Isa and May Page 5

  Half an hour later (still with plenty of time because I’d known there would be this fuss) we left with May clad in black. It was her funeral outfit. A black skirt and a black top with white piping round the square neck and round the cuffs of the long sleeves. She’d said she couldn’t wear black to a party, what would folk think, and I’d said they’d think her very smart and stylish. She insisted on wearing a cardigan with it ‘to cheer it up’. The cardigan was red but it didn’t look too bad. And she added her fake pearls, given to her by Albert on her fortieth birthday. ‘What a carry-on,’ she muttered as we finally left her bedroom, after a dab of lipstick had been dashed on to her thin lips and a brush pulled through her still thick hair. ‘I can’t be bothered,’ she said, ‘all this tarting up.’ But I could tell she felt quite pleased now with her appearance. I thought, as we drove off, how the elegant Isa would inwardly shudder at the sight of May dressed in her best. Dress, to Isa, is such a serious business. She is appalled by women of her age who go on dressing as though their arms are still firm, their cleavages wrinkle-free, their legs unscarred by varicose veins. ‘Clothes, Isamay,’ she once said as though it was a brilliant insight, ‘are to enhance one’s best features when young and disguise one’s worst when old.’ Quite so. I wondered if, logically, the disguise for most women would have to end up being a burka.

  Because the day was warm and sunny, the French windows of Isa’s sitting room could be opened wide on to the terrace so that guests could, if they wished, sit outside on the cushioned benches or wander round the garden, admiring the late-season roses. The food was inside, arranged on a long table stretching from one end of the room to the other. Guests had to help themselves, but staff had been engaged to stand by and assist them if necessary. ‘Staff’ consisted of Elspeth and two girls she had found. The guests were mostly elderly but they were all in terrific good humour. Delighted to be there, pleased to see people they hadn’t seen for years. Isa looked fantastic in her old Worth frock, with her immaculate white hair in a chignon. She moved about the party with a grace and ease that belied her age, laughing (but not immoderately), smiling (but not falsely), kissing cheeks far more withered than her own, and shaking hands lightly, quickly. Her colour was a little high perhaps, and once or twice I saw her reach for a chair to hold on to for a moment, but her poise was remarkable. I couldn’t help but be impressed, and proud of her.

  She greeted me warmly and May politely. ‘How good to see you, Mrs Wright,’ she said. May thrust her box of chocolates at her. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Happy birthday, don’t eat them all at once.’ Isa smiled, glacially, took the chocolates, and invited May to help herself to some food and a drink. May turned at once to the table, dragging me with her. She worked her way from one end to the other, piling up the plate I was obediently holding. She took something of everything, regardless of the indigestion she claims to suffer from and regardless of whether or not she recognised what it was. ‘Do you really like aubergines, Granny?’ I whispered. ‘And anchovies?’ She said it was a party; she’d give them a go. When she was satisfied she’d missed no delicacy, she led me to a little wrought-iron table on the terrace and told me to get a couple of chairs. I said I thought this table was just to put drinks on, and pointed to the four garden tables arranged further along the terrace, each with pretty cloths on and places set for six. ‘I want this table,’ she said. ‘Fetch two chairs, quick, before they get snatched.’

  So I found myself crouching at this ridiculous toy-like table, feeling embarrassed at so pointedly separating myself from the rest of the company, who were gradually taking their place at the proper tables. May was not in the least bothered. She applied herself to the food in a determined fashion, pausing only to sniff certain items before putting them into her mouth. She spread duck pâté over the slices of smoked salmon, dipped bits of chicken into cream cheese, never putting her knife and fork down until her plate was quite clean. ‘Very tasty,’ she said. ‘Mind you, it should be, it’ll have cost her enough.’ At that point, the Canadian cousins appeared. They stood beside us, only drinks in their hands, and asked if they could say hello. They were Mary-Lou and Beth, from Ontario, related to ‘the birthday girl’ through their fathers. May eyed them suspiciously, a little alarmed by their aggressively tartan outfits. They both wore not only tartan skirts but tartan jackets over red blouses, and on their heads they had tartan berets. They were, though, aware of looking a joke, and got in first with their own amusement at their rig-out. ‘We couldn’t resist it,’ Mary-Lou said, gaily. ‘Let’s go the whole hog, we thought, let’s be out-and-out Scottish for the party.’ She then told us, without being asked, that the tartan was the Macdonell tartan, and that they’d given Isa a jacket the same as theirs.

  I left Mary-Lou and Beth regaling May with every detail of their lives, from how many children they had to what kind of cars they drove – they never seemed to be going to draw breath. I went straight to Isa’s side and tried hard to be the granddaughter she wanted. She was talking to a man in a wheelchair, whom she introduced to me as Uncle George. A handsome man, strong-looking, with broad shoulders, he sat very upright in his chair. I should have guessed he’d been a soldier.

  ‘So you’re related to Grandmama?’ I asked. Both he and Isa laughed.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘the “uncle” is an honorary title, isn’t it, George?’

  ‘Big honour,’ he said.

  I was lost – this wasn’t Isa’s style, it was May’s. She was always referring to ‘Uncle this’ and ‘Auntie that’ in her tales of her childhood, and they always turned out to be neighbours and not relatives at all – everyone in her street was Auntie or Uncle to children.

  ‘What was the honour?’ I asked George.

  ‘Oh, it’s a long story,’ Isa said quickly. ‘I will tell you some other time.’

  George’s helper – a grandchild of his, a bit older than me, I thought – appeared with his food, and as she pushed him to a table outside, another woman came up to Isa and said, ‘Lovely food, Isa, such a treat.’ Isa introduced me. Her name was Gertrude Symondson, widow of my grandfather Patrick’s brother Harry. Dad joined us. ‘Ah!’ said Gertrude. ‘The son!’ Dad smiled, did a mock bow, said he was the son indeed. ‘The longed-for son,’ Gertrude said. ‘You don’t know the joy the news of your birth brought, my dear.’ Dad said he was glad to hear it. ‘Longed-for, longed-for, my boy,’ she whispered. It was embarrassing, but Dad dealt with her well. He realised she’d had quite a bit to drink and very little to eat, and he steered her away towards the food table. ‘That woman is a menace,’ a voice said, quietly, in my ear. ‘How do you do? I am a second cousin of yours, I believe, Frederick Macdonell.’ I shook his hand, looking sharply at him, and we moved out on to the now very busy terrace. He told me he had known Isa when they were both young, but lost regular contact after she married and moved to London. ‘A big surprise, that,’ he said. ‘Both families were rather upset. They didn’t see the point of London, you see, and it was all rather sudden, I seem to remember.’ This was not what I wanted to hear so I tried to get him to describe what Isa had been like when young. ‘She looked like you, my dear,’ he said, ‘just as lovely,’ and he put his arm round me and squeezed. Well, he was an old man, so I tried not to cringe. Luckily, I could hear May shouting my name and saw her waving her napkin in my direction, so I had a good excuse to leave him.

  The Canadians had moved on to wanting to know about May, a trade-off for all they’d shared with her. They were saying how proud May must be of me, and of her daughter. May responded with her usual grunts, which could have meant anything. Clearly, the cousins were having trouble equating what seemed a grumpy, greedy old woman with her gentle, pleasant, concerned daughter. I saw them look from May to my mother Jean in confusion – some mistake, they were thinking. I saw exactly what they meant. Mum was going from guest to guest, hovering over each one, bending down to listen to them, smiling at them, getting more food or drink for them. What had this woman they were looking at to do wi
th May?

  Then Isa came over to ask the cousins if they had sampled the desserts yet, and recommended the zabaglione, which had just been brought out from the kitchen.

  ‘The what?’ asked May.

  ‘Zabaglione, Mrs Wright,’ Isa said. ‘It’s a special Italian sweet with—’

  ‘Oh, Italian, is it?’ May said. ‘Not for me, too fancy.’

  ‘Would you prefer some chocolate mousse, Mrs Wright?’ said Isa, her tone still ever so light, ‘I know you’re fond of chocolate.’

  ‘Not specially,’ said May, ready to interpret a love of chocolate as Isa’s way of saying she was fat.

  ‘Or I believe there is apple tart,’ Isa said, blandly. ‘More your kind of pudding, Mrs Wright? I’ll leave you to decide,’ and she wafted off.

  ‘Damned cheek,’ May muttered, almost inaudibly, but the cousins caught it. There was a little throng round the table of desserts by then. May and I were left sitting together just outside one of the open doors, still at the small table, our backs to the house. I said nothing, I just waited. After a few minutes, May sniffed and said: ‘Nice garden. She has it kept nice. Albert would’ve liked it.’ This was a peace offering, her peculiar kind of way of apologising. She said it without a sneer, even if a sneer was implicit in ‘She has it kept nice’ rather than ‘She has it nice.’ I knew how the ‘kept’ could have been made to sound. I still said nothing. I could play May’s games very well. Sometimes I felt she was the child and I was the grandmother. It was tempting to scold her, but neither the place nor the time was right. I got up, to go and get May some sort of acceptable dessert, but she said, ‘You leaving me on my tod?’ I said, ‘Just to get you some apple tart.’ ‘I don’t want any,’ she said. ‘I’m full. I want to go home.’

  It was so plaintive – ‘I want to go home’ – the cry of a four-year-old who was tired. We would be the first to leave, it would look bad, very pointed. I leaned towards her and whispered that we would go soon, but I had to go and be with Isa for a while. I’d tell Mum to come over so she wouldn’t be on her own. ‘Suppose so,’ May said, grudgingly. She looked both fierce, frowning away, and vulnerable, clutching her napkin and twisting it around as though strangling it. She had no social graces at all, was only at ease with her family. But it was Isa’s day, and I had to put her first, so I went and circulated, giving Mum a quick nudge and a look towards May, still at the table. Isa was by then sitting down at one of the other tables, and I joined her and chatted away to her guests, smiling until my cheeks ached. They all said how like my grandmother I was, and we were requested to stand together to be photographed and our likeness preserved and marvelled at. I never got straight who was who, but I took them all in, so that I could ask Isa later. There were more women than men, and not one of them had aged as well as Isa. She looked the youngest and healthiest woman there (not counting the Canadians). What I couldn’t work out was how these guests regarded Isa – I sensed a strange mixture of respect and something like caution, but what made them cautious? Did they think she was frail? Were they afraid of offending her? Or maybe it was just that I was mistaking caution for admiration. Whatever – there was suddenly an air of hesitation, as though these relatives and friends didn’t feel quite comfortable, in spite of all the laughter and good humour.

  Isa herself was unaware of this, I’m sure. Her party was going with a swing and she was content. At three o’clock, twenty minutes after May had wanted to go (so she’d be furious with me), Elspeth brought out a cake and we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’, which Isa endured graciously, though she doesn’t like that kind of display. Then Dad stood up and made a little speech. Well, he had to. Mum and he had laboured over it, and he delivered it with just the right mixture of seriousness and light-heartedness. He stressed his mother’s independence of spirit, her dignity, her generosity, and he reminisced, just a little, about his father and how proud he had been of his wife. Then I spouted my doggerel, which went down very well. That was supposed to be it, with coffee and cake to follow, but to her own family’s surprise Isa stood up and said she would like to say a few words while she had the opportunity. She began with thanking people for coming, and Jean for doing the organising, but then she moved on to talking about her late husband in, for her, surprisingly emotional terms. She said he had made her the happiest of women and his death had been the cruellest of blows. Everyone knew of his bravery but few appreciated his other virtues: his kindness, his sensitivity, his constant concern for others. Being his wife had made her so proud and as his widow she had tried to lead her life, bereft as it was, according to his standards.

  There was quite a bit of throat-clearing at that point, a lot of it due to embarrassment, I think. I didn’t dare look at May, whose opinion of Isa’s eulogy would be one of scorn – she’d be muttering that she didn’t believe a word of it. But Isa then moved on to talk about her son, my father. James was the perfect son, handsome, clever, devoted – Dad looked slightly bewildered – and his wife Jean was the perfect daughter-in-law. (Her perfection, though, was not gone into.) And then it was my turn. I was her only and much-loved granddaughter. I was ‘very precious’. What was precious about me was not just my particular qualities, but what I represented. ‘Isamay,’ said Isa, ‘carries forward the family banner. When I am gone, I will live in her, which makes me so happy.’ She was so desperately serious no one quite knew how to react. There was a tentative clap from someone, picked up with relief by everyone else, and then we all relaxed. There was an urgent pull on my sleeve. ‘I want to go, now!’ hissed May.

  ‘What was she on about?’ May asked, crossly, as I drove her home. I didn’t reply. I felt exhausted, though I’d done nothing but hand out plates of food, and chat.

  ‘All that banner business,’ May persisted. ‘What banner’s that? Eh?’

  ‘It was a sort of metaphor,’ I muttered.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much. A met-what’s-it, eh? Baffled by long words, am I?’

  ‘You know what she meant,’ I said.

  ‘Would I be asking if I did?’

  ‘Yes, you would, you often do, just to make a point.’

  ‘And what point’s that, then, madam?’

  ‘You think Isa was showing off and being ridiculous and over the top. Pretentious, in a word.’

  ‘You’d know it, o’ course, never heard of it meself.’

  ‘Well, you know it now.’

  ‘You’re being cheeky, talking like that to your grandmother what isn’t educated like—’

  ‘Oh, Granny, stop it!’

  There was silence after that little outburst until we got to her house. Once there, I spent twenty minutes helping her look for her indigestion tablets in case she needed them. When she commented, as she was showing me to the door, that it had been a very nice party anyway, I knew that was, again, a peace offering. I agreed that it had been. ‘It made Isa happy,’ I added. May obviously decided that to let that go was too much. ‘Happy?’ she echoed. ‘She ain’t had nothing to be unhappy about, that woman, never done a hand’s turn, never had to wonder where the next penny was coming from, never lost a child, life of Riley she’s had.’

  ‘Are you jealous?’ I said it before I had the sense to stop myself. I got the usual response – ‘Did I say I was?’ – and didn’t pursue the accusation. I knew it was an unkind one, even if May had provoked it. Then she suddenly said, ‘You’re my granddaughter too. She forgets that, with her banner. Thinks you’re all hers, just because you look a bit like her. Looks are nothing. You’re more like my side than hers.’

  I turned back from the door and gave her a hug. She looked so defenceless, her old face all screwed up with resentment against Isa’s claim on me, vulnerable and yet fierce, like a small animal determined to defend itself against some predator. My hug, I could tell, relieved her – she relaxed against me, patting my back, and saying I was a good girl. It was as touching as Isa’s speech had been. God, the pathos of being old, old and envious; what a combination. I thought ugly feelings like t
hat belonged only to the young, I thought jealousy was an emotion we grew out of. How foolish. Maybe it lasts until death, until the victory of one rival over another is final.

  I was lolling on the sofa, recovering, when Ian came home. He doesn’t understand this family stuff. Soon after I first met him, and was starting to get interested in him, I made the mistake of trying to find out about his family. I think I asked him a harmless question, such as where did his parents live, and he asked why I wanted to know. He didn’t say this aggressively, but there was a definite feeling that he resented the enquiry. I quickly said it didn’t matter, I just wondered, and I suppose I expected him to laugh and go on to tell me. But he didn’t. Another time, when I was regretting that I am an only child, I asked him if he had any siblings. He made the same reply: why did I want to know? That time, I defended my innocent question. I said surely it was normal, wasn’t it, to wonder if someone had brothers or sisters. He said something about not wanting to be defined in terms of his family, and I told him not to be so pompous. But he was, and is, secretive. He won’t give anything away about his family. This, of course, makes me more and more curious.