Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  Inevitably, May had to be told about Isa’s death (the post-mortem revealed she’d died of an aortic aneurysm). I was afraid she might glory in it, be almost triumphant that she had survived ‘Lady Muck’, but she was clearly shocked and, without being ghoulish, wanted to know every detail of what had happened. ‘You never know,’ she said, ‘you never know the minute.’ She said it in awe of Isa’s fate, her face creased with concern. I thought she’d be eager to go to the funeral, but no, she said she’d ‘gone off’ funerals.

  I don’t know why Mum had told her about Ian’s mother turning up – maybe to take her mind off death – but May rang me up in a great state of indignation.

  ‘What’s this? What’s this I hear?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard, Granny.’

  ‘About that woman turning up, about the carry-on.’

  ‘Oh, it was nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Don’t sound like it. Bloomin’ cheek, fancy her barging in like that, and you carrying her grandchild, scandalous.’

  ‘Granny, don’t let it upset you.’

  ‘Was she right in the head? That’s what I want to know. Is she barmy?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, what’s this bee in her bonnet about? What’s this about your fella’s father?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s confused, she—’

  ‘Confused? Blimey, she’s more than confused if she’s taken all this time to tell the boy who his dad is.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’

  ‘What was it like, then? What was she doing there? What is she after? Is there money somewhere, eh?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Bound to be. I knew it. Has your fella’s dad just died or something?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Ian hasn’t explained yet.’

  ‘Well, he’d better. It ain’t good for you and it ain’t good for me, all this. I’ll be going the way of your other grandma any minute, I will.’

  I slept again all afternoon. I was still lying there when Ian came home.

  ‘I have been up,’ I murmured, thinking he might imagine I hadn’t stirred since he’d left.’

  ‘Good. And have you eaten?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And now I’m ready to hear it all, Ian, every little bit, OK? No more putting off.’

  ‘Am I allowed some food myself first?’

  ‘Only if you’re quick.’

  He came and sat on the bed with a plate of food and ate steadily while he related his history in a straightforward way. He spoke slowly, in short bursts, pausing while he ate some more, and then starting again. It seemed to help him that he was consuming food, engaged in a simple activity, and not just talking, and I think it helped, too, that because I was lying down, and he was sitting beside me, we were not staring at each other. He’d told me before he started not to ask questions till he got to the end, so I didn’t, though from the beginning of his recital they crowded in on me. The story of his childhood was told flatly, but even so it was distressing to hear, and the fact that it was sadly familiar enough didn’t make it any less so. His mother always had some man living with her after Sammy had died. Ian’s first memory of a stepfather (though since his mother never married again these men were not real stepfathers) was not of Sammy but of Pete. Pete must, Ian reckoned, have stayed about two years but he dominates Ian’s earliest recollections. Pete drank, his mother drank, there were fights, though Ian himself was never struck. He learned, as such children do, to keep out of the way, which often meant under the bed, or, as he grew older, and other stepfathers behaved in much the same way, out of the house. His only ally was his maternal grandmother, who sometimes came and took him to her home. She lived in two rooms in a tenement block with a bed set into an alcove in each of the rooms. Ian was happy with her but he was never there long. His mother, instead of being glad to get rid of him, as might have been expected, kept wanting him back. It wasn’t, he was sure, through affection or consideration for his welfare. She just seemed to want to own him. But then, when he was about fourteen, a new man, Stuart, came into his mother’s life. He was, said Ian, a very nasty piece of work. There was no need, he said, to go into the nastiness, and he personally didn’t suffer from it. The point was, eventually he could no longer stand it. It had taken him a long time to work out what was happening, but then he was young, only fourteen when it started. Stuart would bring a ‘mate’ home. The mate would stay the night and be gone in the morning. These mates didn’t like Ian being around, so his mother would tell him to go to his room and stay there, which he was only too glad to do. Sometimes there would be weeks without Stuart bringing anyone home, and then it would start up again, this ‘bed and breakfast’ as Stuart called it. So far as Ian could tell, his mother didn’t seem to object. Every time a strange man stayed, Stuart would buy her new clothes or jewellery. But then one morning, Ian, still in his room, heard his mother shouting at Stuart, and Stuart shouting back. The words were indistinct, but he could tell his mother was objecting and Stuart was threatening. Ian crept to the top of the stairs and peered down, into the kitchen. He saw some banknotes on the table. Stuart was giving his mother some of them and his mother was trying to take more. Suddenly, he understood. As soon as he could, he went to his grandmother’s. He asked if he could stay for good. She said of course, but that his mother would come and claim him, and she warned him that she had the right.

  So Ian prepared himself. He carefully wrote down an account of Stuart’s behaviour and sent it to the police station near where his mother lived. Social workers appeared. Ian was closely questioned. A court order was issued. He was allowed to live with his grandmother. He remained with her for four years, until he went to university. His mother did keep appearing but he managed, as he grew bigger and stronger, to face her down, and of course there was the court order on his side. Once he left his grandmother’s home and came to London, he didn’t see his mother for ten years, till just before he met me.

  So far, so good, meaning I’d understood what Ian was telling me, even if I had loads of questions to ask. But the next bit was difficult to make sense of. Ian was well aware of this. He’d finished his food, and was sitting with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, as though forcing himself to stay still and concentrate. ‘She said she had something to tell me, “in your interest”, as she put it.’

  ‘How did she find you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anyway, she did find me. I was living in Vauxhall. She turned up, just like she did yesterday. Luckily, I was on my own, my flatmates were out. I didn’t even recognise her straightaway, I really didn’t. It had been ten years, more than ten, and she looked very different, her hair, her clothes, and she’d put on weight. She said she wanted to get to know me, let bygones be bygones, she was my mother after all. I said I didn’t want to know her. I forget how I put it, but maybe that’s because I want to forget, it was all so embarrassing and somehow humiliating. I just wanted rid of her, but she wouldn’t go. She said I should try to see things from her point of view, now I was grown up and “a man of the world”. I didn’t say anything. Then she asked me if I’d ever wondered who my father was. I said I’d never been interested. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t deserve to be known. She said she’d tell me if I wanted. I said no thanks. I actually said “no thanks” as though she’d offered me a sweet. She just wouldn’t go, sat there smoking and staring at me and rambling on. She said I got my brains from my father, he’d been a clever bastard too, she should have known the type – and I stopped her. She said right, she’d done her best to “make amends”, “heal the breach”. She said I’d regret not taking the opportunity to learn where I came from, whose blood I had, who I was. I said I knew who I was, and she laughed. “You’ve no idea, son,” she said. And then she gave me a name. I’m not going to repeat it. She said that this man with the famous name had been my father. I knew instantly it was a fantasy.’

  He was nearly at the end. For a whi
le, he stopped talking and I didn’t know if I was going to have to press him to tell me why his mother had turned up again. I ought to have guessed, of course. Ian’s father, the man whose name he refused to repeat, had been killed in a car accident, years ago, but his father, Ian’s alleged grandfather, had only just died, at the age of ninety-one, and he’d died intestate. If Ian took a DNA test and proved he was this man’s grandson, he could claim the estate, or at least part of it. And his mother expected him to share it with her, ‘for all I’ve suffered’, as she’d put it.

  Another long silence. I was appalled by what Ian had told me about his mother, but eventually, shakily, I said, ‘Permission to ask questions now.’ He smiled slightly, a tired smile, and said, ‘Go on then, but not too many.’

  ‘To begin at the end,’ I said, ‘what did you say to your mother yesterday, how did you make her leave?’

  ‘I reminded her about my name, all the complications. My name on my birth certificate is Wallace, because she was still married to Mick Wallace when she gave birth to me. I changed it by deed poll later. Mick had thrown her out, but the divorce wasn’t yet through. My alleged father’s name isn’t on the certificate.’

  ‘But her point is still that a DNA test would prove who your father was, so it wouldn’t matter.’

  ‘It might. There are other claimants, and it could even weaken my claim. It would be clear that my supposed father had rejected me, denied I was his, didn’t want my mother’s offspring to have anything to do with his family. And then I reminded her of the cost of a legal battle. She has no money – obviously that’s why she’s doing this, to get money – and I have none, and even if I had I would never make this claim.’

  ‘Did she still want you to have a DNA test?’

  ‘Of course. Which makes me suspicious. She says this man was my father but I think there’s a hint she isn’t absolutely sure. If she had been so sure even pre-DNA testing, I think she’d have tried harder.’

  ‘What could she have done?’

  ‘I don’t know. Turned up at his family home, it’s a famous enough place – something like that. She did nothing else until his father died. She’s a chancer, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you think she really believes you’d get some money? And that you’d share it with her?’

  ‘Yes, in her fantasies, if she can prove I’m his grandson.’

  ‘She is a bit, she’s a bit . . .’

  ‘Unbalanced is the kindest word.’

  ‘Don’t you feel, well, sorry for her, in a way?’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just, it sounds such a mess of a life.’

  ‘She made the mess.’

  ‘You’re very certain. But how can you be?’

  ‘My grandmother.’

  ‘That’s not an answer – your grandmother what?’

  ‘My grandmother wasn’t the religious bigot my mother says. She wasn’t a bitch. She was a good, kind, decent woman who brought her daughter up well.’

  ‘You know that, do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you weren’t there, you weren’t alive, you can’t know what went on.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that my mother had a good start. Whatever she did, once she grew up, was her own doing.’

  ‘Maybe she was “unbalanced” because it was innate, a genetic—’

  ‘Cut the lecture, Issy.’

  ‘It wasn’t going to be a lecture. I was just saying that if there was nothing in your mother’s upbringing to make her what she seems to be, then, logically, she was born that way, unpleasant, nasty, a fantasist, according to you, and so perhaps it isn’t her fault.’

  ‘I’m getting tired of this blame the genes stuff, Issy.’

  I wasn’t, though. I can’t think of anything else except all the unknown genes floating in my baby’s system. There are enough respectable unknowns on my own side of the family, but on Ian’s there’s a weird mother and a truly unknown father. I wish Ian would take the DNA test so that at least the man his mother said was his father could be ruled in or out.

  But he won’t.

  It suddenly struck me when I woke up in the middle of that night that Ian still hadn’t told me where he’d been in Glasgow. His mother said that he hadn’t come to her, which is why she’d had to come in search of him. So where had he been? Why had he come back so drained and tired? As soon as we woke up, I was on the attack. ‘Ian, where did you go in Glasgow? I know you didn’t go to your mother’s. Where did you go, and why, and why did you deliberately give me the impression you were going to your mother’s?’ I was beginning to sound tearful.

  ‘All right, I’ll answer part one of that if you promise not to harangue me about the rest.’ He was up and dressed by then, ready to leave the bedroom and have his breakfast and set off on the long ride to work. I thought I’d shock him into telling me what I wanted to know. ‘You have a wife in Glasgow, don’t you, Ian?’

  He spun round, his expression one of absolute bewilderment. ‘A wife?’ he said. ‘Are you mad?’ I shook my head slowly. ‘Oh, come on, Issy, you know that’s bonkers. Of course I haven’t a wife in Glasgow or anywhere else. What the hell are you playing at?’

  ‘What are you playing at, Mr Mysterious Visit to Glasgow? Don’t you see, if you don’t tell me, I’d be tempted to believe anything. Of course I don’t think you’ve got a wife in Glasgow, but . . .’

  He was angry, but also, I could see, relieved. He’d certainly thought for a second that I’d believed he had another woman. I thought he might be too annoyed with me now to tell me where he’d been, but he sat down on the bed again and said, ‘I went to see my grandmother.’

  ‘Christ, I thought you said she was dead!’

  ‘No, I never said that, but she might as well be. She’s in a home, in a bad state. She doesn’t know me, really.’ I choked back all the questions that rushed into my mind, knowing Ian would clam up if I asked even one. ‘I went to see her then because . . .’ He stopped. ‘I thought maybe . . .’ and again he halted. Finally, with a huge effort, he said, ‘I thought I ought to ask her about, you know, him. I’ve never asked her, she’s never mentioned a name. But I’d trust her. I thought it might be a way of putting an end to my mother’s fantasy. Or, yes – before you say it – confirming it. I don’t want to know who he was but it just seemed . . . she won’t live much longer, it just seemed something I should have heard from her.’ He got up again. ‘Shall I bring you some coffee?’ His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded upset. ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. But he didn’t leave the room at once. I hadn’t asked a single thing. ‘She wasn’t able to speak,’ he said, ‘she just mumbled. I haven’t visited often enough for her to know me as she used to. My fault. She’s not demented or anything, but nothing I was talking about seemed to make any sense to her. I’ll make the coffee.’

  I wished I hadn’t forced him into telling me about going to see his grandmother, but on the other hand it showed me so much about him that he hadn’t wanted me to know. Later, without any encouragement, he told me more about her (though he still wouldn’t tell me her name for some reason). It distresses him that she’s had to be in a home for the last few years, but there was no one to look after her, and Ian’s mother hadn’t been near her for nearly twenty years. Ian had sent money to a neighbour, to go in to see his grandmother every day, but it wasn’t possible to arrange the twenty-four-hour care she needed. He’d only visited her twice a year (times, I realised, when he went off on cycling trips), feeling guilty but doing nothing, in effect, to lift the guilt. It was all so sad. He said he could hardly bear witnessing the care Isa and May received, especially May, when he thought of his own grandmother and her circumstances. Talking about it would have only hurt more, and have made him feel even more ashamed. His grandmother had done everything for him, and here he was, virtually abandoning her when she needed him.

  Eight in the morning is not the time of day to make this kind of confession, but if I
an hadn’t blurted all this out then I don’t think he ever would have done. There was no chance to talk to him about it before he had to rush off, late, for work, and when he came home he wouldn’t discuss it – the shutters were down again, the whole topic forbidden once more. I was left to do what I am always doing, speculating, trying to fit the pieces together.

  XIII

  THE DAY BEFORE I was due to hand in my completed dissertation, I suddenly decided that the conclusion, the final few pages that should have drawn the whole thing together, weren’t working. They strained for effect and ended on a flat note. So I ditched them. Then I sat at my computer, staring at the blank screen in a state of near panic. It was uncomfortable sitting there anyway, in such an advanced state of pregnancy, but the physical misery was nothing compared to the mental torture. Ideas and words would not come. I only knew in the vaguest way possible what I needed, and I was waiting, helpless, without any confidence that given time (which I didn’t have) the words I wanted would appear.

  They formed themselves around midnight, in that beautifully serendipitous way that can sometimes happen. Ian, in the background, in the other room, was watching something on TV about the President elect Barack Obama, whose memoir Dreams from My Father he’d been reading that week. I’d picked the book up myself, and read some of it, the early stuff, and I suddenly remembered a passage about Obama’s grandmothers, which had, naturally, attracted my attention. That’s all it took. I went and got the book and read it again, the bits about his maternal grandmother especially. He stressed how important she had been when he was still so unsure of himself and his ambitions. ‘What is a family?’ he asked, and then considered what the definition might be. A family could simply be a collection of people linked by a genetic chain; a family could be a social contract; a family could be an economic unit. It could be one or a combination of all three. But what grabbed me was Obama’s other, alternative suggestion: a family could be ‘a reach across the void’. That void was time. His grandmothers, in very different ways, had done the reaching. He’d lived with his white grandparents as a child, and had watched his grandmother leaving the house very early each morning to catch a bus to the bank where she worked, as a clerk, to support her family. She had expected from her grandson the same hard work and determination she had shown herself and demonstrated to him. She reached across the void to teach by example. His paternal grandmother, whom Obama didn’t meet till he was an adult, set another example. Hers was one of endurance in the face of catastrophe. It seemed to him that both grandmothers had expectations of him. He felt there was nothing simple about the genetic chain – his grandmothers had forged the strong links that bound him to them, and he could not, and did not want to, break them. The message in his case, he decided, was one of determination and stoicism – ‘They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine.’