Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller Read Free Book Online Page A

Accordingly, there is in Langlands Lodge the ghost of a little white dog (killing, as it were, two birds with one stone). My cousins say they’ve heard it clatter up and down the stairs at night, and until my grandmother died in 1993, she saw it with such persistence she began to doubt it was a ghost at all and began to leave milk and food for it on the landing.
    Uncle Sandy is two million percent Scottish and a pilot. He plays the bagpipes at all our family funerals and weddings, kitted out in the proper attire (a mere glimpse of his bagpipes and sporran makes Mum weep). Uncle Sandy can tell you next week’s weather just by looking at the clouds over the Sidlaw Hills; he can dead reckon the speed of the wind to within a knot or two and he can tell, without looking, when the rooks have come in from the fields to roost in the forest near Langlands. Because of his job, he is off traveling much of the time, but when he is home, he stations himself in the kitchen and cooks the kitchen to a steam, as if the act of leaving behind frozen tubs of chili and freshly baked bread and bottles of plum jam means that he is never really gone from Langlands.
    It is in this creaking, ghosted home, fragrant with Uncle Sandy’s cooking, the BBC ancient-rhyming the Shipping Forecast from the kitchen and the old grandfather clock in the dining room creaking as if time hurt to tell, that I touch the corner of my grandfather’s war in two scraps of paper. The first is his enlisting agreement, signed June 13, 1940. “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Sixth, His Heirs and Successors, and that I will as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully defend His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, in Person, Crown and Dignity against all enemies, and will observe and obey all orders of His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, and of the General and Officers set over me. So help me God.”
    There appears my grandfather’s signature.
    Below that was written “Have you received a notice paper stating the liabilities you are incurring by enlisting?” Next to which my grandfather had penned, “Yes.”
    “And do you understand and are you willing to accept them?”
    “Yes.”
     
     
    MY GRANDFATHER’S FATHER was a vicar in the Church of England. “There are bishops and vicars going back as far as you like on that side of the family,” Mum says. “Scholars, you understand. It wasn’t as if God sent down a great bolt of lightning and inspired them—nothing that easy—not like preachers and missionaries. All of our family had to go to something like university for seven years—ages and ages, in any case—and speak Latin and Greek and Hebrew. One of the Huntingford bishops is buried under the floor of Winchester Cathedral, or there’s a plaque there, anyway, commemorating him. He was head of the college. No one liked him very much. I think his flock—or whatever it is that Bishops have—mutinied.”
    At the turn of the century, my grandfather’s father looked at his growing family—three young boys—and decided that he couldn’t raise them on a vicar’s income in England. So like a lot of other people buying into the myth of East Africa’s munificence, he thought he’d try to make a go of it in Kenya. “Everyone thought they could go out there and grow coffee, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded and my grandfather wasn’t the least bit interested in coffee, he was too spiritual, too otherworldly, too learned and scholarly to come to grips with farming, so that failed,” Mum says. “He built a church somewhere, but the thing burned down. And then the youngest of the three boys, Tony, became terribly ill.”
    The child was raced to the Eldoret hospital, but he died of septicemia. He was ten years old. “I don’t think the family ever recovered from Tony’s death. His parents went into a deeply profound mourning. They didn’t really care about money or much of anything