Have the Men Had Enough?

by Margaret Forster

  I decide to put in ten minutes in the corner shop, our ever open Indian general store. Grandma is very pleased. She loves all shops. Most of her life seems to have been spent humping shopping home, great bags of it. Mum’s methodical ways are a mystery to her. Every day Grandma drove herself mad wondering what to get the men for their dinner and every day she trudged out and ended up bringing back much the same things. Potatoes, carrots, onions and mince. And tea and sugar, naturally. Pounds and pounds of sugar. Sugar for porridge, sugar for tea, sugar to make jam, sugar for puddings, sugar for cakes and sugar sometimes for just sticking fingers into and sucking. When Bridget and Dad cleaned Grandma’s Glasgow rooms out they found thirty-one two-pound bags of sugar. And precious little else.

  I manoeuvre Grandma down the aisle in the crammed shop. The Indian woman on the till smiles and nods. They like to see me with my Grandma, it is right and proper that I, the young one, should be looking after her, the old one. They approve. Grandma reads the prices out, scandalised, especially by the price of her beloved sugar. She cannot believe it, in the name of God, she exclaims all the time. Her voice is deep, rough, guttural. She once told me she used to worry about it. Her mother convinced her she was going to be a giantess and she convinced herself she was going to be a man. Her Glasgow accent is broad, the dialect strong. People around here find Grandma hard to understand when she’s in full flow. I wish Dad had her voice but he has only the faintest trace of Scottish vowels and Bridget has none at all. Only Stuart is recognisably Scottish but then he was twelve when they moved south for those years in Newcastle.

  Newcastle is where Grandma went when her husband was killed. She had no choice, Bridget says. She had no money, not even to pay the rent. She went to her sister Annie’s even though she had two brothers still living in Glasgow. Bridget says neither of them offered her a home. Dad tells her to be fair, for God’s sake, how could either of them have offered a woman with three young children a home when one of them only had two rooms and four kids himself and the other was in the navy and not even married or with any kind of home. Anyway, Grandma went to sister Annie’s and Annie was kind and welcoming. Her husband was not. He found Grandma and children very hard to take and according to Bridget gave her ‘cold charity’. Dad won’t say a word on the subject even when goaded by Bridget. He only says he liked Newcastle better than Glasgow. He didn’t want to go back to Glasgow but Annie died and that was that.

  Grandma whispers she wants some ciggies. She hasn’t any money. Up to recently she had a handbag but losing it and worrying about it caused her and all of us such distress and trouble that Bridget put it away. Grandma misses it. Since she still has hysterics about where it can be, I don’t see anything is gained by not letting her have it. But I have money, not that I will need it.

  I want some ciggies.

  Fine. What brand?

  I haven’t any money.

  I have. How many? Twenty? Two packets?

  Five.

  Packets?

  Ciggies. Five will do.

  They don’t sell them in fives, Grandma.

  In the name of God.

  I’ll get twenty. Which brand?

  I want some ciggies.

  I smile at the Indian woman and we pass the till. I have Grandma’s cigarettes in my pocket and have extracted five which I roll up in silver paper and present to her. She gives me a squeeze, clutches the cigarettes tightly. She says it’s getting dark. It isn’t but I agree. She says she must get her washing in, the men’s overalls will be dry, damned awkward things to wash. She stops at a lamppost and recites that we are very lucky to have a lamp before our door and the lamplighter will soon be here and this gets mixed up with bairns cuddling doon at night. I am so bored by the time we get in again. I switch the radio on. Grandma turns round and round like a dog chasing its tail and then faces me. She asks me where I’ve been all day, bloomin’ cheek, she’s been waiting and waiting and where is that Bridget? I say at work and Grandma snorts with emphatic derision. A fine story, she says, when she know she’s gallivanting. All the same, they’re all the same, all after the men. Except her.

  Here we go. No songs, no poems, no anecdotes, no reminiscing now. Black sulk sets in. She trails off, closing the door behind her. I take a book out of my bag, Bleak House, one of Grandma’s favourites and hell as a set book. Grandma has read all Dickens six times or so she boasts. Certainly she’s very knowledgeable and makes lots of Dickensian catch phrases her own. I’m not going to follow her through but I listen with one ear. She’s probably pulling all the towels out of the airing cupboard and throwing them around. Well, they’re easily put back. Or more likely in the lavatory tearing sheets of loo paper into microscopic bits. Makes a mess but who cares. Bridget, I suppose. Bridget will say Grandma must not be allowed to do it because it’s a shocking waste and Grandma herself would be upset if she realised because she hates waste. Grandma used to say all the time how she hated waste, if anyone left so much as a bit of gristle. My smart reply used to be so did I and that Grandma had wasted her life and that was the only sort of waste that was wicked. Grandma just used to stare and ask if the girl was mad.

  After half an hour, when Grandma has not re-appeared, I go in search of her. Bridget will be back soon and I want Grandma in a good mood so that it looks as if I’ve been doing a good job. No Grandma in the bedroom. Oh, God. It’s not unknown for her to escape and be found wandering, streets away. Bridget will give me hell. But she’s in the bathroom, scattering Vim everywhere. I lead her back to the kitchen gently. Tea, a cigarette, nice harmless music on the radio. Bridget is even earlier than she hoped. She bustles in. Grandma’s face breaks into a great smile. Bridget kisses her.

  What I cannot decide is:

  Do I think this is a touching scene?

  Do I think it is nauseating?

  Do I think Bridget is a heroine?

  Do I think Grandma is lucky?

  Do I think it is normal or sick?

  Jenny

  I WAS SOUNDLY asleep when the telephone rang but then at three in the morning most people would be. We do not have an extension in our bedroom, but I heard it ringing downstairs. I lay, listening, carefully checking the people in the house. Charlie, Adrian, Hannah – we were all safely in bed. It could be a wrong number. Or it could be Bridget. Most unlikely, but it could be Bridget. I slipped out of bed and down the stairs, mind racing. Maybe Grandma was dead. Oh, God, the relief if she were – quietly, painlessly, in the middle of the night. All problems solved, neatly. I was practising what to say, arranging the funeral, consoling Bridget, assuring her it was the best thing that could happen in view of what we were told lay ahead, doing all this in my head as I lifted the receiver. It was indeed Bridget but my mother-in-law, Grandma as she likes to be called by all, was not dead. She was very much alive but on the floor. Bridget told me to wake Charlie up and send him along; she could not get Grandma up and needed him. I said I was on my way and put the receiver down before she could argue.

  Hanging behind the kitchen door was my old raincoat and in the cupboard under the stairs my wellingtons, so I had no need to go back to the bedroom and risk waking Charlie up (though I doubt if I would have done). Bridget does not understand. He needs his sleep. She is contemptuous of his need compared to hers. Is Charlie on shifts, responsible for the lives of a whole ward of patients? No, he is not. Does he spend two nights a week with his mother, being wakened, sometimes every hour? No, he does not. Charlie sleeps deeply, undisturbed, every night and as far as Bridget is concerned his job does not compare with hers in its demands, this sleeping of his does not need protecting. But it does. Charlie is a broker, specialising in metals. He makes decisions involving thousands of pounds and hundreds of jobs every day of his life and is under constant pressure. Bridget has always refused to understand her brother’s job – he is ‘something in the city’ and gets handsomely rewarded for it and he is not serving society as she is or even as Stuart is. She is disappointed in him and wishes he had become a tea
cher as Grandma hoped.

  At least it is not cold as I slip out of the house, as silently as I slipped out of bed, and hurry along the street. All the lights are on in Grandma’s flat. Bridget does not credit Charlie with any generosity in renting that flat. She sees it as guilt money, for not taking Grandma in, and it is. But Charlie did not have to rent that flat. He could have insisted on Grandma being put in a Home. He did not have to co-operate with Bridget, whatever the moral pressures. Stuart, the eldest, did nothing but then, in that respect, Bridget lets him off the hook. Policemen are not rich, not like ‘something in the city’. What Bridget doesn’t see is that money does not solve everything. True, Charlie can afford to rent the flat but he handles the maintenance too and that involves a great deal of trouble. The flat has ancient plumbing, cracks in the ceilings, all kinds of problems crop up and Charlie deals with them all. It takes time and effort and not just money, as Bridget imagines. Charlie is sick to death of that flat.

  I have my own key so I had no need to ring the bell. I saw, as soon as I entered the bedroom, that Bridget was hysterical. If an old lady fell in her ward – not that Bridget is on a geriatric ward – then Bridget would be a model of calmness and have her up in no time. But now her face was contorted with anxiety and her professional expertise had deserted her. Grandma was lying on the floor, between bed and wall, looking perfectly cheerful and comfortable. She was singing ‘Hey, Johnny Cope’ in a sort of murmur, alternating the tune with the occasional whistle. What on earth was all the fuss about? Bridget had put a rug over her and a pillow beneath her head. She told me she didn’t think anything was broken but the crash had been violent, she couldn’t be sure until Grandma’s limbs had all moved without causing her pain. I said, I suppose a little acidly, that Grandma would be bound to make a loud noise when she fell because she was so heavy and that she looked pretty comfortable to me so why not leave her until the morning. Bridget said she couldn’t. Susan must not find her like this in the morning. Susan comes at nine o’clock, an hour after Bridget leaves on Tuesdays. Grandma is left in bed and Susan gets her up and gives her breakfast.

  Of course Bridget is right. I felt ashamed. Susan certainly would be alarmed. And there is a deeper point which Bridget reminds me of: as long as Grandma is a cheery old dear who is just ‘a bit funny’, then Susan is happy to oblige, but she made it plain when we took her on that she didn’t want to have charge of an invalid. I told Bridget not to panic, we had no proof that this was anything but an isolated incident. And then we set to, trying to get Grandma up. I took her shoulders and Bridget tried to straighten her legs but Grandma roared at us both ferociously. We were in such an awkward position, trapped in a very narrow gap. But the main trouble was that Grandma did not want to get up and would not co-operate one tiny bit. She told us all decent folk were in bed. She asked us if we wanted to kill her. She requested confirmation that she had never hurt a fly. We got her into a sitting position and then rested. She eyed both of us and burst out laughing and shouted, ‘Look what the cat brought in.’

  I ordered Bridget to go away. With her there, Grandma was never going to make any effort. The minute she had gone I closed the door and then came and stood over Grandma, quite threateningly, I suppose. I pulled the blanket off her and Grandma immediately shivered and moaned that it was cold. I agreed. I invited her to get into bed with me and got in myself and pulled the blankets up, saying aloud how cosy it was, oh how comfy Humphrey. Grandma began to struggle. She got herself in a crouching position and then clutched the side of the bed and very, very slowly (I held my breath) levered herself up. The minute she was upright I was out of her bed in a flash and had pushed her in. She closed her eyes and smiled and said, ‘Night night, sleep tight,’ and went straight back to sleep.

  Bridget thanked me. She had listened at the door, of course. I rather despised her for not trusting me. Does she really think I would hurt her beloved mother? I told her not to worry. She apologised for telephoning at such an hour and I said she did the right thing. We sat and drank tea and I could not help it, I had to seize the opportunity and ask. ‘Bridget,’ I said, ‘how far do we have to go before you give in?’ She did not pretend not to understand. She held her mug of tea tightly, just as her mother does, and avoided my eyes, just as her mother does, and said, ‘If she didn’t know me. If I couldn’t look after her properly. Maybe then.’ Then she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply and raised her eyebrows and made a funny face. Emotion embarrasses Bridget, as it does her mother, as it does Charlie and Stuart. The McKays do not hold with emotion, any emotion. I have never seen any of them cry. At moments of extreme grief or stress the most they ever do is go silent, quite silent.

  Maybe Mr McKay was different but who knows? Certainly not Grandma. She cannot even remember her wedding day, it made so little impact. Any tales she tells about her husband are derogatory in a mild way. She relates how the children were sick one night and she was sick herself and ‘he’ never moved, never stirred, and them ‘all hollerin’ and crying’. Then she laughs, admiringly. Or she recalls being in hospital with her varicose veins, loving the rest, and ‘he’ came into the ward and said she would have to get up and come home, the children needed her, and there were no clean clothes, and the Sister came up and shouted at him to have consideration for his wife. Again, Grandma always laughs at this point, uproariously, as though telling a joke she loves, and she ends, gasping, by repeating ‘consideration!’ She wants a united front against men when she tells these stories. It annoys her when I will not conspire to agree that all men are selfish and inconsiderate. I tell her how tender her own son is with our children when they are sick and how loving and protective when I am ill but she ignores me. If I remark, as I used to do the first hundred times I heard these stories, that her husband sounds a brute, she is most indignant. ‘Not at all, not at all,’ she says, ‘he was just a man.’

  He died young anyway. Bridget was born in 1945, the year her father was killed in the war. I have to remind myself, now that Charlie and I have celebrated our Silver Wedding anniversary, that Grandma was only married thirteen years, only half the time I have been married. She has been a widow forty-three years, roughly three times as long as she was married. So is it surprising she can hardly remember her husband? Well yes, if you look at what she can remember. The doctor has explained it to us: the long-term memory remains after the short-term has gone. Grandma cannot remember what she had for dinner an hour ago but she can remember every detail of what she ate on the train journeys to the Highlands in the 1920s. And it makes her happy. It does not seem to worry her in the least that she cannot remember her husband’s first name or the colour of his eyes or what he liked and did not like. He remains in her memory as the subject of a few unflattering anecdotes and, if she has to sum him up, she is content to say he was ‘a man’s man’.

  Stuart can probably remember him best of all, since he was eight when his father went off to the war and twelve when he was killed, but Stuart is taciturn on that subject as on most. Stuart does not go in for memories. He is our silent, practical, solid brother, perfectly suited to being a policeman. How Grandma loves him in his uniform. Bridget in her nurse’s uniform, Stuart in his policeman’s, what more could a mother ask? Charlie in his suit does not impress though she admires his general smartness. Stuart does not want to discuss anything, ever, regarding all forms of discussion as ‘soft’. He thinks Charlie is mad to pay for Grandma’s flat and foot the bills and generally manage her affairs. He let it be known, in an uncharacteristic outburst of at least four sentences, that he thought Grandma should be in a Home, that Home should be in Glasgow and a Council Home. Grandma had paid her taxes and was entitled and that was that. Her mind had gone and nothing could be done and he was very sorry but facts were facts and could not be dodged. She was better off with her own kind. How Bridget blazed! What Grandma was entitled to, she shouted, was love and patience and kindness, the very qualities she had lavished on Stuart himself. Her mind had not gone, she knew her family
and that was a fact they could not dodge. And she was not better off in any institution. Bridget invited Stuart to just tell her how many Old People’s Homes he had been in, because she, Bridget, had been in scores and not one was good enough for a cat, never mind her mother. Stuart said he washed his hands of it all. That was five years ago and he has stuck to his resolution.

  So maybe Grandma’s husband was like Stuart: handsome, dependable, unimaginative and boring. Maybe she married him for the same reason Paula says she married Stuart: because he inspired confidence and pestered her. Grandma uses those words – ‘He pestered me.’ She used to say, when I first became her daughter-in-law and dug deep into family history, ‘I couldn’t get rid of him. Mind, I could have had all the men but I was never bothered. I didn’t fancy them, but they never stopped pestering.’ Well, if Mr McKay was like his son Stuart then nobody would be allowed to pester once married to him. Grandma was twenty-four when she married. Not excessively young, but there must have been plenty of time to pick and choose, and to be picked and chosen. ‘Don’t marry young,’ Grandma tells Hannah all the time, followed by, ‘Always keep a hundred pounds to yourself.’ Hannah laughs and asks what for and Grandma says, ‘So you can always run away.’