Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  But now she had been visibly angry. There had been no shouting or yelling, but her fury was in every one of her few words. So what had angered her? After all, she had never been distressed reminiscing about the death of her sister, never been angry when, in a short-lived morbid phase, I’d questioned her about it. I’d heard loads of times about Clarissa’s death, about the big blue eyes closing for ever, about how beautiful she’d looked in her coffin with her golden hair around her head like a halo . . . all that stuff. Isa had been allowed to kiss her – her nanny had lifted her up and she had kissed the dead child on the forehead. Yet now, the very mention of a baby brother who had died and whom she had no recollection of having existed made her angry. She didn’t want to discuss it or speculate as to what had happened, and she had forbidden any further investigation.

  The point is, am I going to obey her? Has she the right as my grandmother to expect me to obey her?

  I told Dad about it. I described the scene (it was like a scene, so theatrical) with Isa, and how angry she had been with me.

  ‘She’s suspicious of mysteries,’ Dad said, ‘unless she’s created them herself.’

  ‘And does she?’

  ‘What? Create mysteries? Oh yes, sometimes.’

  ‘I never knew that about her.’

  ‘No reason why you would.’

  ‘Dad, you’re being mysterious yourself now. Do you know something about this birth certificate business?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you think happened, then? What does Isa suspect that makes her angry?’

  Dad stopped eating his spaghetti vongole for a minute and took a gulp of wine. ‘No idea,’ he said, and then, very abruptly, ‘Do you want ice cream?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and then, ‘I’m going to find out.’

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘The truth, about the baby boy. I won’t tell Isa, of course, I don’t want to upset her, but I have to know. It’s like an itch, I have to scratch it, it’s driving me mad.’

  ‘Scratching itches makes them bleed,’ Dad said. ‘It might end up painful.’

  ‘Who for? Not for me. And I won’t tell Isa, so not for her. I’ll just keep to myself what I find out.’

  Dad looked down at his by then empty plate, his arms crossed over his chest, and stared at it as though there was something there visible only to him. A waiter came and asked if we wanted coffee, and Dad shook his head. I didn’t want any either, so we were ready for the bill. It was duly produced and slipped under a side plate. Dad didn’t touch it for what seemed like ages, and then when I said should we go, he looked at it intently. ‘Some mistake?’ I asked, smiling. Dad is famous for minutely scrutinising bills. It embarrassed me as a child, but now I see it as an endearing eccentricity. I began to get up, and as my chair scraped on the tiled floor he put his hand out, as though to stop me. ‘I think I will have some coffee after all,’ he said. ‘Keep me company, will you, or have some water or something?’

  The coffee came. He was looking at me in that slightly puzzled, abstracted way he sometimes has, as though wanting to check I am who he thinks I am. It amazes me that I still hadn’t the faintest suspicion of what he was about to tell me. I was feeling a little impatient with him for fussing over the coffee, making such a production of stirring it round and round, and so carefully measuring out a level teaspoonful of sugar. The sugar alone should have alerted me to something unusual about to happen. He gave it up months ago, saying he was putting on weight.

  ‘Dad?’ I said.

  ‘The trouble is,’ he said slowly, ‘I don’t know why I think I should tell you now, why I think it might make you see – no, that’s not it – why it’s possibly relevant . . .’ and his voice faded away.

  ‘Dad, for God’s sake, is this about the birth certificate? You know about it, don’t you? It isn’t a mystery. Tell me, go on . . .’

  ‘No, I don’t know about it. It is a mystery.’

  ‘Then what are you on about?’

  At that moment, a man suddenly stopped at our table and said, ‘James! How are you? Haven’t seen you for ages.’ Dad looked up at him in a dazed sort of way, appearing not to recognise this interloper, or else he was so distracted by the thought of what he had been about to tell me that he was unable to remember his name. But this man was oblivious to Dad’s blank look, and continued to stand there, chattering away. I began tapping the table impatiently with a knife lying by my plate, feeling increasingly that I wanted to pick it up and stab the man, just to shut him up and make him go away. Eventually, Dad cleared his throat and collected himself. He half stood up to shake his friend’s hand and call him, at last, by his name. There was some exchange of news, while I seethed, and then the man went on his way, with a promise to give Dad a call soon.

  ‘Thank God,’ I said. ‘Now, come on, Dad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what – the birth certificate, Isa, all that.’

  He looked stricken. ‘I haven’t discussed it with Jean.’

  ‘Why do you have to? Can’t you make up your own mind? Why does Mum have to give you permission?’

  ‘She might think it’s only going to encourage you . . .’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Poke your nose into the certificate thing.’

  ‘I’m going to do that anyway, whatever Isa says. I don’t know why you’re so bothered when I’ve promised never to tell her.’

  ‘I’m bothered because it makes me think of other secrets Isa has, other certificates she wouldn’t want dug up, I mean looked at. That whole area is so dangerous. She’s got enough to hide and I don’t see the point in upsetting her. I don’t know if this brother’s birth and fate is truly a mystery to her, but I know why investigating the past, or sections of it, frightens her. And I want you to leave it alone. I want to persuade you by telling you something about Isa so you’ll, well, understand her better.’

  Why did he choose an Italian café for this? Was it deliberate? So that the noise and bustle and the very ordinariness of the situation would make what he had to say less dramatic? No, I don’t think he thought like that. I believe him. He just suddenly decided, there and then, when I was boasting about what a great sleuth I was going to be, that he would stop me in my tracks. He certainly succeeded. The coffee machine roared, the waiters clattered plates, people around us laughed and talked, but Dad’s words came to me across the table perfectly clear – all other sound simply fell away. What he told me astounded me and excited me in equal measure and yet he didn’t make a drama out of it (as I expect I would have done). He spoke in short sentences, pausing between each one to check that I’d taken the information in, and I nodded frantically, urging him on. When he’d finished, he spread his hands out on the table and said, ‘And there it is.’ I stared at him, speechless, my head whirling, the implications of what he’d told me sinking in. ‘We’d better go,’ he said, and we both got up and wandered out into the busy street, his arm round me. ‘Now I’ll have to go home and tell your mum I’ve spilled the beans,’ he said, gloomily.

  It’s my father’s attitude I can’t understand, the way he seems not to care, not to be in the least bothered, not to have the slightest desire to discover the truth about half his genetic inheritance. Because that was what his ‘confession’ was about: Isa is not his biological mother. She is therefore not my true grandmother. I’m shattered by this revelation and its implications, but Dad isn’t. To him, it is of no real consequence. Isa is his mother in every sense that matters. He has emphasised that Isa doesn’t know that he knows she did not give birth to him and that she must never know that he knows. There must be no hint whatsoever from me. I’ve promised. I wish I hadn’t.

  The story Dad told me in the café goes like this: one day, in a science lesson at school, the fact came out that two blue-eyed people cannot produce a brown-eyed child except under very rare circumstances. Brown, he learned, is the ‘default’ colour for human eyes, which results from the build-up of a substance called m
elanin. Originally we all had brown eyes, but a mutation affecting a gene in the chromosomes acted as a switch that turned off the ability to produce brown eyes. All blue-eyed people in the world are related to that one individual thousands of years ago in whose crucial gene this switch occurred. Dad took all this in, and then he began to wonder about himself. Both his mother and his father had blue eyes. He thought about his grandparents. One of his grandmothers, he was quite sure, had blue eyes, but he had never noticed the colour of his other grandparents’ eyes. He saw both sets of relatives quite often at that time, so on the first chance he had he checked out their eyes. All blue. For a long time he mulled this over, and then one day, on a climb he was having with his father, just the two of them tackling Snowdon, he brought the subject up. He said wasn’t it funny that he had brown eyes when everyone else in the family had blue eyes. He didn’t mention the science lesson, by then weeks ago. It would have been easy for his father to agree that yes, it was, that he must be a throwback to some forgotten ancestor.

  But Patrick, his father, doesn’t say that. Instead, he tells James the truth. They crouch on a rock halfway up Snowdon, and while they are resting, he tells his son what happened. He starts with an apology. He says he is ashamed of his own behaviour and he isn’t going to try to excuse it. (This in itself is a shock to James, who revered his father and would never have imagined he could have any behaviour for which to apologise.) He goes on to say he had an affair with a young woman with whom he worked at the time. Then he changes the word ‘affair’ – he says James is too young yet (he was thirteen) to understand, but that it was not an affair but an ‘attraction’ between them. This attraction only happened for ‘a short while’, but James was the result. He says the young woman (no name mentioned) did not want to have a termination (James didn’t know what that was, but guessed) and agreed that the baby would be put up for adoption. Patrick says he is ashamed, for a second time, ashamed that he was relieved. Isa, his wife, need never know. He says he was appalled at the thought of how such a thing would hurt her. She had wanted a baby for the five years of their marriage and nothing had happened. So the whole thing was to be kept quiet. He paid for the girl to go away and be looked after. But then, says Patrick, disaster. The girl died during childbirth (no details given to the adolescent boy).

  There was then, Dad said, a long pause. He remembers wondering if he should be asking questions, or saying something, anything, to show he’d heard, but he was mute with embarrassment and didn’t actually want to hear any more. But Patrick goes on, half his words now lost in the wind that had begun to whip round them. He says Isa discovered about the baby. How? (James hadn’t asked.) Someone phoned her. Who? She would never say. There was a confrontation, Patrick says. It soon became apparent that all Isa was concerned about was the baby – she must have the baby. Patrick was the baby’s father; he must cancel the adoption procedure and claim his son. To Isa, it seemed divine providence: here was a baby for her. She was ready to adore him and forgive how his birth had come about. But part of her forgiveness was to be the insistence that no one should ever be told the baby was not truly her own. Patrick sighs at this point, suggests they climb a bit further. James plods along in his father’s footsteps, his head in a whirl. He doesn’t feel upset so much as astonished and then also fascinated – how had the deception been managed?

  They are almost at the top of the mountain when Patrick stops again and finishes the story. James hasn’t said a single thing, but his father carries on as though he is being interrogated. He explains that the girl’s family lived abroad. They did not want the baby, had no interest in its welfare. In fact, their worry was that they would be expected to look after it. So, that part was easy. The next part was not. Patrick and Isa moved from one part of the country to another. They arrived in London from Somerset with a baby, and since no one knew them there, no one was surprised. But what about family, friends? Patrick asks the question himself. He says it involved a great deal of subterfuge and that yes, he thinks Isa’s mother must have known and gone along with the deception, and also someone called Uncle George (though exactly how George helped was not explained). As for his own parents, his mother died at that time and his father was confused anyway.

  They complete the climb. They stand on the summit and can see nothing. A mist envelops what should have been a magnificent view. James feels he must, at last, say something. He can feel his father expectant and tense at his side. What he chooses to say is, he later thinks, stupid. He says: ‘So she had brown eyes?’ His father looks down at him, his face creased with anxiety, and says, ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. I just don’t know.’ And James says, ‘It doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.’ And he didn’t, he really didn’t. His father was his father and his mother was his mother, even if she wasn’t. Fine by him. It was never referred to again. On the way down, the mist clears, the views appear, and Patrick says, ‘Never let your mother know that you know, will you, James?’ ‘Of course not,’ James says. He remembers feeling happy. They went to a pub and had a drink and crisps, and then they went back to the cottage they were renting, where Isa was waiting. He says he gave her a hug.

  Incredible. To me, incredible. The total absence of excitement, of any feverish need to find out about this young woman, this ‘girl’, who died giving birth to him – his biological mother. I can tell when my dad is pretending or lying. He isn’t.

  I came home that day and looked in the mirror. For hours. So I have Isa’s eyes, do I? Said over and over again, ever since I was a child. Said by myself, quite pleased to agree, since Isa’s eyes are her best feature. I’ve liked being told I have her eyes. But now I know I do not. The only connection between the colour of Isa’s eyes and my own is some ancestor common to millions of blue-eyed people who lived thousands of years ago. There is nothing I can see in the mirror that comes from Isa. I am not the image of my paternal grandmother. Genetically, she has nothing to do with me. She is tall, I am tall; she is slim, I am slim; she has blue eyes, I have blue eyes. The combination is that of millions of women.

  But what about Isa’s characteristics that I am said to have inherited? Is there a case to be made for arguing that, although not genetically inherited, I have ‘inherited’ them through constant exposure to them? Maybe. Isa is aloof, distant. None of that has passed down to me. But she is also often arrogant and I’ve certainly been accused of that. She is meticulous, neat, organised, independent, self-contained, unemotional, private – no, I am not like Isa. Neither is my dad. I’ve always thought him unlike his mother, except in his work, where he too pays great attention to detail. It makes perfect sense that she is not his mother. But as soon as I write that, I see how absurd it is – loads of men are completely unlike their mothers.

  I suppose that what I can’t get over is that Dad really, genuinely has no curiosity about his real birth mother. He denies he has ever had any. Isa is his mother, as far as he is concerned. He’d only told me the few facts about his conception and birth, which he was told to stop me pestering Isa, so that I wouldn’t go blundering down paths to the past that I have no business to be on. He told me in order to protect her. I will keep my promise. I won’t ever let Isa realise I know she is not genetically related to me. But I can’t guarantee that once she is dead I won’t try to find out about my real grandmother.

  I’d like a name, at least.

  I feel so restless. For the last two hours all I’ve done is what I always do when I can’t settle to anything – I wander about, picking up things and putting them down, turning on taps and turning them off, gaping out of the window and counting cars (and sometimes becoming so idiotic as to memorise their number plates). It is literally as though I have ants in my pants. If Ian is here, it drives him mad and so I have to go out and roam the streets, closing people’s front gates, breaking off sprigs from shrubs overhanging walls, and carefully not treading on the lines between paving stone – neurotic, obsessive behaviour. But today Ian is out and th
ere is nothing to stop me flitting from living room to bedroom to kitchen to bathroom as if I am demented. Maybe I am. I can’t bear not knowing things once I know they are there to be known. I can’t stop thinking about Isa, seeing her differently, reappraising her. I tot up what she has meant to me, what she has done for me, how she has grandmothered me. I run my eye over the books she has so generously bought me, big, expensive art books and catalogues. She always indulged me, after she’d taken me to an exhibition, buying the catalogue afterwards if I’d liked the paintings. I have loads of them. I am looking at them now, remembering the outings to the Tate, the Royal Academy, the Hayward, the Courtauld, the National Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery – every major gallery in London at one time or another. I take down the catalogues of the exhibitions I recall most clearly. I calm down. I turn the pages, I get lost in the paintings, so beautifully reproduced – so beautifully that sometimes the reproductions are more impressive than the actual paintings. Hours pass. I am still, at last.

  I stared at a painting by Vanessa Bell. The Nursery Tea, painted in 1912. The woman who’d painted it must have been interested in children, I reckoned, and though I wasn’t absolutely sure, I thought Vanessa Bell had probably used her own children and their nanny in the portrait. So if she had children, she may have had grandchildren – and I was off doing exactly what Claudia had cautioned me against doing. I felt defiant.

  Vanessa Bell was sixty-four when her first grandchild, her daughter’s daughter, was born in 1943. Altogether she had seven grandchildren, six girls and one boy, but the one to whom she was closest was Amaryllis, the firstborn. ‘What a blessing that they exist,’ she wrote of her grandchildren, ‘what an incredible difference such small creatures make to life’. She adored having them around, didn’t mind the noise and mess a bit, and felt that she could ‘fully enter’ into their world with no effort at all. In fact, she freely admitted that she preferred the company of children to the company of most adults. She felt more natural, more at ease, more comfortable. There was no need to feel shy (which she was) in the presence of children – they took her as she was and she never had to worry about what to say.