Chapter One #2
I return to the love seat and she lowers herself slowly to the sofa across from me. “Thank you so much for agreeing to see me,” I say. “And on your birthday, too.”
She waves away my gratitude. “It’s just another day.”
Beryl appears at the doorway with a tea tray. “Ninety-three is not just another day, Auntie.”
Isabel MacFarland smiles as if she has just thought of something funny.
Beryl sets the tray down and hands Mrs. MacFarland her cup, already creamed and sugared.
Then she hands a cup to me and I add a teaspoon of sugar to it.
The stirring of a silver spoon in an English china teacup is one of the sounds I will miss most when I head back to the United States.
“Thank you, Beryl,” Mrs. MacFarland says. “You can just leave the tray. And can you be a dear and close the door so that we aren’t in anyone’s way?”
Beryl glances from me to Mrs. MacFarland with an unmistakably disappointed expression on her face. “Of course,” she says with feigned brightness. She heads for the door and looks back at us with a polite smile that surely takes effort. She shuts the door softly behind her.
“I think she was hoping she could stay,” I venture.
“Beryl is a sweet companion and I could not live here on my own without her, but I’d rather have the freedom to say whatever I want, if that’s all right with you.”
I am not prepared for such candor. “Um. Of course.”
“When you get to be my age, your physical frailties cause people to think other things about you are frail as well, including your ability to make your own decisions. It’s my decision to meet with you today.
And my decision to say what I will about what happened during the war.
I don’t need or want dear Beryl patting my hand or telling me I’m not properly addressing your questions. May I call you Kendra?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Mrs. MacFarland sips from her cup and then sits back against the couch. “And you will call me Isabel. So how are you enjoying your studies at Oxford, Kendra?”
Her interest in my life has an amazingly calming effect. “I will leave here kicking and screaming at the end of next month. I’ve loved every minute of it. There’s so much history compacted into one place. It’s intoxicating.” I suppose I have spoken like a true history major.
“And is there no history where you are from?”
“There is. It’s just different, I guess. Not quite so ancient. Where I’m from, the oldest building isn’t even two hundred years old. It’s just an ordinary house.”
She smiles at me. “I’ve come to appreciate ordinary houses.”
I redden just a bit. “That’s not to say your house isn’t charming, Mrs. MacFarland. Your home is beautiful. Has it been in your family a long time?”
“Just Isabel, please. And yes, you could say that it’s been in my family for a very long time. You are a history major, then?”
I nod my head as I sip from my cup.
“And what is it about history that interests you?”
I’ve never understood why I am routinely asked why history interests me, as though the subject has no appeal to people who didn’t major in it.
All during my last year of high school when well-meaning adults and even other students asked what I would be majoring in and I answered them, the next question was invariably a request to explain the reason why. I still get asked three years later.
“How can a person not be interested in history?” I crack a smile so she won’t take offense.
But really, how can someone who survived the London Blitz not see the significance of an appreciation of history?
The writer Michael Crichton said, “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything.
You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. ”
Isabel finds my question back to her amusing. “Ah, but what is history? Is it a record of what happened or rather our interpretation of what happened?”
“I think it’s both,” I answer. “It has to be both. What good is remembering an event if you don’t remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing and neither would anyone else.”
Isabel’s mouth straightens into a thin, hard line and I am wondering whether I offended her and just ruined my last chance at an interview.
But then Isabel inhales deeply and I see that she is not angry with me.
“You are absolutely right, my dear. Absolutely right.” She takes another sip of tea and her mouth lingers on the rim of her cup.
For a moment she seems to be very far away, lost in a memory—an old and aching place of remembrance.
Then she returns the cup to its saucer and it makes a gentle scraping sound.
“So, what will you do when you return to the States, Kendra?”
“Well, I’ve another year at USC and then I’m hoping to head straight to grad school,” I answer quickly, eager to be done with pleasantries and get to the reason I am here. “I plan to get my doctorate in history and teach at the college level.”
“A young woman with plans. And how old are you, dear?”
I can’t help but bristle. The only time a person asks how old I am is when they think the answer is somehow relevant to him or her. It usually never is.
“You don’t have to tell me, of course. I was just wondering,” she adds.
“I’m twenty-one.”
“It bothers you that I asked.”
“Not really. It just surprises me when people ask. I don’t know why it should matter.”
“But that is precisely why it does bother you. I felt the same way once. People treat you differently when they think you are too young to know what you want.”
The bristling gives way to a slow sense of kinship. “Yes, they do.”
“I understand completely. You are the oldest in your family?”
“I have a sister who’s four years younger.”
“A sister. Just the one?”
I nod.
She seems to need a moment to process this.
“I’d surmised you might be the oldest. We firstborns are driven, aren’t we?
We have to be. There’s no one leaving bread crumbs for us on the trail ahead.
We blaze our own trail. And the younger ones, they look to us.
They watch us—they take their cues from us, even if we don’t want them to.
” She drains her cup and sets it carefully on the tray.
I’m not sure what she is getting at. “I guess. Maybe. I’m not sure my sister would agree. She’s got pretty strong opinions of her own. I think she’d say she’s leaving her own bread crumbs.”
Isabel laughs and it is light and airy. It’s the kind of laugh that spills out when a memory is triggered; the kind of memory that perhaps was not funny in the slightest when it was being made.
“What is your sister’s name?” she says as her laughter eases away.
“Chloe.”
She closes her eyes as if tasting the word. “What a lovely name.” Her eyes open. “Have you a photo?”
I pull my cell phone from my messenger bag and find a photo of Chloe and me taken in front of Christ Church on the last day she and my parents were here.
My sister is a brunette like me, wears her hair shoulder length like I do, and has the same gray-blue eyes.
But she puts ketchup on everything, plays lacrosse and the violin, and wants to be a civil engineer.
We are close, Chloe and I, but none of those things interest me. Not even the ketchup.
I extend the phone and she studies Chloe’s and my smiling faces.
“She favors you,” Isabel says.
“We look like my dad, actually.” I take the phone back and find a picture of my parents from the same day.
My mom’s red curls are dancing a ballet in the breeze and she is smiling so wide, her eyes have narrowed to slits.
Dad, blue eyed and brown haired with a brushstroke of gray at the temples, has his arm around her. Their heads are nearly touching.
Isabel studies this picture as well, memorizing it. Then she hands the phone back. “You have a lovely family, Kendra. I hope you know how lucky you are.”
I’ve never known quite what to say when someone says I have a lovely family. It’s nothing I can take credit for, so saying thank you seems silly. But that’s what I say as I smile and slip the phone back inside my bag.
“Now, then,” Isabel says, and I sense she is at last shifting the focus from me. “Charles tells me this interview is more than just for an essay for a class.”
It takes me a second to make the connection that Charles is Professor Briswell.
“Yes. The seventieth anniversary of VE Day is next month. The professor for one of my other classes has made an arrangement with a London newspaper. The five best term papers will be published in the paper the week of May eighth.”
I watch her face carefully to see whether this additional information is going to spell trouble for me.
“So what you write will be read widely?’
“Only if mine is one of those chosen. And I don’t know that it will be. Is that okay with you if it is?”
“You will write to win one of those spots, yes? You’ll be happy if yours is chosen.”
“Well, yes.”
“This other professor, he is friends with Charles? Can you count on him to judge your essay on the strength of your writing alone? Be a shame if he discounted yours because a fellow professor assisted in helping you secure an interview.”
I am still not sure whether it is helping me or hindering me that this paper I am to write might be published in a London paper.
“I don’t know that they are friends. I suppose they are since they teach at the same college.
I happened to mention to Professor Briswell that I was in a bind for another class. He was nice enough to want to help me.”
Isabel leans back and I can see she is satisfied with my answer. “What did Charles tell you about me?” she says.
I’d done all the research on the effect of the Blitz on London’s female population and had needed only the interview to write the paper and be done with it.
When the woman I was to interview died, it was too late to change the subject matter without setting myself so far back that I would never finish the paper on time.
I had mentioned as much to Professor Briswell, just in passing, and he had told me that an elderly friend in his family might be convinced to help me out.
This person was one to decline interviews, though, even regarding her watercolors for which she was known throughout the southwest of England.
He’d ask her anyway and tell her I was in a tight spot.
But he said I should expect her to say no.
“He told me that you typically decline interviews,” I say.
She smiles. “That’s all?”
“He said you are known for your watercolors. I love your work, by the way.”
“Ah, yes. My Umbrella Girls.”
I turn my head in the direction of one of the more prominent paintings in the room: A young girl in a pink dress is walking through a field of glistening-wet daisies and holding the trademark red-and-white polka-dot umbrella.
A brave sun is peeking through clouds that are plump with purpose.
“Have you always painted girls with umbrellas?”
“No. Not always.” Her answer is swift and without hesitation. But the way she elongates the last word tells me there is more behind the answer. She doesn’t offer more even though I wait for it.
“Tell me, Kendra,” Isabel says after a pause. “What is it about the Blitz that you would like to know? I should think there are dozens of books out there. What information do you lack that you cannot read in a book?”
I fumble for an answer. “Well, uh, aside from that I’m required to interview someone, I think . . . I think information is only half of any story about people. Personal experience is the other part. I can’t ask a book what it was like to survive the bombs.”
Isabel cocks her head to one side. “Is that what you want to ask me? What it was like to have my home bombed?”
It occurs to me that I posed a rather elementary question with surely an equally elementary answer. I am suddenly superbly underconfident about all my questions. I glance at the notepad in my lap and every bulleted sentence looks superficial to me.
What was it like in the shelter night after night?
Were you afraid?
Did you lose someone you loved or cared about?
Did you wonder if it would ever end?
“Are you going to turn that thing on?”
I snap my head up. Isabel is pointing to my little voice recorder on the coffee table. “Do you mind?”
“You may as well, seeing as you brought it.”
As I lean toward the table to press the RECORD button, the notepad falls off my lap and onto the thick Persian carpet at my feet.
As my fingers close around the tablet, I realize that there is really only one question to ask this woman who for seventy years has refused all interviews, and who told me not ten minutes ago when she told Beryl to shut the door that she would say only what she wanted to.
I place the pad on the seat cushion next to me. “What would you like to tell me about the war, Isabel?”
She smiles at me, pleased and perhaps impressed that I figured out so quickly that this is the one question she will answer.
She pauses for another moment and then says, “Well, first off, I’m not ninety-three. And my name’s not Isabel.”