Free She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockes Page B

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.
    â€œShe 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.”
    â€œThey 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