Isa and May

by Margaret Forster

  Isa, when I arrived, still looked a little paler than usual, but she was as dignified and regal as ever in the way she greeted me, or rather allowed me to greet her. She likes an air kiss on her right cheek, and that’s it. I sat down, and automatically looked for the sherry. No sherry bottle on the table, no glasses, though it was sherry time. Was this an indication that I was in disgrace? I made no comment, and neither did Isa. I willed myself to be humble, and careful about anything I said. I must not rise to provocation, I must let Isa get away with any fantasies she wished to project. She is old, she has rights. I am not sure what sort of rights, only that they exist.

  We exchanged pleasantries, as we usually do, about the weather, about the traffic on my way there, about our health. Isa was as polite and attentive as ever, listening gravely to the banalities I came out with. She enquired how May was – ‘How is Mrs Wright?’ (not how is May, or how is your granny, or how is your mother’s mother) – and I told her she was making good progress. Once this was over, she then surprised me. ‘Isamay,’ she said, ‘you are a very dear girl to me.’ I said she was very dear to me too. ‘Very dear,’ she repeated, ‘but capable of getting into a muddle.’ ‘Too true,’ I said, cheerfully, ‘all the time.’ But honesty was not what she apparently was after. She was clasping and unclasping her hands, I noticed, the fingers first locked together and then separated. What was she working up to? She didn’t, though, seem nervous, even if this gesture suggested she might be, but on the contrary quite composed. Her voice was now confident, measured, no hesitation in her tone. She was, as she liked to be, in control. She was going to tell me something, I was sure, and my heart began to beat a little faster.

  Suddenly I wanted to stop her telling me anything at all. She’d regret it, whatever it was, I instinctively knew she would. People do. People like Isa always regret revealing secrets. First, there’s the relief, of not holding in whatever it is, no longer having to worry about the secret being revealed, but then there’s the price to pay. You can’t tell how it will be received, how you’ll be forever altered in someone’s eyes. And there’s the wider damage, which can’t always be limited, the effect of confession on others involved in the secret, who you’ve perhaps betrayed. I make myself sound experienced but I’m not. It’s more that I’ve been told secrets, not that I’ve had any to divulge. Take the most recent example, my dad telling me his secret about Isa not being his real mother. It changed him for me – I still haven’t readjusted to his history. I feel a peculiar kind of pity for him that was never there before. He doesn’t want, or need, my pity, but it’s there. And since knowing this secret, I can hardly look Isa in the eye. She’s always been a model of propriety. I would never even imagine her being capable of telling a lie, or acting out such a deception, yet since my dad told me his secret I know she’s been so adept at both that no one has ever suspected anything. Her cunning, her ability to sustain deception, astounds me.

  I started talking, to stop her, blurting out about her being right, I did get into muddles, and launched into a convoluted account of muddles I’ve been in – but she held up a hand in protest. ‘Isamay,’ she said, ‘quiet.’ So I was quiet. (God, for once I’d have welcomed the horrible sherry.) ‘Human beings,’ Isa said, ‘are storytellers. We all need stories, do we not?’ I nodded, wondering if she was possibly going to quote Mrs Gaskell, and others. If I’d been my usual self, I would have asked her what she meant by ‘stories’, and enjoyed splitting hairs with her over the definition, but I wasn’t and didn’t. ‘We need stories to explain who we are and where we come from, do we not?’ I wanted to say no, not really, but I nodded again. Where on earth had she got this Christmas-cracker wisdom from? ‘But stories are not facts,’ Isa went on, ‘they are inventions woven round facts.’ It was as though she were reciting something she’d memorised – she had that look on her face that people have when they are concentrating on something learned, a look of strain as they try to get each line right. ‘Especially when stories are about family history,’ she continued, ‘because such stories are complicated. Many of them are myths. They have been told so often, and in the telling, details have changed. The facts the stories are based on become less vital and what surrounds them takes over.’ Then she stopped. This wasn’t Isa, all this stuff. I couldn’t think where she had picked it up – from some programme on the radio? Some magazine? In any case, she’d now forgotten what her point was. I wondered if I should help her out, but suddenly she got a second wind and was off again, giving examples of how family history stories change. Somehow, she’d jumped to my own birth, describing the event as I’d heard it described every Christmas Eve. ‘That is a factual account,’ Isa said. ‘I was there, your other grandmother was there, your parents were there. We all have a clear recollection. Facts. Indisputable. But there are other stories where the facts are not known.’

  She was actually trembling slightly, her whole body quivering in the most disturbing way. I asked her if she was cold, and looked around for something to wrap round her shoulders, but she said she was not cold, she was perfectly all right and I should not fuss. The quivering stopped, and she took a deep breath. I started to say something – I was going to ask what on earth she’d been hinting at – but she held up her hand, in the well-known manner, to tell me not to speak. I couldn’t read her expression. Her eyes, her still so bright blue eyes, appeared vacant – it was quite frightening to observe. I began to get goose pimples and my mouth went dry. ‘Grandmama,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong? You look so odd.’ She didn’t reply, but some recognition seemed to creep back into her expression. She put a hand to her head and kept it there a moment. ‘I am the keeper of another story,’ she said, ‘and I have kept it long enough. You have got in a muddle, Isamay. You have brought this about.’ Totally confused, I asked what I’d brought about, was she referring to the brother she hadn’t known about? ‘You have got in a muddle, and forced my hand,’ she said.

  I studied her carefully, half afraid to move or speak, wishing for once that Elspeth would come creeping in, but she’d gone, or that a phone would ring – anything to shatter the weirdness of the moment. But there was silence except for Isa’s breathing, rapid and surprisingly loud, and my fidgeting as I rubbed at the arms of my chair to try to conceal my anxiety. I was counting as I did it, one-two rubbing forward, three-four rubbing back, a pointless motion that soothed me. ‘Upsetting things,’ Isa suddenly burst out, making a fist with her right hand and banging her knee. She’d gone from appearing hardly to be there to being very present and now angry. Colour crept into her pale face and she frowned in a way she never allows herself to – frowning creates lines – and there was a renewed strength in her voice. ‘It is time for the lying to stop!’ she announced, melodramatically. ‘Who’s been lying?’ I asked before I could stop myself. ‘Sssh!’ she said. ‘This is quite difficult enough.’

  And then, just when I didn’t want the interruption, which only minutes before I’d been desperate to happen, the telephone on the table beside Isa’s chair rang. It has an old-fashioned ring, hard and loud, no personal tune for Isa. It’s an old-fashioned dial telephone, rather large and cumbersome, taking up too much room on the table, but she won’t switch to a neater, push-button sort. She would never not answer it, either. So when it began its insistent double-beat ringing, Isa gave a start, and then reached out her hand for the black receiver. Her face changed the moment she heard the voice. ‘Darling!’ she said, and smiled. She listened, nodded, said ‘Of course, of course,’ and then ‘Yes, she’s here,’ and rather reluctantly handed the phone to me. It was Dad. He said he hadn’t known I was visiting, he was just checking on Isa because Elspeth had said she wasn’t too well, and how did I find her? With Isa watching and listening, all I could say was fine, and I’d ring him later.

  That was it. When the receiver was replaced, Isa said, ‘Where were we?’ in an absolutely normal tone of voice. I said she’d been talking about lying, and then, predictably, we got into a complicated conversation about w
ho had been lying and why, and in the end Isa agreed she couldn’t remember what she had been going to say. It had all been so tiring, first Isa’s strangeness, then her apparent resentment about something or other, and lastly the sense that she was going to make some unpleasant announcement, or divulge some shocking news (though that bit may have been my imagination). Nothing could have been more different from my normal sessions with her – they had always followed a reliable pattern, boring maybe but entirely dependable. I knew more or less what she would say, I knew how to respond, what she wanted of me. Now I was bewildered. She’d definitely summoned me to tell me something but I hadn’t the faintest idea what it was, and thanks to Dad calling, she had herself forgotten.

  There was nothing to do but leave. ‘Oh!’ Isa said, when I rose to give her the regulation farewell kiss on the cheek. ‘You haven’t had your sherry!’ I said it didn’t matter, but she said she’d been ‘remiss’ and had forgotten her manners, and how could she have done? She saw me to the door and her walking, though stately as ever, was very slow, as though she feared she might fall. Her hand reached out to hold on to the hall table as she passed it and the little lace handkerchief she’d been clutching fell to the floor. I bent down and picked it up. It was damp, and I remembered she’d been twisting it earlier, over and over – it was damp with perspiration from her hands. This touched me. It was all wrong that an old lady should be in such a state and that somehow I had caused her distress. I hesitated when we reached the front door, wishing Elspeth was still in the house. Was Isa safe on her own? I wasn’t at all sure. But when the door had been opened, the rush of fresh air from outside seemed to revive her. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘What a lovely evening,’ and she stood on the doorstep with her eyes closed, breathing in and out in the theatrical manner she sometimes adopted. I felt reassured. She was still standing at the door by the time I got to my car, parked outside her front gate. She looked so elegant in her blue dress, one hand still raised in a courtly wave. To my relief, she closed the door before I started the car. Elspeth would have left her supper for her. She would slip into her beloved routine and, with luck, remember nothing of the previous half-hour.

  When I got home, Ian was already there. He said I looked shaken, had something happened? I told him I wasn’t sure what indeed had happened, and tried to explain about Isa. He’s only met her once, but I’ve talked enough about her for him to be familiar with what she’s like, and of course I’ve gone on about the brother thing and Mary-Lou’s research, so he knows about all that.

  ‘I just feel that whatever is wrong with Isa it’s somehow all my fault,’ I said.

  ‘Yup,’ he said, which annoyed me.

  ‘What do you mean, “yup”?’ I said.

  ‘Well, like you said, you and the Canadian cousin have started something off, even if you don’t know what. Just memories, maybe. Ones she’s suppressed and doesn’t want to surface again.’

  ‘Memories of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t either, maybe there’s all sorts of stuff just swirling around and she’s confused. She’s eighty, she’s entitled to a bit of confusion. I don’t know why you’re all so scared of her.’

  ‘What do you mean, scared? We are not scared.’

  ‘Yes you are. In awe of her, then. The way you talk about it, always nervous of offending her, worrying about what she’ll say or think.’

  ‘Ian, you’re making this up. You’ve only met her once, you’ve only seen me with her once . . .’

  ‘That was enough.’

  ‘. . . and you’ve never seen the rest of my family with her.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I’ve listened to you, that’s enough. It’s obvious Isa makes your mum nervous and your dad isn’t comfortable with her.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be the expert of course on mother/son relationships.’

  ‘I’m an expert on you, anyway. The way you behave with her it’s as though she’s made of china and you are afraid of smashing her. She’s probably the only person you seem not to be cheeky to, from your own accounts, or sarcastic. From the sound of it, you do the good-little-girl act, and she treats you like some kind of favoured acolyte she’s anointed—’

  ‘That’s not fair. I’m her granddaughter, she treats me like a granddaughter.’

  ‘Except you’re not. You’re not her granddaughter.’

  ‘The birth thing doesn’t make any difference. I am her granddaughter.’

  Ian shrugged. I wanted to challenge everything he had said, but I felt stopped in my tracks. I am not Isa’s granddaughter. Knowing this makes me doubt all kinds of things I was once sure of. The doubt is creeping into my work.

  Ian came home this evening and silently passed me a newspaper cutting he’d taken from his jacket pocket. It was all scrunched up and I had to smooth it out to see what it was. He has this sneaky habit of tearing items that interest him out of newspapers he reads in the cafés where he has his lunch.

  I ought to have screwed up the pilfered cutting as a matter of principle but I didn’t. I’d caught sight of the photograph. It was obviously of a grandmother and granddaughter, the likeness clear in spite of the age difference and contrasting styles of dress. The caption under this photograph read: ‘Found at last, after 28 years’. So it was irresistible to me, as Ian had known it would be – I had to sit down and read the whole thing. I read it rapidly, then twice more, slowly. It was about a group of grandmothers known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, who got together to search for the missing children of their own children who had ‘disappeared’ during the military dictatorship in Argentina during 1976–83. These grandmothers had persuaded the post-dictatorship government to set up the National Bank of Genetic Data to facilitate the tracking down of missing people. The children of the grandmothers were usually dead – tortured, then killed – but their children were very often alive and being brought up by people who they did not know were not their real parents. The article said that so far eighty-two grandchildren had been traced. Often, it seemed the grandchildren had been shocked and resented the exposure of their real parentage; they had been happy with their adoptive parents (usually members of the previous dictatorship’s regime) and had been brought up in luxury. To find that they now belonged to much poorer families presented all kinds of problems, and the love of the grandmothers was not enough to overcome them.

  I stared at the photograph a long time. The grandmother was said to be eighty but looked much older, very frail and bent, and the granddaughter, much taller than her, was twenty-eight, almost my age, but looked younger. She’d been six months old when her parents (her mother a student, her father a lecturer) had disappeared. They had both been arrested at their home and taken with the baby to an undisclosed destination. From the first, the grandmother, a seamstress, had been certain they had been murdered for their part in demonstrations against the regime, but she could not believe the baby had shared their fate. Her joy at discovering that this young woman was indeed her granddaughter – all it took was a blood test (though it wasn’t explained how the young woman came to be traced in the first instance) – was overshadowed by the realisation that it was not shared. The granddaughter hadn’t been keen to meet her. She said she had a grandmother already and would always regard her as her true grandmother. The reunion was not the happy occasion it was expected (by the blood grandmother) to be. No wonder that in the photograph they both looked stern-faced and sad – and yet the resemblance was truly striking. Both of them had the same high forehead, the same long, slim nose, and most noticeable of all, a distinctive upper lip with a pronounced bow in the centre. The granddaughter was wearing lipstick, so the upper lip really stood out, and the grandmother was not, and her mouth was sunken – false teeth, or missing teeth? – but nevertheless the strong similarity was clear.

  There were so many unanswered questions in this article, and the last paragraph was missing, due to the carelessness with which Ian had torn it out, but it didn’t matter. There was enough there to demonstrate
how important grandmothers are – they have the knowledge, and not even a military dictatorship can make them forget it. It doesn’t ‘disappear’, as their children did. This made such a deep impression on me, the thought of how the genetic claim could not be denied, that I almost forgot that the granddaughter hadn’t wanted to be found and claimed.

  Whenever I visit May, she likes me to prattle on non-stop, yet when I do that she complains that I never pause for breath and give her a headache. Today, she was actually out in her little garden when I arrived, which was a good sign, watering the tubs. The watering can is just a cheap plastic thing she can handle quite easily. I always thought it ugly and once bought her a pretty metal one, on sale at the Sainsbury Wing shop in the National Gallery, after a Monet exhibition. It was pale grey with water lilies painted on it. May never used it, said it was too heavy and the lilies didn’t look anything like water lilies, but what had really turned her against it was the price, which I hadn’t noticed – the sticker was still on the bottom, £12.50, and it enraged her.

  I’d remembered to bring my key this time and let myself in, shouting a greeting. When I realised she was out at the back, because the door at the end of the passage was wide open, I went and stood there, waiting for her to catch sight of me, so as not to alarm her. She looked so sweet, concentrating on her watering, both hands gripping the old can as though it were much heavier than it possibly could be when it held so little water. She held it as a child might do, as I myself had held it under her direction. I noticed how much weight she’d lost since being in hospital – it didn’t suit her, this new thin look. I wanted her to be round and plump again. And her hair was thinner too, not as bouncy as it usually was. It hung lank and a bit wild. She hadn’t had one of her perms for ages.