Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  I honestly can’t see anything I’ve taken from this uneventful (excepting always that one irregularity) trajectory of Isa’s life, and yet I still feel there must be some discernible influence. Until I was eighteen, I was with her a great deal and must surely have picked up some sort of wisdom. Manners, I suppose, the importance of having good manners, but that’s hardly ‘direction’. I absorbed more from May. Her example shows me how tough life can be and how hard one has to fight to stay afloat. I haven’t had to fight, of course, but being aware of how May’s life has, in the past, been hard has stopped me becoming complacent or smug, I hope. On the other hand, I could argue that May’s waste of her own abilities has directed me to be ambitious. I don’t look at May’s life with that touch of scorn I reserve for Isa’s, but with a sort of regret, I suppose. Born into a working-class East End family, worked in a factory, married when she was pregnant, looked after her family, worked for some years as a cleaner, widowed at forty-eight, deserted by her sons but with a dutiful daughter at hand, and enough money to ‘manage’. What kind of direction does that give me? In what way has my life really been directed by my grandmothers? I have yet to find out.

  Walking down the street today, I heard a girl say in a bad-tempered way, ‘Oh, for Chrissake, get a life, Ella,’ then she quickened her pace and left ‘Ella’ behind. I badly wanted to get a look at Ella, so I quickened my pace too and when I was abreast of her sneaked a look. She was an unremarkable-looking girl, about fifteen I’d say, wearing the uniform of a local school. Short bobbed hair, neatly brushed. Quite well developed under the hideous jumper. She appeared unmoved by the insult hurled at her by her departing friend. Maybe Ella thought she had a life already.

  I’ve had it said to me, often – ‘Get a life, Issy.’ Beattie used to say it, usually when I said I had too much work to do and couldn’t go somewhere or do something. It’s often the truth – I do have too much work to do – but sometimes it is just an excuse to avoid telling the truth, i.e. that I’ve travelled and lived abroad enough, and now I’d much rather stay at home and get on with whatever I’m doing instead of going to the cinema/for a drink/to a club, whatever. That’s when friends have said ‘Get a life’ in a tone of exasperation, or even contempt. I can see what they mean. Doesn’t look good at my age, nose stuck in books and all that. Has never stopped me having boyfriends, though. I have lifted my eyes from books occasionally, with interesting consequences. Boys/men have ended up saying it too: ‘Get a life.’ But not Ian.

  Ian likes feeding me more books, more printed matter. It amuses him that I never fail to snap up whatever is offered. He says he finds me particularly attractive when I am engrossed in some book or pamphlet or article, and that’s when he pounces. ‘I’m reading,’ I say, and he laughs, and says yes, yes, he knows I am and I do it beautifully and he can’t resist me, go on reading, he urges me, and when I do, he lunges and I have to stop reading. Just because I’m a serious reader – and how solemn that sounds – doesn’t mean I’m like a nun.

  Well, I can’t read. Today, the print jumps, it swims.

  Glasses. Maybe it’s just that I need specs for reading. What, at my young age? Surely reading specs are for the middle-aged, and I’m not quite thirty. Nobody in our family had specs at thirty. Mum still doesn’t need them for anything, and Dad only wears them for watching telly or at the cinema. Isa – but it isn’t relevant now to think about Isa. May, then. Yes, she has an ancient pair of specs for reading, but she’s in her late seventies, and anyway she never uses them because she hardly ever reads anything, not even a newspaper. If she wants to read a label on a packet or tin she holds it a long way away and squints and manages to make it out, all the while cursing out loud that she can’t find her specs, somebody’s pinched them.

  It isn’t my eyes. I know that really, but I’m clinging on to that as an explanation. I know the print is swimming because I feel dizzy, light-headed, and I’m not focusing properly. If I lie down, the swirling around stops. I reach for my book, a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett, and hold it up in front of me. Good. While I’m lying down and not moving, the print behaves itself. Relief.

  Frances had her first grandchild when she was sixty-six, a girl, Verity, daughter of her surviving son. Verity, her grandmother claimed, seemed to have been born ‘by magic, so quietly and beautifully’. I wonder how her daughter-in-law managed it. She was also, writes Frances, ‘so wonderfully well and radiant’. Frances resolved to invent a new category of grandmother, the Fairy Grandmother, ‘before whom the Fairy Godmother will pale in comparison’. She was another who made doll’s clothes, for Verity and her sister Dorinda, and romped with them, and play-acted, and wrote little notes to them . . .

  I sit up to make a note myself at this point and this time the whole room lurches. And now the phone rings and I really can’t get to it. I wait for it to switch to the answer phone, and when it does, I let Frances Hodgson Burnett fall to the ground as I lie back and close my eyes. The obvious has occurred to me, of course. I’m not so wrapped up in books that I don’t notice such things. It is possible. Not probable, but possible, and so I must act quickly, as I have done before. Not yet, though, not until I can stand up safely. I lie and think about Fairy Grandmothers. It makes me feel even more queasy. I have this vision of May in a pink net dress, and with gossamer wings attached to her back, prancing around her kitchen waving a wand and scattering fairy dust . . . grotesque. Maybe Frances fitted the image, but not May. Not Queen Victoria. Sarah Bernhardt? Yes, she’d throw herself into the role. I go through all my grandmothers, checking out who could have been a Fairy Grandmother . . .

  Cautiously, I get up. Good. Quite steady. I listen to the phone message. It’s Mum. Can I go to Isa’s? She’s ‘in a state’ and Elspeth can’t cope, and Mum, as ever, can’t leave what she’s doing or not for another hour, and where Dad is she doesn’t know, his mobile appears to be switched off, and can I ring her back the minute I get her message.

  I drove over to Isa’s, hesitating only a minute, wondering if it was safe to drive when I had felt so odd, but my eyesight seemed normal again, so off I went. The roads were fairly empty and I knew all the short cuts, so I was there within twenty minutes. As I parked, an ambulance was leaving the next-door house and I could hear from within a child, a young child by the sound of it, screaming. It made me shiver. Elspeth answered the door clutching dramatically at the collar of her blouse, as though she herself were having a heart attack, and began at once on a breathless description of how she’d found Mrs Symondson with her eyes ‘popping out’, her complexion ‘white as a sheet’ and, apparently, ‘in a trance’ (this was amended from ‘in a coma’ when I queried that rather sharply). The shock of her discovery, said Elspeth, had given her palpitations. In fact, she still had them.

  Isa was sitting beside an open window, looking out of it. She turned to face me. I wouldn’t have said her eyes were popping out exactly, but they were certainly bulging a little, and were wide open and staring ahead. She didn’t reply to my cautious greeting either. I wondered if she might have had a stroke, but my knowledge of such catastrophes is pretty limited. Isa just looked as though something had startled her into a catatonic state. I experimented by snapping my fingers in front of her. She blinked. I did it again, and she frowned and jerked her head away. Not a stroke then, surely. I took hold of her hands. They were cold. I told Elspeth, who all this time had been hovering over us, to go and make some tea, and she scurried off. Gently I squeezed Isa’s hands. Equally gently she squeezed mine. Hers looked so white against mine, her manicured nails a reproach to my bitten ones. I kept looking into her eyes, trying to identify some response, but as yet there was none.

  Elspeth returned with the tea. She poured some for Isa, who ignored the cup. ‘Do you think we should call for the doctor now?’ Elspeth whispered. Suddenly Isa seemed to snap to attention. ‘Doctor?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about – I do not want a doctor. Why ever would I want a doctor?’ I smiled and told Elspeth to leave
us for a minute. I waited for her to go, though she seemed reluctant to do so and had to plump up a couple of cushions quite unnecessarily before she did, and then I tried to talk to Isa.

  ‘You seem to have had some sort of . . .’ and I stopped. Some sort of what? Elspeth’s term ‘a bit of a turn’ didn’t seem right, but neither did ‘odd episode’, so I started again. ‘Elspeth was worried, she said you didn’t know she was there, you were staring into space and your eyes were blank.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Isa said, and, releasing her hands from mine, placed her right hand across her forehead. ‘I had a shock,’ she said, ‘that is all. I am perfectly all right, thank you.’

  ‘What kind of shock, Grandmama?’ ‘The usual kind,’ she said (quite sarcastically, I thought). I handed her her cup of tea, but she shook her head and said she had had her tea. ‘What I meant,’ I said, ‘was what was the cause of this shock?’

  There was a long pause, during which she seemed literally to return to herself – the back straightened, the chin went up, the sharp intelligence returned to the eyes. She coughed a little, and shook her head to and fro, as though shaking water off.

  ‘Dear me,’ she said, the voice definite and strong, ‘most unfortunate.’ Then she gave me one of her usual stares, her eyebrows raised very high. ‘Isamay!’ she said, as though just recognising me. ‘What brings you here at this time of day?’

  ‘Elspeth rang Mum, and Mum rang me.’

  ‘Whatever did Elspeth do that for?’

  ‘She was worried about you. She thought you’d had an attack of some sort. Mum couldn’t leave work for another hour and Dad couldn’t be contacted.’ Isa made a sound that could’ve been either of irritation or exasperation. ‘So I came. I was glad to come.’

  ‘And all for nothing,’ Isa said. ‘How provoking for you.’

  ‘I’m not sure it was for nothing,’ I said. ‘Elspeth isn’t stupid. She thought something was wrong, and so did I when I got here. You did seem very strange, Grandmama, not yourself at all.’

  ‘Well of course I was not myself, as you put it. I had had a shock. I simply looked shocked, I imagine. Is that so strange?’

  ‘But so far as Elspeth knows, and she was with you, nothing had happened to shock you.’

  ‘How can she possibly know that?’

  ‘Because she was here, in this room. You went suddenly stiff, your eyes were popping out of your head . . .’

  ‘Oh, do not be so vulgar, Isamay!’

  ‘It’s what Elspeth said.’

  ‘Well, do not repeat it. Repetition doubles the insult.’

  ‘Sorry. But Elspeth was worried, and something must have happened to make her worried.’

  ‘She worries about everything. She is a worrier. Nothing will cure her, I am afraid.’

  ‘What was the shock?’ I said, abruptly, determined to try one more time.

  ‘It is private.’

  I smiled. ‘A private shock,’ I repeated. ‘How interesting. It took place in your mind, then?’

  ‘Almost,’ she said.

  ‘Were you frightened?’

  ‘Yes. Temporarily.’

  ‘So it was an hallucination.’

  ‘It was not. Did I say that? No, I did not.’

  ‘But you saw something?’

  ‘No. I heard something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That is private. It would mean nothing to you. Now, Isamay, I am grateful that you came, supposedly to my rescue, but I have things to do and I’m sure you have your work to return to. I am perfectly all right, and you should go.’

  There was no escaping Elspeth. She was waiting in the hall, not exactly barring my way but giving the impression she was an obstacle that would have to be negotiated. I said that my grandmother seemed fine, in full possession of her faculties. Elspeth was not pleased with this verdict – she seemed to think it cast aspersions on her judgement. I thanked her and then I left.

  I didn’t go straight back to my flat. I thought some fresh air and exercise would do me good. It was a beautiful morning, so I didn’t want to get back into the car. I left it in Isa’s road and walked from there on to Hampstead Heath. It was still only midday and there was no one around as I skirted Whitestone Pond and crossed the road. I followed the path above the Vale of Health and made towards Kenwood House. I was thinking about Isa’s ‘shock’, of course, and the ‘something’ she had heard that had set it off. I’d asked Elspeth if she’d heard anything – a car backfiring, perhaps, or had she dropped something in the kitchen? That was a mistake – Elspeth never dropped things, she was very careful. We both agreed, though, that the sound Isa had heard could very well have been a far-off police siren, or the ambulance I’d seen leaving, sounds familiar enough at any time of the day anywhere in London. But then they were familiar to Isa too, and therefore unlikely to have given her a shock . . .

  I smiled to myself, remembering that she had said that the shock, and the mysterious sound that had precipitated it, were ‘private’. A favourite word of hers. She was always using it, and not always appropriately. If there was any question she didn’t want to reply to, then the information she was not prepared to divulge was ‘private’. Sometimes it was quite funny. ‘Grandmama, where did you get this scent from?’ ‘It is private.’ I think she just meant secret. If she’d laughed, and said it was a little secret, it would have made some sense. ‘Private’ didn’t.

  Is that being pedantic? I don’t think so. Isa meant something quite clear to herself, if not to others, when she described her shock as ‘private’. It set me thinking, as I walked through the trees, of how little privacy there is for old people. Isa has always employed people to do things for her – cleaning ladies, housekeepers, gardeners – but she’s always been in charge until recently. She still thinks she is, I’m sure. And no doubt Elspeth, if discovered and challenged, would always be able to come up with a plausible excuse for her snooping. All that is truly private for Isa now is her past, her memories. Neither Elspeth nor anyone else can take those away from her. So I reckoned, as I walked, that Isa’s ‘shock’ was to do with a sudden overwhelming memory of something long forgotten. What did she hear to trigger it? What kind of noise connected with a memory so unpleasant or frightening that it had shocked her into a temporarily catatonic state?

  When I got home, I rang Mum and reported that Isa was fine. Then I surprised myself by ringing Beattie, my old school friend. I don’t see much of her, but that’s my fault – I’m lazy about keeping in contact. If Beattie doesn’t make the running I don’t bother, I just depend on her to do it, and eventually she always does. Her life is different from mine and sometimes it makes the gap seem too big to cross – she married young, has two kids, lives in Pinner – though when we do get together again, and she’s managed to meet me on her own, we can quickly slip back into our old easiness. The reason I broke a lifetime’s habit and was the one to ring Beattie was because of her grandmother. She’s an extraordinary woman, quite unlike either Isa or May. She was a spy in the Second World War, parachuted into France, and then afterwards set up her own travel company, just at the beginning of package holidays, and made a fortune. Beattie adores her (though I think she might be a bit of a disappointment to her grandmother). I thought I could talk to Beattie about Isa, and invite her and Jack, her husband, to supper. So I rang her and she was lovely, as she always is, and I invited her over. Then I told her about Isa’s ‘shock’. Beattie knows both Isa and May, though she hasn’t seen either of them for years, so she could imagine what I was describing, how Isa would have looked. She decided that Isa had had ‘a senior moment’, one of those sudden mental lapses when the brain seems to freeze momentarily, and then recovers and returns to normal operation but having lost the frozen time. Plausible, but I didn’t think it fitted. We chatted some more. I asked how her grandmother, now ninety-two, was – off on a trip to Scandinavia with one of her sons – and then fixed a date for her and Jack to come to supper, if she could get a babysitter. I’d much rather
have arranged to see her on her own, but that’s too difficult to organise somehow – she always ends up bringing both babies and we have to talk over them.

  I told Ian when he came in. ‘Good,’ he said. He likes Beattie and Jack, but he doesn’t like going to their place. It isn’t because of their children, and all the crying and fussing that goes on; it’s their house, the set-up there. He says he feels he’s looking at a fate – the semi, the neat garden, the attached garage – that he hopes will never be his.

  He said he’d cook roast lamb, we hadn’t had any real meat for ages, and at the mere suggestion I felt nauseous. I closed my eyes, and shook my head. Ian asked what the matter was; I looked pale, he said, and asked was I sick. I said not sick, exactly. Silence. I waited for him to pick up on the ‘exactly’. After a good while, I opened my eyes and found him studying me, in that infuriatingly calm, appraising way he has. ‘Well,’ he said, carefully. ‘Not well at all,’ I said. ‘Awkward, then,’ he said, ‘but not . . .’ he paused, wanting to find words that wouldn’t offend me, ‘not something you don’t know how to deal with. You told me you’d—’

  ‘I know what I told you.’

  ‘So, you know what to do, how to get it done.’

  ‘Do I?’

  It was only then that he seemed to realise there might be something going on he hadn’t bargained for. His expression changed, from one of a vague sympathy to wariness. He didn’t want to make a mistake, and waited for me to explain. I’d so have liked him to come and put his arms round me and comfort me, but he didn’t. He just stood there, waiting. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, at last, and repeated this, my voice sounding weak and plaintive. I was experimenting, trying to get near to saying out loud what I was beginning to dare to think: I could have this baby, I think I want this baby. Terrifying words I hadn’t yet the courage or the conviction to come out with. I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘I want to think about it this time, Ian. I never needed to think about it the other times. But this time . . .’ My voice trailed off.