She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (27 page)

In the late 1940s, she emigrated to Australia but returned two years later. “She was very confident. She spoke slowly but with emphasis. She had enormous integrity and a very dry sense of humor. Dry and sarcastic. She was the brightest in the family.”

He gestures helplessly. “She had a relative called Grevler, on her mother's side. I think he won the Delagoa Bay Lottery.”

Sima's nephew gets up and goes digging in a file. “I can give you a copy of this,” he says. It is a short piece of writing she did when she returned from Australia.

“Thank you.”

“She died in 1958 of cancer of the liver.” The year of the High Court trial. No wonder my mother's thoughts turned to suicide that year.

That evening, I sit outside on the terrace and read the piece of writing. It is a sentimental account of her childhood, how each of the seven children had an allotted role: the mother, the baby, the rebel, the caretaker. She was the rebel, in the middle, fighting to stand out. After two years in Australia, she saw she had made the wrong decision. She came home to Johannesburg, she wrote, with the realization that after all her protestations of independence, what mattered most in the world was family.

•   •   •

STEVEN HAS MOVED
to another town farther east along the coast, a not-so-chichi resort where he is staying with friends. I go down to see him one last time. By chance, it's April 27, the anniversary of South Africa's first democratic elections, christened Freedom Day. We walk along the beach for an hour before sunset, the sky pink and translucent, pebbles clacking beneath our feet as Jesse and Jezebel run ahead of us. Every now and then they skid to a halt and whip over to bite themselves.

At the driftwood, we stop. It is burned white by the sun and shaped like a bench, curving up from the beach in two ribby arcs. We sit on it and watch the dogs. Steven says, “I was headed for a life of repressed mediocrity. I didn't want to repeat his pathology, be a drunk. I thought, ‘If I'm going to go wrong, let me do it my own way.'” He doesn't believe in closure. “I have sufficient healing.” My uncle smiles. “Like sufficiently free and fair elections.” He says, “If I hadn't had her love for the first ten years, I wouldn't have survived.”

•   •   •

ON THE LAST DAY,
I drive around the neighborhood. The trees are burned orange at the edges. Through the flat, still air a wood pigeon calls. You could die from an afternoon like this, I think. I draw level with the car park at the end of the street and wind down the window. Siya puts his hand through it and grips mine. He is wearing black fingerless leather gloves. “Stay cool,” he says. His guitar is slung around his back and his beanie is as high as the Cat in the Hat's. “Keep smelling the air and feeling the sunshine.”

“See ya, Siya,” I say. Our fingers grasp and release.

I am so sure I will be back in Johannesburg before long, I have left a large pile of books in the closet. I have said good-bye to Fay in a deliberately casual manner because I will be seeing her again soon. On the plane home I am ecstatic. I did it. I have done it. It is done.

I don't go back.

Afterward

NOW THAT I KNEW
what she was fleeing from, those intermediary years after my mother came to London but before she met my dad and had me seemed all the more extraordinary. How did she put herself together? What did that process look like from the outside? Friends, I think, are the thing.

Recently, I attended my godfather's eightieth. At the party in London was my mother's old gang from the 1960s, people I hadn't seen for years. I arranged to interview them, these people I have known my whole life, but it was strange to come to them in her absence, as an adult, and ask what they remembered of her. I had put it off for a long time, thinking she'd be angry, that she mightn't want me to reveal anything to them. And then, suddenly, it didn't matter anymore.

One cold winter's day, I sit in my mother's friend Edward's apartment, where she and my dad had their wedding-day brunch; I go to the pub with her great friend Roger; I sit in the beautiful living room of her friends Bob and Nick. It is the old Thursday Night Club.

Edward is eighty. He makes me a cup of tea. The late afternoon light floods his top-floor apartment. There are paintings on the wall whose style I recognize from our house. They are by another great friend of my mother's. “Yes!” says Edward. “It seems nice, somehow, that we all have these paintings by Bill Graham. We're all part of a club!” He met my mother in the early 1960s, when Britain was just emerging from postwar austerity. Edward had come to the country as a ten-year-old refugee, on the
Kindertransport
from Austria. He knew something about what it was to be alone. They were natural allies.

“When I first met her, she was really compressed. Not depressed, but compressed. As if she had been in one of those chambers in films that gets smaller and smaller. And slowly she expanded. She had resources that were there and that she had to find in herself.”

I ask Edward if she had said anything about her background before arriving in London. He tucks his chin in and smiles at me. “There was something about a gun, I think?”

I am unexpectedly joyful—that she had a friend and that she spoke to him, and that he saw her come to life. That she didn't do all this alone. That she was not, in fact, superhuman.

Still, says Edward, those were not easy times, not for any of them. “We were all potentially criminalized. Our lives were illegal. There was a certain danger. We all adapted to living that way, but it was a dreary time; one was oppressed. Black people were having a very tough time in Notting Hill Gate. It was volatile. Thursday nights were a lovely kind of anchor in the week.” The pretext was exercise. None of them had the cash to join a gym, so they were supposed to meet each week to work out. “But I don't recall exercises lasting longer than a few weeks. Then it became a get-together and food.” He smiles. “Your mother, this girl, with this odd bunch of gay guys. She embraced us. She might not have. Not everybody did.”

She was living then in a bedsit in west London. Her friend Bob was among the other tenants. It was at Bob and Nick's house, many years later, that my mother fell and cut her own throat. “Yes,” says Bob, “and of course you know the punch line? That she came back from the hospital and insisted on finishing the dinner party?”

“Yes,” I say. “She loved that story.”

We are in Bob and Nick's living room in west London. Back then, it was just Bob. “We were all single,” he says, “all working. Paula lived in the basement with a girl called Ann, who she didn't like, but it helped pay the rent. She'd take a book out the front of the house and would smoke a pipe out there and sometimes a cigar. She was quite eccentric. We'd sit and gossip and groan.” He pauses. “I always had the feeling there was a father problem. I understood that it was important for her to leave South Africa. That getting away from the father was a problem. I think we had heard that.” He looks at Nick, who looks blank.
“A father problem that affected girls, not boys.”

“Oh,” says Nick. We all burst out laughing.

Bob had come from Australia, so they had a colonial background in common. “I was twenty-six and had left Australia—yippee!—and was in London, for God's sake. It was enormously exciting. There was Mary Quant on the King's Road. It was the beginning of more freedom for people. The law didn't allow our lifestyle, but it went on—in the back of buses, everywhere. The rent was six pounds a week. It was a nice house, although it only had one lavatory and one bathroom. We were there for two years.

“Everyone was poor but not broke. You might have to borrow ten pence for your bus fare occasionally but you didn't feel poor, because everyone was in the same boat. The only people who went back to Australia were those whose family sent them money. Three hundred pounds. I had wobbles, and I think your mother did, too. But we didn't have the money to go back, and it passed.

“Paula was always herself. She didn't dress up for anyone. She wasn't out looking for men. She was quite lonely, I think. She went to Cornwall for four days and didn't speak to anyone.”

“Was she happy?” I ask.

Bob pauses. “I wouldn't say she was happy. But I wouldn't say she was unhappy. She was trying to work her life out. She was not depressed, not at all. She was a coper.” He looks thoughtful. “But happy? No. She was lonely.”

In the pub around the corner from my dad's house I sit with Roger. My mother and Roger infuriated each other and would go through spells during my childhood of not being on speaking terms. There were photos from a famous holiday we all took together when I was a baby, to Majorca. Now Roger says, “I looked in one of the suitcases, and d'you know what was in there? Pond's Face Cream—glass, heavy as hell, like a paperweight. She'd brought two of them, and I said, ‘What the fuck? Where's the kitchen sink?'

“We first met in the 1960s. She was working for your godfather. There was a dinner for eight people, and Paula was on my immediate left. All of a sudden, out comes a white clay pipe, out comes a cigarette that she sticks in the end and smokes. I had never seen anything like it before. And she dropped a few words every now and then.

“She was very forthright, outgoing. She was up for a good row. It was a bit daunting at first, but you learned to fight back, and she enjoyed that. Your dad would let us get on with it. I remember one time I went down with the two dogs, and they chased her cat and she went ballistic.

“The 1960s in London were brilliant, let me tell you. I didn't start fooling around until I was twenty-nine, and I was just starting to find my feet. We used to hang out on the King's Road. Everyone down there was a bit dotty. The Markham Pub, and Mary Quant had a boutique. The Alexander was a restaurant. There was a shop opposite the World's End pub called Granny Takes a Trip. Pairing off came second to the group. It was group living. It was camaraderie.

“Paula was very spatty. These spats, I liked the spark. We liked each other. She could let go with me. We could let go with each other and get rid of a lot of crap in our veins. She once said to me, ‘You're a fucking cunt,' in front of John, a friend I went to school with, and he was really angry. He didn't know Paula.”

Did Roger know she had shot her dad?

He bursts out laughing. “I wish I had. I'd have said, ‘Don't you get your pistol out to me, dear.' I'm lucky I'm still around—I pushed my luck! I suppose I should be surprised. But I'm not.

“I used her as my referee in my vetting. I had the highest security clearance for the MOD. Paula was my referee; they asked her, ‘Is he homosexual?' and I passed on both occasions. The interviewer would have been tough, but Paula was tougher. If they'd said anything nasty about me, she would have slapped them down. You couldn't get a better referee. She was as tough as they come with anyone who tried to give her the push around.

“All of us thought you were going to be a horrible kid, you were going to be a spoiled brat—only child, older mother. We were surprised at the way you turned out. I mean”—he smiles—“you're nasty, but not the way we expected.”

Does he think she mellowed over the years? “Not really. Toward the end, when she'd lost her hair, we were sitting on stools in your old kitchen, and I suggested going somewhere for lunch, and she snatched the hat off her head and hissed, ‘What, looking like this?'”

It is wonderful talking to my mother's friends, the love they had for one another still so apparent. Out of all the conversations I have that week, it is something Edward says to me that I think most about afterward. Of everyone, he perhaps understood her best, having come from war-torn Europe and lost not only a family but a country and a way of life. “When people have had an awful childhood themselves,” he says, “it impinges later in life. At its best, it becomes an ability to make sure that your child has none of the experiences of your own childhood. Some are too wounded to do that. I was in great admiration for Paula for that reason, because of what she said about her father. She had a philosophy: always be positive, feel positive, encourage your children. That was her principle. She may have done some reading about bringing up children; she said, ‘People buy books on how to raise a dog, why wouldn't you for a child?'

“Bringing you up was her major point about life. Biologically—having reached a ridiculous age—I see no point in life other than nature's ability to repeat itself. She believed that was her role.”

The Thursday nights kept going all the way to 1972. And then what happened?

“After that?” says Edward. “I took up with Louis. Paula was married. Another life began.”