Claudia always ends with questions.
No chance to get down to any work today. The Canadian cousins want to meet me ‘properly’. Dad picked them up again from their hotel and brought them to his house for lunch, where Isa and I were already waiting. Isa was tired after her party, but still keen to see the cousins again and hear about their forthcoming tour of Scotland. They were not wearing their tartan outfits this time but grey pantsuits (Isa, of course, loathes such garments). Almost the moment they were through the door, they were telling Isa they had a big surprise for her, she was going to be so thrilled, so amazed . . . Isa, with her dislike of surprises, looked alarmed. The surprise turned out to be a genealogical chart of the Macdonells, tracing them back hundreds of years and going up to the present day. They could hardly wait for lunch to be over to get the table cleared and their chart laid out. I put Isa’s apparent lack of enthusiasm down to her general exhaustion, and her irritation with how the cousins, Mary-Lou in particular, shouted.
The chart was secured at its corners to Mary-Lou’s satisfaction with a salt cellar, a pepper mill, and two small china bowls, and then she began what amounted to a lecture, impossible to interrupt. She, with Beth’s help (Beth beamed her pride), had traced Isa’s family, the Macdonells, back to the Jacobite rebellion period. Her great-great-great-grandfather Gavin Macdonell was killed by the musketry of Pulteney’s Regiment on Culloden Moor, together with his chief, Alexander Macdonell of Keppoch, and scores of others. His son, also Gavin, inherited the land leased by the chief to his father, but in 1772 he, together with an estimated 5,400 others in that year, emigrated to Canada. Mary-Lou, who was proud of knowing the history, informed us that this early emigration movement was not the desperate affair it was to become in the next century, when starving Highlanders were cleared from the land to make way for sheep – Gavin Macdonell and his fellow emigrants had some money and left because they could see better opportunities in North America. This Gavin bought some land on the Gulf of St Lawrence and prospered. He had three sons, the eldest of whom (Gavin, of course) was Mary-Lou’s great-great-grandfather and the youngest, James, Isa’s. James returned to Scotland – Mary-Lou didn’t know why – and became a businessman, ending up owning a steelworks and becoming wealthy. Mary-Lou’s side of the family hadn’t been so fortunate. We listened politely as she detailed their hardships. My father yawned, and Isa’s fixed smile and head-nodding became irritating to watch. Mary-Lou kept pausing, as though for gasps of appreciation or astonishment. But you don’t have to be clever to unearth this stuff. It’s just a matter of having computer skills and being patient and dogged.
On and on it went, with Beth jumping in to finish Mary-Lou’s sentences. Their excitement should have been infectious – they were so thrilled by all this family history – but instead was slightly embarrassing. Mary-Lou was particularly thrilled about the longevity of the name Gavin. ‘There are,’ she announced, ‘at this moment in time seven Gavin Macdonells alive!’ She pointed them out among the crowded lower branches of the family tree. They were all Canadians. Mary-Lou said she’d been unable to trace any Gavins on this side of the ocean and asked if Dad knew of any. That made Mum and me smile – Dad hasn’t a clue about any of his relations. He didn’t recognise any of them at Isa’s party. Realising what his blank expression meant, Mary-Lou asked him, in a rather incredulous tone of voice, if he didn’t keep in touch with his family on his mother’s side. Dad said he was afraid not. This admission temporarily silenced Mary-Lou. I took the chance to ask a question. I’d been studying the chart, concentrating on Isa’s side and not the Canadian lot, and I’d noticed a tiny question mark written next to Isa’s name and date of birth. I pointed at it. ‘What’s that there for?’ I asked. Mary-Lou said it was there to signify that Isa’s parents had had a son, born in 1930, but that there was no information about him other than his date of birth. ‘I wrote to you, Isa, do you remember?’ Mary-Lou said. ‘About your brother?’
We all looked at Isa. Mary-Lou had at last got us truly interested. Isa was smiling, but it was that fixed, glacial smile she specialises in when she wants to intimidate someone. ‘I had no brother,’ she said, speaking very clearly, slightly separating each word. ‘As I told you, Mary-Lou, I had a sister, who died of diphtheria, aged three. You made a mistake.’ As far as Isa was concerned, end of subject. But Mary-Lou was not so easily thwarted. She was mutinous. I could see it in the way she flushed and her mouth became set. ‘I know about your sister, Isa; she is there, on the chart, see. But there was a brother too. I have his birth certificate. I offered you a copy, do you recall, dear? But you said not to trouble myself.’ ‘How fascinating,’ I said, quickly. ‘What do you suppose happened to him? What was his name?’ ‘James,’ Mary-Lou said, and then added, ‘I think. The writing is almost indecipherable.’ ‘I had no brother,’ repeated Isa. ‘This is all a nonsense.’
The tension was marked in both Isa and Mary-Lou, but I couldn’t let the matter of the mysterious brother rest. I wondered aloud what had happened to this baby Isa knew nothing about. ‘Maybe he was stillborn, and it was kept from Isa,’ I suggested. But Mary-Lou didn’t think so. She said there would have been a record of his death, and that, in fact, the birth was registered six weeks later, showing the child had at least reached that age. But there was no death certificate for a James Macdonell born on 1 June 1930. She had searched and searched and found nothing. ‘Because there is nothing to find,’ said Isa. ‘But you weren’t quite two,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t necessarily have known about the baby, Grandmama, and—’ My dad nudged me, and said, ‘I’m sure Mother is right and it’s all a mix-up. Anyway, it’s all in the past, it doesn’t matter.’ ‘Oh!’ said Mary-Lou, ‘But the past does matter!’ Dad hurriedly muttered something about the past always being a bit unreliable anyway, and then Mum started serving the coffee and the atmosphere lightened.
After that, my parents both worked hard at steering the cousins away from their precious chart, asking them about the Scottish trip they were about to set off on. They gave us their itinerary in bewildering detail. Isa had by then quite obviously gone off them and seemed relieved when they made the first move to leave. I offered to drive them back to their hotel. It gave me the opportunity to give Mary-Lou my address and ask her to send me a copy of the intriguing birth certificate. ‘You’ll find there’s no mistake,’ she said, and offered me a copy of her whole chart if I’d like one. I said I’d love a copy, but I must pay for the copying and the postage. She wouldn’t hear of it – I was family. Before we parted, I asked her why she thought my grandmother had been so angry about this brother, why wasn’t she fascinated instead and curious to know what had happened to him. ‘She is offended she didn’t know about him,’ Beth offered, but Mary-Lou wasn’t sure that was the reason. I pressed her to give me her opinion, but for a woman who was normally so garrulous, she was curiously reluctant. I couldn’t get anything out of her, if there was anything to get.
The letters Claudia had told me about, from Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse, showed a grandmother who, though she had indeed written ‘look on me as a mother’, and been full of sympathy for the young princess’s plight, was also highly critical of the girl’s behaviour. She obviously took offence easily and insisted on the highest standards. ‘Two letters I have received from you,’ she wrote in 1879, ‘but never the one thanking me for mine.’ Not to thank her was inexcusable. She was also shocked by Princess Victoria’s tomboyish ways, especially her love of hunting – ‘it is not ladylike to kill animals and go out shooting . . . only fast ladies do such things’. All this struck me as typical grandmotherly stuff, but what was more interesting was the Queen’s attitude to her granddaughter’s girlfriends. She advised her never to make close female friendships – ‘girls’ friendships and intimacies are very bad and often lead to great mischief’.
Really? I sat and thought about that. Friends are important to girls, especially in adolescence. I thought about my own friends at that period and knew I’d
have been lost without them even though I wasn’t as dependent on friends as some girls are. Beattie, especially, was important. We told each other everything, spent hours in each other’s company planning what we were going to do in the future, how far away from our boring lives we were going to move. Other friends didn’t matter as much but we, Beattie and I, still needed them to give our activities more point – we needed them for parties, and to play games with, and to move around in a pack with when we wanted to seem powerful. So why did Queen Victoria think this kind of thing was bad? A grandmother who had wanted to be thought of as a mother forbidding her granddaughter the kind of friendships that could bring her so much comfort and pleasure – it was odd. I don’t think there can have been any sexual undertone. Wasn’t the Queen famous for believing lesbianism couldn’t exist? So she can’t have been warning the princess off girlfriends for that reason. It was such a strange piece of advice to give a young girl, and I raced on through the letters looking for clues as to what the Queen meant, but there weren’t any. She had other extraordinary things to tell her granddaughter, though, but I was interrupted before I could absorb them.
Mum rang. May is in hospital. How she comes to be there is a drama she will relish describing once she is better, featuring as it does hammering on her party wall with a heavy torch (her dead husband Albert’s) to attract the attention of her neighbours, the Patels, and then the Patels calling the police, who used a ladder to get in her bedroom window to find her lying in her blood-soaked bed . . . all true, apparently. No good asking why May hadn’t used her telephone to call someone. She hasn’t a phone in her bedroom, won’t have one, won’t have a portable or a mobile, and says the bedroom is no place for dratted telephones. She was lucky the Patels heard her and acted swiftly. May has not exactly been a good neighbour to them, restricting herself to good morning and nice day type pleasantries, though she does give their children barley sugars. She admits that Mrs Patel keeps her family in good order and that Mr Patel is very polite and always puts her bin back in its proper place if the bin men have left it on the pavement. But she has never invited them into her house and I doubt she’d accept an invitation into theirs, if it was offered.
Mr Patel, when he heard the noise, was afraid his neighbour was being burgled. He didn’t have her telephone number, so he rang the police, afraid to confront intruders himself. The police banged on May’s front door first, got no reply, and then went through the Patels’ house into their garden and over the wall into May’s. They climbed up to her bedroom, opened the window easily, and found her unconscious, half in, half out of her bed, clutching a pillow sodden with blood. They called an ambulance and rang Mum (her number was written in large print beside the downstairs telephone). It’s a call she’s been anticipating and dreading. She went straight to the hospital, where May was still in A & E in a cubicle, and stayed with her until she was moved to a short-stay ward. She’d had a haemorrhage, but they don’t know the cause yet. Mum is going to work soon. I am to take over, and visit this afternoon.
I’ve been trying to remember how many people I’ve ever visited in hospital. Not many. I’m not the hospital visiting type. It’s not that I don’t care when friends or family are ill, just that, like many people, I have a weird phobia about hospitals. OK, it’s cowardice. I always worry that I’m going to faint at their bedsides. I only have to walk into the building and the palpitations start. Sometimes, when I’m visiting someone, I only just manage to get into a corridor, or stumble to a toilet, before my knees give way, and I end up lying on the floor. These dizzy spells are over quickly. I get up, splash my face with cold water and rush out of the place.
So, going to visit my granny was not easy. I dreaded disgracing myself and upsetting her. For ages I stood outside the main entrance of the hospital, with the smokers, and tried to brace myself. I took deep breaths, and shivered – though not with fright but from the cold, from the sting of the wind whipping its way from the north, round the concrete pillars. Going into the place was at first a relief because of the warmth. I relaxed a little, and lectured myself, and vowed I was going to be fine this time. I almost ran up the stairs, scorning the lifts, and felt better for the exercise. I hoped it would have given my cheeks some colour so that May wouldn’t tell me I looked like death warmed up. I found the short-stay ward but paused to read a printed list of instructions about wearing protective clothing because of the threat of MRSA. I had to put on a kind of apron, made of plastic, I think, and a pair of gloves, after I’d removed my jacket. This helped, funnily enough. I felt protected against my fear, too.
There were only four beds in the ward, all of them occupied, though one patient was out of her bed, standing looking out of the window. May was nearest to the door. She was propped up on pillows, awake and watching the two women opposite her with what looked like pop-eyed surprise. ‘Granny,’ I said, and went to sit on the chair beside her bed, pulling it close. For a moment, I thought she didn’t recognise me, but then she said, ‘Well, you’ve come; I’m glad someone’s come, ’cos I don’t know what they’re doing to me here.’ I said they were finding out what was wrong with her and then they’d make her better. ‘Huh,’ she said, ‘if you believe that you’ll believe anything.’ But she said it in a mild tone, her heart not in it – usually, that phrase comes out searingly sarcastic. I thought she might relish telling me what had happened, but she hadn’t the heart for that either. The spirited account I’d imagined never came. Instead, she sighed and mumbled about the blood, and the pain in her belly, and how she was all on her own and didn’t know what to do. ‘Right carry-on it were,’ she said. I was just about to try to reassure her, as well as praise her for managing to alert the Patels, when a loud ‘Fuck that!’ rang through the ward. May jerked her head round to trace where the swearing had come from, and I did the same.
It had come from the woman who, I’d thought, had been standing just looking out of the window, with her back to us. I saw now that she’d been struggling with some sort of oxygen mask, which she’d wrenched off and flung on her bed. The other two patients appeared to have slept through this interruption, but the woman could see that May and I were mesmerised, staring at her, probably with our mouths hanging open. ‘I’m fucked up,’ she said, but in a resigned way. She came towards us, pointing at her chest. ‘Lungs fucked,’ she said, and then, moving her finger down, ‘liver fucked. I tell you, I’m bloody well fucked, good and proper, and as for that fucking nebuliser, it does no fuckin’ good.’ Neither May nor I said a word. A polite ‘how interesting’, or a caring ‘I’m so sorry’ definitely would not do. May clutched my hand tightly, and I cleared my throat. ‘That your gran?’ the woman said, perching now on the end of May’s bed. I nodded. ‘Thought so, poor old sod. Brought her in in a right state, early hours this morning. Haemorrhage, was it? Stomach ulcer, was it?’ I said I didn’t know. ‘They don’t know either,’ she said. ‘They know fuckin’ nothing.’ I cleared my throat again. ‘Want a Strepsil?’ she asked. I nodded, and a packet was produced from her jeans pocket. ‘I’m Jess,’ she said. ‘Don’t mind me, I just get that fuckin’ angry, know what I mean?’ I said I did (but do I?). ‘I’m sick of being told this is all my own fuckin’ fault. Do they think I don’t know that? Course I do. But I can’t help it if it’s my own fuckin’ fault, can I? Do they ever think of that? Course they don’t.’
At that point, a nurse came in. I waited for Jess to scurry back obediently to her bed, but she didn’t. She greeted the nurse with ‘Where the hell have you been?’ and the nurse, perfectly amiably, said she’d been bringing a patient up from A & E. ‘Have you used your nebuliser, Jess?’ she asked. ‘Course I fuckin’ have and it’s fuckin’ useless,’ said Jess. I waited for the reprimand, but all the nurse said was that she’d check the nebuliser to make sure it wasn’t blocked. ‘This thing on my arm is killing me,’ Jess complained, holding out her shockingly thin arm, where there was a patch of something stuck on the upper part. The nurse said it was probably sore because Jess was
reacting to the antibiotic. ‘Of course I fuckin’ am!’ Jess shouted. ‘So do something about it, get another antibiotic going. One I ain’t allergic to. I’m not having this, it’s itching like mad, I want it off or I’ll rip it off myself! Go on, scarper, get a doctor!’ The nurse, completely unfazed, gave a little laugh, as though Jess had made a joke, and went off again. Jess went back to her bed.
May and I looked at each other. ‘In hospital!’ May whispered. She was astounded more than outraged. Sick people didn’t swear. Sick people revered doctors and nurses. She was stunned, and so was I, with less excuse. Why shouldn’t Jess be angry and complain? Why shouldn’t the nurse just overlook the swearing, knowing it was Jess’s normal language and she didn’t mean to be offensive? But May’s attitude had passed over to me in spite of my different upbringing. She’d always been in awe of doctors and hospitals. She’d wanted her clever daughter to be a nurse, not a scientist (but at least she had married a doctor, the one thing my mum ever did that really pleased May). Now I sat there, as uncomfortable as my grandmother, eyes only for Jess, who was walking up and down the short length of the ward, talking to herself furiously. Then a phone rang, and she produced a mobile from her pocket. May and I gave each other another shocked look. ‘A phone, in hospital!’ May whispered. ‘They ain’t allowed!’
We were either out of date (and we were) or else Jess was defying orders. ‘Tony!’ she yelled. ‘You wanker! Yeah, I’m in again, fuckin’ prison, not even a telly. Just had the place done, it’s a new ward they say, and no bloody telly, can you believe it? What are they like? What are their priorities, yeah? Taxpayers’ money, and no telly, for Gawd’s sake, bloody ridiculous. What? Yeah, my dad’s been, wish he hadn’t, he says Stacey wants to visit. I ain’t having that bitch anywhere near me telling me it’s my own fuckin’ fault, yeah, that’s what she does, bloody cheek.’ There was a longish pause. Neither May nor I could drag our eyes away from Jess, who seemed entirely oblivious to the presence of anyone else. ‘What?’ she started again. ‘What? At my age? Forget it. I’m going to be forty in July, forty. I’m a fuckin’ miracle I am, only four pounds when I was born and that was in a toilet, no, honestly, stop laughing, I was, I come out head first into a toilet,’ and then Jess screamed and laughed and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. ‘What? Right, see you then, love you, babe, bye.’
Isa and May Page 7
