Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  A day or two passed. Mum put blankets on the cottage’s dry lawn and prayed that fresh air and the weak winter sun would somehow penetrate her child’s body and boost his strength. Then the next morning, Adrian would again throw a frighteningly high temperature, and again Mum trickled paracetemol down his throat and ran to the main house. “It was obvious they were all thinking I was just a neurotic new mother. But I wasn’t. It was such a bad winter, we were so hard up and Adrian just kept getting sicker and sicker.” So then Mum wrapped Adrian in wool blankets and kept him inside. And for a day or two, this appeared to be the magical formula to keeping her son well.

  Until it wasn’t.

  THEN MUM HOPED that warmer weather, or rain, would change the atmosphere, settle the dust. And like women everywhere and for all time, she stared at the sky and begged the universe to do something to heal her child. And in due course, the very cold season gave way to a warm, dry September. After that, October came, hot and humid, but still it did not rain and still Adrian did not thrive.

  By the third week in October, clouds had been banking against the high veldt violent with thunder for a month, but when the rain fell, it hung like a half curtain in the sky, not touching the earth. And one morning in that third week, not unusually, Adrian woke with a fever and he was crying, a constant, monotonous cry as if he no longer had the energy to express the precise nature of his illness. Mum gave him paracetamol and tried to nurse him, but Adrian wouldn’t eat and his fever stayed high even after a second dose of medicine. Once again, Mum wrapped him in a blanket and ran to the main house to beg a lift from Cherry. On the way to the clinic, Mum put her lips against the soft fluff of hair on Adrian’s hot skull and silently she implored him, “Please don’t give up. Don’t give up. It’ll get better, you’ll see.” And she closed her eyes and did her best to picture Adrian at twelve, at eighteen, at thirty, as if her sheer will could drag him beyond his infancy. And then she bargained with God that if He was going to take a life, let it be hers. “I just couldn’t see how I would ever take another breath if Adrian died,” Mum says.

  As Mum is telling me this, I realize that I can’t remember a time when I did not know about Adrian, as if knowledge of him crossed the placenta and went directly into my own cells. But in every important way, I know nothing about what happened to him. When I was young, Mum would sometimes spill his story, but never when she was sober and so the story grew soggy and more confused and refused to hold together. But on this late, hot morning in the Cederberg, I am forty years old and we are not drunk and Mum’s narrative is relentlessly clear. Now, even as I am beginning to know the details of this story, I already know how it ends. My impulse is impossible: I want to reach back through the years and protect my young parents from what happens next.

  On that hot afternoon, Dad got a message at the nickel mine from Mum. He hurried back home to find her waiting in the driveway, Vanessa in her arms. My parents drove to Bindura as fast as the Chevy would go, but Adrian was no longer at the little clinic. He had been taken by ambulance to the children’s hospital in Salisbury. So now I picture my parents racing into town, Mum pale and thin at twenty-three with Vanessa on her lap, Dad helpless and unprepared at twenty-seven. They are both frantic.

  Adrian was not in any of the cots in the hospital’s general ward and it took some time for my parents to find him, isolated in a white cell at the end of the private wards. “He was strapped to a board, his little arms pinned down as if he were on a crucifix, with intravenous drips coming out of his head.” Mum’s voice is so soft I can hardly hear her. “And he was still crying, that dry, monotonous little cry.” Vanessa, aware of impending tragedy, did the only thing she could think of to make everything normal. She asked for lunch. And the nurse, matter-of-fact in the way of most Africans, told my parents not unkindly that they had a choice: they could either take Vanessa for a meal, or they could stay and watch their son die. “It was meningitis,” Mum says. “And it was too late.”

  NOW THERE IS A LONG, long silence. I look out at the Cederberg Mountains, flattened gray in the noon sun. In the intensifying heat, the garden is utterly subdued. The weaver birds in the bougainvillea have given up their usual quarreling. Even the common Cape buntings have melted back into their rocky hideouts. The wind has died completely. The whole country seems crouched and serious in anticipation of the six months of dry heat to come. Somewhere in the servants’ quarters a cockerel crows. Dad has his head in his hands.

  Eventually Mum breaks the silence. She says, “I remember walking out of the hospital and being so shocked that the world was still there. All the jacarandas were in blossom. Salisbury looked so beautiful. The flower sellers were in Meikles Park, the agapanthus were out, the jasmine was so sweet. And I thought, ‘How can the world look normal? How are people walking around? How can everyone not understand that the world has come to an end?’”

  The doctors tranquilized Mum until her grief receded to a place so deep that she was the only person who could hear it. In this way, everything about Adrian’s death became a devastatingly slow injury, shards of hurt surfacing sometimes unexpectedly decades later the way pieces of shrapnel emerge from soldiers’ wounds years after they have been hit. “It’s the most terrible thing to go home and you walk into the nursery and all his things are there—the toys, the cot, his nappies,” Mum says. “It’s the most horrible thing that can happen to anyone. So I just thought, ‘I’ve got to buck up.’ And I did what I could to get on with my life.”

  Then Mum shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, that’s not true. I didn’t get on with my life. I couldn’t. Vanessa kept asking, ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s Adrian?’ No one tells you how you should handle the situation, and I handled it very badly. I couldn’t stand it. I asked Cherry to look after Vanessa for a few days. I took more of those awful tranquilizers and I lay in a dark room with a pillow over my head. I didn’t want to hear anything. I didn’t want to see anything. I wanted to stop. Just stop being.”

  Three days after Adrian died, Dad spent half his month’s wages on a two-piece suit from an Indian tailor in the second-class district. Then he drove to the children’s hospital, picked up the small urn they gave him and interred Adrian’s ashes at the Warren Hills Cemetery in southern Salisbury.

  “All alone?” I ask.

  Dad’s eyes threaten to brim. “Well, it’s not the sort of thing you send invitations out for.”

  As Adrian’s ashes were closed into the wall, the season’s first rain began to fall. Water pooled at my father’s feet on the hard earth. It ran down his face. The suit from the second-class district shrank, the sleeves crawled up his arms, the legs receded up his calves, and blue dye ran on the red soil. Dad stood in place and memorized everything: the rangy lilac bushes, the pied crows, the cold rain on hot earth, the small and lonely grave.

  A few years ago, my parents went back to look for it, the bronze marker with my brother’s name on it, but along with anything else of value in that cemetery, the marker had been ripped off, melted down and sold or used for something else. I had always believed that Adrian’s grave was unmarked, but it was more than that: his grave had been unmarked after the fact. In this way, Adrian is most African: a victim of circumstances, he lies anonymous in that beautiful, bloodied soil, with no date to mark either his birth or his passing. His grave as good as empty. “You can’t blame desperate people for that,” Dad says.

  Mum looks up and her eyes are bright. “Yes, you can,” she says. She is adamant. “Yes, you must.”

  And it seems to me that both my parents are correct. Whether out of desperation, ignorance or hostility, humans have an unerring capacity to ignore one another’s sacred traditions and to defile one another’s hallowed grounds: the Palawa Aborigines lost on Waternish, the Macdonalds trapped in St. Francis Cave on Eigg, the MacLeods burned in Trumpan Church, the Boers dying in British concentration camps, thousands of Kikuyu perishing during the Mau Mau, the Rucks family hacked to death in Kenya’s White Highlands, Ad
rian’s grave desecrated. Surely until all of us own and honor one another’s dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.

  BEFORE THE END OF the next disappointing rainy season (another drought), Boofy—worn out by gin, cigarettes and disappointment—finally died of throat cancer. She left a cruelly unfinished life and—not wealth, exactly—but the impression of wealth. Wrongly assuming that my father would inherit a lawyer’s bounty, Lytton-Brown settled out of court the case my parents had brought against him for his refusal to pay their bonus. My parents banked the money—there was little else to do with it; because of UDI, Rhodesian dollars could not leave the country—and a week later they crossed into Botswana via Victoria Falls and set up a tented camp on the Chobe River.

  “Your mother was very brave,” Dad tells me. “Your mother is a very brave lady.”

  So I picture them in Botswana on the banks of the Chobe: Vanessa throwing all their silver teaspoons into the river; Dad fussing with his pipe and catching fish for supper; Mum downwind of a turpentine-scented mopane campfire with tears on her cheeks. “You’re all right, Tub?”

  And Mum putting on a brave face. “You know how it is. Smoke gets in your eyes.” Then, singing the way she always has, out of tune but with an unerring knack of hitting the truest emotional note, “So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes. Smoke gets in your eyes.”

  Nicola Fuller in England

  1969

  Van and Bo with grandparents in Karoi. Rhodesia, circa 1973.

  Mum is profoundly superstitious: she will not walk under a ladder, nor will she look at a new moon through glass. She scratches an itchy palm with wood and tosses spilled salt over her left shoulder. She won’t close the windows in a thunderstorm, nor will she kill a spider. But in July 1968, for the first time in her life, she did not ritually touch the four walls of her room in Africa before embarking on the ship to England. And instead of leaving the doors open behind her, she made sure every door was firmly shut, and locked. “I didn’t want to come back to Africa,” she says. “Not ever.”

  On the ship from Africa to England she carried these things: Vanessa; the fetal me (“conceived at the Victoria Falls Casino Hotel. A bit second rate, I’m afraid”); a hangover as a result of the excellent service on the train from Salisbury to Lourenco Marques (“It was my birthday, so the Portuguese waiters brought us gallons and gallons of free wine”); a few favorite books; two hunting prints; the Wellington bronze and the Le Creuset pots.

  The MS Oranje (later known as MS Angelina Lauro) was the dreariest ship Mum has ever been on. “There were a lot of Zambian miners and American missionaries on board. It was not a hilarious amount of fun.” But what seems to have upset Mum even more than the dull company was that half the women on board had bought the same new dress as she had, “a shapeless thing in sludgy beige. It was all they had in Rhodesia because of sanctions—bolts and bolts of ghastly colored cotton made into one hideously unflattering pattern.”

  Mum sulked in her berth and wouldn’t look out of her porthole. As the ship pulled out from the harbor, she turned her back on Africa and for the rest of the journey she refused to race up on deck with the other passengers whenever land was glimpsed: the faint, green blur of Kenya’s coast; the hot, orange shimmer of Somalia and Sudan. And as the ship was piloted through the Suez Canal, she ate white rice and complained that the reek of the canal was giving her morning sickness. She came on deck only when England was within sight. Then she stared at the island emerging out of the thick breath of a humid summer’s day, and she willed herself to feel British.

  Nothing stirred.

  TO BEGIN WITH, my parents rented a semidetached house in Stalybridge, Cheshire, from a merchant seaman. “There was no double glazing. You could see, hear and smell everything the neighbors did.” And whenever my parents tried to make the most of the long summer evenings the neighbors teased them. “There goes Gov’ment House having tea on lawn.” So Mum and Dad borrowed money, bought a rundown little farm near Glossop in Derbyshire and lived in the barn. “The roof leaked, drafts blew straight through chinks in the walls, there was no electricity, no running water and no loo,” Mum says. “Just a bucket in a shed out back.” But the Peak District was close, “a bit of open,” Mum says, and it was land beneath their feet.

  Dad found what work he could in town. Mum bred rabbits, fattened chickens, fed pigs and drank a half pint of Guinness each day, paid for by the National Health. “In those days, they used to say that half a pint of Guinness a day was very good for pregnant women,” Mum says.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. They even advertised it: ‘Guinness is Good for You.’” Mum sighs. “Mind you, it didn’t do much to guarantee beautiful babies. I got such a fright when they gave you to me. Black hair, yellow skin and the most impressively disagreeable expression you can possibly imagine on a brand-new baby.” She narrows in on me. “Don’t you sometimes feel you must have been switched at birth?”

  NEWS OF MY ARRIVAL REACHED my father very early on the morning of March 29, 1969. Dad fed the animals and dropped Vanessa off with a neighbor, whose husband, Kevin, was in the process of selling Dad a car number–plate business. The business came complete with a very hot-tempered Spanish exprisoner of war who both made the number plates and contributed some bona fide authority to the name, Continental Car Plates.

  “Where’s Kevin?” Dad asked the neighbor’s wife.

  “Down pub.”

  Dad looked at his watch. His admiration for Kevin grew exponentially. “That’s very heroic of him.”

  Dad went down pub himself and found Kevin having a quick prebreakfast hair of the dog, but upon hearing the news that Mum had produced an offspring, Kevin slammed his pint on the bar. “Champagne!” he shouted. The workday was canceled, friends were rounded up and morning visiting hours were missed. It wasn’t until two in the afternoon that Dad suddenly came to and remembered that he hadn’t yet bought a present for my post-delivery Mum.

  “Swift thinking,” Kevin said.

  So Kevin and my father had a quick one for the road and then drove around Glossop looking for a gift of some sort.

  “What does Nicola go in for?” Kevin asked.

  “Dogs,” Dad said. “She likes dogs a lot more than she likes most people.”

  “So what about a puppy?”

  Dad rubbed his chin. “Better not,” he said. “She’s likely to ignore the baby if we do that.”

  “Fair enough,” Kevin said.

  “Also culture—she’s very keen on books, opera, art, that sort of thing.”

  Kevin looked out the window doubtfully. “Oh bollocks,” he said.

  Dad sank into a thoughtful reverie. “I think I’d be better able to concentrate if I had a drink in front of me,” he said at last.

  “Me too,” Kevin said, so they swerved into the nearest pub, where they discussed further possibilities over a brandy: a horse was dismissed as too big; a China tea set was rejected as too mundane; and they both felt a night at the Proms would be expensive and noisy. “All that hollering in the Albert Hall,” Kevin said. He downed his brandy and put his glass upside down on his head. Dad stared at Kevin for a moment and then he jumped to his feet. “That’s it! A hat! She loves hats! How about a hat?”

  “A hat?” Kevin repeated uncertainly.

  “Hat and dress then,” Dad said.

  So the two men drove up and down the high street until they found a suitably posh women’s boutique. “Top of the afternoon to you,” Dad said to the woman behind the counter. “Cash customer! Do we get a discount for good behavior?”

  Kevin collapsed in an armchair by the changing rooms.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Dad told the shop assistant. “It’s been a tiring day. Now what do you have in the . . .”—Dad whistled and swiveled his hips a few times—“department?”

  Dad tried on
several outfits, but at last the shop assistant and Kevin agreed on a short, scalloped pink mini with a matching satin pillbox hat. Then both men felt strongly that it would be a criminal waste not to give the dress a proper outing before it had to be folded up neatly in a gift box. Accordingly, they crawled around a few more pubs, picking up champagne, flowers and cigars along the way, until at last they calculated it must be getting close to afternoon visiting hours. “And don’t spare the horses,” Dad said. “We don’t want to be late.”

  There was a confused moment in the car park of the nursing home while Kevin and Dad debated the merits of my father’s showing up in the maternity ward in the dress. “It’s a bit worse for the wear. Perhaps you’d better get back into your suit,” Kevin suggested. But the dress’s buttons and zips defeated both men, and in the end, it was decided to leave well enough alone.

  Mum shakes her head. “You can just imagine,” she says. “Your dad comes bursting into the ward in a pink minidress, arms full of flowers and champagne, puffing away on a cigar with a very drunk Kevin weaving behind him.”

  “Let’s have a party!” Dad shouted.

  “For heaven’s sake, this is a nursing home,” Mum hissed. “Keep it down.”

  “Sorry,” Dad said, momentarily chastened. And then sotto voce, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! Hallelujah!”

  Mum held her hands to her ears. “No, Tim, no. No singing. And for God’s sake, not ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’”

  The door slapped open and the matron stormed in to see what all the fuss was about. “How do you do?” Dad said, bowing. The matron froze in her tracks. Dad put a rose behind his ear and began to do the samba. “Work all night on a drink of rum,” he sang, waving a cigar in the air. “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.”