I
The Father
We were not taken to the funeral but were left with an aunt to play in the garden.
Afterward, what I remembered were the stones in the rock garden, the spiky cactus, and my shiny new shoes with the bar across the instep. I remembered the brilliant sunlight in my sister Mary’s blond, bouncing curls as we tried to balance on the stones, holding hands.
We were seven and nine years old, and someone had no doubt decided that a funeral would be too sad for us. No one spoke of our father. It was as if he had disappeared into the bright Highveld light. I feared he might come back to us in ghostly form to see if our mother was taking good care of us, the way the uncle does in Jane Eyre.
In a way, our father was already a ghost, even when he was alive. He left for work early in the morning, before breakfast. If we happened to be up, we would catch a glimpse of him going down the driveway in the dawn light, in his shiny silver car with the silver fairy on the bonnet. Mostly he came back after we were fast asleep, though we were sometimes woken when he came up the driveway, the lights of the car shining through the nursery window and flickering mysteriously on the ceiling. Those lights always frightened me. I believed they were made by a witch, come to carry me away.
The morning he died, I ran to the end of the corridor and into our parents’ big bedroom. The thick curtains were drawn on the sunlight. Before the nurse abruptly and rudely thrust me out of the room, I was able to glimpse—or I thought I had glimpsed—Father, lying there gray and unmoving. Later, however, I was not sure if I had really witnessed this at all. The still body, the silver oxygen cylinder glinting in a beam of light by the bed, the nurse’s cap trembling atop her head—I was not sure if I had seen it or made it all up, or if Mary had been the one to witness it, and I’d simply written down her account at some point and made it my own. My sister and I often shared the same imaginary world.
I do clearly remember Mother announcing Father’s death, leaning against the nursery doorframe in her soft maroon gown, her face like a white mask without any trace of makeup, her black curls wet. She did not take us into her arms to comfort us or even put her hand on our heads or shoulders. All she said, in a severe voice that sounded strangely cross, was, “Your father is dead,” before she turned to go, the slap of her slippers against her heels sounding almost like an accusation. Though he seemed old to us, much older than our mother and our aunts, he wasn’t yet 60. Had we done something to make Father die? Was it because we had written in crayon on the green walls of the nursery, which had resulted in an unexpected spanking? Or had we witnessed something that we shouldn’t have? Once, while going downstairs with the nanny for breakfast, we had heard angry voices coming from our parents’ bedroom. My mother popped her head out, her eyes red, her curls unruly, and asked in a tremulous voice for a glass of soda water. I had the impression that our father was upbraiding her for something bad she had done, but was this really so?
The morning Father died, I stood in front of the mirror, my thick hair in two neat braids, looking at myself and trying to produce a tear. My sister said, “You don’t have to cry.” And so, I did not.
II
The Mother
After our father’s death, there was no wake, no food, no wailing or gnashing of teeth, no talk of the dead. There were no tears, no recriminations. We heard no testimonials from admirers or criticism from detractors. There was only silence. The cause of his death remained a mystery to us. Coronary thrombosis—what did that mean? It sounded like an exotic flower. Later we learned that he had had meningitis as a boy, and that the illness had weakened his heart.
Now our mother was free to make him up as she wished, or so it seemed to us, her girls. When someone asked about our father, she said quite different things, depending on who was doing the asking. To the well-to-do society people in Johannesburg, she said that her husband’s people were wealthy German timber barons from Port Elizabeth, in the Cape, that they had owned polo ponies, which our father had once ridden with great skill. To the less affluent, the tradespeople, or the numerous hangers-on who congregated around her after Father died, she told a more inspiring story. She said that he was a poor but brilliant boy, one of five children who had to walk barefoot across the burning veld to go to school, that he came up to Johannesburg and started his own timber business there, carrying the wood himself on his bare back onto the lorries, sweating in the heat.
To all she said he was brilliant with figures and could compute sums in his head faster than a calculator. “He worked too hard,” she would sigh.
“The 11 years I was married to your father were the happiest in my life,” she would say to us.
We didn’t believe her, not only because what she said seemed so contradictory, but also because of the way she said it. When our mother spoke of our father, she adopted a special tone of voice, theatrical gestures, a lofty expression that would cross her face even before she began to speak. Our mother had only to begin telling a tale in her special voice, with a little tremolo rising from her throat, her head tilted slightly and her gaze lifted to the sky, for us to raise our eyebrows and whisper, “Here she goes again.”
What we wondered, of course, was whether our mother, while in her late 20s, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with her soft curves and sweet smile, had loved our father, a timber baron nearing 50, balding, and portly in his double-breasted suits and stodgy ties. Or was it the diamonds that she loved, the jewels he gave her, which she would take out of her secret drawer and allow us to try on—the pendant with the three blue whites or the big yellow diamond or the earrings in the shape of stars? Or was it the trips around the world on luxury liners?
Our mother and father had traveled extensively, once leaving us behind for 18 months when we were just five and seven. Yes, we had the nanny and all the servants to look after us, but 18 months! It was of these voyages that our mother spoke most easily. She recited the names of places where they had been, a litany of exotic destinations most of her South African listeners would never have heard of, let alone visited. “Sacramento, Carmel, San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Banff, Lake Louise, Stratford-on-Avon,” she said, as if intoning a Latin prayer.
Now her travels were over, and there was nothing for Mother to do in the big house and the big garden. The servants did everything. They polished the silver and the floors. They shined the shoes. They vacuumed, dusted, scrubbed the bathrooms, washed the clothes, did the dishes. The women cooked, and the men served at table in white starched suits that rustled as they moved, blue or red sashes covering their chests. They found the objects our mother was always losing: her telephone book, her ashtray, her handbag, her priceless rings, her shoes.
In the mornings, Mother went shopping. She bought clothes, hundreds of pairs of small delicate shoes, dresses for herself, her sisters, and us. She bought kid gloves that went up to the elbow and leghorn hats with flowers. She sipped tea at 11, drank a beer at lunch, and slept all afternoon in the heat of the day. At four, there was tea with her sisters, before evening cocktails were brought onto the veranda.
When it was suggested that she remarry, she said, “What do I want with some old boy?”
It was as if her life was finished. “You are all I possess,” she would say to us children.
She took me into her bed to sleep at her side and offered up her long dry nipple for comfort. One afternoon, our younger aunt, the more outspoken of the two, came striding into the bedroom and pulled open the curtains, letting in the bright light.
My mother said, “Look at my baby!” looking fondly down at me as I lay sucking on her breast.
“Some baby!” the aunt said. I was seven or eight, perhaps even nine, old enough to feel the little shock that spread quickly across my face into shame.
III
The Stranger
The running of the big house proved to be too much for our mother. And so, we moved. We left the nine-hole golf course, the tennis court, the sweeping green lawn, the rose garden, and the swimming pool. We left the two fluffy Airedales that lived in a kennel in the garden, the Steinway grand, on which we were learning to play Mozart duets, the grandfather clock, the purple curtains with the purple pelmets, and the kist in the hall with the bowl of stiff proteas. We said goodbye to the servants, who had taken care of us with such good humor, carrying us on their backs and telling us stories about the Tokolosh, the evil spirit who lived under one’s bed.
We moved to a boarding house, into a furnished room with one double bed for the three of us. We ate our meals in a communal dining room where we were joined by an old lady in a brown feathered hat who always slipped a piece of fruit into her large handbag before retiring to her room for the night.
There was never any real explanation as to why we had to move into these close quarters. Was our mother afraid of penury? Or did she just prefer to be close to us and back in more familiar circumstances?
The big house and the vast garden, our father, the servants, the cars, the tea parties under the oak tree—these seemed now to belong to an imaginary place. They were, like our mother’s tales of our father, an illusion.
The boarding house was surrounded by a wild garden populated by several feral cats. I would go looking for them after school, and one day, I finally caught one, a little black kitten that lay trembling under a tree. I picked it up easily and stroked its mangy fur. I hid the kitten at the back of the closet with a saucer of milk. Mother, of course, when I was off at school, found the kitten and had it put down, but by then I had contracted ringworm, with sores all over my skin and scalp. A hairdresser named Monsieur André, who sounded French but was actually German and had a tattoo on his arm, had to come to the house and cut off my long, thick hair so that Mother could apply the muti to cure the sores.
When I asked Monsieur André to pick me up so that I could see myself in the bathroom mirror, I encountered a ghastly image: a stranger with large dark eyes and a fat white face, blond hair sticking up like bristles all over her head. I screamed in horror and ran to bed, shouting, “Too ugly! Too ugly!” I buried myself under the sheets and refused to come out for the rest of that day.
IV
The Mother
When I turned 10 and Mary was 12, the headmistress at the Anglican school we attended in Johannesburg summoned us and Mother to her book-lined study. She urged Mother to allow us to become boarders. “It would enable them to be more independent,” the headmistress advised.
Mother was firmly against the idea. She kept saying, “You are the only thing I have in the world!” as she clasped us to her breast. “Oh! Mummy!” we said, embarrassed, and though we did not protest too loudly, we were eager to be allowed to go: we acutely felt the burdens of our home life, and the evenings with Mother often left us sad, lonely, and afraid of the dark.
Soon after that conference at school, our mother seemed to turn into another person, someone as strange as the creature I had seen in the mirror after Monsieur André had cut my hair. The change would take place every day after six o’clock, when it started to grow dark, and so it was that we increasingly associated the twilight with these frightening transformations. Her mouth would dip at the corners, and her speech would become slurred. We had, by then, moved into an apartment, with one servant who sometimes had to put Mother to bed, after she’d drop from a dining-room chair. Once she fell asleep while reading, her cigarette burning down between her fingers and leaving a dark stain on her dress. She would speak to us angrily and say odd things. I will never forget one uncomfortable visit with our younger aunt. As we were piling into the back of the silver Jaguar that Mother had recently bought, our aunt said, “You shouldn’t drive the car with the children when you are in this condition.”
“What condition does Mother have?” we asked the servant after he had carried Mother to her bedroom. “Is it the Tokolosh?”
Our servant, a tall, thin Zulu man, sighed and nodded his head. Perhaps the Tokolosh had emerged from under our mother’s bed and entered the body of that loving woman, with the gentle hands and generous heart, and taken her away to some far-off place. If it could happen to her, Mary and I thought, could it not happen to us, as well?
V
The Handsome Soldier
Very soon after, Mother sent us off to boarding school. I was in the junior school, housed in an ugly modern building at the top of a hill. Mary was lodged in the Dutch gabled house at the end of an alley of oaks, in a structure that had once belonged to the high commissioner Sir George Farrar.
The school seemed like a safe place, girls and teachers all together, the days structured by rules and regulations. And yet, lying in my bed in the long dark dormitory, I wept. I missed my mother, but above all, I missed my sister. I had never gone to sleep without her beside me. How would I ever sleep alone? In the mysterious shadows, I thought, unknown dangers surely lurked. Now in the bed next to me was a strange girl who, I became aware, was weeping loudly, too. “What’s the matter? Do you miss your sister?” I asked with sympathy.
The girl sniffed and blew her nose and said no, she didn’t miss her sister or her brother or even her mother. It was her father whom she missed. There was a picture of him in a silver frame beside her bed, and I could make him out in the pale moonlight: a very young, handsome man in a military uniform, bedecked with medals.
“He died in the war,” she said, “before I was born. They say he was missing in action.”
“What’s missing in action?” I asked.
The girl explained that because her father’s body had never been found, he had been presumed dead.
“So he might be alive, wandering around somewhere in the world,” I said. I sniffed and blew my nose and said I, too, had rarely seen my father and that I wasn’t even sure if I had seen his dead body, if that made any sense, but he, too, was presumed dead. We were now both weeping, for those men we had never known.
The girl said her name was Pippa and that she had moved to South Africa from England. “And now, my mother has married a horrid, old, fat man with a mustache, and she has two new babies, a boy and a girl, who cry all the time.” Then Pippa cried some more.
I said, dramatizing a little for effect, “I think my Mummy sometimes goes mad, in the evening time.”
“Mad? In what way?”
I told my new friend about Mother’s evening transformations.
“Perhaps she just likes the bottle a little too much,” Pippa suggested.
“Oh no! I never see her drink.” But of course, that wasn’t true. Just before I had become a boarder, I even saw Mother taking a pill before dinner and washing it down with a tall glass of gin.
VI
The Principessa
On Sunday afternoons, our mother came to chapel. She was always dressed up in her triple string of pearls, her organdy dress, her high heels, her elbow-length gloves, and her leghorn hat, its flowers trembling gently when she sang the hymns loudly and off key. All the girls, and even some of the other mothers, all of them dressed more sensibly, stared and whispered and sometimes snickered, and Mary and I looked out the stained-glass window as we sang in the choir, pretending not to know this overdressed lady in pearls.
After chapel, Mother was always accosted by our Italian teacher, a short, plump woman who wore tight corsets and tight clothes and whose white hair rose above her forehead like an open fan. In class she would close the windows and pull down the shutters and give us the latest gossip about the other teachers. She told us once that Mrs. Willis, the thin gray science teacher, was the lesbian lover of Ms. Carmichael, who taught English literature and made us copy out the whole of “The Waste Land” while she lurched up and down the aisles in her crepe-soled shoes, her hands folded in prayer on her chest.
We girls were to call our Italian teacher Principessa, since she maintained that she had once married a member of the princely Colonna family in Italy, though what had happened to her husband was not made clear. The headmistress said that this so-called Principessa had no right to the title, given that she had only married a younger son. The Principessa said that she had been tortured during the war, subjected to abuse so severe, she would have told her captors whatever she knew, had she known anything at all. She told us stories about her childhood spent at a convent school, where the nuns punished the girls by forcing them to kneel in a corner until they fainted. She also instructed us, as if to distinguish her own empathy from the cruelty of those nuns, to let her know when we were having our periods.
After Sunday chapel, the Principessa and our mother would walk slowly together, arm in arm, going down the oak-lined driveway to Mother’s silver Jaguar. The Principessa, we gathered, was asking our mother to donate to her various “charities.” We presumed that Mother would always oblige, given that Mary and I, who were not very good at Italian, began routinely receiving As.
By the time I was 15 and Mary had matriculated, the headmistress had fired the Principessa. That’s when Mother sent us to Florence for a summer, where the Principessa had established what she called a finishing school on the Via de’ Guicciardini. It was a place where pupils would learn the arts necessary to attract someone who could keep them in the style they had become accustomed to. Someone like our father.
VII
Strange Swellings
We arrived in Florence half-dead after an endless flight across all of Africa, and a bumpy ride along the edge of the Arno River. When we got to the Principessa’s apartment on the Via de’ Guicciardini, we found ourselves in a dark entrance hall with a sloping red marble floor and chipped gold leaf on the consoles. We were asked to sign and hand over the travelers’ checks we had brought with us to pay for our holiday. We barely had time to drop off our luggage before the Principessa escorted us to a concert at the Pitti Palace, where we sat in the moonlit courtyard, our heads drooping from exhaustion, while a chamber orchestra played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
That summer, we spent lazy mornings on our own, lying around in our twin beds, dunking brioche in our caffe lattes, and reading books from the Principessa’s library. Our hostess would appear at lunch, serving us Florentine wedding soup and wine poured from large straw-covered vats. All the while, she exhorted us to speak frankly of our desires. “No repression here!” she said, and we looked at each other and giggled.
I remembered how one of us had once asked Mother a question about sexual relations. She had replied with a dreamy pronouncement that sex was the most pleasurable thing she had experienced in her life, and that Father, overcome by a moment of wild desire, had once made love to her in the back of a taxi. She related this last bit in a matter-of-fact tone. I recall wincing, as Mary surely did, too, imagining our respectable father, in his Sulka shirt and his bespoke Savile Row suit, behaving in that way.
After lunch, the Principessa would take us to her private club, where we stretched out by a pool, half asleep in our bikinis. The Principessa would sit in a deck chair, her short legs dangling, as she commented on the anatomy of the young men strolling by. “See how they swell in the sunshine of your youthful beauty,” she would say.
We stared and wondered what was responsible for this transformation. Was this the Tokolosh in another guise?
VIII
The Count
Shortly after our summer in Italy, the Principessa sent over an Italian count, who happened to be a painter, to stay with Mother.
“He’s a perfect gentleman and such good company, and he can copy anything, anything!” the Principessa wrote to Mother. The Count, whom we assumed to be a relative of the Principessa’s, arrived from Rimini soon after. He was a small, handsome man, not much taller than Mother, who was five foot four. He had perfect features and delicate hands and feet and held himself very erect as he walked with small mincing steps, swaying his hips slightly. He was always impeccably dressed, his hair brushed neatly back from his high forehead, his skin a motley pink, his soft-soled shoes polished to a high shine.
He would sit, silver-haired and silent, in the guest-room armchair, smoking Dunhill cigarettes, or drift through the apartment quietly, apologetically, inspecting Mother’s precious china, paging through her few books, and studying the paintings of the sea she had inherited from an uncle. It was almost as if he wasn’t there. He would appear suddenly in various places. There he was, on the small, shaded terrace that overlooked the garden of dahlias, strelizias, and royal palms. Next he’d pop up beside the garden pond, where he seemed to be contemplating the goldfish. He came punctually for meals, eating well, saying little—his English was not very good—and in the evenings, he drank several glasses of red wine with our mother. He never offered to pay for anything. “Count No Account,” Mother called him, though he occasionally hinted at an illustrious childhood spent in Paris.
Eventually he set up his easel on the terrace. He copied any painting Mother liked, from books or photographs or even postcards, works by Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence and George Romney’s portrait of Lady Hamilton. He was obviously skilled and worked quickly and efficiently.
One afternoon over tea, he stared across the table at Mary and me and murmured, “Che belle ragazze!” and offered to paint both of us.
“What a good idea,” Mother said. “Whose portrait will you do first?”
“Well, Mary is the elder and she has such lovely English coloring: such bright pink cheeks, blue eyes, and blond curls,” the Count said. (We translated his Italian for mother.)
“I don’t want my portrait painted,” Mary protested, giving the count a dark look.
“Of course you do!” Mother insisted.
“I don’t like sitting still and having someone stare at me. It makes me very anxious. I won’t do it,” Mary protested.
Mother, who had had a little sherry with her tea, gave her a kick under the table and told her not to be so rude and to go to her room.
“Will you go first?” Mary later asked me. “Perhaps then he’ll forget all about me.” She had already enrolled in medical school in the Cape and would soon be leaving home.
IX
Stories
That evening, Mary said that she had woken one night to find the Count standing over her bed and pleasuring himself.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“How could I?” she replied. “It was terrifying,”
I suggested that she put the chest of drawers against the door, so that it could not happen again. Mary said she had a better idea: she was going to ask the pharmacist for something to take the flush out of her cheeks.
When Mother insisted on the portraits, Mary begged me again to go first.
And so, I sat out in the garden, as I was asked to do, under the royal palm, staring at the Count, or the sky, or the flowers, turning my head and moving my hands and feet, making up stories in my head, restless and uncomfortable. Somehow the Count managed to paint me, despite all my fidgeting, quickly and efficiently and without any fuss.
“What a good likeness!” Mother exclaimed when the portrait was finished. “You have captured Charlotte exactly! There’s something about her expression that is extremely lifelike. Now you must do Mary so I can hang their paintings side by side over the mantelpiece in the hall.”
X
Mary
When it was Mary’s turn to sit under the palm tree, the Count had considerably more trouble. “You must sit still,” he kept telling her. “I can’t get it right when you keep jumping up every few minutes and running off.”
“You keep changing the pose,” Mary protested.
The Count paid her compliments, hinted that he found her irresistible. And when he failed to make progress, the sittings continued inside.
First he made her stand in a blue dress and lean back against the mirror in the hall, with her hand placed on her chin as in the famous Ingres painting. Then he painted her sitting down in the lounge as she gazed out the window with a look of longing. Then he gave her a big bunch of flowers to hold, but she couldn’t keep her hands from trembling.
“You don’t understand how difficult you are to paint,” the Count said. “It’s almost as if you aren’t here. There is something about you I cannot
capture.”
“What nonsense!” Mary shouted. “I’m just a girl like all the others.”
When the portraits were eventually finished and were hung on either side of the mantelpiece, so that Mary and I seemed to stare across at each other complicitly, Mary in a blue dress and me in pink, Mother looked at them and said, “They are charming, charming. They seem to be talking to one another with their gaze.”
“You’ve made us look almost identical,” I said, or perhaps it was Mary who said it.
“That was the only way I could paint Mary,” the Count said, looking sad.
XI
A Proposal
Then the Count asked Mother to marry him. He had been with us almost three months.
“What do you think I should do?” Mother asked us. We were sitting out on the terrace and having tea and scones. For once, the Count had gone out for the afternoon.
“Do you think he’s shopping for a ring?” I said, looking over at Mary.
“Not bloody likely,” Mother said.
I said, “Well, he seems very gifted. He knows a lot about art. He could show you around the great galleries in Europe.”
Mother said, “I can hire a guide to do that. What would I want with some old boy at this stage of the game?”
“He’s not much older than you, is he? He always looks very clean and neat.”
“Oh,” Mother said, “if he touched my privates, the moths would fly out.”
“Mummy, really!” we said, embarrassed as we always were when Mother spoke so bluntly.
In the end, the Count was sent away. Mother and I accompanied him to the airport and watched his plane take off, a flash of silver in the bright blue sky.
“What a relief!” Mother said. “I thought we would never get rid of the man. Whenever I walked into a room, he was always there!”
“But now you will be alone, Mummy,” I said, which was indeed to be the case.
XII
The Father
Years later, when I was now the one who was alone—Mary was dead at the age of 39, killed in a car accident, and I was divorced from an unfaithful husband—I found a pink leather suitcase in my basement, among a collection of items I had inherited from my father. Inside were the letters our father had sent us when he and our mother went on their long trip to Europe, Canada, and America, back in the late ’40s. They were intelligent, evocative, and beautifully written, detailing the voyage at sea (he lingered, in one letter, on the albatross that had followed the ship), the places where my parents subsequently stayed (including facts about populations and descriptions of landscapes), and the people they had encountered. All these letters were addressed to, “My darling little girls.”
Yet I had no memory of them. It’s possible the nanny had read them to us, but I didn’t remember. At any rate, they were not letters a girl of five or even seven could understand. But reading them so many years later, after a long life of heartache and joy, I heard my father’s voice for the first time, loud and clear. I was moved by the solid, careful sentences, by the facts recounted in a believable and loving voice, by his desire to teach, to share, to reach across great distances, all of it written before death struck so suddenly. Here he now was, coming back to his darling little girls—although Mary was gone, I knew she could feel him, too.
