Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  What bliss to be out in the fresh air – and it wasn’t just the freshness after the hot room, but the lifting of the sense of oppression. I wasn’t sure what had oppressed me, but there’d been some weight bearing down heavily while I sat with my grandmother. My head had felt tight, even my clothes had felt tight. May was just a little old woman, but she had some sort of power over me. I was afraid for her. Not of her, but for her. For what lay ahead, inevitably. No good saying that it – dying, death – lies ahead for all of us. That’s not the same. May feels, to me, near it, even if she’s recovered from this particular illness, and I do not. I feel a kind of panic when I think of what she’s so near to, and it’s a selfish panic – I know I’m not going to get from her what I want. I’ve wasted the opportunities to extract from her what I think is there, and soon it will all be gone.

  I feel I’ve got more time with Isa. She’s older, but she’s healthy. But is there as much there as there is with May? Is she ‘in every sense’ my grandmama? Am I as close to her? And if not, why not?

  ‘Florence Nightingale returns,’ said Ian, laughing, ‘but for how long? Is this the end of a shift? Will duty recall her within the hour? And how is the patient? Thriving under your tender ministrations?’ It was best to ignore him – he can go on entertaining himself for hours in this sort of vein.

  It was good to be back in my flat, even for just a night. Mum leaves for work at eight thirty in the morning, so I didn’t need to be back at May’s till then. And maybe, if things carried on going so well, I’d only need to spend one more night and another day, and then the ‘care plan’ would swing into operation. I wandered round the rooms in my flat, marvelling at how empty they felt compared to May’s, how light and spacious, though measurement for measurement that’s probably not true. What these rooms are empty of is memories. That, maybe, is the crucial difference, more important than wooden floors versus thick carpets, blinds versus crimson velvet curtains, and so on. May’s house is choked with memories. I’m constantly aware of the life lived within its walls for the last – what? – fifty-odd years. I see her as she was when I was a small child, a little bustling figure, forever rushing around busily putting things to rights, vigorously polishing her best bits of furniture or dusting her many ornaments. And now her belongings hardly know her – they seem to own her instead of May owning them. She can’t polish or clean effectively any more, or do a host of small things that would stamp her authority on the place. I’ve tried to do it for her, but she doesn’t want me to. ‘Leave it,’ she said, when I began picking up her Toby jugs on the mantelpiece to clean them. She couldn’t bear to see me taking over. I have to know my place. I don’t think May herself knows what that place is exactly. She knows my mother’s, her daughter’s – that’s simple, it should be to look after her – but mine? Am I an insurance against my mother’s possible defaulting? Or am I something else?

  Yesterday, the first free day I’d had for a week, I had a summons from Isa. She rang and in that high, artificial-sounding voice she has on the telephone commanded my presence. I exaggerate, but only a little – it did sound like a royal command. It was the last day of the Canadian cousins’ visit. They were back from bonnie Scotland and leaving for home from Heathrow the following morning. I was to come at five p.m.

  They were all in the drawing room (Isa always calls it that, having no truck with sitting rooms, or living rooms, and certainly not lounges), where they had been having afternoon tea. The best Spode china was in evidence, and so was the crystal cake stand, bearing a Dundee cake out of which only two portions had been taken. I was annoyed that I hadn’t been invited for tea too – Isa knows I love the cakes Elspeth makes for her. I boldly eyed the cake and said it looked delicious, and was eventually, reluctantly (‘it is a little late to be eating cake, Isamay, surely’) invited to have a slice. Isa asked how Mrs Wright was, and so did Mary-Lou and Beth. I gave them a run-down on what had happened, and on May’s condition, and Isa said, ‘I have never needed to be in hospital my whole life,’ and looked around for applause, or, at least, amazement and admiration.

  It wasn’t forthcoming. ‘Then you’ve been lucky,’ Mary-Lou said. ‘It’s all a matter of luck, most of it genetic.’

  ‘Well,’ said Isa, clearly rather offended, ‘I am not at all sure about that. The stock one comes from is, of course, important, but then so is how one lives one’s life. I have led a healthy life. I have never smoked, I drink only in moderation, I exercise daily—’

  ‘Oh, Grandmama,’ I butted in, ‘you don’t exercise!’

  ‘I most certainly do,’ said Isa, indignantly. ‘I take the air every day in my garden, unless the weather is very inclement.’

  ‘That’s not exercising,’ I insisted. ‘That doesn’t get your heart rate up.’

  ‘That’s the target, getting the heart rate up.’ Beth nodded.

  ‘The Macdonells have strong hearts,’ Isa said, proudly.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ said Mary-Lou, ‘but not such healthy brains.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Isa, eyebrows shooting up.

  ‘Tumours,’ Mary-Lou said, laconically. ‘Quite a few of the death certificates have brain tumours as cause of death.’

  ‘How very unpleasant,’ said Isa, displeased with Mary-Lou.

  ‘What else do the Macdonells commonly die of?’ I asked, enjoying the turn the conversation was taking.

  Mary-Lou hesitated. ‘There were some nasty causes of death on various certificates,’ she said. ‘Tumours of different sorts, with peculiar names, and in odd sites.’

  ‘Odd sites?’ I queried.

  ‘Really,’ Isa protested, ‘we have just had tea. I really do not think we want to hear about these unfortunate deaths.’

  ‘No,’ Mary-Lou agreed, ‘they seem to have faded out anyway, if there was any genetic basis to them. But deaths from strokes, especially among the women, have continued. Macdonell women have tended to have high blood pressure.’

  ‘My blood pressure has never troubled me,’ Isa said, quickly.

  ‘What is it?’ Mary-Lou asked.

  ‘What is it?’ Isa repeated, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The reading, what is it?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Reading?’

  It turned out she hadn’t had her blood pressure taken for ages, and had never known what it was, leaving ‘all that’ to her doctor. But he had told her she had the blood pressure of a twenty-year-old when last he had taken it, though she couldn’t remember when that was. Isa announced that she kept away from doctors. She thought people who fussed about their health were hypochondriacs. This did not go down at all well with the cousins, who, I felt, saw rather a lot of their medical men and might at any minute start enumerating their ailments. Isa clearly worried about this too, because she suddenly said had they heard that I was writing a dissertation about grandmothers and their importance to granddaughters, and wasn’t this interesting. I said that wasn’t quite right, and tried to explain what exactly it was that I was working on, but my efforts fell on deaf ears – the cousins, much relieved to have a topic they could be enthusiastic about, launched into their own hopes regarding becoming grandmothers themselves. Mary-Lou was optimistic about her chances, with one daughter married and ‘broody’, and another about to marry and wanting children straight away. Beth was less hopeful. She had two sons, and neither of them had any intention, they said, of settling down and having children. ‘I can’t bear the thought,’ Beth wailed, ‘of never becoming a grandmother.’

  Now, this struck me as peculiar, and I picked up on it eagerly. I could understand women not being able to bear the thought that they might never become mothers, but grandmothers? Why did Beth and Mary-Lou crave this role? What was so important to them about becoming a grandmother? They both tried hard to explain. There was a lot about second chances, which didn’t make much sense to me – I mean, they weren’t going to be mothers again, they wouldn’t have the grandchildren with them a
ll the time, and they wouldn’t be the same children, so what was all this ‘second chance’ stuff about? Then they went on about ‘continuing the line’, which was more understandable in a way. They wanted to think of part of themselves going on and on, which I suppose made the thought of their own deaths less frightening. But what fascinated me was the realisation that they both felt that if no grandchildren duly appeared, then this amounted to some sort of failure on their part. Grandchildren would, in some mysterious way, vindicate their existence, make them feel that their own lives had been worthwhile. Crazy as I thought this was, Mary-Lou did come out with a comment that seemed worth considering. ‘We need to know,’ she said, very solemnly, ‘not just where we come from but where we are going.’ So grandchildren would tell her where she was going? Apparently. How weird.

  It was alarming. Long after I’d said goodbye to the cousins, I was thinking about this belief of Mary-Lou’s. I decided that it was nonsense. How can grandchildren tell you where you are going when they don’t know where they are going themselves? It just sounds good, that’s all. I think women want grandchildren, especially granddaughters, simply as a status thing – that and for the fun of playing with babies again, only this time, as everyone points out, without the responsibility. The urge is no more profound than that, and that’s my opinion. I tried it out on Mum this evening. I told her what Mary-Lou had said and asked her if she agreed. Well, of course, she didn’t – she’s a scientist, she isn’t sentimental – but she does agree that there is significance in having grandchildren. ‘It must be like recharging a battery,’ she said. I liked that.

  But as a theory, it didn’t fit Queen Victoria. Her batteries were always fully charged. No, in her case grandchildren were an extension of her authority. She was a true matriarch, who wanted to see herself reproduced over and over. I was right: she is a standard against which the role of grandmother can be measured only in a restricted, even false, sense. It seems to me that most grandmothers lack the very thing that made the Queen important to her grandchildren: power. No granddaughter could possibly emulate her, or even want to. She wasn’t an example to follow but someone far above them, someone intimidating, surely, someone essentially remote. What I’m looking for now is a grandmother who was more of a confidante – friendly, non-judgemental, ready with encouragement, rather than the Queen Victoria brand of advice. That would put the grandmothering role in a different perspective.

  I met Dad for one of our lunches, at a place in Covent Garden near where the Theatre Museum used to be. He’s always been a theatregoer, which some people find surprising. Isa claims the credit for making him interested in the theatre, though he says that on the contrary she almost put him off by taking him to the wrong things at too young an age. Anyway, he is a committed theatregoer, and for a while he drew me into his interest. Over lunch, Dad said he was worried about Mum. She’s depressed, he said. About May, and what is to be done. She’s begun to think that, after all, it’s her duty to have her come to live with us, he said. We’ve got more than enough room, and the house could be adapted to her needs. We can afford help, so we don’t have to worry about that. But she dreads it, he said. Well, obviously she does. May and my mother . . . they may be mother and daughter, but not that kind of mother and daughter. They are not just not close, they are practically alien. As I’ve already said, they irritate each other all the time. I said all this to Dad, though he knew it anyway. He shrugged. He said that personally he wouldn’t mind his mother-in-law living with them. The only drawback would be the effect this would have on Jean. To console him, I suggested that May might well refuse the offer if it was made. She loves her own house, loves her independence. But Dad said events might force her hand – it would become a choice between some kind of home, or living with them, and she’d never choose a home. Who would?

  We were sinking into gloom, so to change the subject I yattered on about Queen Victoria, and told him how I needed a different kind of grandmother, one who was more of a friend to her granddaughter. Straight away, Dad thought of Sarah Bernhardt. He had several books about her, and though he couldn’t remember the details, he knew that one of them was written by a granddaughter who had lived with her and been her secretary at one time. I went home with him, though I hadn’t intended to, to borrow the books.

  Dad was right. Sarah Bernhardt had a granddaughter, Lysiane, to whom she was very close. Lysiane was the second of her two granddaughters, born when Sarah was fifty-four and still at the height of her fame as an actress. Lysiane (daughter of Sarah’s only child, Maurice) was aware from the very beginning that her grandmother was famous. She remembered being pushed in a pram by her nurse in the Bois de Boulogne and the excitement all around her when her grandmother’s carriage stopped so that Sarah could get out and kiss her. She recalled, too, how she and her older sister used to be taken by their father to lunch with their grandmother (though she was never called that – she liked to be known simply as Sarah). Her studio in Boulevard Pereire was an extraordinary place to the children, packed as it was with curios of every description, collections of ivories, piles of old weapons, and festooned with colourful costumes and drapes. It smelled of citronella and cigars, and was overcrowded not just with furniture but with dogs, who were allowed to run around as they pleased, with inevitable results.

  At these lunches they were not the only guests. Even when the girls were very young, with Lysiane still in a highchair, there were distinguished people there whose conversation was far over the children’s heads, but Sarah thought it educational for them to learn to listen. She saw her role as grandmother as one of being an inspiration, and exposing them to this kind of company – publishers, actors and writers – was part of it. During the lunches, Sarah sat, dressed all in white, on a throne-like chair, encouraging the little girls to taste all kinds of sophisticated delicacies and giving them watered-down white wine. Later, when the other guests had left, she played with them, imaginative games in which she would take part herself. Any sign of talent was seized upon and developed. Lysiane liked to write poems, so Sarah commissioned her to write one about her dogs, paying her one louis for the result. The only time she was ever cross was if she caught her granddaughters idle. To do nothing was a sin. ‘Do something with your ten fingers,’ she would instruct them.

  It was no wonder that they adored her, but what, I wondered, happened when they grew older, and so did she? Did they become embarrassed by her? Did she cease to be an inspiration and become a burden? Maybe she even had a depressive effect, when they realised they could never be like her – her fame may have cast a long shadow over their later lives.

  I needed to find all this out.

  A letter from Mary-Lou, posted as soon as she got back to Canada and containing the birth certificate she’d promised. I love these certificates, the when and where, the registrar’s name (even though meaningless to me) – there’s something moving about the bare details. Mary-Lou was right. Isa had had a brother, born in 1930, two years after her. I already had a copy of Isa’s own birth certificate, and I got it out and compared it. Same registrar, same address at time of birth, same informant of the birth. Could Isa really have had a brother about whom she knew nothing? Whose existence she claimed to be unaware of? She was not quite two years old when this baby was born. Could I remember anything clearly at that age? I tested myself: first memory is of May, of sitting on her knee and being given a barley sugar. I was about two and a half then – it was one of the times I stayed with my granny, because Mum was either having a miscarriage or in hospital trying to hang on to her pregnancy. Since May’s method of comforting me was always to sit me on her knee and give me a sweet, maybe I can’t remember being two and a half at all, maybe all the occasions have run into each other. I can only be definite about being four, when as well as having a sweet stuck in my mouth, I was told I wasn’t after all going to have a baby brother or sister. I was furious and made a great fuss. But if Isa was not yet two, maybe she wasn’t told anything about a baby on th
e way, and then when he died she wasn’t told that either, because she wouldn’t understand or would be frightened and upset.

  But did the baby die? There was a note attached to the birth certificate in which Mary-Lou repeated what she’d already told us: there was no death certificate. She had searched thoroughly, but there was no trace of a male Macdonell who had been born in June 1930 and had died shortly after. So where had he gone? Why hadn’t his birth been greeted with rapture – at last, an heir? He could, of course, still be alive, but in that case where had he grown up? Why didn’t Isa know about him? My fertile imagination – ‘over-fertile’, as Ian would label it – ranged over the possibilities. Maybe he’d been mentally backward, as it used to be termed, and had been hidden away, like one of the royal family’s relatives, many years ago. Or maybe he wasn’t James Macdonell’s son at all – maybe Isa’s mother had had an affair and her husband had forgiven her but refused to keep the boy. I loved that one. But there could be another reason: maybe the boy is still alive and well, aged seventy-eight. Now there’s a thought, there’s something to startle Isa, if I suggest it. Which I will do, if I can get my courage up. Isa can be formidable when outraged, and such suggestions would certainly outrage her – I don’t know which would make her angrier, the idea that her sainted mama had had a lover and borne his child, or that she could have a brother alive and not know him. It might be cruel to suggest either. I’ll have to think about it. What, after all, would be the point? It isn’t enough to argue that uncovering this secret is in the interests of family history. That’s just pompous. I’d have to find a better justification. If I confront Isa, I might seriously upset her. Would discovering the truth be worth such distress? All I really want to know is whether Isa has been aware all along that she had a brother. Is she concealing his fate because it involves some sort of disgrace or shame? She’s capable of it. She’s always had her parents on pedestals. She’s talked freely of the death of her sister, so she hasn’t tried to make out there was no tragedy in her family.