She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (5 page)

And her brother Mike had come, before I was born, to play against England in the South African hockey team. He was in goal. My mother had shown him and his teammates around London, and when they asked her a question she didn't know—“Is Marble Arch really made out of marble?”—she just made up the answer. When I was a year old, my mother had a gigantic row with her in-laws, scooped me up, and fled back to South Africa for a month. There was a photo from that trip of a round, pasty-faced baby, ears sticking out at right angles, surrounded by cousins I didn't recognize.

“Weren't you worried?” I said once, pointing at my ears.

“Don't you criticize my child,” said my mother fiercely, and she repeated the story of Debbie, who'd been pregnant at the same time as my mother, but whereas Debbie's baby “looked like a pig,” I was beautiful. “She just couldn't see it!” My mother looked freshly amazed every time.

•   •   •

AMONG THE PHOTOS
from that trip was one of my mother with her auntie Kathy. Kathy was very old by then, sitting beside my mother with Uncle Dick, her husband, on somebody's wicker porch furniture. My mother spoke very highly of Kathy, whom, after that one and only meeting, she identified as the source of various sterling traits in the family. “Auntie Kathy,” she said, “had a very sharp tongue.”

It was Kathy who told my mother what had happened in the immediate aftermath of Sarah's death: that efforts to adopt her had been made by Sarah's sisters, but that her father had rejected them. That they had kept track of him for a few years and had been relieved to hear he'd remarried. That Kathy had sent his new wife some little vests for the child, and that she had them sent back, with a note saying they weren't in need of charity. Then the family disappeared.

Kathy spent years trying to find her late sister's baby. Another sister, Johanna, even named my mother sole heir to her and Charlie's farm, as if the convention of an advantageous will to draw people out of obscurity like a magnet might summon her back to them. But when Johanna died, some years later, my mother failed to materialize. When Kathy retired from the search, her daughter Gloria, a year older than my mother and born in the same bed, took it up.

It was Gloria who finally tracked my mother to London, by which time she was in her thirties and married to my dad. Gloria sent her a letter, introducing herself as a member of her mother's family and asking, “Hey, what happened? We've been looking for you for thirty years. Someone left you a farm . . .”

My mother stared blankly when she said this and shrugged at the shame of it all. She couldn't blame her mother for picking her father. “He was the exciting choice,” she said helplessly. If you were twenty-two and had a shortened life expectancy, you wouldn't marry a man called Trevor, either.

“What happened to the farm?” I said.

“It went to someone else.”

•   •   •

MY MOTHER'S FRIENDS
during those early years in London were a circle of gay men, who became like substitute family. During school holidays, we drove down in her Mini to see them: my godfather, Len, Bob and Nick, Ken and David, Willy and Barry, Edward—“dear Edward”—Roger, and Kenneth. They were mainly artists and architects. They had large abstract paintings on their walls and Eames chairs in their living rooms. When they came to see us in the village, my mother's voice took on an arch tone, as if her life there were a bizarre experiment she would one day abandon. She always said of these friends that they expected her to spoil me—the only child born a month shy of her forty-third birthday. “They thought you'd be a brat,” she said. I don't know what gave them that idea. Perhaps it was the decor in the living room, where photos of me taken every year from age two and a half upward ran across the length of one wall, which uncharitable friends called the Shrine.

“Rogue's gallery,” she said.

•   •   •

FOR THE REST
of the school holidays, we hung out at home. We went to the shops and to the bottle bank one town over. My mother worried I would be lonely without siblings and organized copious playdates and activities. For her sake I suffered Scrabble, although it bored me, and for mine she suffered Snakes and Ladders, although as a game that turned entirely on luck, it offended her principles. “You make your own luck,” she said. And, “Sufficient unto the day.” And, “Don't scratch, you'll make it worse.” One summer she taught me canasta and we created vast, sprawling games across the kitchen table. We had a whale of a time.

“Did they feed you?” she said when I came back from a sleepover. “What did they feed you? Who else was there? What were the sleeping arrangements?”

“Who's your best?” she would say, and name two of my friends. “Which would you rather?”

I once heard Nigel Nicholson tell a story on the radio of an encounter he'd had as a child with Virginia Woolf. She had asked him about his teacher, and he had given her a bland description, enough to fob off most adults, to which she had replied impatiently, “Yes, but what sort of
shoes
does she wear?” My mother was like that. “Did you see . . . ? What did you see? What do you think . . . ? Which would you rather . . . ?” Motivation established, then came judgment. Her judgments were arbitrary and final. Cremation over burial. Charlotte Brontë over Emily. France over Italy. Spain over France. “Slob,” she once said of the mother of a schoolfriend of mine whom I'd reported seeing dump clean laundry from the machine straight onto the floor. “What a slob that woman is.”

One day I walked in from school to something sharp and filmy in the air, like gasoline. My mother was at her usual post, on a bar stool by the sink.

“What?” I said. She turned to look at me so strangely.

“Mike died.”

“Oh.”

Her brother Mike was seven years her junior, the next one down and a great athlete. In the event of she and my father dying, she'd said once, I'd go and live with Mike. I'd been quite looking forward to it. Now he had collapsed with a heart attack at the mine, in his mid forties, fit as a fiddle, with three young children and a wife.

My mother glared and turned away so I wouldn't see her cry. I carried on standing in the doorway, neat in my school uniform, worried about my math homework, dental checkup in the diary, tennis coaching, swimming coaching, rehearsals for the school play, dance class, piano practice, Latin verb revision on my mind, and before she turned away, I thought, the look on her face was unmistakable: this child has nothing to do with me. She didn't go back for the funeral.

Mike, mum's younger brother and “best friend” in the family.

And then a cousin came to stay; an actual blood relative, the daughter of my mother's sister Fay. Her name was Victoria and she was three and a half years older than me. She had long blond hair and was very pretty. We got on in a low-key kind of way. She wanted to be a vet and spent most of the trip in the tack shop on the high street, talking to the woman about horses. She told us about the time her pet rat died and she dissected it to see how it worked, pinned out the skin and laid out the bones. It was a startlingly unsentimental thing for a child to do. My mother blinked when she told us this, as one does when confronted, unexpectedly, with one's own reflection.

Because of the age gap, my mother arranged a playdate for her niece with older siblings of a friend of mine. It didn't go well. They teased her about something—her accent or her shyness. Anyway, my mother got wind of it and never let it go. It gave her immense satisfaction when these girls grew up and, “despite all their advantages,” didn't go to university or amount to anything much beyond marriage. She persecuted their mother with news of my progress—would literally stalk her down the high street into every shop, until she had her cornered in the post office, whereupon she pinned her flat against the wall and made her listen to my exam results. Or Victoria's exam results; my cousin did become a vet, after seven years of training. My mother could wait. She was in it for the long game. You worked hard, time passed, the wheel eventually turned.

One of the things my mother admired about her niece was her good manners, which she thought important in a child. To that end, she policed a strict no-swearing zone around me while I was growing up, so strict in fact that I remember the two occasions when it was broken. “It's not big and it's not clever,” she said, when I expressed a reluctance to go to Brownies and prefaced it with the words “Oh my God.” And then we were walking down a London street with my godfather one day when it started to rain. “It's pissing it down,” he said, and received a look from my mother to turn a man to stone.

Years later, she was driving me to school when a car cut in front of us at the roundabout by the garden center. I was in my teens by then. “What a cunt!” said my mother airily, and gave me a sly look. “What?” she said, feigning surprise as my jaw hit the floor. “Didn't you know your mother had a filthy mouth?” She had tried her best, she said. If I wasn't well-spoken after all these years, there was nothing more she could do. “It's enough now.”

•   •   •

IT WAS AN ATTITUDE
she wanted me to inherit; not quite stiff upper lip, which she considered too English, but a less-repressed version of that. Whining was not permissible. Undervaluing oneself was not permissible. “For goodness' sake,” she said, when I had the temerity to suggest I might have to slip down a grade in tennis coaching. “Of course you can do it, you're my child, aren't you?” (I feel a pressure from beyond the grave to point out that I held my place in the top stream.) I wasn't much interested in inheriting an attitude. I was entering a materialistic phase. My mother showed me the things she had brought over on the boat with her: the trunk in the garage, with her name and cabin number on the side; all the books; and the dinner service. She had me try on the bespoke suit, but it was too big. I read her copy of
Gone with the Wind
, which she said her best friend in Johannesburg had given to her. “To Dear Pauline,” it said on the flyleaf. “God Bless! All my love, Joan, December 16th 1956”—my mother's birthday. My mother looked sentimental at the mention of Joan. And then there was the gun.

Of everything she brought over with her it was the item she most wanted me to have. “This will be yours one day,” she said, long before those kinds of conversations were necessary. In the end, however, the price of a gesture can be too high to bear. In 1990, a gun amnesty was declared in Britain, and my mother decided that, after all, it might get me into trouble. Reluctantly, she laid it in a box like a dead pet and drove it to the police station. By the time she got back she'd cheered up. The female desk sergeant had squealed when she opened the box and called out her fellow officers from the back room. It was the only contribution to the amnesty they'd had.

“They were completely intrigued,” said my mother, beaming. “I suppose I don't look the type.”

I still have the trunk and I still have the dinner service. The bespoke suit went down in a freak sewing accident in the mid-1990s. I am not, on the whole, sentimental about the gun.

Chasing the Train

ONE EVENING IN 2003
the phone rang and I answered it. Over a bad line, my cousin Victoria said she had a message for my mother from her own mother: Fay was poised to book a flight to England from South Africa and wanted my mother to green-light it. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and walked from the hallway into the living room, where my mother sat in a chair by the window, blanket over her legs, feet poking out of the end in thick woolly socks. Outside in the heat wave the trees towered and loomed. I passed on the message.

“Absolutely not,” said my mother.

She had been off-color for a while. There was a persistent skin irritation that wouldn't go away, even with antibiotics. She was uncharacteristically listless, then nauseated, and finally breathless. She lost interest in pretty much everything except going out every morning to feed the birds in the garden and reading the newspaper. It took her the best part of a day to get through it.

Much later, my dad and I tried to trace back the symptoms—the tiredness and coughing, the misdiagnoses (asthma, bronchitis)—to work out how long she'd been ill. Well over a year, we thought. Since her mother had died from TB, she'd been confident, when we finally went in for the biopsy, that that's what it was. I think she was even a little consoled by this, a connection to the woman she had never known and of whom no living person had a single memory. The diagnosis of lung cancer seemed unfair when my mother hadn't smoked for thirty years.

I took the phone around the corner and in a low voice said to my cousin that Fay's offer was appreciated but that my mother was too tired for visitors. My cousin disappeared from the line and came back a moment later to say her mother understood. I went back into the living room, passed my mother the phone, and the sisters spoke to each other for a few minutes. Then my mother said good-bye and hung up. I went back into the kitchen to make cocktails.

•   •   •

WE WERE WORKING
our way through the
Savoy Hotel Cocktail Book
that summer, which is why, for years afterward, I had orange liqueur and Tia Maria and angostura bitters in my cupboard, up there with the baking soda and other things I never use. I'd had an idea we'd start at A and work through, but by mid-June this was looking ambitious. There were too many ingredients and the exercise, conceived of in the absence of any better ideas on how to ritualize the end, threatened to furnish me with a tragic coda at the funeral: “We only got to Sea Breezes!” (An epitaph she would have loved, by the way.)

Because I was in charge, my mother drank from a glass. Left to her own devices, she would drink from a washed-out old yogurt pot, silver foil still stuck to the rim. It was the kind of ostentatious economy she loved, right up there with reusing unfranked stamps or folding a single sheet of loo paper in half. She poured her first yogurt pot at nine in the morning.

“Here,” I said, handing her a White Russian.

“Cheers.”

We sat and looked out through the living-room window. Every now and then the breeze would lift and a great hiss and surge of light seemed to fill every wavelength.

“It's so peaceful,” she said. “It's so peaceful here.”

When my dad came in from work, she looked up and smiled. “Go and change.”

•   •   •

THERE WAS SOMETHING
we were supposed to be doing, during those dozy afternoons and long, empty mornings, which we had emphatically been failing to do. My mother always said that, given the choice, she would rather go down the long, slow decline route than be run down by a bus. That way, when the time came, she'd have had a chance to have put her affairs in order. But now we were here and it wasn't appealing. It seemed absurd at this stage to ruin what time we had left with painful and long-avoided subjects, although “what time we had left” was a cliché we were finding hard to make meaningful. I had taken semileave from work, and the sense of time running out had been replaced with the peculiar drag of being home on a weekday, with its echo of sick days off school. It felt like this period would go on in slow motion forever.

“Is there anything you want to do today?” I asked in the morning, and my mother's eyes flitted.

“No,” she said. “I don't think so.”

In the evening, another phone call, another sister three thousand miles away. This one didn't offer to visit. “Sensible woman,” said my mother.

We were trying to be disciplined about crackpot remedies. Some free reflexology at the hospital, a rosary I bought in Camden Passage for a joke. In a moment of weakness, I'd been to the health food store for pills that promised to restore a full head of hair in record time.

“Do I have to?” she'd said when I handed her one. I was horrified. My mother loved nothing better than to contrive a minor discomfort for herself, for the pleasure she got from overcoming it. “Too many pills,” she said in a small voice.

“Of course you don't have to,” I said briskly, and packed them away.

Every morning, either my dad or I—whichever of us had slept overnight in the downstairs bedroom in the single bed next to hers—helped her up and we hobbled through the kitchen to the living room. At lunchtime, I maneuvered her into the car and we drove the two blocks to the high street, where we sat in the window of the Chinese restaurant. We'd been going there for years; my mother always asked after the owner's children. The place was empty, and he solicitously and diplomatically took our order.

“I'm surprised it pays them to stay open,” I said.

“Yes.”

For a change, one day I drove us to a pub halfway between our village and the next. We used to go there for a treat on the last day of school. Under-twelves weren't allowed in, but my mother said if I was quiet, no one would object. We'd stopped going when they changed beer suppliers to a brand she didn't like and the ham in the ham sandwiches went from dry-cured (right) to honey-glazed (wrong), so this was a sentimental gesture, of sorts. We sat in the garden.

“Beats working, doesn't it?” called my mother to the couple at the next table. It was the hottest day of the year so far and she looked startling in a heavy wool jacket, a black skullcap—which she preferred to a wig—and a red T-shirt I had given her with Che Guevara on the front. The couple turned in alarm. Tormenting the English was one of my mother's favorite pastimes, but there was something off in her tone that day; it had none of the usual archness—was almost beseeching—and where normally I would have cringed, I thought, “Answer her, you fuckers.”

“Yes,” they said, eventually. My mother turned away and, relaxing for a moment, tilted her face skyward as a flower tracks the sun. “Lovely,” she said. After lunch, we crossed the garden in a feat of horizontal rock-climbing: table to chair to wall to drainpipe, into the pub and across endless carpeted space to the toilet. “Phew!” said my mother, hanging on to the door handle. “I thought we'd never make it.”

•   •   •

I DROVE US BACK
the long way. Down the road that ran parallel to the railway, which we had driven down to school every day for ten years. When we coincided with a train, she'd speed up to race it until I squealed and made her slow down again. Up the hill, along the lane by St. Mary's, past the RAF base, and then I pulled in at a place where I used to go swimming. We sat in the car in front of a squat 1970s building.

“Do you remember . . . ?” I said.

“Yes,” she said vaguely. I had the sense she was indulging me.

In the evening, I sat beside her in the living room, holding her hand. “Look,” I said. There was a pattern on one of her fingernails, a corrugated effect like the ghost of an old infection. “Is that a new thing?”

“I don't know,” said my mother. “Funny.”

“I'll get us another drink.” She smiled at me.

“If anyone tries to stop you, call a policeman.”

If the first cocktail didn't work, I reverted to rum and Coke. After two rounds I started to scale back the measures. We got stuck on piña coladas for a week before tiring of them. The margaritas came out like lighter fuel. But the White Russians were perfect, the Kahlua thick and syrupy, the texture of cough medicine. When I poured in the milk, it came up, like sludge, from the bottom of the glass.

•   •   •

MY MOTHER WAS SITTING
on a stool at the kitchen table. I was standing behind her, rubbing lavender oil into what remained of her hair. It had come back a little curly and appeared now in fine gray swirls on her scalp, like a weather map depicting a hurricane. As I applied the oil, I saw the strawberry birthmark at her hairline. “Stimulates regrowth” is what it said on the bottle, but it was just a nice sensation. I had to stop it from flooding the neck of her jersey.

“Lovely,” she said.

There was no preamble. It appears in my memory out of nowhere, as it had the first time, although on this occasion my mother's voice was less harsh. When all else failed, she said, she had her father arrested. The case had gone to the High Court. He had defended himself and cross-examined his own children in the witness box, destroying them one by one. He had been found not guilty. She didn't say what the charge was, beyond that the action was triggered by a pattern repeating itself. What had happened to her had been happening to her sister Fay, the one she called her baby, and she wouldn't stand for it any longer. My mother was twenty-four; her sister was twelve. She gave me the last of the heavy-weather looks, a worn-out version of her old favorite, Woman of Destiny Considers Her Life. I managed to squeak out a question this time: how was he found not guilty?

My mother looked bitter and by way of an answer repeated something the prosecutor had said to her about her stepmother: “If that woman isn't careful, I'll have her up as an accessory.” She had lied in the witness box or retracted her statement; some kind of U-turn that contributed to the collapse of the case. The prosecutor was furious with her, said my mother.

After the verdict, her father had come up to her in the courtroom and, grinning, said, “Aren't you proud of me?” My mother said it was the most shocking moment of her life.

•   •   •

SHE HAD GONE BACK
to her apartment and had tried to decide what to do. She had dragged her siblings through a horrifically public ordeal, which had failed. She had been personally defeated. The worst thing about it, she said, was worrying that people at work would find out. It had been in the newspapers.

It occurred to her that she had two options: to carry on living, or to kill herself. We sat side by side at the kitchen table. I put my head on my arm. In an odd way, I was less disturbed by the information itself than by the fact of its eleventh-hour revelation. It seemed to me incredible that, behind all those hints and intimations, all those years of comic threats and camp overreactions that I had come to see, more or less, as a flourish of character, an actual solid event had existed. Occasionally over the years I had wondered which would be worse: to discover that something terrible
had
happened, or that not very much had happened at all and that either my mother or I had concocted a drama from nothing. As she spoke, a tiny part of me was relieved that neither of us had turned out to be mad.

I was also incredulous. Deathbed revelations weren't something people had. That my mother, who would ring me at work with the news flash that she'd found the socks she was looking for, that the thermal vests she'd ordered for my dad had arrived, that a woman we knew slightly had walked past the house and her ankles were huge, and whom I rang back with the news I'd had tuna for lunch, had managed to keep this from me was extraordinary.

There was no time to think about it. I knew, dimly, that it would come back at some stage and demand to be thought about. But right then, alongside the daily effort of not looking forward, not looking back was relatively easy. Only once, and for a second, did I have any real understanding of what she had told me—that to her this was not an ancient grievance, easily back-burnered. It was a few days later. She was walking through the door from the kitchen to the hallway. A thought occurred to her in that instant that she articulated to me, sitting at the kitchen table, and that in the face of stiff competition still constitutes I think the most shocking moment of
my
life.

She looked at me and said, with something like surprise and as if it had only just occurred to her, “I think I have come to terms with it.” Not “came,” but “have come.” As if, in all those years of village life, in the market, at the tennis club, in the midst of our mild existence, a process had been ongoing, another reality alive to her in which she'd been wholly alone.

•   •   •

FOR THE SPACE
of an afternoon she had sat in her flat and weighed up her options. If she lived, she said, she had to be sure she could meet two conditions: one, that she would never be intimidated again; and two, that she would be happy. She may very well have done this. But—and I knew this instantly—the recollection had a tailored quality to it that suggested the scene had been worked on. It bore all the hallmarks of my mother's philosophy: that it's not what happens to you that matters so much as the story you choose to tell afterward—even if the only person you tell is yourself.

A few days later I asked her, as a joke, if there were any skeletons in the closet. She gave the appearance of thinking about it. “No,” she said, and tilting her face upward launched her most theatrically innocent look. “I don't think so.” Oh, God.

She died at 7:20 p.m. on a warm summer evening, in the downstairs guest bedroom of our house. All that talk of “putting one's affairs in order” had fallen away to this: “You and your dad must stick together.” I had told her we would. She had tried, then, to counsel me about her own death. “You'll be sore afterward . . .” This was too much, even for my mother, and she looked away. I was furious that she should even try such a thing, such a piece of existential masochism, just as I'd been furious when, well into her illness and unsteady on her feet, she had insisted on going out every morning to feed the birds. I had wanted to scream at her, “Stop it, it's over, you can't bluff your way through this one.” Then she had stopped going out and complained of being in pain, and I longed for the old bravado.