Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Well then, what did happen?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Ian! This is so stupid.’

  ‘Yes, it is, and if you’re going to go on like this just because I refuse to call my mother back, for my own good reasons, then I’ll go out.’

  He didn’t shout. He didn’t sound particularly angry. He just sounded tired. I went into the kitchen and started cooking. Maybe if we ate, Ian might change his mind and realise that he must reply to his poor mother’s message. His ‘poor’ mother – that was how I was thinking of her. Ian had grown in her body as my baby was now growing in mine, and she’d gone through the agony of giving birth, and the intimacy of feeding him, and now he wouldn’t even return a phone call. I hadn’t believed that his detachment could be as extreme as this. He’d told me virtually nothing about his childhood, but I did once ask him if he’d never loved his mother and he sighed and said no, not that he could recall. He’d added that I just had to get it into my head that some people feel nothing for their mother, and that I was wasting my time trying to make him feel guilty about this.

  This makes Ian sound such a cold, hard man, but he is not. I asked him once if he would have liked to feel about his parents the way I feel about mine, and he admitted it had certain attractions. I suggested that in that case maybe he could try harder to foster family relationships, but he got annoyed then and said he’d spent years trying, and he’d failed. Distance, and time, hadn’t made him feel any differently. So I’d learned not to go on about his lack of any contact. But now I felt outraged on his mother’s behalf. I begged him as we ate to call her back. Finally, wearily, he said he would, but later. We chatted amiably for a while longer. The tension I felt was making me stutter. He asked about Isa, and whether anything had been done about the legacy business. I said I hadn’t had time to do anything about it yet. When we’d finished supper, I pleaded with him again to ring his mother. He said he would, but that he knew she’d call again anyway, he’d just give it another half-hour. When the phone rang, about nine o’clock, he gave me a little smile, knowing perfectly well what I was thinking. He let it ring until it almost switched to the BT answering service – that’s twelve rings – and then he went over and picked up the receiver. He didn’t say anything, not even hello, or his number. He just waited. After a moment or two, he gave a small grunt, which must have been an agreement to some question.

  I wondered if I should leave the room and let him have this conversation in private, though what I wanted to do was lift the extension in our bedroom and listen in. But since Ian didn’t seem to be saying anything at all – this was a monologue on his mother’s part – there was no need for me to go. I sat at the table instead, still nibbling the fruit we’d ended our meal with, skinning grapes ever so carefully with my teeth, watching his face. I decided it wasn’t quite expressionless, though that was what he was aiming for. When you know a person really well, when you’ve been their intimate companion for a long time, no facial expression can really be blank. Ian wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t frowning, he wasn’t contorting his features into any show of boredom or impatience or irritation. His face was quite still. But his eyes gave everything away. He had narrowed them, dropped his eyelids, so that anyone who didn’t know him as I knew him might have thought he was falling asleep. It wasn’t that at all. When Ian lets that happen he is angry and he is trying to hide his anger.

  I saw him pick up a biro and scribble something on the notepad beside the phone. ‘Yes,’ he said, and ‘Tomorrow, if possible.’ There was a pause. ‘Because I don’t know if it will be possible,’ he said. Another fairly prolonged silence, with the earpiece held a little way from his ear so that even across the room I could hear the loud Scottish voice. It stopped. Ian still held the receiver until there was a click at the other end. Carefully, he replaced it. ‘Well?’ I said. He shrugged and walked off into the kitchen, carrying our empty plates. I followed him with the rest of the used dishes and said, ‘Well?’ again, and at that moment the phone rang again. This time I went to answer it – Ian was shaking his head and I knew he wouldn’t – and I was suddenly desperate to talk to his mother myself.

  But of course it wasn’t his mother. I don’t know why I’d been so convinced that it would be. It was May. She’d been thinking about me and was everything all right? I said fine, everything’s fine, and how come she was making phone calls so late, why wasn’t she in bed listening to her wireless, all snug with her hot-water bottle? She said because she was worried and knew she wouldn’t sleep and it was better to wander about until the worry settled. I asked her what had suddenly made her so anxious about me and she said it wasn’t sudden, she’d worried about me all my life and always would because that’s the way she was made, that’s what being a mother and then a grandmother did to a woman . . . I listened as patiently as possible, repeating all the time that I was very well, and so was the baby (though how could I know that?), and eventually she was satisfied and said she was off to her bed. The last thing she said, after one ‘Good night, love’ and before the next, was that I should remind her to show me something the next time I came round.

  ‘That was May,’ I said, out loud, when this was over. ‘Just fussing about how I’m feeling.’ There was no response from the kitchen, and when I went back to it there was no Ian there. He was in the bedroom, packing. Well, not exactly packing. He was standing in front of the chest of drawers, the drawers all open, staring into them.

  ‘It’ll be cold,’ he muttered, ‘it always is,’ and he picked out his thickest sweater, a black and grey thing with a polo neck. This went into the bag he’d already got out of the cupboard. ‘So you’re going to your mother’s?’ I asked. No reply. ‘What’s wrong, then? Has there been an accident?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then? Is she ill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s too boring, too complicated.’

  ‘If it’s complicated it can’t be boring, Ian.’

  ‘Yes it can. Complications can be immensely boring.’

  ‘I won’t be bored. Tell me.’

  He hadn’t put much into the bag but he zipped it up and put his jacket on quickly. Then he checked his pockets, counted the cash in them, and slung the bag on his shoulder. ‘I haven’t time,’ he said. ‘I’m getting the train. I’ll be lucky to catch it.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Where do you think? Glasgow.’

  ‘So it is an emergency?’

  ‘Not in my opinion.’

  ‘But in your mother’s?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I thought I heard you tell her you’d have to see if you could get time off work.’

  ‘That was so I get the advantage.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Arriving before she expects me.’

  ‘Ian, you are odd, really you are. I don’t understand this.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Oh, come on, surely you’re not going to leave without filling me in just a bit . . .’

  ‘I will when I get back, when everything’s sorted. Bye.’

  I followed him down the stairs, right to the front door, begging him to give me a clue, but he wouldn’t. As he opened the door to leave, I was so cross with him that I said something deliberately to annoy him. ‘Don’t forget,’ I said, before the door closed on him, ‘to tell your mum she’s going to have a grandchild’ – the last thing in the world he would tell her. It was spiteful to make that my parting shot, but then I have a tendency to be spiteful when I’m thwarted, unlike Ian. I was sorry the minute I’d said it, and opened the door to shout after him, telling him so, but he’d gone. I rang him immediately on his mobile but he had it turned off, so I texted him, apologising.

  Usually when I’m on my own in my flat, there is a sense of relief at having it to myself again. It’s not that I don’t want Ian there – we wouldn’t be living together if I didn’t – but that I like gaps, the sort of short gaps that happen naturally. I ne
ver have to say to him look, can you give me a day or two on my own, a couple of nights maybe, because he realises I have this need and he absents himself quite unconsciously at just the right moments, saying he’s off on some cycling trip, or going to an away football match and will stay overnight. So it’s not unusual for me to be on my own, and I like it. But that night I didn’t. I was shocked to find I felt lonely, deserted. I wanted Ian there, sharing with me whatever his mother had told him. The way he’d behaved seemed suddenly to underline how far he was moving away from me just when I didn’t want him to. And it was my own fault. I was going to have his baby, the child he did not want. I was going to be with it on my own. I was sure he was going to move out. I knew all this, I’d accepted the consequences of going against Ian’s wishes, but what I hadn’t taken into account was how I would change because I was pregnant, and by changing need him in a way I had never anticipated. Pregnancy was making me feel dependent on him.

  Now, this had nothing to do with Ian not disclosing his mother’s news – seeing it as private, and none of my business – but it started something off that I didn’t like. He wasn’t going to let me, or his child, anywhere near his mother or anyone else in his peculiar family. He was probably terrified that I would somehow contact his mother and tell her I was carrying her son’s child. It wasn’t fair, on me or my child-to-be, to know nothing about her. My child was going to be as deprived of knowledge of its true genetic inheritance just as surely as my father had been deprived of his.

  We have two desks in the flat. Ian’s is just a basic IKEA job, but it fits neatly under the window on the landing, leaving mine to occupy the tiny box room. Ian doesn’t ever really work at his desk – he just needs it for storage, and to use his laptop there occasionally. It has three drawers, none of them very deep, but he keeps most of his stuff on the surface, spread out. I wasn’t expecting to find anything interesting or personal in the drawers – I knew there wouldn’t be diaries or letters, Ian being the sort of man he is (or who I think he is). But I did find something underneath his passport. It was a tiny photograph, about 5x3cm, in a cardboard folder. It was very old, the black and white turned grey type, and it didn’t show much. Just two faces, neither distinct, one of a woman with white hair and one of a boy. I couldn’t be absolutely certain the boy was Ian. The photograph wasn’t large enough and the image not clear enough to see any distinguishing features, but it was easy to persuade myself that the boy’s rather square face was Ian’s, and so were the heavy eyebrows. I took it over to the window to get a better look. Both boy and woman were smiling, happy to be photographed (not at all like Ian now). I turned the snap over. No names, but a pencilled date, 1984.

  If it was Ian, he would’ve been eight. But who was the woman? Somehow, I didn’t think it could be his mother. I know nothing about his mother; I don’t know her age or any other detail, but this woman looked too old, at least sixty, maybe older. Could it be his grandmother? But he had never given the remotest hint of loving, or being close to, a grandmother. He had told me that one little anecdote about her teaching him to bake, and had told May about the tea ritual, but beyond that no suggestion that he was devoted enough to her to keep a photo of the two of them – and keep it secreted away, never showing it to me. I was hurt. Why hide it? He knew I would love it. I replaced it. My heart was thudding slightly, not so much with excitement at unearthing the secretive Ian’s secret photo but with a strange sort of nervousness.

  I kept thinking, how well do we know people who are not part of our family? Well, I agree, how much do we know about those who are family, but it is somehow different. You’ve grown up with family; you haven’t grown up with people you meet outside it. I met Ian four years ago, when he was twenty-eight. There are twenty-eight years of his life I don’t know about. He doesn’t reminisce, he isn’t into that kind of sharing, and he has moved geographically a long way from where he was born and brought up so nothing can be known by me from observing him in his natural habitat, as it were. And now he has gone off to a mother he barely refers to for a reason he won’t divulge.

  I suddenly wanted the comfort of my own family. If I’d had a sister, I’d have rung her, but I don’t, so the choice was only between my parents and, I suppose, Beattie. I hesitated a long time before ringing Mum, ashamed that all I wanted was some kind of reassurance it wasn’t really possible for her to give – she knows Ian even less well than I do, how can she explain his attitude? But I had to talk to someone safe, and none of my friends, not even Beattie, came into that category. By ‘safe’ I mean someone I could trust not to get carried away and enjoy the drama of the situation too much – I didn’t want their speculations. And I didn’t want to lose face. My pride wouldn’t let me confide in them. Ian is the one I confide in. Nobody else has filled the same need for the last few years. So, eventually, after another hour of pacing up and down, and making tea I didn’t drink, I rang Mum and unloaded all my anxiety and bewilderment on her.

  She was sensible. I know I mock how invariably sensible she is but it is very soothing. When I was younger, it enraged me, but now it is what I want. Ian, she said, would be dealing with his own emotions and was probably unable to be coherent about whatever had happened to make his mother call. As he’d told me, it might all genuinely be so complicated he wouldn’t have known where to start. And he was hurrying to catch a train. He’d had no time to sit down and start explaining. I was, she thought, being unfair to him, which was understandable, but still. She said that one of my faults was constantly to imagine that other people fitted into their families the way I fitted into mine. Ian had made it plain from the beginning of our relationship that he was not a family man. He had removed himself from the family set-up. Pulled back into it now, for whatever reason, he would be fighting his reluctance to give way to the pressure being exerted.

  I listened, and was calmer. I had her sensible voice in my ear and that was all I needed – it wasn’t as though she was actually saying anything I hadn’t thought of anyway. I lay on the bed, duvet up to my neck, warm and, at last, relaxed, the phone on the pillow beside me. ‘But what about the photograph, Mum?’ I said. ‘Why go to the lengths of keeping it hidden like that?’ She said probably because it was so precious, or maybe it was wrapped up with something too sad or distressing to talk about. I said I was hurt that he’d never shown it to me if it was so precious, what did that signify? ‘You ask too many questions, Issy,’ Mum said, ‘that’s what it signifies. Ian couldn’t face the inquisition, I expect.’ She sounded tired, as well she might be. She works so hard, and there I was moaning away when she should be asleep. So I mumbled my thanks and said I was sure she was right, and hung up.

  But I didn’t sleep straight away. I do ask too many questions. I do start asking more when someone is trying to answer them. It makes Ian’s head ache. The thing to do was not to badger him with questions but instead to wait, to be receptive to his mood, and see if this would encourage him to volunteer what he would not let be dragged out of him by excitable questioning.

  See, I can be as sensible as my mother.

  XI

  WOKE UP FEELING much better in every way. Showered, dressed, had a decent breakfast and left for the British Library resolved to put in a full day’s work and not think about Ian and his mother at all. I waited patiently in the queue to hand my coat in when I got to the library, and then had to wait again to get a chair in the Reading Room, which was crowded and not nearly as quiet as I like it to be, but once my books arrived, after twenty minutes, that other life became mine. I was content, immersed in Coming of Age in Samoa and another Margaret Mead publication I thought might be relevant, Letters from the Field. I forgot I was pregnant. My baby couldn’t dominate me in that place. I was happily living in my head.

  And then, after about an hour, I felt it. A beat, a pulse. Low down in my stomach, a quivering. I held myself absolutely still. I waited. Nothing happened. Slowly, I relaxed, cautiously turning a page. But then it began again, the beat, the pulse, the q
uivering. Three times in succession I felt it, stronger each time. Of course – the quickening. It was what I’d been told would happen. The child stirring, the child telling me what a fool I was to think I could forget it. The flutterings ceased, but I couldn’t get back to concentrating. For half an hour I simply sat there, head bent, furtively watching the bulge under my green sweater to see if it moved, but it didn’t. I packed up my stuff, handed the books in, and left the Reading Room.

  I felt upset out of all proportion. What was going to happen to me if this child could already distract me before it was even born? I struggled on to the hellishly noisy Euston Road, suddenly appalled at my irresponsibility. Ian was right. There I was, fancying myself scholarly, supposedly loving research, and choosing to go ahead and have a baby I had not planned. A pattern familiar in the history of women, which I enjoyed studying so much. I didn’t need to go in search of examples of my behaviour. They tumble down the ages in hordes, women bearing children they had had no intention of giving birth to, and yet for over half a century there’s been contraception available, and access to terminations has been allowed now for decades. The cars and lorries and buses hurtled past me as I stood at a bus stop doing sums in my head. Was it really too late to get rid of this baby? Yes, it was, absolutely, definitely, completely impossible for me. I was twenty-two weeks pregnant. I stood there and wept.

  A bus came. I had no idea which bus it was, or where it might be going. It was just a bus, getting on it was something to do. I clambered on to the top deck and sat right at the front, and carried on quite openly crying in a self-indulgent, slow, unembarrassed way. It was as though I was just leaking grief. Can a grown woman really be so childish? Apparently. And the awful thing was, I almost wanted someone to notice me. Anyone, a complete stranger, just someone who registered my distress and bothered to stop and console me. But it was London, the Euston Road. I’d have had to collapse, literally fall flat on to the filthy pavement before anyone noticed, and even then I’d have been approached warily. The most a passer-by might have done was ring an ambulance. And there I was full of self-pitying resentment that nobody cared about my tears, sitting on the top of a bus going God knew where. How could I have a child when I couldn’t control myself?