My Real Children by Jo Walton Page B

to a dog. She told Mark she was pregnant almost immediately, before she could possibly have been sure, but he did not question her. She hated lying, but she had come to the end of her resources. She had loved him, and even after she had stopped loving him she had tried to make the marriage work, and this was what it had come to. She made a desperate plan to run away to her mother in Twickenham—a journey requiring a bus and two trains and most of a day, no easy trip with a three-year-old. She reached her mother’s house after six at night, to her mother’s astonishment. She took them in and put Doug to bed at once. Then she insisted on telephoning the Lincolnshire neighbor who was prepared to take messages for Mark and Tricia.
    “He’ll be so worried about you,” she said, dialling. No matter what Tricia said, her mother insisted on treating it as a temporary problem. “All marriages have these little blips,” she said. Mark agreed that Tricia should stay until the weekend and then he would fetch her back. She felt her mother conspired with him to make her again the child, the misbehaving child.
    “I want to leave Doug with you and take a teaching post,” Tricia said to her mother. “I’ll be able to send you money for his keep.”
    “Married women can’t teach!” her mother said.
    “They can now,” Tricia said. “That law has been changed. Or if I can’t teach I’ll get secretarial work. Goodness knows typing Mark’s book has taught me something.”
    But her mother wouldn’t hear of it. “Your place is with your husband. I know you took losing the baby badly, but the best thing for that is to have another baby as soon as possible. I lost a baby between Oswald and you. It’s natural to hate Mark for putting you through all that pain, but it isn’t his fault really.”
    She tried to tell her mother about the way he had burned the letters and his pettiness with the housekeeping but she couldn’t make her understand. She made light of everything and kept repeating that all marriages had these problems. When Tricia cried, her mother said she was run down, and made her cups of Bovril.
    On the Saturday morning Mark arrived in the car, Doug was delighted to see him. Tricia was too busy being sick to care. She tried to blame the Bovril, but she knew she really was pregnant again.
    In the car she tried to make an ultimatum as Doug ran about the back seat pointing out cows and horses excitedly. “We have to move into town. I can’t stay there in the village where there’s nothing. It’s driving me mad. I never talk to an adult. I’m completely trapped. There isn’t even a library.”
    “I’ll consider looking for a house in Grantham after the new baby is born,” Mark said, with the air of somebody making a huge concession.
    The baby was born in January 1954, and it was a girl. They called her Helen Elizabeth, after Tricia’s mother and Elizabeth Burchell, and perhaps the new queen. The order of names was at Tricia’s insistence. She was again very pulled down after the birth, and her mother again came to stay. Doug was jealous of the new baby and of his mother and grandmother’s attention to her. He had been toilet trained for more than a year, but he began to deliberately soil himself. Tricia found this so distressing that she broke down in tears every time it happened. She still had to wash everything by hand herself. Mark dealt with it by spanking Doug, much against Tricia’s desires. “He’s too little,” she insisted. “He doesn’t really understand. It’s just because of Helen. He’ll be fine again soon.”
    “Haven’t you seen the look on his face? It’s deviltry and he’s doing it on purpose.”
    “Well, he is, but he doesn’t understand.” Tricia was furious with Doug herself, but she couldn’t condone hitting a child so young. Mark, however, was implacable, and as his methods worked and Doug gave up his rebellion it made it more difficult for her to continue to insist the