Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Emotional? You’ve got the wrong man, Issy. Me, emotional? I’m not emotional over problems. I’m logical, I think them through. I thought you did, too.’ He seemed so sad, and that made me resentful.

  ‘I did. I always have done. But being pregnant doesn’t come under the same heading as other problems. I’ve tried to explain, it’s different this time. I’m, well, I’m following an instinct, that this is—’

  ‘An instinct? Oh, come on! A whim would be more accurate.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have a baby just on a whim. If you think that’s what I’m doing, you can just leave.’

  ‘Leave? You want me to leave? Seriously?’ He was incredulous, but then he said, ‘I suppose it might be as well. I couldn’t cope with a baby.’

  I started to laugh, hysterically. He couldn’t cope with a baby living with us? Neither could I, or not without him. What had I said? I wanted to take it back, but I couldn’t find the words. And yet, at the same time, the belief that I would, should, could go ahead and have this child grew curiously stronger in me. Was it because of Ian’s opposition? If he’d reacted differently, said OK, if it’s what you want, it’ll be interesting . . . If he’d said something on those lines, would I have had a termination?

  Confused was not an adequate word for how I felt.

  And then I had the scan, and the confusion left me. I couldn’t make out a damned thing on the screen but I was told all was well. ‘It’s a lively one,’ is what the nurse – doctor? technician? – said. ‘Want to hear the heartbeat? I nodded, dumbly. The heartbeat . . . how it thumped, how determined and regular and unrelenting it was – Me! Me! Me! it said. I must have had tears in my eyes without realising it, because the woman operating the scanner smiled and patted my hand. I was in a trance leaving the room, barely able to straighten my clothes and pick up my bag. I remembered, with what felt like shame, the other occasions when I’d been pregnant (though never as pregnant as this). Suppose I’d had scans then? What would I have done? Changed my mind? No, not then, not at those times. I was a different and much younger person from the person I am now. But it would have made it harder to go ahead.

  I so desperately wanted Ian to have been with me. I know it would have made him feel differently – whatever he thinks, it would have made him feel. That is what I am doing, feeling. Feeling is proving stronger than thinking.

  It suited my mood to spend this morning looking at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of children posed as cupids, cherubs and angels. She eventually had to seek models outside her own family and found some children of a Royal Artillery soldier who lived nearby, and another child, son of a local fisherman, who were willing. Loads of studies of Alice, Elizabeth and Kate Keown, and of Freddy Gould, to me the most appealing. I thought how May would enjoy them. She is back in hospital. No drama this time. Her GP recognised the signs of another imminent disaster and had her admitted. We’re back to taking turns visiting. The last thing I want to do is go again to a hospital, but it has to be done.

  I visited her this afternoon. She’s in a four-bed ward, like last time, but this one is part of a much bigger unit. When I arrived, she looked asleep. I studied her. Closed eyes, obviously, make a huge difference to how anyone’s face looks, but in May’s case the result was dramatic. Everything about her seemed shrivelled – her skin was collapsed in on itself, with all kinds of dips and hollows appearing. I suppose it’s just that if you’re looking into someone’s eyes you don’t notice the detail of what surrounds them. Her face was suddenly like a paper bag that’s been screwed up and cast aside. Her hair had been brushed, though not by her. May brushes her hair off her face, with a parting on the left. Someone had brushed it flat to each side, with a parting in the middle. Stray strands had been pushed behind her ears. It isn’t all white, May’s hair. There’s still quite a bit of brown mixed with grey. The white is only noticeable when it’s windy and she’s outside and it blows about showing the patches underneath.

  I wondered how much May knew about what was wrong with her. All the stomach trouble, which was supposed to be due to a treatable ulcer, had now turned out to be something possibly more sinister, a growth/tumour – they seemed to alternate the words – that might, or might not, be malignant. May hadn’t asked. She hadn’t asked anything except when could she go home, though suspicions had clearly occurred to her – she did say to me that she might not live to see her great-grandchild. ‘I might never know if it’s a boy or a girl,’ she said. I asked if that would matter and she got cross with me, saying that of course it would matter, she thought it would be a boy but wanted a girl. I told her that quite soon, in a few weeks or so, I’d be having another scan, which would show the sex of the baby. ‘Bloomin’ marvellous,’ she said. I promised that I’d come straight to her and she’d be the first to know. She repeated that she hoped it was a girl, for my sake. ‘You have a son till he takes a wife,’ she recited, ‘you have a daughter, you have her for life.’ This, she informed me with pride, was ‘a wise old saying’. She’s always coming out with what she claims are wise old sayings, most of which I’m convinced she’s just made up, but this one sounded more authentic.

  The funny thing is that what May said makes me want this child to be a boy. I don’t want to keep any child for life. But then maybe I’m defining ‘keep’ and ‘life’ wrongly. I don’t know anything yet about the nature of the relationship between a mother and a child, from the mother’s point of view. Obviously, it’s complicated, but to May, it’s simple, summed up satisfactorily in one neat little rhyme.

  It’s been ages since I had lunch with Dad; my fault, not his. He’s invited me to meet him often enough but I just haven’t felt like eating, or watching him, and others, eat. But I met him today, and we had a snack at the Tate Modern, not what he calls a real lunch but it suited me fine. Great views over the Thames from where we sat.

  Dad, of course, wanted to talk about the baby, or more particularly about Ian and the baby. There didn’t seem much point in concealing the truth.

  ‘He’s moving out when the baby’s born,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Dad said, squeezing my hand. ‘Why don’t you come back home? No need to struggle on your own.’

  ‘Who said I’m going to struggle?’

  ‘Well, you’d cope, of course you would, but it’ll be hard, and—’

  ‘I don’t actually want to talk about it, Dad. There’s no need to worry about me. Millions of women look after babies on their own. And anyway, I won’t really be on my own. Ian isn’t abandoning me, he’s just . . .’ And I stopped.

  ‘Moving out,’ Dad said.

  ‘To get some peace.’

  ‘Noble of him.’

  ‘No good being sarcastic, Dad,’ I said. ‘He’s entitled to. He doesn’t want this child. I made the decision to keep it.’

  I tried to think how I could explain my confused feelings. I tried to tell him that it is all wrapped up in my work. I don’t know how, but I know it is. I started quoting lines of hymns May used to sing, stuff about time’s ever-rolling something or other, and more incoherent nonsense about feeling powerless, in the grip of fate, etc. Dad looked more and more anxious, so I decided to change the subject fast. I asked him how Isa was. He sighed and said not so good. Elspeth is talking about giving in her notice because ‘madam’ is acting increasingly ‘funny’, and Elspeth’s nerves can’t take it. Dad doesn’t think Isa is showing symptoms of senile dementia or anything like that but he admits she isn’t her usual self. She’s been what Elspeth calls ‘funny’ with him too. The other day, when he visited her, she started talking about his father in a way she had never done before. Up to now, Dad said, Patrick has always been spoken of in reverential terms – war hero and all that – but now Isa told him that his father had not been all he had seemed. This was said in an almost threatening manner – Isa, he said, appeared to wait for a response from him, leaving her words hanging in the air. Dad was uncomfortable and made some remark about none of us perhaps being as we seemed
. He rather dreads his next visit.

  We walked together back along the South Bank, all the way to Westminster Bridge. Dad put his arm round me and I put mine round him, and we sauntered along slowly, stopping every now and again to lean on the balustrades and watch the boats go by. I thought how I never seemed to do this kind of thing with Mum – it’s always with Dad. Mum’s forever working, she doesn’t have time to have lunches and walks. Will I have time? That’s what I was wondering. I’ll have to, because there won’t be a dad in my baby’s life to do this kind of thing. My work will not be able to come first, not for years and years. I almost panicked at the realisation – for my child’s sake I’ll have to snap out of my obsession with the past, my endless ruminations, and as a normal person of my age would say: ‘get real’. But I don’t want to get real if it means the sort of life I think it will mean. Tough. Maybe I should have become a nun, or a secular version of one, shut myself up in an ivory tower, withdrawn from ‘real’ life.

  Not that I came out with any of this to Dad; it would only have worried him more. We parted outside the House of Commons, quite reluctantly. I do like being with my dad. Watching him stride off – he has this odd, erratic walk, alternately shortening and lengthening his pace – I felt suddenly tearful and had to struggle not to cry. Pure self-pity, or rather pity for my unborn child, with no daddy to put his arm round it and take it out to lunch and . . . Oh, stop it! I stopped. Hormones, that’s what it was all about. Hormonal activity was making me drown in sentiment, and I had to get it under control. I have a supervision tomorrow, for which I’m nothing like prepared. I’d meant to look into the life of the anthropologist Margaret Mead and come up with some wonderfully original idea, but all I’ve done so far is outline the chronology of her work. This will hardly satisfy Claudia.

  IX

  MY SUPERVISION WITH Claudia was on Thursday at two p.m. I’d been reading about Margaret Mead half the night and felt terrible when I woke at nine o’clock. At ten, Elspeth rang Dad and reported that his mother had received a letter that appeared to have upset her very much. No, Elspeth hadn’t read the letter herself, but Mrs Symondson was still in a terrible state and she thought one of the family ought to come round. It was the usual story, Mum and Dad both with very important work that morning, so I was the ‘one of the family’ who went over.

  When I got there, Isa did look stricken, it was true. She’d been weeping, not something I’ve ever seen her do, and her face powder had run. It made me feel peculiar to see the streaks down her cheeks – I was embarrassed and shocked. The offending letter was lying in her lap. I thought she might object if I just picked it up and read it without asking her permission, so first of all I sat down next to her and took hold of her hand (which felt quite daring enough). I could see the headed notepaper, and that the address was in Hatton Garden. After a few minutes, during which there was no reaction from Isa, who was sitting quite still, staring into space, I asked if I might read the letter. She didn’t reply, so very gently I manoeuvred the sheet of paper round until I could read it without needing to pick it up. My first thought was that it was a con. I felt instantly relieved – not bad news at all. Isa was distressed for no reason, and I felt angry with these con merchants for upsetting an old lady.

  According to the letter, a relative of Isa’s had died intestate, leaving some money, and she, Isabel Clara Symondson, née Macdonell, could claim it, as his next of kin. I told her there was nothing to worry about and that I’d ring these people and give them a piece of my mind. ‘No,’ she said, ‘do not ring them. I do not want to know. I shall tear this letter up.’ She then seemed to make a huge effort, said how foolish she’d been, apologised, and did indeed begin to tear the letter up into very small pieces. ‘I shall burn it,’ she said. ‘Where are the matches?’ I couldn’t stop her – with a sudden impressive rush of energy, she was on her feet and over to the fireplace, looking unsteady but determined. She groped around for a matchbox on the mantelpiece. The fire was laid, as it always was, and she set fire to it by hurling first one match on to it, which went out, and then another and another. When the paper under the twigs and logs at last began to burn, she scattered the torn-up letter like confetti, and only when every little piece had been incinerated did she relax. ‘There,’ she said, smiling oddly, ‘all done.’

  I was stunned. What was this about? First her distress, then her agitation, and now this false good humour. She couldn’t wait to get rid of me. ‘Off you go! Alarm over,’ she kept saying, in this hearty, cheerful tone. ‘I do apologise, darling, for causing such a fuss, off you go.’ So I went. I went straight home and phoned the number I’d memorised. Once I’d said who I was, and had given my grandmother’s name, and complained about their letter, I was passed over to someone who said he was a case manager. He was very polite, answering all my barely civil questions patiently and calming me down. The firm, he assured me, was a highly respected business. It finds hidden beneficiaries of wills and unites them with the cash which they are entitled to claim before the government does so. Ten million pounds or so, he told me, slips into government coffers every year simply because nobody claims it. The government apparently publishes lists of unclaimed estates, and firms in the heir-hunting business choose which people to try to find. Macdonell, he said, was a name unusual enough to give them a good chance of tracing a descendant. They’d found Isa quite easily. Their letter hadn’t given details of who had died intestate, or of how much there was to be claimed, because they first of all negotiate a fee for doing the finding. I asked how much, thinking this was the catch, and was surprised at how reasonable it seemed. ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘my grandmother doesn’t want to know about it. She’s burned your letter.’ ‘Then perhaps her children do,’ he said, ‘or you yourself?’ I said I’d call him back.

  She hasn’t any children. Her son is not her son. She hasn’t any grandchildren. Her granddaughter is not her granddaughter. Dad and I are frauds. If Isa doesn’t want the money, we can’t claim it. But whose is it anyway? Why doesn’t she even want to know that? Well, it’s obvious. It must be her brother, the one she’d denied had ever existed. She’d always known he had. But where? And why conceal his existence? He hadn’t tried to contact his sister, not so far as we knew (though Isa, I could now see, was perfectly capable of hiding anything she wanted). But maybe he hadn’t known he had a sister. These heir-hunters could hardly know what a complicated history they were uncovering – or maybe they did know it, maybe such deceptions in the world of blood ties are commonplace to them.

  I want to uncover the truth, but without Isa’s co-operation I don’t see how I can. It’s not that I want the money (though if it’s going begging, why not?); I want to know what happened to my grandmother’s brother, why he was banished from the family and why his sister lives in such fear of this other secret of hers being exposed. But do I have any right to make her tell me – why should she?

  It isn’t my family. That’s what it comes down to. Blood ties. The deciding factor. Yet I’ve made no attempt to find out about my ‘real’ grandmother. It’s strange. It’s Isa’s fault, somehow.

  I could hardly bear the thought of my supervision and almost cancelled it but in the end knew it was too late to let Claudia down without good reason. So I went, my mind full not of Margaret Mead, the grandmother I now want to consider, but of Isa’s mysterious brother, his legacy.

  Someone was coming out of Claudia’s room when I arrived, five minutes early, a much younger woman than me. She was flushed, and might, just might, have been on the edge of tears. Anyway, she was in a state, dropping the papers she was holding in her hand as she tried to stuff them into her bag while hurrying along. I bent down to help her. I could see there were red marks, in Claudia’s startlingly neat italic handwriting, all over the pages – lots of question marks, too. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ the girl kept saying. ‘I feel sick, I’m going to vomit in a minute.’ I asked if she’d like me to go down to the cloakroom and get her a glass of water, but she said no,
she’d be fine once she got out into the fresh air, and off she scurried.

  I can’t imagine anyone actually being scared, or upset enough to feel sick after a session with Claudia, but then maybe that shows how little I know about how she treats other students and how they react to her. I was, as usual, dreading my own session with her, but not enough to make me sick. Somehow, seeing the agitation of that other young woman made me feel less apprehensive about what Claudia was going to think of how I was progressing. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of reducing me to a wreck. So I went into her room with my head up and a bright smile on my face and said, ‘Good afternoon,’ rather loudly. She inclined her head graciously, looked at her wristwatch and said, ‘Well?’ I took a deep breath and launched into Margaret Mead. I told Claudia that the best thing about Margaret Mead, for the purposes of my dissertation, was that she had addressed herself as an anthropologist, as well as a woman, so directly to the importance of grandmothers. According to her, no woman could think of herself as ‘a full human being’ without access to grandchildren – a pretty bold claim, and on the surface absurd. Her very description of the role of grandmother seemed to me inaccurate. She saw the grandmother as ‘standing in the middle of the past and future’. But surely it is the mother who does that? What did she mean? ‘Past and future merge in the relationship’ (between grandmother and grandchild), she declared, ‘and any society that ceases to recognise this is greatly endangered.’ This theory had partly come from spending her working life tracing patterns among what she termed ‘primitive peoples’. In cases where there were no written records, these people had only themselves and their families to embody what they were. Grandparents were therefore of tremendous significance and value.

  But she’d also come to this conclusion, about grandmothers being so important, because of her personal family experience. She wanted to emulate her grandmother, who had been a teacher, and it was from her that she gained her sense of self-worth as a woman, and the self-confidence to do what she wanted to do. One of her aims was to become an anthropologist but another was at the same time to become a mother – a combination unusual, still, in the first half of the twentieth century. She planned to have six children. But in 1926, during her first marriage (she was married three times), when she was twenty-five, she was told that because of her retroverted womb she wouldn’t be able to have children – if she did conceive, she would miscarry. And miscarry she did, once during that first marriage, and then repeatedly during her third. Most of her miscarriages happened early in the pregnancies, but in 1939 she had a late, bad, miscarriage and thought her chances of ever carrying a baby to full term were finished. But in that same year, 1939, on 8 December, she gave birth to a daughter. She was thirty-eight.