Channel ferry, the one where Pat nearly fell asleep on an Alpine road and forgot what side to drive on and almost hit a lorry, the one where Flossie refused to stop speaking Italian, the one where Bee went off to pee on an Alp and found a gentian, the one where Pat was pregnant and kept having to stop to be sick and the children found it hilarious. Pat wrote the three Roman books, then a guide to Siena and the small towns of Tuscany. Bee’s book on plant diseases was republished in America. Spain and Portugal joined the European Economic Community, and elections were held for the new European parliament. President Rockefeller visited China and was given a panda. Bee and the children shared a great longing to see the panda and Pat teased them all about it. They bought toy pandas for both girls for Christmas.
In November of 1966 there was a flood in Florence, killing six people and damaging some property. Fortunately the weather computers had predicted it well in advance, so most people had evacuated and most works of art were moved to safety. Some frescos were damaged. Pat wrote articles about their restoration and sat on a committee to raise money for it.
In January of 1967, when the girls were four and three and a half and Pat was seven months pregnant, she had to go to London to meet her editor for a meeting about the Tuscany book. It all went well, and the editor agreed to use a picture of her that Michael had taken, with her head and shoulders against the stairs of the Bargello. (Pat’s favorite of Michael’s photographs was one of Bee sitting in the garden with both babies on their first summer in Florence. She had an enlargement of that in a silver frame on the mantelpiece in Cambridge. She had the Madonna of the Magnificat in a matching frame next to it.) As she made her way out of the lift into the lobby of the Constable offices, she was astonished to run into Mark.
Mark looked older and a little less prosperous than Pat remembered him. His hair was receding and graying, and while his clothing style was still academic dinginess, it suited him less. To her astonishment he didn’t seem to notice her at all. He just walked past towards the lift.
“Mark!” she said. “How are you?”
He paused, looked at her, and blinked. She realized that he really hadn’t recognized her. “Patty!” he said. “My goodness.”
“Are Constable your publishers too?” she asked.