It was a bit romantic, but I felt I could take from his feelings enough to pull together the strands I hadn’t quite succeeded in plaiting strongly enough myself. The whole point of my dissertation had been to try to establish that grandmothers provide a continuity of a spiritual as well as a genetic sort, that there is some ‘reaching across the void’. I had to work hard to make all that sound connected to everything that had gone before, but finally I did it. I rewrote those last pages four times before I got rid of the slightly portentous tone, but in the end I was pleased. My conclusions were clearer and carried conviction.
Whether I believe them myself is another matter.
Dissertation done, gone, I have nothing to do but loll around, if I want, waiting for the baby to be born. But it is the wrong time of year to be so free – I long for summer, so that I can be in the open air, because it isn’t much fun roaming parks in this grey, drizzly weather. I can’t seem to apply myself to what I should do next. I’m drifting, making my condition the excuse. I long for invitations, to anything, to go anywhere. I’ve met Beattie a few times, gone with her and her children to the playground near where she lives. A disaster. I don’t know whether her kids are particularly demanding or not, but they never seem to leave their mother alone for a minute, always clutching at her, calling for her, interrupting anything she attempts to say. I didn’t know what I was doing there. ‘You soon will,’ Beattie said, a trifle grimly, I thought, and after one afternoon spent in her house and not the playground, because of the rain, I saw what she meant – being in the open was definitely preferable.
Lunches with Dad were always something to look forward to, but now they’ve become glittering dates in my empty diary. I had lunch with him yesterday, but it wasn’t as enjoyable as usual. I arrived at his café of choice to find him unusually morose, sitting with an untouched glass of wine in front of him, staring at the menu chalked on a blackboard as though he couldn’t understand it. He asked me what I would like, and I said he could choose for me, but he shook his head and said no, you choose for me, I can’t be bothered. I ordered the meze. Some pitta bread and olives, his favourite sort, arrived while we waited but he left them alone. Gloom seemed about to settle. Luckily the café was busy, quite full, and the general noise and bustle covered our silence. I didn’t ask what was wrong. Isa had only been dead three weeks. I felt depressed myself. Dad’s low spirits would also, I was sure, have something to do with Isa’s brother’s legacy, about which, for weeks now, there had been a lot of trouble. I was right.
The problem was that Isa had in fact received the legacy before she died but she had not had the time to make it over to the home where her brother had lived all those years. It should have been simple for Dad to do this for her, but for some reason it was proving legally complicated. But quite apart from all that, it emerged, as I ate my food greedily and he picked at his, what was bothering him was an uncomfortable feeling that he should go and inspect this institution that was to benefit from the money. He felt that it was his duty to make sure that what was a fairly large sum should only go to a decent establishment. This was what his conscience was telling him. And he was tempted to tell it to shut up.
‘Guilt, is it?’ I said.
‘Suppose so.’
‘But it isn’t your guilt. None of whatever that poor man had to endure is your fault. It’s got nothing to do with you. You didn’t even know he existed.’
‘I ignored signs.’
‘Signs? What signs?’
‘I think there were hints, and I ignored them.’
‘What kind of hints? From whom, how?’
‘Oh, little things, even before that Canadian cousin, what was her name . . .’
‘Mary-Lou?’
‘Mary-Lou. Even before she came up with that evidence that Isa had had a brother, I’d shut my mind to certain puzzling remarks my mother used to make.’
‘Such as?’
‘She’d refer to bothersome letters that were annoying her and I never showed any real concern – I just thought she meant letters about finance of some sort, to do with her stocks and shares, which she was often fussing about. But I know now that I’d sensed they were not. She was nervous about these bothersome letters in a way that was different.’
‘That’s hindsight. I don’t believe you sensed anything at the time.’
‘Well I should have done. I should have checked she didn’t just mean letters about money. I never did.’
He sighed, and said he would have to visit the place. I said he didn’t need to go himself, he could easily get it checked out, or he could get someone to go for him if he felt a personal investigation was essential. I said I could go, I wasn’t doing anything, but he shook his head at the idea. No, he would have to go himself.
‘Where are these letters anyway?’ I asked. ‘Have you read them?’
‘No. I didn’t find any. She must have destroyed them.’
‘Are you sure it was her brother writing to her? I mean, how did he have her address? He’d never even met her. How did he know he had a living sister?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Well, anyway, he wasn’t mad, or disabled enough not to be able to write.’
‘Apparently not.’
‘What was wrong with him, then? Why was he hidden away like that? Why wasn’t Isa happy to hear she had a brother? When did she hear, when did these letters start?’
Dad groaned, and rubbed his eyes till he must have made them sore. He said he didn’t know the answer to most of my questions, questions he’d asked himself ever since he learned of the legacy, and that was what shocked him, his own ignorance. He ought to know, and he didn’t.
‘Well,’ I said, gently, ‘you can find out. Now Isa’s dead, nothing you discover can hurt her. It should be simple, I would’ve thought, getting most of the answers. They’re pretty obvious questions.’
‘But that’s the awful thing – I don’t want to know the details. I ask myself the questions, as you do, but I don’t really want the answers. The thought of them appals me. It’s a scandalous story.’
‘You don’t really know that the story is scandalous.’
‘Putting a child into an institution, letting him live there all his wretched life, and all the time ignoring his attempts to communicate with them – how could that not be scandalous?’
‘But you don’t know the circumstances. Think how your own history could be interpreted. There may be explanations you can’t even guess at that would make the fate of Isa’s brother far from scandalous. That’s why you have to find the answers to all your questions even if you dread them.’
He shook his head, said he’d been through all this with Mum, who said just what I did. We might be right, but it didn’t make him feel any differently. I offered again to help. I said I didn’t need to visit the home, if he was so opposed to my doing so, but what about my going down to Somerset and seeing some of the relatives who’d come to Isa’s party? They would surely know something.
‘No,’ Dad said, ‘I don’t want old people upset.’
‘You don’t know they would be upset.’
‘Raking over the past is always upsetting when it’s that kind of past.’
‘But Isa’s dead.’
‘Yes, but it was her behaviour while alive that we’d be uncovering, and that remains shameful.’
‘There would be no need to tell them about the letters or that Isa ignored them. I’d only talk to them about her parents, see if they knew about the brother and what happened to him.’
‘No. I don’t want you to. I have to deal with this myself.’
I know he won’t. I’m going to carry out my own investigation, though. No need to tell Dad. I know how his mind works, and what would upset him. I know how he will slowly begin to convince himself that there is no need to visit the home. He will not even imagine the unpleasant scenarios that are constantly invading my mind. He will tell himself that there is no point in attempting to uncover what is at best a
sad story and at worst a shocking one. He does not suffer from my insatiable curiosity. A sense of a story unfinished will not bother him for long. It will go on bothering me. His conscience troubles him at the moment, but soon it won’t. I know my father.
The man I am finding I still know even less well than I thought is, in spite of recent revelations, Ian Scott. I don’t know a simple, basic thing like his surname. Why did he really change it? What is the significance of his having changed it to Scott? Surely it wasn’t just because he is a Scot? And added an extra ‘t’ for the look of it? But he keeps his original surname hidden, together with everything else about his background. He won’t tell me his mother’s name. It is, he says, of no consequence. Well, it is to me. I need to know her name because I want to find out all I can about her, I want to understand what has made her into the horrible woman she seems to have become. Ian laughs at the idea of any information explaining his mother’s behaviour. I said maybe he is right, but I have to start somewhere. ‘No,’ Ian said, ‘you have to stop somewhere, Issy.’
But I can’t, and won’t. I have my child to think of.
Ian’s mother’s name is Moira. Moira Janet Macpherson, born 8 November 1956. It wasn’t too difficult to find out, as Ian should have known. She’d told me herself that she’d got married at seventeen to Mick Wallace, so although Wallace is a common surname in Scotland, I had something to go on.
Moira’s mother, Ian’s grandmother, the one who took him in, is called Janet. Her father, Ian’s grandfather, was Hugh Macpherson, an engine driver. It pleases me so much to have even this kind of basic knowledge of Ian’s family. Pleases me, but also makes me greedy to find out more. What about those half-sisters? I am so tempted, and yet I hesitate. Ian never knew them, they were never part of his life. And maybe they have turned out as unpleasant as their mother. I think maybe I ought to leave that one alone, for the time being, anyway.
Finding out information about Isa’s brother was more difficult. Thanks to Mary-Lou, I had his birth certificate already and it was straightforward obtaining the death certificate. Cause of death was lobar pneumonia and heart failure, which told me nothing about how he came to have lived in an institution, how long he had been there, or why his sister appeared not to have known of his existence until she began receiving his letters when she was around sixty (that’s when Dad roughly dates the beginning of Isa making references to bothersome communications). I spent a long time on the phone tracking down the name of the home where James Macdonell had resided (though he’d actually died in hospital) and even longer finding someone to talk to who knew how he came to be there, and what was wrong with him. There seemed to be a strange reluctance to go into details, and nobody seemed to know exactly what had happened, or even when. I said, when finally I was able to speak to the warden, that surely there must be a file on James Macdonell, notes of his condition and so forth, and some history of where he was from and how he’d been treated. I was told these were confidential and I would have to prove I was related and then apply for access, which would involve a fee. So I applied. Six weeks went by before I heard anything at all, and I began to think of resorting to plan B – going to Bath and visiting one of the relatives. But that would have meant directly disregarding Dad’s wishes, and I was reluctant to do this.
The medical file when it arrived was thick. What it told me explained a lot but still left a great deal mysterious. I learned that James Gavin Macdonell was born very prematurely, at twenty-eight weeks, and suffered oxygen deprivation at birth. He weighed only 3 lb 6 oz. He was kept in hospital for three months, finally being discharged when he’d reached 7 lb 2 oz, though he still had mild respiratory problems. One month after he arrived home, he was badly scalded. The burns were mainly over his face and left shoulder. There were masses of entries about his injuries and what was done for them, but the language was mostly too medical for me to understand. He was in a burns unit for nearly a year, and then there is a gap in the notes until he was four, when he broke his right leg. The records of numerous illnesses follow, but I was so numbed by this catalogue of tragedy that I hardly took them all in. I concentrated instead on tracking addresses, where given. I quickly realised that poor James had not been in the home near Bath for long. He’d been in a series of other homes across the south-west of England. Some of the earlier ones were schools – School for Disabled Children, School for Physically Afflicted Young Adults, a whole list of Dickensian-sounding institutions. It was a litany of misery.
But I still didn’t know how baby James came to be scalded, or what effect the oxygen deprivation at birth had had, or why his well-off family couldn’t arrange care at home, or why his sister was never told about him. Medical records don’t reveal that kind of thing. Maybe today there would be reports from social workers included, but not then. It seemed to me inevitable that I’d have to consult either Uncle George or Isa’s sister-in-law, whose name I couldn’t remember. They could fill in the gaps, maybe. Still I hesitated. I contacted the warden of the home again, but she was suspicious of my motives even after I’d said who I was. My father, I was told, was in possession of all the facts. I should ask him.
Everything I was learning about James Gavin Macdonell was unbearable to know, and yet I don’t regret knowing it. Is that because I am so far removed from any connection with the tragedy? I try to imagine it, but even that seems shameful. Suppose this baby of mine . . . but that’s a route it is too dangerous to go down. Isa, of course, closed her mind to any inkling of what those bothersome letters might mean. Somewhere, though, she had that ‘private’ memory tormenting her decades later. Of a baby screaming? Of a nursemaid shrieking? Of a mother howling? Of general chaos, pandemonium in the house? But then I thought of the very existence of letters. James Gavin Macdonell could apparently write, or else was sufficiently intelligent to dictate letters. Oxygen deprivation at birth could not have entirely damaged his mental faculties – he had been capable of composing a letter, and he apparently knew he had a sister.
It is very difficult to forgive, or to understand, Isa’s attitude. She hated any kind of disfigurement – even warts on someone’s face had her shuddering – but if she didn’t know about her brother, how did she know, when he wrote to her, that he was so badly facially scarred? Did he tell her? Possibly, but if he was hoping to meet her, he would hardly have dwelt on his appearance. I think the very sight of his name at the end of any letter must have caused her great alarm. She didn’t want a man coming out of the past to claim her – she was perhaps instinctively afraid. That’s the best excuse I can make for her. It’s still an excuse.
Another excuse is needed for my ‘real’ great-grandmother, she who, according to the story Patrick told my father, was only too relieved to let the wife of her dead daughter’s lover claim him. I know her name – oh, how the names are gathering! She was called Gladys Walker. Her daughter, my ‘real’ grandmother, was called Elizabeth. Elizabeth when she died soon after giving birth was twenty-seven. I had a bit of luck there (I mean, trying to find out about Elizabeth). At Isa’s funeral I met a man who had served in the same regiment as Patrick, my grandfather. Never mind his name, there are enough names already, but the point is that he turned out to have known about Elizabeth Walker. I didn’t, of course, bring her name up – at the time, I didn’t even know it – but in his ramblings about Isa, he did. ‘A fine woman,’ he said, ‘fine woman, stood by her man in times of trouble, no hesitation.’ I said did he mean the war? He was very deaf, and I had to shout the words again, asking him if he meant during the war. He was impatient, said no, no, good heavens, no, he meant after the war, ‘over the little secretary and all that hooha’. I nodded politely, desperately keen for him to spill out more indiscretions and wondering how I could prompt him. But he needed no prompting. Old age seemed to make him feel free to recall anything he liked without worrying about possible consequences. I wasn’t the only one who heard him remember my grandfather being ‘infatuated, swept off his feet by that girl, the Walker girl,
pure madness, but his wife stood by him when it was over, a fine woman’.
The sleuth work was easy on this one. My real grandmother was born in 1926, in Nottingham. Her father was an optician; her mother, Gladys, a nurse. Her father was killed in the war and the widow Gladys moved with her only child, Elizabeth (aged fourteen), to London, to live with an aunt in Putney. Gladys got a job at St Bart’s Hospital, but when Elizabeth was twenty-two, her mother emigrated to Australia. I imagine Elizabeth had the chance to join her but she apparently chose not to. The address on Elizabeth’s death certificate is in Kilburn. I went to look at it, though I’ve no idea what I thought looking at a building half a century and more later would reveal. But it did seem to reveal something. It is still a house full of bed-sitters, and from what I’ve been able to piece together, using the local history archives, that is exactly what it was then.
But back to Gladys. Once in Australia, in Perth, she became a sister in the general hospital there. She married a doctor in 1951 and I imagine, though of course I can’t be sure, that the last thing she wanted was to be burdened with her dead daughter’s illegitimate son. Maybe she never even told her new husband about Elizabeth’s disgrace (which is what, in 1953, it would still have been). Can I blame Gladys? On the one hand yes, on the other no. I don’t think she and Elizabeth can have been especially close. The news of her daughter’s death in childbirth must have been an appalling shock, though. Maybe she’d known nothing of the affair, nothing of the pregnancy. It’s possible. Excuses, again. But I suspect there was an unfeeling streak in Gladys. Not to have attempted any kind of contact with the people who had taken her grandson, not to have shown any concern, sounds unfeeling to me. But then again, maybe this was part of the bargain, Isa’s bargain. My father had to be totally hers.
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