She opened the front door and went in. “I’m home!” she called, and heard Cathy and her mother reply from their own corners of the house.
Miss Montrose was efficient, and the divorce moved forward quickly. Mark did not dispute the adultery, and he agreed to everything Miss Montrose suggested financially. “His solicitor probably told him he’s lucky we’re not asking more,” Miss Montrose said, with a tight-lipped smile. Mark never talked to her about the nature of the evidence, though he must have known she knew. She would have liked to talk to him about what he had been thinking, all those years, making everything her fault, but despite that she didn’t feel she could torture him that much. Helen had been right to call him a hypocrite, but Tricia understood that to strip a hypocrite of his hypocrisy can be a real wound.
Tricia’s divorce was made absolute in October 1972. In the same month she began teaching an evening class in Feminist Literature in the Workers Education Authority. So many people signed up that it was completely full. She stood up in front of a class of adults, mostly women but with a few men.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, her old remedy against nerves. “Some people say women have never achieved anything great,” she said, as she opened her eyes. “This class is going to demonstrate that women have achieved great things over and over again, but they’ve been patronized and ignored whenever they have. Women making art isn’t anything new, though there is some wonderful new stuff being done that we’re going to get to in due course. I’m going to ask you to read and think, but I’m not going to ask any background knowledge from you, anything beyond what we’re bringing to this class. I don’t expect you to know it all already. I want us to explore together. And I’m going to begin by reading you a translation of a poem written by Sappho in the Sixth Century before Christ.”
19
“I Wish I’d Gone by King’s X” Pat 1970–1971
Everything went on much the same through 1970. The girls were in school, Pat visited her mother weekly, the Como guide book came out, and in Italy in the summer she began working on one for Bologna.
In 1971 Bee began to work on a fungal immunization for elm trees. A new more virulent form of Dutch Elm Disease had come in to Britain from the continent and was killing trees. It could be controlled by lopping infected branches, but something better was needed. “But could you immunize all the trees in the country?” Pat asked when Bee was telling her about it.
“We probably could, but it looks as if we might need to do it every year, which would be a huge job. There’s a European agency being set up for crop diseases and improvement, and they might let us have a grant towards paying people to do that, but it’s hard to define elm trees as a crop.”
“I suppose they sort of are, in a way,” Pat said. “I mean, timber?”
“Let’s develop the cure before we start worrying about that,” Bee said. She was working long hours at it, and teaching and all her other work. She resented needing to take a morning off in April when their turn came to get new identity cards. As they already had passports it was really only a formality. The children were on their mother’s passports so Bee and Pat had to produce their birth certificates and have photographs taken. Most difficult was Pat’s mother—not only did they have to fill in the forms for her but Pat had to go to Twickenham to find her mother’s birth certificate. “We really should do something about putting her house on the market,” she said when she came back.
“We should go down one weekend and clear it out,” Bee agreed.
The identity card photographs were as unflattering as such pictures always were. Philip was squinting, Flossie was scowling, and Jinny’s eyes were screwed up. Bee looked fierce and Pat looked resigned. Only her mother looked natural.
“All this red tape, and for what?” Pat asked, looking through the packet when they arrived. “Just to make us look a pack of fools.”
“So the government knows who everybody is all the time,” Bee said briskly. “Such nonsense. I’m sure it won’t stop the terrorists for a moment.”
A few weeks later they were having a picnic lunch in their garden on a warm May Sunday. “Just think, in six weeks we’ll be doing this in Florence,” Pat said.
“Six weeks!” Jinny said.
“Italy, Italy, Italy!” the children all chorused.
Bee looked serious and put her hand on Pat’s knee. “Pat, love—I’ve been thinking, I don’t think I can spend the whole summer in Italy this year. With the fungus and everything. I need to be here to get ahead on work while there isn’t any teaching. And there’s that conference at ICL at the beginning of August, and they want me to present. I thought I’d come out with you and have a couple of weeks, and come back here on the train. Then I’d come out again at the end of the summer for another couple of weeks.”
“Of course, if that’s what you need,” Pat said.