Leaving Before the Rains Come (15 page)

“I know.”

“I hope you’re married.”

“I am.”

My grandmother’s eyelids fluttered and she sank against her pillows again. “Well, that’s something.” Then her mind reeled back through all the eligible men who would have been living in Kenya at around the time my mother was meeting my father. I explained that Charlie Ross was no one she had ever seen before, and from no family she had ever known or heard of. “I met him in Zambia,” I said.

“Ross,” my grandmother muttered. Then her mind skipped centuries and seized on Scottish history circa the brief, shaky reign of Mary Queen of Scots. “Chief Alexander Ross,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“The ninth of Balnagowan,” Granny insisted. “A very violent and unpleasant man. Wild and lawless. He’s given to land raiding.
Land
raiding. Ardmore, Aird Mhor. You can’t be too careful, you know. These tendencies are very strong. Very.”

I said, “Charlie’s from a very old Philadelphia family.”

“That’s not possible,” Granny argued.

“He’s American,” I explained. “From the United States.”

“Well then.” My grandmother looked out the window. My grandfather was making his way slowly down a row of potatoes, weeding. His pipe clamped in the lower left corner of his mouth emitted tiny blue clouds of smoke. “There will be mildew, of course,” Granny said. Then she respired in that way of the elderly, her cheeks sucking in, as if great sadness had overtaken her. We sat in silence for a while. On the wall above the dresser was a portrait of Mum as she’d been in her late thirties. She looked radiant, but also a little surprised, as if startled to find herself in a picture frame in this Scottish bedroom. The baby turned mercilessly, pushing feet into ribs. I shifted my weight.

Then Granny turned back to me and with sudden, ferocious clarity she said, “You know, you will be terribly lonely, Bobo.”

I smiled, thinking of Charlie in Lusaka, and of the family we would have, and of the ways in which our house would soon be filled with noise and life and urgency. We’d get more dogs; there would be cats and horses. We’d settle into one another and a culture would grow around us, the way culture had grown around my parents and grandparents. Mum and Dad’s house was salty with dogs and horses and sweat. My grandparents’ house was redolent with old books, pipe tobacco, and dust—as if Kenya was something that had never shaken out of the furniture. They had overcome the early days of Granny threatening Grandpa with her chamber pot. They had survived Granny’s hatred of the matrimonial state. Now, even with Granny’s mind in full flight, they were like a tiny, unassailable sovereign nation. Charlie and I would do the same.

“No I won’t,” I said. “We won’t be lonely.”

But later that evening, in the spare bedroom where I was sleeping, I noticed the end of the bed was dented, as if a dog had habitually nested there. I settled myself into the hollow and looked up. On the wall opposite the bed there was a painting my mother had done as a teenager in Kenya. It showed giraffes cruising across the grasslands of the Uasin Gishu plateau. I knew then that I was sitting where my grandmother must have sat for hours, staring at her history, remembering the irrational decades in Africa, when she had most belonged to a land that would never have her. I knew then that there was a terrible possibility Granny knew everything there was to know about loneliness and that she’d seen my likely future in her own unlikely past.

B
y August Charlie’s work wasn’t going well. His investors in the safari company decided the government-issued permits were taking too long to procure. The canoe and walking safaris were canceled; Charlie needed to move closer to the whitewater rafting operations below Victoria Falls and concentrate his energies on that part of the business. So we packed up the house, sold two ponies, and rented a cottage in Livingstone on the banks of the Zambezi River.

Before we left Lusaka, I invented a reference for Mr. Njovu that might help him get work elsewhere. Freddy waved me away like a cholera fly, insisting the last thing he needed was a reference from me. His uncle, he assured me, had a car and a good nose for business. “I am going to be a taxi driver,” he announced. Then he invited me to see the house he had been building near the Great East Road.

I was astonished. “You’ve been building a house?” I thought I knew Freddy and that I had been on friendly enough terms that I would have known something this monumental. “When?”

“On my days off,” Freddy said. “You should see it.”

So Freddy and I took one last terrifying drive together through town, over the bridge that spanned the railway line, past the Anglican cathedral, and out toward the airport. Then we turned down a jumble of dirt roads and stopped at a small house, redolent with fresh cement. Freddy negotiated the cluster of padlocks on the door and let me in. My eyes adjusted to the light and I saw that not all our belongings had made it down to our new house in Livingstone. Freddy’s new house was furnished almost entirely from what he had gleaned from ours: a couple of small tables, two garden chairs, some pots and pans, plates and cups, cushions, a few vases, photo frames.

It took me a while to know what to say. “It’s very nice,” I said at last.

Freddy smiled. “We like the same things,” he agreed.

Charlie and I moved south with the two remaining horses and the puppy. At the end of the month, when my belly had stretched far beyond the limit of what it seemed possible my skin could contain, we drove across the border into Zimbabwe and found lodgings on a farm next to a clinic in Marondera. I worried about being alone for the delivery, by which I meant I was worried about being beyond the reach of anyone related to me by blood. I phoned Dad and asked for Mum, even as I feared that her latest depression compounded with her own mother’s precipitous final decline had put her out of the running as a potential helpmeet. “I’ll have a word with her,” Dad said. “She’ll pull her socks up for you, Bobo. She always does.”

So Mum joined us—her hair slightly askew, her eyes paled to yellow, and her hands more unsteady than normal. I could tell it was a great effort of will for her to stay on the surface of her mind, to keep her madness at bay. She had difficulty concentrating, she drank a little too much too early, her sentences sometimes came out of sequence, slurred and breaking the bounds of customary logic. I could tell she felt my watchfulness, anxiety, and wariness and she wanted to compensate with a level of caring she was barely capable of giving to herself. “Come on, Bobo,” she said. “Isn’t it time for your afternoon nap?” Or, “Here’s a nice cup of tea,” by which I knew everything she had left unspoken.

In the mornings, we went for walks around the lodge. In the afternoons, we drank tea under the flamboyant trees in the yard and read. In the evenings, we ate an early supper on the veranda and listened to the sounds of a southern African spring: bush babies, crickets, and frogs. About once every three hours, Mum looked at her watch and said, “This has been a biblically long pregnancy, Bobo. Why don’t you drink some Epsom salts and hop up and down?” Then, early on the morning of September 15, 1993, the slight contractions I had been having all week tugged stronger. We drove to the little clinic nearby and the midwife declared the baby ready for arrival. “First we give you an enema,” she said, snapping rubber gloves onto her hands.

I looked at Mum in terror.

“Oh sorry, Bobo. I forgot to tell you about this bit.” But the truth is, no one had told me about any bit, or at least not in any way that might now be helpful. Anything I knew about childbirth I had gleaned from my
Where There Is No Doctor
book, from high school biology, and from Vanessa who had closed her eyes when I asked her what to expect. “Oh Al, it’s not the
most
fun I’ve ever had.”

I labored hard for eight hours. And then, at two in the afternoon, I suddenly felt the baby insisting itself into the world, its head crashing against my pelvis. But as hard as I strained, nothing would change. The baby stayed inside me, and I stayed helplessly beetle-turned-up, my spine buckling with the pressure of this unproductive heaving. I searched for Mum. “Is this bad?” I asked.

“You’re fine,” Mum said, which I didn’t think I was, but if she sounded calm, almost bored, then I reasoned we were probably still okay. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Charlie told me not to panic. Then he said something about the difficulty he’d sometimes faced breathing thin air near the summit of Kilimanjaro back when he’d guided it for American clients. I glared at him. A cigar poked preemptively out of his shirt pocket. Another wave of agony surged through me. Another hour passed. I pushed and breathed and pushed and breathed. Yet another hour came and went. Then Mum said, “Oh, do get a move on, Bobo. It’s jolly nearly time for tea.” Which is how I knew even she was beginning to worry, seriously.

So I redoubled my efforts, and still nothing happened. More time passed. Then the doctor made an impatient noise. She brought out a scalpel, made an incision in what felt like the epicenter of my pain, sank her arms between my legs, attached something to the baby’s head, and began pulling. Charlie put his foot on the end of the bed to stop it skidding across the room, Mum held on to my shoulders. I pushed and breathed and told myself I’d never do this again. Then there was an abrupt release, and there she was: a long-limbed, waxy, blood-smeared baby unfurling on my chest, her lips a perfect rosebud of query, and everything I had ever thought I knew about pain and love and fear of death raced out of me and was replaced by a fierce, murderous adoration. I looked at Mum in astonishment.

“I know,” she said, and for a moment something swam between us that had to do with the children she had lost, although it wasn’t anything I was prepared to put into words. Then before I could try, Mum cleared her throat. “Don’t worry, Bobo. They all look like that when they’re born. Chinless and a bit squashed.” The baby closed her mouth over my nipple. Mum pulled the sheet back off my stomach with careful apprehension, as if expecting to unearth a small but vicious animal, and allowed herself a proper inspection of her first granddaughter. “Well at least she has a nice leg for a riding boot,” she said at last.

Our new cottage, several miles upstream from Victoria Falls, had seemed romantic and charmingly eccentric when I was pregnant. But now that Sarah was here, I could tell it was not suitable for a newborn. Our landlady, a Belgian of White Russian descent, had come out from the gloom of postwar Brussels to the violently bright promise of the Belgian Congo. In subsequent decades, divorce, war, and her own restlessness had kicked her about the African continent and even for brief stints to Pakistan and England. But in the 1970s she had ended up in Zambia, teaching French in a Catholic mission school. When she retired, she bought this dry little farm at a bend in the river and named it Quiet Waters.

Out of rocks harvested from the farm, she built a house for herself and cottages for potential renters. We were the only takers. The buildings were picturesque enough from a distance. Up close, however, the concrete floors were cracked and seeped colonies of stinging guinea-fowl ants. The small, uneven rooms were stiflingly hot, absorbing heat all day and exhaling it at night. Electricity was sporadic; there was no running water. I became frantic and tearful, holding Charlie up on his way to work in the morning to plead my case. “Nappies,” I argued, pointing to the washing line. “The baby,” I implored. “And it’s so hot.”

I wanted the luxury of running water, a fan, and reliable refrigeration. And more than at any other time since leaving for boarding school at the age of seven, I needed my mother. But one morning, not long after Sarah was born, Granny had refused her morning cup of tea, turned her face to the wall, and closed her eyes in the final Highland gesture. So in early October, Mum flew to Scotland and stayed in the antiseptic hum of a Scottish hospital for weeks, watching her mother gradually let go. Granny had already relinquished most of her mind, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Now she went about losing her appetite, her worldly attachments, and her will to live.

Her final words were, “I don’t want to be a nuisance.” Then Granny closed her eyes and seemed to hold her breath until everything stilled and she was gone. After that, Mum left the Dundee Infirmary and went back to the bungalow with its tropical-setting radiators and its radio forever statically lost beyond the reaches of
The Archers
. She found her father in his garden, bent over his potato bed, preemptively turning the hard winter soil for next year’s crop, as if grief could be stanched as long as there was the promise of seasonal vegetables. Mum stood, cocooned in the sheepskin jacket she had kept in her parents’ spare room since she had left England in the early 1970s. The wide collar had come and gone out of fashion at least twice in that time.

My grandfather saw my mother watching him, straightened up, and tapped his pipe out against his corduroy pants. “It’s eleven,” Mum said. My grandfather confirmed this fact with a glance to the soupy sky. Wordlessly, he propped his hoe against the shed wall, broke the clods of clay off his shoes, and went inside. Mum followed him into the kitchen. They had their aperitifs—a couple of rough martinis—then Mum set the table with her mother’s cracked or chipped china plates and with the old silver cutlery worn with the teeth of their ancestors. My grandfather took the food out of the oven and brought it to the dining room.

They sat down to lunch. My grandfather poured them both a Guinness stout. “She’s gone, you know,” Mum said. My grandfather nodded and a few huge tears rolled down his impressive nose. Then he carved the reheated mutton and handed her a plate. The green beans had been boiled gray, which was one of those details you notice after someone has died, and then can never stop noticing. My grandmother always blanched beans to perfection; salted water to a boil, the beans added and cooked for no longer than four minutes, rinsed in a shock of cold water, and served within minutes of coming off the stove. These colorless, limp things were the beans that would forever more come to this table now she was gone.

A week after her death there was a small memorial service for my grandmother at the village kirk, but there turned out to be remarkably little to say about a woman who had been born on the Isle of Skye, found her way to Kenya to raise her two daughters, and had come home to Britain for the last decades of her life. The fact of her having taken safaris in the shadow of Mount Elgon, or of her having been fluent in both Gaelic and Swahili, and of her ability to kill a rabbit with a single well-placed chop to the back of its neck did not seem worth recounting to a group of mostly dutiful, slightly doddering parishioners attending the service. They had known her only as the old woman in the Second World War cottage on the edge of the village, the owner of a sweet dog, the wife of the chivalrous, absentminded English gentleman who spent most of his days in his vegetable garden.

“Well, that’s the thing. There’s never very much to say at the end,” Dad said. “Or there shouldn’t be. Someone’s born, does the bit in the middle, and then they die. It doesn’t change all that much from one bloke to the next.”

In the New Year, Mum flew back to Zambia and surrendered completely to that old undertow of grief. Although this time she went so deep that looking down even we—her daughters and husband—couldn’t see much more than the waving shadow of her limbs. We missed her as much for who she was in particular—irreverent, intelligent, capable of surprising surges of compassion—as we did for who she represented for us: the mother ship.

Perhaps most of us never stop needing a person from whom we can fledge and return repeatedly, continually trying out our independence in the knowledge that there is somewhere and someone to which and to whom we can return. Vanessa and I had learned the beginning of this universal truth piecemeal and early in the sinkholes of our mother’s periodic depressions and manic attacks, but what we didn’t know then was the whole of that truth: the only way to stop needing a mother ship was to become the mother ship yourself.

Mum spent most of her days in bed, refusing to notice anything around her. She didn’t notice mealtimes come and go, she didn’t notice Vanessa or Vanessa’s two young sons, she didn’t notice Sarah or me when we came up to visit. She drank mostly brandy, and often she took pills, and the combination of the two caused her days to bleed into one long deferment. She had taken our family lifeboat—the one in which I had vaguely expected us all to reconvene and reunite from time to time—and she had wobbled off alone on her own compelling current. She was now impossible to reach by either ordinary or extraordinary means.