The teacher was supposed to return from maternity leave in September, but the headmistress took Tricia aside one day and told her that she wouldn’t be coming back. “We’re going to advertise the post, of course. We have to. But if you applied we’d look very favorably on your application.” Tricia could take a hint; when the post was advertised she applied for it and was duly taken on permanently for the new academic year of 1971. At the same time she found a woman called Marge who lived nearby to come in and care for her mother in the daytime, as now she really couldn’t be left. She felt she was underpaying Marge, who was endlessly patient with the old woman.
One Saturday that autumn when she and George were at the library returning and collecting books, she spotted a new notice on the noticeboard: “Women’s Consciousness Raising Group, Thursday evening 7:30 pm, upstairs, Ring O’ Bells.” It was the same pub where CND met. Tricia showed up, uncertainly, not sure if she wanted her consciousness raised or what that really meant. What she found was a group of women like her, mostly housewives or women returned to work after children, women who had read The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch, and wanted something better than the lives they were offered. Tricia tried to persuade Helen to go to the next meeting, but she rolled her eyes and said she was meeting a boyfriend that night.
Tricia’s attitude to Women’s Liberation was that it had come too late for her. It could have made a huge difference to her life if it had come along ten years before, but as it was she had mostly freed herself. She had a job and a car and the children were older. Mark had stopped bothering her for sex. But listening to these women talk she did feel that they were, as they said, sisters. They had shared experiences she had never been able to talk about with anyone before. It meant so much to be able to talk about these things. And she wanted things to be better for the next generation, for Helen and Cathy to have the chances she had not had.
At Easter 1972, Tricia, George and Cathy came back from a visit to Doug in London to find a note from Helen: “Gran in Infirmary. Please come.” Tricia rushed around to the Infirmary, which was just around the corner, close enough that they heard ambulances so often that they didn’t look up at a siren any more. “My mother,” Tricia said. “Helen Cowan?”
They directed her through the Victorian building to a newly built ward where her mother was strapped into a bed and unconscious. Helen was there looking exhausted, her hair a mess. “She fell,” Helen said. “I came home and found her. Well, I didn’t find her at once. She was downstairs. I came in late and was going to bed, but I heard something. I thought a cat had got in. I went down and she was on the floor outside her room, in a pool of pee. I didn’t know what to do. I called the doctor and they sent an ambulance. They say she’s broken her hip.”
“Have you been here since last night?” Tricia asked, hugging Helen. “How marvellous of you. I’m here now, and I’ll stay with her. You go home and get some sleep, and see that the little ones eat something if you don’t mind. Where’s Dad?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t there. Last night. It was gone eleven.” Helen flushed a little. Eleven was her curfew, which Mark had insisted on while she lived at home. “It was closer to midnight. And of course I thought he must be in bed and went to wake him. I thought he’d know what to do. I wasn’t sure whether to try to move her. She was whimpering, oh it was horrible, Mum. But Dad wasn’t there. No sign of him. I knocked, and then I opened the door, and the bed was made and empty. I looked in your room too, in case, but of course he wasn’t there.”
“No, he wouldn’t have been,” Tricia said, absently. “I wonder where he was? Had you seen him in the morning?”
“No, nor the night before. I hadn’t seen him since Friday morning, when after you left he asked me if I was going to church with him and then stormed off when I said no, I was working.”
“I hope he’s all right,” Tricia said. “If he’d collapsed or anything they’d have telephoned, and nobody would have answered.” Just then her mother moaned from the bed, and Tricia went over and took her hand. “I’m here, Mum, you’re in hospital, but everything is all right.”
“Patsy?” her mother said.
“It’s all right. It’s all right, Helen. You go home. We’ll sort out the mystery of where your father is later. I’m sure there’s some perfectly sensible explanation.” She wondered what on earth it could be.
The doctors had set her mother’s broken hip, but they wouldn’t let her go home. “She shouldn’t have been left alone,” one of them said, a young Pakistani man.
“She wasn’t. A woman comes in to be with her when I’m in work, and the rest of the time I’m there. She can only have been alone for a few hours. And I thought my husband would be there.” Tricia felt guilty, and yet she seldom left her mother. “I took the younger children to London to see my oldest son, who lives there.” Now she felt she was explaining too much, and that the doctor was judging her.
“Well she can’t return yet in any case,” he said.
“Mammy! Mammy!” Tricia’s mother called from the ward. “Where are you?”
“She’s calling for her mother,” the doctor said. “Everyone does that in the end.”
“Her mother died in 1930,” Tricia said. “Wait. Do you mean that she’s dying?”