She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (9 page)

In November and December, everything comes in succession, as always: my birthday, my mother's birthday, Christmas, my dad's birthday. For her birthday, my dad and I go up the hill behind the house to the place where we scattered the ashes. It is a frozen December day, the earth rising in icy ribs beneath our feet. There is no view from the top; just white-gray mist as far as one can see.

For Christmas we have a brilliant idea. I'm often in Los Angeles for work, and Christmas there is as outlandishly far removed from our idea of Christmas as you can get. Christmas at home meant turkey and trimmings, the open fire my mother liked to light in the morning and keep going all day, maybe a walk to the village. This year, my dad and I take the ten-hour flight to the west coast of America and check into a hotel opposite the beach, on Ocean Avenue. On Christmas Day we go to the movies, twice. (LA being a movie town, every theater is full, mostly with big family groups. It's surprisingly festive.) We have hot dogs for Christmas dinner and walk beside the Pacific, along Venice Beach.

As a journalist, you discover quite quickly that the question “What did you feel?” doesn't get you very far. “What did you see?” is the more useful question. And so, while I can't remember what I felt that Christmas, I remember what I saw. I remember thinking about the importance of seeing new things; that whatever else the coming trip might or might not achieve, it would at least serve to generate fresh memories, to unseat the things I saw in my head when I closed my eyes or stared through a bus window or did anything that permitted my mind to go slack and default to that same set of images. Even if I had a wretched time in South Africa, I thought, each wretched new memory would be a welcome brick in the wall between me and the things I saw: a head that couldn't hold itself upright; two eyes opening and slowly closing again; the closeness of a room on a warm summer evening, when the energy shifted and the air seemed to part.

•   •   •

I AM HUNGOVER THAT MORNING.
All week I have been seeing friends to say good-bye. As a leaving gift, my friend Susannah gives me a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
and a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce, which, in the event of disaster, seem obliquely to cover all bases.

The night before, a friend came around, and we worked our way through the best part of a bottle of vodka until she was sick on my wood-effect flooring and I passed out on the sofa. On the way to the airport, I rest my head against the condensation-slick window and try to steady my brain while London churns by.

“You could change your flight,” says my dad, loyally.

“I'll be OK.”

We are going to the airport via the cattery, where the cat has been billeted since Christmas. Our cat is used to a five-star cat spa with central heating and an evening lecture program, but that was for the two weeks when we went on holiday and this is for months, while my dad sells the house. “Arm-and-a-leg job,” we had said, at the prospect of sending her to the usual place. “Second mortgage.” Instead, we put her out on a farm. My mother would have been horrified, and we knew it. We haven't seen Mogs since December and so, guiltily, we drive out to see her before my afternoon flight. She was my mum's cat more than ours; I want to say good-bye.

“Do you think she still knows us?” At the back of the cage, the cat cringes and glowers. I sprinkle my fingers in her sullen face. “Mogs!” She glares. The farmer looks away.

In the car again on the way to the airport, my dad passes me his cell phone and asks if I'd mind ringing his parents to say good-bye. It is my dad's stepmother who answers. My heart sinks. She was the main inspiration for my mother's rants about English people, how cold they are, how incapable of saying anything to each other that matters.

“Hello,” I say.

“Oh, Emmy, hello.” The diminutive, so at odds with the tenor of our relationship, had driven my mother crazy. It was blatant hypocrisy, and besides, she hadn't authorized it. I wonder now if, back in the day, it had been offered as a tentative gesture of intimacy, which my mother had rejected as too little, too late. The lines had been drawn by then; each had decided who the other was: my mother, in the eyes of her mother-in-law, a horrendous loudmouth with a superiority complex based, as far as she could tell, on absolutely nothing. Where in the world did this woman come from? Who were her family? And my mother, for her part, saw in her mother-in-law the vinegary image of snobbish England, a woman who “rejected my child,” as she liked to say, looking martyred, and who was, despite all her airs and graces, “only a farmer's daughter.”

I didn't feel particularly rejected, but speaking to my dad's stepmother was always a trial. She had a knack on the phone of communicating a lack of interest so profound it was amazing she could summon the will to breathe. And so, when she says on the phone that day, “How are you feeling about your trip?” I am amazed. Feelings haven't been reported between us in either direction for as long as I've lived. Frazzled, freaked, hungover, I answer honestly for once. “Pretty nervous, actually.”

“Well,” she says, kindly, “of course you are. It's only to be expected.”

At the Archive

I HAVE FRIENDS WHO,
on visiting Israel for the first time, came back to report experiencing a powerful deliverance, a sense of recognition that at the extreme end is recognized by psychiatrists as Jerusalem syndrome: when previously balanced people set foot in the Holy Land and become instantly psychotic. (Lesser versions of this take place when Western teenagers set foot in India, Africa, or anywhere you can buy beads.) I had half wondered whether I'd have a similar reaction when I touched down in Johannesburg. Instead, to my relief, I have no reaction at all.

For the first time in six months, I'm in a place with no cues, no reminders. It is raining when I arrive; a mild English rain, not the African downpour my mother had threatened. In the early morning drizzle a taxi drives me through suburbs that look like Milton Keynes or Houston to an aggressively bland hotel in the north of the city.

I have been deliberately hazy about my arrival date. I want space to acclimatize before the pressure of a meeting. I am aware that what I'm doing is unfair, unethical, possibly unforgivable: flying halfway around the world to bother other people's parents with questions I had been too afraid to ask my own. I'm also aware of the license I have. I'm the bereaved; I can do whatever I like and no one can say anything.

The hotel room is dimly lit and perfectly climate-controlled, the only distinguishing detail a note on my bed left by the hotel management advising me against leaving the premises alone on foot. My mother would have had a fit.

“Is it safe there?” I go through the old catechism, in my head now.

“Of course it's safe. It's a hotel, there's a lock on the door.”

“But if there's a fire you can still get out?”

I remove the note, lie down, and sleep for several hours with sudden, weightless abandon. Heaven, I think, might very well be a version of the high-end business hotel.

When I wake up, it's still raining. I go downstairs and walk gingerly out into the parking lot. Nothing happens. I turn left and walk down a sidewalk running alongside the highway. There are glass-and-chrome business parks on either side and a well-manicured strip of grass down the middle, where black men in overalls are either sleeping or touting for work. They look like figures drawn on a laminate sheet, overlaid from a different reality entirely. They emphatically fail to molest me when I pass.

At the end of the street is a shopping mall, where I revel in the triumph of finding the adaptor plug I need and in the prices in Yo! Sushi, where even the purple plates are under a few dollars. By the time I get back to the room I'm euphoric. I have managed, in defiance of the hotel's instructions, to walk along a road without incident. I pick up the phone and, looking in my notebook, turn to the first number on my list.

“Oh, my darling!” Joan's voice bursts down the line as if released from a can. “Where even are you? In your hotel room?! Oh, I can't bear it—what would your mother say? I'll get Ted to drive over
this instant
and pick you up—”

“Oh, Joan, that's lovely of you but—”

“I can have the spare room all ready. It's a bit cluttered, but alone in your hotel room, and is it even safe there? Oh, I'm almost crying, I”—a muffling as her hand goes over the mouthpiece—“in her hotel room, yes I've told her, oh, I can't bear it—”

“Joan, it's the Crowne Plaza.”

A howl down the telephone. “How much must it be costing!”

I am out of sync, generationally, with Joan's children because my mother had me so late. There is a more than twenty-year age gap between Joan's daughter Jennifer and me. “Dear Aunty Paul,” wrote Jennifer to my mother once a year on her birthday. I reassure Joan I am happy in the hotel and arrange to meet her in two days' time. I turn to the next number on my list.

•   •   •

THE PHONE RINGS
for a long time before someone picks up.

“Hello?” The voice is faint. My heart drops as if the cable snapped.

Fay and I have spoken several times by now; there should be no taboo in it. But ringing from a distance of a few miles seems a different proposition to ringing her from England. Those conversations were distant, logistical, hampered by a bad line. Now, I'm nervous. It occurs to me it's possible I'm about to embarrass myself. I have come all this way to claim a connection everyone else involved might think expired long ago.

“Fay, it's Emma.”

“Emma!” Her voice soars. “Are you here?”

“I'm here!”

“Where are you?”

My aunt does not object to me being in a hotel; boundaries are being observed, as are certain formal preliminaries necessary when white South Africans of a certain age encounter anyone, of any age, from anywhere else.

I ask after her daughter, Victoria, and after telling me where she is and how she's doing, my aunt assures me unbidden that her children were brought up to respect all human life. When her son was thirty-six, she says, he thanked his mother for teaching him to see everyone as equal, so that while some of his contemporaries are struggling to adjust to the new South Africa, he is not. When she herself goes on holiday, says my aunt, Maria, her maid, stays in the house and sleeps in the guest room like anyone else.

“It's just so wonderful you're here,” she says. Her voice is low and quiet. There is an urgency to the conversation that was absent from the previous ones.

“I'm glad I'm here.”

Fay doesn't know precisely where all her siblings are, but there is a chain of command through which they can, if necessary, be reached and which is how news of my mother's death spread. She tells me some family news, which I receive like a drink of water after crossing a desert. Since leaving Johannesburg, her sister Doreen has sold all her furniture and practically become a nomad. “I couldn't,” says Fay. “I need the—what's the word? Security.”

“What about Tony?” I ask.

“Tony is Tony. He means well. It just doesn't always come out right.”

“And Steven?”

“Steven is Steven.”

I sit on the edge of the bed in the gathering gloom. The only light in the room is from the spots above the minibar and the glowing LED of the alarm clock. My aunt tells me about these people I have heard of all my life, whose characters, like those from a novel, I am familiar with as archetypes: Arty, Sporty, Sneaky, Fighty, Saintly, Baby, and Dead—although the designations overlap. By the sound of it everyone is a bit fighty and more than one is dead. “Fay was my baby, Steve was my baby.” Out of all of them, Fay, I think, is the one who will tell me what I want to know.

“You know your mother was called Pauline before she changed it to Paula?” says my aunt.

“Yes, I know.”

Fay says this was because “the first thing she did when she got off the boat in England was to buy a pair of shoes, and the label in them said Paula, so that's what she called herself.” I laugh indulgently. There is nothing in the Story of How I Arrived on These Shores about this. Besides, my mother would never have named herself after a pair of shoes. She changed her name because she'd always thought “Pauline” was soppy.

Fay tells me my mother used to take her to the central library in Johannesburg when she was a little girl. She made her read
Anne of Green Gables
. “Me, too,” I say.

She tells me the story of Derek, an old boyfriend of my mother's who once visited the house and made a profound impression on the younger siblings. He owned a station wagon—no one could understand why my mother didn't marry him. She and Derek were going to a dance. When he came to the door, says my aunt, my mother stepped out in an exquisite navy dress with a white collar. Everyone gasped. And then, crossing the room, she caught the dress on a baby's wicker pram belonging to Fay and it ripped. Fay was seven; it was just after Christmas. My mother didn't shout, says Fay, which made her feel even worse. “I remember it so clearly. It was such a beautiful dress. I don't remember Derek at all. But I remember that dress. She looked so beautiful. I felt terrible when it ripped.”

Several times, we push up against the boundaries of what can and cannot be said, buffeting and retreating like a boat trying to dock in bad weather. When I say, tentatively, that I find it useful to write things down sometimes, I sense her bristle and withdraw.

I tell my aunt I need a few days to settle in, and we arrange to meet at the weekend. I will stay over at her house on Saturday night and we'll have Sunday to catch up. She asks what I'd like to eat and should she buy yogurts, “or yoggies, as your mother used to call them. I can just hear her saying it.” So can I. A chill passes through me. “Yogurt would be lovely,” I say.

Toward the end of the conversation, my aunt says, “I feel terrible, I never knew her mother's name.” I sometimes forget they had different mothers, or any mothers at all, so absent from my mother's narrative was her stepmother. Fay has barely mentioned Marjorie either.

“Her mother's name was Sarah,” I say.

“Sarah!” says my aunt. We are so desperate for signs. “I had a plant called Sarah once. I gave it to my sister Doreen to look after. She killed it, of course.”

Fay asks me what I'm doing the following day. “Oh,” I say vaguely, “this and that.”

•   •   •

THAT EVENING IN THE HOTEL
bar I take out my journal. It was given to me by my friend Merope as a leaving present, with an inscription on the flyleaf: “I am your South Africa book. Be nice and write clever thoughts in me.” If she hadn't given it to me, I'm not sure I'd be keeping much of a record. Despite my journalistic camouflage, I'm going about this whole thing while looking through my fingers, as if watching a scary scene in a horror movie. It's not that I want to
find out
what happened so much as to
have found out
,
in the same way, I think, that my mother didn't want to tell me so much as to
have already told
.

The bar is off to one side of the lobby, furnished in dark wood and with the TV tuned to an American sports channel. Lone businessmen sit, jackets off, ties loosened, craning up at the telly. I order a double vodka tonic, and feeling pleased with myself, record the day's events: the buying of the phone adaptor (“panic, panic over”); how much my lunch at Yo! Sushi cost; my miraculous walk along the highway. I note my aunt's determined “nothing surprises me” outlook and the strange, feverish tone of our conversation. I write joyfully of Joan's
joie de vivre
.

In a separate notebook I keep all the names, numbers, and addresses, the evolving to-do lists and impressions scribbled at angles, to be transcribed later. It is these notes, unthinkingly produced, that, looking back, strike me as the truer record of what happened.

•   •   •

GIVEN THE CHOICE,
I would rather see things written down first; you can control the flow of information just by looking up and don't have to do anything particular with your face. The thing I had concealed from my aunt is that I am not going to sleep late or wander around the neighborhood acclimatizing the following day. I am going to hire a car and driver from the front desk and go to the National Archives in Pretoria. Taking no chances—I don't imagine it's a popular route—I plan for the trip as if driving myself. I study the map and in the second notebook scrawl: “Hamilton Street, Arcadia, via Mears, Jeppe, Beatrix, right into Savage, right into Hamilton.” If all goes to plan, I'll photocopy the paperwork, take it back to the hotel, and, with a large drink in hand, read it at my leisure.

The next morning is overcast again. There is a women's health conference taking place in the hotel and you can't wait at the elevators or stand in line at the breakfast buffet without overhearing women wearing laminated badges loudly discussing chlamydia. Outside the foyer, security men in yellow vests mill redundantly around.

When the maroon BMW pulls up, I shake hands with the driver, who introduces himself as Paul, and say I will need him all day; after he drops me at the address in Pretoria, he will have three hours to kill before coming to collect me. While speaking, I monitor myself for signs of condescension, overcompensation, madame syndrome, visible race or class guilt, or any other tonal imperfections, while wondering if he is ripping me off. The rate is so high it is practically Western. Paul nods and we get into the car.

Pretoria, the capital, is not known for its charm; Johannesburg has the charm, the guile, and energy, although I have yet to see any of it. We pull off an arterial road into a leafy car park and Paul lets me out. He promises to be back at the arranged time.

I don't match the profile, I suppose. I am too young to be here in the middle of a weekday, a lone female arriving at the guard hut eccentrically on foot. The two men in the booth eye me suspiciously. I slide my passport across the counter. They will see it, I think. They will see I am bringing unruly emotions into what is, after all, a library environment and they will not let me in.

“Purpose of visit?” says the man.

“Family tree.”

•   •   •

THE ROUTINE IS REASSURINGLY FAMILIAR.
As at Colindale, I check my bag and jacket and go into the reading room with my pens in a plastic bag, as if for an exam. The smell hits me first: old paper, plastic book covers, more than one patron who has not showered recently enough. The comforting smell of every public library in the world.

The reading room is low-tech, a card-index system in one corner, a bank of photocopiers against the wall. The only decor is a Soviet-style poster of a woman raising her fist to the sky, under a slogan for the country's biggest trade union. The procedure seems to be to fill in a slip, then wait in your seat until your order is brought up from the vaults. Every now and then a woman with a gray bun wheels a trolley across the floor, unloads a pile of ledgers, and leaves again, whereupon elderly men in khaki shorts fly over from all corners of the reading room to raid what she's left, like beetles carrying off cubes of sugar.