Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  She didn’t thump at all. I was up several times in the night, peering anxiously into her bedroom, but she never stirred until I was up and dressed myself. I took breakfast up to her, managing the wretched grill this time well enough not to burn the toast, and suggested she stay in bed for the morning. She said this suited her, and so I went downstairs and tried to start on the books I’d brought. Once I actually got into a volume, really into it so that May’s claustrophobic, dingy living room receded, I was OK, but it took some effort, and of course I was on the alert all the time for May knocking. I heard her get up to go to the bathroom and held my breath – but she made the trip without falling, which she couldn’t have done the day before. So maybe I wouldn’t be in her abode long.

  Lunch, and then she got up and I helped her to dress and somehow got her safely downstairs. Once she was in her armchair, I sat down with my books spread out, determined to involve her. ‘Listen to this,’ I said. ‘This is Queen Victoria writing: “I hate marriages, especially those of my daughters.” What do you make of that?’

  ‘Jealous, likely.’

  ‘Who of?’

  ‘The men, of course, the husbands, taking her girls away.’

  ‘You didn’t mind Dad taking your daughter away, you were glad, you said, showed she was normal after all, you told me.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t the Queen. Who else could she trust except her daughters, eh? Being a queen. It ain’t easy.’

  ‘I think she was just selfish, thought it was their duty to put her first, especially where the youngest daughter was concerned, Beatrice.’

  May gave one of her little grunts, but I thought she sounded pleased. ‘You and your books,’ she said. ‘You and your history. Go on then, tell us some more if you want.’

  ‘Queen Victoria,’ I said, ‘didn’t like having so many grandchildren. She wrote: “I do not rejoice in such constant additions.” That was after she’d had fourteen, and the fifteenth was on the way.’

  ‘What was wrong with her?’ May asked, sounding very cross. ‘I wish I’d had more grandchildren.’

  ‘How many have you got?’

  ‘What do you mean? You know how many, asking daft questions like that doctor did. I’ve got four, counting you, and do I see them? No, I do not. A Christmas card if I’m lucky and that’s it. Useless. I might as well just have had the one, you, for all the good the others have done me.’

  ‘Is that what grandchildren are for, then, to do you good?’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, miss.’

  The story of May’s sons, my uncles, is a strange one, or strange to me. One died when he was just ten. He was the eldest and according to May the spitting image of Albert (the highest compliment she could pay). She won’t talk about his death, even now, partly because she blames herself for not recognising the symptoms of meningitis. The other two boys both emigrated to Australia, together, when they were eighteen and twenty. Like their father, they were plumbers, and had a good trade to offer. May never forgave them for going. Plenty of work here for them, she says, there was no call to go skedaddling to the other side of the world. She claims it broke Albert’s heart. Whatever. My mum says she’s sure her brothers went partly to get away from May, who liked to try to control them. They both lived at home, and Mum remembers terrible arguments between them and their mother. They settled in Perth, and married, and had children, but May has had virtually no contact with them. A Christmas card arrives every year, very early, and a few photographs from time to time, but a letter is a rare event (and usually written by one of the wives). There has never been any mention of either them or their children coming back to the UK, or any suggestion of being willing to pay May’s fare for her to visit them. May supposes, bitterly, that they won’t come to her funeral just as they didn’t come for their father’s.

  So, what went wrong? Or did nothing ‘go wrong’; it’s just that the sons wanted their freedom and took it and then not even a bad conscience could bring them home again. My mother remembers being glad of the peace and quiet when her brothers left and glad of the extra space too. She doesn’t seem to think they should share responsibility for May in her old age, she doesn’t blame them for, as it were, deserting. I asked her if she’d told them about May being ill and she said not yet, there didn’t seem any point. I did a May-type glare at her then and said I thought they should be told and encouraged at least to express some concern. Mum just smiled. She said I’d be saying next it was her brothers’ duty to respond. Well, I do think it is. Foolishly, I’d said this to Ian and he’d groaned and said there you go again, assuming blood ties automatically bring responsibilities that have to be honoured. I said it was about feelings, emotional ties, which can’t be denied. Ian said it was possible they were not there at all. Why, he asked, couldn’t I be like my mother, who expected nothing from her brothers, and she was the one who had the right to. I said I wasn’t like Mum. I’m like May. ‘Unfortunately in that respect,’ he said. And we left it like that.

  May sulked for a while after I’d irritated her by bringing up the matter of her absent grandchildren and what they could all be doing for her. She said she might have a nap, in her chair. I said I’d read to her, if she liked, it would send her to sleep. I was joking, but May took it seriously and grunted her permission. So I began to read out stuff about Queen Victoria and her children. I read a description of Beatrice, Victoria’s youngest child, making her escape and marrying and having four children, who the Queen admitted brought her great happiness, though she found them a little boisterous. I paused, and said to May that I was trying to find out what kind of influence the Queen had over her grandchildren, especially the girls. ‘I know she was very strict about their manners,’ I said, ‘just like Grandmama Isa was with me.’ (A flicker of response from May’s closed eyelids – she didn’t like Isa being mentioned.) I read on, about a visit made by Wilhelm, Vicki’s son, when he was five, to his grandmother. She was going to take him for a ride in her carriage but he refused to sit in the back seat. She thought this showed a disturbing sign of arrogance, which should be dealt with severely before it became ingrained. May nodded.

  I carried on reading bits out, choosing the anecdotes most likely to entertain May. I thought she would like that reference to the Queen warning her granddaughter, the Princess of Hesse, against having close friendships with other girls, which she believed led to ‘great mischief’. I read the actual quote out to May, and watched her expression closely. ‘Why shouldn’t the poor motherless Princess be chums with other girls?’ I wondered aloud. ‘She needed them, all girls do, at some time, don’t you think?’ ‘You can’t be too careful,’ May said, but wouldn’t enlarge on what either she or the Queen might mean. Her eyes were properly open again. She pulled one of the books towards her. ‘Any pictures?’ I showed them to her. She loved the photograph of the Queen in the garden at Osborne surrounded by her family, taken in 1889, and the portrait of her in her wedding dress by Winterhalter. ‘That’s how a bride should look,’ she said. ‘They did it proper in them days, not like today, in and out of register offices wearing any old thing. That’s what you’ll do, likely. Is that what you’ll do, eh?’

  My turn to ignore her. ‘It worried the Queen,’ I read out, ‘that the Princess asked too many questions, especially about religion and the meaning of life. She said it was a mistake to try to find an explanation for everything and—’

  ‘Quite right!’ May interrupted me.

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘Too many questions. That’s you to a T. Always nagging away, wanting to know things, asking questions there ain’t no answers to.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘There you are! Like nothing.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. What I asked was—’

  ‘Don’t you tell me what makes sense, the idea!’

  ‘OK, OK. Anyway, what the Queen meant was that she thought there was a spiritual world as well as a material one and that it couldn’t be explained, you just had to ac
cept that it was there, and beyond understanding. What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think of what? You talk in riddles, you, talk for talk’s sake.’

  ‘What do you think about Queen Victoria’s opinion that there’s a spiritual life that can’t be explained?’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re on about,’ May said, ‘and my tea is cold.’

  I made fresh tea, sugaring it well. I wanted to persist. May and I never seemed to talk about anything that mattered, we just exchanged pleasantries and platitudes, and I wanted to take the chance of really trying to find out her opinions. There she is, seventy-eight, a lifetime’s experiences behind her, and I know nothing about how it’s made her view life, death, the lot. Once she was vigorously blowing on her tea, I tackled her.

  ‘Granny, do you believe in God?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘But I just want to know if you believe there is a God.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t mean “where” – I just want to know if you believe in him.’

  ‘Tell me where he lives and I’ll tell you if I believe in the fella.’ She was very pleased with this silly answer and smirked as she sipped her tea. I decided to take her seriously.

  ‘God is believed to be a spiritual power,’ I said, ‘not actually a person.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief.’

  ‘He is supposed to be an almighty spirit who created the universe and sent his son Jesus Christ to save us all.’

  ‘Very kind of him.’

  ‘But the point is, as I said, he is a spiritual presence, or idea . . .’

  ‘Make your mind up.’

  ‘. . . whose existence we can’t properly grasp because our mind can’t fully comprehend—’

  ‘Oh, for Gawd’s sake, stop it! You’re making me poorly. Haven’t I gone through enough?’

  ‘All I’m trying to say is that some very clever people believe in God . . .’

  ‘Good luck to them.’

  ‘So you don’t, then?’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Believe in God.’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘Well then, don’t you twist my words.’

  I paused, let her finish her tea, let her think she’d won. Then I took another approach. ‘Mum told me Grandad Albert had a big funeral,’ I said.

  ‘Course he did, a proper send-off.’

  ‘There was a church service, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Course there was.’

  ‘Mum says there were a lot of flowers, she remembers that, big wreaths.’

  ‘Course there were.’

  ‘So you must be religious, you must believe in God, or you did then.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’

  ‘The funeral was in a church, and—’

  ‘Where else would it be?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m told there were prayers and hymns and all that. There was a religious service. He could’ve been cremated, there—’

  ‘Cremated! Your grandad! Burn a good oak coffin?’

  ‘Well, it rots in the ground anyway, there’s no difference.’

  ‘Stop it, you’re upsetting me. The doctor said I shouldn’t be upset, not when I’ve been ill, not at my age.’

  I don’t know why we can’t ever have a reasonable discussion about such subjects. What’s so difficult about saying one does or does not believe in God, that one is or is not religious? Or simply that one doesn’t know. But May won’t allow it. She pays lip service to religion when it suits her, for the big occasions, and then forgets about it. She never goes to church and I’ve never seen a Bible or a prayer book receive any attention from her, though I know she has both somewhere in her house and would be indignant if anyone suggested she hadn’t. The trouble is, she’s superstitious. I’m sure she doesn’t believe in God, and has no religious faith, but she’s scared to say so in case she’s wrong and heavenly wrath descends on her. I’d wanted to talk to her about dying but there was no way I could – that would be upsetting her for real, and I hated upsetting her. Hadn’t I lied to her, assuring her she was going to live to a hundred when I thought, in fact, she’d die long before?

  I let it go. Better to try to get her to talk about love and marriage, though it was just as likely that she’d find that subject impossible to discuss, for different reasons. ‘Listen,’ I said, reading aloud, paraphrasing, ‘Queen Victoria told her granddaughter that marriage was the very reverse of independence because two wills had to act together so all the time two people were having to compromise if they disagreed, or one had to give way. She warned all her granddaughters against marriage for that reason. Don’t you think it was odd, when she had such a happy marriage?’

  ‘I had a happy marriage, never a cross word.’

  ‘Then you weren’t like Queen Victoria.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘She and her Albert had lots of cross words. They had some dreadful rows. There are dozens of descriptions of the Queen in a rage and Albert trying to calm her down.’

  ‘I never had no rows with my Albert, we was as happy as the day was long, two lovebirds we was.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You can believe what you like, it don’t make any difference.’

  ‘So you both always agreed on everything?’

  ‘I never said that. But we never had rows.’

  ‘And you were never in a rage?’

  ‘He knew how to handle me, if the occasion arose.’

  ‘So you did have rows?’

  ‘What you trying to prove, eh? What you trying to spoil?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just interested in marriage and how people survive it.’

  ‘Survive? What you talking about? It ain’t a disaster, it ain’t an earthquake.’

  ‘Sometimes it is.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft.’

  ‘What about love, then?’

  ‘What about love?’

  ‘Did you love your Albert?’

  ‘I married him, didn’t I?’

  ‘But my uncle was on the way, Tom . . .’

  I’d gone too far, and was immediately ashamed. Even now, I wasn’t supposed to know that May had been pregnant with her beloved Tom (the one who died, aged ten) when she got married. She was more shocked than angry, and that made my guilt worse – awful to see her face collapse and her head lowered, as though she was trying to hide. ‘None of your business,’ she muttered.

  ‘I wish I’d known you when you were young,’ I said, trying to make amends. ‘I bet you were stunning.’

  ‘Flattery will get you nowhere.’

  ‘Do you wish you were young again? Do you wish you could go through all your life again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve done it. Any more silly questions? I’m nearly asleep with them.’

  She pretended to snooze, but then I saw that she really had fallen asleep. I put a pillow behind her head and covered her knees with a shawl, and soon she was snoring away. The clock ticked away loudly. An hour until my mother would come to relieve me. I applied myself to my books, rapidly skimming the letters quoted in them, looking for relevant bits about Victoria and her granddaughters that I could follow up. May had never written me a letter in her life, but then I’d mostly lived near her and there had been no need to until I went abroad. She’d never kept a diary either, or any kind of journal. All her memories were in her head and inaccessible to me, except for the well-worn ones she trotted out and had polished until they had become suspect. As for advice, it had amounted to short, sharp commands – do this, don’t do that – and had been entirely superficial. There had never been any interesting reflections that I knew of, nothing gleaned from her own experience that had been worth passing on to me. Realising this, I felt depressed.

  May snored, I read, the clock ticked . . . I was half asleep myself in the overheated room. Then I came across an odd statement, made after Queen Vi
ctoria’s death, by her grandson Wilhelm, the one who’d made her so angry with his arrogance and bad manners. He commented, of his grandmother, ‘I have never been with her without feeling that she was in every sense my grandmama and made me love her as such.’ What did he mean, ‘in every sense my grandmama’? How many senses are there, then? I looked at the sleeping May, slumped in her armchair, and wondered if I could agree with Wilhelm that there is more than a genetic connection between my grandmothers and me (which is presumably what he meant). I think he must have been thinking of her authority over him, and of her importance, which in turn made him more important than he already was (he was the Kaiser by then). But what about love and affection? Was that another sense in which he felt she was truly his grandmama? Did he feel her love?

  I do feel May’s. But it comes now at a price, with expectations.

  Mum came in quietly, as she does everything. May didn’t stir. Mum took off her jacket, put down her bag, and gestured to me that I should go. It was a smooth handover. I piled my books up neatly, to please Mum, and put my notes in a file to take with me. Mum had already settled down, looking through a folder that seemed full of diagrams, but I didn’t stop to ask what on earth they were. I left as quietly as she had entered.