Free Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller Page A

ponies were grazing placidly in the home paddocks. A large yellow sun was making its way toward the hills in Zaire. I remember details like this because the story Mum told me that late afternoon was the first time I felt that the tranquil homeliness of Zambia was far preferable to Kenya’s thrilling glamour.
    “Shortly after my mother arrived in Kenya from Scotland, she took a position with a wealthy white hunter from the Happy Valley set,” Mum said. “The white hunter, Inky Porter, was rich and spoiled, but I wouldn’t say that she was an aristocrat.” Mum looked disapproving. “ Aristocrat implies good breeding, noblesse oblige.” Mum sniffed to demonstrate that Inky Porter’s behavior fell well short of the mark. “Anyway, this awful Inky Porter had found herself inconvenienced with a pregnancy right in the middle of the hunting season, so she hired my mother to help with the baby.”
    “Your mother was a nanny for Inky Porter,” I clarified.
    Mum blinked. “No, no, no,” she said. “Nanny doesn’t sound right.”
    We went back and forth for some time on a suitable noun. I suggested maid or child minder.
    “No,” Mum said. “She was more than that.”
    “Nurse?” I tried.
    “No, she wasn’t a nurse.”
    I attempted governess and au pair, but Mum refused them too. The way I looked at it, there was no getting around the fact that my grandmother was a nanny. The way Mum looked at it, I didn’t understand class at all. “Don’t forget, my mother was from a very good family,” she reminded me. “She would not have been simply a nanny.”
    So my grandmother was a not-simply-a-nanny for a not-worthy-to-be-called-an-aristocrat white hunter named Inky Porter. “And Inky Porter,” Mum said, “liked to drink gallons of gin and sniff mountains of cocaine. She was a big fan of adultery and intrigues, and she was very bored with the idea of children. So the moment her baby was born, Inky Porter handed it over to my mother, then she pushed off to Uganda to shoot lots of animals, drink gallons of cocktails and generally make up for lost time. But the poor baby was born absolutely pickled in gin and withdrawing from cocaine. It was awful. The infant died in agony—seizures, fevers, tremors—in my mother’s arms when it was only a few days old.”
    For a while Mum and I stared silently into the empty space held by Inky Porter’s dead baby. “And that is why I am so impatient with all this celebration of that Happy Valley crowd,” Mum concluded. “All these books and films and carry-on that make their lives seem so glamorous. No one talks about the poor dead baby.” Then Mum spoke slowly, for emphasis and so that I would never again make the mistake of muddling up her—or any of her family—with the Happy Valley set. “We didn’t live like that in Eldoret. We were surrounded by pukka -pukka sahibs, proper gentry. People like Betty Webster and Zoe Foster—good, wholesome, outdoorsy types.”
    Everyone Mum knew had lots of dogs and horses. They all played cricket or rugby twice a week and went for long, improving walks every evening. On the weekends, the whole community show-jumped or entered gymkhanas and raced their ponies. “Which was quite exhausting and didn’t leave much energy for too much funny nonsense,” Mum said. And once or twice a month, the district dressed up at amateur theatricals, sang naughty songs and satisfied the very British need to see men in drag. “We had lots and lots of good, clean fun,” Mum said.
     
     
    WHEN I WAS IN MY final year of high school in Zimbabwe, Vanessa took a year off doing very little for a television show in London (a sign above her desk asked the really very good question, “What DOES Vanessa do?”) and backpacked around Africa on trains and buses, by boat and by foot. When she came home—sunburned and much thinner as a result of being too vague and polite to refuse any food offered to her no matter how long it had been sitting out in the sun