Perhaps more knowledge would have come in time and I would have found out more about the grandmother and the rural home and how my parents met and about the children they were, about their parents and where they had lived. All this may have been told to me one day, passed down like oral tradition.
It was the opposite at Summer Madness. Lloyd’s past was an active part of his present. It was in the Distinguished Flying Cross that Lloyd’s father had obtained with the 44 Rhodesia Squadron, in the Victoria Cross awarded to his grandfather, and in the sepia-toned photographs from long-ago wars that hung on the walls of the library.
Lloyd could not have gone off on a more different trajectory from his grandfather, Assistant Commissioner Lloyd Douglas Hendricks, commander of the King’s Native Regiment in Tanganyika and one of Rhodesia’s only six recipients of the Victoria Cross. He was one of Rhodes’s Pioneers, just the sort of man you wanted in a battle, especially if the battle happened to be against warriors in loincloths with nothing to shield them from the arsenal of a Maxim gun and other firearms than a goatskin shield, an assegai and the fleetness of their bare feet.
He appears on page 245 of the second volume of the African Heritage history book, a man with colourless eyes and a bushy moustache, looking out at Zimbabwe’s schoolchildren with the glassy stare of the subjects of early photography.
My father was right to say that I was to live with a doctor, but Lloyd was not a doctor in the sense that my parents would have understood doctors. He had obtained his doctorate in classics at Oxford, where he had first gone as an eighteen-year-old to avoid the call-up, the conscription that required all young white men with complete limbs to fight for Rhodesia. At Oxford, he campaigned for the guerrillas, raising money for refugees and for scholarships.
Where he had really gone off on a tangent was in his role in the war. Instead of answering the call-up, or staying as long as he could in England, Lloyd had actually returned to join the comrades – or, as the whites called them, the terrorists. He worked in the refugee camp at Nyadzonia as a teacher of English and civic studies, and he wrote the pamphlets that were scattered from helicopters across the eastern regions. He was there when Nyadzonia was bombed.
Lloyd’s refusal to join the war – I should say, his joining it on the wrong side – put him in direct conflict with his family. And after independence, he cemented his eccentricity by joining the university, but it was not to teach what he had studied. The new curriculum stated that students were better off learning how to make propane-gas-powered stoves and Blair toilets than learning Greek and Latin. Lloyd reinvented himself as a professor of classical literature, specialising in filtering Greek tragedies through the African experience.
Lloyd became another of that special class of Rhodesian eccentrics who were considered to have gone native in preposterous ways; men like Peter Garlake, whose insistence that the ruins in Masvingo were the work of black people alienated him from his fellow whites; or Michael Gelfand and Herbert Aschwanden, who collected Karanga mythology; Frank McEwen, who set up a village for sculptors; and George Fortune, who collected in one place all the totem names and poems of all the totem groups in the country.
It was during the war that Lloyd did just about the only thing of which Alexandra approved: he got engaged to a girl called Tracey Collins. Like Lloyd, she had been a teacher at a school in the Eastern Highlands; she had gone to Chimoio to volunteer as a teacher. She was killed in the attack on Chimoio by the Rhodesians.
Her face was in a frame on Lloyd’s mantelpiece, a small plain woman with hair like Farrah Fawcett’s, in a bow-tied blouse, her eyes earnest behind thick, round glasses, frozen for ever in the unflattering fashions of the late seventies.
4
From my new room at the back of the house, I heard the hum of the swimming pool. I was woken each morning by the sound of birds in the garden. In the first week, I slept on the floor, terrified of making the clean white sheets dirty. And I could not get used to not having Mobhi’s warm smallness next to me, no Joyi to breathe in my ear.
In time, the room became truly mine as I filled it with the strewn evidence of the passions that I picked up and discarded over the years: shoeboxes in which I bred silkworms and fed them mulberry leaves, model horses and framed pictures of jockeys, portraits of Markova and Fonteyn and my mountains of Archie comics and Misty and Jackie annuals.
On my first night, I broke Alexandra’s doll. It was an old one that had been passed down from Eleanor-Jean. It sat on the window ledge opposite my bed. It looked exactly the same as the doll with the porcelain face in Bester Kanyama’s photo studio in Highfield. I vividly saw my sisters and me sitting and posing next to it for a photograph.
It made me shiver to think that this doll with its blank, empty stare had sat there all these years looking first at Eleanor-Jean, then Alexandra, and now me. During that first day, its eyes seemed to follow me. And later, when I woke up in the night, I found its face shining at me in the moonlight. Unable to withstand that steady, unblinking stare, I decided to move it to the back of my cupboard. But I had woken up from a terrifying dream, and my hands were unsteady as I lifted it down. It fell to the floor with a crack, and when I lifted it up it was to see that I had smashed its porcelain face.
I hid it at the back of the cupboard, afraid that Alexandra would one day ask for it. As I lay in my new room in Lloyd’s house in Umwinsidale, I knew only that this room, with the new bed I did not sleep in until much later, was not big enough to contain the pain and fear that were within me. Fear of the doll, of Lloyd, of the unknown world in which I found myself.
The dream I had in Mufakose after Mobhi died came to me again later that night. I was pulled into the embrace of a horrible creature that spoke with my mother’s voice and said I needed to bathe while my father screamed a protest. I woke up frightened, unsure where I was, and only remembered when I realised that I was alone. I clutched the troll doll to my chest. In the company of the ugly doll with pink hair, and a hidden one in the cupboard, I passed my first night in the room that was to be mine for the next nine years, and that remained mine long after I left Lloyd.
For two weeks, nothing happened, and I was safe. Then one afternoon, Lloyd’s sister Alexandra walked over to where Lloyd and I sat outside on the veranda. As soon as I saw the doll in her hand, I waited for the kind of explosion that my mother would have produced in similar circumstances.
But she didn’t look at me, or ask me what had happened.
Instead, she looked at Lloyd and said, ‘If you are to make a success of this, you must teach her to respect other people’s property. And you really ought to teach her better manners, too.’
She put the doll down next to me.
My heart was loud in my chest as I looked at it. Its cracked face and sunken eye seemed to reproach me.
Lloyd said, ‘Memory can’t have meant to do it. In any event, you have not cared about that hideous thing for years now. It should have been at your house if it means so much to you.’
‘Memory, indeed,’ said Alexandra and pursed her lips.
After the doll, my next moment of discomfort came from MaiJethro, who, with Namatai, was one of the maids who took care of the house and of Lloyd’s grandmother, Poppy. They lived in the servants’ quarters, which were at the back of the house, hidden by a large hedge, but I naturally saw them every day as they worked in the different rooms.
MaiJethro, as far as I knew, never had a child, Jethro or no Jethro. And there was no Ba’Jethro, though he lived every day in MaiJethro’s conversation, serving, it appeared, no further purpose beyond agreeing with whatever view she wished to put forward. She told long stories about their conversations. His views served only to support hers, and she offered him to us as an authority on any subject, from the war in Mozambique to anything else she wanted to pronounce on.
I used often to see a small skinny man with gnarled hands, who smoked roll-up cigarettes outside the servants’ quarters while reading Lloyd’s newspaper from the prev
ious day. I assumed that this was Ba’Jethro until Namatai told me that he wasn’t, but did not explain any more.
The first time she saw me, MaiJethro made me stand before her in the kitchen while she assailed me with a thousand questions. Where was I from? What did my father do? Did I have many brothers? How had he died, this brother that was dead? Where was he buried? What did my mother look like? Where was she from? What about my sisters? What were they called? How old were they? Did all my family look like me? Why did I look the way I did? Had I been bewitched? How did Lloyd know my family? Did he give me any money? Where did I keep the money that he gave me? What was my totem? Where was our kumusha? When was I going back?
I tried to answer, but the questions kept coming.
I burst into tears.
‘Otilda,’ said a voice from the kitchen.
MaiJethro and I looked at the door and found Lloyd, looking stern. He put an arm around me and told me to go to my room. I left them in the kitchen. When I saw MaiJethro again, she looked at me for a long time. I looked back at her without blinking. She never again asked me any questions about my family or how I had come to live with Lloyd, but she looked at me warily, as though I were a dog of whose temper she was not entirely certain.
Namatai was one of the handful of people that I had met who did not do that visible double take on first seeing me. She reminded me of MaiWhizi, back on Mharapara, who talked constantly of other women’s complexions, only Namatai was obsessed with hair – with who had nice hair and who did not. She gave me greasy green ointment that she said was hair food, and she plaited my hair. Unlike my mother’s, Namatai’s hands were not harsh against my scalp.
Both Namatai and MaiJethro had rooms in the servants’ quarters. But more often than not Namatai spent the night in the cottage with Poppy.
Lloyd and Alexandra’s grandmother, Poppy, was the oldest person I had ever seen. She lived in a small cottage on the estate, some way away from the main house. She spent most of her days lying in bed or sitting in her wheelchair on the veranda, looking out at the flowers, trapped in the dementia that had come upon her after her first stroke. In the rare intervals when she was lucid, she asked Namatai to play her jazz records.
When she was young, Poppy had come to the colony as a flapper, with suitcases full of daringly cut drop-waist dresses and strings of beads. Transplanted from the world of London nightclubs to the heat and dust of Rhodesia, and shut out from the currents and fashions of London, Poppy flapped determinedly right to the end, stuck in the jazz age. When I came to live at Summer Madness, I found her still playing the records she must have listened to when she first got off the boat from England.
Her one moment of glory was just a few years after her first grandchild was born, when Louis Armstrong came to play in Salisbury, and the ‘colour bar’, as they called the segregation that separated the races, was for that one evening put aside: both blacks and whites gathered to hear him perform.
With Namatai, MaiJethro and Poppy, I was happy enough, but I never recovered my relationship with Alexandra. I want to believe that she might have been kinder to me if she had known how. She only knew how to command black people or give them her charity. And I was a black child who was only black on the inside.
More than anything, I was relieved that Alexandra and Ian did not live in the valley, but on their farm in Chipinge. They came to town once a month. Alexandra’s marriage to Ian Fleming gave her the improbable name of Alexandra Fleming, which, given her manic dislike of germs, seemed apposite.
Large, florid and moving always in the comingled smells of tobacco and brandy, Ian was a man of many prejudices and little humour. He hated Jews and Greeks and Italians. He hated the Portuguese. He was not too wild about the Irish, either, or the Scots and Welsh, so you can only imagine how he felt about non-whites. His language was coloured by racial otherness. ‘He was drunk as a mine munt on payday’ was one of his favourite expressions, munt being short for muntu, a word that means person in its original, but truncated to munt was as dismissive as his other favourite words for black people: zots and Afs and kafs.
Above all, he hated the new leadership; he had gloomy predictions about what would happen to the country now that the zots had taken over.
His Rhodesia was one of excellence and possibility and he was given to enumerating its successes. He said all of this in my presence, but I was probably invisible to him, and he did not think that I understood anything he said – or if I did, that it did not matter. I was not sophisticated enough to take him on, to point out to him that this Rhodesia had worked only for a few thousand white people.
He also hated people he called ‘poofters’, an all-encompassing category that took in anyone who was not a zot or Jewish or Greek, Portuguese or Italian, Welsh or Scottish, who behaved in any manner that Ian saw as disagreeably different.
It was a category elastic enough to take in Lloyd’s friend Sandy Knight-Bruce, Alan Milhouse, who was a psychiatrist and taught at the university, and anyone else who had the effrontery to act in contravention of how Ian prescribed men should act.
He talked mainly about his macadamia nut estate in Chimanimani, and about the wars that the Flemings and Hendricks had fought in. Between them, the Flemings and the Hendricks had been in every war from the Matabeleland suppression to the First and Second World Wars and the Civil War.
What tied him and Alexandra together was drinking. During their visits, bottles piled up. Looking back, there was something essentially joyless in their drinking, a determination that had nothing to do with conviviality.
Liz Warrender and Sandy Knight-Bruce, the most malicious gossips in Umwinsidale, told me later that Ian had another excitement in his past – a tragedy, even. He had had an affair once, but Alexandra had made him leave the woman and the baby. ‘And I promise you,’ said Liz Warrender, who told me this story, ‘she’s had him by the short-and-curlies ever since.’
Alexandra did not forgive easily. That smashed doll formed the strained basis of my relationship with her. I can connect a straight line from the crack in that doll’s face to her testimony in the witness box at my trial.
She told the judge that I had killed Lloyd for the Hendricks money and for Summer Madness and everything in it. She knew about the will because Lloyd had told her that he would be leaving everything to me. She had not liked it, of course, and had tried in vain to plead with him, and she saw me only as one who sought to take the things the family had fought for and make them my own.
I could never forget that I had ruined her doll, and always I felt that I would say the wrong thing to her. I felt incomplete and inadequate before her cool scrutiny, and so I said as little as I could; for a long time afterwards she thought, as I heard her say to Ian one day, that I seemed ‘slow, somehow retarded’.
This, then, was my new life at Summer Madness, with Lloyd who brought me there, Poppy, MaiJethro and Namatai, and Sandy and Liz and the dogs, and, happily on the periphery, Alexandra and Ian.
5
When I look back, those early years with Lloyd come to me as a jumble of books, horses and dogs, and a long series of journeys, both actual and imagined, but all real to me. In Mufakose, I moved between my rigidly defined worlds of home and school, my mother’s churches, healers and hospitals.
In my tree house at Summer Madness, mercifully far from the swimming pool, I spent long days reading Lloyd and Alexandra’s old books. I captured the castle. I went deep in the sea of adventure. I danced with Markova at Sadler’s Wells, with Drina in Switzerland, and with Posy and Petrova and Pauline. With the Lone Pine Five, I hunted German spies on the Yorkshire Moors.
To Middle-earth and the Secret Garden I went, to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees. I brought Beth March back from the dead, and instead killed off Amy and married Laurie to Jo.
When it was too wet or cold to go outside, I stayed in the library, a dark, cool room at the back of the house, from which I could hear the burr of the swimming p
ool engine. In the library, and up in the tree house, I found the happiest and most peaceful moments of my life at that difficult time.
Crippled by fear and longing for home, I was saved by books. The worlds I travelled to allowed me to escape the pain of being uprooted from Mufakose. I had never seen so many books gathered in a single space as I saw in that room. I felt less afraid when I thought of all the other people who seemed to have had harder lives than mine. I disappeared completely to occupy the world of whatever book I was reading.
As I read more and my English improved, I often spent days in Lloyd’s library. I spent hours before the television, watching Flambards, and Flipper, fascinated by adverts for Sunlight and Colgate.
I sometimes cried myself to sleep in the first months with Lloyd. When I did sleep, it was to wake from the terrible dreams in which the Chimera spoke in my mother’s voice. It strikes me now that I was scared of many things in that first year: going to bed, the swimming pool, Alexandra, MaiJethro even, but I was never afraid of Lloyd.
I had thought him very old when I first met him, but I was seeing him through the eyes of a child, to whom all grown people are ancient. In reality, he was just over thirty-five when I came to live with him. If you want a physical description beyond the black-and-white blurs you have seen in the papers, then I would say he was tallish and thin, with ash-blond hair that he wore to his shoulders, and an amused face, as though he had just that minute remembered a joke someone had once told him.
The early years also come to me with the sounds of the eighties. Lloyd and I listened to cassette tapes by Fleetwood Mac and Depeche Mode. I hear ‘Take On Me’, ‘Personal Jesus’, as we drive under the umbrella trees on our approach to Nyanga, to Mutare to stay at La Rochelle, to Matopos to stand on top of the world, and to Mana Pools to track elephants – or at least, for Lloyd and Alan to track the elephants while I read in the tent, or listen to Salt-N-Pepa on my Walkman.
The Book of Memory Page 14
