Everything That Matters
MY COUSIN PULLS up outside the hotel in an off-white truck. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, jumping down. “I never come to this part of town.” She is in khaki shorts and shirt and Timberland-type boots. She looks at my feet. “Are those the only shoes you have?”
We are going dog training, Victoria and I, en route to her house, where Fay, her mother, is waiting. My cousin runs the course and breeds and shows dogs with her husband, Tony, with whom she owns a successful veterinary practice. After her visit to England, she and I kept up a fitful correspondence through our teens and early twenties, friendly but fundamentally misaligned letters. All her news turned on rugged outdoor activities and animal husbandry; mine was bookish and indoors-based, and then glib and in the city. You could almost hear the wrinkle of dismay that each of our letters provoked in the other. Even when Victoria married and had children, it amused my mother to note that most of her niece’s communications favored the goings-on of the dogs and the horses. She thought her a fine, sensible girl. “I thoroughly approve of Victoria,” she said. There was no higher praise.
I look at my cousin as we drive through the northern suburbs on our way out of town. Her hair is shorter and darker than it was twelve years ago, and what I took then for shyness now manifests as a kind of no-nonsense economy. I think with panic about the present I have in my bag for her. Pink champagne is probably an even worse crime than white footwear.
“Is it fun being a vet?” I ask.
She is so stern and substantial, I wonder what of our history Victoria knows. I have never thought about this before—what, if anything, has been passed on by the six of my mother’s siblings who have children. After all these years of avoidance and doubt, it is hard to believe there are people in the world who might have the same hang-ups I do.
I have had glancing contact with only one other cousin: Mike’s son, Grant, for whom my mother had a soft spot. In the photos I have seen, he was the spitting image of his father, very South African–looking, with a wide face and bumpy nose—attractive and grinning. When I was thirteen, I had found a strange letter from him addressed to my mother. It was stuffed in a folder in the kitchen with all the supermarket coupons and clothing catalogues. In large schoolboy handwriting, my cousin detailed how hard he had been practicing his cricket to get provincial colors, that he was learning the guitar, and that he had passed a home-economics exam in which he cooked sago pudding with meringue topping and an egg custard. I couldn’t see why Grant had written to her, nor why she had kept it from me. Then, at the bottom of the letter: “Thank you Aunty Paula for sending me the Marlboro.”
I read this again and looked at the date; he was fifteen. My mother was buying cigarettes and sending them to my fifteen-year-old cousin, who was still at school. His mother had added a note at the bottom: “Paula you spoil that child, he was so excited to receive the cigs—no charges as it was 1kg. He has sold a few boxes to his friends.” If anyone had offered me a cigarette, she would have killed them and burned their body on the village green. If I had accepted and resold them at a profit, there would have been a playground massacre. It was like stumbling on evidence of a life prior to witness protection, where the rules were completely different. I put the letter back where I’d found it and didn’t mention it when my mother got home from work.
• • •
THE DOG PLACE is in a field about an hour outside of town. My cousin gets out of the car, throws a whistle around her neck, and calls to order a group of dog owners milling in the sun. She begins to put them through their paces. “You should stay up here,” she says, turning to me and indicating the short, freshly mown grass of the children’s play area. She gives me a mildly sarcastic look, then plunges down the hill after the dogs and their owners, forcing me to run with her as a matter of pride. The dogs yelp with delight as the owners thrash their way through the shimmering grassland.
It ends, thank God. We climb back to the top of the hill, where a small blond child runs over and throws her arms around my cousin. Her daughter is a cheerful eight-year-old who has been dropped off by another mother. I have watched Kirsty grow up in photos sent by my cousin, most of them taken at dog trials, with the little girl clutching a rosette for her winning dog or with her arms wrapped around the animal’s head. Now she takes a leash from the back of the truck and snaps it expertly onto a young black Labrador. She is every bit as capable as her mother. The three of us get in the truck and start the drive home.
We had a lot of photos of Fay’s three children in the house, two blond, one red-haired. My mother approved of redheaded children; it was an Anne of Green Gables thing, I think, and the fact that before her own hair darkened it had, she insisted, been on the red side of blond. In one of the photos, Fay’s children were dressed in matching outfits. In another, the blond boy was holding out a banana to feed a monkey in their garden, which struck me at the time as impossibly glamorous. Fay’s redhead was the sweetest-looking boy you ever saw, grinning in his school photo, and later, as a young man, standing haloed in sunlight. He grew up, got married, and had children, and when he was killed in a car crash when I was in my early teens, Fay rang my mother. I remember hovering in the hallway, alarmed by my mother’s unnaturally quiet voice and the firm, soothing urgency of her tone. It was the parental voodoo that gets done in the face of a genuine emergency. When she got off the phone, she told me the news and, looking at me across a distance of several million miles, said brokenly, “Fay’s baby is dead. She needed her mother.”
• • •
AFTER DRIVING FARTHER OUT, we stop at a house set back from the road, surrounded on all sides by open country. I walk up the path behind my cousin. On the porch, a woman in brick-red culottes, with short brown hair and a white shirt is sitting in a garden chair. My cousin greets her and disappears through the front door. My aunt stands up, visibly shaking, and takes two steps toward me. We hug and separate. A second passes as we rake each other’s face for the missing third party. “You don’t look like Paula,” she says. She is half my mother’s size, smaller, slighter, but otherwise similar. It is impossible to conflate her with the things I have read. We laugh nervously and go in.
My cousin is brisk and hospitable. She relieves me of the champagne and brings a tray of soft drinks into the lounge. Tony, her husband, is a large, attractive, affable man. He regards me with bemusement.
“So, your mom was Faith’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“And”—he looks at his wife—“you went to visit them in England?”
“Yes,” she says. “Twice.”
My cousin is apologetic. “I don’t have much to do with the family,” she says, and it sounds like a coded directive to bugger off and find whatever it is I’m looking for elsewhere. The last time she saw any of her mother’s siblings was when Doreen, our mothers’ sister, visited five or so years earlier. Her hair was unkempt and streaming and she kept trying to pick up the toddler, who screamed. “I didn’t like it,” says my cousin, frowning. “I didn’t like it at all.”
Tony asks politely where I live. I tell him I have a flat in north London. This provokes a look of almost aggressive indifference. Most London flats, I add, are so small that when you throw a party in them it’s like hanging out on a Tube train at rush hour. My cousin laughs—“It sounds awful”—and we are suddenly on a friendlier footing.
Being a vet in these parts is not, I gather, a question of prescribing antidepressants to toy dogs or nursing pampered cats through cancer scares, but more one of keeping working animals maintained. From the way my cousin and her husband talk about it, it’s a tough profession, more akin to farming. We go outside, and they give me a tour of the grounds. It is the first patch of earth I have seen that bears any resemblance to my mother’s descriptions of this country: blazing sun on red soil; khaki foliage waving behind a heat haze in the distance.
There is a peacock wandering around, and dog pens for the breeding program. The children skitter on the grass, fearless around the family’s animals, particularly the Great Dane, a huge, dopey-looking creature, jogging around the garden like a miniature horse. My cousin’s youngest is a little boy with almond-shaped eyes and long, fibrous lashes who comes up to the dog’s chin. “That child,” says my aunt, looking at her grandson in wonder. “That child.”
I have brought the blue-and-yellow Arsenal away strip for him, and he puts it on and runs around in the sunshine, squealing in delight. We spend the rest of the afternoon by the pool, watching the little girl do star jumps into the water.
As I leave, I pick her up and give her a hug. My cousin looks surprised. “She doesn’t normally let people do that,” she says. We regard each other with friendly amusement and, I think, a certain amount of respect. “You can take your pink wine from the fridge. We won’t drink it,” she says, but not unkindly. As she waves Fay and me off, I can guess what she’s thinking: that whatever is going on between her mother and me, it’s our business and she’s glad to be out of it. I can’t say I blame her.
• • •
MY AUNT’S DEMEANOR changes the second the car door slams. It is as if my cousin had been the adult, and in her absence, we become giddy as children. My aunt falls into a state of feverish reminiscence. “Your mom—” she says, and we’re off.
We are driving to my aunt’s neighborhood in the south of Johannesburg. It’s a place I haven’t heard of and can’t even pronounce because, like a lot of Afrikaans, when pronounced correctly it sounds as if while saying it you are suppressing a powerful urge to vomit. It is early evening, the light a deep, burned yellow and the road almost empty. While she drives, my aunt tells me a story from my mother’s first trip back here, in 1967. My mother went to the store to buy beer, and when she got back to Fay’s house, recounted how every car on the road had beeped its horn and waved at her. “I’d forgotten how friendly South Africans are compared to the English,” she said, to which her sister, looking out the window, replied drily, “It might have something to do with the six-pack you left on your roof.”
“She told me that story, too!” I say. In my family-starved state, the sense of shared interest comes on like a head rush.
The house is at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a quiet suburb made up mostly of bungalows. It is almost dark by the time we get there. My aunt presses a button and the electronic gates open and close behind us. She parks the car under a carport alongside the house and we walk up the path. Through the gloom, I see a giant bird feeder on the lawn.
Fay was characterized by my mother as the sensible one. She is the one who holds down a job and owns her own home. She has sensible children. She talks in a low, even, sensible voice and doesn’t get ruffled. Which isn’t to say she’ll be put upon. She is tenacious like all of them, and when she gets going on a grievance, she’s like a dog with a bone. I have the same sense of her as one might of a celebrity, long talked about and unnerving, finally, to meet. At the same time, I feel instinctively protective toward her. Unthinkingly, I have absorbed my mother’s position toward each of her siblings.
Fay shows me along a corridor to my room, where I dump my bags, and we return to the lounge. I sit on a sofa in front of what looks like my aunt’s version of the Shrine: endless framed photos of her children and grandchildren on a sideboard where a TV might be expected to stand. She disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a three-liter carton of white wine and two glasses.
There was a glaring omission in my mother’s paperwork: no letters from Fay. I don’t recall seeing a single one. There were plenty from her sister Doreen, several from her brother Steven, even a couple from her brother Tony, but none from her favorite sister. Now, after Fay hands me a full glass and settles on the sofa, she pulls out some keepsakes, and there’s a letter my mother sent in 1976. “The baby has all my faults,” I read, and I laugh. It’s a backhanded compliment: my mother thought her faults a great deal more valuable than most people’s virtues. Farther down in the letter she complains of being without family support: “I have no one to leave her with.” It was a refrain of my childhood, but I’m surprised to see it written here. There is no archness in the tone. Instead, there is something I never once heard in her: the ring of fresh vulnerability.
“She talked a lot about the wildlife, and weather,” I say. “And all the jokes you used to play on each other.”
My aunt starts giggling. “There was a maid called Flora.”
“Yes! I know about Flora!” I do not, as it turns out, know about Flora.
“She was mad,” says my aunt. “She’d climb that peach tree in the yard and sit up there knitting. Poor Tony at the bottom. Her husband had run off and left her.” There was another chapter to the Flora story that my mother failed to mention and which my aunt now relates. Flora’s insanity extended to waking the younger children in the middle of the night and ordering them out into the yard to “harvest coffee beans”—acorns she’d buried in the dirt that afternoon. “We went back into the kitchen and she brewed them up and tried to make us drink them,” says my aunt, “before Mom woke up and took us back to bed.” She laughs. “Totally mad!”
Attracting staff who weren’t mad was difficult, she says, what with there being no money and the tendency of her brothers to creep up behind them in the kitchen and drape a snake over their shoulders. Several already disturbed women had been dispatched, screaming, into the cornfields this way.
Fay digs around in the file of keepsakes and pulls out a photo to hand me. It’s of a teenage girl in a uniform, leaning against a wall and looking cross.
“My sister Doreen,” she says.
“What’s she wearing?”
“That was the uniform at the children’s home.”
“What?”
Fay blinks at me, surprised.
“Where we were put, afterward.”
I’m so taken aback I miss the cue. The conversation moves on.
My mother’s portraits of her siblings stand up well against Fay’s second opinion. Mike was the worst, with his practical jokes. One night, says my aunt, he burst into the girls’ room, woke them up, put them in their school clothes, and dragged them outside so they weren’t late for school. While they stood in the dark, catching their breath, he broke it to them that it was eleven p.m., led them back into the house, and gave them chocolate to say sorry. They all spent the night on the loo; it was a laxative.
Tony was a terror for different reasons, drinking and fighting and getting into trouble.
“My mother was fond of him,” I say.
Fay shakes her head and repeats what she said to me earlier. “He means well. It just doesn’t always come out right.”
Doreen and Fay are next to each other in age. They have been through phases of being close and phases of not speaking to each other. A few years earlier, when Doreen found herself between addresses, she moved into Fay’s spare room, where she lay around smoking and sulking and running up a huge phone bill until, after a blazing row, Fay asked her to leave. For a while, she lived back in Hillbrow, an inner-city area where my mother, too, had once lived. The neighborhood had changed since then. Doreen sent my mother a clipping from the local newspaper, illustrated with a photo taken during a shoot-out on her block in which a policeman crouched by a wall, gun raised, with arrows in red pen to indicate Doreen’s door. Soon after that, she moved to the coast to be near Jason, her only son. She and Fay had made up and occasionally spoke on the phone.
“My mum said she was terrific fun, but you had to keep an eye on her,” I say.
“Ha,” snorts my aunt. “That’s an understatement.” Her sister is in her late fifties, as Fay is. She had been a model in her twenties and fancied herself as a femme fatale. She flirted with everyone—men, women, teenagers, geriatrics. Mid-flirt, Doreen once encouraged a teetotaller called Joyce to drink an entire bottle of sweet sherry, until Joyce vomited so copiously she threw up her own dentures, and having no money to replace them, had to work her shift as a cashier at a movie theater toothless.
“Poor woman,” says Fay, and starts giggling. You were to lock up your spouse if Doreen came around.
My aunt sobers. “I sometimes wonder how much of Jimmy there is in her.”
And there it is; the taboo is broken. I don’t miss it this time.
“What—?”
“I’ve never talked about it.”
“What, never?”
“Never. Not once.” My aunt says this proudly. She is trying to impress me, I think, which is to say, to impress my mother.
“And Victoria . . . ?”
“Doesn’t know anything.”
There is a long pause. My aunt looks at me. There is only one possible thing to say in the circumstances. I reach for her glass. “Refill?”
• • •
THE REST OF WHAT HAPPENS that night has had to be pieced together from notes I made a full two days later, when I could grip a pen again. The conversation circles around possible entry points. My aunt says her memory of events is very sketchy. She has a complete blank where the trial should have been.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
The word she uses is “psychopath.” “He was a psychopath.” There are two memories on either side of the darkness. The first is of a knife at her throat; the second is of a scene from the children’s home afterward. Nothing in between.
It was her father holding the knife. The room was full of children. It was somebody’s birthday party, she can’t remember whose. Her father burst into the room, found his daughter, and while mayhem ensued, threw her against the wall and put a knife to her throat. He threatened to kill her if she said anything against him.
“After that, I don’t remember anything.”
I am too frightened and ashamed to tell her I have read the court papers. It feels like an obscenity—to know what she said on the witness stand when she herself can’t remember.
“I . . . do you remember any of the . . . ?”
My aunt’s face shuts down. “I don’t remember it at all.”
I look at my aunt and see the brave, articulate twelve-year-old who described incident after incident of abuse to the court and then fended off her own father’s questioning. Remembering on that occasion got her nowhere. She has every right to remember nothing.
• • •
MY MOTHER MUST have been devastated, I say, when the trial failed. I let my voice wobble, and alongside my aunt’s perfect calm it sounds self-indulgent. She shrugs. “Your mom tried. But he was cleverer.”
The only one of them he left alone was Doreen, says Fay. I’ve never heard this before.
“Yes,” she says. And then she says, “I think she was jealous.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
• • •
AT THE TIME I put this down to sibling warfare so vicious no insult is taboo. Later, I speak to a therapist, who tells me that molestation is often presented by the molester as a gift. In households that are violent it is usually the only affection on offer, and the child is made to believe it is a form, if not of love, then at least of selection. As we talk on, I find myself wondering where the eldest of my mother’s brothers were, why they didn’t do something, and then recant the thought guiltily. What could they do? They were children, too.
• • •
INSTEAD, I SAY, “It nearly killed my mother when she got news of Mike. It seemed so unfair.”
“What?”
“That he should die of a heart attack when he was so fit and healthy.”
Fay looks at me strangely. “Who told you that? Mike drank himself to death.”
Fay was fifteen when my mother left. I had never thought about her departure from the perspective of the other side. Her claims to have led a central role in the lives of these people didn’t square with their absence. Except that it did, I see now. They are people with whom you can’t be in a room because their pain is your own. “I was devastated when she left,” says Fay. “But I understood why.”
I say something tactless then: that my mother didn’t come back to visit for seven years because she “didn’t want to get sucked in.” This hangs in the air.
“I would never have left this country for personal reasons,” snaps my aunt. But she relents a minute later. There is a memory she has of her older sister from when they were living in De Deur, a town in the sticks to the south of Johannesburg. It’s where my mother caught the bus every day with Denise. Their house was in the middle of nowhere, down a track and surrounded by grassland. On my mother’s twenty-first birthday, the children clubbed together to buy her a present, a pair of pink silk pajamas. She was so delighted, says Fay, she stripped off then and there, and putting them on, walked clean out of the house, the children running behind her, screaming with delight.
My aunt smiles. “Everything that matters came from her.”
• • •
HERE IS MY AUNT’S second memory, fading in from the black. It is of their father. After the trial, he came to visit Fay and her sisters at the children’s home, as was his right. He had charmed the staff so thoroughly, she recalls, that they read his letters aloud to one another. Incredibly, Fay and her sisters were made to keep a photo of him by their beds.
Fay remembers so little, but she remembers this: her father walking toward her in the home, carrying a suitcase of clothes for her. She told him she didn’t want them. He persisted, and again she said no. In a temper he slammed down the suitcase and left. It was the last time she ever saw him.
• • •
WHEN I WAKE UP the next morning, it’s in a single bed beneath the window in my aunt’s spare room. I lie there for as long as I can and then, bent double, shuffle to the bathroom. I look down at the sink and at my own hands, which, through the prism of my hangover, look utterly foreign to me. Still bent double, I walk down the hall, past the photo display, and into the kitchen, where I look around in vain for something to heal me. The counters are fanatically orderly, everything put away in cupboards or Tupperware boxes. There is even a padlock on the washing machine, to stop the maid from using it.
Through the window I see my aunt pegging out washing. I step outside and feel the sun strike me like a skewer, inserted into my brain via the ear. The grass is as coarse as a doormat. I make it to the center of the lawn and, kneeing Fay’s dog away from my crotch, lie on the ground. My aunt pauses in her duties to peer down at me. The expression on her face makes the hair on my neck stand up: serene, detached, sympathetic to my mortal status in contrast to her godlike invincibility. One of my mother’s textbook looks. Of course. I put my head on the lawn and prepare to die.
“Aren’t you feeling rough?” I groan.
“No,” she says, as if to be hungover is the most bizarre outcome of a night of heavy drinking. Fay laughs. “I don’t feel a thing.”
• • •
IN ALL THOSE hours of talk, we had not talked of Marjorie. Of everything, it feels like the most taboo subject. Fay might understandably feel vestiges of loyalty to her. “Did your mother betray you?” is not a question I have the nerve or the heart to ask. She is the blank in the story. And yet she wasn’t always a villain. I think of her listing in my mother’s address book, under “Mum.”
I am too frozen on Sunday to have much of a reaction to what my aunt told me beyond a sense of relief—that we are on the other side of something and have both survived—and gratitude for her generosity. I am almost embarrassed by the lurid nature of the memories. It’s an inadequate response, but at some level all there can be is incredulity: who bursts into a kids’ party and, in front of everyone, threatens to kill his own daughter with a knife? I mean, who does that? All those exaggerated looks of my mother’s suddenly seem not theatrical but entirely proportionate.
That Sunday morning, I slowly recover and we have breakfast at the round dining-room table. My aunt is brisk and cheerful. “Sit,” she says, and brings out coffee and yogurt. When the phone rings, Fay picks up and, eyebrows shooting into her hairline, says, “Yes, a very long time. Yes, she is. Hold on.” She holds out the phone and says, “It’s my brother Tony.”
On the way back from Joan’s, I had asked the driver to take a detour to Tony’s last known address, a house way out east where no one answered the door. I had torn a page from my notebook and scribbled a note saying I was Paula’s daughter and he could catch me at Fay’s over the weekend, and shoved it through the door. He had moved out, but one of his sons still lived there. On the phone now my uncle sounds hesitant and a little stunned—both that I have managed to find him and, even more amazingly, that despite being the Most Chaotic Member of the Family, he has managed to call me back. The distance covered in this one act is so vast that if he had been patched through from Mars, the surprise on both sides couldn’t have been greater.
You’d think Tony’s reputation for going off the rails would be meaningless in the context. But he went for it in such cinematic style it was almost conventional, an adhering to type that everyone could get behind being dismayed about. From what Fay has told me, the family’s overriding image of Tony as a teenager is one of him completely drunk, driving a car across a cornfield, but my mother remembered him as a little boy she felt guilty about. When he traipsed after her and Mike, they whipped around and told him to bugger off home. “Shame, Tony,” she always said.
My uncle says the credits on his phone are low, but we can talk until they run out. “It’s strange to hear your voice,” I say. “My mum was very fond of you.”
“I didn’t think she noticed me,” says my uncle, gruffly.
“That’s not true. She spoke of you often. She kept all your letters.”
By all, I mean two. The first was dated October 1960. I found it in the secret drawer, after her death, on two bits of paper torn from an exercise book. “To dearest Pauline,” wrote the nineteen-year-old tearaway to his departing sister:
I want to take this last chance to wish you a pleasant journey and all the success of the future and I wish to thank you very clearly for all that you did and sacrificed for our sakes, whilst times were hard. Those are things of the past, but we will always remember and appreciate all that you did for us, the same way a child will come to its senses at some time, and start being thankful for all its mother has done. This has been a dream of yours for a long time and I’m so glad for your sake that it is actually coming true. We all hope you have a wonderful time. God bless you, Paul,
Tony.
The second arrived in the last year of my mother’s life. “I’ve had a letter from my brother Tony,” she said when I walked in the door. It was open on the kitchen table. I picked it up and turned it over. “Where does it start?”
“It just starts.” She giggled. “It’s very peculiar. Read it to me.”
Finding a suitably ridiculous voice, I began reading: “And God commanded the sun to rise and it sent out its searching rays . . .” I looked up.
“I told you,” said my mother.
I continued, “. . . and lo, the daylight revealed a pathetic conglomerate of rabble sheltering under a lone thorn tree.” My mother giggled again.
“Is that you, the pathetic conglomerate?”
“Who knows. It’s very peculiar. He seems to have found the Lord.”
I read on. “From the midst of them stood up a young maiden, tall and beautiful, she stretched and yawned, dusting herself off after a troublesome night. But nought”—I snorted—“but nought could daunt the courage of this young maiden. She turned smiling at our mother and said—” I paused.
“Go on.”
“And said, ‘We may be poor but we sure see life.’”
My mother grinned rather fixedly.
I continued: “Though life dealt you many challenges and injustices not once did I detect any malice or selfishness. You remind me of the Bible’s Ruth.”
Now she snorted, softly.
“My dearest sister,” I read. “Thank you for not deserting us all when we were little. You are—”
In alarm I scanned quickly down the letter.
“Go on.”
“You are an old iron horse, a strong tower to which we could run and hide. Be not afraid, my sister. We shall not die but at the sound of the last trumpet soon the dead in Christ will rise. Be vigorous and be courageous. ‘You are precious to me says the Lord, I have called you by name and you are mine.’ Do not underestimate the power of God or for a single moment think that he does not know or care. ‘I know,’ says the Lord, ‘I know.’ And we love you too. Tony.”
Standing in our atheists’ kitchen, I started to cry. My mother looked off into space. “Shame, Tony,” she said. “He always was full of nonsense.”
“I’m divorced from Liz, you know that?” says my uncle down the phone.
“I know.”
“She left me for a better man.”
Tony is now the oldest. I wonder if it is strange for him, but before we can talk any more, we are cut off as his phone credit expires.
“He’s so sweet,” I say to his sister.
“Sweet? He’s a devil. He put Liz through hell.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Oh, nineteen years ago.” I must look stunned, because she bursts out laughing. The house where I dropped off the note was four miles away.