“Oh yes. The tray’s all set,” Beryl says from the hallway, but out of my view.
“Lovely. You can bring it straight in.”
“And your medicine?”
“Just the tea, thank you.”
“But you didn’t take it yesterday, either.”
“Now, don’t fuss, Beryl.”
Isabel MacFarland steps into the room. She is a wisp of tissue-thin skin, weightless white hair, and fragile-looking bones. She is impeccably dressed, however, in a lavender skirt that reaches to her knees and a creamy white blouse with satin-covered buttons. Black ballet flats embrace her slender feet. A gold necklace rings her neck. Her nails are polished a shimmery pale pink and her cottony hair is swept up in the back with a comb of mother-of-pearl. She carries a fabric-wrapped rectangle, book shaped and tied with a ribbon.
I rise from my seat to see if I might need to assist her.
“Miss Van Zant. How very nice to meet you.” Her English accent is not like Beryl’s. There is something about it that seems stretched.
“Can I help you?” I take a few steps forward.
“No. Thank you, though. Please sit.”
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.