Have the Men Had Enough?

by Margaret Forster

  Dad goes to see Bridget. I time him. If he’s gone longer than half an hour then there has been a row. He’s gone ten minutes, comes back cheerful. Mum is astonished. Bridget has said we can take Grandma to the Day Centre if we want, if we can’t manage (Dad says that was the emphasis) each afternoon but that she knows what will happen: it will be a lot of fuss for nothing. And she, Bridget, is not going to have anything to do with it. She will neither take nor collect Grandma. We’ll soon see, she has warned Dad. But Dad sees this as a victory. He’s very pleased with himself, looks for applause. Mum gives it but not enthusiastically. She’s suspicious. Bridget has agreed too readily and also what does she mean, we will soon see. But she says Dad has done well. She will ring tomorrow and arrange to take Grandma next week. Dad says she’ll love it, bit of a sing-song, lots of company, pots of tea and bikkies, there will be no keeping Grandma away.

  *

  Mum begins the soft-soap. She tells Grandma she’s going to take her out tomorrow. Grandma, who’s sitting at the kitchen table as usual when I come in, says that will be very nice, she hasn’t stepped a foot out of doors for a month. Mum, who has read far too many dopey psychology books, asks Grandma where she would like to go. Grandma answers very promptly, the Highlands, my heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here, oh it’s lovely up there, we used to go on the train etc. etc. Mum says it’s a bit far. She says she thought Grandma might like a bit of company. Grandma says she only likes her family. Mum says she knows this lovely club.

  You’re better in yer ane hame.

  But you get bored, you say you do.

  East west hame’s best.

  It would only be to give you a break for a couple of hours.

  I’m fine as I am.

  It would give you a change.

  You’re better in yer ane hame.

  Mum is silly. Fancy trying to tee it up. Hopeless. Mum thinks she’s cleverly sowing the seeds of acceptance but she’s doing no such thing. I ask, quietly, if Grandma had barricaded herself in. Mum says no, she was fine. Bridget says she slept exceptionally well, never even got up. Mum remarks that Bridget didn’t actually add ‘so there’ but it was implied. As if, Mum said, she wouldn’t be pleased Grandma had slept, as if it was some sort of competition. She’s upset. I tell her Bridget doesn’t mean to hurt her. Mum snaps that she knows that perfectly well, thank you. Grandma asks where is that Bridget, the hussy. I say at work. Grandma snorts, says a likely story, she’s gallivanting, don’t try to fool me. Always the same, you bring them up decent and they gallivant.

  She’s a wash-out, that Bridget.

  Don’t be silly, Grandma.

  You mind your mouth.

  Bridget works like a slave and she’s devoted to you, you couldn’t do without her.

  I can do without anyone.

  You couldn’t do without Bridget.

  She’s a wash-out, that Bridget.

  Now I’m being silly. No good trying to persuade Grandma that Bridget is at work and, when she’s not at work, she’s with her which is another kind of work. She’s going to sulk now. She’s saying she’s going to go, she doesn’t like being where she’s not wanted. She says she’s left on her own, the last rose of summer left bloomin’ well alone. Oh, let her wander off, Mum says.

  She wanders, muttering. She pockets two fifty pence coins lying on the dresser and then finds Mum’s handbag and becomes absorbed, minutely examining the contents. Alistair and Jamie come in, dropped off after school by a friend of their mother’s. It is their last day with us. Paula and Stuart will collect them tomorrow. Grandma’s eyes light up. She tells them they are both bonnie laddies. They stand in front of her, impassive, desperate to get away. Grandma touches Jamie’s reddish hair and he flinches. She asks him what his name is and he whispers it. Grandma is delighted. She leans on the dresser and declaims, with extravagant gestures, guying herself and the poem, ‘Thou has left me, ever Jamie’. When she gets to the line, ‘Aften hast thou vow’d that Death only should us sever’, Jamie bursts into tears. She’s disconcerted, bends to comfort him, to embrace him, and he screams and beats at her with his little fists.

  I swoop, Mum swoops. I put my arm round a bewildered Grandma and lead her away. Mum picks up Jamie, Alistair trailing behind, and takes him into the kitchen. Grandma asks what is the matter with the puir wee soul, is he not well? I say no, he isn’t, he’s suffering from Stuartitis. Grandma says what in God’s name is that, is it catching, and I say only for the cold-hearted. Grandma says cold hands warm heart and I take her hands. They are hot. I ask if hot hands mean cold hearts. She says hot hands mean can I have a cup of tea. We laugh. Jamie has stopped crying. I ignore him as I make Grandma’s tea. I try hard to see Grandma from a small boy’s point of view. If she was familiar, if he had grown up seeing her every day, then he would not be frightened but she is not truly familiar, he sees her only six or seven times a year, and there’s no denying that to a stranger Grandma can be alarming. She’s large and shambolic and she likes to get close to people and thrust her dark, heavily furrowed face into theirs, and her whiskers tickle. Then her voice probably frightens Jamie most, so deep and rough and Scottish. But I accept no excuses. Surely even a child can sense Grandma’s kindliness, her gentleness.

  Grandma drinks the tea. She sighs with pleasure. Then a strange expression settles on her face, part alarm, part surprise. She munches a biscuit, her eyes vacant, her thoughts far away. I pick up a book. Then Grandma starts to heave herself up saying the men will be in for etc. etc. I ignore her. It’s an hour before Bridget is due. Grandma, on her feet at last, stands stock-still. I watch her out of the corner of my eye. She turns round and round. Then she says why do folk leave wet flannels on seats, is there no end to it. This is a new one. I put my book down. She’s still turning and suddenly I see a dark patch on the back of her dress. Alistair has come into the room, edging round the wall. His eyes widen and, before I can stop him, he shrills out, ‘Grandma’s wet herself!’

  Jenny

  CHARLIE MAINTAINED THAT just because Grandma had wet herself once, only once, there was no need to tell the Day Centre people this. He preferred, in any case, to describe it as Grandma forgetting to go to the lavatory and I agree that is preferable. Bridget said at once, ‘Something must have upset her’ and of course it had. Children crying, whether in anger or misery, always distress Grandma. It was easy to connect the unfortunate incident with Jamie to the accident. And Hannah should not have given Grandma more tea, but then she was not to know Grandma had just drunk three large mugfuls. As Bridget lost no time in saying, it was all a fuss about nothing.

  But it was not, it is not. Every time something new happens the complete picture changes. Incontinence is to be dreaded. Grandma is not a baby. She cannot be easily lifted and changed when she is wet – it is a performance. All her clothes have to come off and it takes hours. Will the helpers do it? The first time it happens, will each and every one give notice? Bridget is outraged at the suggestion that changing Grandma may prove distasteful, that dealing with wet knickers is not something Mrs O’Malley or Susan or Lola wish to do – but then Bridget is a nurse. I am not. I find it quite distasteful myself. It is not something I want to do myself, frankly.

  But we did not tell the Day Centre people. They had told us they could not take Grandma if she was incontinent and we had said, truthfully at the time, that she was not. Maybe it would never happen again (just as Grandma has never barricaded herself in again since that time Hannah found the doors blocked). And if it did, well, then, that would be that. I made sure, the first afternoon we took Grandma to the Day Centre, that she had had no tea for two hours and that she had emptied her bladder. She knew something was about to happen even though I had given up trying to prepare her. She was nervous, kept clearing her throat, said as I pulled her coat on that, since it was snowing, she thought she would just stay at home. I pointed to the October sunshine flooding through the windows and the blue sky. I told her it was a lovely day and an outing would do he
r good. She said right-o, resigned.

  Charlie drove, with Grandma in the front seat beside him. Charlie talked away, Grandma was silent, as though going to her doom. Unfortunately, as we drove up to the front door of the centre a dormobile-type van was unloading several old people, some severely handicapped. Grandma watched, horrified, as a woman bent double over a walking-frame inched her way through the door and another, clearly disabled by a stroke, her mouth all to one side, was half-lifted in by helpers. Grandma said she did not like to see old folk, the poor things. As we waited, the next person out of the van was a man, quite sprightly, who turned to one of the helpers and beseeched her for a kiss, which she gave him, laughing and calling him a sexy old bugger. Grandma shuddered. She said if there was one thing she hated, it was familiarity and men, they were all the same.

  Grandma can walk perfectly well but to show solidarity we walked either side. We overdid it. Charlie exclaimed over the indoor garden and the pretty fountain and I went into ecstasies over the posters on the walls and the comfortable chairs and we both urged her to listen to the distant singing. She said not a word. We were unsure where to take her but a woman in a pink overall came out of an office and smiled and nodded and asked if this was Mrs McKay. Thank God she gave Grandma her full, formal title. She said she would take Grandma along to hang up her coat and then maybe she would like a nice cup of tea. We gathered we were meant to go. Charlie kissed Grandma and said he hoped she had a good time. When I tried to do the same Grandma hissed in my ear, ‘Don’t leave me – there’s men about.’ The woman in charge was very good. ‘You’re going to be with me, Mrs McKay,’ she said, ‘and I’m not a man, am I?’ Grandma was embarrassed and said she had nothing against men. And they went off down the corridor.

  I wasted the next two hours. Charlie went back to work and, when I had dropped him off at the tube, I drove home and worried. There was no one in at that hour, just me, and I longed for Hannah who understands Grandma’s pathos and the curious way she can blackmail us emotionally without meaning to do so. It was far worse than leaving a child in school for the first time. A child has to go to school, a child’s future is all bound up with the relationships it will make in school. But Grandma did not have to go to the Day Centre and she is no longer capable of making any relationships. It is no good persuading myself that she is there because she will enjoy it, as Charlie obstinately chooses to believe. Bridget is right, she is there for our convenience and as a stepping-stone to a Home. It feels wrong. But nevertheless I was full of hope as I went, alone, to collect her. I deliberately went early so that I could catch Grandma unawares, just as I used to go early for my children and peep through the classroom door. Wandering round the Centre it still felt as friendly as when we inspected it and I was again cheered. Grandma was in a room singing lustily. I saw her sitting in the centre of a half-circle of women and men singing ‘Afton Water’. I waved. She ignored me. The woman in charge brought her out to me. She said Grandma had had a lovely time and my what a good voice and she would look out some other nice Burns’ songs for next time. Surreptitiously, as I put Grandma’s coat on, I checked to see that she was dry – she was. Victory.

  I felt elated as I drove Grandma home. It had been managed, a whole afternoon in a strange place and no disasters. Next time, knowing how well it had worked, I would not worry about imposing this routine on Grandma. It was so much better for her than being stuck in her flat. I took her straight to her own kitchen and waited for Mrs O’Malley, trying all the time to talk to Grandma about the Day Centre. She denied she had been anywhere, didn’t know about any singing and became irritable at my attempts to remind her. Mrs O’Malley said she looked exhausted. Am I becoming as paranoid as Bridget or was there a note of censure in her voice? If so, it is absurd, and I am not going to let it depress me. Charlie was pleased to hear this, even more pleased to hear the session had gone well. He said that in no time at all we would have Grandma there every day and it would be a weight off our backs. I said he had better not repeat that in front of Bridget.

  If Grandma is a weight, then I have lifted her on to my back deliberately and Charlie knows that. I didn’t have to become so involved with her – no one asked me, least of all Bridget. I could have done a Paula, visited her once a week, kept my distance. It is not as though Grandma even likes me. She classes me with Paula as far as liking goes. And she was as against my marrying Charlie as she was against Paula marrying Stuart. Neither of us was suitable for her beloved sons. I involved myself so heavily with Grandma because she is worth it. She is a good woman who has had a hard life and she deserves care and kindness. What is good in me responds to what is good in Grandma – that is the link. But I do not love her and I am not close to her and when we were both younger I could not stand either having her in my house or being in hers. We clashed, our personalities clashed quite spectacularly.

  Hannah, on the other hand, does love her grandmother (which is why she is so popular with Bridget). It is not good for Hannah any more to have so much to do with her Grandmother. Bridget was furious when I said so to her, when I warned her that should Grandma become incontinent, then I would not allow Hannah to change her. ‘Why ever not?’ asked Bridget. ‘It’s too disgusting,’ I replied, determined to be honest. ‘Well, you are a precious little flower,’ Bridget sneered. ‘Good heavens, I’m surprised you can survive in the world at all. If that’s the most disgusting thing your Hannah is going to have to do in her life, then she’ll be very lucky, I must say.’

  When Grandma used to come and stay with us years ago, soon after we were married, the first thing she used to do was wash her underwear. She would arrive in the evening and first thing in the morning she would be standing in the kitchen washing her knickers. ‘Just rinsing out m’breeks,’ she would whisper. It took her half an hour. Squeeze, in a tiny amount of hot water, rinse, in an equally small amount of cold, then wring with those ferociously strong wrists and take out into the garden and pin in the middle of a washing line. Did she only have one pair, I used to wonder? No, she had three: one pair to wear, one in the wash and one spare. It was such a paradox: on the one hand she hated, and was deeply offended by, any reference to natural functions, especially to going to the lavatory, and yet on the other was obsessed with knicker-washing during family breakfast and derived great satisfaction from watching her knickers blow in the wind in full view of us all. And again, though appalled by nudity, Grandma had a passion for absent-mindedly ‘stripping off’, as she put it, if it was hot. She would sit in our garden and proclaim she was roasting alive and very slowly she would start taking her clothes off. Once, when Grandma was down to her vast vest, Adrian said, ‘Ugh’ and she was black-affronted (her favourite expression of outrage). She asked him what the devil was the matter with him and had he anything else unpleasant to say while his mouth was hot. Bridget, of course, told him he was a horrible little boy and then encouraged her mother to bare her all.

  Her legs were, are, the worst. All of Grandma’s life is written in her legs. She once had her hideous varicose veins surgically removed and the scars are horrific. Then there are the burns. She still cannot talk about the burns because Stuart was burned too. I have tried and tried, this long time after, to get her to tell me exactly what happened but it pains her so, and I have to stop. She closes her eyes and shakes her head and winces and says sssh, sssh. Not even Bridget knows the whole story, but then Bridget was not even born. Charlie was, he was four, but he says he can’t remember a thing – typical! Piecing together scraps of information gleaned from older family members all I know is that Grandma spilled a pan of boiling water over herself and Stuart, aged six. She scalded her own legs from knee to ankle and Stuart’s from thigh to knee. Luckily, he was wearing those long, grey-flannel short trousers fashionable for little boys then or his burns would have been much worse. Hers were more serious. She had only lisle stockings on and these absorbed and made more damaging the boiling water. Of course, there was no one in the house – which was not a house but a
few rooms in what were called the Buildings – except for four-year-old Charlie. There was no telephone. There was no one she knew who had a car. She sent Charlie to find a neighbour but no one was in. He came back and she had taken Stuart’s trousers off and covered his thighs with butter. Her own legs she ignored. Then – and this is the part I cannot stand – she somehow shuffled to a bus stop with the screaming Stuart and boarded a bus to the hospital. On the bus she passed out. If it had not been for the wretched butter, Stuart’s injuries would have been relatively slight, but it set up an infection. He was in hospital for two weeks and had a skin graft. She was there three weeks and her skin grafts did not take properly. If it were possible, which it is not, I would like to tell everyone who wonders why I am so ‘devoted’ to my mother-in-law that story.

  Hannah knows it, of course, and she knows all the many other tales of Grandma’s heroism and her hard life. Since Grandma has never moaned or complained and is utterly convinced that all of the past was wonderful, it is only now that Hannah is beginning to piece things together. She gets angry and asks why Grandma put up with all the things that happened to her, and the only reply I can offer is that she had no choice. Nobody asked her, or any other person, if they thought they could suffer before the suffering arrived. One of Grandma’s most scathing remarks used to be, ‘We could all have a nervous breakdown if we wanted – nervous breakdown indeed, well I never.’ But that, to Hannah, is the mystery: why did Grandma not just break down under the weight of accidents and deaths and every variety of misfortune? Why did she not scream and roar and run yelling into the street when she was burned? Why did she wait for a bloody bus? Why, when her husband was killed, did she not lie in bed and weep? Is it bravery, that kind of bravery peculiar to women, the kind for which there are no medals or glory, or is it stupidity? Who can say? Not Grandma, not I. It is a puzzle Hannah will have to work out for herself.