‘William dahling, how lovely of you to come to collect me. Where’s the chauffeur to take my bags?’ She was pulling a poor arthritic-looking creature along behind her on a lead. ‘Pooch? Come along now and give William a kiss.’
I thought quickly. ‘The chaffeur didn’t turn up for work today,’ I answered, brushing both dry, powdered cheeks with my lips.
‘I know what you mean …’ said Aunt Lulu. ‘Good staff …’
The matron stiffened, outraged.
‘… are not easy to find.’
She flung her tatty fur over her shoulders, arched her neck and waited for me to proffer my elbow so that she could make a grand exit.
I escorted her to the car, where she turned and began to blow kisses to the other patients who had congregated to see her off. Some actually clapped as she stepped into the Bentley. ‘Tell the hotel staff to send my suitcases on, won’t you?’ she said to me in a loud voice. ‘And do tip the maid.’
Oh, the delight of digging into my pockets for a few dollars to push into the matron’s hands.
Showing signs of intermittent life, Pooch gave a growl and snap of his teeth and then, all energy exhausted, settled into Aunt Lulu’s arms when she picked him up.
I opened the door for Aunt Lulu and as she seated herself, all pretence fell away. ‘I’m being kicked out, William,’ she whispered, tears of humiliation in her eyes.
However, she revived enough of her savoir faire to shout out the window, as we drove from the kerb, Gloria Swanson’s line from Sunset Boulevard:
‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’
There was applause from the patients who apparently hadn’t thought Aunt Lulu was a danger. Gratified, she whispered, ‘One must always leave in the same manner as one came: as a star!’
And then she cradled the dog against her face, ‘Okay, let’s go to Lamarr, eh Pooch?’
When Aunt Lulu was a teenager, Wairangi realised she had an uncommon and intelligent beauty on her hands and, therefore, none of the young men around Gisborne was an appropriate suitor.
That discerning dowager grand-aunt came from a line of chiefs and must also have known that if she didn’t get Lulu out of town her daughter would fall pregnant to some lucky but undistinguished Maori lad. Wairangi kept Dad behind to look after the land, but Lulu she sent up to Auckland to attend a convent school.
This was during the Second World War, and therefore, with all those American servicemen around, Aunt Lulu found a new kind of boy following her as she made her way from the convent dormitory a few blocks along the Remuera streets to the school classrooms.
To be frank, Aunt Lulu did not find the attention discomforting. By this time she was a functioning voluptuary who found her virginal status tiresome and wished to quickly rid herself of it. She had also discovered she liked everything American, in particular American movies, and she took to channelling film sirens like Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth or Rhonda Fleming, all of whom had titian hair; it’s not a colour you see these days.
‘Americans are best,’ she would say. ‘They smell so divine. They have intelligence, but not too much, they’re extremely good in bed, and the best thing is that they love to get up very early and go and play golf in the mornings. A girl must always be left alone in the mornings to freshen up.’
She would show us how to drape oneself seductively on a couch, in calculated dishabille, desirable and ready to be ravished … again.
And she had made her own Hollywood dream come true when she married an American GI, Gardner Harrington.
In his photographs at least, Uncle Gardner was a spunk. He looked like one of those blond, muscular lifeguards on Malibu Beach, and had all those even, white, teeth. He was the Burt Lancaster of Aunt Lulu’s dreams, and he was as horny as.
He was eighteen when he was stationed in Auckland, and he met Aunt Lulu at one of those dances that New Zealand matrons liked to organise for ‘lonely GIs’, though family legend says that he first caught a glimpse of her as she was going to Mass on Sunday. He followed her into the church where the choir was singing ‘Ave Maria’ and after another look, he was a goner.
At the time, Aunt Lulu was sixteen going on twenty-six, a mature head on a young girl’s body, and fortunately Uncle Gardner’s desire for her was reciprocated. And one thing about Aunt Lulu, she was never patient and all her whims required instant gratification. She knew what she wanted: Gardner. Nothing could stop her from having him. They fell madly in love and lust — though you weren’t supposed to have sex until after you were married. Instead you necked or petted. Presumably Aunt Lulu either didn’t go the whole way or, alternatively, was incredibly lucky.
If we take the benign view that Aunt Lulu and Uncle Gardner were virgins, the consequence was that Aunt Lulu, seeking consummation, climbed over the walls of the convent school and eloped with him. This brought the wrath of the American military down on them both and there were huge efforts to have the marriage annulled. Wairangi wasn’t pleased either: an American as a son-in-law? She sent Dad up to Auckland to bring his sister back home. I understand that when Dad met Uncle Gardner, they had a huge fight in the middle of Queen Street. Dad went down to Uncle Gardner’s uppercut, but it was to her brother that Aunt Lulu went to offer solace.
‘I’ll come home with you, Monty,’ she wept. Yes, she was prepared to give her husband up because of her love for my father. I suspect that they’d always loved each other and, after all, they weren’t brother and sister at all but, rather cousins, so they could have got together — but let’s not go there, eh.
Nevertheless, Aunt Lulu did return to Gisborne with Dad and Gardner Harrington went back Stateside but — he didn’t want to get divorced. Despite his parents’ objections, he came back after the war to collect his wife.
‘What took you so long, Gardner?’ she asked, before she slapped him.
Thus did Uncle Gardner forsake the Land of Uncle Sam for New Zealand. He and Aunt Lulu must have been really hot for each other because they produced three children with glamorous Hollywood names — Viveca, Yolanda and then their precious son, Lamarr.
By that time, Dad had met Mum, married her, and had me and Kataraina. When I was born, it was only to be expected that Aunt Lulu would consider me her son too. But whereas Dad had taken to the Maori side and lived in a Maori world, Aunt Lulu, by virtue of her marriage to Uncle Gardner, existed in a spec-tac-ular world of her own.
To my boyhood eyes, Aunt Lulu was the most unlikely Maori you ever saw. She was tall, attractive, scandalised the aunties in Ruatoria by dyeing her red hair even redder, and she wore slingback high heels that went clickety click over their wooden floors.
And what made her world spectacular? Well, although at the time she married Gardner and swore that she was unaware ‘he had all that money’, it all came out in the end. He was actually Gardner Harrington III (and my Cousin Lamarr was Gardner Lamarr Harrington IV). No wonder the Harringtons were horrified when he married someone, well, dark.
Nevertheless, he was the heir to the family fortune. Minions of the Harrington empire were therefore dispatched to ‘Noo Zeelin’ (‘Where the hell is that?’) to tell Uncle Gardner that all was forgiven and he should bring his bride home. Aunt Lulu and the three kids were hauled off to meet the folks ‘in some dull place called Washington DC,’ she would tell us, airily. There, the Harrington rellies tried to parlay her suspect Maori blood into something more suitable: they liked the possible Spanish caravel link in her ancestry and began hinting to their social circle that Lulu’s pedigree was Castilian.