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

smothered in flies and thereby spending much of her year trying to find clean loos in remote places—I peppered her with questions about Kenya. Had she seen Mum’s childhood home? Was the light perfect? Had she met any pukka -pukka sahibs? But Vanessa had frustratingly little to say on the matter of Kenya. She had gone as far as Nakuru to see the hospital in which she had been born and then she had spent a fortnight on the coast in a cheap hotel that turned out to be a brothel.
    “There were people knocking on the door all night,” she said. “‘Kissy-kissy five shillings.’”
    “How fascinating,” I said.
    “Oh goodness,” Vanessa said, “you’re just like Great-Uncle Dicken.” She shut her eyes. “No it wasn’t fascinating. It was yuck.”

    I LEFT HOME, married and moved to Wyoming with my American husband. I got on with the business of raising children and I wrote the Awful Book. For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to go to Kenya and see the place for myself, but there didn’t seem much point in going without Mum, and Mum was barely talking to me, let alone agreeing to family holidays. Then, two years after the Awful Book was published, Auntie Glug had a mania-induced brainstorm to attend her high school reunion in Kenya. She called to tell me about her plan and to ask me if I knew Mum and Dad’s phone number in Zambia.
    “You’ll have to write them a letter,” I said. “They haven’t answered their phone in months.”
    “Typical,” Auntie Glug said.
    “I think it’s because of the Awful Book,” I said.
    “Yes, well,” Auntie Glug said.
    “I want to go to your reunion,” I said.
    “You’re not an old girl,” Auntie Glug objected.
    “I’m oldish,” I said.
    I could hear Auntie Glug taking a long drag off her cigarette.
    “Please, Auntie,” I begged.
    “Well if you’re going to be a tag-along Niece-Weevil,” Auntie Glug said, “I’ll leave it up to you to get your mum and dad to come along too.”
     
     
    BUT FROM THE VERY START, Nicola Fuller of Central Africa was not keen on the whole idea of the reunion: “Not really my sort of thing.” She made a face. “They’ll all be pretending they’re so thrilled to see someone to whom they haven’t given a second thought in forty years.”
    We had been sitting under the Tree of Forgetfulness on my parents’ fish and banana farm in the middle Zambezi valley for the better part of a mediocre box of South African wine. I was trying to be persuasive and nonchalant at the same time, attempting to appeal to Mum’s highly developed sense of adventure without arousing her extraordinarily overdeveloped sense of mistrust (which had been on code red since the publication of the Awful Book). She took a sip of wine. “And another thing,” she said. “They’ll all have read the Awful Book and they’ll be counting my drinks. I’ll resent that.”
    “Maybe they’ll be drunk themselves,” I tried.
    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