Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [46]
Nicola Fuller and the Perfect House
Mum and Dad with dogs at Lavender’s Corner. Kenya, circa 1965.
Nakuru, the Masai call it, “place of dust,” and I imagined the air gritty and restless, deviled with pillars of torn plastic. But when I visit in November 2004, it is the beginning of the short rainy season and stone-colored clouds are hanging over the Great Rift Valley. The damp earth is unmoving beneath a greening-blond savannah, and Lake Nakuru is pink with the ebb and flow of thousands of flamingos. Above the town, the Menengai Crater seems placidly mossy, not at all the demon-dancing Kirima Kia Ngoma of legend. Nakuru, it appears to me, is less a place of red dust than a place of mauve quenching.
I search through all the colors of Nakuru and I find peripheral signs that British settlers were here—the sturdy War Memorial Hospital, a faded mock-Tudor pub, storm drains engineered as if by Roman invaders—but I do not find Lavender’s Corner. For this reason, the place stays in my memory as Mum has described it: “A lovely bungalow with a wood shingle roof, an enormous pepper tree at the bottom of the garden and lots of paddocks for the horses.”
And in the same way that Lavender’s Corner stays in my imagination, perfect and somehow innocent, so does the version of my mother that lived in that miraculous house. She is twenty years old, and her beauty is classical and untested by time and the elements. And in this part of her story, she does not work, in the ordinary sense of the word. And she has not yet known grief, beyond the normal, relatively mild tragedies of a typical colonial childhood. In many ways, I barely recognize this person. She is someone else’s mother. She is not the broken, splendid, fierce mother I have.
My parents moved into Lavender’s Corner shortly after their wedding. They brought Mum’s beloved Violet; a cat named Felix; a German Shepherd named Suzy (“one of the nicest dogs we ever had,” Dad says) and a few polo ponies (“Horrible, abused, rescued things that no one else would ride,” Mum says). There were also several suitcases of high-heeled fashion boots and winklepickers (“completely impractical, and they’ve given me bunions now, look!”); trunks of Irish linen; cases of Egyptian cotton; rolls of canvas; pots of paint; crates of china; a set of hunting prints; a few bits of silver; a bronze cast of the Duke of Wellington riding his favorite horse; and a set of Le Creuset pots and saucepans.
“Imagine,” Mum says, “those Le Creuset pots have survived all these years. Even now, visitors see them in my kitchen as they come down the stairs in the garden and they say, ‘Oh, your pots, how orange and picturesque! I must take a photograph!’” What those visitors to the Tree of Forgetfulness can’t know is that they are not only photographing the Le Creuset pots but also the shadow of everything that has not made it this far. Each time Mum set sail or moved to another farm or gave up a country, she had to assess what would fit into a few boxes, what could squeeze into the back of a Land Rover, what could make it across the borders of an unpredictable African country. Considering that Mum has always moved with a full complement of animals and a sizable library, precious few other acquisitions have survived the shift from one place to the next. “Lost, stolen, broken, died, left behind,” she says.
AFTER RETURNING FROM Mrs. Hoster’s College in England, Mum had been hired as a secretary at a law firm in Eldoret. “Doris Elwell, the other secretary, could type so fast sparks flew from her machine,” Mum says. “Well, she’d been a typist for the Nuremberg Trials, so she had an unfair advantage. And then there was me: plink-plink-pause, plink-plink-pause. After every few lines—scrunch, scrunch, scrunch—I had to rewind the paper and pour gallons of Wite-Out on all my mistakes. It was a tremendous relief to everyone at Shaw and Caruthers when I got engaged to Tim because in those days, you weren’t expected