“But you’re staying here, Mum, and these people are going to look after you.”
“Nonsense! We’ve just been visiting them, and now it’s time to go. I couldn’t be expected to stay here!” She wept and raged at last, when nobody would agree that it must be a mistake. Pat was shaking when she got back into the car.
“How did it go?” Bee asked when she arrived home.
“Terrible,” Pat said. The girls were planting bulbs along the fence and Philip was asleep on a blanket. “It was all fine until she understood she had to stay, and then she was sure it was a mistake. It must be like a nightmare, being that confused.”
Bee put her arms around her. “Would it be better having her here after all?”
“No, I think it’s the right thing. But it was so awful.”
“We’ll all go and see her tomorrow,” Bee said. “We won’t just abandon her there.”
“No,” Pat agreed.
“And now I’ll put the kettle on. We thought we’d have a picnic tea. The girls have been working hard getting it ready. Come on, wash your hands, girls, it’s time for tea.”
The girls raced each other indoors. Close in age, they were often taken for twins. Both of them had Michael’s dark hair but were otherwise very different. Flossie was long legged and stalky. “A rower, like her mother,” Bee said. Jinny was shorter and more solid, with a square face and a turned-up nose like Bee’s. They both chattered in Italian as fluently as English, much more fluently than their mothers. Pat had worried about their starting school, about their different surnames and absent fathers. All the children had Michael written down as their father on their birth certificates, as the alternative was to say the father was unknown, which sounded awful. But although they saw Michael for a weekend every month or so and they knew he was their father, it was far from a usual situation. Pat was afraid the presence of two mothers and the absence of a father would be a social embarrassment to them in school. She needn’t have worried, at least not immediately, as the girls loved school and nobody seemed to have bothered them about their unusual family.
The girls continued in the village school, and Pat’s mother continued in the home in Trumpington. Pat got into the habit of visiting her mother with the whole family on a Sunday afternoon and taking her mother out to lunch in Cambridge on a Thursday. They had two cars now, the big Hillman and a sporty Mini. Her mother often wept and raged when she left, and often asked to go home. She generally recognized Pat, and sometimes the others. She frequently asked Pat where her father was, and even more frequently asked her who was the father of the children.
They went to Italy in the summer of 1969, just after the fuss of the European space launch. “We’ll get to the moon yet,” Bee said.
“To Italy, Mamma!” Flossie corrected her. To the children Bee was Mamma and Pat was Mum.
“Italy, Italy!” Philip chorused.
On the ferry, as the children ran up and down chasing seagulls and dodging in and out of the legs of other passengers, Bee took Pat’s hand. “You’re very quiet.”
“I keep feeling as if I’m abandoning my mother in the home. I tell myself she won’t know the difference, or won’t remember, and I want to go so much, even aside from needing to go to write a new book, but I feel guilty.”
“She really won’t know. Put her behind you for the summer and enjoy the moment, or you’ll just be wracked with guilt and then you’ll have left her for nothing.”
The sea-wind ruffled through Pat’s short hair and blew a strand of Bee’s longer hair into her mouth. “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s catch up with the kids before they have to be fished out!”
Her mother did cast a shadow over that summer. Pat kept seeing old Italian women, with wrinkled faces and black clothes. They were old but vital, alive. She had always been aware of them since her first trip to Italy as protectors against predatory men. Now she wondered how old they were and whether they lived with their families. Surely there must be old demented women in homes in Italy, but she didn’t see them. She found them in paintings—Saint Elizabeth, and anonymous Renaissance Italian women in crowds. She took the girls to the Uffizi this year and began to talk to them about art and the men who had made the art. Jinny loved the colors and the shapes, and Flossie loved the stories.
Several days were wasted in getting papers allowing her to own the house in Florence she had owned now for more than ten years. “It’s just stupid paperwork, there’s more and more of it,” the official said. “Since you are a European citizen there is no problem, but you need the permit.”
Michael came to visit at the beginning of August. She went with him up to Como and Lake Garda, taking photographs for the new book. “Don’t you ever get tired of Italy?” he asked.