Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  Mum ignored me. “Or they’ll go on and on about how happy and smiling all the locals are.” Her brow sank over the rim of her wineglass. “Well, of course the locals are always smiling—that’s the expression least likely to arouse suspicion.”

  I was running out of arguments. “Well, it was the school you liked,” I said.

  This, at least, was true. A reunion at the convent would have been out of the question, but this was a reunion of the Highlands School to which Mum and Auntie Glug had gone after leaving the convent. Unlike the convent, the Highlands School offered a decent education, a good art teacher, and, all things considered, Mum wasn’t unhappy during her four years there. “That doesn’t mean I want to sit around with a bunch of old girls talking about it,” she said with a shudder.

  But Auntie Glug’s manic episode persisted and by September, the whole fixture had been organized. Old girls had been rounded up from all over Britain, and rooms had been arranged at the Nyali Beach Hotel in Mombasa (“Oh dear,” Mum said, “they’ll have sticky drinks and so-called traditional dancers to greet us, all ululating and carrying on”). There was to be an evening excursion on the Indian Ocean in a dhow (“There go half the Old Girls’ wallets,” Mum predicted), an opportunity to wander the streets of Old Arab Town (“There go the other half”). Finally, there was to be a plane ride up to Nairobi for a night at the Muthaiga Country Club (“All those pretentious ex-pats playing pukka sahib on the lawn”), followed by a day in a snake park and a safari in the Masai Mara. (Mum shut her eyes. “No,” she said. “I have elephants in the bananas, crocodiles in the ponds and hippos in the garden anytime I want. I don’t think so.”)

  NEVERTHELESS, the following February, we all arrived at the Nyali Beach Hotel—a dozen Old Girls from the Eldoret Highlands School, Mum, Dad, Uncle Sandy, Auntie Glug (whose mania had worn itself out on a walk across the Brazilian rain forest and had now resolved itself into a gentle depression) and me. Our taxi stopped outside a sturdy cement barrier while a guard crawled around with a mirror to check its undercarriage for ordnance.

  Eighteen months earlier, a red sports utility vehicle had crashed through the gardens and barrier outside the Paradise Hotel, the only Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa. Sixty Israeli tourists had just checked in and were enjoying their welcome sticky drink. When the vehicle hit the lobby, it had exploded, killing two Israeli children, one Israeli adult and nine Kenyan traditional dancers. Almost simultaneously, two shoulder-launched Strela-2 surface-to-air missiles were fired at an Israeli-based Arkia Airlines Boeing 757 as it took off from Moi International Airport in Mombasa, barely missing the aircraft. Kenya’s security was still in the process of being thoroughly assessed.

  And Kenya’s security was increasingly suspicious of Mum. “Hujambo, askari!” she told the security guard. “Pole sana. Those horrible, vicious terrorists. ” She smiled magnificently and stuck her head out of the window and addressed the guard loudly. “The tourists will be back. You mustn’t give up hope.” The guard frowned nervously at Mum and asked the taxi driver to open the boot. “That’s right,” Mum said, encouragingly, “you must carry on. You must have courage.” And then she broke into a long string of Swahili that she spoke deliberately and in incantations, as if wrapping a spell around Swahili speakers from which the rest of us were to be excluded.

  Released from the uneasy security guard, we swept up to the hotel. The taxi driver jumped out and opened Mum’s door. She paused a moment—as if her foot touching the earth might break the spell—before stepping out onto the gravel. She breathed in the salty, humid air and her arms went out in front of her. For one astonishing moment I thought she was going to embrace the taxi driver. Instead, she offered him her hands and he took them, helping her to her feet. They bantered back and forth in Swahili, a tongue in which Mum must be a standup comedienne because they had to prop each other up through gales of laughter.

  At the reception, Mum sniffed and wiped her eyes when the traditional dancers came out to greet us. “Oh bravo,” she said. “Well done!” When the dance was over she clapped enthusiastically and shouted, “Mzuri sana! Encore! Encore!” Her mood was infectious. The traditional dancers, surprised by such unbridled enthusiasm, began their dance again. “I’ll take another one of those delicious sticky drinks,” Mum said, swooping down on the woman holding the tray.

  Dad filled in the guest registration card without his usual griping (“Good God, what are you trying to do, kill every last tree with all this bloody paperwork?”). Instead, in the space requesting “Please list all allergies,” he caused hilarity by writing “WOMEN AND ALCOHOL.” Then when he greeted the Old Girls who were collecting against the reception desk he was so effusively warm and courtly that several of them retreated into the potted plants, their hats and money belts askew.

  “Let’s have a party!” Dad said, handing Auntie Glug a sticky drink. She propped herself up against an arrangement of wooden curios and looked as if she were beginning to have second thoughts about the reunion.

  Meanwhile, Mum clapped along to the dancers, and cocked her hips this way and that. “Asante sana!” my mother cried. “And what beautiful voices, what lovely smiles you all have!” The traditional dancers trooped out into the sunshine with my mother cheering them on. In fact, she seemed in danger of joining them more or less permanently. “All right,” Dad said, sensing how things might easily unravel, “that’s enough for now, Tub.” Then, in his enthusiasm to demonstrate that nearly forty years of marriage had done nothing to diminish his chivalry, he accidentally hit my mother in the head opening the door for her from the reception room into the garden. Mum reeled into the cannas clutching her eye.

  Auntie Glug stared into her sticky drink. “I wonder how these go with Prozac?” she asked.

  ASIDE FROM OUR SMALL PARTY gathered for the Highlands School reunion and a group of American geologists who had been exploring for oil in Uganda, no one was staying at the hotel. Nor were any of the other hotels up and down the beach much occupied. A few rent boys combed the beach for old European women, but found only a couple of takers: an Italian matron of leathery complexion and a broken French woman in her early seventies with bad knees. Without the customary crowd of guests into which to fade, the old women seemed doubly desperate, and the rent boys looked doubly ill used. “Why on earth can’t they go to bed with a good book like everyone else?” Mum asked, eyes lowered over a glass of cold Tusker.

  Even beyond the main tourist strip everything still felt ghosted and shocked from the attack against the Paradise Hotel. Our Swahili guide, Mr. Faraji, gave us a tour of Fort Jesus and the spice market and he walked us through the old Arab quarters, but it was as if a disease had washed over the place, taking with it the usual, pushy, vibrant clatter of an ancient port city. “Oh dear,” Mum said, “how sad and quiet.”

  “Very quiet and sad,” Mr. Faraji agreed.

  So Mum and Mr. Faraji embarked on a two-person mission to revive Mombasa. Nothing could dim their excitement, their curiosity, or their determination to be deeply impressed by everything. Mum bought spices and kikois, baskets and carvings, beads and postcards while Mr. Faraji haggled with hawkers to secure her the best price. Mum admired every angle of the city, ran her fingers along the woodwork on the doors, joked with the shopkeepers and bought food from everyone who offered it to her even though Mr. Faraji begged her not to eat anything from street vendors.

  “Why ever not?” Mum said, licking her fingers.

  I reassured Mr. Faraji that Mum is an extreme omnivore. She has eaten snails peeled off the farm’s driveway and wild frogs’ legs from the bush surrounding the Tree of Forgetfulness. Once she even ate a prawn cocktail in hyperlandlocked, socialist-era Zambia, and if that didn’t kill her, I argued, a little dysentery-laced street food in Mombasa wasn’t going to do the trick.

  While we walked through the Old Arab quarter, Mr. Faraji tried to give us each a sprig of fragrant wild marigold to hold to our noses. Mum shook her head. “Oh no,” she said. “I’d be very o
ffended if someone walked past my house sniffing herbs.” She stepped over a broken, bubbling pipe. “And I’m sure my drains smell at least as bad as this.”

  One afternoon, Mr. Faraji took us out to a beach near the harbor. This was the site of the children’s holiday camp where the Huntingfords had stayed for three weeks every year. We all piled out of the taxi. There was no sign of the holiday resort now, but there was a hot little shack on the edge of a littered beach to which we all repaired. There was a smell of sewage and rotting fish. An unfinished concrete building sprouted rusting rebar. “Now,” Mum said, half closing her eyes, “this was where we spent our glorious holidays.”

  By some miracle, Mr. Faraji managed to procure some cold beers for all of us, so we sat in the tin shack while Mum repainted the dreary beach as it had been in her glorious childhood. Another round of cold beer arrived on the heels of the last and the sun began its slow descent over the land so that the sea became a tranquil sheet of gold. As Mum remembered it, the holiday camp at Mombasa was almost unmitigated bliss—watching the huge ships pull into the harbor, diving for shells, exploring empty beaches, swimming in the shark fence (which may explain why Mum always swims with her head well above water, as if scanning the horizon for fins). The only drawback to these holidays seemed to have been the ablution block. “It was very off-putting. There was one large building for men and one large building for women, and in the women’s bathroom, there were eight holes all lined up next to one another without any divisions over one huge pit.” Mum shook her head at the memory. “Very hard to relax.”

  OUR DAYS TOOK ON A predictable rhythm resolving into a pleasant routine. In the morning, we were awakened by the rhythmic scraping of the gardener’s broom against the sandy walkways and the shouting mynah birds. Afternoons brought camels strolling up the beach and heat-stunned siestas under the umbrellas around the pool. In the evenings, stars appeared slowly over the Indian Ocean, the Guiana chestnut slapped against the windows in the breeze, and a dense peace settled against the hotel. The heavy air was thick with frangipani, tropical lilies and gardenia. “Everything’s changed everywhere,” Mum said. “But some things here feel very familiar. Wonderful people, gorgeous gardens, exciting markets, delicious spices and so much more ancient feeling than anywhere else I’ve been in Africa, such culture, such diversity. Oh, I shall always be a child of Kenya, always.”

  After supper, Mum, Dad, Auntie Glug and Uncle Sandy created a dance floor in the hotel restaurant. By ten or eleven most evenings, we seemed to be the only people awake on the whole beach and we trailed our small party out onto the sand. Then, dancing together in the moonlight, Mum and Dad appeared as they must have in their twenties: beautiful, optimistic and aware of being the most exciting couple anyone had ever met.

  The barman put on Doris Day and Mum moved into Dad’s arms. “Gonna take a sentimental journey,” Mum and Doris sang together. “Gonna set my heart at ease.” Then my parents danced close to the bar and I could smell her perfume, his pipe tobacco. “Gonna make a sentimental journey, to renew old memories.” Mum sank back against Dad’s shoulder briefly before spinning back out into the shadows. Even in the near dark I could see a crescent of tears brimming in Mum’s eyes. “Got my bag, got my reservations,” she sang along. “Spent each dime I could afford.... Gotta take that sentimental journey, sentimental journey home.”

  I turned back to the bar and sighed. “Go on, Niece-Weevil,” Auntie Glug said, pushing a sticky drink toward me. “One of these can’t hurt.”

  Nicola Huntingford, the Afrikaner and the Perfect Horse

  Circa 1957

  Mum and Violet. Kenya, circa 1958.

  Sometimes memory does a trick of packaging events together so that they are conveniently conflated and easier to retrieve. In this way, Mum remembers nothing of the circus that came through Eldoret in the mid-1950s except that Nane left with it. “I suppose my mother must have thought that he had knocked me out one too many times,” she says, “so off he went to feed the lions.” Mum gives a little gulp. “And I don’t know if this is the way I imagined it, or if this really happened, but I have a picture in my head of Nane bouncing off down the road behind bars, peering back at me, with big pleading eyes.”

  “Oh, that’s awful,” I say.

  Mum thinks about this for a moment. “Yes, it was,” she says. Then she looks uncomfortable and I can tell she does not want to seem like an ungrateful Christopher-bloody-Robin type. So she clears her throat and revises the story, assuming a stiff upper lip for the task. “Well,” she says, “I’m sure my parents didn’t tell me he was going to feed the lions at the time. I am sure they told me that Nane had run away to join the circus. Trapeze artists, dancing bears, happy days.”

  My grandparents asked knowledgeable friends to source a really good replacement for Nane. In their minds, they pictured a Thoroughbred, something largehearted and bold that could match my Mum’s courage and skill in the show-jumping arena. Golden Duckling, the horse the friends selected, was very well bred by King Midas out of Cold Duck. “She was a great big Thoroughbred,” Mum says, “pretty head, nice neck, she was perfectly put together until you got to her legs.” Mum pauses from dramatic effect. “They were sawed off.”

  I look suitably horrified.

  “I know,” Mum says. “We all stood in the stable yard in Nairobi staring at this apparition, but we were too polite to tell the friends who were supposed to be experts that they had selected a dud. Sawed-off legs and curved hocks”—Mum turns her elbows out in an impression of a horse with bad conformation—“which meant she’d just fall down in the middle of whatever you were doing. Oh,” she adds, “and she had an absolutely murderous disposition.”

  Nevertheless Mum—brought up by her parents not to complain almost no matter what—gamely paid forty pounds of her own money for the horse (more than half a century later she remembers with undiminished resentment the exact amount), and the thing was hauled home in the back of a truck. “Well, Duckling wasn’t ideal,” Mum admits. “In fact she was pretty awful, but she was what I had.” So Mum entered show-jumping competitions as before, and as before she contributed significantly to everyone’s entertainment. “I usually left the arena unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, dripping blood,” she says with a happy smile.

  For a year or two the homicidal, sawed-off Thoroughbred bashed Mum senseless week after week and Mum gamely hauled herself back onto the creature for more punishment. And then—beginning in the year Mum turned thirteen—an almost biblical series of events brought her Violet, a horse of such shining perfection that none of the scores of other horses she has owned since have ever quite rivaled that one, flawless animal.

  “In 1957, there were terrific floods in Eldoret,” Mum says. “Water roared down the passageway, the choo was submerged, the cows and horses stood around up to their knees in mud, the roads washed away, the mud bricks on all the buildings got soggy, the walls sagged, the roof leaked, the laundry never dried, frogs moved into the house.” This went on for weeks and by the time the sun did come out again, the community was very rundown and measles broke out. “It started in the villages, then the old ladies next door got sick, then half the kids in my school got sick plus all the nuns. Then the Polish refugees keeled over and finally my father caught it,” Mum says.

  My grandfather had to lie in a darkened room for a couple of months. “Doctor Reynolds told him not to read, but of course he did and ruined his eyesight forever.” And my grandmother was run ragged taking care of sick people. She took meat and milk to the Nandi villages; she ferried soup and bread up to the old ladies. She visited the sick boarding-school children and took clean linens to the nuns. She fed the Polish refugees—“Eldoret was smothered in them for some reason,” Mum says, “and they all insisted they were princesses and counts. Very unlikely, I would have said”—and finally she came back to bathe my grandfather’s rash in calamine lotion and give him his supper.

  One morning, into this overwrought and distracted atmosphere,
Flip Prinsloo arrived at the Huntingford’s door, the brim of his sweat-stained felt hat clutched in his fists, and asked to see Mrs. Huntingford. My grandmother ordered tea from the drunken Cherito and sat out on the veranda with Flip. It says something about my grandmother—and about Flip, for that matter—that the two of them waited for the tea tray to arrive in perfectly companionable silence. It also says something about the depth of Flip’s desperation that he had come to a British woman for help. “You see,” Mum explains, “in Eldoret, there was a big group of very British settlers, like our family. And then there was a quite big group of very Afrikaner settlers, like Flip. And of course the two groups did not mix at all.” Mum narrows her eyes. “The Boer War,” she says darkly. “Never, ever forget the Boer War, Bobo. They certainly haven’t.”

  THE DUTCH ARRIVED in South Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, on the southwestern tip of Africa, in 1652. To begin with, they saw themselves not as settlers but as temporary workers, there to grow vegetables for the Dutch East India Company’s ships sailing between Holland and Indonesia. But by the early 1700s, independent trekboers—nomadic farmers—had broken away from the Dutch East India Company and were pushing into the wild, pepper-scented land to the north, displacing the native Khoikhoi. Over time, these trekboers began to call themselves Afrikaners (Africans) to mark their sense of a new identity as distinct and separate from the Dutch. And they developed a distinct language—Afrikaans—basic Dutch salted with whatever other languages were floating around the Cape at that time.

  In 1795, the British, looking to protect their sea routes and alarmed by the empire-building intentions of other European countries, sent an expedition to the Cape and easily forced the Dutch to surrender, but they hadn’t counted on—or recognized—the increasingly cohesive and nationalistic sensibilities of the Afrikaners. By the mid 1830s, British rule had so disgusted the Afrikaners (the 1834 emancipation of slaves was the final straw) that about twelve thousand of them responded by emigrating far into the interior—the Great Trek, it was called afterward—and setting up two of their own independent Afrikaner-run republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.