Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  Then another wave of tiredness came over me: I fell forward on to my desk, and drifted off to sleep.

  I went to the GP. Finally. This afternoon. Note that I went to see ‘the’ GP, not ‘my’ GP. I registered with a practice when I moved to this flat, just to satisfy Mum, who fusses about such things. I’ve seen two of the five doctors there, briefly, but never Dr Fraser, who is apparently my designated doctor.

  Sitting in the waiting room, I knew my mind had to be made up. It was no good breezing into Dr Fraser’s room and saying I was just about twelve weeks pregnant and hadn’t decided whether to have a termination or not. Time was short – it would have to be full speed ahead in the case of aborting this foetus (horrible words, ‘abort’ and ‘foetus’: I don’t like the sound of them at all). But I felt my mind had been made up for me by my very inactivity. I’d done nothing, now possibly there was nothing that could be done. I stared round the room looking for signs. There were only five other people waiting, all elderly. They were no help. Then the outside door opened and in came a young woman pushing a buggy with a child in it. The child was asleep, well wrapped up, though it’s warm today, sunny and mild. Quite a pretty picture, the attractive mother – blonde, slim, nicely dressed – sitting looking anxiously at the sleeping child. Boy? Girl? I couldn’t tell. Couldn’t tell the age either. What do I know about children . . .?

  I haven’t, thank God, had much experience of doctors, but Dr Fraser was enough to put one off them for life. Distant, distracted, massively bored. I told him I’d done a pregnancy test three times (I’d thought I’d better have evidence) and they had all confirmed I was pregnant. He asked if I wanted him to examine me. I mean, he is the doctor, he should decide. I said not if there wasn’t any need. Right, he said, you need to make an appointment with our midwife. Which hospital do you want to have it at, she’ll book you in. And that was that. I don’t know what I’d expected – some concern as to how I was feeling, perhaps? – but his briskness shook me. The receptionist was equally offhand. Told me which day was antenatal day and made the appointment for me. I felt unimportant. Well, that’s a clue, shows how self-important I’d begun to feel – look at me, I’m pregnant, I’m going to have a baby, everyone! Cut down to size, that was me, the size of a shrimp. For a moment I thought dammit, I’m going to have a termination after all, so there, Dr Fraser, you’ve lost me. How petty.

  I rang Mum, who for once was at home. She was very soothing, said Dr Fraser was probably having a bad day, overworked, etc., and he’d probably thought I was matter-of-fact and had mirrored my approach. ‘You can seem a cool customer, Issy,’ she said. ‘You can sound brisk and uninterested yourself.’ Then Mum reminded me that I hadn’t yet told Isa my news and that I should, she’d be so pleased and might be hurt not to have been told. I promised to go and see her, but I haven’t rung her yet. I need to get everything clear with Ian first, now that I’ve seen Dr Fraser, and I have the other appointment and am in the system. Never mind Isa, I haven’t actually told Ian that I am definitely going to have this baby. I have to spell it out, just in case he is clinging on to the hope that I will ‘see sense’, i.e. still have a termination. He’s made his opinion, and his position, plain, but I haven’t told him I am going ahead in spite of his opposition.

  His disapproval over the last couple of weeks has expressed itself in various ways but most of all in his silences. They are not sulky silences, or hostile ones – it’s simply as though he cannot bring himself to talk about what I want him to talk about. He always seems to be on the verge of saying something, and then he looks at me and decides not to. I interpret this look as meaning it isn’t worth his effort because I’m not up to any kind of proper discussion. Too true, but he could try. I feel disappointed in him, though I’ve no right to be. I wanted him to share my new feelings about having our child, especially the curiosity I have. Is that so wrong, to feel curious? To let curiosity influence me? Best not to provoke an argument about it. Ian would win easily.

  VIII

  JULIA MARGARET CAMERON wrote that ‘the eyes of the first grandchild should be more beautiful than any flower’. Should? Apart from the gushing tone, this sounds so silly. But she was far from a silly woman. On the contrary, she was clever and ambitious, and not above using her grandchildren for her own purposes in the career she built for herself as a photographer. Perhaps because she knew she might well do that, she was careful not to get too close to them. When her first grandchild, Charlotte, was born (Julia was then forty-four), Julia wrote that though she intended to cherish the child, she was ‘building bulwarks round my heart to prevent myself getting too fond of her’. The bulwarks seem to have stayed in place. None of her grandchildren are on record as adoring her. Instead, they were wary of her. To them she was rather scary-looking, short and squat, dressed in dark clothes stained with chemicals from her photography, and smelling of them, too. In manner, she was bossy and controlling and sometimes made them model for her when they didn’t always want to. Modelling was a tedious business for them, which involved staying still for inordinate lengths of time, but they didn’t dare disobey their grandmother.

  Bossy and controlling grandmothers are surely fairly common, but I hadn’t come across one quite like Julia Margaret Cameron. Queen Victoria was bossy and controlling but then she was a monarch and had the power to be, and she used that power, so far as I had discovered, for the benefit of her grandchildren. I suspect that Julia Margaret Cameron may have used her relationship with hers to serve her own ends. Or is that too harsh? I need to read some of her letters, which are in the Bodleian Library and at the Royal Photographic Society. I imagine they’ll be fun to read – someone commented that ‘she lives upon superlatives as upon her daily bread’. And I must look at all the photographs available in which her grandchildren appear. The only one I’ve seen is ‘My Grandchild’, taken in 1865, a picture of a baby of about a year old (I think), lying asleep. Nothing bossy or controlling about it.

  I have to think about Julia Margaret Cameron and her significance as a grandmother. Something about her is disturbing. I read that in order to get the right expression of grief, or similar, she was capable of shutting a child she wanted to use as a model into a cupboard for a while. A woman dedicated to her art, then, but at what cost to the children?

  At last I rang and arranged to visit Isa. It was an unseasonably hot day when I went, and Isa was in her garden pruning roses while her ‘man’, Mr Pinkerton, was doing a last clipping of the hedge at the bottom of the lawn. Isa looked like an illustration in a book called The Lady Gardener, elegantly dressed in a long pale green skirt and a white blouse, her head covered with a straw hat, which had a ribbon round the crown matching exactly the green of her skirt. She was wearing immaculate pale cream gardening gloves, and over one arm she had one of those shallow baskets, which I could see contained two last, perfect yellow roses. She was concentrating hard on her pruning and I didn’t want to alarm her by shouting a greeting so I sat on the stone steps and just watched her for a while. I liked watching her. She looked so graceful, if frail, nothing crabbed or disturbing about her. She looked like everyone’s ideal old woman, serenely tending her flowers, her faithful retainers – her ‘man’, her ‘girl’ – discreetly keeping her under observation. What could be more reassuring? If this was old age, I thought, how charming it could be.

  I got up from the steps as Isa finished her task and turned to go to another rose bush nearer the house. I waved. She stood still, facing me, and I went towards her, calling out ‘Hello, Grandmama!’ For one worrying moment I thought she didn’t recognise me, but then she smiled and said my name. We went up the steps together – no, she did not need a helping arm, she said – to the sheltered corner of the terrace and she called for Elspeth to bring out some tea. It was brought promptly, and there was the usual fuss setting out the china and the tea strainer and covering the milk jug with one of those net things that have little beads round the edge to give them weight and keep the flies off the milk. ‘Isn
’t this pleasant?’ said Isa. Mr Pinkerton’s genteel clippers sounded faintly in the distance. Would a bee soon hum contentedly overhead? Yes, it did and then buzzed off. A butterfly (only a cabbage white, but still) fluttered past. Isa gazed about her, pleased with nature. She sat in her basket chair, her back ramrod straight as usual, her skirt draped over her knees, almost covering her ankles. Her ankles are her weak point. They grieve her. Tall and slender though she is, her ankles are thick. She could hide them by wearing trousers, but in Isa’s opinion, no lady wears trousers, not even in the twenty-first century. She may be the last woman in England to stick to dresses and skirts, but so be it.

  Isa was charmed with herself and the setting. All was well in her world, mysterious shocks forgotten and a granddaughter’s tedious probing about an alleged brother forgiven.

  ‘Grandmama,’ I said, ‘I have some news for you.’

  ‘Good news, darling?’

  ‘I think so.’ I knew I mustn’t use that word I don’t even like myself: ‘pregnant’ – Isa thinks it common, quite unacceptable – and instead I should say ‘I am expecting a baby’ if I couldn’t bring myself to use the archaic expression ‘anticipating a happy event’, which she would prefer.

  ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ I said, ‘next March.’

  Now truthfully, what kind of reaction did I expect? Delight at the very least. I thought her face would be flooded with a huge smile and that she would let out a little cry of pleasure perhaps. I even thought there might be a tear in her eye. Instead, she seemed startled. Her mouth opened slightly in evident surprise, and she put a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘oh dear, dear!’ I was puzzled. I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard me properly, or that she’d somehow misunderstood me. So I repeated that I was going to have a baby, next March. Still no response, just a slight shaking of her head. It was baffling. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you don’t seem happy about my news.’

  ‘Happy?’ she echoed.

  ‘Yes, happy for me.’

  Did I sound resentful? Did I say this in a whiny voice? Possibly. Probably. I suppose I felt cheated, disappointed. The longer she was silent, the more restless I became, ending up fidgeting in my chair in a way I knew would bring forth a reprimand. It did. ‘Do sit still, Isamay,’ she said, but in an absent-minded fashion.

  ‘I’m going, actually,’ I said, and stood up.

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Well, there doesn’t seem much point in staying; you don’t seem to want to hear about the baby.’

  Again, the silence, the air of abstraction, as though I were speaking to her from a long way off, or that my words were somehow muffled. At least, that’s what I deduced from Isa’s face, from her vague, dreamy look, so unlike her usual poised, carefully arranged expression of either intelligent interest or concealed boredom. Her eyes in particular were devoid of feeling, not blank but deliberately not registering any thoughts she might be having. It was the same expression she’d worn when she had her ‘shock’ and Elspeth had been so alarmed. It occurred to me to remark on this, so I asked her, straight out, if she had had another shock. She nodded slightly. I sat down again. I tried to be sympathetic and gentle. ‘What has shocked you, Grandmama?’ I asked. ‘Are you shocked that I am going to have a baby?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘It is private.’

  I laughed. ‘Private again? But I was here, nothing happened. You couldn’t have heard a noise, there was no noise.’ She cleared her throat, and blinked several times. A sharpness returned. She frowned and fussed with a button on the cuff of her dress.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘you are going to have a baby.’

  ‘Yes. In March.’

  ‘I see. And who, may I ask, is the father?’ She sounded as if she genuinely did not know. There was no hostility in her tone, nothing like that, but I was wary.

  ‘Ian, of course. My boyfriend. You’ve met him, remember?’

  ‘Your boyfriend.’ There was no question at the end of the words – it was just a flat statement, a repetition, as though she were checking she’d heard correctly.

  ‘Yes. We’ve known each other four years; we’ve lived together most of that time.’

  ‘But you are not married.’ Again, a mere statement.

  ‘You know we’re not.’

  ‘Will you marry now that a child is to be born?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to get married, neither does Ian.’

  ‘Whose name will this child take?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘Then had you not better think?’

  What was wrong with her? She was spoiling everything. Why couldn’t she be like May, thrilled to bits and not bothered about husbands or names? I wanted to flounce out, but what kept me there was trying to work out what Isa was really saying. What was going on in her head? There was a subtext I couldn’t quite read. So I tried again.

  ‘What is it that worries you about my having a baby?’ I asked her.

  ‘What are you going to do with the child?’

  I was shocked. ‘Do?’

  ‘Yes. Are you going to give it away?’

  I simply stared at her, speechless. I couldn’t even attempt to reply. I felt insulted and angry, though perhaps I had no right to be, and had to struggle to control myself. After a long pause, during which we held each other’s stare, I managed to say, ‘Why, why do you imagine I would have a baby then give it away?’

  ‘Women do.’

  ‘Women used to, because they had to, because they hadn’t intended to become pregnant . . .’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Intend to conceive?’

  ‘No. That’s not the point, I—’

  ‘It is very much the point.’

  ‘No, it is not! If I had not wanted this baby I could have terminated the pregnancy, I could—’

  ‘You could have murdered it, you mean?’

  ‘No! Grandmama, stop this. I became accidentally pregnant but I do want this baby and I will not be giving it away.’

  ‘Perhaps you should.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps you should think about whether this child might not be better off with another woman who has a husband and can care for it in a proper manner.’

  There. It was out. Of course. Now I felt sorry for her. This was all about the past, her past, the past none of us was supposed to know about. It was so tempting to blurt out that I knew why she resented my having a baby when I wasn’t married and hadn’t wanted one – it wasn’t fair, she couldn’t stop envying women like me. She was old, long beyond the years when she hadn’t been able to conceive, but she was still unable to get over it. It was silly to allow myself to become upset over the tortuous workings of Isa’s memory. It was up to me to behave sensibly, until the confusion was overcome, as it surely would be, so I didn’t say anything else, just got up, kissed her and said goodbye. I left her sitting motionless in her chair. I felt let down. But it was more than that. Somewhere in my subconscious I’d envisaged an emotional scene in which I listened to Isa confessing the truth about my father’s birth. I’d seen myself comforting her – for what, precisely? – and admiring her. There would have been a new intimacy between us, a bond of a kind there had never been before. Instead, there was now a rift.

  All this time, I had been putting off telling Ian what I hoped he had by now surely realised: I had decided to have the baby. I couldn’t justify my decision, and dreaded arguments, and attempts to dissuade me. But I knew I had to tell him, to leave him in no doubt. I dreaded his response. Anger was one thing, but distress was another. What if he became upset and pleaded with me? He is so good at consoling and comforting me, but I’ve never been challenged to do either for him.

  I told him, choosing my time carefully. He held my gaze, and I was the one who had to look away. Then he said I was making a big mistake. It made him weary, thinking of the mess I was getting into. A lit
tle spark of rebellion flared in me, and I started to list all the women in history who had had children they hadn’t planned to have, and hadn’t thought of them or their lives as a mess. Ian said their experiences were irrelevant. He took hold of my hand and begged me, ‘Don’t do this to yourself.’ I let him hold my hand a minute longer, and then I took it away. ‘Sorry,’ I said. Afterwards, I was ashamed I’d said sorry.

  When the twelve-week scan was due, I told Ian about the appointment. I didn’t seriously expect him to offer to come with me, but I suppose I hoped he might. He didn’t, but he asked what was the point of the scan. I said it would give an estimate of the date of birth, and reveal any abnormalities. He asked what I’d do if there were any abnormalities, and I said I’d have a termination. He approved of that. ‘It still isn’t too late to have one anyway,’ he said. ‘I’d go with you. You don’t have to go through a termination alone, Issy. I’d be with you.’ I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

  We were both sitting very still, across the table from each other. I felt we should get into an arm lock, put our forearms against each other, clasp our hands, and then each try to force the other’s arm down. But he’d win, obviously. He has strong arms. They look like tennis player’s arms, as though they could swing a racquet to devastating effect. I struggled to lighten the atmosphere.

  ‘I wonder if our child will have your arms,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t try that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what very well.’

  ‘Couldn’t be that you’re afraid to see the baby on the scan, could it? Couldn’t be that you’re afraid you might become emotional when you see—’