Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  Finally, she noticed me. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Have you put the kettle on? I’m worn out.’ I went and put it on. I asked her if we should sit outside, since it was so sunny and warm, and offered to bring a couple of chairs out. She said I must be mad to think of such a thing at this time of year, but didn’t enlarge on this pronouncement. We sat, as ever, in her crowded kitchen. There were the usual traps everywhere, things she could fall over, but she negotiated them expertly, clinging on to the backs of chairs, clutching the corner of her cooker, avoiding the trailing wires of her electric fire – it is lethal having that fire there at all, but she will not part with it. She claims it warms her kitchen ‘in two ticks’, and wants no truck with any other form of heating.

  She produced a new packet of digestive biscuits. ‘The Body got them,’ May said. ‘Gets paid for doing it an’ all. Fancy, paid to buy biscuits for poor old folk.’

  ‘I expect she does a bit more than buy biscuits.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll have degrees for it,’ May said, giving a little snort of contempt. ‘In my day, we helped each other out, but now you need a degree to buy digestives.’

  There was absolutely no point in challenging this ridiculous statement. Instead, I said, ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This Body with a degree who buys biscuits.’

  ‘I give her the money, mind, it isn’t her money.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. But is she nice, do you like her?’

  ‘She talks funny. She’s from somewhere foreign. I can hardly make her out.’

  ‘She probably thinks you talk funny.’

  ‘Well, that’s her funeral, she’ll have to learn. I got a shock when I saw her. Nobody told me she’d be black.’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘So as I wouldn’t get a shock,’ said May, at her most indignant. Was this another thing, not to challenge?

  ‘You know plenty of black people,’ I said, ‘and you like them. Look at your neighbours . . .’

  ‘They ain’t black, they’re brown.’

  ‘It’s the same thing – brown, black . . .’

  ‘Yellow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And yellow, Chinks, Japs . . .’

  ‘Granny!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t say Chinks.’

  ‘I do if I want. Prince Philip does, he said they had slitty eyes, it’s no more than the truth.’

  ‘It’s insulting, offensive.’

  ‘Oh, get on with you. I’ll say what I like in my own kitchen. Nobody’s listening except you, and you know it don’t mean nothing. I can say what I like.’ And a fourth digestive was crammed into her mouth and satisfactorily crunched.

  I gave up the battle. I hadn’t come to argue about her carer’s qualifications or skin colour. Maybe I was being far too self-righteously virtuous, correcting her choice of words. She was right – I did know she didn’t intend to be insulting. I decided to change the subject, and told her about the Argentinian grandmothers and what had happened in the Argentine during the military dictatorship there. May seemed reasonably interested, which is to say she didn’t interrupt during my little résumé of events, and she didn’t yawn ostentatiously. I was encouraged. I described how people who demonstrated against the regime were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and then often killed. May asked if it had been on telly, all this. I said I didn’t know, I was only a baby when it was happening. Then I told her about how the babies of the protesters were given to people on the side of the dictator and brought up not knowing these were not their natural parents. ‘But the grandmothers never forgot,’ I ended my spiel dramatically. May nodded, sagely. ‘They never gave up hope of finding their lost grandchildren.’

  ‘I should think not,’ May said.

  ‘Would you have tried to find me?’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘I know, but if there’d been a military dictatorship here . . .’

  ‘Don’t talk silly!’

  ‘. . . and Mum and Dad had been arrested . . .’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Anything, going on a demonstration, say, or—’

  ‘They wouldn’t be so daft.’

  ‘They went on the peace march against invading Iraq.’

  ‘I told them then they shouldn’t.’

  ‘But they did, and they might have done the same if the situation here had been like it was in Argentina.’

  ‘Well it wasn’t.’

  ‘I know, but just supposing they had been arrested and—’

  ‘I don’t like this kind of talk.’

  ‘All I’m asking is whether you’d have acted like these Argentinian grandmothers if—’

  ‘I ain’t Argentinian, thank God.’

  May does this all the time. She pretends not to understand the point of something or other when she’s grasped it perfectly well. She’s not stupid, but she’s quite prepared to give the impression that she is if it will cut short a conversation she doesn’t like. It’s easier than arguing back. Her method is to turn questions round so that they become meaningless, or else to reply to those not being asked. I often think she has a brain that works in such a perverse way she could have been brilliant – say, as a barrister – if she’d had the necessary education. As it is, she jumps about mentally in non sequiturs, which are maddening and successfully avoid giving away what she really thinks.

  She was smirking now, convinced she’d put me off, but I was determined to force her to answer properly. I tried again. ‘If I’d been taken away and given to someone else after my parents were killed—’

  ‘Oh, stop it, it’s bad luck, that talk.’

  ‘How much would finding me have mattered to you? Come on, Granny, that’s a straightforward enough question – how much?’

  ‘Flesh of my flesh,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘What it says. You’re flesh of my flesh. It’s in the Bible.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘There’s a bit that comes after that but I can’t remember it. I never read the Bible. Have you read the Bible, being clever? You should think about it, do you good.’

  ‘So, just because I’m flesh of your flesh you’d have wanted to find me?’

  ‘Don’t know how.’

  ‘There’s a genetic bank . . .’

  ‘A what? A bank?’

  ‘Not the sort of bank where you have money, another sort, where they store your DNA.’

  ‘I’ve seen them going on about that on the telly. It’s all twisted veins, looks horrible.’

  ‘No, it isn’t to do with veins, it’s what’s in them, what’s in the blood. Your blood and my blood match, the genetic profile contained in it, I mean.’

  ‘Double Dutch.’

  ‘Anyway, you could trace me through a blood sample, or a hair from your head, or—’

  ‘I can’t spare one. It’s thinning, my hair, something chronic. I used to have lovely hair, thick and curly, don’t know where the curl has gone either. You’ve got it only you won’t let it show. Why is it so short? Doesn’t suit you, you should be proud of your hair, it’s a woman’s crowning glory . . .’

  She was off, a long rant about hair and how it should be treated and worn and brushed. I gave up. All the way home, I was imagining what it would have been like to be claimed by May as her lost granddaughter at the age I am now – a nightmare. How could we have made even the most tenuous connection? I would never have believed in, or accepted, the relationship. Flesh of my flesh? No, surely not. I looked up the quotation as soon as I got in. It’s from Genesis: ‘. . . bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh . . .’ I am of May’s bone, I am of her flesh, via my mother. But what about the rest of this genetic inheritance? How far does it go? Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh . . . what does it mean, apart from the obvious?

  Ian says I should be trying to understand the science behind DNA, or at least how the tests that determine it work, how it could be proved that I am bo
ne of May’s bones, etc. (but not of Isa’s). He is right, I should. All I know is that somehow a sample of my blood, or hair, or (I think) fingernails could be subjected to some sort of examination that would prove, or not, my genetic connection to my grandmother. What I don’t know is how exactly the testing is done, what process these samples go through, and how definite the results are.

  So, I’ve looked up everything available to a non-scientific person such as myself. Acres of information on the internet, from which I’ve absorbed the following: the certainty that a grandchild belongs to a particular grandmother would be 99.95 per cent if their DNA matches. Pretty definite, though I suppose a neurotic (me?) might fret over that .05 per cent of doubt. The tests are haematological, and there are four of them. They determine genetic markers from blood groups; HLA, or histo-compatibility; seric proteins; and blood cell enzymes. I still have only the faintest idea what all this means. Blood groups, yes, that’s straightforward enough. I know there are four main ones, A, B, AB and O (though I don’t know which either May or I belongs to). But there are apparently lots of other rarer groups, of which the only one I’ve heard is rhesus negative. How important is the blood group match as part of the four tests package? I must find out.

  As for the other tests, my understanding of them is still vague. I know what a protein is, but what is a seric protein? And enzymes are chemicals, aren’t they? Or are they proteins too, and produce a biochemical reaction? I’ll have to ask my mother. But I’ve already learned enough to realise that these tests must be pretty thorough and complicated and can only be carried out by people who know precisely what they are doing. I think I’d trust them. I doubt, though, whether May, if she had found herself in the situation the Argentinian grandmothers did, would have managed to discover how she might be able to trace me. I’m not sure what it involved, but it must surely have meant having blood taken by a medical person in some sort of medical establishment, and May, with her fear of needles and hospitals, would have been reluctant to do this. Also, she would have been suspicious – she wouldn’t have understood about DNA and wouldn’t have believed in it.

  But Isa would have done. There’s the irony. Isa could have coped. She’d have read about, or heard about, the genetic bank and the possibilities it offered. Having a blood test would have held no fears for her. And she would have been persistent, endlessly checking that everything that could be done was being done. On the other hand – and now my imagination runs away with me – she could just as easily have been one of the women to whom a child of murdered parents was given. I can see her as the wife of some regime-supporting official. And then she would have done everything in her power to thwart any tests. She would have brought up the child as she has brought up my father, and as she has, to a certain limited extent, brought me up, to believe they were hers. DNA would have had no chance against Isa. She would have outflanked it.

  VII

  THERE’S THIS CONSTANT little voice whispering away in my head, saying why wait until Isa is gone to find out about your dead grandmother and her family? Where’s the harm? Isa will never know, Dad need never know. I wouldn’t be breaking my promise. The promise was only that I wouldn’t ever let Isa know I knew the truth about my father’s origins. But the time to begin any investigation is not right. How will I know when it is right? I’ll feel it, I know I will. The conviction will come over me that it’s OK to begin. It might come over me quite suddenly, or just creep up and I’ll be surprised to recognise that it’s been there for some time. Meanwhile, the existing grandmother, the one who took the dead one’s place, needs attention. Elspeth, the self-righteous Elspeth, tells me so. She rings up and says that Mrs Symondson ‘seems lost’ at the moment and needs company. She, Elspeth, tries to stay a little longer each day she’s there, but she has other responsibilities and it is becoming a little difficult. She wonders if, since I live fairly near and have a car and I’m ‘not tied to set hours’, I could perhaps pop in more often to cheer my old grandmother up. All this is said in a breathless kind of way over the phone, the tone striving to be apologetic but failing. Elspeth just loves pointing out to people how good she is and how far from good they are.

  So I have started ‘popping in’ on Isa, though I know, and Elspeth ought to, that Isa does not like being taken unawares. I don’t spend long with her, twenty minutes maximum, and I make a point of leaving some small evidence that I’ve been so that Elspeth will know – a bunch of flowers, some fruit, that kind of thing. It isn’t that I want to earn Brownie points from Elspeth, more that I think she is right. I’ve discussed Isa’s changing mood with Mum and Dad. Dad doesn’t see any real difference, but Mum does detect a slight slackening in Isa’s general controlling behaviour lately (and is glad of it).

  I think it is worrying and we do need to keep more of an eye on her. During one of my visits Isa was reading a review in her Times of a biography of Lloyd George, and she went on from telling me about it to talk about other prime ministers whose biographies she’d read – and one of them was Herbert Asquith.

  So, it is Isa’s fault that I may have wasted time on Cynthia Asquith. I thought she’d been Herbert Asquith’s wife, but of course she was his daughter. By the time I’d found that out, I’d got interested in her and was desperately trying to think how I could use her. Part of the attraction was that she was so nicely modern, in historical terms, and I need more variety in my range of grandmothers if I’m to make a general point. (Times change, grandmothers change, etc.) Another instance of not being able to confess to Claudia how I came to select her, but I put that to the back of my mind – I’d think of something. She sounded a bit odd, Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960). The role of grandmother certainly didn’t appeal to her. She had no Queen Victoria type ambition to be a fount of wisdom, George Sand’s desire to stuff her grandchildren with happiness, or Sarah Bernhardt’s resolve to be an inspiration. Was this a more usual kind of grandmother then? Definitely not.

  She had six grandchildren, the first (Annabel) born when she was fifty-two. In spite of not welcoming her new role, she had written books and articles that might have indicated that she would revel in it. One series was for The Times – ‘Children and the Doctor’ and ‘Seaside for Children’ – full of advice for parents and showing what looked like a great love of children. But Cynthia’s attitude was very Edwardian: children belonged in the nursery, with contact designated to a particular, and brief, part of the day, especially when it came to grandchildren. They called her the Choccy Lady, because when she visited she distributed sweets. After that she was at a bit of a loss, though she tried to amuse them with jokes. These ‘jokes’ were very strange. One of them consisted of inking a face on to her bare knee and then swaddling her skirt round it, pretending it was a baby. Not surprisingly, the grandchildren weren’t sure whether to laugh or be appalled. But what was referred to as Granny’s ‘puckishness’ was part of her, and accepted as such. It pointed up, I thought, the element of embarrassment in relationships with grandmothers. There was lots of scope for this with Cynthia Asquith as your grandmother. Her clothes, for a start. She wore flowing garments and liked to sport striking headgear. Once, she appeared with a band round her head that had the blunt end of an arrow emerging from one side and the sharp end from the other, making it look as if her head had been pierced (a friend who’d bought this at a funfair had sent it to her). Not someone a grandchild would want to be picked up by from school, then. But luckily Cynthia never did such a mundane thing, nor did she join her grandchildren for meals. She was an eccentric who had very little idea of how to relate to her grandchildren, and yet, at the same time, she was fond of them. I’m attracted to Cynthia, but is she worth including? She doesn’t appear to have had any influence with her grandchildren, or to have wanted any. What would she be an example of? What would her style of grand-mothering illustrate?

  I recite their names over and over again – Elizabeth Fry, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Vanessa Bell, Queen Victoria, Edith Holman Hunt, Dora Russell, Cyn
thia Asquith – no, not Edith, not Cynthia, they are now rejects. These women crowd in on me, all with their piece to contribute, and though I can hear them clearly when they speak individually, it is the collective voice that doesn’t harmonise. I tell myself there is no reason why it should, but if it doesn’t, there is no point to my dissertation. Is a ‘point’ necessary? Of course! Claudia, though, wouldn’t use that word. She would say there has to be a ‘focus’, I have to add something meaningful to what is already known. I look at ‘my’ grandmothers, the ones I’m interested in, and what these women are known for is not for being grandmothers. They have been selected for a whole variety of reasons other than their status as grandmothers. However famous they have been, their links to the next-but-one generation have been mostly ignored, this influence hardly discerned. As for power, the idea that these grandmothers had any is doubtful. Prove it, critics would say. I’m trying to. And I have this conviction that my own relationship with my grandmothers comes into it – I ought to be learning something from how I regard, and have regarded, Isa and May. My life has been influenced by them. Their example – no, not example, the direction their lives have taken has in some subtle way directed my own life. Now, is that true? So, what direction has Isa’s life taken? A predictable one for most of the way. Born to a pretty well-off family, educated at a private school not known for academic success, then stayed at home afterwards helping her mother and going to dances and other social occasions until, at the age of not quite twenty she marries the soldier hero Patrick. After that? Nothing. Being a wife, trying to have a baby. And then that glitch, that stunning overturning of how she had been brought up (to be honest and truthful), the great deception. Once it has been carried off, with the move to London, the easy life with Patrick, the dinner parties, some travelling with him, and then widowed when she was fifty. A great blow, but one from which she recovered, cushioned by having no financial worries and by having a devoted son and his wife living near her. And a granddaughter.