Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [43]
What nobody says, but all of us know, is that Boofy was a catastrophic drunk, a legacy from her spectaculary alcoholic grandmother who died after falling leglessly backward into the fireplace. It would be logical to suppose that this would have put Dad off drinkers for life. On the contrary, nothing short of drinking a bottle of gin before breakfast for a decade at a time will convince Dad that a person has a real problem with alcohol. Moreover, a hangover is almost the only ailment for which he is likely to consider offering a person a consoling aspirin. Heart attacks, diabetes, influenza and migraines he regards as purely psychological. But admit to the effects of a late night and Dad is uncharacteristically caring. “Bad luck,” he’ll say, doling out a couple of tablets, “it must have been something you ate.”
Dad’s father, Donald Hamilton Connell-Fuller, was a commodore in the British navy (the position doesn’t translate to civilian life, where he was relegated to the rank of captain). To the world Dad’s father presented a witty, charming and devastatingly handsome front. But, “No, not tolerant,” Mum says. “And he had cold blue eyes like a dead fish.” She puts down her teacup for a moment and gives me her best impression of a flayed haddock. “He was very ambitious and he had a very short temper.” Donald made captain in 1942, when he was just thirty-three years old, and commodore shortly after that, but he never did make admiral, or even rear admiral, and he was bitter about it. “It didn’t help that wives were supposed to be supportive in those days, and poor Boofy would show up at regimental dinners with a flask of gin in her handbag and had to be carried out feet first before the fish course was served,” Mum says.
Concerned and preoccupied with their own deep disappointments and thwarted ambitions, the Fullers didn’t do much with their two young sons. There were no books at bedtime or visits to the cinema, no evening walks and very few meals together. “Sometimes we would be allowed on the battleships, and that was exciting,” Dad says. “And once in a while, my father played golf with Toe and he shot rabbits with me. Plus, there was one summer he took us both on a caravanning holiday in Ireland.” Dad pauses. “A lonely beach and it rained every day.”
Even from the distance of so many years and with the whole beautiful, fierce continent of Africa between me and the sodden Irish beach, I can feel the gloomy failure of that holiday in the pit of my stomach. “Oh God, that’s awful,” I say.
“The English after the war,” Mum explains. “So unhappy. So gloomy. So much boiled cabbage.”
BY NOW IN OUR SECLUDED kloof in the Cederberg, the doves in the tree above our heads are wing clattering into their night’s sleep. A single baboon in the cliffs barks a warning and the warm world feels leopard watched. A breeze picks up in the meadow and blows the cereal scents of grass and old heat-struck earth toward us. On an ordinary evening, we would have moved inside—a central African’s reflex against malarial mosquitoes—but on this inimitable night, none of us stir, the way no one gets up and leaves between movements at a concert.
“Anyway,” Dad says, at last, “there was always Noo. She was very good, very kind.” And it does seem telling that the presence of a Norland nurse, Irene Stanland—“Noo”—is felt on the edge of every photograph I have ever seen of Dad’s childhood, her off-camera, sterilized hands hovering at the ready to pluck my uncertainly smiling dad and his younger brother back to the nursery, where they were expected to be Seen But Not Heard in the manner of Blackie.
Blackie was Noo’s passionately adored cat. Even in the ration years after the war, the cat ate a pound and a half of prime steak a week. When he eventually died of complications from obesity, Noo had a taxidermist in London stuff him in an upright, sitting position. So there he sat on her bedside table, flatteringly