“We got the Seven Wonders going,” she said. “That’s something. And you have taken some wonderful pictures.”
A burst of Albioni came through the open window of Philip’s room above the front door. “And there are the children,” Michael said. “Maybe they’ll do better with the world than we have.”
In the sitting room Bee was talking to one of her old students, Sophie Picton, who was briefly visiting Cambridge, and indeed Earth, from Galileo, the European space station. She had brought Bee some cuttings from space, and was taking some of Bee’s plants back up with her. “These should make the air smell a lot better,” she said.
“I’ll keep working on it,” Bee said.
“You should come up and work on it,” Sophie said. “In zero gravity you’d be able to move about as well as anyone else. Better, because your arms are strong.”
“Oh, that’s a tempting thought,” Bee said. “But I have my responsibilities here.”
Pat brought everybody some fruitcake and tea and Philip came down to join them and they chatted until Sophie left. Then they settled Michael into Jinny’s old room at the front of the house. Most of Jinny’s things were in Florence, and Pat moved the rest into the spare room.
“What we need to think is not that you’re here to die but that you’re here to celebrate while you can,” Bee said.
“Champagne every night?” Philip asked.
“Good things while we can have them anyway,” Pat said. “Flora’s going to come down at the weekend.”
“I want to take a series of pictures of you two and the children and the house and garden,” Michael said. “Nothing posed, just the way you go about your routine.”
“All right,” Pat said, exchanging looks with Bee. “My favorite picture of yours is still the one you took of Bee in Florence when the girls were babies.”
“Though your second favorite is St. Mark’s Square taken from ground level,” he said.
“It was the way you didn’t care at all if you completely ruined your clothes,” Pat said.
They put the news on after dinner, but after a few minutes Bee switched it off. “Nothing but violence and explosions and men posturing,” she said.
“Do you really want to go to space?” Pat asked Bee the next morning when she was dressing for work.
“No,” Bee said. “Well, yes. I always have loved science fiction and I’d love to go to space. But the way it is now with nobody sharing what they’re doing it’s anti-science. I’d be happy to give cuttings to the Americans and the Russians, but that’s not the way we do things any more. I hate that. Working on what I work on it’s not so bad, but if I were to really go into the space stuff it would stifle me not to be able to share freely.” Bee stopped. “Besides, we have to make choices. I used to think we had time to do anything we wanted, but we can only do some of the things in any one lifetime.”
“But at my back I always hear time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near. And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity,” Pat said.
“Deserts of vast eternity,” Bee echoed. “What’s that from?”
“Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress,’” Pat said. “It often comes into my mind. It’s about doing things while you can.”
“A good sentiment,” Bee said, wheeling herself towards the stairlift.
It took Michael eight months to die, and so he died in Florence at the end of August.
He had taken his series of photographs of them—of Bee swinging between the wheelchair and her green chair, and hauling herself up off the bed; of Pat cooking, and pushing her hair back impatiently as she typed; of Jinny pulling on her boots, and laughing with her head thrown back, looking exactly like Bee; of Philip playing the oboe, and clearing plates from the table; of Flora arranging flowers, looking like a goddess, and scrunching up her face at the thought of asparagus. He had kept photographing them right up to the end, the last of them were still in his camera. He had not been able to speak for the last two weeks, the growth in his throat was too much. He had written down detailed instructions for how the photographs were to be processed.
When they had driven down to Florence in late June, as soon as Philip’s exams were over, they had discussed Michael’s funeral. “There’s a Jewish cemetery in Florence,” Michael said. His voice was hoarse already.
“It’s some kind of ancient monument,” Pat said. “I don’t think it’s still used.”
“What kind of a guidebook writer are you?” Michael teased. “There’s a modern Jewish cemetery to the north of the city just out of town. I’ll talk to the rabbi and sort it out.”
“You don’t speak Italian,” Bee said.
“The rabbi speaks Hebrew.”
“Do you speak Hebrew?” Philip asked in astonishment.