Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [72]
The next morning, Dad arrived in London. He changed into the new suit, hired a car and made it to the church two minutes before his father’s funeral was due to begin. “It was a showstopper,” Mum says. “Here was Tim back from Africa, sunburned and elegant.” As a former colony and now renegade country, Rhodesia made frequent and alarming headlines in the international press: RHODESIA—APARTHEID HEADS NORTH; RHODESIA FACES ITS FINAL HOUR; THE ARMAGEDDON IS ON. My father must have appeared to his relatives as someone suddenly showing up after being forever lost, dark continent vanished. “It couldn’t have shocked them more if Donald had sat up in his casket and ordered a pink gin for the road,” Mum says.
Dad took a place near a side door and looked at his fellow mourners. I picture them: Lady Fuller sitting stiffly silent in the front row, very elegant in her weeds (I knew so little of my grandfather’s second wife that I can think of her only as the name I have seen in lawyer’s letters, frozen in my imagination like a caricature from a Noel Coward play); Uncle Toe looking pale and serious in the pew behind her; in his wake a respectable showing of cousins, a few aunts, an uncle or two; then a row of solid navy types; and at the back my grandfather’s pig man.
After the vicar had made obligatory noises, everyone was asked to stand and sing “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended.” Then a toppish-brass navy officer took the pulpit and was eloquent on the subject of Captain Connell-Fuller’s career (skillfully steering his comments so that they sailed with considerable berth around the sore point of my grandfather’s never having achieved the much-desired rank of admiral, or even rear admiral). Then an elderly relative stood up and talked about Donald’s fondness for polo; the passion he’d developed in his retirement for raising pigs (the pig man gave an unhappy little wheeze); the time he blew up an oak tree at Douthwaite because it was getting in the way of his golf swing (general chortling). Then the congregation was asked to please stand again for a closing hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”
After that, the old man’s coffin was carried out of the church, lowered into a hole in the ground and then as if the first clod of damp English earth on the wooden lid was a starting gun, the quarrel among his heirs began and didn’t let up for a generation and a half, by which time there was almost nothing left over which to fight. My mother closes her eyes and shakes her head, “There were, as you know, let us just say, some . . . problems with the will.” But Mum won’t elaborate. She flaps the air in front of her face, “Troubled water under the bridge and all that,” she says. “No point going on and on about it, is there?”
SO OUR FATE WAS one million per cent Rhodesian and even at this late date, we carried on fighting for Rhodesia as if it were the last place on earth, as if to lose it would be the same as losing ourselves. And life—the life that remained—went on in all its increasingly surreal impossibility. Vanessa and I continued to attend our segregated government school, where we prayed with renewed concentration and intensity at morning assembly for our fathers, our brothers, our boys, our men. Every six weeks Dad continued to disappear up in the Himalayas to fight guerilla forces, returning home exhausted, his right shoulder hunched like a broken wing from the perpetual weight of the FN rifle he carried. And Mum continued with farmwork: