“I’d rather she was clever like you and George,” Helen said. “Pretty doesn’t get you anywhere.”
Tamsin came home and thrived. Her great-grandmother held her and sang old lullabies to her, though they didn’t leave her alone with the baby. Trish, coming home one day after school, heard Helen and Marge laughing downstairs with her mother. The washing machine was spinning down there too, and she thought how much easier it was for Helen being home with Tamsin than it had been for her in Grantham with Doug.
George came home at Christmas and Easter, but spent the summer of 1976 at MIT in Boston on a work/study program. “I think I’ll do my Ph.D. there,” he said when Trish asked him how he liked it. “Space is American now, whether we like it or not. And we’re America’s allies, even if they do think we’re all pinkos.”
“Pinkos!” Trish said. “What an old-fashioned word!”
“I heard people over there using it about the proponents of the new state health system. But it passed, so I don’t suppose they meant anything all that bad.” George laughed. “After Cambridge where they think my accent’s awfully northern it was funny to be in America where they all think it’s cute! And they all kept asking me if I’d met Prince Charles and Princess Camilla—for Republicans they’re awfully keen on hearing about our royalty!”
One Sunday late that summer Trish had a picnic in the garden with a lot of friends. Tamsin was toddling around from one person to another, holding on to legs indiscriminately. Trish had made a huge salad and Helen had made bread and other people had brought other things to share. She was practically a vegetarian now, as were many of her friends, but one of the younger men from the peace group had brought a cold roast chicken and carved it neatly with Trish’s mother’s antique carving knife and fork. “I think Gran might like to see that,” Cathy said.
“No, she doesn’t like new people,” Helen replied, before Trish could say anything.
“I’ll go and take her some chicken and tell her about it,” Cathy said.
When Cathy came back she seemed subdued. “Is Gran all right?” Trish asked.
“Yes,” Cathy said. “She’s sitting in the sun by the window. She was pretending to read, but she had the book upside down. She liked the chicken. But she said the strangest thing. She said she couldn’t remember who I was, but she did remember that she loved me.”
“Oh Cathy!” Trish hugged her.
Trish’s mother caught a bad chill that autumn and never really recovered. Doug and George both came home at Christmas and saw her for the last time. She didn’t know them. By that time she wasn’t sure of anyone. Her days of singing with Tamsin were over, she was afraid all the time. She was incontinent and wept at everything, plucking at her blankets and her clothes as if she wanted to tear them off but did not have the strength. She had gone beyond knowing she loved people and was afraid of all of them. It broke Trish’s heart when her mother cowered away from her, or fought against her. The doctor suggested that she should go into a hospice, and Trish agreed, but before a place opened up she died, in February of 1977, and was cremated. Doug and George came home for the funeral. But on the day in April it was just the girls and Trish who dug her ashes into the garden. Cathy planted rosebushes over the place.
“Let’s try to remember her as she was,” Trish said, and then realized that for the children she had always been forgetful. It had been such a long slow decline. She felt exhausted to think how long. Little Tamsin was playing in the dirt, and Trish knew that one day even she, the youngest of them, would die and somebody as yet unborn would mourn. She hoped she wouldn’t go through what her great-grandmother had—she hoped none of them would.
That summer Cathy took her A Levels and passed them, doing respectably but not as brilliantly as George. “It seems to me that not having their father at home is better for children’s education,” Trish said to Barb. Cathy went off to Bristol to study history. Trish drove her down with all her books and clothes filling the Beetle. Helen held two-year-old Tamsin up to wave as they went.
“All the rest of us are making our own way,” Cathy said as she settled back into the seat.
“Helen’s doing all right,” Trish said, stung. “But of course I’m very proud of you, darling.”
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