Isa and May
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Margaret Forster
Title Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Copyright
About the Book
Isamay’s unusual name comes from her two very different grandmothers, Isa and May, who were both present at her birth and who have both formed and influenced her whole life in very particular ways. Now almost thirty, Isamay is trying to write a thesis about grandmothers in history but is instead constantly ambushed by the startling secrets her own family has been keeping. When disturbing truths are revealed that force Isamay to examine her own certainties, will her grandmothers be able to build a bridge across the generations?
About the Author
Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster is the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady’s Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? and most recently Over, as well as bestselling memoirs (Hidden Lives and Precious Lives) and biographies. She is married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies, and lives in London and the Lake District.
ALSO BY MARGARET FORSTER
Dame’s Delight
Georgy Girl
The Bogeyman
The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff
The Park
Miss Owen-Owen is At Home
Fenella Phizackerley
Mr Bone’s Retreat
The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury
Mother Can You Hear Me?
The Bride of Lowther Fell
Marital Rites
Private Papers
Have the Men Had Enough?
Lady’s Maid
The Battle for Christabel
Mothers’ Boys
Shadow Baby
The Memory Box
Diary of an Ordinary Woman
Is There Anything You Want?
Keeping the World Away
Over
Non-Fiction
The Rash Adventurer
William Makepeace Thackeray
Significant Sisters
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Daphne du Maurier
Hidden Lives
Rich Desserts & Captain’s Thin
Precious Lives
Good Wives?
Poetry
Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(Editor)
MARGARET FORSTER
Isa & May
I
THE HARDEST THING to tell Isa and May was where, and how, I met Ian. I thought seriously about lying. I could claim I’d met him at a party, which would have satisfied May but maybe not Isa. Isa is the sort of morally upright person who can sense a lie at once. She would have wanted to know who had given this party, where it had been held, and a load of other questions hinting at her suspicions. So I told the truth, but not the whole truth. I said I’d met him at an airport. I didn’t say I’d tried to pick him up. The meeting place was scandalous enough for them.
My grandmothers hated me going abroad as soon as I graduated. To May, ‘abroad’ represented desertion; to Isa it meant evasion of some sort. They ought to have been reassured by the fact that I was going to teach, but teaching English to foreign students, in several countries, was not what they regarded as respectable. My parents didn’t approve either but were resigned to my evident need to spread my wings. I e-mailed my parents often, and sent regular pretty postcards, as well as letters, to Isa and May, and I phoned on special occasions. But they missed me. And I found I missed them too.
The airport was exceptionally busy, with long and confusing queues at every stage. I was standing at the end of one queue, praying it would be the last before reaching the departure area, when a man standing in a parallel queue caught my attention. There was nothing remarkable about his looks (medium height, dark hair, slim build) or his clothes (jeans, black jacket, white T-shirt) but his composure struck me as unusual. He had a serene air, a calmness, that contrasted with my own agitation and that of everyone else I could see. There was I, fussing because my queue wasn’t moving, and there he was, not bothered, relaxed.
Then he did something unexpected. The woman immediately in front of him was elderly. She had white hair, caught up with clips in an untidy bun, and she was wearing a weird assortment of clothes. She had a long, bedraggled flowered skirt topped with a bulky red anorak, and round her neck she wore a brown woollen scarf that half obscured her face. She looked hot and uncomfortable and was forever turning round, as though searching for someone. She was quite stooped, but had a bag on each shoulder. The bags were clearly heavy, because she kept shifting their weight, constantly readjusting the straps. She shuffled her trainer-clad feet all the time. I was watching her, feeling sorry for her, when the young man tapped her on the arm. She swung round, alarmed, and though I couldn’t hear what he said, I saw him point to her bags. He was offering to carry them for her. At first she shook her head, and looked afraid, and then, when he smiled and made a gesture indicating that he understood, it was fine, she changed her mind. He was given her bags. She stopped moving from foot to foot, but repeatedly checked that her bags were still there. This old woman was nothing like elegant Isa or plump little May, but I immediately thought of my grandmothers and how they would have reacted to the stranger’s kindness. It made me feel sentimental and a little tearful.
When we got to the front of our respective queues, we were still level with each other and I heard the woman, who was American, thank the young man effusively. He said it had been a pleasure, no trouble at all. He was Scottish. And then I couldn’t resist speaking to him. I said, can I just say what a kind thing that was to do. He looked a little embarrassed, and shrugged, and said it was nothing. I asked him where he was flying to, and he said London. So was I. Maybe we were on the same flight, I said, flourishing my boarding card. But he was on a later one, and had arrived much too early. He didn’t say why. We walked together to the departure lounge. I went on trying to engage him in conversation. It was hard going. I could tell he was amused by my persistence, but wary, too. I carried on chattering, the way I do when I’m nervous, telling him what I’d been doing the last few years. He listened politely but didn’t reveal anything about himself. I did all the talking, acting entirely out of character, but he wasn’t to know that. At that point, my flight was called. I said it had been nice meeting him and here was my mobile number – ‘Here is my mobile number!’ Oh God.
Now, how could I tell Isa and May this? May would say that Ian might be an axe murderer, you never knew, and Isa would say – well, she would look rather than say. She doesn’t like the unexpected. Mysteries intrigue her, but my inexplicable behaviour and the lack of information about Ian would make her very uneasy. A strange young man standing in a queue at an airport – a foreign airport – would strike her as an untouchable. So, what I said was that I’d met Ian in an airport and, extraordinarily, he turned out to be a friend of my school friend Beattie. They both know Beattie, so that seemed all right. Just.
It was a tough time, those first few weeks when I came back. There was the question of money, for a start. I had none. Everything I’d earned had gone on keeping myself, and doing a bit of travelling. I had to go back to living at home, where I was made very welcome, but it felt like putting the clock back. I wanted my own flat, but that meant finding money for rent. Meanwhile, I was applying for a grant to do an
MA – that was a laugh. I discovered I could get accepted on a course OK but I didn’t qualify for a grant (hardly anyone does any more).
My parents offered to ‘lend’ me the money that would be needed, but I refused their offer. They’ve been generous enough to me in all kinds of ways. Instead, I had to take really boring temping jobs. It was such a shock, that sort of work – May laughed at my dismay. She reminded me that half the population get up at six and don’t get home until seven or eight in the evening, and that the work they do is boring. May said I carried on as though I were down the mines instead of sitting on my backside in offices. Being a temp was to her the life of Riley. Isa, on the other hand, was ‘pained’ that I had had to resort to such ‘undistinguished’ employment. She was quite alarmed when I explained my job as that of a sort of stand-in secretary. ‘To whom are you a secretary?’ she asked. I said to different people; that I just filled in for various people in big organisations when someone was ill or taking leave. I was sent by the agency I’d enrolled with and was never anywhere more than a month. Isa thought this ‘low’ employment, and was surprised my father allowed it.
It took me almost three years to save up enough to finance my MA course. I would never have got through those years without Ian. He called a week after I got back. He told me later that I’d stuck in his head, refusing to fade from his mind, but that he had been ready to find either that the mobile number was a joke, just made up, or that I would have no idea who was calling and no recollection of giving my number to a strange man I’d encountered in an airport. We met at a Café Rouge. After that, things happened fast. Skip another month, and we’d met ten times. Skip six more weeks and we were renting a flat together (with Ian paying the major share). I’d kept him a secret up to that point – I was twenty-six, and felt entitled to. I’d told my parents, of course, that I’d met a really interesting man, but Ian hadn’t met them yet. He said he’d rather not, which upset me a bit. His reason was that he preferred not to get involved with family. I didn’t mention him to Isa nor May for another six months, fearing the inevitable inquisition, and then I told them the Beattie lie.
It will be obvious by now that I am obsessed with Isa and May, my grandmothers, or, more precisely, I am obsessed by their significance, without being sure what that is. There is nothing special about these two old women. They are not famous or anything, but that’s not the point (we’ll come to what the point is later, I hope). I am named for both of them. It’s an awkward name: Isamay, pronounced Is-a-may. Isa is my paternal grandmother’s name (shortened from Isabel) and May my maternal grandmother’s (it comes, somehow, from Margaret). The amalgamation is, as you see, strictly alphabetical. Life, I feel, would have been much easier if they had chosen Maybel. But Isamay it is, reduced to Issy by my friends but never by my grandmothers. They are pleased with, and proud of, the name, and want me to be. I wish I could oblige.
I owe rather more than my odd name to my grandmothers. I owe them my life, and not merely in the genetic sense. The tale of how they delivered me, of how I was born, has grown in the telling, as such stories do, but the facts seem to be real enough. I was a Christmas baby, though not due to arrive until three weeks later. It was Christmas Eve, no snow, but driving winds and rain, and my parents had just moved into their first flat the week before. My grandmother May had come to help her daughter Jean ‘get organised’. My mother didn’t want to be organised by May but there was no denying her. What she hadn’t told May was that she had been having pains that she thought might, or might not, be contractions. She knew May would make a fuss and insist that she go to the hospital and she didn’t want to do that only to be told it was a false alarm and find herself sent home. So she was waiting for more definite signs. I’ll cut short what happened next – no need for the gory details, though these are gone into every Christmas. My mother went into labour and May called an ambulance. Before it arrived, my other grandmother, Isa, came to deliver a present (a china tea set, never used). She came by taxi and kept it waiting, intending merely to drop the present off. May, expecting the ambulance, flung open the door, and then there followed some confusion about whether the taxi should be used to take my mother to hospital. The grandmothers argue about exactly what they each said, but anyway it doesn’t matter: I took things into my own hands. There and then, on the bathroom floor, I was born, with May and Isa managing things between them.
God knows how. It is unimaginable, knowing them as I do now. The paramedics who turned up in the ambulance minutes later apparently congratulated them – ‘good team work, ladies’ (or something like that; again, there are arguments about what was said). Isa and May, a team? I don’t think so. Isa and May are as different as it is possible to be (no, that’s not quite true, they could have been of different races and nationalities, which they’re not). In the few meetings there had been up to my birth they had not got on. They were mutually suspicious. A lot of this was due to class, but the hostility that always hung in the air between them had, I think, a much more basic explanation. There was, and is, a sort of animal-like antipathy there, a cat/dog reaction, which neither of them, not even Isa with her emphasis on good manners at all times, can quite conceal. I make it worse. They are jealous, because of me. They each have always wanted more of my time than the other is getting, each wants me to prefer her company. Isa has no other grandchildren so her need is greater. May has others but they are boys and she’s never seen them because they live on the other side of the world. Isa and May don’t actually fight over me, but I’ve always felt they could. I take care not to provoke them.
My grandmothers loom large in my life, even now, when I am almost thirty years of age. I would not have chosen to do this work if it were not for their importance. I love them both, though I love each of them in a different way. But I am trying, and will go on trying, even if I fail, to keep my love out of it, to keep the personal in the background.
In the foreground, at the moment, is another grandmother: Elizabeth Fry.
I selected Elizabeth Fry because of May. She looked like May in George Richmond’s portrait of her, which I came across in the National Portrait Gallery. The clothes are different, of course, especially the cap, but that face is my maternal grandmother’s – same plump cheeks, same rather long, straight nose, same pointed chin, and, most striking of all, the same shrewd expression in the eyes.
This is not a good reason to have chosen Mrs Fry. I won’t tell Claudia. I’ll think up some suitably convincing explanation as to why I picked her. She did, after all, draw attention to the state of prisons in the early nineteenth century, especially for women, and did much to help reform them. And she had eleven children, eleven, the last born on the same day as her first grandchild in 1822. That fact alone self-selects her, surely. For my purposes, Mrs Fry should be perfect, maternity personified. But the first surprise has been to discover she was no great shakes as a mother, never mind what she might have been like as a grandmother. She always put her work before the comfort and welfare of her children, reckoning it was all right to leave them in the sometimes doubtful care of servants while she went off to do it. When that last child was just six weeks old, the exhausted forty-two-year-old mother travelled seven miles from her home in Essex to visit the damp and filthy Newgate prison. ‘My dearest babe,’ she wrote, ‘suffered much by the rides to and from town, so that its little cries almost overcame me.’ ‘Almost’ may even have been an exaggeration – nothing was going to stop her doing what she felt she had to do. And the six-week-old boy was still an ‘it’.
So, the question, the question for me, is did Elizabeth Fry see her role as a grandmother in the same way as she saw her role as a mother? Or did she regret never putting her children first and decide that being a grandmother gave her a chance to make amends? That seems unlikely, from what I’ve learned so far. She was no more inclined to stay at home and teach her granddaughters to bake cakes than she had been to teach her own daughters. Domestically, she remained as uninterested and as inadequate
as she had always been. It wasn’t in her nature to organise and preside over a well-run household – she wanted to be out and about, managing things on a larger scale, striving for the public good and not for harmony at home. This makes her an exciting figure, in my opinion. She was a grandmother who rejected the traditional roles for women and set her granddaughters an example of public service.
But did she have any real influence with them? That’s what Claudia will want to know. Her granddaughters and grandsons (how many of each did she have, how close was she to them?) may have admired her without wanting to follow in her footsteps. Or they may have privately thought her quite wrong to have lived her life as she had, and turned back with relief to an easier pattern. They may well have respected her achievements, but how much does respect matter? How much does it mean to respect a grandmother? The one it matters to is surely the older person. May brings up the lack of respect in the young, i.e. me, but I don’t think it is respect she really wants. It is not what she’s after, and I suspect it was not that important to Mrs Fry either, but we’ll see.
What May wants is love. She wouldn’t call it that – talk of love is ‘soft’, and she doesn’t hold with it. She craves company and affection and attention, lashings of it. She feels starved of it these days, and it makes her grumpy, not that she would admit that this is the reason for her increasingly cross moods. I used to love May extravagantly when I was young – she was so cuddly, unlike Isa, who was never comfortable being cuddled and whose lean frame didn’t lend itself to a child’s embrace. May was better than any soft toy and I loved the very feel of her plump tummy. I’d put my arms round it and hug her, and she’d pick me up and put me on her knee, and then I’d switch my eager arms to her fat neck and lie on her chest. May liked the contact too. She only had this physical closeness with small children. With older children, even me, she became distant, the hugs perfunctory and only given if offered first by the child, and with adults there was no close contact. I’ve never seen her touch my mother. But May wants love still. She hasn’t grown out of that. She wants exactly what I now find hard to give her, because I’m no longer a child. She wants me to be at her side, in her house, as often as possible, preferably once a day for at least an hour. She wants me just to be with her. I would have been a better granddaughter to Elizabeth Fry. She would have sympathised with my love of studying even if she would have deplored my lack of involvement in any kind of reform work. She approved of girls being well educated, writing in her journal when she was seventeen that she hoped to gain more knowledge and to have her mind in greater order. Her poor grasp of grammar bothered her, and her spelling wasn’t up to much (she spelled ‘went’ as ‘whent’ and ‘wrong’ as ‘rong’), so she set herself to read Lindley Murray’s English Grammar to correct her deficiencies. A granddaughter such as myself, of a scholarly disposition, would not have dismayed her.