But in spite of it all—or maybe because of it all—Uncle Roly and Auntie Bar’s only child ended up rewarding all Mugger’s exhausting social climbing in spectacular measure: by the time of her death, in 2009 at the age of eighty-one, Cousin Jane was one of the queen’s oldest friends, and widow of her majesty’s master of horses, David Anthony Thomas Fane, Fifteenth Earl of Westmorland. “You see?” Mum said, as if this proved a point she had been trying to make ever since handing me The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook more than two decades earlier. “Having a barmy mother is a veritable bonus in the proper circles.”
“Well, it hasn’t always worked out for me,” I said.
“No,” Mum agreed, but I could tell she was trying to think her way out of a tight spot. “Although it seems worth the risk, doesn’t it? I mean, better to err on the side of insanity than total boredom, isn’t it?” Then Mum started flapping her hand in front of her face in delighted panic. “Or to be descended from Hottentots,” she managed to wheeze before lurching for her asthma inhaler. “Oh Bobo, don’t make me laugh!”
To say someone has lost her mind does not do justice to what madness looks like. It’s not as if a person’s mind rolls out of her head, lodges under the carpet or between the cracks of the sofa, and is therefore retrievable by some logical search. A person whose mind has gone is lost to herself as well as to the world; she becomes a shell of terror in search of what is missing. What is confusing, from the outside, is that a madwoman might still have relatively long periods when her mind is restored to her, or times when muscle memory allows her body to behave as if she is coherent and all here, present and correct.
I watched my mother go mad. Afterward, when I tried to put a time on it I would have said her mind left her when I was around eleven and she did not conjure, or will, it back in a robust and enduring way until I was in my late twenties. But my mother’s absence wasn’t anything like a solid washout, a Boofy-like obliteration. It was drier than that, more as if an internal current had shorted, and flickering outages would occur, only to suddenly trip on again. And in those times, as if to make up for her gone days, my mother was a prism of creative clarity: compassionate, witty, capable, and fierce. I could feel myself slipping into the deep grooves of her influence; her passion for books, her appreciation for art, her addiction to the BBC, her obsessive love of dogs inherited in turn from her own parents.
Meantime, Vanessa cleaved to the Garrards. Photos of my great-grandfather, my grandfather, the six Garrard sisters, and their children put her firmly on that side of the family. She has their enormous blue eyes, their slightly disapproving look of torpid detachment, the dreamy artistic temperament of Auntie Bar, the Welton Place addiction to an appearance of perpetual childhood, and the spiritual susceptibility that led a couple of the Garrard sisters to become Christian Scientists. She has, too, Boofy’s fatal aversion to pain. I can see why Auntie Pammy took one look at Vanessa on that unfortunate visit to her in London and recognized disappearing versions of her lost twin. “Such a lovely, love-ly, child,” Auntie Pammy said of my sister. “So utterly, so completely one-of-us.”
And I had cringed, knowing that I was not completely one-of-them. Instead, like my mother’s side of the family, I am small-framed and intense and anything but languorous. My creativity wasn’t the enchanting landscapes and innocent vibrancy of Vanessa’s William Morris–inspired pastels. My creativity was the madness of all that Scottish passion and fiery tribalism, barely contained. While Vanessa refused to paint unless the mood was perfect or her studio allowed the right light, I wrote because the urge to do so collected the fuel of too much left unsaid, and sparked onto the page almost unbidden.
I have the shape of my mother’s face, her thick hands, her short torso, her thin, long legs—“Wonderful leg for a riding boot,” Dad always said charitably of our underpinnings—and her unswaying, staccato walk. I had her sense of humor too, finding delight in the absurd, the deliberately provocative, the ridiculous understatement. In the way of all daughters, I watched my mother for clues to my future. Her madness terrified me in part because it was too easy for me to see that if I had inherited her small ankles and her oversized laugh, how could I have skipped the place where her ingenuity and passion sat too close to insanity on the spiraling legacy of heritage? Add to this the fuel from all that alcohol on my father’s side of the family, my star sign, and half a dozen other physical and metaphysical facts, and I figured I was probably an inferno waiting to happen. Stop, drop, and roll.
MARRIAGE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
It is the perpetuating tragedy of all families: each of us believing our congenital pathologies and singular pains end with us. We think of ourselves as individual dammed rivers, the blood of generations stopped up in our veins, the accumulated habits of a lifetime ceasing at the border of our skins. We don’t think of our present, our current conditions, and our immediate decisions as incurable infections or persisting gifts that will cross through the porous vectors of inheritance and time and blossom into the future. In spite of biblically ancient warnings, we don’t think of our choices—our decision to wake up each morning and be free, or remain in the thrall of some visible or invisible jail, for example—as contaminating or blessing not only ourselves but also our children, their children unto the third and to the fourth generations.
But here I was. Look back into the double mirror images of my history, past my mother to my grandmothers, and to their mothers before them, and regardless of their true talents and ambitions, the women whose blood rushed directly into mine were basically glorified housekeepers, their fates inextricably tied to the men they married. There’s the tragically drunk Australian, understandably homesick perhaps, immolated in the fireplace of one of England’s grand homes. There’s Mugger, all her ambition going powerfully sideways into ever-greater and more extreme acts of charity. There’s Boofy, all her joie de vivre horribly funneled into self-destruction. And there’s my mother’s mother, reading late into the night through all the histories of England and Scotland, memorizing clans and battles and chiefs and kings and queens until she could have earned a double doctorate in the subject, but still rising at dawn to make oats porridge, weed the vegetable garden, and do the laundry.
“When we were first married, I kept the chamber pot within reach at all times,” my grandmother confided to me when I was over in England as a teenager. “Otherwise you never get any sleep, or any time to read, or any time to yourself.” She sighed and sank back against her pillows, Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots resting on her chest. “You need to empty it over their heads only once. They won’t pester you without your permission after that.”
Out my grandmother’s bedroom window that warm English summer, I could hear my grandfather in the garden removing the suckers off his small crop of tobacco. “If I could do it all again,” Granny said, “I’d do more of it my way.” Then she closed her eyes and with that went whatever she might have said next. What was bewildering to me then was that my grandparents seemed to have the sort of marriage anyone might think of as sound. They synched perfectly, their habits and addictions, their passion for Kenya and Cairn terriers, their love of books, strong tea, and rough midmorning martinis. They shared secret languages, speaking Gaelic or Swahili to one another so they could gossip about fellow passengers on trains and planes. And yet at least once a week in the time I spent with them that holiday from Africa, Granny would say, “Marriage is the workhouse, Bobo. Don’t do it.”
But like all newlyweds I thought I had made a contract of a different sort with my spouse, a fresh pact, distinct and separate from all the ways my grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done marriage. I thought that Charlie and I would operate out of our own unique and complete love, as if boredom, thwarted ambition, petty sulking, and the tiny ways in which we deliberately or accidentally misunderstand one another could not happen to us because we alone had fallen in love, as it had never been done before. Ours was a love across
seas, between cultures, and against all the odds. Charlie was the perfect rescuer, and I the most relieved and grateful rescue victim. “Wahini,” he called me. “Chica,” he said. Or “Mamacita.” I didn’t know the meaning of Charlie’s terms of endearment, but their foreignness only served to prove to me that ours would be a new and different connection.
Still, the Polish priest at our wedding had been right. The first year was hard, and after that, well, it didn’t get worse immediately, but it got more and more silent, and silence frightened me more than almost anything else. What was confusing is that I had wanted to be saved from the uncertainty and the noise of my childhood, but beyond a definite idea that I would feel safe docked to the steady command center that was Charlie, I hadn’t thought it all the way through. I hadn’t figured that what had terrified me had also defined me; without the exuberant crazy-in-a-good-way and the disturbing crazy-in-a-bad-way pendulum that had been all I had ever known, I wasn’t sure how to be. I turned the music up, and Charlie turned it down.
“How about somewhere in the middle?” he suggested.
But I wasn’t good at the middle. I was good at the extremes; I had been trained for that. Loud was my specialty, although if I needed to—in the bush when surrounded by wildlife, in the hours and hours of chapel at boarding school under the gaze of unforgiving teachers, when the business of war turned serious and deadly—I could outsilence anyone. Still, a silent marriage—a house without banter, without one person shouting and another screaming opera, without the occasional all-out drunken brawl—was going to take some getting used to. “Marriage takes work,” I had heard over and over again, but I hadn’t believed that would be our marriage.
To begin with, we rented a sterile house on the outskirts of Lusaka. The main attraction was the land, seven walled acres, large enough to keep our four ponies and to maintain a small vegetable garden. But the house was a dismaying thing, long and dark and bricked up, clinical in its aspect. An Indian businessman had built it during the 1980s when the city was becoming increasingly violent, and it embodied his stifling paranoia: bars on the tiny windows, a metal door with a huge padlock to separate the bedrooms from the rest of the house, the yard cleared of shrubs and trees to dissuade snakes and robbers. I threw rugs on the floor, smothered the walls in bright African-print cloths, and planted scores of trees in the garden, but I couldn’t shrug the feeling that we had been institutionalized by someone else’s fear.
As far as I was concerned, the chief flaw of the Indian’s security system was the massive black gate at the entrance of the property, which could not be opened from the outside. Charlie had brought Mr. Sinazongwe with him—an officious, hostile, supernaturally silent man with the creeping aspect of a spy—whom I avoided the way a junior consort might avoid the senior wife. Mr. Sinazongwe said he would be happy to open the gate, hover under the bougainvillea whenever I left the property in readiness for my return, but I wasn’t taken in by his obsequious eagerness. “I think he just wants to know when I am coming and going,” I told Dad. “He’s such a snoop.”
“When the wife walks in the front door, the gentleman’s personal gentleman leaves out the back,” Dad said.
“Oh good heavens,” I said. “This isn’t Jeeves and Wooster. It’s Charlie’s old cook.”
“Lot of wisdom in that stuff,” Dad persisted. “Take it or leave it.”
I left it. But if I was going to have a jailkeeper, I thought I should hire him myself. I put out word at the kiosk down the road that I was looking for a gardener, whose other task would be to guard and man the padlocked gate. Among the potential candidates who came forward was an elderly man who appeared so blank and feeble I hired him on the spot.
“Have you done much gardening?” I asked.
Mr. Njovu made a face and I knew that whatever was about to come out of his mouth next was unlikely to be entirely true. “Plenty,” he said.
I showed Mr. Njovu the gate, gave him a key, and begged him to listen for me when I returned from any outing. Mr. Njovu nodded and started work right away. After that, he stayed at work, regardless of how much I offered, and then begged, for him to take days off. After a couple of weeks, it finally dawned on me he had nowhere else to go, and after that, I let him drift around the seven acres as he wished. He mostly kicked around the rear of the property, and then he acted so wounded and exhausted from his long walk to the gate from whatever he was doing back there, I put out word I needed a groom, whose secondary job would be to open the gate. So Freddy Mapulonga arrived, arrogant and full of swagger, and I felt too hapless and inadequate not to hire him.
My mother would never have hired servants the way I did—out of pity, intimidation, or habit—and allow them to run roughshod all over her and her property. She had learned her servant-managing skills from her mother, who had been sent away to a college for young ladies in Inverness specifically to learn how to run a grand home. And even after the world changed in the 1940s, war-wearied into rations and the great houses emptied of all but the most needy and least able-bodied servants, my grandmother’s notes from that college survived, ledgers containing instructions on how to pay household bills, how to adjudicate the inevitable rivalries and tensions between a butler, the housekeeper, and the cook; when to order leg of mutton and how to best prepare shoulder of lamb. And Mugger, I knew, had been raised to the task. “She kept a beautiful house,” my father said. “It ran like clockwork.”
I, on the other hand, constitutionally opposed to the idea of servants in the first place, seemed unable to manage my modest household at all. I could not prevent the staff from fighting with each other and brazenly stealing from us, and then spreading blame all around. I had no control over when anyone came to work, or when, if ever, they left. I could not even persuade Mr. Sinazongwe not to scrub the floors outside our bedroom door at midnight. “I’ll clean them myself,” I offered finally. But Mr. Sinazongwe simply smiled enigmatically and was back the following night, the scent of Cobra floor polish wafting under the threshold and into the tangle of our mosquito net.
“I think he’s spying on us,” I told Charlie.
“No, he’s just diligent,” Charlie said.
Then Dad came to visit from the farm and kicked the soil in my vegetable garden around. “Oh, you’ve got this awful red stuff, haven’t you?” he said. The soil dusted up and settled on his shoe like dried blood. “You’re going to want a lot of manure in here, tobacco scraps would be good. I’ll bring you some from the farm.” He marched around to the back of the house and disparaged my pasture. “Your horses aren’t going to get very fat on this,” he said. Then he found Mr. Njovu’s nascent marijuana crop. He pursed his lips. “Well, your gardener has done a good job with this at least.”
Charlie’s days were full of dreary government meetings and business plans and putting together safari itineraries for clients. My days stretched ahead of me interminably. With a British passport and nothing but a bachelor of arts to my name, I was both foreign and underqualified and I had been denied a work permit by the Zambian government. I gave free aerobics lessons to overweight government officials’ wives. I wrote letters to the freshly appointed and woefully careless minister of environment lamenting deforestation and pollution. After that, I hardly knew what to do with myself.
“Routine,” Dad counseled. “If all else fails, have a routine.”
So in the mornings, I exercised the ponies with Freddy, and afterward gave him driving lessons, which terrified both of us. “Brake! Brake!” I yelled, as the garden wall loomed toward us. In the afternoon, I tried to persuade Mr. Njovu to put half the effort into growing our vegetables that he put into cultivating his drugs, and I took Tank and our new puppy, Lizzie, for walks toward the army camp at the top of our road. Then I stared at the clock and waited for Charlie to come home.
It was as if, marrying Charlie, I had stepped across some invisible membrane into another country. This wasn’t my Zambia—days o
f unstructured freedom on the farm, chaos at the dinner table with Adamson’s undercooked chickens. This was someone else’s idea of Zambia. In the evenings, Charlie came home exhausted after a day of wrangling with ministers and government officials and exuded an air of wearied disappointment. We sat in near silence over dinner, no dancing on the table, no dogs churning at our feet, moderation, bloodless poultry. On the few occasions Mum and Dad came up from the farm to stay they too were subdued and orderly, especially after Charlie expressed his understandable opinion that we all drank too much. It was what I had wanted, a ticket out of disorder and into calm, but now that I was here I felt imprisoned, suffocated. “You should volunteer somewhere,” Charlie suggested.
But in the early nineties, with the collapse of socialism and a new culture of anything goes, Lusaka was already awash with highly skilled foreign volunteers—“Bloody missionaries are always the first to arrive,” Dad had said. “You mark my words, Bibles then bulldozers.” There were the English hydrologists saving the water, the Canadian engineers rebuilding the sewage systems, and Irish actresses teaching self-expression and theater to abused and/or fallen women. No one needed an underqualified undergraduate in their aid programs, and in any case, that kind of do-gooding only made me feel more alien, as if I too were a visiting two-year wonder with no history in the country and no real intention of creating a future in it of my own. I’d be Mugger-lite, transposed to Zambia, ineffective. I’d mess it up.