Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  Naturally, as an anthropologist, she was even more fascinated than a normal mother by the emergence in her daughter of traits and dispositions that could be attributed to one member of the child’s family or another. She knew how dangerous and misleading this game could be, but she couldn’t stop playing it. When, at the age of sixty-nine, she became a grandmother to her daughter’s daughter, she played it even more intensely during the brief spells when they saw each other. In fact, because her daughter lived in Europe, Margaret’s grandmothering was hardly put to the test, and in any case the child was only six when Margaret died. I hadn’t yet been able to find out much about how she developed as a grandmother, but that didn’t seem to me to be as important as knowing what she thought and why. I said to Claudia that Margaret Mead’s conviction that grandmothers were vital in society was something my whole theory, my whole dissertation, was based on.

  There was the most unnerving silence after I’d stopped talking. I swear I could hear my own breath going in and out of my nose, so laboured and heavy, as I waited. Then Claudia finally spoke. ‘Theory?’ she said, as though it were a dirty word. ‘Theory? What is this? It is beginning to sound more like a romantic novel than a dissertation.’ She closed her eyes and seemed to shudder slightly, repeating ‘theory’ with disgust. Then she sighed and said that after all this time I still needed to narrow down my broad subject matter – ‘the importance of grandmothers in women’s history’ had to have behind it a proper rationale. What exactly was my research question? She still was not clear. And what was the relationship between the question, whatever it was, and the nature of my sources? I had to decide if these sources – was I talking just diaries, letters, autobiographical fragments? – presupposed certain horizons, certain limits, to my investigation. She didn’t doubt my genuine interest in how the role of grandmother had developed and how it has influenced the growth of feminism, if it has, but what she very much doubted, as she had by now constantly repeated, was the direction in which my interest was leading me. I must sort out the relationship between my material, my methodology and my intention. In short, I lacked self-reflexivity. I was becoming tiresome.

  It’s an offensive word, ‘tiresome’. It suggests a reprimand to a whining, snivelling three-year-old. To use it to describe the behaviour of an adult is contemptuous. I’d rather be called stupid, but maybe that is because I know I’m not stupid, whereas I hate to think I might indeed be tiresome. I hung my head, bright smile gone. There was another prolonged silence. Claudia, of course, uses that kind of silence as a weapon. Usually, I break it, trying to snatch the initiative, to show I’m not cowed, but today I didn’t. I was thinking bugger it, I’ll just drop this whole charade and become a full-time mother. Claudia was talking again. She was saying that she would like to see a draft of my dissertation. She presumed, she said, that a first draft had long since been completed. She presumed wrongly. I hadn’t written a word of the thirty thousand she was expecting.

  I said I would deliver something next week.

  There are 10,000 trillion ants in the world. There are about 6.6 billion humans. Ants live and die for the good of the colony. Isn’t that noble?

  It’s the kind of information that sidetracks me. I think about the ants and their altruism, and then I think about humans and, on the whole, their lack of it, and I struggle to make something of it. I’m not a myrmecologist, so why does it interest me? Because of the genes thing. Humans pass on their own individual genes. Ants apparently pass on group genes – their altruism starts with family members. It is more important to them that the group, the family, survives than that the individual does.

  I am convincing myself that I am behaving like an ant.

  Well, that came to me in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep. Ian was sound asleep beside me, so I couldn’t ask him questions, not that he is a myrmecologist either, but it is his fault I was thinking about ants and their altruism. He came home yesterday with one of his pilfered cuttings, about some scientist who has this theory about the replication of genes. He thought it might help me with my dissertation. The idea was so bizarre it made me laugh, a little hysterically, but still – it was good to laugh when all I wanted to do was weep.

  I was tired. I’d been to see both Isa and May, and it was too much, but I felt I’d neglected both of them and I felt bad about it. I resolved to spend at least an hour with each of them before getting my head down and starting the draft of my dissertation, because once I do start – and that will be a miracle, I’ve put it off so long – I’m not going to do anything else. I’m going to hole up and think and straighten out my thoughts and then astound Claudia with a clear, concise, intriguing outline. I am.

  It was a risk, visiting Isa without phoning her first and without knowing what kind of state she was in, after the letter episode, but if she was going to give Elspeth the pleasure of relaying the news that she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, receive me (Isa always ‘receives’ people, even family), I would at least be able to say to myself that I’d tried. But I was given a true welcome, which startled me – it was as though Isa had forgotten about her disapproval of my pregnancy, or even that she’d forgotten about my being pregnant at all. This was the Isa pre-’turns’ – gracious, kindly, eager to converse. The relief . . .

  What she wanted to converse about was her father’s car. She’d found a photograph of his first motor car, a 6hp Oldsmobile, registered in January 1904. It had cost £150. But what Isa remembered hearing about the car wasn’t the price but the fact that it had travelled extensively in the service of the suffragette cause. It was Isa’s aunt Mabel, her father’s sister, who thought women should have the vote. Her interest in the suffrage movement started in 1906, when she met some ladies at tea in Bath. In July of that year she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed by Mrs Pankhurst in 1903. She was only eighteen at the time. Surprisingly, said Isa, her parents were sympathetic and her brother positively enthusiastic – ‘very odd’. It was James, Isa’s father and Mabel’s brother, who drove her to meetings during the next six years. Mabel never took part in any violence – Isa shuddered at the thought – and was never imprisoned. Her main activity was distributing leaflets. But she met Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney and Mrs Patrick Lawrence, and other prominent suffragettes.

  Isa carried on talking about Mabel, and though I was interested, my mind wandered, as it seems to all the time at the moment, and I felt sad. It was nothing to do with hearing about Mabel’s fate (she died aged twenty-six of TB) but with thinking that this interesting-sounding woman had no connection with me. Before I knew that Isa was not really my grandmother, I would have been thrilled to have such a relative, someone who had actually had the nerve to become a suffragette. But now the thrill is not there. I don’t carry Mabel’s genes. My admiration for her isn’t personal. I can’t boast about her.

  ‘He loved Mabel,’ Isa was saying, ‘loved her dearly. I do believe he never got over her death.’

  ‘Shame,’ I said, vaguely.

  ‘My mama looked like Mabel. That was the initial attraction for my father, I’m sure.’

  ‘How incestuous,’ I said, still vague, still not concentrating.

  Luckily, Isa didn’t seem to have heard my remark, which surely would have offended her, and I had time to pick up the photograph of the car and admire it, and then, though I was hardly listening, I think Isa chatted away about all the cars her father and her husband had had, and I was able to smile brightly and nod, and the hour flew. I wondered if I ought to mention being pregnant again, just in case she really had forgotten, or not taken it in, but I decided not to. And there was the legacy business to discuss, but she was in such a good mood and I didn’t want to spoil it. Then, just as I was about to start preparing to go, she came out with the strangest remark. ‘Men never can know,’ she said, ‘that they are truly the father. Women have the advantage there.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What did you say?’ I realised I really hadn’t been lis
tening to her properly. Somehow we’d finished with cars and the suffragette cause and moved on to establishing paternity.

  ‘Men,’ Isa said, serenely, ‘terribly difficult for them, don’t you think? They can never be certain. They have to believe the woman.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, not sure quite how to take this up but desperately keen to, ‘well, I suppose men do know who they’ve slept with, and what the chances are, and—’

  ‘Ah yes, the chances,’ and she smiled.

  I stared at Isa. She looked back at me, quite steadily. I thought she seemed expectant, geared up for some sort of challenge, perhaps. ‘I suppose,’ I said, carefully, ‘it’s about trust. If a man trusts a woman. If he believes he’s been the only one.’

  ‘Oh yes, in my day,’ Isa said, then added, ‘but not always, even then. A man could not be absolutely sure unless he’d kept the woman locked up, and she was a virgin to start with.’

  ‘Grandmama,’ I said, ‘I think I’m lost; I think I can’t have heard something you were saying . . .’

  ‘Mabel,’ Isa said.

  ‘Yes, I remember that of course: your father’s car and Mabel and the suffragettes and your mother looking like Mabel, but—’

  ‘You said it sounded incestuous.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘My mother told me that she wondered if my father loved her because she looked like his sister. That would have been a sort of incest, would it not?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think so, not really.’

  I was still lost. Somehow Isa had gone from speculating about why her father was attracted to her mother to reflecting that men could never be sure that they were the true father of their child. Any connection was so glaringly missing that there was no point in pretending I understood. She seemed quite pleased that she had baffled me. ‘I was remembering,’ she said, slowly, enjoying her sense of advantage, ‘my father loving my mother because she looked like Mabel. And then you made your remark about incest and I recalled hearing a tale of an adopted boy who had unknowingly fallen in love with his natural sister and they produced a child before they discovered their relationship. Now, in those days it was very shocking, but when my mother told me this story she did not seem shocked. The child, it turned out, was perfectly normal. But then my mother said that though this woman said the father was the man she later found to be her brother, he may not have been. Men can never be sure. I didn’t know these people she was talking about; I didn’t know their names or who they were or where they lived. My mother may have identified them – she made it clear that she had known them, that this was not gossip – but if so, I have forgotten. But I have not forgotten how strangely she smiled when she pointed out that men can never be sure. That has stayed with me. It worried me then and it worries me now.’

  Was she trying to tell me something in the only way she knew how, the convoluted way, the roundabout way? Definitely she was waiting, watching me intently, gauging my reaction. I was frowning. I could feel the frown. Usually she would have told me not to frown, not to disfigure myself – the skin of the face should at all times be relaxed, neither frown nor smile allowed to settle in too deeply. I felt that anything I said would be dangerous, and yet I so badly wanted to be blunt and ask questions – I was bursting with questions. But Isa didn’t wait for me to speak. She said, very quietly, almost absent-mindedly, ‘Your grandfather had a secretary once. Quite a young girl, pretty in a rather old-fashioned way. She had a baby. Nobody knew who the father was. Names were bandied about, but it seemed she had had several boyfriends in spite of her youth. She named the father but she couldn’t prove it and many did not believe her, many thought she was naming the one man who could provide for her if he could be convinced he was the father. Shocking, really. I’m sure it happens all the time. Fathers can’t be sure.’

  I knew what to say this time. ‘They can now, Grandmama, with a DNA test. You’ve heard about that, haven’t you? It’s quite simple. At least, having the test is simple. You only need a blood sample, or a hair from a baby’s head, or—’

  ‘Ah, but if the man is dead, it is too late.’

  ‘No, no, it isn’t. A blood relative will do. Look at Prince Philip and how he was used to prove that an American woman was not Anastasia. Exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Prince Philip?’

  ‘His family was related to the Russians, to the Tsar’s family, so they shared a genetic inheritance. Whatever sample Prince Philip gave didn’t match the sample this impostor gave. Their DNA was different, so she couldn’t be Anastasia.’

  I could now see, of course, exactly where this was going, but what I couldn’t see was how to bring it into the open and get rid of all this beating about the bush. Did Isa truly want to know if my father was really the son of her late husband? But why? For what possible reason? If her husband had believed my father was his son, wasn’t that enough? Why cast doubt on this, after all these years? What had got into her? But she was calm and composed, there was calculated thought behind what had at first seemed a case of mere reminiscing. She had always intended, I was suddenly sure, to end up getting as near as she could to telling me she had doubted the truth of my father’s parentage, and now she was waiting to see if I saw through her pathetic ploy.

  Except it wasn’t really pathetic. I realised that. I sensed she wanted to expose doubts about my father’s paternity as some sort of twisted revenge. I’d upset her all those weeks ago, going on about a brother she either hadn’t known existed or whose existence she still wanted to conceal, and her resentment had festered. Into her mind had crept a way of getting her own back. She knew how I felt about family and she was taking half of it away from me. My father was to be made anonymous, with his mother dead and her family wanting nothing to do with him right from his birth, and now he was to be robbed of the man supposed to be his father. Was there no option for me except to be brutally frank?

  Before I could, Isa again took me by surprise. ‘Your young man,’ she said, ‘the father of your child, is he sure it is his?’

  ‘Of course he is! Really, Grandmama . . .’

  ‘He has no doubts?’

  ‘No! How can you ask such a thing?’

  ‘Then why does he not marry you? Why does he not do the proper thing by his child?’

  ‘There isn’t a proper thing . . .’

  ‘Or is he married already? Have you thought of that?’

  I was so exasperated I could hardly stop myself from shouting at her. There she sat, a complacent smile on her face, imagining that she had somehow cornered me, and it was all so ridiculous and twisted. I caught myself just in time, and saw that instead of being furious I should be amused. My laugh didn’t come out very convincingly, but it helped. ‘Grandmama,’ I said, at my most formal and polite, ‘I must be going. We seem to be at cross-purposes today.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Isa said, ‘but you should pay attention.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To me. To what I am warning you of.’

  ‘Warning?’

  ‘The dangers. For the child you are carrying. The confusion there will be.’

  ‘What confusion? For God’s sake . . .’

  ‘About the father.’

  ‘There is no confusion. Ian is the father. He knows he is. The child will know who its father is.’

  ‘His name will be on the birth certificate? He will pay for the child’s upkeep? He will help rear it? He will love it? He—’

  ‘Grandmama, stop!’

  She stopped. I stared at her in amazement – her voice had risen hysterically. I could hear Elspeth opening the door, and it was a relief instead of an irritation to hear her ask if everything was all right. I managed to say I wasn’t sure if it was or not. Elspeth hurried to Isa’s side and said she looked flushed. She did. ‘There, there, Mrs Symondson,’ Elspeth said, ‘I’ll get you a glass of nice cold water.’ She scurried off, and I got to my feet, feeling shaky. Should I kiss Isa or not? Even the regulation peck seemed too much, so I just patted her
hand and said I would see her soon. I didn’t say anything to Elspeth, who was coming back into the room with the water as I left. I escaped before she could interrogate me to find out what had upset madam.

  I wouldn’t have been able to tell her anyway. Back and back I went in my mind, trying to trace the course of our conversation and being unable to. Writing down what I remember of it now, it is obvious that some link is missing. While my mind had wandered, there had been a change of direction, and of mood, and I’d become a victim of Isa’s long-buried anger with her dead husband. But am I right to think that? She hasn’t actually said to me that she always doubted that Patrick was James’s father. She hasn’t ever confessed what I know, and my father knows, to be the only truth: that she is not his mother. Everything has been obscured by hints and insinuations. She has depended on all of us letting her maintain the façade she constructed so long ago. We have conspired with her to let things stay as she wants them to stay.

  Or is that wrong? Trying to get into Isa’s mind, and understand her thinking, is impossible.