My Real Children by Jo Walton Page B

in his lodgings. He still sounded strange and distraught. “You came, then,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.”
    “You can trust me to do what I say I will do,” she said.
    He turned up at the station in half an hour, in a car borrowed from friends. He did not kiss her or embrace her as she had half hoped and half feared. He barely seemed to look her in the eye. She wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. “You’re going to stay with the Burchells for the next few days until we can be married on Wednesday. It’s extremely good of them and I hope you’ll be grateful.”
    For a moment Patty resented his assumption that she needed to be told how to behave. Then she forgave him. He was under a strain, of course.
    “Wednesday? I’ll write to my mother.”
    “I suppose you have to.”
    “What church?”
    “St. Thomas the Martyr, in Osney.”
    Elizabeth Burchell treated the entire thing as a joke. The only thing she took seriously was Mark’s Third, which she saw as tragic. “We’ll have to try to do something with him,” she said briskly. She was several years older than Mark and Patty, a philosopher with published books. Patty knew her only slightly. Her husband, Clifford, was a Classicist at Magdalen. They had a small daughter who seemed perpetually grubby and tearful.
    Over gray sausages and watery cabbage she returned to the theme of Mark’s failure and future. Clifford had apparently found Mark a teaching job at a boys’ school in Grantham. “Until we can find something better,” he said.
    “You know how much I appreciate it,” Mark said.
    Patty would have appreciated being consulted as to where she would live, but she supposed there had hardly been time. The three of them clearly knew each other well and were well into making plans. Patty felt like a child, with her future being decided for her. This feeling intensified when after dinner Elizabeth, who had declined help, served watery coffee and stared at her over the cup. “You’re not a bad little thing, but I positively can’t call you Patty,” she said. “It makes you sound like a little pie.”
    Patty looked to Mark for help, but he was laughing with the others and did not see it. “My full name is Patricia if you prefer that,” Patty said, with what dignity she could manage.
    “That sounds like a girl who rides to hounds,” Elizabeth said.
    Clifford snorted with laughter. “And it means a female member of the Roman upper classes. I can hardly imagine how it came to be a name at all.”
    “Tricia isn’t so bad,” Mark said, seeing her distress. “I think I’ll call you Tricia. Would you like that?”
    “Oh yes, much better,” Elizabeth said, cutting off Patty. “And tomorrow we must find you something to wear. Do you have any coupons?”
    Patty made herself a dress on Elizabeth’s sewing machine, white cotton, short and very simple. She intended to dye it a more serviceable color later and wear it for a summer dress, but she resisted Elizabeth’s suggestions of buying colored fabric. If there was white fabric available she intended to get married in white. It was the only part of the whole process where she managed to make her own decision stick. Mark, Clifford and Elizabeth had decided everything else. She spent most of her time in the Burchell house looking after the little girl, Rosemary.
    “Children are a bore,” Elizabeth said frankly, after she and Patty had bathed Rosemary and put her to bed one night. “You’re not in the family way, are you?”
    “No,” Patty said, indignantly. She gathered her courage together. “I wanted to ask you about that.”
    “Oh yes, I am, about four months along and due in November if I’ve counted right,” Elizabeth said. “You are a funny girl, making a mystery about that. I hope it’s a boy this time.”
    Then she opened the door to the sitting room, where Clifford was reading, and Patty could not explain what she had really wanted to ask.
    On her wedding morning she felt