Running in the Family (13 page)

Wait a minute, wait a minute! When did all this happen, I’m trying to get it straight …

Your mother was nine, Hilden was there, and your grandmother Lalla and David Grenier and his wife Dickie.

How old was Hilden?

Oh, in his early twenties.

But Hilden was having dinner with my mother and you.

Yes, says Barbara. And Trevor de Saram. And Hilden and your mother and I were quite drunk. It was a wedding lunch, Babette’s
I think, I can’t remember all those weddings. I know Hilden was moving with a rotten crowd of drinkers then so he was drunk quite early and we were all laughing about the drowning of David Grenier.

I didn’t say a word.

Laughing at Lalla, because Lalla nearly drowned too. You see, she was caught in a current and instead of fighting it she just relaxed and went with it out to sea and eventually came back in a semi-circle. Claimed she passed ships.

And then Trevor got up in a temper and challenged Hilden to a duel. He couldn’t
stand
everyone laughing, and Hilden and Doris (your mother) being drunk, two of them flirting away he thought.

But
why?
, your mother asked Trevor.

Because he is casting aspersions on you …

Nonsense, I love aspersions. And everyone laughed and Trevor stood there in a rage.

And then, said Barbara, I realized that Trevor had been in love with your mother, your father always
said
there was a secret admirer. Trevor couldn’t stand Hilden and her having a good time in front of him.

Nonsense, said your mother. It would have been incest. And besides (watching Hilden and Trevor and aware of the fascinated
dinner table audience), both these men are after my old age pension.

What happened, said Hilden, was that I drew a line around Doris in the sand. A circle. And threatened her, “don’t you dare step out of that circle or I’ll thrash you.”

Wait a minute, wait a minute,
when
is this happening?

Your mother is nine years old, Hilden says. And out in the sea near Negombo David Grenier is drowning. I didn’t want her to go out.

You were in love with a nine year old?

Neither Hilden nor Trevor were
ever
in love with our mother, Gillian whispers to me. People always get that way at weddings, always remembering the past in a sentimental way, pretending great secret passions which went unsaid …

No No No. Trevor
was
in love with your mother.

Rot!

I was in my twenties, Hilden chimes in. Your mother was nine. I simply didn’t want her going into the water while we tried to rescue David Grenier. Dickie, his wife, had fainted. Lalla—your mother’s mother—was caught in the current and out at sea, I was on the shore with Trevor.

Trevor was there too you see.

Who
is Hilden? asks Tory.

I
am Hilden … your host! Oh.

Anyway … there seems to be three different stories that you’re telling.

No,
one
, everybody says laughing.

One when your mother was nine. Then when she was sixty-five and drinking at the wedding lunch, and obviously there is a period of unrequited love suffered by the silent Trevor who never stated his love but always fought with anyone he thought was insulting your mother, even if in truth she was simply having a good time with them the way she was with Hilden, when she was sixty-five.

Good God, I was there with them both, says Barbara, and
I’m
married to Hilden.

So where is my grandmother?

She is now out at sea while Hilden dramatically draws a circle round your mother and says “Don’t you
dare
step out of that!” Your mother watches David Grenier drowning. Grenier’s wife—who is going to marry three more times including one man who went crazy—is lying in the sand having fainted. And your mother can see the bob of her mother’s head in the waves now and then.
Hilden and Trevor are trying to retrieve David Grenier’s body, carefully, so as not to get caught in the current themselves.

My mother is nine.

Your mother is nine. And this takes place in Negombo.

OK

So an hour later my grandmother, Lalla, comes back and entertains everyone with stories of how she passed ships out there and they tell her David Grenier is dead. And nobody wants to break the news to his wife Dickie. Nobody could. And Lalla says, alright, she will, for Dickie is her sister. And she went and sat with Dickie who was still in a faint in the sand, and Lalla, wearing her elaborate bathing suit, held her hand. Don’t shock her, says Trevor, whatever you do break it to her gently. My grandmother waves him away and for fifteen minutes she sits alone with her sister, waiting for her to waken. She doesn’t know what to say. She is also suddenly very tired. She hates hurting anybody.

The two men, Hilden and Trevor, will walk with her daughter, my mother, about a hundred yards away down the beach, keeping their distance, waiting until they see Dickie sitting up. And then they will walk slowly back towards Dickie and my grandmother and give their sympathies.

Dickie stirs. Lalla is holding her hand. She looks up and the first words are, “How is David? Is he alright?” “Quite well, darling,” Lalla says. “He is in the next room having a cup of tea.”

How I have used them.… They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong. They lead me through their dark rooms crowded with various kinds of furniture—teak, rattan, calamander, bamboo—their voices whispering over tea, cigarettes, distracting me from the tale with their long bony arms, which move over the table like the stretched feet of storks. I would love to photograph this. The thin muscle on the upper arms, the bones and veins at the wrist that almost become part of the discreet bangle, all disappearing into the river of bright sari or faded cotton print.

My aunt Dolly stands five foot tall, weighing seventy pounds. She has not stopped smoking since the age of fifteen and her 80-year-old brain leaps like a spark plug bringing this year that year to life. Always repeating the last three words of your question and then turning a surprising corner on her own. In the large house
whose wings are now disintegrating into garden and bush she moves frail as Miss Havisham. From outside the house seems incapable of use. I climb in through the window that frames her and she greets me with “I never thought I’d see you again,” and suddenly all these journeys are worth it, just to be able to hug this thin woman who throws her cane onto the table in order to embrace me.

She and her brother Arthur were my father’s close friends all his life. He knew that, whatever he had done, Arthur would be there to talk him out of madness, weakness, aloneness. They introduced most of the children of our generation to the theatre, dressing us up in costumes for
The Mikado, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
—all of which Dolly made herself. Although her family was not excessive in their affairs, they shielded anyone who was in the midst of a passion. “Affairs were going on all around us, even when we were children … so we were well trained.”