Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [52]
Lots of love,
Tim.
A month later, Mum gave away what she could not carry and boarded a ship in Mombasa with Vanessa, Felix the cat, and Suzy the dog. She took her favorite books, the Duke of Wellington bronze cast, a couple of the hunting prints, a few linens, and the orange Le Creuset pots. “You could feel Rhodesia long before you got there,” Mum says. “You could sense this outlaw nation, this rebel state.” And I can tell she likes those words—outlaw, rebel—and how they fit in with the idea she has of herself. “British warships patrolled the Mozambique coast to prevent anything getting into Rhodesia via Beira. South African and Rhodesian passengers weren’t allowed off the ship. I thought it was very exciting.”
But Mum was quickly disillusioned. On the train north from Cape Town to Bulawayo, she watched in horror as the landscape turned drier and harsher and flatter. When Dad had written that “there’s rather a dry spell here,” it was a colossal understatement. In fact, the country was in the throes of one of the worst droughts on record. In Matabeleland, cattle had begun dying of thirst before Christmas. By January 1967, the late-planted cotton had grown only six inches and defeated farmers had begun to plow it under.
Up in the high veldt it was just as dry. Cultivated crops wilted blue in the fields, wild trees on the kopjes failed to leaf out and thirsty snakes swarmed to Berry’s Post to drink the dog’s water. “The farmhouse was a funny Spanish style with these big French doors,” Mum says. “My first morning there, I found Vanessa looking through the glass eye to eye at a cobra bellied up to her on the other side of the door, tongue flickering. I was so terrified, I hired Tabatha the next day to follow Vanessa around everywhere.” Mum, appalled by the hostility of the land, its dusty loneliness, the unrelentingly dry wind, couldn’t envision an occasion for her winklepickers.
Within weeks of arriving, Suzy died of tick fever and then Felix was murdered. “We think by the workers,” Mum says. “There was a nasty undercurrent in that part of the country. They resented UDI and they didn’t like whites. I suppose that’s why they killed our cat.”
And then, their second month on the farm, my parents woke up in the middle of the night, shocked conscious by a sensation of being watched. “There, standing at the bottom of the bed was the manager who had worked on the farm before us.” Mum’s eyes go pale. “Well, his ghost anyway. He had shot himself six months earlier, so he wasn’t really there.” Even on this very warm South African morning, Mum rubs her arms as if cold. “Look.” Mum presents me with the evidence of gooseflesh on her skin. “To this day, I get chills talking about it. I’ll never, ever forget looking at someone who was not really there, but he was there. It wasn’t a bad dream, it wasn’t a hallucination, it was real.” Mum’s chin goes up. “Especially being Scottish from the Isle of Skye, I know there are ghosts and fairies in our midst.” Mum lowers her brow and clarifies, “Proper fairies, not gays and stuff like that.” She takes a sip of her tea and then scans the garden with her binoculars to see if any acceptably uncommon birds have shown up. “No,” she says at last, “the ex-manager had come to warn us that Lytton-Brown was a crook. He hadn’t paid the ex-manager and he wasn’t planning to pay us. He was going to wait until it was harvest time and then fire us and take all the profits. Wasn’t he, Tim?”
Dad grunts. “Say again.”
“FIRE US AND TAKE ALL THE PROFITS!” Mum repeats.
BY HARVEST TIME, Mum was eight months pregnant. As predicted by the ex-manager’s ghost, Lytton-Brown fired my parents as soon as the crop was in and refused to pay them for their season’s work. “It was a terrible blow because we had worked so hard and had produced such good yields in spite of the bad rains,” Mum says. Dad began legal proceedings, but in the meantime,