Leaving Before the Rains Come (12 page)

So I remember only two things from that otherwise indistinct, headachingly nauseous visit to whatever Mews it was in London. The first is that Auntie Pammy—self-contained, gracious, and precise—seemed as apologetic about the tininess of her guest lavatory, to which I had to repair almost immediately to be sick, as I was about my accent. “No, no, no, you have a beautiful speaking voice,” she lied when I preapologized for whatever else might come out of my mouth. “Very musical.” My second appalling recollection is that I emitted a bark of horribly loud laughter when she told us that almost a decade earlier her son, Sir Robert Arthur Wilmot, Eighth Baronet of Chaddesden, had been killed in a hit-and-run accident moments after his divorce had become final. He had been barely thirty-five; his children were both under ten at the time.

“Bobo!” Mum said, blanching with embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” I hiccuped, covering my mouth.

But something about that awful story, told over tea in the quiet, cigarette-smoke-filled flat, while my head spluttered and sparkled with exquisite pain, had shocked me into an inappropriate hoot, not of mirth but of recognition. Until that moment, I had imagined my father’s English family as coddled and protected by their titles and money. They went to the first night at the Proms, they were on first-name basis with royalty, they swanked it up on champagne and strawberries on opening day at Wimbledon. They would live for decades in splendid comfort to become affable old geezers at the Army and Navy Club, or handbag-swinging dowagers at the counter at Harrods where they kept accounts.

I didn’t envy them necessarily. Yes, it was unlikely they had parasites, and I knew they didn’t have civil war, or much in the way of malaria and rabies, but they also didn’t have leopards stalking in the home paddocks, or nights under the southern sky scented with mopane woodsmoke from a campfire, or the thrilling terror of roaring through the lowveld clinging to the roof of an ancient Land Rover. But I assumed that as a trade-off to our adventures, they had comfort and security, and they had the certainty that they were protected and worth protecting.

However, on that warm summer London afternoon, in the revelation of Pammy’s prolonged mourning for her son, I saw that our English relatives were just as vulnerable and broken as we were. Except their tragedies and grief were magnified by the loneliness of the experience, by the shocking singularity of the accidents, by the almost religious belief that keeping one’s vowels short provided adequate protection against the world. We, at least, could see clearly the ways in which we might die—Mozambique spitting cobras in the pantry, an ambush on a lonely road south of the equator, bored drunken soldiers at a checkpoint. We knew too with a certainty born of long experience that luck was capricious and life was fleeting, no one was too special to avoid suffering. We could tell that bad things happened all the time, to everyone, regardless of who you thought you were. On the other hand, it seemed to me, our English relatives couldn’t see their own oblivion coming.

As the six Garrard sisters grew up and war loomed, the field days and garden fetes turned into weekends of entertaining cavalry officers. While suitable boyfriends courted the older sisters, the twins were left to run amok. The future actor David Niven lived nearby and was often asked to keep an eye on Boofy and Pammy. When he left for America, he wrote to them frequently, in the cheerful, deliberately careless style of P. G. Wodehouse. “Then came a lapse in activities while I had my tonsils jerked out by the local vet. He does the job for five dollars when sober and for nothing when tight. As a result of his drunken excavations I developed a neat little thing in hemorrhages and as near as a toucher passed away from loss of blood (or was it alcohol) before they could get me to a hospital and operate again.”
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But there was a cost to the casual boozing. Five of the six sisters seemed able to steer out of the incessant rounds of revelry and into marriage, grand weddings in Calcutta, where the Garrards kept shops to bejewel the Indian maharajas and English civil servants, and at Welton Place. Something swamped in Boofy, though, and while everyone around her was joking about intoxication, she was a sopping mess on the floor of the bathroom, draped helplessly over the banisters, flopped unfixed across her dressing table before dinner. It was a relief when she too could be married off. “I suppose they just had to keep her upright long enough to get her down the aisle,” Dad said of his mother. “And then she was someone else’s problem.”

Boofy married a man who looked so like her own father—the very blue eyes, the sharp nose, the high cheekbones, the country estate manners—that it’s easy to see how, in a thick gin haze, she might have mistaken the life she was stepping out of for the life she was stepping into. They were soldiers of a type too, both the man who bred her and the man who claimed her. Her father—nicknamed “the Major”—had taken time off from the crown jeweler business to fight in the First World War; her husband was a career naval officer. Both men were used to giving orders, and they were accustomed to having those orders instantly obeyed. “Absolutely fatal for my mother,” Dad said. “She was completely allergic to rules of any sort.”

Meantime, with all her daughters married off, Mugger did not slip quietly under the pond water. Instead, her sense of noblesse oblige went into overdrive. As if in a grand conservative attempt to preempt Clement Attlee’s radical Labour government of the late 1940s, with its slew of nationalization and social engineering, and having achieved the heights of philanthropy herself—she was mentioned by the secretary of war for her “devoted war service as Commandant of the Auxiliary Hospital in Daventry” and awarded the Order of St. John of Jerusalem for her work in Northamptonshire—she turned her not inconsiderable energy into cultivating good works in her three eldest grandchildren. Per her instruction, they were each to “adopt” a needy village child. Accordingly, after family lunch on Sundays, the three cousins had to troop down to the village to fetch up their little wards and return with them to play games on the lawn at Welton Place. Things went so far that the girls even undertook to have one of the children christened, putting themselves in the role of godmothers.

“Perhaps it was overcompensation,” I suggested.

“For what?” Dad asked.

“Well, wasn’t your grandmother also the alleged Armenian?” I asked.

“Oh, supposedly,” Dad said. “But actually, I think I saw somewhere she was descended from Hottentots. There’s that very nice book my cousin Annie wrote.
The Family Behind the Firm
. Have you read it?
Very
good book.”

“Not Hottentots,” Mum said. “
HUGUENOTS
.”

“You should read that book,” Dad persisted.

So I read Cousin Annie’s book and decided that while it was informative and interesting, it was tactful to the point of misleading. For example, she wrote that my grandmother Boofy “always suffered from bad health and . . . died quite young.”

“Exactly,” Dad said. “Half the people who read that book will know what it means, and the other half don’t need to know.”

“Well, I think it’s best to write things the way they are,” I said. “I mean, the plain truth.”

Dad regretfully offered me a cigarette. “I suppose the Hottentot blood had to come out
somewhere
,” he said.

But I think of how unhappy Boofy must have been, so soddenly drunk all day that she manifested to my father and his younger brother only as a kind of washed-out absence, a vaporous essence of anger during breakfast, a specter of backwashed misery in her bedroom by lunch, surging and china throwing behind closed doors by dinner. And I think of how a family’s shame at her fatal addiction ultimately euphemized her into nothing, hushed her into an early death of which I know very little except that it was poorly attended and painful. Throat cancer is what finally got her, the flagons of gin she drank every day accompanied by a perpetual ribbon of cigarettes. “Terrible waste of a life,” Dad says. “No life at all, really.”

From the start, Boofy could not even be trusted to hold her own children—a Norland nurse was hired for that—and although she made an effort to attend sports day and school plays, Boofy was always so mortifyingly drunk, her children wished her gone. And gone she is, negated, vanished, her epitaph—all that can truly be known of her—summed up in three words. She Drank Gin.

Nothing survives of Boofy’s thoughts and creativity; no letters, no watercolors, no needlepoint cushions. Although she’s heartbreakingly there in the early photos at Welton Place—indistinguishable from Auntie Pammy—startlingly innocent looking, smug in her privilege, playing bicycle polo, draped over the church wall in a white flapper dress, winged as a fairy. The twins weren’t beautiful—a little jowly, with jumbles of bad teeth and thick ankles—but they had good figures, full lips, and thick hair, and they appear blithe and expensive, as if they expected to make an impression without ever having to make an effort.

There’s one more photo of Boofy laughing a little breathlessly behind a veil on the arm of her father, being led down the aisle toward her future husband, and then she is gone from family photos, washed out of the frame and out of life. I think of her marriage, the shock of coldness in the navy family to which she had been relegated. And I imagine her pregnancies, an alcohol-soaked vessel for her two sons, whom she had no way of nurturing.

The Norland nurse, Nu, who was hired to take on the care and keeping of Boofy’s sons, was the most solid presence in my father’s early life. “To be one up on the Joneses—the royal Joneses that is—get a Norland nanny,” wrote Nadeane Walker from London for the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
in a 1967 article. “A genuine Norland nurse, brown-hatted, white-gloved, and impeccably accented, is a treasure to be prized above pearls.” Norland nurses, the article goes on, are not allowed to spank their charges. “But she must be firm not only with the children, but with the Madame in any disputes over authority.”

The principal of the Norland Institute, Miss L. Keymer, deplored any mention of the royal and aristocratic employers who snapped up most of her graduates. “Why harp on that?” she asked. “What gives me more pleasure than anything is sending a good nurse where she is badly needed, such as to a motherless family.” Which described my father’s family with unintended precision to a T.

“Nu was very dutiful,” Dad remembers. “Very professional. Very fond of her cat, Blackie.” Caped, with a hat and white gloves, she took the boys on improving daily walks through the countryside and taught them to recognize birds, birdsongs, and wild plants. She worked on their elocution. She read to them before lights-out at seven. And when my father left for boarding school, Nu wrote him a letter every Sunday, and every Sunday he replied. Decades later when she eventually died, an early letter from Dad was found among Nu’s possessions. It is a crayoned imaginary self-portrait, a little boy standing next to a giraffe below which my father, improbably prescient and perhaps wishing himself away from the domestic ache of his family life, has written, “Dear Nu. I am going to Africa to see a giraffe. Yours sincerely, Timothy Fuller.”

It was the emotional iciness of England my father could not stand, not the actual climate with its famously drenching, low skies. As an added attraction to the supposed Dark Continent, no one from either side of his family had ever been to Africa, except his grandfather, in a naval ship, to Nigeria. “But I didn’t know about him until much later. I think he won some sort of medal for blowing up a bunch of revolutionaries,” Dad said. “Anyway, it didn’t make much of an impression on me. No, I left England like my arse was on fire. I suppose I always wanted to see a giraffe, don’t ask me why. But still, ending up in Africa was a bit of an accident. I just wanted to get the hell out of Britain. It was the pity I couldn’t bear. After the house broke up, I mean, everyone felt sorry for us.”

Boofy moved into a grim little cottage in Sussex. “Good address, horrible dark little hovel.” And although my father and his brother were by then in their early teens and at boarding school, and therefore long beyond the need of a nanny, Boofy took the Norland nurse with her. “I suppose someone paid for Nu to stay on and look after my mother,” Dad told me recently. “Well, it was terrible, but my mother couldn’t cope on her own. She wasn’t raised for that. Self-sufficiency, I mean. She was raised to be coddled and spoiled by some rich bloke, and when that fell through, well, she had nothing to prop her up.”