Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  The fuss over Isa’s eightieth birthday party had puzzled him. Why have a party if everyone dreads it? he’d argued. I’d said Isa didn’t dread it, and neither did the rest of us, not really; we just worried about it turning out the way she wanted. He shrugged, and said it still seemed not worth the tension, the agonising over arrangements. So when he came in and found me prostrate on the sofa, he wasn’t going to ask how the party had been, but I told him anyway.

  Somewhere, Ian has a family. He must have a family, even if the members of it are all dead, or unknown to him. His parents may not be alive now – are they? I don’t know – and he may have no siblings (has he?), but he was once part of a family. He will at least have distant relatives he doesn’t know about, to whom he is genetically connected. But he denies them all. As far as he is concerned, he comes from nowhere, and I have to accept this. He stands on his own, uncluttered, or so he likes to think. Naturally, with this kind of outlook, he doesn’t want to start a family of his own. Doesn’t bother me. Bothers my grandmothers. Isa drops hints; May approaches the subject full frontal. When, they ask in their different ways, is Ian going to marry me and give me children? They’ve taken to pointing out that I am nearly thirty, and mustn’t leave it too late. I laugh, and point out that today women are having first babies at forty, and that anyway I’m not considering maternity. I have my dissertation to nurse. Ian and I are perfectly happy as we are, together and childless. They’ll just have to get used to it.

  Ian eventually met them, my parents and my grandmothers: my family. He had gone on being highly resistant to meeting any of them, but I pleaded with him. What harm could it possibly do, and it would be such a relief to them – their imaginations had been working overtime, thinking his reluctance to meet them meant he had evil designs on me, or else there was something spectacularly wrong with him. Ian said he just didn’t want to get involved. That was it, quite simple. I more or less had to issue an ultimatum: if you take me, you take my family. That’s the package. We argued a long time about this – he rejected absolutely that I was part of a package, and I argued that everyone is – but when he finally met my parents it came about accidentally. They came round unexpectedly to give me a surprise birthday present and Ian was here. He was suspicious that it was a put-up job, but it wasn’t.

  Naturally, when it came to the crunch he was charming. Well, maybe not charming, but polite and friendly and interested, which is better. My father liked the fact that Ian is a Scot, and they chatted about Scotland, with Dad boasting of his Macdonell heritage. My mother didn’t ask him anything, but he asked her about the project she was working on (I’d told him about it, obviously) and he made more sense of her answers than I had ever done. After they’d left, with invitations to come and have a meal issued (and deftly sidestepped by Ian), I said that wasn’t so bad, was it, I told you they are nice. He said he’d never doubted that they were, it was more that he feared their niceness sucking him in, into a set-up he wanted to stay clear of. I was offended. My family is not a ‘set-up’.

  But it was done, the meeting, and for the time being I was satisfied. Ian is a very private person and I didn’t want to push him further. I bided my time and engineered an introduction to May. Funnily enough, he didn’t fight against that so hard. I asked him to pick me up from her house. I said he needn’t come in, he could just knock on her door and I’d come straight out. But he did step in when May invited him (this time it was a put-up job – I knew that if my granny opened the door, he wouldn’t turn his back on her). Ian, I’m sure, had known perfectly well what would happen, and so by going along with it he was complicit. May made him a cup of tea, and he said it was good to have it properly made, with loose tea in a teapot, just like his own grandmother used to make. I almost choked – did he realise what he’d let slip? He had, or had had, a granny who made tea in a teapot! What a revelation! What a sensation, this tiny sliver of family news! But I didn’t tease him. I was just glad to hear it. We only stayed long enough for Ian to finish his tea, and then we were off. May’s only comment, later, was that he had good hair. She likes a man with good hair.

  Isa, by then, had learned that my parents had met my young man, and was aggrieved that he had not been brought to be vetted by her. She invited me to bring him along for sherry, and when I said Ian was never home in time for sherry, it was an impossible time of day for him, she said surely he didn’t work on Sundays. I said no, but he played football. This scandalised her and kept further invitations from being issued for quite a while. But when she heard from Dad that May had met Ian, she became absolutely determined to see him. On and on she went, ringing me up and giving me a list of dates when it would be convenient (for her) for me to bring my young man to her house. I made desperate excuses, knowing Ian would never agree to anything so formal. And then one day he answered the phone to her, and said her voice sounded so quavery he hadn’t the heart to turn down her suggestion. So he agreed to some of what she wanted, i.e. accepting her invitation to a cup of coffee on Sunday morning, but making it clear he only had half an hour to spare before another engagement. He meant going off to football, of course, but the use of the term ‘engagement’ was a masterstroke.

  It was quite a tricky occasion. Isa is always elegant and beautifully coiffured, but I noticed that extra effort had gone into how the vital silk scarf round her neck was tied. Ian, mercifully, had conceded that it would be insulting to wear his tracksuit, and so had on proper trousers and a shirt, but the shirt was open-necked and he didn’t wear a jacket. I saw Isa run her eye over him and find fault, but the way he drank his coffee (in Isa’s opinion there are vulgar ways) passed muster. Conversationally, he kept his end up, playing her at her own game of exchanging pleasantry with pleasantry very successfully. When Isa moved on to an ever-so-delicate line of enquiry regarding career, family, etc., Ian ever-so-delicately blocked her. He timed the agreed half an hour to the second without once looking at his watch, and when he rose to leave, his manner was impeccably correct. Isa reported to my dad afterwards that Isamay’s young man was a disappointment in some respects but she thought him clever and certainly not the ‘undesirable’ she had feared.

  When I told him today about Isa’s speech and the banner remark, he smiled. I asked him what he found so amusing. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘nothing.’ And he wouldn’t explain.

  III

  THERE IS NO escaping her. Queen Victoria it will have to be. You will need to examine Queen Victoria closely, of course, Claudia had said, but I’d instantly felt rebellious. Why ‘of course’? There is no element of surprise about Victoria as a grandmother – it is all as would be expected. Obviously, she set an example to her granddaughters. Obviously, she was an influence. And I won’t be able to make a connection between her and grandmothers in general. She was a queen, she was different. She is not what I am seeking (and what is that, pray? I can hear Claudia asking).

  However. Here we go: so far, I’ve found thirty-eight grandchildren, of whom twenty-two were girls. Six of them were named after her. Dutifully, I’ve listed them all, and an impressive, even overwhelming, list it is. From 1859 to 1886, Victoria was being blessed with grandchildren. What surprises me – there, a surprise already – is discovering that the Queen was not thrilled to become a grandmother in the first place. She was not pleased when her daughter Vicki, married to the Kaiser’s son, announced that she was pregnant. The news, she wrote, was ‘horrid’. She’d wanted Vicki to have at least a year free from pregnancy, and there she was, practically having a honeymoon baby. There is little pride and joy to be found in Victoria’s correspondence about becoming a grandmother at thirty-nine, and absolutely no burbling about how she looked forward to holding the baby in her own arms. In fact, she disliked small babies. To her, they were ugly and unappealing, especially naked, so perhaps it was just as well that she didn’t see her grandson, Vicki’s baby, until he was eighteen months old.

  But Victoria had no doubts about what her role as grandmother was: to be a fount of wisdom.
In the interval between her grandson’s birth and her first sight of him, she bombarded his mother with detailed advice and instructions to do with his care and upbringing. Yet in spite of the hectoring tone of some of the letters I quickly read, there seemed to be a good deal of sympathy there for what Vicki would be going through in her pregnancy and childbirth. The Queen herself had hated being pregnant – it made her feel like an animal – and thought women who enjoyed this state ‘disgusting’. As for giving birth, the pain was terrible, her sufferings ‘severe’. The indignity of it all, as well as the physical agony, outraged her. But to her credit, she did not pass all this on to Vicki – she told her not to dread the birth, there was no need to.

  But Vicki suffered far more than the Queen had ever done. It was a breech birth, during which the poor mother almost died and the baby’s left arm was damaged. ‘How I wish I could have lightened the pain for you,’ wrote Victoria. She felt helpless. A grandmother ought to be there, supervising the care of both baby and mother. Once Vicki was pronounced well, and her son thriving (though his arm remained withered), the Queen began to enjoy being a grandmother – it was, after all, ‘fun’ to ‘look and feel young’ even so. She intended to be fully involved.

  That sounded promising for my purposes, but I had to stop at that point, just as I was beginning, and with all those relationships with the twenty-two granddaughters to come, and high hopes of useful material emerging . . .

  May is ill. Mum rang to tell me, and to ask me to look in on her some time this afternoon. She, Mum, has been round already and thinks it isn’t anything serious, just overindulgence at Isa’s party. May’s been sick half the night but wouldn’t hear of the doctor being sent for. She is blaming ‘them fancy dishes’ and not her own greed.

  I don’t like to think of May lying alone in her house. The image is a pitiful one. I see her white hair, probably with a hairnet in place, peeping out from the pink satin eiderdown, which bulges round her plump little frame. She’ll have her winceyette nightie on, and her red candlewick dressing gown will be hung over the end of the bed. At least she’ll have the curtains open and won’t be lying in gloom. She and Albert always slept with the curtains open so that the light could wake them for work – ‘better than an alarm clock’. (It used to puzzle me. Dawn breaks at around four at the height of summer – why would they want to wake up then?) The curtains wouldn’t have kept out much light anyway. They aren’t lined, and the material is thin, but May made them herself and likes them because they ‘wash easy and dry in ten minutes’. She’ll be lying in that saggy old bed, watching the pigeons coming and going on the guttering . . . I’ll have to stop, I’ll be in tears in a minute. My poor old granny, ill and alone, nobody to look after her, having given her life to looking after others, etc., etc.

  I remembered to take my door key this time. The moment I opened the front door I yelled out so May wouldn’t be scared. I half hoped – very mean, this – that I’d find her blissfully snoring, and that all I would need to do would be to refill her flask with tea and tuck the bedclothes in. But she was awake, and told me there’d been no need to shout, she wasn’t deaf yet. The radio was on – a repeat of The Archers, I realised – and I was told to be quiet till it finished. I sat down on the hellishly uncomfortable chair beside her bed and studied her. She had her eyes closed, to concentrate. That made her look worse than she probably was. Her colour wasn’t good, it had a yellowish tinge, but otherwise she looked robust enough. The programme over, she told me to put the wireless off and go and make her some toast because she felt peckish.

  I couldn’t work the grill on her old cooker. She hasn’t got a toaster, won’t have one, claiming the grill is perfectly adequate for the making of toast. It isn’t. Getting the damned thing to light is a challenge to start with – it hasn’t an automatic switch, and I didn’t remember at first that I’d have to find matches, and so the kitchen filled with the smell of gas before I could light it. The first slice burned – I’d turned the flame too high – and I had to throw it away, but I didn’t dare put it in May’s waste bin. I put it in my pocket instead. Taking a successfully toasted and buttered slice up to her, I was greeted with an accusing stare and ‘What you bin and gone and burned then? And don’t say nothing, ’cos I’ve got a nose.’ I confessed. She grunted and said I was too clever to make toast, brain work had made me stupid. I humbly agreed. She nibbled at the slice I’d given her, then pushed it away – ‘Here, you eat it, do you good.’ So I did. ‘Always had a good appetite, you did,’ she said, and then began a recital of all the dishes I’d loved best when she made them for me: the apple crumbles, the roast chicken, the fishcakes – ‘Oh, you weren’t faddy, you ate anything, not like your mum at all. You took after me.’

  Mum was faddy, Mum was fussy, Mum had made May despair. I know all that. Nearly died of malnutrition at six months, etc., etc. May’s never forgiven her for the shame of it. ‘“Madam,” the man at the hospital says to me, “madam, this child is wasting away, she is dying of malnutrition.”’ As the tale goes (and it goes regularly, even now), May had just had all her teeth out and her milk was affected. The baby was fed, but she wasn’t getting the nourishment she needed. She survived, obviously, but was for ever after a picky eater. The opposite of her brothers, the opposite of her mother. It was the first sign that she was a cuckoo in the nest, as May loved describing her – ‘I dunno where your mum come from.’ But she knows where I came from. I am from her. Greedy. Stubborn. I am her, through and through. There’s no point in arguing, no point in listing all the ways in which I am not like her.

  I didn’t even think of doing so this afternoon. I humoured her, nodded and smiled and agreed, and all the time wondered how soon I could get away and still be in time for my supervision with Claudia. I didn’t feel bad about leaving May. She looked comfortable, and Mum would be coming again. She called me a good girl as I left, though in order for this not to go to my head, she added that my shoes could do with a polish. I stood for a moment in the narrow hall before I opened the front door. I wanted to hear if the radio had been switched back on, and when I heard it I was relieved. May was tucked up, and listening to the wireless. All was safe.

  I arrived for my supervision late. Only about ten minutes, but late. This was bad. Claudia will never listen to excuses, she isn’t interested in them. She holds her hand up like a traffic policeman when I begin to explain, so I’ve learned only to apologise and then sit down looking humble. It was tempting to tell her about visiting my sick granny – surely it would place me in a good light – but I resisted. I don’t know if Claudia has grandmothers still, or whether, if they are dead, she knew them and was fond of them. Since she never indulges in idle chat, when this kind of information might emerge, it’s impossible to guess. There are plenty of other academics who I’ve heard are quite chummy with their postgraduate students, but she isn’t one of them. She treats supervisions as I’ve been told psychotherapists treat their clients – all detached and distant, their approach scientific rather than humane.

  I tried to impress her with what I’d learned so far about Queen Victoria’s attitude to becoming a grandmother, but that was a mistake. She asked if I’d consulted the letters the Queen wrote to Princess Victoria of Hesse. Oh, you mean Wilhelm’s mother, I said brightly, and was about to launch into a précis of what I’d read when she said no, not Wilhelm’s mother, that was Vicki, the Queen’s eldest daughter. Princess Victoria was the Queen’s granddaughter, her second daughter Alice’s child. She told me about Alice, who died at thirty-five from diphtheria, leaving Princess Victoria, as the eldest, aged fifteen, to look after her three sisters and her brother. The Queen, said Claudia, had told the Princess to ‘look on me as a mother’. She said it might be interesting for me to look at what the difference is between being a grandmother and yet acting as a mother, if indeed that was what the Queen went on to do.

  We then spent the rest of the supervision discussing this. Naturally, I was eager to show off what I’d learned about D
iana Holman Hunt’s experience, but though Claudia listened politely, she seemed to think this had no great relevance to my dissertation and certainly none to Queen Victoria’s mothering of her granddaughter. What I had to study, said Claudia, was the essential difference between being a mother and being a grandmother. Obviously, said I, a mother actually gives birth; she goes through the physical process of pregnancy and childbirth, whereas a grandmother does not. But, on the other hand, it is an experience she has gone through herself and so she can identify with it. And once the child is born, the grandmother can do everything the mother can do, apart from breastfeeding (which many mothers don’t do anyway). In Queen Victoria’s case, she clearly meant, I thought, that the Princess should turn to her for guidance in all matters, as she would have done to her mother. But Alice had been quite different from Queen Victoria. Alice breastfed her children and was intimate with and close to them, the kind of mother to whom children could turn without fear of criticism or scolding. According to Prince Albert, Victoria was not that kind of mother. He wished she could be more relaxed with the children, more inclined to play than impose her will upon them. As a grandmother who wanted to be looked upon as a mother, Claudia asked, did the Queen change? Did her role as grandmother enable her to reinterpret the role of mother?

  Claudia ended by telling me something I didn’t know (well, compared to her I know nothing) that struck me as important. When someone assumes a new role in life, she said, they tend to copy or to reject the example of whoever has filled that role for them. Claudia said that Queen Victoria had no role model as a grandmother. She never, within her own family, saw grandmothering in action. She had to invent the role for herself, as many women have to. Is grandmothering, then, all about second chances? Or about repetition?