Read My Real Children for Free Online Page B

tea.”
    Marjorie was reluctant but Patty persuaded her to come with her. Mr. Collins’s house was nearby, and the whole group was gathered when the girls came in. An awkward silence fell. Ian looked at Patty in horror. Patty saw at once that there was no use waiting for somebody else to say anything. She had developed a technique for overcoming shyness where she took a deep breath and then shut her eyes for a second as she began to speak. She did this now.
    “Marjorie wants to tell you it’s all a mistake,” she said.
    “There’s really nothing wrong at all,” Marjorie said. She went on to explain, as she had to Patty.
    To Patty’s astonishment, although the members of the Christian Union listened they did not immediately see that Marjorie was telling the truth. She was caught wrong-footed because she had been so sure that they would react exactly as she had and see that it had been an act of Christian kindness. Instead they said nothing, until Marjorie stopped talking and then one of the girls said, “If you want to repent we’ll take you back into fellowship, but until then it would be better if you left.”
    Marjorie ran out of the room weeping. Patty began to follow her, but as soon as she was outside Ian put his hand on her arm. She thought at first that he had followed for the same reason she had, to comfort Marjorie, but he paid no attention to her. “Stop, Patty,” he said.
    Patty stopped and turned to him. “Didn’t you see that she’s telling the truth?”
    “It seems a really unlikely, contrived kind of story. And if it’s true, why didn’t she tell anyone before?”
    “Because Grace didn’t want everyone to know and feel sorry for her.” This seemed like a very reasonable answer to Patty, but Ian smiled cynically.
    “I hardly find it likely. She has done wrong and is lying about it.”
    “No. I don’t believe that, and I can’t see how you can.”
    “You’re such an innocent,” Ian said. “It’s good of you to try to see the best in everyone. But you have to think how it looks.”
    “How it looks?” Patty was bemused.
    “If you defend her people will assume that you’re a lesbian too.”
    Patty felt hot all over as if she was coming down with a fever. She could hardly believe this was Ian saying this to her. He took her stunned silence for acquiescence. “Come on back in,” he said. Instead she turned on her heel and walked away from him.
    The Christian Union did try to reach out to Marjorie, begging her to repent in a way that strongly resembled bullying. They tried the same thing on Grace, who fled them, and who did not return to college the next year. Patty became lonely again. She worked hard and spent a great deal of time sculling alone on the river, where she still felt close to God.

 
    5
    The Epistles of Mark: 1946–1949
    Patty’s third year at Oxford began in the autumn of 1946 and ended in June of 1947. In that year she engaged in a passionate affair with English literature, falling in love successively with Robert Herrick, her old friend Andrew Marvell, Elizabeth Gaskell, and finally and most spectacularly with T. S. Eliot. She also joined societies for various social causes, feeling that if the churches were falling to petty bullying, the secular world should be doing what it could. Oxford has many churches, and in the Michaelmas term she and Marjorie tried them all out, a different one every Sunday. She discovered a deep love of choral music and auditioned for the Bach choir, where she sang happily for the rest of the year. She continued to row. The war was over, but rationing and deprivation continued and were harder to bear. These were the years when Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and understanding the value of the two-minute hate. There was a great deal of grumbling, to which Patty tried not to add. The first months of 1947 were the coldest she had ever known, and the shortage of fuel for heating made everything worse. She suffered terribly from