London–Buckinghamshire–London
THE SHIFT IS INSTANTANEOUS. It is as if, the day after her death, a van pulls up outside my house and men start unloading luggage onto the pavement.
“Oi,” I say. “Hang on a sec. None of that’s mine.”
“Sorry, love,” says the man. “Someone has to have it.”
What can I say? “OK. Bring it in.”
My dad and I had never talked about it. He could hardly get a word in with my mother around, although in the last year of her life a subtle change had started to occur. Whereas usually when I rang home she gave my dad five minutes on the line before swooping in and taking over, as she got sicker and less able to follow the conversation the balance had tilted. My dad’s portion of the phone call got longer and longer, while my mother’s dwindled. I would tell him jokes and stories from my day that I hadn’t told her. He would laugh, and I would know, in the background, she was hearing it and registering the change. I knew how awful this was, but I kept on doing it. I was punishing her for leaving me.
As a result, my dad and I have never really talked about anything serious, certainly not about her history. She was the gatekeeper and she kept the gates shut.
• • •
I DON’T HAVE THE HEFT for this. I can’t get lids off jars. I get drunk on half a shandy. My mother, who could get the lid off anything and metabolized alcohol like water, would be appalled by this admission, it being worse in her view to admit to a weakness than to have one in the first place. “Go and ask the man,” she would say when I was little, trying to get me to overcome my Englishness. I didn’t want to ask the man. I would rather do without than ask the man. How I became a journalist, when all you do all day is ask the man, I have no idea. And yet despite being a journalist, I have never so much as fed her name into a search engine. All I have, after her death, are the stories she told and the stories she threatened to tell but didn’t.
It had delighted my mother when I went into journalism. “I’d have been proud, of course, if you’d been a maths genius,” she said airily, “but it wouldn’t have been my preference.” She bored the neighbors rigid with details of my life. She once got into a fight with someone in the village who suggested, mildly, that I was an odd choice to send to Israel to interview Ariel Sharon—twenty-five years old and bereft of any knowledge, let alone specialism in Middle Eastern politics. (In fact, so wholly unthreatening a proposition was I that Sharon, showing me around his farm, picked an orange from his orchard and, after peeling it, fed a piece of it into my mouth like a baby bird, while I tried to arrange a response around the giant size of my freak-out. Such are the dividends of knowing nothing.)
“She seemed an odd choice,” said the man in the village, and my mother snapped, “I’d like to see you do better.” In the newsagent’s, she furtively moved stock so that copies of the Guardian, where I worked, covered copies of the Telegraph, where I didn’t.
Lurid threats were made as to what, precisely, would befall my employers if anything befell me.
The year before she died I won an award, and my mother considered her legacy: “Some people write novels or paint beautiful paintings,” she sighed. “I created you.”
Now I sit in my flat in London and turn on my computer. “I will be professional about this,” I think. I will do all the things you do in the early stages of a story: flip between websites, jump up for snacks, write words at crazy angles in your notebook, hoping they’ll never come before a judge, not least because you’ve drawn a little house with a chimney and smoke coming out of it in the middle of the page confident that if it looks like action it will generate results, or at least the momentum to achieve them down the line. It will be a matter of lists and itineraries. I am suddenly cheerful. Some cups of tea, some common sense, and who knows what harm might be undone?
I had asked my dad, groping for a language—any language—in which to talk about these things we’d never talked about, if she had said much to him.
“There was something about a trial?” I said, as we sat in the kitchen not long after the funeral. We were drinking red wine from the box on the counter. Apart from cocktails, which were different, I wouldn’t drink much when I was at home. I drank plenty in town, but at home I instinctively avoided it. I might have a glass of champagne at Christmas, but I wouldn’t join my parents in wine at the table. “It’s good you don’t drink too much,” said my mother occasionally. “Not like your mother.”
“That’s not true,” I’d say angrily. I wouldn’t take her up on it, she who never asked for help nor confessed to a need. It was too late, by then, to change my idea of her. Now it’s just me and my dad, drinking a glass of red wine like ordinary people.
“Yes,” he said. “She mentioned it, a long time ago.” And he repeated the quote she had given me, which the prosecutor had said of her stepmother: “If that woman isn’t careful, I’ll have her up as an accessory.” There had been some kind of abuse—violence and worse—and that’s all he knew, too. Like a veteran returning from the First World War, my mother had maintained, in her marriage as in her life, a hard line on revisiting the past. My dad had respected that. I said something like, “Obviously her dad was a weirdo.” My dad said something like, “That would be putting it mildly.” We reached the limit of what either of us was able to say.
The day after her death I had rung her sister Fay in Johannesburg, a conversation I remember less for its content than for the fact I made the call on my cell phone. Peak hour, long distance, on a cell. “You must be mad!” my mother would have said. I had been calling my friends all day, getting two seconds into the conversation and then losing it. “Did you know I was crying all the way through that phone call?” my friend Merope said later, although I hadn’t heard her through my own crying. Later, much later, my friend Pooly said, “After I spoke to you I had to go home from work.” My friend Dave picked up the call in a bar: “Hold on, hold on, I’m going outside,” he said. I told him the news. Dave had come up to see us a few weeks before, when my mum could barely open her eyes. Now he said, “I’m standing on a traffic island in the middle of the street and there are tears just streaming down my face.”
Unlike these calls, neither my aunt nor I cried, and Fay didn’t try to console me. We didn’t know each other, after all, although I had the sense we were striving to live up to the same steely ideal. “Dying just isn’t the sort of thing my mother would do,” I said glibly, and Fay laughed.
“No, it isn’t.” My aunt told me a bit about her life, her grown-up children and grandchildren, her routine. Like all my mother’s siblings, she wasn’t married and hadn’t been for a long time. Every morning, she told me, she got up at the crack of dawn to go out and feed the birds in her garden.
“That’s so funny,” I said. “My mum does that, too.”
“Your mother had a lot of time for Fay,” said my dad in the kitchen that evening.
“I’d like to go there,” I said, “to South Africa, to see them.” It had only been a week and already—with no siblings, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no one I had common cause with except for my dad—I was tired of my face being the only reminder. He said that sounded like a good idea.
“I offered to go,” said my dad. “But Mum always said no.”
• • •
THE SOUTH AFRICAN national archive has a searchable database, broken down into seven geographical regions. Search terms return on a single line with a date, shelf reference, and archive locator, indicating the whereabouts of the paperwork. Civil trials, criminal trials, land disputes, naturalizations, and probate going back to the nineteenth century all seem to be held on the system, on which I defy anyone to spend five minutes and fail, guiltily, to have the response I did: say what you like about the British Empire, they knew how to keep records.
Her maiden name had, at one time, been relatively common in those parts and so pages of unrelated data come up—old wills and estate disputes, applications for citizenship, bail hearings—before I recognize the name of one of my aunts. Below it is the name of another aunt, and then a third. It is only a record of their divorces, but they are such hypothetical figures to me that, even though by now I have spoken to Fay on the phone and seen letters from the others, their names in the archive strike me as the first decisive proof—official proof—that they actually exist.
A few pages on, and there he is: my grandfather, unmistakable with his unusual middle name, Mauritz, the Dutch version of Maurice. There is a single line of description—Criminal case. Regina vs. James Mauritz DeKiewit—and a date two years before my mother emigrated. A trial had taken place. Something terrible had happened. We weren’t all caught in a hideous misunderstanding. I stare at it for a long time before printing it out.
Then, for good measure, I run the name through the other regional databases. To my surprise, my grandfather’s name returns a second match, in a remote depository in Pietermaritzburg, three hundred miles south of Johannesburg. I ring my dad.
“Do you know anything about a murder?” I say.
“No,” he says innocently. “What murder?” (Like a human GPS, my dad, after thirty years of marriage to my mum, is used to mapping a vague context onto thoughts that start in the middle and work outward.)
“Before all the other stuff.”
I tell him what I’ve found: my grandfather’s name alongside two others in a murder trial.
“Ma never mentioned it.” He is thoughtful. “Maybe it’s not him.”
“I will send away for the papers,” I say.
“Be careful,” says my dad.
“What?” I scoff. “It’s hardly dangerous. Everyone in this story is dead.”
“No,” he says. “I mean, be careful how much of this you want to know.”
• • •
I THINK ABOUT IT afterward, what I am doing and why. The stronger reaction, I think, would be to walk away, to honor the firewall my mother put between her past and my present and to carry on with my life. But I can’t. In those days and weeks after her death it is all I can think about. While she was alive, it was none of my business. Now, unless I make it my business, it will follow her into oblivion. By way of explanation, I return in my mind to something that happened in high school. When I was fifteen or so, a brief craze for Ouija boards swept the school, and every lunchtime for a month girls gathered around homemade boards to commune with the dead. The dead had three fixed qualities: omniscience, omnipresence, and they were all men, which is weird. You’d think it’d be like calling home from college, when your dad picks up the phone and has three seconds of secure airtime before your mother, scattering furniture, touches down to snatch the receiver from his hand.
Most of the spirits we called up introduced themselves as Bert or Arthur and, in reply to the question “Where are you?”—or rather, “WHERE ARE YOU?” bellowed at the penny as if it were an antique listening device—spelled out A-Y-L-E-S-B-U-R-Y C-E-M-E-T-E-R-Y, whereupon someone in the circle burst into tears and said it was her grandfather.
Two significant things happened during these sessions. The first has nothing to do with my larger point, but is worth repeating for the benefit of skeptics. To test the authenticity of the exercise, those in the circle asked the spirits things only they knew about themselves: pets’ names, middle names, and then Lizzy Shute suggested bra sizes. She was a big girl, as were two of the others around the board that day, and there was much clapping and screaming from the crowd as the penny divined their CC and D cups. I will never forget the agonizing journey undertaken by Bert or Arthur to describe my 28AA. My point is this: for those who doubt the reality of the afterlife, don’t you think, if I had been pushing that penny, I might at least have given myself a B cup?
There were strict protocols surrounding Ouija. At the end of each session, you had to politely ask, “Please can we leave now?” and wait for the spirit to release you. There were rumors of people who hadn’t broken the connection cleanly and, like a phone bill that keeps running, had accrued a vast and unhealthy debt to the Other Side, causing them to throw themselves from buildings and become teenage mothers. The craze eventually ended when the deputy head, looking grimmer than anyone had ever seen him—grimmer than when Michelle Leyland fell out of the coach on the way back from Germany, grimmer than when Joanna Fretwell told Mrs. Stone, the PE teacher, to fuck off—visited every classroom in turn and said words I forget but which impressed us deeply at the time. We were nice girls. We stopped.
And here is my second point: twelve years later, in the wake of my mother’s death, it occurs to me that despite everyone’s best efforts, a connection has failed to be severed. Politely it has been asked, “Please may we leave now?” and the request has been denied. I won’t have it any longer. The time for politeness has passed.
• • •
FROM A LIST of researchers provided by the Pietermaritzburg archive, I choose a man with the most English-sounding name and e-mail to ask if he’ll photocopy papers for me. He replies promptly with details of a Barclay’s bank account in Worthing. Typical Brit, I think. Keeping a toehold in England in case he ever has to flee.
Two weeks later, a large buff envelope drops onto the mat before work. I put it on the table, and that evening, when I get home, I stand by the window and tear it open. The top page is divided into two halves: English on the left-hand side, Afrikaans on the right. Under the heading “Preparatory Examinations” there are three names, one of which is my grandfather’s. Then: “charged with the offense of MURDER.” The capitalization strikes me as histrionic. The case was prosecuted by a William Scott Bigby on behalf of His Majesty the King, and the three men, “hereinafter called the Accused,” were “now or lately prisoners in the jail at Ladysmith.”
I glance down the page. In the bottom left-hand corner is something I recognize instantly. Apart from the poem, the only other thing of her father’s that my mother kept was his copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He had signed it, I remembered, on the flyleaf. I go to the bookcase, pull it out, and, returning to the window, hold it up against the charge sheet. Under a heading of previous convictions, there is a single entry for housebreaking and theft, with a twelve-month suspended sentence. “I admit the previous conviction,” the murderer has written, signing his name underneath. The signatures are the same.
I read on. The murder was of an old man and took place in the course of a robbery. The three accomplices had identified the remoteness of the farm and the vulnerability of the victim and struck without mercy. It was, said the judge, unforgivably brutal. He had considered applying the death penalty, then relented and gave each of the men ten years with hard labor.
There follows a thick sheaf of paperwork, most of it depositions by witnesses. The three men had been spotted at the railway station and by various laborers on the road up to the farm. When they were caught, they were in possession of a firearm and the old man’s money. There were no details of how much of that decade-long jail term was served, but my grandfather must have been released early. I look at the date of sentencing. My mother was born six years later.
• • •
I HAVE NO IDEA if my mother knew about the murder. I have a dim recollection of her telling me her father had been to jail once, but for what I don’t know—although I have an even dimmer memory of her saying he was fired from various jobs and locations for “interfering” with children he had access to.
In any case, any doubts I had about going to South Africa are resolved by this paperwork. It is one thing to have a researcher photocopy and send me pretrial notes from the murder; the murder is impersonal. But the idea of someone providing a similar service for the second trial—of potentially reading my mother’s testimony in the action she brought against her father before I do—is unthinkable. I will have to go to Pretoria and read whatever is in the archives for myself.
• • •
JOURNEYS LIKE THESE should take months of planning—trips to travel agents, consultations of maps and with shamans—but ten minutes on the Internet and it’s done: flights, hotel, even an e-mail to a man who used to work with my mother at the law firm in Johannesburg. He writes back instantly to say he remembers her well and would be delighted to have lunch when I come in the new year. I feel vaguely embarrassed; after all these years, is this all there is to it?
I ring the South African consulate to ask about visas, and they suggest something that hasn’t occurred to me: that if my mother’s paperwork is in order, I can apply for dual citizenship. I have a visceral reaction, followed by a second, guiltier one. I put the phone down and ring my friend Pooly. “They offered me a passport,” I say.
She bursts out laughing. “And?”
“I know it’s a new era and all, but—”
“What?”
“Ugh. ‘South African passport holder.’ Makes me feel physically sick.”
• • •
AT THE WEEKENDS I go home to Buckinghamshire, out on the Friday-night train and back again on Sunday. It is a journey I’ve made hundreds of times. Now it turns into a cliché—woman looks through train window at familiar landscape made alien by sad thoughts about death. My memory of those months from July to September is reduced almost entirely to being on the train every weekend, watching the bleached walls of the council estate go from ash gray in the sun to pewter in the rain, and the derelict lots, with their mountains of scrap metal, burnish and blacken. The new Wembley Stadium is being built in the distance and gets higher each week. London bleeds into the suburbs and then the greenbelt: the spire at Harrow, the allotments, the back end of the private school, the pub garden. My favorite part of the journey comes forty minutes in, when the train emerges from tree-covered escarpments into a clearing with views across the valley. It looks like the opening scene from a Jane Austen adaptation. My spirits soar. I am two stops from home.
Before my mother died I would round the corner and see her head in the window, and she, eagle-eyed, waiting, would wave. The window looks blank now. Friday night passes somehow and then, on Saturday, while the weather holds, my dad and I go on long walks. We go along the canal for the first time since I was a child. We go up the hill behind Chequers, and climb over the fence to the summit. There are sheep up there, and we wonder to whom they belong. You can see right down into the prime minister’s residence. We joke about snipers. We go across the fields by the air force base, yellow stubble underfoot, dry hay in the air, and across the cricket field behind the station. We don’t talk much, just walk and stop at the pub for lunch or a drink.
We go all the way along the ridge to the beacon at Ivinghoe. The weather is on the turn by then and it is blustery enough to hold out your arms and lean into the wind. One weekend, we go the steep way up the hill behind the house where we scattered her ashes. On a clear day you can see across the Thames Valley from here, all the way to County Hall.
One Sunday, my father and I drive over to Henley to take his parents out for lunch. It is the first time we’ve seen them since my mother’s death, and although they are kind, they don’t mention her, either her death or the fact of her ever having lived. I think how she would have loved this, confirmation of what she had been saying for the best part of thirty years, about the English generally and her in-laws in particular: “My family are weird, God knows, but this lot are weirder.”
During the week, I walk to work instead of taking the bus. It is better to be moving; sitting still risks opening the door to reflection. I retreat to the most ordinary of memories: standing in line for the park-and-ride in Oxford, waiting for the bus, boarding and sitting in it. That’s the entire memory. My mother is in a blue three-quarter-length coat, a brown cashmere scarf my father’s brother gave her for Christmas, and Ecco shoes, in which she has put neon-green laces. I don’t know why I remembered it, beyond that I must have been happy, anticipating the day we would spend together, looking at colleges before I filled out my university application forms.
There is another, more complicated image I keep looping. Six months earlier, my mother had come up to London to help me buy a sofa. It was one of those early-spring days of freak heat wave, and London was smoldering. There were roadworks everywhere. My mother had worn a coat too warm for the day, a padded green jacket with a brooch in the shape of a fox on the collar. I told myself she had merely failed to look at the forecast, although she wasn’t eating enough then to stay warm. All morning we walked up and down the Tottenham Court Road, getting nowhere. Heal’s was too expensive. Everything in Furniture Village was dark and heavy, with a cheap finish. There was nothing in Habitat.
By mid-afternoon, we were exhausted and my mother was keen to get back. She was late for the train, and with half the Underground shut for track maintenance, we waited in the heat outside Edgware Road Station for the replacement bus service to Marylebone. We should have taken a taxi. I wish we had. I thought the satisfaction of doing it the hard way would outweigh the discomfort, but on the bus halfway there I saw I’d miscalculated. As we shuddered and lurched down the Marylebone Road, the air boiling around us, I saw something like panic cross my mother’s face, followed by regret for letting the side down. We got to the station so late that, after leaving me at the barrier, she had literally to sprint the length of the platform to catch the departing train. I watched her run with a sudden, leaden awareness that everything—the heat, the panic, the retreating back in a jacket too warm for the day—was something I would remember, when remembering became necessary. It was the last of the ordinary days.
• • •
ONE FRIDAY EVENING, I don’t take the train. I stay in London and go to the launch of my godfather’s art show, where an old friend of my mother’s hands me an envelope. It is photos of her he found and thought I might like to have, from an early holiday they took in Portugal or Spain. I’ve heard about these holidays. On one, my mother and godfather read Portnoy’s Complaint on the beach and both cried. On another, her long hair bleached blond by the sun, men followed her through the streets of Lisbon, clicking their fingers and propositioning her. This was “before Portugal opened up,” she would say grandly, and how much it annoyed my godfather had delighted her.
“I’m not doing anything,” she had said innocently when he hissed at her to stop.
I have never seen these photos before, although I’ve seen one of her from a few years earlier, just before she left South Africa, when she was a bridesmaid at her friend Denise’s wedding. She had looked slightly spinsterish then, with a terrible 1950s hairdo and unflattering bridesmaid’s garb. In these she is modern, sleek, with an almost catlike expression. There is a startling shot of her standing in a black ankle-length negligée on a vine-strewn terrace. The negligée is transparent and she isn’t wearing anything underneath. I have a surge of primness; for God’s sake, mother, put some clothes on. I wonder if she is having a breakdown. I study her face. She looks coy, as she always did in photos, but pleased with herself, serene. In another photo, she stands on the beach in a jaunty orange tunic, feet firmly planted in the sand, bag swinging, my godfather standing beside her in a pair of swimming trunks. I have a dizzying sense of the largeness of the life led before I came along.
One rainy autumn day, I take the train to a town an hour outside London. My mother’s cousin Gloria and her husband, Cyrille, are in England, visiting their daughter and son-in-law. It was Gloria who sent my mother the painting and the teacup, the little items from her mother’s estate, and it was Gloria’s mother, Kathy, who spent all those years trying to track my mother down. Gloria grew up with the legend of her disappeared cousin, and when she catches sight of me in the station car park, her eyes fill with tears. “Oh, my heart could just break.”
Gloria is small and ferociously family-oriented. Years earlier, she and Cyrille came to stay with us for a few weeks. I remember them as kind, generous people—the personification of the good side of the family. Gloria remembers that trip primarily for my mother’s short temper. My mother was very fond of Gloria; she was a link to her own mother, which didn’t stop her shouting at her cousin for taking too long to get ready and then laughing at the old-ladyish rain hood she put on.
“She had such a sharp tongue!” says Gloria, over tea in her daughter’s house. “Just like my mother.” At seventy, Gloria is still reeling from some of the sharper things her mother said to her over the years.
Gloria does not have a sharp tongue. She is infinitely kind. She is involved in a church group. I see her do a brave thing now, which is, knowing my mother’s feelings about religion and correctly intuiting mine, to say, “I know you don’t want to hear this, luvvie, but Jesus does love you.”
Gloria is the memory of that side of the family, and as we settle in for the afternoon, she tells me about it. I have never heard any of this and am fascinated. The first Doubell anyone can remember, says Gloria, is Bebe, said to have fled from France to England after killing a man in a boxing match, and from there on to Africa, sometime in the early nineteenth century. Several generations later, his descendants boiled down to eight siblings: Daniel, Samuel, Benjamin, Francis, Johanna, Anna, Kathleen—Gloria’s mother—and the youngest, my grandmother, Sarah Salmiena Magdalena Doubell. She gave birth to my mother in Kathy’s house, attended by Dr. Boulle, the railway physician, and his midwife, Sister Cave. I burst into laughter. “Boulle and Cave?” I say.
Gloria laughs. “Yes.”
“They should have had a magic act.”
Gloria was delivered by the same duo, in the same bed, in the back bedroom of the house she grew up in. “Oh, my mother loved your grandmother,” she says. “Sarah was the baby of the family. It broke my mother’s heart when she died.”
Gloria remembers clearly the first time she met my mother. It was at the airport in Durban. My mother had flown down there from Johannesburg at the tail end of her trip in 1977. She would be meeting members of her mother’s family for the first time. When she spotted Gloria across the concourse, she had to sit down on her suitcase abruptly; her legs buckled under her.
“When I think of what happened . . .” says Gloria, tearfully. “She had a terrible life.”
“But I don’t think she did, Gloria!” I say in astonishment. I’ve never had to defend my mother’s happiness before. It is strange to hear a rival view of her. “I think she knew how to be happy.” It is also strange to be talking like this, around forbidden subjects and in my mother’s absence. I wonder if she’d be angry.
Gloria urges me to come and visit them in Durban when I arrive in January, and I say that I will. She gives me food for the train. On the way back, I look out the window and think of the pride with which she related the family history. I think of her unquestioning concern and generosity toward me. And I think of her mother, Kathy, who my own mother admired so much. Whatever else happened, I think, the baby who became my mother had, at least, been born into love.
“All her life my mother asked,” Gloria had said before I left, “all her life she asked, ‘Where’s Pauline? What happened to Pauline? I wonder where Pauline is now?’”