Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller Page A

Girls who were collecting against the reception desk he was so effusively warm and courtly that several of them retreated into the potted plants, their hats and money belts askew.
    “Let’s have a party!” Dad said, handing Auntie Glug a sticky drink. She propped herself up against an arrangement of wooden curios and looked as if she were beginning to have second thoughts about the reunion.
    Meanwhile, Mum clapped along to the dancers, and cocked her hips this way and that. “Asante sana!” my mother cried. “And what beautiful voices, what lovely smiles you all have!” The traditional dancers trooped out into the sunshine with my mother cheering them on. In fact, she seemed in danger of joining them more or less permanently. “All right,” Dad said, sensing how things might easily unravel, “that’s enough for now, Tub.” Then, in his enthusiasm to demonstrate that nearly forty years of marriage had done nothing to diminish his chivalry, he accidentally hit my mother in the head opening the door for her from the reception room into the garden. Mum reeled into the cannas clutching her eye.
    Auntie Glug stared into her sticky drink. “I wonder how these go with Prozac?” she asked.
     
     
    ASIDE FROM OUR SMALL PARTY gathered for the Highlands School reunion and a group of American geologists who had been exploring for oil in Uganda, no one was staying at the hotel. Nor were any of the other hotels up and down the beach much occupied. A few rent boys combed the beach for old European women, but found only a couple of takers: an Italian matron of leathery complexion and a broken French woman in her early seventies with bad knees. Without the customary crowd of guests into which to fade, the old women seemed doubly desperate, and the rent boys looked doubly ill used. “Why on earth can’t they go to bed with a good book like everyone else?” Mum asked, eyes lowered over a glass of cold Tusker.
    Even beyond the main tourist strip everything still felt ghosted and shocked from the attack against the Paradise Hotel. Our Swahili guide, Mr. Faraji, gave us a tour of Fort Jesus and the spice market and he walked us through the old Arab quarters, but it was as if a disease had washed over the place, taking with it the usual, pushy, vibrant clatter of an ancient port city. “Oh dear,” Mum said, “how sad and quiet.”
    “Very quiet and sad,” Mr. Faraji agreed.
    So Mum and Mr. Faraji embarked on a two-person mission to revive Mombasa. Nothing could dim their excitement, their curiosity, or their determination to be deeply impressed by everything. Mum bought spices and kikois, baskets and carvings, beads and postcards while Mr. Faraji haggled with hawkers to secure her the best price. Mum admired every angle of the city, ran her fingers along the woodwork on the doors, joked with the shopkeepers and bought food from everyone who offered it to her even though Mr. Faraji begged her not to eat anything from street vendors.
    “Why ever not?” Mum said, licking her fingers.
    I reassured Mr. Faraji that Mum is an extreme omnivore. She has eaten snails peeled off the farm’s driveway and wild frogs’ legs from the bush surrounding the Tree of Forgetfulness. Once she even ate a prawn cocktail in hyperlandlocked, socialist-era Zambia, and if that didn’t kill her, I argued, a little dysentery-laced street food in Mombasa wasn’t going to do the trick.
    While we walked through the Old Arab quarter, Mr. Faraji tried to give us each a sprig of fragrant wild marigold to hold to our noses. Mum shook her head. “Oh no,” she said. “I’d be very offended if someone walked past my house sniffing herbs.” She stepped over a broken, bubbling pipe. “And I’m sure my drains smell at least as bad as this.”
    One afternoon, Mr. Faraji took us out to a beach near the harbor. This was the site of the children’s holiday camp where the Huntingfords had stayed for three weeks every year. We all piled out of the taxi. There