THE JAZZ SINGER.

I have a handwritten family tree of uncertain provenance, according to which my father's mother's family, the Whitburns, splits into two branches around 1670. One branch, descended from the elder son, stayed in Cornwall: they were landowners and worked as accountants and agents for the tin mines. The other branch--my branch, descended from the younger son, Deggery--went to sea. My great-great-great-grandfather, a sea captain born in 1811, had three sons. The eldest died of the plague in Glasgow in 1886; the third, the captain of the S.S. Mexicano, was lost in 1877, with all of his crew, on a voyage from the West Indies. But the second son, fortunately for me and mine, survived longer than his brothers: he sailed to India on the Tiger to work on the railways and lived to retire to Cornwall. His son William, my great-grandfather, hated England and ran away to sea when he was fourteen.

William Whitburn ended up, like his father, in India, became an engineer, and married Gladys Hughes, whose family had been living on the subcontinent for several generations and had become, as people then put it, Anglo-Banglo. Those of mixed blood were generally scorned by English and Indians alike, but somehow Gladys's mother--dark as a Bengali, definitely more Banglo than Anglo in appearance--slipped through the social net and married an Englishman, and her color, diluted past suspicion in her offspring, was not discussed. Her skin passed out of the family, but not so her contour: the shape and consistency of a trifle, short, large-bosomed, and tub-hipped, she provided the prototype for two generations of Whitburn women--a shape maintained, despite the considerable counterforces of hunting, tennis, riding, gardening, and training dogs, by the ingestion of astounding subcontinental quantities of curry and rice and sticky sweets and equally astounding English quantities of alcohol.

William Whitburn was a big man, six feet two or three, with bulky features and mottled skin that seemed pressed out of coarse clay with thick thumbs. He looked crude and male and took advantage of the fact that many women found him attractive. Gladys Hughes was just five feet, but she exercised over her husband as much control as was feasible and pleasant. The Whitburns moved around India, following his work--the building of bridges and roads. They had, in those days, four children: my grandmother Berenice, known throughout her life as Toddles, born in 1906; Robert, 1908; Lucette, 1910; and Edgar, 1912. In 1918, all four children were packed off to boarding school in England, and the senior Whitburns moved a thousand miles across the country, from Calcutta, on the east coast, where they'd met, to Bombay, all the way west, on the Arabian Sea.

Early in 1923, Gladys, at the mortifying age of thirty-six, became pregnant again. Her condition was the result, William told people, of A.B.C.--absolute bloody carelessness--and Gladys tried her best to get rid of it. She and William rode a motorcycle over bumpy roads. She drank things. Nothing worked, however, and the child, Diana Geraldine, was born on October 5th and christened in Bombay Cathedral. My grandmother Toddles, who was seventeen at the time, commented, upon receiving the news, "How disgusting." It was, in fact, rather disgusting, since Diana was born with dysentery.

Diana, my great-aunt, grew up to be a cabaret singer, stage name Gery Scott. She worked all over the world until, owing to will, flair, and stupid mistakes, she fetched up in her late fifties in Australia. If it hadn't been for the will, she might have stayed in India and married, like her sisters. If it hadn't been for the stupid mistakes, she might have played out her career in London: singing in night clubs after the war until the big bands died and pop took over, then retreating to humiliating seaside restaurants in Brighton or Blackpool. As it was, she was forced early into narrower, odder channels: into countries that hadn't heard that the big bands had died, and where the night life of the forties and fifties--the cocktails, the music-with-dinner, the dancing-after-dinner, the long, slow drunk of an eight-hour evening--continued undisturbed. She left London for East Germany and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and Bangkok in the sixties, when the G.I.s came, and oil towns in Iran before the revolution. In the course of things, she changed her name four times and cut her hair short and dyed it platinum blond. Her features shifted as they hardened into the form of her character: her mouth setting into a stubborn line; her chin pushing forward; her nose broadening from decades of flared nostrils. She retained her plummy accent, which garnered her the uncomplimentary nickname of Duchess.

Diana now lives in Canberra, in a small brick bungalow crowded with objects of sentimental value: a miniature Korean crown encased in plastic; crystal decanters; heavy cut-glass ashtrays from when she smoked (she finally quit a year ago, after her doctor told her that her circulation would give out and he'd have to cut off her legs). She has a white dog, Bea, who is blind in one eye and half-blind in the other and careers around the house, barking at nothing. Because Diana was the last child by many years, she has outlived nearly everyone she's known. Her family is in England now, under the ground: her parents in Buckinghamshire; one sister in Kingston upon Thames and the other in Hampshire; her brothers in Richmond; her first husband she's not sure where, possibly Brighton; her third husband in Norfolk, near the house where he was murdered. Only her second husband is still alive, running a hotel in Bavaria with his second wife. Diana has made a life for herself in Canberra, a fifth or sixth or seventh life, singing in clubs again and teaching jazz; but when she thinks about cremation it seems to her a hollow chance that her ashes should fall on this desert suburb, four thousand miles in a line through the earth from England, even though England has never been home.

The Whitburns were the sort of English family that valued toughness above almost everything: not fighting toughness--toughness to endure pain or, more often, humiliation, with humor and unsentimentality intact. Toughness doesn't always come naturally, and so it must be bred into English children by the application of mockery and physical unpleasantness, until the soft belly of childhood becomes calloused and fit for life's travails. Diana's mother, Gladys, was a chain-smoker who used to shoot crocodiles, not from the shore, like other people, but point-blank in the head, wading among them into the river. She expected fortitude from her children: her usual response to their complaints was "Don't fuss." When William beat Lucette, Diana's second sister, as a child, she called her bruises her medals. Diana didn't have the Whitburn toughness, not at first, and that made her life difficult. Her sisters loved to hunt, to kill tigers, to suck the fat in a cut of meat. But Diana cried the first time she shot a stag, and she couldn't finish the job--her father had to kill it for her, and she never hunted ...