She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (28 page)

EVERY YEAR I PROMISE
to go back and don't. I adopt an attitude of “It's no big deal.” On the rare occasions I talk about my time abroad, whom I met and what I discovered, I am flippant or evasive. I tell the peripheral story, as though I really had just been a tourist escaping the English winter. This attitude survives my move from London to New York, and is still in place when I sit down to write about my memories of it. I put off reading the transcript from the National Archives for as long as I can. As I start to write the book, it is my mother's cousin Gloria I am most worried about offending; that she won't want to be connected with all this; that she, and her family, will feel tainted by association.

Gloria greets my phone call as always with an outpouring of love and affection and then, as always, starts to talk about the past: her mother's stories of my grandmother; the house where both she and my mother were born; my mother's disappearance and the long search to find her; the first time Gloria set eyes on my mother, when her legs buckled in the arrivals' hall. At the end of that trip, says Gloria, they drove back to the airport. “Your mother hadn't said anything specific, I don't think. But I had the sense . . .” She sighs. “On that last day, she said to me, ‘You were obviously well cared for as a child. I wasn't. One day, when we're two old ladies, I'll tell you about it, and we'll laugh.'”

To me, my mother said, “When I'm dead and gone you will write about me,” but she would, I know, have been deeply ambivalent about it. Tentatively, on the phone to Gloria, I bring up the subject of the book. “Am I wrong to—” I say, but before I can finish, she cuts me off.

“No,” she says fiercely, this small, kind woman, and I have a flash of her ancestors chucking underachievers from the back of the wagon. “It is right you should say something. A crime was committed.”

•   •   •

I DON'T GO BACK
to South Africa for the books or for anything else. I speak to Fay once a year on my mother's birthday, which falls on a bank holiday in South Africa and so she is usually at home.

“I am thinking of what day it is today, as, of course, are you,” she always says.

“How is Tony?” I say.

“Tony is Tony.”

“And Doreen?”

“Doreen is Doreen.”

“And Steven?”

“Who knows?”

Her grandchildren are thriving, and she remains the rock of the family. During one of these phone calls, she tells me about a relative of ours who has long put up with bad treatment from her husband and who, when he beat up her children, failed to go to the police. “I can't forgive her,” she says. “If you stand by and do nothing, you're as bad as the person doing it.”

One day, I receive a message through Facebook from a cousin, asking me to ring Fay urgently. I am on a street in Brooklyn, about to go into a fancy cookware shop, and it is too late to ring by the time I get home. I call her the next day.

“Doreen passed yesterday,” says Fay, and gives me the details. It all happened very quickly—organ failure, slippage into unconsciousness, Jason was with her, et cetera. To my amazement, I burst into tears and begin sobbing, loudly.

“I don't know why I'm so upset,” I say.

“Yes, you're very upset,” says my aunt, sounding bewildered.

“I don't know why,” I say, around the edges of a sob. “It's not as if . . .”

I pull myself together. “What did Tony say? And Steven? And Liz?”

Finally, I say, “Will anyone tell John?” John is their brother in Florida, the only one, apart from my mother, to have left, or as my dad puts it, “got away.” My aunt doesn't have a number for him. I say I'll find one, and since we are on the same continent, give him a call to let him know his sister is dead.

The next day, after a bit of searching online, I find a cell number for my mother's brother, and, reassured by the South African accent on the voice mail, leave him a message to call me in New York. A day later, I am having coffee with my dad at Lincoln Center when the phone rings. “This is John,” he says. I get up and walk around the back of the serving area to a quiet zone.

“Do you know who I am?” I say. I think the English accent will tip him off.

“I haven't a clue,” says John.

“I'm your . . . niece. Paula's daughter.”

“Oh,” he says. “Yes, I've heard of you.”

I say I wished I had a better reason for ringing. I apologize for being the one to give him the news—the weirdness of it, given we've never spoken before—but finally I get it out that his sister died on Sunday. A sharp intake of breath, as if someone has crept up behind him and performed the Heimlich maneuver. John and Doreen were good friends. He was the one she always fought with over which of them had greater right to middle-child status.

I tell him as much as I know. Then I say, “Your sister Fay has more details, you can call her if—”

“No,” says my uncle sharply. “I haven't spoken to Fay for ten years. I can't get into that.”

There is a long pause.

“How is your mother?” says John.

Now it is my turn to be shocked. “Oh God, John. Er . . . She's been dead for seven years.”

“Oh my God—”

“I thought Doreen—someone—would have—”

“Oh my God—”

“I'm so sorry,” I say. I am mortified. I am also aware that Doreen would be furious that my mother's death had upstaged her own in this exchange. Meanwhile, my uncle has lost two of his four sisters in the course of a single conversation. “Nobody told me,” he says.

He can't talk. He is driving in Jacksonville, where he sells insurance for a living. He tells me to take his e-mail address, but I can't find a pen. I'll text him, I say, but he says the text function on his phone has been disabled by the insurance company. He pulls over, writes down my address, and says he'll e-mail at the weekend. That is his preferred medium. “But if I don't e-mail, please ring me again. Please.” There is an intimacy on the phone with this man I have never met or spoken to, the sibling my mother knew least of the seven but still her flesh and blood, and in that moment all I want is to fly down to Florida to see if his face is like hers.

“I have a very clear picture of your mother,” he says softly. “She must have been eighteen or nineteen, very slender, very elegant. She had reddish blond hair, standing there in the sunlight.”

He says, “She knew how to take command.”

“She did,” I say. “She could give orders with the best of them.” We laugh. That evening, I picture him in a motel somewhere in Florida, sitting on the edge of the bed dodging asteroids of memory. Neither of us follows through at the weekend.

•   •   •

ON MY LAST TRIP
back to London, I packed up the storage unit. Most of it went to the dump: all the clothes and the bric-a-brac, the school projects lovingly hung on to, although, inexplicably, I still have the hideous cat magnet. It is on my fridge in Brooklyn, holding up a
People
magazine recipe for fried rice. The trunk is at my dad's house. I have kept the letters and the photos, and in tribute to the random way in which she ascribed value to things, a pink terry-cloth dress of my mother's that, as she would have said, “doesn't owe anyone anything.”

I sometimes wonder if the owners of our old house will one day come across one of my mother's overlooked hiding places and find an old reference of hers or a piece of gold jewelry; some onionskin letter with her father's name on it. Now, when I look at old photos of my mother and her siblings, it is with wonder. It is an axiom of disfigurement that the courage it takes to survive is construed as a substitute beauty, more powerful than the thing it replaces. But here's the thing: they really were beautiful.

We had adhered to my mother's wishes for the funeral, but a few months afterward, my dad and I had cracked and had organized a memorial lunch for her, at a restaurant in the village. Our neighbors came, and some of my friends from London, and my dad's boss, who had been generous with time off. I was touched that Ron, her old boss from the jewelry shop, came, and his wife, Connie. I stood up and told some stories about my mother's idiosyncrasies. How she picked up rubber bands in the street. How she had threatened, shortly before her death, to remove the bollocks of someone who was bullying a friend of mine, with the proviso, “If I can find them.”

An elderly lady from the village came up to me afterward. She was a member of what my mother called the blue-rinse brigade, a staunch Tory and upholder of village standards. Whenever she passed the house she would always look for my mother's head in the window and wave. “She was a different kind of person, wasn't she?” she said, looking puzzled. “But I liked her.”

A few days later, my dad and I went for a walk through the village, down the back street past the rubbish bins behind the Chinese restaurant. “Hang on,” I said to my dad. The owner of the restaurant had come out and was throwing stuff in the bin. I jogged back up the hill. I'd never seen him in his own clothes before; he always wore a suit in the restaurant. I stood in front of him, and without saying anything, he held open his arms. “She's gone,” I said—not a euphemism I ever use—and the two of us stood there hugging by the bins, while my dad looked up the hill in amazement.

•   •   •

ABOUT A WEEK
after her death the heat wave was still raging. England was curling at the edges. I went into the garden to fetch the last of the containers from underneath the bird table. There were dried apple cores on the ground and a lose shale of sunflower seeds from all the years of my mother's ministrations to the birds. As I straightened and turned, something caught my eye. I sprinted back into the kitchen.

“Do you know anything about a sunflower?” I asked my dad.

“No,” he said innocently. “What sunflower?”

I led him out into the garden. Against the wall of the shed, where my mother had grown tomatoes and taught me how to do handstands, stood a huge sunflower, stalk as thick as my wrist, head fully eight feet high, which I swear, I swear, hadn't been there the week before. It was so heavy it leaned over, as if taking a concerned but rather condescending view of the rest of the garden. We stood there, my father and I, staring at the flower, blinking in the sunlight.

“It's Mum,” said my dad.

“Yes,” I said.

Enough now.

I AM GRATEFUL
to more people than can be named here for reasons of privacy; but biggest thanks go to my mother's siblings for their generosity in sharing their memories with me, and to their children, awesome people one and all.

To Fay, for welcoming me into her house and looking after me a long way from home, and for her extraordinary courage in blessing the writing of this book.

To Tony, for his warmth and frankness; Steven, for his kindness and incredibly thoughtful insights. To the memory of the magnificent Doreen, and to Liz, for her strength and talent for seeing the funny side.

I'm grateful to my cousin, Caroline Walker, another writer in the family, for her generosity in sharing material from her grandfather with me.

Gloria and Cyrille Motet continue to be a great source of sanity and their encouragement made all the difference.

To my mum's friends: the wonderful Joan Borrill, and in fond memory of Danny, her husband, who died in 2009; to Jennifer and Terence Zinn; Denise and Reg Lander; Bob Salmon, Nick Young, Edward Mendelsohn, Roger Hearne, Len Sash, and Ken Mellor.

To Marion Smith, for kind encouragement and good advice.

To those who helped me in Johannesburg; Dee Rissik, Adam Roberts, and my late friend, Heidi Holland.

Thanks to loyal friends and early readers in London: Liese Spencer, Sam Wollaston, and Ian Katz.

To the particular genius of Merope Mills, for suggestions that made all the difference.

To Jat Gill for his generous early feedback; to Kate Fawcett, with whom I seem to have been talking about this book forever; and to Hannah Pool, whose friendship, then as now, I couldn't do without.

In New York, thanks to Janine Gibson for tolerating what might generously be called my fluctuating productivity while writing the tail end of this book. Oliver Burkeman listened to more of my brain melt than most and never failed to talk me down off the ledge.

Zoe Pagnamenta is the best agent a girl can have. I am very lucky to be at the Penguin Press, where Ann Godoff and Benjamin Platt made a difficult process so much easier.

To the late Nora Ephron, who with characteristic generosity came up with the title of the book for me and was the kind of encourager and role model you only get once.

And with love and admiration to Carin Fox, who always saw what was missing, and who made me press send.