Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  Yet it seems to me relevant to what I’m trying to work out that Isa and May were a real presence in my young life. I once lived with May for a few months, when my mother was in hospital, flat on her back; trying to hang on to her second baby (she failed). I was not quite three, but the memories are distinct, though I expect heavily influenced by what I’ve been told. ‘You were as good as gold,’ May says, and then she boasts, ‘You didn’t miss your mum one little bit.’ But this is possibly true. I was certainly very fond of my granny till I was about ten, extravagantly so. She was no George Sand, but in her own way she too tried to stuff me with happiness. And sweets, especially the lethal barley sugars, the cure for all unhappiness. God knows how my teeth survived.

  Happiness, to May, lay in being well fed and having plenty of sleep. I only had to let out the merest whimper of discontent to be told I was tired and a good sleep would see me right. Either that or I was surely hungry and needed a biscuit or some cake to get me through to the next meal. My mother frequently remonstrated with May about stuffing me with food, but was told that what the child doesn’t want she won’t eat and it was doing her no harm. May overrode my mother at every turn and did what she liked with me until I myself began to rebel and say I wasn’t tired or – less often – hungry. That didn’t go down well. That was giving her ‘lip’.

  As I grew older, I gave May a lot of lip. Sometimes I was unthinkingly cruel. I’d tell her she had a funny smell. She’d never laugh that off – funny smells to her meant dirt of some sort, and she had an obsession about cleanliness. She’d tell me she’d had an ‘all-over wash’ that very morning, and her clothes were fresh on from the skin outwards, so no more talk of smells. I was too young to be able to stipulate what exactly I could smell or to say that it had nothing to do with being dirty. It was May herself who had a distinctive smell, a mixture of soap and soap powder but also of her particular scent, a kind of yeasty aroma, a bit like the kitchen after some baking had been done – far too complicated for a young child to explain. I hadn’t meant anyway that ‘funny’ equalled ‘bad’. But she took it that way.

  I commented on her accent and grammar as well, which was naturally very offensive to her. But I wasn’t sneering; I was just eager to show off that I knew how to say things properly once I’d learned to. After I’d moved into the juniors section of my primary school, I didn’t like May coming to pick me up, which she was always eager to do. There was one girl who mimicked May’s grammatical slips, trying to get the others to laugh at the dropped aitches, and the ain’ts. I hated the girl but was at the same time embarrassed by May. As for May herself, she could handle this kind of thing in public. She’d just turn and stare at the girl, if she heard the sneers, and ask, ‘Anything else to say, madam, while your mouth is warm?’ Everyone would laugh and May would pass round the forbidden barley sugars and the incident was over. But my embarrassment remained and I was ashamed of it and didn’t understand it. May was my grandmother. I shouldn’t have this uncomfortable feeling about her, surely.

  I was glad when I moved on to secondary school that I no longer needed May to pick me up. She thought I still did, but my mother agreed that I was perfectly capable of getting myself to and from school even though it involved crossing a major road. Anyway, May’s arthritis was beginning to bother her, and it was now too far for her to walk. So everything changed. Instead of seeing her every weekday I saw her only at the weekends, and not always then. I began saying ‘Do I have to?’ when my mother suggested I go to visit her on Saturdays, and I absolutely refused to stay the night if I did condescend to visit. The days of being tucked up with May in her big, sagging double bed were long over. I expect she was hurt by my sudden lack of interest in being with her, but if so, she was too proud to show it. When I trotted out excuses, around the age of thirteen or so, she asked why I thought she cared, she’d plenty to do, didn’t have time to entertain me as once she had done.

  It was around then that I switched my allegiance for a while to Isa. Isa took me for tea at posh hotels after we’d been to some art exhibition or other. For a couple of pre-teenage rebellious years – I was a late starter – I was impressed. Isa took taxis everywhere, and that alone was impressive. I was even quite agreeable to ‘looking nice’ for her, and wore clothes she’d chosen for me quite willingly, down to the Mary Jane shoes. I listened respectfully to Isa’s lectures on artists, and dutifully studied the expensive catalogues she bought. Then, inevitably, the thrill wore off. I still relished the teas, though I was reprimanded frequently for never, ever leaving anything for Miss Manners. My greed was beginning to annoy her – it was not ladylike. Worse still was my growing habit of contradicting her. Rather than standing humbly beside her, a little overawed, while she interpreted a painting for me, I offered my own opinions and told her I thought she’d got it wrong. Instead of being pleased with my independence of thought, she was offended. There was no tea at Claridges on those days.

  Remembering that period in my life makes me see that this was when I first became fascinated by what my two grandmothers represented, not that I thought of them as ‘representing’ anything at the time. They were so contradictory, pointing me in entirely different directions. I knew virtually nothing about them, of course, though I was constantly asking for information. Isa would produce photographs of herself as a child, but May only had one blurred snapshot of herself at around the age of seven. In spite of not knowing much about them, I regarded them both as figures of authority when I was young. It was this conviction that, between them, my grandmothers knew all the things that mattered that led me, eventually, and in a very convoluted way, to what I am doing now. They are the source of my idea: grandmothers matter.

  But how? Why? Where’s the evidence?

  Isa mentioned, before I left her, that there was to be a Millais exhibition soon and that perhaps we might go to it together. What she means is, will I take her, because she can now no longer quite manage on her own, in spite of having a taxi there and back. I said that of course I would go with her, and I will, though I loathe all the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Millais. Isa actually looks a bit like one of Millais’ portraits, a portrait of Effie Millais, though all I recall of it is that the woman is wearing a dark red velvet gown with a lace collar and that she has another bit of lace sitting on top of her hair.

  Effie Millais had eight children. I looked her up. I looked up the wives of all the Pre-Raphaelite artists – Rossetti’s, Madox Brown’s, Holman Hunt’s; it’s possible to spend ages doing that sort of thing, and I am an expert at it. Because Isa wanted to go to a Millais exhibition, I justified pleasantly passing an hour or so gathering useless information. Except in this case, it wasn’t quite useless. I hit on Edith Holman Hunt, a rather terrifying, and therefore promising (for my purposes) grandmother. She was a tall, bony woman who lived in a bizarre house full of paintings, gongs, church candlesticks and all kinds of other curious things. Her granddaughter Diana wrote that her throat used to be ‘sore with worry’ when she was deposited on her grandmother’s doorstep. The welcome she got was warm, but also uncomfortable – Edith would embrace her, and all the brooches and buckles adorning her person would press into her.

  Like Isa, Edith saw it as her job to educate her granddaughter. She’d take her to the Tate Gallery and go from painting to painting lecturing her. These lectures in the Tate were not as agonising as one that took place in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, where, at one time, Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World hung. Edith would gather a small crowd round herself and her granddaughter and before beginning to tell them all about the picture would announce that she had the honour of being the artist’s widow.

  Afterwards, she would take Diana for tea, but it wasn’t the sort of tea Isa treated me to. No plush hotels for Edith. She’d choose a modest café, and once settled at a table ask for two cups and saucers and a jug of boiling water. When these items arrived, she’d produce a muslin bag of tea leaves from her reticule, and an envelope of powdered milk,
and proceed to make tea. The tea drunk, she’d dip her finger into the salt on the table and massage the gums of her lower jaw. By this stage her granddaughter would be beetroot red with embarrassment, but her ordeal was not over. On the way home, Edith would make a commendably regular habit of stopping to give pavement artists money. This was fine, but where she got her purse from was not: she wore it under her skirt, and so, to retrieve it, she had to crouch down and lift her skirt. She also kept printed cards in her purse, and one of these would be given with the money to the artist. They read: ‘Prudent thrift permits the luxury of giving.’

  Diana Holman Hunt spent her childhood being shuttled between her grandmothers when she wasn’t at boarding school. Now, what effect would that have on a child? How did she turn out? There couldn’t, surely, have been more influential grandmothers, but how did this strong influence make itself felt? Did Diana become rigidly conventional? Or did she follow the pattern of eccentricity laid out for her? And what kind of grandmother did she become, if she became one? I felt quite excited just thinking about her – her experience links into what I’m looking for, the thin (as yet) thread slowly unwinding.

  I try to imagine myself at seven, the age Diana Holman Hunt was when she went to live with her grandmothers, first with one, then the other, and it scares me. This is odd, because I was closer to both Isa, and to May, then, than at any other time. I loved going to their respective homes and being the centre of attention. But I wouldn’t have wanted to live with either of them, I know that. I was always glad when my parents collected me, though sometimes I’d pretended to make a fuss about leaving, doing it to please the grandmothers. It used to irritate my mother a little, particularly when I acted reluctant to leave her own mother, May. ‘Why do you do it?’ she would ask. ‘You don’t really want to stay with Granny, do you?’ I’d just smile and say I didn’t know why, but of course I did. I sensed the need in May for me to make her better loved than her daughter, and sometimes I played the game she wanted me to play and let her think she was my favourite. This sounds sophisticated for a child, but it was merely instinctive. I couldn’t have explained exactly how I felt.

  I would have turned out quite unlike the person I am now if either of my grandmothers had had sole care of me. How lucky I am that this never happened. My grandmothers have stayed just that, grandmothers, mothers once removed, as it were. Grandmotherhood brings a sense of distance, however close the involvement, as George Sand found out. It’s what makes their influence valuable, I think.

  Party day yesterday, and thank God it dawned warm and sunny, one of those late September days more summer-like than any we’ve had since May. I rang Isa straight away, as soon as I looked out of the window and saw the thin mist, low on the ground, already lifting, swirling away, and the blue of the sky unmistakably heralding a perfect day. Isa was ecstatic. She boasts every year that her birthday is always blessed with beautiful weather.

  May couldn’t care less about birthday celebrations, no need for them. The fuss some folk make is ridiculous . . . Told that Isa was going to have a big party for her eightieth, May was as usual dismissive. She wondered aloud why Lady Muck would want to. Parties were for the young. It was just showing off at the Duchess’s (another of her alternative names for Isa) age to have a party. Who would want to go? Well, May for one. She might detest Isa, she might scorn her party, but if she had not been invited she’d have been livid.

  Isa herself had been in some doubt about inviting May. She had tentatively discussed it with me. She did not wish, she said, Mrs Wright to feel excluded, but on the other hand, if an invitation was dispatched, she did not want it to place Mrs Wright under any obligation to accept. I told her not to worry about it, just to do what she felt comfortable with. The invitation came through May’s letter box while I was visiting one morning. Thick, cream-coloured envelope, first-class stamp, hand-written address, the postcode neatly underlined in red. I handed it to May. She fingered it suspiciously, yet with respect. She doesn’t get much post and none of it comes in stylish envelopes. It took her a long time to open it, after many turnings-over and minute examination of the handwriting, which yielded no clues. ‘Get me a knife,’ she ordered. ‘Don’t want to spoil an envelope like this,’ which made me snigger. ‘What you cackling about?’ she said. ‘You don’t know how it might come in useful. We made use of all kinds of things in the war, no waste then.’ I just went and got a knife and handed it to her silently, not prepared to get involved in a daft argument.

  May stared at the embossed, gilt-edged card and finally said, ‘I can’t read this fancy writing, it’s that posh sort. You read it out.’ The script was ornate but perfectly legible. I read out Isa’s invitation to a luncheon party on 27 September. It said RSVP by 5 September. I read that out too. ‘RSVP means—’ I began, but May cut in crossly, saying she wasn’t born in a bog and knew what it meant, everyone knew what it meant. I apologised, and meant it. May was just as likely to have gone the other way, pretending she did not know, and I was trying to forestall her game. Anyway, the details read out for a second time, May pondered. She said she would have to think about it. She thought she was going to have her toenails cut at the clinic that day. ‘What,’ I said, ‘on a Saturday lunchtime? I don’t believe the clinic is open then.’ I pushed her. I said why bother to invent excuses if she didn’t want to go to Isa’s party, why not just say no, Isa wouldn’t care. ‘I know that,’ May snapped, then she said, ‘I suppose there will have to be a present.’ The worry about an appropriate present sat heavily, and Isa’s request that there should be none was treated as a come-on by May. ‘Course I have to take something,’ she said. ‘Can’t go to someone’s house empty-handed.’ Her face was creased with anxiety. I suggested maybe just something like a bunch of flowers from her own garden. Isa would appreciate that. She didn’t like stiff arrangements from florists. A bunch of home-grown flowers would be just the thing. ‘Home-grown, eh?’ May said. ‘From my garden? You blind, or what? You taking the mick? Come and show me what to pick,’ and she held out her hand. I took it and she led me to look out of the kitchen window. I looked. A tiny square of tired-looking grass, surrounded by borders that had nothing in them but a few straggly-looking Michaelmas daisies together with some unidentifiable shrubs. No flowers to pick, yet in my head was such a strong image of myself standing on that grass and May handing me red and pink and yellow flowers to hold, straight after she’d cut them from among masses. She was watching my face. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought . . .’ ‘That was in them days,’ she said, ‘not now, can’t do it no more.’ Of course she couldn’t. But I could, and should. ‘Sorry,’ I said again. She gave another of her little grunts, open to many interpretations. She likes being apologised to, though she is never gracious about accepting apologies. She never responds with ‘you’re forgiven’ or ‘never mind, we all make mistakes’. A grunt, a nod, that’s it. We returned to the vexing question of what she could give ‘her’. Finally, we settled on chocolates.

  Next fuss was over what kind of birthday card to get, should it have 80 on the front or not? I said I thought not. Cards that had figures on the front tended to look cheap. May said there was nothing wrong with cheap. I sighed, and she asked me what I had that face on for, and did my card have an 80 on it? I said no. I hadn’t bought a card, I’d made one. I told her about my card to distract her from any more grumbling, describing the collage of photographs I’d assembled of Isa at different ages, starting with one of her as a baby on her mother Clara’s knee. Clara was a strikingly beautiful woman, much more beautiful than Isa turned out to be. There’s one photograph I’ve used in which Isa, aged about five, is standing between her parents, holding their hands. Clara stares straight to camera, but Isa is looking up adoringly at her father. He is not a handsome man, big and heavy, with one of those fearsome moustaches and not much hair. In the later snaps, the resemblance between Isa and me is pronounced, as everyone always points out. Even I can see it. It’s not just the colour of our eyes (which can’
t be seen, naturally, in these sepia-tinted photographs) but their shape, slightly tilted upwards at the corner. And then there is our bone structure, such strong cheekbones (from my grandfather, by the look of him).

  I said I’d take May to buy the chocolates and a card, and she grumpily fixed a day and time.

  It was my job to collect May and take her to Isa’s party. I’d rather have been given the task of picking up the Canadian cousins from their hotel, but that fell to Dad. Mum couldn’t be spared to do either because she was in charge of organising the caterers and carrying out Isa’s orders, something neither Dad nor I would have managed to do without making a mess of it and upsetting Isa. Mum doesn’t always find dealing with her mother-in-law exactly easy – Isa can be so bossy, so peremptory – but she prefers allocating her services to her rather than to her own mother. I think it’s because there is little emotion in her relationship with Isa, whereas there is a lot of suppressed feeling of one sort or another in her relationship with May. Mum and May don’t fit. Their personalities as well as their looks and temperament are totally different. I am more like May than my mum is. I am more like Isa than my father is. Sometimes I wonder if anything about me is my own or whether I am made up entirely of my grandmothers.

  I knew May would be in a faff, and I was right. When she opened the door she was wearing a heavily patterned short-sleeved dress that for at least a decade had been her ‘going-out’ outfit, worn with a beige jacket that could no longer be buttoned owing to her increased girth. She looked at me defiantly. ‘I know it’s a bit on the neat side but there’s nothing else.’ There were so many things wrong with this dress that there was no point in mentioning any of them. May’s body is now a travesty of what I’d seen from photographs it had once been, but she made no allowances for all the extra weight and its distribution. In my mind, I defended her. She liked the dress. The fact that her upper arms were now so fat that the edge of the sleeves cut into them and produced a painful weal was neither here nor there, neither was the display of wrinkled chest revealed in the generous neckline, nor the visible straining of the rather thin fabric over her large tummy – none of these things mattered if May was happy in her dress. But she wasn’t. That was the point. She was waiting for me to make even a mild comment about it no longer fitting as well as it had once done, and then to flounce off, declaring she wasn’t going to the party. All I said was ‘Very nice.’ I wasn’t perjuring myself. The dress, once upon a time, had been ‘nice’, if also ordinary. ‘I’m not wearing it,’ May said. ‘It don’t fit no more and if you can’t see that you need glasses.’