“Mamma’s hurt her legs. Remember when you fell down and cut your knees? Mamma’s in hospital in London and she needs us. We have to go and help her get better.” Bee wouldn’t have said the doctors were talking about wheelchairs if it wasn’t serious. Wheelchairs. How were they going to manage? She tried to imagine what could be wrong. Shattered could mean anything—would Bee’s legs ever heal?
“Let’s go home and pack up,” she said, and looked down into three desolate faces. Flossie’s lip was quivering as she tried to hold back her tears. “Let’s go to Perche No! and have one last gelato and then go home and pack.”
In Perche No! she ordered all Bee’s favorite flavors, watermelon and white mint and raspberry. The children ordered for themselves, even four-year-old Philip. Eva, the girl at the counter, had known the children for years and spoke to them as old friends. Flossie told them that their Mamma had hurt her legs and they had to go home. “Beatrice?” she said. Pat had always loved the Italian way of pronouncing Bee’s full name, but now it was all she could do to stay calm hearing it.
“Give your sister my love,” the girl said to Pat, in Italian. “I would send her a gelato if it were possible.”
“I’ll tell her you thought of her,” Pat said. Her sister. It was a misapprehension they never corrected. She looked up at Verrocchio’s sad Christ, opening his wound to Thomas, and sent up a prayer for strength and help and healing for Bee.
She picked up an English paper at the little kiosk and found news of the bomb. Six people had been killed and nine injured, three severely. They did not give names, but there was a black and white photograph of the damage to the station. What possible good had it done the cause of a united Ireland to blow up a station in London, to kill six people and smash up Bee’s legs? Pat hated the IRA for their casual disregard for other people’s lives. Why couldn’t they just let Ireland join the rest of Europe and stop making a fuss?
As she walked across the Ponte Vecchio she ran into Sara, one of her oldest friends in Florence. “What’s wrong?” Sara asked immediately. The children blurted it out before Pat could speak.
“We have to go back immediately. Bee wouldn’t have asked unless it was really important,” Pat said.
“How are you going?” Sara asked.
“I think I have to drive, though it will take so long doing it alone. But if we take the train the car will be here, and we’ll need it there.”
“Why not sell your car here and buy another when you reach England?” Sara asked.
“That’s audacious, but I don’t think I have time to sell it.”
“I will sell it for you,” Sara announced. “I’ll come with you now and you can give me the papers.”
So later that afternoon Pat found herself with three children and a thrown-together set of luggage in a sleeper car on the express train to Paris.
The train proved to be a good idea. None of the children had taken a long train trip before, whereas they were accustomed to the drive. On the drive they would all have missed Bee at every moment. On the train everything was new. They loved their sleepers. The girls had the two top bunks, one on each side, and Pat took Philip in with her underneath Jinny. Besides, it was much faster. With only one driver the drive would have taken days. On the train they did not have to stop for meals or bathroom breaks. “I’m sure we’ve left half of what we need in Florence,” Pat said, putting pajamas on the children.
“Maybe we’ll go back soon,” Flossie said. “Maybe we’ll get Mamma and all go back next week.”
“I think it’ll take Mamma longer than that to get well,” Pat said, and she thought “wheelchairs” and wondered if they would ever be able to go back.
At Dover, the immigration officials gave her a hard time over Jinny. “What is your relationship to this child?”
There wasn’t a simple answer. Bee had always been there before. “She’s my best friend’s daughter. We were all on holiday in Italy. There was a family emergency and she had to come home, and now we’re all joining her.”
The man looked at Jinny suspiciously, then at her identity card. “She should have a passport.”
“She’s on her mother’s passport,” Pat said. “We didn’t think.” At the Swiss and French borders they had barely glanced at their papers. Borders within Europe were growing less important. Only Britain still maintained its moat.
“Well, next time think,” the man said. “Where’s your mother?” he asked Jinny.
“In London,” Jinny said, with a quick glance at Pat.
“All right then. You’re lucky you’re all British and you’ve only been in Europe, or you could be in real trouble.”