Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Come and sit down,’ he said. It was such a relief to be on the sofa beside him, his arm across my shoulders. ‘This time isn’t any different, Issy,’ he said. ‘You don’t really want a baby. Think about it. You’re doing an MA, you’re hoping to go on to some academic work, it would be disastrous. And then there’s me. I don’t want children. I told you from the beginning I didn’t want a family, and you said you agreed, you’d never wanted children, and—’

  ‘I believed it,’ I said, ‘but things change. I’ve changed.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘No, I know. But I want time to think, I don’t just want automatically to have a termination. Something, this time, is making me hesitate. It’s to do with studying all those women who—’

  ‘Oh come on, you’re romanticising now.’

  ‘Maybe. But – don’t laugh – I see that I could be a link in a chain, carry on a line—’

  He did laugh, though it sounded strained and false. ‘And whose line would that be?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I think of May and—’

  ‘So you’re considering having a child to let May’s genes, or some of them, trickle down the ages?’

  ‘I feel some sort of need, I suppose; the so-called biological urge.’

  ‘Which you have never had. You’ve boasted about not having it.’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Mm, you have. You’ve scorned it, you’ve called it “the biological urge”. You have.’

  ‘OK, I have, but that was because I hadn’t felt it. I didn’t know what I was talking about.’

  ‘And you truly feel it now?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back where you started, not really wanting to have a baby but tempted by the idea for purely romantic reasons and all because you’ve fallen in love with grandmothers and their alleged impact on grandchildren, which so far you haven’t been able to prove, and that sort of stuff. You’ll be telling me next that you think it is your duty to have this baby, that it was meant.’

  He’d gone from being calm and reasonable to being scornful and impatient with me. I’m not sure what might have been said if Dad hadn’t rung at that moment. Abruptly, Ian left the room, and then the flat, as soon as I’d answered the phone. Dad said I sounded odd, did I have a cold? I said no, no, and launched into telling him about my latest visit to Isa, and her shock, etc., so that I didn’t have to tell him why I sounded so shaky. He didn’t seem in the least bothered about Isa’s ‘turn’. ‘She’s eighty,’ he said. ‘These things are bound to happen, it’s all part of becoming old.’ I said we weren’t talking about mere forgetfulness, we were talking about a shock temporarily freezing Isa. He still wasn’t worried. In fact, my anxiety made him irritable – he said I sounded like Elspeth. Then he asked if Ian and I could come for Sunday lunch. May was going to be there and it was going to be as like ‘the old days’ as Mum could make it, with roast beef and all the trimmings. I said Ian wouldn’t be able to make it, he had a football match, but that I’d be there.

  The rest of the evening I just lolled on the sofa watching rubbish on telly – high-class rubbish, but rubbish all the same. It was some kind of spy thing and I hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on. Half an hour later, Ian came back, and sat down beside me and made some comment about what I was watching. After that, neither of us said a word. Companionable? In a strange sort of way, considering the tension, yes. We are good companions as well as everything else. But hanging in the air was the implicit question: why change things? Why let a baby interrupt this companionship? For the moment, it seemed something too dangerous to discuss again.

  Sunday lunch with May . . . it used to be so commonplace, so ordinary, so much part of our family routine, and now it has become an event. May herself is very aware of this. She resents the fact that an invitation to Sunday lunch has to be given when once it was simply assumed that she would be picked up at her house around midday and returned to it about half past four. She liked her neighbours, even the ones she didn’t know, to see her being ushered into a car. The short drive was all part of the treat, almost as important as the meal itself. The food, of course, had to be the kind May liked, and it was probably the need to provide big roasts that Mum couldn’t stand. I’m not quite sure exactly how or when she broke the tradition, but broken it was and never resumed in the same way – the feast became movable. May was upset. ‘Not wanted in my own daughter’s home on a Sunday,’ she said to me, but quickly had to add, ‘Not that I care, I can look after myself.’ This announcement was followed by a lot of sniffs. Sniffs always punctuate May’s words when she’s indignant, like loud full stops.

  Dad was just pulling up in front of the house when I arrived. I leapt out of my car to open the door of Dad’s so that May could get out. ‘Lovely to see you, Granny,’ I said. ‘You could see me any time,’ May said. ‘You’ve got my address, you lazy lump.’ But it was said affectionately. I gave her a kiss and she told me not to mess up her hair. We could smell the beef roasting the minute we stepped into the hall, which made me instantly feel nauseous. ‘Smell that!’ Dad said. ‘I will,’ May said. ‘I haven’t smelled a smell like this for a long time.’ We trooped into the sitting room and not down into the kitchen/dining room. This was a state occasion. May liked the formality of being given a drink first in the upstairs room, where she could sink into an easy chair and look out on to the garden. Mum didn’t appear. She shouted hello and said she’d be up in a minute, she was making the Yorkshire pudding. ‘Hope she don’t mess it up like she can,’ May said. ‘You could go and show her how,’ I said, and got a disdainful look in return. ‘I’ve shown her hundreds of times,’ May said, ‘and she can’t seem to get the hang of it, she’s so clever.’

  It was like an old-fashioned stage set, May in her armchair, centre left, Dad near the window, standing beside the drinks table, and me on the sofa, near the door. I found myself consciously trying to think of something to say, and was shocked. For years as a child I’d chattered away to May, and now there was this silence, which I had to strain to fill. Being in my parents’ house and not in May’s cluttered kitchen made the strain worse.

  Luckily, at that moment Mum called out that lunch was ready. Dad helped May to her feet, and for once she didn’t refuse, but clung to his arm and didn’t let it go. I offered to take her other arm but she said she wasn’t incapable yet, so I picked up her drink and followed the two of them down the stairs. May only managed them by turning sideways and going down crabwise, with Dad now preceding her so that if she fell she’d only fall on him. I stopped being cross with her. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed at the thought of becoming old. ‘What’s that long face for, miss?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said, and went to help Mum carry all the stuff across. May smiled, a smile of pure delight that she couldn’t suppress. ‘Now that,’ she said, surveying the beef on its oval platter, surrounded by roast potatoes, and the dishes of carrots and peas, ‘is a grand sight.’

  We were all pleased that she was pleased. Everyone relaxed and began eating. May was in full reminiscing mood and went on and on about the glories of the Sunday lunches she herself had provided in her time. I knew without needing to ask Mum that they hadn’t been as May described. May had cooked a roast all right, but then used to rage because Albert was late coming back from his drink at the pub (his particular Sunday treat) and the boys were either fighting or else just arriving back themselves from playing football. Only Mum was sitting there, captive, and May was in a fury with the rest of her family, whom she judged lacking in appreciation. It was even worse when May’s mother was still alive, because she would apparently criticise her daughter’s cooking, finding fault with almost everything. But May has forgotten all the tension. ‘This takes me back to the good old days,’ she was saying for the tenth time, ‘when Sunday lunches were Sunday lunches. Slaved over them, I did.’

  ‘Bet you were glad when you stopped, then,’ I said. I couldn�
��t have said anything more stupid.

  ‘Glad? Glad? Course I weren’t glad!’

  ‘I just meant glad you didn’t have to slave any more.’

  ‘Who’s talking about slaving? It was hard work, that’s all, and I was glad to do it, looking after my family properly. Women did then. We had our family round the table of a Sunday, feeding them proper, and glad to be doing it.’

  There was another silence, while we all ate busily. But May was not eating as heartily as usual, in spite of her relish. Normally, she would have scoffed everything on her plate in double-quick time and would have been ready for seconds before anyone else had finished. Instead, she was picking at the meat, had eaten only half of a potato and hadn’t touched the other vegetables. It was proof, I thought, that she was taking heed of what the doctor had advised. Yet she was asking already what was for pudding. ‘Oh, the puddings I made,’ she said. ‘The apple crumbles, the spotted dick – grand. Remember them, Jean? Proper puddings. What we having for pudding, then?’ ‘Fruit salad,’ Mum said. ‘Fruit salad?’ May echoed. Mum told her it was all fresh fruit: strawberries and raspberries and melon and . . . May cut her short. She sighed, and said she supposed fresh fruit was healthy, and then asked if there would be cream to go with it. Mum said yes, if you want. Nobody spoiled her pleasure by saying she shouldn’t be having cream. Mum brought the fruit salad and the dishes to the table, together with a jug of cream. Though May had nothing like finished her main course, she pushed her plate away and helped herself to a little fruit and a great swamp of cream, and ate the lot in something of her old style.

  We had managed, throughout all this, to have a stilted sort of chat, each of us politely waiting for the other to finish talking, totally unlike our usual way of conversing, which involved constant cutting across each other and virtually never waiting for anyone completely to finish what they were saying. May had concentrated on her fruit salad, contributing nothing, but after she’d slurped up the last of the cream she looked at me and said, ‘You could do with some cream, by the look of you.’

  ‘I hate cream. It clogs your arteries anyway.’

  ‘It ain’t clogged mine. You need some fat on you, all skin and bone you are.’

  ‘I’ve always been slim . . .’

  ‘Skinny, you are, like one of them girls what starve themselves.’

  ‘I don’t starve myself.’

  ‘Well, you look as if you do. Nice little fat baby you were, and now look at you. You must take after your dad’s family, ’cos you don’t take after ours, not now, not in the looks department.’

  I took some fruit salad, ostentatiously pushing the jug of cream away. May glared at me. I glared back. Then she suddenly leaned forward across the table and said, ‘Is this the thinning before the fattening, then?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Are you up the duff?’

  Could I have lied? Of course I could have. I could have out-stared May easily. I could have laughed convincingly and said she must be joking, and that would have been that. But for a second, a mere second, I hesitated, and to a beady-eyed observer like May, hesitation is proof. I saw the triumph in her eyes – she’d scored a bull’s eye, she was sure. She sat back in her chair and said, ‘Well I’ll be damned!’ and then ‘I’ll be a great-grandmother’ and ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’ Soon she was chuckling away, and shaking her head, and altogether giving an exaggerated display of delight. Mum and Dad still hadn’t said a thing. ‘Isamay,’ Dad eventually said, ‘is this true? I mean, it’s wonderful news, but is your granny right?’ ‘Course I am,’ May interrupted. ‘Oh, I knew all right, minute I set eyes on her today.’ Mum put her hand over mine and squeezed it, and waited for me to confirm or deny what May had said. It seemed impossible to tell them that even though I thought I was pregnant, yes, I hadn’t decided whether to have a termination or not. They’d be shocked. It was too cruel. So I said it was early days. I said I was about five minutes pregnant and anything could happen, and I’d rather not have told them. May boasted again that she’d guessed, that I couldn’t fool her. ‘I knew you’d fall in the end!’ she cackled, and then, ‘It’ll be a boy, I can tell. What you going to call him? Albert, after your grandad, eh? Albert James, after his great-grandad and his grandad.’ There was nothing I could do to stop her babbling on, her previous grumpy mood forgotten. She said she thought she might still be able to knit, if she took her time, if she picked a good day when her arthritis wasn’t too bad. She said she wanted to buy the pram. She hadn’t much money but she had a bit saved, just for this occasion. ‘How much do prams cost these days?’ she asked. None of us knew.

  It was hard to get away. I would have liked some time alone with Mum, to tell her how I was really feeling, but May was clearly determined to get her fill and stay all day, so I left about three o’clock with instructions to look after myself, and put my feet up, while she followed me out of the door. Dad saw me into my car. ‘Lovely news, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I’m going to enjoy being a grandfather.’ I must have looked miserable, because then he asked anxiously if I was happy about it. ‘It wasn’t a mistake, was it?’ he asked, leaning down to look at my face through the car window. ‘Or was it?’ I said that of course it had been but that it didn’t mean I was necessarily going to get rid of it. At the words ‘rid of it’ he flinched. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever you decide. Take care.’ I drove off, furious at how I’d mishandled things – I should have lied, at least until I’d really left it too late for there to be a choice. Now I will upset my parents and most of all my grandmother if I have a termination – the distress it would cause is so unnecessary. Suddenly I realised there was still a solution that would avoid this distress. It involved lying, but I’d just agreed with myself that lying would have been preferable and still is: I could quite easily have an early miscarriage. Happens all the time. I could be brisk and sensible about it – God, the last thing I want is for my lies to reap misplaced sympathy.

  This way out of the mess I’ve got myself into appeals to me. I’ll think about it.

  I’ve got a postcard of a photo of Vanessa Bell stuck up in front of me, just above my computer, and one each of Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Victoria, George Sand and Elizabeth Fry. I haven’t been able to find one of Dora Russell and I’ve taken down Cynthia Asquith. It helps to look at them, though it hasn’t so far helped enough. I’ve studied photographs in all the relevant books and watched my subjects age as they became grandmothers, but what I’d really like is a sequence of snaps or portraits of each of them, one for each decade, so that I could flick through them like through a pack of cards and watch the changes in them accelerate.

  I think photographers today try to catch the personality of the sitter. The formal pose still exists, but even that attempts to create atmosphere. Vanessa Bell does this in her paintings, but I wondered if there were a woman photographer who did the same. I wondered aloud, as I often do. Ian heard this particular wondering as he was on his way out and said, ‘Julia Margaret Cameron . . . Bye . . . won’t be home until late, remember.’

  I wrote the name down, but then spent the best, shocking part of an hour thinking about Ian and the embryo still within me. Actually, I think it is a foetus by now, not an embryo. With distinguishable arms, legs, etc. I am nearly at the end of the first trimester. I’ve been promised, in the books I’ve consulted (reading them in Waterstones, a little furtively), that in a couple of weeks I won’t feel sick any more or have these worrying dizzy turns, but will I feel any less slow? Slow? I mean stupid. My mind wanders, my concentration is wrecked. The books – there are loads of them – say this is normal. I hope this changes, if I’m to stay pregnant, that is. I want my brain back in full working order, I want this fog to lift. I keep having these strange images of waterfalls, but instead of water, it is DNA cells that are thundering down – it’s mad. I see this great torrent cascading down the years, unstoppable, with more and more tributaries being fed into it, and I am part of it, my DNA is joining the fl
ow. Why am I letting it happen? Why? I listen hard, carefully, for the answer. I want to be truthful. I didn’t intend to become pregnant. So? Why haven’t I dealt with it? I hate to admit that I am keeping this child – though am I going to? – because I can’t resist the chance to see what I can create. Curiosity – what an answer. I don’t yearn for the cuddling bit. What I feel is an intellectual curiosity, and a desire to be part of a mysterious process. That’s appalling.

  What I can’t understand is why Ian doesn’t share this curiosity. Maybe he does, and is just refusing to allow himself to admit it. And of course it isn’t growing inside him, which makes a difference, though theoretically it shouldn’t. He notices me being sick, naturally, and is solicitous, bringing me cups of tea in bed and that kind of thing, but he doesn’t say anything. If I do, if I groan and say I can’t go on with this, he doesn’t tell me to do something about it. The whole business is turning into some sort of silent battle in which Ian’s strategy is to give me enough rope to hang myself – and now I’m being melodramatic as well as choosing unfortunate metaphors. Work is the only refuge from all this endless fretting about what to do.

  I stared blankly at the name written down in front of me. Julia Margaret Cameron. Yes, I knew who she was, I’d seen some of her photographs in various biographies. But how would she fit in? Was she even a grandmother? It was a relief to have something easy and definite to do, something my sluggish brain could cope with. Julia Margaret Cameron, born 1815, married 1838, had six children – promising already. Only one daughter, Julia, who gave her a granddaughter in 1859. So, a young grandmother. But she – Julia Margaret – didn’t have a camera of her own when Charlotte, her granddaughter was born. She didn’t get one until Charlotte was four and she didn’t take her first successful photograph until 1864. She was smart. Right from the beginning she began to copyright her work. Lots to look into, then. I felt that little spark of excitement, though ‘excitement’ is too strong a word, at the thought of being on the trail of something interesting.