Running in the Family (22 page)

Before my mother left for England in 1949 she went to a fortune-teller who predicted that while she would continue to see each of her children often for the rest of her life, she would never see them all together again. This turned out to be true. Gillian stayed in Ceylon with me, Christopher and Janet went to England. I went to England, Christopher went to Canada, Gillian came to England, Janet went to America, Gillian returned to Ceylon, Janet returned to England, I went to Canada. Magnetic fields would go crazy in the presence of more than three Ondaatjes. And my father. Always separate until he died, away from us. The north pole.

(i)
“Once he nearly killed us. Not you. But the three older children. He was driving the Ford and he was drunk and taking the corners with great swerves—and you know those up-country roads. We began by cheering but soon we were terrified. Yelling at him to stop. Finally on one corner he almost went off the cliff. Two wheels had gone over the edge and the car hung there caught on the axle. Below us was a terrific plunge down the mountainside. We were in the back seat and once we calmed down, we looked in the front seat and saw that Daddy was asleep. He had passed out. But to us he was asleep and that seemed much worse.
Much
too casual.

As he had been driving he was on the right hand side—the side which was about to tilt over, so we all scrambled to the left. But
if we climbed into the front seat and got out then he would have gone over by himself. We didn’t know what to do. We had passed some tea pluckers a few hundred yards back and the only hope was that they might be able to lift the car back onto the road. We decided the lightest one should go but Janet and Gillian got into a fight as to who was the lightest. They were both sensitive about their weight at the time. Finally Gillian went off and Janet and I tried to pull him towards the passenger seat.

When he wakened the car had already been lifted and moved to the centre of the road. He felt better, he said, started the car up and told us to hop in. But none of us would get into the car again.”

“I remember when Daddy lost his job. He had just been sacked and he was drinking. Mummy was in the front seat with him, you and I were in the back. And for the whole trip he kept saying ‘I’m ruined. I’ve ruined all of you. All of you.’ And he would weep. It was a terrible trip. And Mum kept comforting him and saying she would never leave him, she would never leave him. Do you remember that …?”

“When I left for England, god that was a terrible day for Mum. We were all at Kuttapitiya and she drove me down to Colombo. Left early in the morning. She had to move fast. He was drinking such a lot then and she couldn’t leave him for too long. So when we boarded the ship,
The Queen of Bermuda
, that was about the time he was waking up and she had to get back before he got
into trouble. She knew he had already begun his drinking as she said goodbye to me.”

“Remember all the pillows he had to sleep with? Remember how he used to make us massage his legs? Each of us had to do it for ten minutes.…”

“To us he was an utterly charming man, always gracious. When you spoke to him you knew you were speaking to the
real
Mervyn. He was always so open and loved those he visited. But none of us knew what he was like when he was drunk. So when your mother spoke of the reasons for the break-up it was a complete surprise. Oh I did see him drunk once and he was a bloody nuisance, but only once.

Anyway she told us things were rough. Their servant, Gopal, would not obey her and would continue to buy your father bottles. So we suggested the two of them go up to ‘Ferncliff’ in Nuwara Eliya. They stayed there a week but that didn’t work out and they returned to Kegalle. He had lost his job by then, so they were at home most of the time. Then your mother got typhoid. Para-typhoid, not the most serious kind, but she had it—and he wouldn’t believe her. She said he hit her to make her get out of bed. Somehow she convinced Gopal how serious it was, and while he always obeyed your father he went into town and phoned us. We drove her down to Colombo and put her in Spittel’s Nursing Home.

She never went back to him. When she was released she went and lived with Noel and Zillah at Horton Place.

Anyway, a few years later we decided to work on the lawn at ‘Ferncliff’ which was turning brown. So we arranged to have some turf delivered from the Golf Club. And when we started digging we found about thirty bottles of Rocklands Gin buried in that front lawn by your father.…”

“I don’t know when this happened or how old I was. I was lying on a bed. It was night. The room was being thrown around and they were shouting. Like giants.”

“After leaving him she worked at the Mount Lavinia Hotel and then the Grand Oriental Hotel, that’s called the Taprobane now. Then in the fifties she moved to England. She had a rough time during those early years in England, working at that boarding house in Lancaster Gate. She had one small room with just a gas ring. Noel’s daughter, Wendy, was boarded at a private school at the time and she was wonderful. Every weekend she’d tell all her Cheltenham friends “Now we must go and visit Aunt Doris,” and she’d drag these posh English school girls, about 6 or 7 of them, and they’d crowd into that small bed-sitter and cook crumpets over the gas ring.”

“I had some friends who played tennis. My best friends in London. And they were invited to Ceylon for a tournament. They were there for two weeks. When they came back to England I didn’t contact them. Never answered their calls. You see I thought they would have found out what a disgraceful family I had come from. Mummy had drummed this story into us about what we had all been through there. I had this image that the Ondaatjes were absolute pariahs. I was twenty-five years old then. When I went back five years later to Ceylon to see Gillian I was still nervous and was totally surprised that everyone remembered him and all of us with such delight and love.…”

“In the end he used to come to Colombo every two weeks to bring me eggs and fertilizer for my garden. He was subdued then, no longer the irrepressible Mervyn we used to know, very kind and quiet. He was happy just to sit here and listen to me gab away.… I never met his second wife, Maureen, until the day of his funeral.”

“You know what I remember best is how sad his face was. I would be doing something and suddenly look up and catch his face naked. And full of sorrow. I don’t know. Long after the divorce I wrote to him. I’d just been to my first dance and I complained about all the soppy songs the boys sang to us, especially one they played constantly, which went “Kiss me once and kiss me twice
and kiss me once again … it’s been a
long long
time,” and he wrote back saying he just wished he could kiss us all once again.

 … The sections you sent me made me very sad, remembering him and all those times. Of course I was always the serious one among us, with no sense of humour. I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare.”

“When I used to meet him years later he was always a fund of wonderful stories, never dirty, never mocked a woman. Anyway, one day I ran into him in the Fort and that night your mother, who was visiting Ceylon at the time, came to dinner. So, playing the devil’s advocate, I told her who I had seen that morning and I said,
you
should see him. I remember she was very silent and looked down at her empty plate and around the room, somewhat surprised, and said, ‘Why should I have to see him?’ And I don’t know why but I kept pushing it and then gradually she began to be interested. I think she almost gave in. I said I could easily reach him by phone, he could come over and join us. They were both in their sixties then, hadn’t seen each other even once since the divorce. For old time’s sake, Doris, I said, just to see each other. Then my wife thought I was being too cocky and made me change the subject and suggested we eat, that dinner was ready. But I know she was nearly persuaded to, I could tell that more than anything else. It was so close.…”

During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with “the mercy of distance” write the histories.