“Does anyone in that sentence mean our children or the government?” Bee asked. “Our children wouldn’t, but the government is another thing.”
“It certainly wouldn’t hold up under a government challenge. But it’s better than nothing.”
On their way back home from the solicitor’s Bee started to laugh. “I was just thinking how grown up all that made me feel,” she said. “I’m sixty-one!”
The next March Pat had a heart attack in the early hours of the morning. She knew at once what it was, a pain in her left arm and chest. She managed to waken Bee before she passed out, and Bee called an ambulance. She woke up in the Addison, alone.
She struggled to press the button to ring for the nurse. “Is my friend waiting?” she asked.
“Try to relax,” the nurse said, taking her pulse professionally. “Don’t worry about anything.”
“I’ll worry myself into another heart attack this minute if you don’t let my friend in. She’s in a wheelchair.”
Bee was waiting, and they let her in. “They wouldn’t tell me how you were,” she said, wheeling herself right up to the bed and taking Pat’s hand.
“I had to threaten to have another heart attack to get you in,” Pat said. “You wouldn’t believe how much good it’s doing my heart to see you.”
“I called the kids, and Philip’s on his way. Flora said she’d come first thing in the morning, and I told her Philip was coming and we’d get in touch if it was really serious.”
“Having grown-up children who know what we want as next of kin is such a relief,” Pat said.
“He should be here any minute. He was in Glasgow.”
“Of course, it would help if they weren’t so far away.”
The Addison assured Pat that it was a minor heart attack. They gave her stacks of pills, a diet sheet that didn’t allow her to eat anything she liked, and instructions to exercise. “I get loads of exercise,” she complained.
“Get more,” Bee said, unsympathetically. “I can’t have your heart packing in on us.”
“Do you think I should ask them if the prohibition on ice cream includes gelato?”
“No,” Philip said. “Because you’re going to eat it anyway, so you might as well not ask. All this low-fat stuff is going to be hard. You love fat. You never cook anything that doesn’t have half a bottle of olive oil in it.”
“Except when I’ve run out of olive oil, and then it has half a pound of butter,” Pat said. “Though I have noticed that Sainsbury’s do a very decent olive oil these days.”
She took the pills regularly and tried to walk more. “I used to love rowing, but I haven’t done it since we moved out here. I’ll walk in Italy.”
“You’ll walk now. You can push me if you like, that’ll be good exercise.”
“Slavedriver,” Pat said.
The news was terrible, as usual. There was a massacre in China, repression in the Soviet countries, and yet another assassination of the president in the US. The war between Uruguay and Brazil threatened to go nuclear, and the Americans said that they’d regard any intervention from Russia or Europe as a hostile act against their hemisphere. “Well, keep peace in your hemisphere, then,” Bee snarled at the television. “No more nukes!”
That summer in Italy Pat found that she couldn’t remember Italian words she knew perfectly well. She’d launch herself into a sentence and come to a dead stop when the words weren’t there. She’d never had that experience before and it confounded her. “Do you think it might be your tablets?” Jinny asked.
Back in Cambridge she asked her doctor and had her prescription changed. She couldn’t tell if it had helped, she wasn’t speaking Italian. The next summer things didn’t seem to be any better. Pat noticed that she was sometimes forgetting words in English too.
“I’m afraid I’m going like my mother,” she confessed to Bee in the dark.
“You’re only sixty-four,” Bee said, holding her tight. “Don’t cry now, Pat love. Hush. You’ll be all right.”
30
Twins: Trish 1994–1999
George rang up one morning in the spring of 1994. “I was wondering if I could ask you to do me a big favor,” he said.
“Yes, of course, what?” Trish answered, looking frantically for her glasses, her notebook and her pen so that she could note down whatever the favor was before she forgot.
“They want us back on the moon, and it would be for a year,” George said, as she found the notebook on the counter and her glasses on their beaded chain around her neck. Tamsin had given her the chain for Christmas. “At least a year, maybe two. It’s really important for Sophie that she go.”