A Tiger's Wedding

by Isla Blair

  He was taken into hospital in May 1981. He was seventytwo, I was thirty-six and Jamie was eleven, soon to be twelve. Jamie was close to his grandfather; they shared the same sense of humour and even now he has many of my father’s mannerisms. Daddy decided, along with my mother and Fiona (although she asked questions as to the appropriateness of the decision), that the full facts of his illness were not to be revealed to me as it could upset me when I was rehearsing and performing. It was a wrong decision, as it deemed me not strong enough to weather the information and thus excluded me from doctors’ opinions and hospital procedures. Of course I knew that my father was gravely ill and likely to die, how could I not? But no one confided in me. It was hurtful to be treated with kid gloves, but it was done from love and concern. Dad had always wanted to help and protect me in my work, finding the concept of going on stage in front of people each evening too terrifying to contemplate – and therefore deciding I must be shielded from upsetting information, supported in every way.

  My father’s remission lasted a mere three months before his cancer returned, making it hard for him to breath. The last time I saw him, I took hold of his hand and saw that the ring with “Ballo” on it was too big for his finger. I thought of that day long ago when we sat together in the heather looking for golf balls. He died on 27th September 1981, two days before my birthday. My mother’s long journey into widowhood had begun and was to last for twenty-four years. She never got used to being without him and although she sometimes had company, she was always alone.

  Losing a partner after forty years is a bitter blow and it takes courage to walk into the future with only memories by your side. My mother was never short of courage. She was sustained, I hope, by Fiona and me and our children. She met up every week with her friends, The Girls, and she went on outings to the theatre, to country houses and gardens, but she had no-one to return home to, no-one to tell about her day, no-one to laugh with or complain to. The house, which for a long time held my father’s clothes and belongings (she wound his watch ritually every day), was redolent with his memory; sometimes she even felt his presence, but she must have been lonely without him. She never complained – why is it loneliness is something shameful to admit to, as if it is somehow your fault? She wasn’t good at joining clubs, so the WI was out. She tended her garden in summer and read and listened to the radio in winter, she went shopping most days, just for the trip. On her death, Fiona and I found hoards of shampoo, soap, face powder and tights in her cupboard – a throw-back to the Indian days of stocking up when she was “Home”.

  We visited her often with Jamie, and Fiona, home from the Caribbean with Chris and their two daughters, Jo and Sara, did the same. She looked forward to these visits and planned the meals with specially chosen wine. I can imagine the melancholy of the clearing up on our departure, emptying the tea cups, plumping the cushions, discarding half eaten biscuits and cake, reminding her of her aloneness after the buzz of activity the day had brought.

  However, I remember being surprised when, one evening, having just seen a documentary on TV about a young boy of Army parents being left at boarding school, she expressed sympathy and sadness, “Poor wee boy, he looked so small, so vulnerable, so lonely as he settled into his dormitory trying not to cry.”

  The little boy was eight and it was indeed moving to watch him, to observe all the little interns coming to terms with their surroundings. I am not sure if she was putting away the similarity of our situations because she didn’t want to resurrect her own pain, or if she was acknowledging how lonely and frightening it had been for Fiona and me. I did not ask her. Whatever the reason, it would have been pointless and cruel to chastise her for a decision made long ago in a different political climate and made because it was deemed to be the right one.

  We spoke on the telephone daily, sometimes several times a day, and I saw her not as often she would have liked, but she was only an hour’s drive away, so I’d drop in for a couple of hours whenever I could. She was becoming more and more immobile and in the last year of her life she had carers twice a day who helped her to dress and undress, got her meals, helped her to the loo and washed her. Her world became smaller and the last few months of her life were not happy and that sits like a weight on my heart; she hated being dependent, she was lonely and, at eighty-eight, wondered why she had lived so long – she had been twenty-four years without my father and she often expressed how she longed to join him. She kept falling out of bed and couldn’t get up and it soon became evident to her carers, to Fiona and me and to her, that she could no longer go on living alone. She was fiercely adamant that she would not live with Fiona or with me, however persuasive we might try to be and so she went into a residential home on a temporary basis until a long term decision could be decided upon. She hated it, missed her birds and the foxes in her garden, she found it hard to make friends and, I think when she concluded that this was what her life was to be (she wouldn’t hear the brighter alternatives we presented), she turned her face to the wall.

  She died in the early hours of April 8th with Fiona and me by her bedside. We spent her last day with her; she was not conscious, but Fiona, who had many years’ experience nursing the elderly and being with them when they died, said that hearing was usually the last sense to go. We talked to her and to each other, we reminisced, we laughed over shared family memories and sang to her quietly; “The Road to Mandalay”, “The Girl That I Marry”, “Lovely” and of course, “Love Walked In”, songs we had all sung together when Dad was alive. Her breathing altered and then stopped.

  So Fiona and I were orphans. But we had each other. Besides, our Mum and Dad are never too far away – Jamie will scratch his head in the very same manner that my father did when he was puzzled or anxious, his hair grows in the same way and when he walks towards me from a distance, it could be Ian as a young man again. My second little granddaughter, Ava, has my mother’s bright blue eyes and her drawn together, quizzical blonde brows and her alabaster pale skin. I answer the phone and as Fiona speaks to me it is my mother’s voice I hear, her laugh – and I only have to look at my hands to remember her hands using the same gesture. In the mirror some mornings I see her looking back at me.

  No, they are not very far away.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Looking Back and Forward

  Looking back at my life, I ponder on what decisions I’ve made that were informed by my Indian/Scottish background; if my focus on family is more pronounced because mine was separated during my early growing up. I know that my childhood had many blessings – Ayah and my early Indian influences, Miss Evans enabling me to read, my self-reliance, my close bond with my sister and my parents – loving, even when absent.

  I have followed my dream of an acting career that has enabled me to do good, stimulating, challenging work without the manacles of extreme fame to keep me a prisoner and away from the very people I am trying to portray (so many famous actors are unable to travel on a tube, shop in a supermarket). I have journeyed to interesting places all round the world in my work and have met fascinating, generous-hearted people. I have been fortunate to be healthy, with a strong constitution; I’ve had days I didn’t know how I was going to afford Jamie’s school meals, let alone pay the mortgage or my income tax, but on the whole I have had money to feed and clothe my family and give us all small treats, if not huge amounts of wealth. (People assume all actors earn vast sums and are astonished when I tell them of the Equity minimum paid to most actors in the West End or the provinces).

  As for wisdom, I am still waiting for that. But I feel more confident in myself, I have learnt to trust my instincts and I hope that I have an open mind, although I have many of the prejudices of late middle age against certain things: body piercing, atonal music, tattoos, the smell of unwashed hair, bad manners, bullying and unkindness, drunken people on Friday nights, CCTV cameras and too many requests to join Facebook. And I prefer to be called an actress rather than an actor – I find no shame in the word actress. All
these quibbles are a generational thing, I have no doubt.

  I have tried to take rejection on the chin. I’ve been cut to the quick by clever-dick critics and wounded to the heart by faithless friends and Julian and I have both done things to hurt each other in our long marriage. I’ve worked with some truly talented actors and some who couldn’t really act at all. I’ve met fascinating people who are stars because of their personalities, unconnected to their work. I’ve got used to the pejorative term “Lovey” (I’ve never known anyone use that term in my profession) and kept my lips sealed when even friends say that I can feign any emotion – “She’s an actress you know, she can act anything,” that because I’m an actress none of my emotions can be real. This irritates more than hurts, an assumption that I must be shallow because I show the emotions of characters outside myself. And I’ve learnt to tolerate the rudeness of strangers. On a tube train on my way to perform in a matinee of “The History Boys”, I was sitting opposite two elderly women who were murmuring to each other about the fact that I had been on TV in a repeat of something the night before. One nudged the other who looked up and said, in the sort of tones that would shatter glasses in Harrods, “Oh, I don’t like her.” I got off the tube to be met by a greasy haired man in an anorak who said, “Isla, Isla, may I take your photograph? I’ve got to use up my film.” On such occasions, laughter acts as arnica on the bruises of the heart.

  On the upside, I have had letters of such kindness from strangers, some telling me that I have made a small difference to their lives by a certain performance; I’ve even been told that someone wanted to make a life in the theatre because of something they had seen me in. Such letters are warming and humbling and I feel lucky, because I dare say had they seen the part played by someone else, they would have been just as uplifted, just as moved, but they have taken the time and trouble to thank me. These are rewards not taken lightly.

  Being in a theatre company is a very close and bonding experience; you get to know each other fast. People expect it to be a bitchy back-stabbing place, but in truth the bitching usually springs from insecurity or disappointment turned to bitterness and more often there is generosity, kindness, warmth and support amongst colleagues. There needs to be, because we all have to trust each other as we are all inter-dependent.

  Anthony Quayle once said to me, “Never envy anybody anything, Isla. You never know what they have to pay for it.” It took me a long time to puzzle out what he meant, but I noticed that the person with the brilliant career had a severely autistic child, or an abusive husband, the happy marriage often held a deep sorrow by being childless, the person with genius intelligence was often lonely, the earth mother surrounded by a brood of babes might long for the spotlight she had given up for their sake. We all of us have disappointments and blessings – it’s a question of balance. For nothing stays the same, all things change and although one hopes one is ready for the change, it’s often a shock when it comes – the up or the down.

  Getting to know my parents as a young adult brought surprises – and comforts, too. All through my growing up, I observed their love and respect for each other. I don’t know how much of that rubbed off on me, but my greatest blessing of all was meeting Julian when I did. I admire and respect him as an actor and as a man. I value my friendship with him and cherish his love. We laugh together, share many opinions and always seem to have a lot to say to each other.

  Julian is very romantic. He observes hints put out for Christmas and birthdays – indeed, on my 50th birthday he did something so touching it still brings tears to my eyes. In the early autumn of 1994, I would go each day to our local picture gallery and look at a painting by Sue Campion that spoke to me, in the way that paintings sometimes do, and made me smile. Five girls in green dresses and jaunty berets dancing with such joy and unselfconscious abandon, it couldn’t help but lift your spirits. I loved it. On September 29th Julian had arranged a dinner party to be held in a private room at our local restaurant, Sonnys, and about twenty really close chums came. The birthday menu had been chosen by Julian from all the things I enjoyed – so, of course, no fish. Halfway through the meal, one of my friends pointed to a painting on the wall of the private room and there were “my girls” in their jaunty berets dancing. “Oh,” I said, “that is my favourite painting!” Julian looked at me and said smiling, “I think you had better take it home.” It hangs on the wall of our stairs and each day continues to make me smile.

  I remember chatting to Jamie about Julian’s signet ring with the Glover crest on it. “When you are eighteen, you will get a ring like this – all the men in the Glover family get a ring like this when they come of age,” said Julian.

  “What if Jamie had been a girl – would she have got the Glover ring?”

  “Oh no,” came the reply, “only the men in the family wear this ring.”

  My feminist feathers were ruffled and a pretty hot row ensued.

  A year later, on our ninth wedding anniversary, Julian and I decided we would have a blessing on our marriage at St Mary le Bow church – just us, Jamie, my parents and Julian’s mother (Fiona and Chris were still in the Virgin Islands). As we entered the church, to my astonishment, I found it full of our friends and decorated with an abundance of white and cream flowers.

  When the moment arrived that the vicar spoke the words, “With this ring I thee wed...” Julian placed the Glover signet ring with its crest and motto “Surgite Lumen Adest” on my finger. I wear it always, even on stage.

  What I hadn’t expected was my granddaughters. Through the nine years of Jamie’s former marriage there was no hint or sign of children. It would have been impertinent and heartless to make any enquiries; it just didn’t happen and I hugged to myself the disappointment in what appeared to be a grandchild-less future. I was overwhelmed on occasion with sadness, almost grief – sometimes to the point of tears, which I spilled in shameful secret – looking at families with children shopping at the local farmer’s market on Saturday mornings. I’d peer through the window of the creche at my gym and watch with full and heavy heart the children laughing and playing, when I knew I’d never have that, I’d never have loving hugs or sticky kisses from little people who would be mine to cherish and protect and love with no conditions at all.

  Then Jamie met the love of his life in Sasha, one of the most artlessly beautiful women I have ever met. She is also fiercely intelligent and warm and generous of spirit. He went through anguish at the break-up of his marriage, but knew that Sasha was the person he had to be with. It wasn’t long before Edie, my first granddaughter, was born, who swept my heart up with a blink of her very long eyelashes and held it fast in the grip of her tiny fist. We spent much time together, chatting amiably, in her local park (the chat was rather one-sided), as I pointed out squirrels and birds and flowers and occasionally a miraculous red sunset, a black storm cloud or a rainbow. I would weave stories about everything and became a rabbit (with my voice), a mole, a fox, a dog. We went on journeys with our imaginations and had many adventures and a great deal of fun. Two and a half years later Ava-Rose came quietly and with little fuss into the world. She was pale and fair with eyes that held the beauty of summer skies. People kept on saying her blue eyes would fade, but they have remained bright, piercing; she looks as if she holds the mystery of the universe in her round blonde head and will impart its secret to us, her chosen few, when she chooses to bestow it upon us. She has a smile that will melt hearts, and she wakes each morning laughing.

  With both children to delight and absorb me, I find their presence brings me more joy than most theatrical roles. I have a twinge of regret that I never played some of the great roles, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Hedda Gabler, Cleopatra – but then, I did get to play many others – Viola, Miss Julie, Nora, both Vivie and Mrs Warren and countless others and I felt a sense of propriety about them all. It’s balance again – things even out.

  My real regret is that my parents never met my grand-girls, especially my mother, who was witness to
my tearful congratulations to Fiona on receiving the news that her eldest daughter, Joanna, was pregnant. I was so glad for her, properly, joyously glad, but that grandchild-less part of me was envious and stricken. My mother knew this – how glad she would be to know that I have not one granddaughter, but two.

  Being without my parents as a little girl didn’t scar or wound me, not in any depth. It made me glad of them when they came home, when we became reacquainted, and it has made me consciously pleased and fiercely protective and grateful for my own family. I treasure each day with them, sometimes turning down work in order to spend time with them; and it is not a sacrifice, it is just something I need to do.

  It is hardly novel to say that I can’t believe that I have an old ladies’ bus pass, for most people of my age feel the same – we feel young in spirit and, if we are lucky, we are not too stiff and doddery of body. But now my conker-coloured hair owes more to the skill of my hairdresser than to any pigment bestowed by nature. The Missy Baba Isla of India has gone and the young girl who shared a dressing room and a two-day film shoot with Paul McCartney has gone, as has the ambitious actress and the young mother, proud, fierce and doting; all have shed their seven-year skins and I’m left with me, made up of little fragments and pieces of all the Islas that have breathed since September 1944.

  I can’t imagine leaving this world, but leave it I will, bequeathing, I hope, memories and smiles for Julian, Jamie and Sasha, Edie and Ava and, of course, Fiona, and echoes of me – a tune, a smell, a sight – that will nudge them into thinking of me. And who can ask more than that?