Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  She came back to May’s bed in high good humour and said: ‘Don’t mind me, I’m hyperactive. It don’t mean nothing, I can’t help it. You won’t be here much longer, darlin’,’ she assured May. ‘They shove you out of here pretty quick, don’t you worry. They’ll be sending me up to Alexandra any minute. I fuckin’ hate it there, full of old women moaning away.’ I looked at May, worried she’d think she was being insulted, but she was beyond any kind of angry response. Jess hypnotised her. May’s expression was almost one of awe that anyone could be so voluble and loud in hospital. But Jess turned her attention to me. ‘Nice tan you’ve got, for the time of year. Been away?’ I’d been with Ian in September to Crete but I felt embarrassed at admitting this – it seemed so flash – and so, stupidly, I said yes, I’d been away earlier in the year to an island. ‘Ireland?’ Jess said. ‘I didn’t know you could get a tan in Ireland, fuckin’ amazing, I thought it was all bogs and rain.’ She’d been perched on the bed but now she stood up. ‘I’ll have to leave you,’ she said. ‘This place is doing my head in. I’m going out for a fag. If anyone comes for me, tell them I’m in the toilet, yeah? Won’t be long.’

  ‘Thank the Lord,’ one of the women in the other beds murmured, still with her eyes shut. ‘A fag!’ May said, still whispering, ‘with her troubles.’ ‘Maybe she didn’t mean it,’ I said, but of course I knew she did. I wondered where exactly she would go. It was a long way to get outside the building – maybe there was some outside space halfway down that I didn’t know about, but no, balconies and rooftops would be too dangerous. Jess would have to go all the way down, it would take her ages. Without her, the ward was deathly quiet. May didn’t like the sudden silence. It made her nervous. She started sighing loudly, and groaning. ‘I want out,’ she said. ‘Where’s my clothes? I’m all right now, I want to go home.’ I patted her hand and said I’d go and find a nurse and try to find out what was happening. ‘Get my clothes,’ she said.

  I couldn’t find a nurse. The place seemed empty, though it couldn’t be. I wandered round the corridors, looking into the different wards, each with four beds, but all I could see were beds with patients in them. There was a long desk at the point where two corridors joined and I stopped there and waited. A nurse finally came and I asked her what was happening about my grandmother. ‘Dr Almed is with her now,’ she said, ‘and then in half an hour, with luck, Dr Smith will be along and we’ll get a report.’ I wandered back to May’s ward, knowing I’d have to stay till the report was made – presumably a diagnosis and a decision about treatment – but as I neared the entrance to the ward I heard a man’s voice, a rather loud, hectoring voice, say: ‘May, I want to ask you some questions, OK?’ I stopped. May’s dignity would be outraged that a stranger, even a revered doctor, should address her by her Christian name. I thought I wouldn’t interfere – I’d just lurk and listen, and then when he’d finished, go in.

  The doctor repeated his request, and I wondered if May had fallen asleep, but surely he’d be able to see that. Eventually, I heard her grunt. If she’d been asleep, he’d woken her up. Bit thoughtless, surely. Jess would’ve told him off. It’s strange building up an image of a person just from hearing their voice. Listening to the doctor, I imagined him as tall and heavy, with thick black eyebrows and old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles. I wondered if he was wearing a white coat, though hardly any of them seem to now. May would want him to wear a white coat and have a stethoscope round his neck.

  ‘Now, May, when were you born? Can you remember?’

  ‘Course I can. January the fifteenth, 1930.’

  ‘Very good. Now, May, listen carefully – your hearing is all right, is it? Good, good. Now, what I’m going to do, May, is give you an address, OK? Then in a few minutes’ time, when I’ve asked you some other questions, I’m going to ask you what that address was. Right? I’ll speak very clearly. The address is forty-two, North Street. Quite simple. I’ll repeat it: forty-two – North – Street. Got it? Forty-two, North Street.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ May said, not objecting, but registering how puzzled she was. ‘Who lives there? Do I know them?’

  ‘No, that’s not the point, May. Don’t worry about it. The point is just to remember it. That’s all I want you to do, just remember forty-two, North Street.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Now, May, can you count backwards from twenty to one?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Never mind why, May. It’s just to see if you can do it. It’s a sort of game.’

  ‘I was never very good at games.’

  ‘Come on, May – twenty, nineteen, eighteen . . .’

  ‘You’ve done it yourself, so that’s good. Anyone can do it, can’t they?’

  A sigh from the doctor. ‘May, who is our monarch?’

  ‘Elizabeth. She’s married to Philip and she’s got four children, Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward, and they’ve all let her down, three divorces, imagine, and what she’s had to put up with, what with—’

  ‘Thank you, May. Now, can you remember that address I gave you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. What is it?’

  But May was becoming suspicious. This wasn’t how doctors were supposed to behave. I could hear her losing her respect for this man, and sounding more like her true self. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘what is this address? Why do you want me to repeat it like a bloomin’ parrot, eh? Why should I?’

  There was a pause. I leaned against the wall of the corridor and smiled. Had he finished? Had he finally established what was obvious from the start – that my grandmother was not senile? But no, he started again, though I noticed he modulated his voice accordingly. ‘May,’ he said, ‘can you remember your parents?’

  ‘Course I can!’ said May, quite angrily.

  ‘What were their names?’

  ‘George and Violet, hard workers they were, honest as the day, Gawd rest their souls . . .’

  ‘Good, good. Right. Now, when you were a child, May, did anyone else live with you and your parents?’

  ‘Course they did – three brothers, two sisters, all passed away now, all a lot older than me. I was the runt of the litter, gave my mum a shock, me appearing, she thought she was on the change. Then one day—’

  ‘OK, May, fine, fine, good. Anyone else live with you?’

  ‘My nan.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Mrs Pearson, my mum’s mum. My mum looked after her, folk did in them days. My nan had a bed in the room me and my sisters slept in, them at one end of our bed and me at the other, lying between their feet, and my nan, she—’

  ‘That’s the end of my questions, May. Thank you.’

  ‘Did I pass?’

  ‘Pass? Oh, it wasn’t a test, May.’

  ‘What was it, then?’

  ‘Just a check-up.’

  I realised as soon as he came out of the ward that the ‘doctor’ was probably a student. He wasn’t big and heavy, and he didn’t have black eyebrows. How he came to have such a loud voice when he was so thin and weedy, I don’t know – there seemed nowhere for it to come from. But his questions had made May agitated. When I went back in, I saw that her face was flushed. I couldn’t tell her I’d been sneakily listening, so had to let her go over what had happened. Jess came in towards the end. ‘Oh, him,’ she said, taking up her perch on May’s bed again, ‘you don’t want to pay him no attention, he’s just a houseman. The one you want is Smith, he’s the registrar, nearest to Cooper, he’s the consultant, but you won’t get near him unless you’re worth him fetching his team so he can show them up ’cos they ain’t guessed what’s wrong with you.’

  Should I stay? Jess saw me frowning and restless, and said, ‘No good fussing, what’s your name? Eh? Funny name. Could be hours till that Smithy comes to look at your gran. You’re lucky to have a gran. Mine’s dead. Not ordinary dead either – murdered. Honest. Not surprising, the men she went with, my mum says.’ On and on Jess went, and May calmed down. It was,
I thought, like a kind of music-hall act to her, without the music. She was the perfect audience. Jess paused long enough in her recital of tragedies to tell me to go, she’d look after my gran, why didn’t I just keep ringing up them dozy nurses and come back when Smith had been and they’d decided what was what.

  So that’s what I did.

  I wasn’t thinking of May when I left the hospital. I was thinking about her granny, her nan, Mrs Pearson. I hadn’t heard the name before, and I’d never seen a photograph of her, but then May’s family was poor and probably didn’t have a camera when her grandmother was still alive. Studio portraits would have been beyond their means. Mrs Pearson must have been born in Queen Victoria’s reign, say around the 1870s. I thought of her in May’s bedroom, her bed squeezed in somehow, and the three girls simply accepting her presence. I wondered if they did things for her, helped her up to use the chamberpot, what a horrible image. May talks a lot about ‘pos’, as she calls them. Makes her laugh to see people using a po as a plant pot, as though these items were pretty and something to show off to their best advantage.

  Does May see herself eventually going to live with my mother? I don’t think so. But if not with my parents, when the time comes (as it maybe already has), with whom? Me? That’s ridiculous. It wouldn’t work. But does May have fantasies that it might? Where else can she turn but to the granddaughter who owes her? The granddaughter whose brain work means she’s at home a lot, who could fit her studies round caring for her.

  It’s no wonder that in my panic at this scenario I almost got run over crossing the road outside the hospital.

  May is not going to be in hospital for long. That’s the good news. Is it? I quite like thinking of her tucked up in bed there, scandalised by but enjoying Jess’s company, and being looked after. She can apparently go home in a couple of days, Mum says, provided there is adequate cover. What exactly does ‘cover’ mean? It means there must be someone to look after her, of course. She can’t be on her own at first. Well of course she can’t – she’s an old lady who’s been very ill. She’ll need help, with everything. So it’s simple, really: either Mum or I will need to go and stay with her, or else she will have to stay with one of us.

  Mum is honest about this. Sometimes I wish she wouldn’t be so honest. She doesn’t try to pretend that her work would prevent her being able to look after May. She knows she could employ people to help, it could be managed. No, she doesn’t plead her career as an excuse for not inviting her mother to live with her. She just says she couldn’t stand it, they don’t get on and never have done. Knowing this is the truth upsets me – I want Mum and May to love each other and get on famously. How did this sad state of affairs come about? Mum says from her birth. But surely, a longed-for girl after three boys must have meant starting off with a huge advantage. Mum concedes this ought to be so, but all she remembers is May shouting at her and complaining she had her head in the clouds or was daydreaming. Things got worse as she grew up. She says watching May with me was a revelation – she herself had never known such affection, such devotion. She’d see me sitting on May’s knee, being cuddled, and sung to, and laughed with, and it brought back memories quite the opposite.

  Mum is fair. She points out that May likes this strange relationship as little as she does, but it’s just one of those things, a genetic mismatch that happens all the time. She and May have tried to surmount their basic differences, of temperament, personality, taste, and to a certain extent they’ve succeeded. Mostly, they can ‘get on’. But they can’t be easy with each other, as May and I can be, even though there are huge differences between us too.

  Mum says it was her father she felt easy with, and probably May somehow resented that. I wish I’d known my maternal grandfather, just to see if it was her father whom my mother resembled, because she certainly does not resemble May. In fact, the physical contrast between them is the striking thing – May small, my mum tall; May fat, Mum slim; May blonde (once), Mum dark. No feature similar. Mum is so contained and reserved, and May noisy and outspoken. It really is extraordinary that my mother is May’s daughter. But she is. No need to fantasise that she was adopted, or mixed up at birth in the hospital. May had her at home, the longed-for daughter after three boys. No mistake about that.

  It’s hard to work out how May and my mother connect except by their DNA. I don’t know if my grandmother loves my mother or if my mother loves her. I’m assuming that if the word ‘love’ is not analysed too closely for its meaning, if it is defined in its loosest sense, then maybe they do love each other, in spite of appearances to the contrary. May is always glaring at her daughter, her expression invariably accusing her (though it is never easy to tell of what), and Mum seems always evasive, never quite looking May in the eye. It’s sad, really. I’ve tried to discuss this with my mother but I never get anywhere. Mum says it is just one of those things. She and May are incompatible. Considering this, she thinks they manage pretty well. Or they have done, up to now.

  Mum is pleased, and relieved, that I am so comfortable with May. I always have been. We are both affectionate towards each other, and we say what we like without fear of offence. May isn’t my confidante any more, but I can still talk to her about most things. I am what is called ‘close’ to my grandmother, even if not nearly as close as I used to be as a child, so when Mum said May was coming out of hospital in a day or so but would need to be looked after, I offered straight away to go and stay with her. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t do it, every reason why I should. I can carry on working while at May’s house, Mum couldn’t. And May won’t drive me mad the way she would irritate Mum. I’ll be her carer until a proper system can be fixed up.

  Ian says I’m being a martyr, and glorying in it. He reminds me that I’ve often told him that May has her wireless, or the television, or both, on at top volume, so I won’t be able to concentrate. This is true, but I said my work is hardly brain surgery, so a little distraction won’t be fatal. Oh, please, he said, not the self-deprecating bit. You’ll just get frustrated and bad-tempered and ruin your beautiful relationship with your granny. I didn’t like the way he said that. Did he mean my relationship wasn’t beautiful, or is he jealous because he doesn’t have a granny to love him the way he knows May loves me? I asked him. He said neither. He said, gently, that he was simply trying to point out what would inevitably happen if I carried out my plan. But I’m going to carry it out. It’s settled. I’m taking a load of books with me about Queen Victoria, the obvious ones, the ones not precious enough only to be accessed in the British Library. I’ll read out interesting bits as I come across them. May will enjoy it. There she will be, sitting in her battered old armchair, a mug of tea in her hand, and there I will be, with my books and notepad. Very companionable.

  IV

  MAY HAS MASTERED the word haematemisis. She takes it syllable by syllable, and pronounces it correctly. She was pleased when I had to ask her what it means. It means, she said, quite self-importantly, ‘vomiting blood’. In her case, a large amount of blood, from a gastric ulcer that had broken into a blood vessel. She said she could have been a goner. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘at my age, you’ve got to expect the worst. Seventy-eight is more than three-score years and ten.’ There was a significant silence after she said this. She was watching me closely, waiting for my reaction. I knew she wanted me to disagree, to tell her that she was not going to be a goner yet, that seventy-eight was young these days and she had plenty of years left. So I did. I said the Bible was out of date. I said I was certain she would in due course get a telegram from Her Majesty when she reached a hundred. It was the right thing to say, it was what she wanted to hear.

  On the first day of my temporary residence at her abode (she loves that word for some reason – ‘welcome to my abode’ she often says, and laughs), I arrived an hour before Mum was due to collect her from the hospital, so that I could put the fires on in her kitchen and living room and make her bed ready. Mum had already been in and stripped all the bl
oodstained bedding and dealt with it, so all I had to do was put clean sheets on and open the window. All the sheets in May’s airing cupboard were flannelette. She doesn’t hold with ‘cold’ cotton or ‘sticky’ Terylene – flannelette it has to be, whatever the weather. Same with the lethal fires – they always have to have at least one bar on, however hot the day. I knew I would roast, and had come prepared in the lightest clothes I had.

  I was choked up helping her into her abode. Mum held her on one side, I on the other, but even so she staggered. ‘I must be drunk,’ she muttered, and hoped no one was watching. Once in her armchair, she revived, and thanked the Lord loudly for being in her own home with a decent cup of tea. Mum’s leave-taking was, as ever, a bit tense. Mum said that I’d be staying for a few days, and May snorted and said she didn’t need anyone, she could manage. Mum said the hospital wouldn’t have let her out without being sure she had someone with her. May said they were not the boss of the whole world, and she would do what she liked. The moment Mum had gone, May said: ‘It should be her, by rights, not you.’ I said didn’t she like me, then? She told me not to talk ridiculous.

  We listened together, that first afternoon, to several programmes on her wireless and then we had tea, what May calls a cooked tea. Mum had brought some Marks & Spencer stuff, which I heated up. May ate a little of it. She had a diet sheet the hospital had given her and had me read it out to her so that she would be sure to obey its instructions, saying repeatedly that she would have to be careful to avoid another ‘do’. But she was too exhausted to eat much and was ready to go to bed by seven o’clock. I had to push her, literally, up her stairs. She helped by clutching the banisters and hauling herself up. We’d considered putting a bed in her living room, but she was adamant that she wanted her own bed in her own bedroom, and anyway there was no lavatory on the ground floor and she didn’t want to go back to using a po. God, what a business it was, getting her upstairs, getting her into bed, the pathos of it making me shaky myself. I wanted to cry but knew that would be inexcusable, so I kept up the bright-and-chatty front required of me, making endless crap jokes of the kind she liked, all linked together with her favourite sayings. When she was finally in her bed, sighing contentedly and saying she wouldn’t call the King her cousin (one of her more complicated aphorisms), I put her walking stick beside her and told her to thump on the floor with it when she needed me.