“Not when all of us were young?” Helen asked.
“I was exhausted all the time when all of you were young,” Trish said. “It was no fun at all. I don’t know how I kept my head above water. And your father—and I was pregnant all the time.”
“You never found anyone else, after David Lin,” Helen said.
“I never had the opportunity,” Trish said. “You’re still happy with Don?”
“Yes, except that he’s so totally predictable. I know what he’ll say about everything all the time. He never surprises me. He’s very dependable, and I think that’s what I wanted when I first met him. But that’s all he is.”
“He’s a good man and he loves you,” Trish said.
“I know.” Helen put her tea mug down. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. It’s probably just working together as well as being married.”
One day in the winter of 1995 Bethany came home very excited. “I have a recording contract!” she said. “I can’t believe it. At my age! I’ve finally been discovered!”
Trish was thrilled and asked all about it.
The next day when Bethany mentioned it she had forgotten all about it. “A recording contract! How wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did tell you,” Bethany said, looking devastated.
“I’m sorry!”
“Not your fault, and it’s not important. I’ll tell you about it again. But I am worried about your memory.”
“So am I,” Trish said.
“We sell a kind of tea called ginkgo that’s supposed to help with memory.”
Trish bought some and drank it every day, even though it tasted disgusting. She couldn’t see any improvement.
George and Sophie came back from the moon in June 1996 and the twins went home with them. “This may happen again,” Sophie said when they came to collect them. “I’m going to be in Cambridge for a year, but after that would you be prepared to have them again?”
“Of course,” Trish said. She had got used to them and felt bereft without them. She was seventy that year and her family made a big fuss, with a cake and a party. She would have preferred to ignore the occasion. She didn’t like to think of herself as old, still less old and senile.
When the twins came back in the summer of 1998 they were nine, nearly ten. They were both wonderful with computers. Rhodri persuaded Trish to buy a new computer, from Don and Helen of course, a Mac. It was expensive, but Trish had enough money. Doug had left half his money to AIDS charities, but the half he had left to Trish made her more comfortable than she had ever been. She bought a new car every few years and could afford the Mac without asking herself how much money she had.
Rhodri showed her how to use it. All she had used her old computer for was making notes for her classes, like a glorified typewriter. This one was different. It could go online, and once it did it had Google. Google was what Trish had wanted for years, the ability to search for something she had forgotten. “If only Google would tell me where I’d left my glasses!” she said. But it told her the lost word “samurai” when she searched for “Japanese warrior” and the author of Sonnets from the Portuguese. It helped her fill in the blanks. The Mac also let the children email to and fro with their parents on the moon and their cousins and friends across town. “What a wonderful machine.”
The twins noticed that she was forgetful. “I told you that already, Gran!” Bronwen said when Trish forgot something.
Rhodri was good at thinking of ways to help. The computer had a “to do” function that reminded her to take her pills and collect the children from school and teach her classes. It beeped in a friendly way to remind her when she had to do something, and when she checked it told her what. She used it for her lists and notes. She wrote them down on a notepad that she carried with her and then transferred them into the computer at night. Doing that she was sometimes distressed at how many times she had written down the same thing.
Cathy, coming up for a weekend with fifteen-year-old Jamie, was skeptical of the computer, and of the twins when she caught Bronwen reminding Trish to take her pills. “Are you looking after those children or are they looking after you?”
“A bit of both,” Trish said, honestly.