Isa and May Page 3

  You’re not old, Grandmama,

  This birthday comes as a shock.

  Your family agree, credulity’s strained,

  Can’t be eighty that’s up on the clock.

  The next verse will have to contain compliments, in some detail, about her appearance, and then move on to her achievements, I suppose. That’s going to be tricky. What exactly has Isa achieved in her eighty years? She’s been a wife and a mother and a grandmother. That’s it. None of those roles have been very onerous. She was quite a spoiled wife, so far as I can make out. Grandfather Patrick looked after her very well and had the means to do so. She only had one child, who was sent to prep school at the age of seven, and then to Rugby. And I am her only grandchild. An empty sort of life, I would say, but mustn’t.

  I’m never sure whether I like Isa or not – not love, but like, quite different. There’s something so detached about her, a sense that she is keeping herself apart, that she fears intimacy – even with her own son – as much as May seeks it. I’ve watched Isa and Dad together hundreds of times and they are painfully polite to each other. They never argue as Mum and May do, but instead, if some disagreement threatens to surface, they carefully register their different views and then move on to other topics. Yet Dad is quite proud of Isa, proud that she looks after herself and that she is well dressed and groomed, and that she at least attempts to read her Times (though complaining constantly that it has ‘gone tabloid’ in style as well as size) and keep abreast of world events. She is, in many ways, a model eighty-year-old mother.

  I tried again to bring up the subject of his so-formal relationship with his mother when he took me out for lunch last week. He treats me as often as work permits and I look forward to these dates. The places he takes me to vary but are all similar – cafés rather than restaurants, family-run and cheerful. He is always there before me, though I am never late, sitting studying the specials board with an anxious air. He only relaxes when the order has been taken and his glass of wine has arrived. Then he asks me how ‘it’ is going. I tend just to say fine, and get on to something else, but last week I was back to feeling lost, so I said ‘it’ was going badly and I wished I’d never started, I wished I’d chosen something straightforward, the growth of women’s literature in the twentieth century maybe. He said why didn’t I change my mind then. I said it was too late, and anyway I never change my mind. Your grandmother’s granddaughter, he said, stubborn as her. There’s no virtue in not changing your mind, he said, it isn’t really anything to be proud of. Minds should change as circumstances do, it’s a sign of strength, not weakness, to realise a decision or an opinion has been wrong.

  Perhaps he’s right, but I’m not just being stubborn. I tried to explain to him that I do feel what I’m trying to do has a purpose but I can’t see it clearly. Dad hasn’t had much need to find a sense of purpose in his work. It’s been all too obvious: someone’s hip or knee has worn out, he replaces it – bingo, job done. He knows exactly what he is doing, and why. He tried to cheer me up by pointing out that there could be a satisfaction in my kind of work, a creative element, which there wasn’t in his, but that didn’t help. Then our moussaka arrived, and after we’d eaten it, we went on to discuss Isa’s coming party.

  One of the many things Dad couldn’t understand was why on earth his mother had invited some members of his father’s family whom she could only have met a few times, long ago, at weddings and funerals and so forth. Even more puzzling to him was why these people had accepted her invitation. Her brother-in-law’s widow, a woman of eighty-five, was coming all the way from Somerset, and a man referred to as Uncle George, though he was not an uncle. Dad swore he had never met them, or several others, but Isa insisted he had. Then there were the Canadian cousins. What was the connection with them? He’d found that this, at least, was relatively easily explained. It seemed they had been planning a tour of Scotland, to visit the places their ancestors came from, and they were fitting in Isa’s party on the way. Mary-Lou, the one Isa had been in correspondence with, is tracing the history of the Macdonell family, of which she and Isa are both members. Dad said he knew he ought to offer to have them to stay, but he couldn’t face it, and had invited them for lunch instead the day after the party.

  We tried to make up some more verses to my poem, over the pudding, but without much success. Dad agreed there should be some compliments about Isa’s appearance, her clothes, and how marvellous she always looks. She’s fussing at the moment about having nothing to wear, and has been to Harrods (by taxi, as ever) but found nothing satisfactory and may have to fall back on a Worth frock she’s had for years. We both smiled, agreeing that her obsession with clothes was extraordinary, at her age, but we couldn’t decide whether it was by now a bit pathetic and somehow unseemly – but then Dad and I set no store by appearance, so we decided we were being snobbish, mocking poor Isa just because we ourselves don’t appreciate fine clothes. Dad said he used to be so pleased with her when she came to his school – she always looked stunning and made everyone else’s mother look dowdy. I couldn’t resist saying, so that’s what you most admire about your ma, is it? Her dress sense? I was mocking him now, and he knew it, but he said, quite calmly, that what he admired more was his mother’s ability to hold herself together whatever happened. But, I said, nothing much has happened to test her, has it? He was silent, then seemed about to say something but didn’t. I pressed him, but he changed the subject. He said he had a message from Mum: would Ian be coming to the party? I said no. He patted my hand and smiled. ‘Don’t be cross,’ he said. ‘She was just hoping you’d bring him.’ I said I knew what she was hoping, and that there was no hope.

  I must be missing the obvious ones. The grandmothers I’m after should spring unbidden into my mind . . . but they don’t. I have to go looking, and then I get ambushed, one of them leaps out at me from the thicket of history and demands attention, and I waste time assessing her and usually find she’s an impostor and was hardly a grandmother at all.

  At least in that respect George Sand was genuine enough when she stopped me in my tracks. She was definitely an influential grandmother. She was far better as a grandmother, in fact, than as a mother. Her first grandchild was born when she was forty-four, but lived only a week, and it was her second, Nini, born the following year, who proved so significant in her life, and she in Nini’s. Nini’s mother, Solange, went into a convent and Nini went to live with her maternal grandmother, who was by then the famous author of several novels proclaiming and defending sensual love as a right for women. Nini, then almost five, completely fascinated her grandmother. The two of them spent hours gardening, each with a wheelbarrow (Nini’s a tiny copy of her grandmother’s). Nini, said George Sand, ‘worked like a little horse’. All she wanted for her granddaughter was happiness – ‘I try to stuff her with happiness,’ she wrote. She couldn’t bear the thought of Nini’s individuality being suppressed to fit her into society. But this ‘stuffing’ didn’t last long. Nini’s father claimed her, filing for divorce from Solange and applying for custody of the child. Nini was taken from her grandmother and sent to a boarding school. Soon after, she contracted a fever and died.

  The death of her granddaughter was an experience so profound for George Sand that it came close to breaking her. She had found grandmotherly love something she was more able to sustain than any other sort, and she had felt herself changed, very much for the better, by it. She had so much to pass on, now that she had white hair and had survived the emotional turbulence of her youth.

  She had two more granddaughters, her son’s children, and though she adored them, she didn’t feel about them the way she had felt about Nini, the only one given into her care. Nini had made her take pride in her grandmotherly role, which contrasted sharply with her sense of failure as a mother. She decided that society needed grandmothers—

  No, that’s me. George Sand never said that. She may well have come to that conclusion, but I haven’t found that she said so, much though
I would like her to have done. It would make my job so much easier. But she at least gives me a lot more hope than Mrs Fry did.

  Going to visit Isa is not like going to visit May. I can’t just drop in. We have to make an appointment, and since Isa likes to keep up the pretence that she still has a crowded diary, this takes some doing. She’s always been like this. When I was at school, I used to complain about this formality, and Beattie would say that maybe Isa needed to have time to hide a secret lover in the wardrobe, ha ha. She likes me to visit between five and six in the evening (after her ‘girl’ Elspeth has left), which is when she has her daily glass of sherry, the Bristol Cream variety. I think sherry tastes horrible, but I do love the glasses it comes in, so I always accept the offer. These delicate, lace-patterned glasses belonged to her grandmama. My father calls them ‘thimbles’ because they hold so little sherry, but that suits me. I like holding my glass by its fragile stem and twisting it gently round so that the light catches the amber fluid and lightens the colour. We sit opposite each other by the fire (real) if it’s the least bit cold, Isa in a Queen Anne armchair (real again, and again bequeathed by her grandmama) and I in a similar style of armchair though of Parker Knoll vintage. We converse. We do not chat, we do not gossip, we do not merely pass the time of day. Isa is proud of keeping abreast of world affairs, which lately has meant a lot of discussion about global warming. I find this boring but try not to show it.

  Isa’s attitude to my MA is different from May’s. She herself did not go to university (‘One didn’t in my day,’ she is fond of saying, though since she was born in 1928, this is not quite true), but she is approving of my education, though not for the same reasons as May. Isa has decided that having a degree, and being in the process of achieving another academic qualification, will find me a good class of husband, not that she would ever use the word ‘class’. She sees me marrying a professor, preferably an Oxbridge one, and that thought pleases her. She used, I think, to be frightened of highly educated women, but since my mother married into the family, this fear has faded. Nobody could be intimidated by my mother. Isa’s relationship with her daughter-in-law is rather strange, changing, I think, quite substantially over the thirty-odd years they have known each other. When my father first took my mother home with him, all he’d told his parents was how pretty and clever Jean was and how he loved her and wanted to marry her as soon as possible. What else was there to tell them? Why, a very great deal, in Isa’s opinion, such as what her father did, a question probably carefully phrased by Isa, and what sort of family this girl came from. My grandfather Albert’s job as a plumber and his Isle of Dogs background did not go down well.

  But Isa, I imagine with a struggle, managed to overlook my mother’s lowly social status because, after all, the girl had been to Oxford, which in her eyes counted for something. She was also relieved that her son’s girlfriend did not have the same accent as she later found May and Albert to have. Jean’s vowels had been smoothed out during her time at Oxford, and while still not what Isa regarded as perfect (Isa had her own standards of perfection in all things), they gave little away. After first meeting Jean, Isa told my father she had been ‘pleasantly surprised’ by how ‘refined’ the girl seemed, and even how elegant, ‘considering’. My father managed not to be appalled by his mother’s patronising attitude and just said he was glad she approved (though Isa hadn’t said anything about approving).

  My mother had, of course, been overawed both by the Symondsons’ house – a veritable manor house at the time, near Bath – and by Isa. She was upset that my father hadn’t given her an inkling of what she was going to experience. All he’d said to her was that his parents lived in the country, in ‘an old, rambling place’, and that his mother could be a bit ‘iffy’ sometimes but was all right once you got to know her. His father, he’d reassured her, was ‘a sweetie’. At least that bit was accurate, according to my mother. Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Symondson was a distinguished man but, as they say, he wore his distinction lightly. I wish I’d known him personally, and not just his history. He was born in India, where his father, an officer in a Gurkha regiment, was stationed. Patrick was sent to Rugby, then went to Sandhurst and was himself commissioned into the 1st Gurkha Rifles. I’m not sure of the details, but I know he was taken prisoner during the war, by the Japanese in Malaysia. He died in 1976, when my dad was twenty-three. Isa loves going over his army record, recounting instances of his bravery, though he himself is said to have been a reticent, modest man.

  My mother told me that on the first awful occasion, when Isa was at her most distant and superior, Patrick himself was casual and relaxed. When Isa invited Jean to ‘tell us about your family’, Patrick interrupted to say that he’d far rather hear about Jean’s studies and what she wanted to do. Mum didn’t really know what she was going to do. The finals results weren’t yet out and she didn’t know if she would qualify for a research grant. Patrick asked her what it was she wanted to research, and she tried to explain about her interest in the communication networks of proteins and their involvement in human diseases. Biochemistry definitely wasn’t Patrick’s field, but he said he was fascinated and asked her to explain. Mum did her best. And remembered being pleased because Patrick seemed to grasp the essentials and asked intelligent questions.

  Afterwards, Isa apparently got her husband to explain what my mother had explained to him, and slowly, with the help of my dad as well, she managed, roughly speaking, to understand what biochemistry was and became quite proud of being able to toss about bits of terminology – not enough, of course, to engage in a real discussion with a biochemist but enough to impress those (like May) who knew nothing. Isa likes accumulating that sort of superficial knowledge. She has picked up a lot of medical lingo from her son, too, and can astound her friends (the few she has) with information about their hip and knee operations. I was never good at any of the sciences at school, which mystified my parents. Dad even thought I’d deliberately acted stupid as a sort of rebellion, but I don’t think that’s true. Well, maybe a bit. I sort of understand my mother’s job, but not the detail. She’s presented papers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and got drug companies all excited about the possibilities opened up by her research. And I’m proud of her, but her work remains a bit of a mystery all the same.

  Ian’s is a mystery to me, too, though not such a dense one. He works at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, a hellish place to get to from our flat. What he works on has to do with time, trying to make an even more accurate optical clock than exists already. Asked to explain, he launches into descriptions of lasers trapping a single charged atom in a force field and then giving it a poke, and then – and then I’m lost. I tell people just that he works on the ordering of time. That baffles them. I told May he works with clocks, which immediately conjured up in her mind the image of a man my late grandfather Albert used to take his watch to, to be mended. She liked that, though she thought it an odd career for a clever young man. She asked me if Ian would have a look at her wedding present, a 1947 clock, and gave it to me to show him. It amused him to oblige. (Actually, he is good at things like that and did succeed in mending it.) He isn’t in the least bothered that May misunderstands what he does, and he doesn’t care that my knowledge of his work isn’t much more profound. It’s fine by him. He has his colleagues to talk to about what he does, and doesn’t need me. When I worry about this and say that one whole side of his life is in effect barred to me, he says that’s how he likes it, a complete separation of the professional and the personal. He is willing to share in my work, though. In fact, he is quite keen to hear about it. So is Isa. ‘A sad story,’ she said, when I’d finished telling her what had happened to Nini. She asked if George Sand had had any other grandchildren and I told her the little I knew about them. I threw in that her dying instruction to her two surviving granddaughters had been to ‘be good’, which I thought disappointing somehow. But Isa approved. ‘Goodness is so important, d
on’t you think?’ she said.

  Well no, I don’t think it is really. I was tempted to ask Isa how she would define ‘goodness’, but I didn’t. She would think it obvious. We’d finished the sherry at this point, and I had an urgent need to go and clean my teeth to take the taste away. Leaving Isa is not difficult the way leaving May can be – an hour is enough for a visit to Isa, she has ‘things’ to attend to, or so she believes. As I gave her the regulation peck on the cheek to bid her goodbye, she murmured, ‘Will you be bringing your young man to my party, Isamay?’ I said no, I would not. I didn’t give a reason, I didn’t make up any excuse for Ian.

  Isa, in this at least, is in agreement with May: she wants to see me ‘settled’, i.e. married. She wants to see me have a child. She wants ‘the line’ (her line, of course) to be continued. She’s going to be disappointed.

  II

  ‘GRANDMOTHERS ARE FIGURES of authority in society.’ The moment I’d written that, I knew it was rubbish. I don’t need Claudia to enjoy pointing it out. If I am to get anywhere, I’m going to have to stop thinking that the place of my grandmothers in my life is the norm. I know full well that it is not. My friends (except for Beattie) don’t have grandmothers who have the kind of influence on them that Isa and May have had, and to a certain extent still have, on me. The majority don’t have grandmothers at all – they are long dead, even memories of them have faded. Beattie is the only one who still has a grandmother alive. For other friends, all that remains are recollections of driving in the school holidays to visit the grandmothers and finding them at first delighted to see them and then, by the third or fourth day, critical of their behaviour, or clothes, or both. Leaving was a relief. None of my friends remember any Nini-type adoration by grandmothers. It simply never had the chance to grow and flourish. The ones who had grandmothers who came to stay tend only to recall the tension of these visits, with their mothers endlessly fretting over how to make Gran comfortable and happy.