—I wish I knew what I did wrong—what I didn’t do for you, darling Hilly. But I never understood Ruthie—I adored her but I couldn’t … I just never … And now I’ve let my sister down again, I know it. It’s not your fault, I don’t blame you for anything, please believe that, I blame myself, you are like my own child, but sometimes you can’t do the right thing even for your own—you see that with lots of parents. There must be something I should have done, something I didn’t understand. But I just have to face the fact that maybe we’re not right for you … You know your Aunt Pauline and I don’t have much to do with each other—not because we don’t love each other, we do, we do!—and anyway we both still love our sister whatever anyone says about her—but maybe, well, we agree perhaps you’ll fit in better with Pauline’s family. Pauline doesn’t like Arthur, or our kind of friends or this house—you must have sensed it, even in the few times the whole family has been brought together. She thinks (a cough of laughter among the tears)—she says what you need is ‘a breath of air’, the kind we don’t breathe here. So you see how it is. Maybe you’ll have more to occupy your interests. Keep your mind busy. Pauline leads a more varied life—oh yes, I’m the first to admit it. My temperament is different. In that way, she and Ruthie were alike—adventurous. But of course with Pauline, I mean Pauline’s serious-minded … Anyway—it’s out of the question you should be in the care of someone like Billie.—
Adults go on talking, all through childhood the monologue never stops.
When she who people say was once Hillela thinks of that time—and no-one who knew her then knows whether she ever does—that is all she retains of it. The tantrum that blew up inside her so bewilderingly that morning has long since been transformed, as electricity goes through pylons from voltage to voltage astride space and in time, and merged as the energy of other passions. Only those who never grow up take childhood events unchanged and definitive, through their lives. It is only in the memory of someone who claims to be her Aunt Olga that the actual tantrum exists, in static anecdotal repetition, in its form of a mysterious defence of Billie, Billie of all people!—poor Len’s tarty second wife.
Don’t Lean Your Smelly Arm Over My Face
Clumsy with emotion, wrenching her hands out of Olga’s, the girl knocked against the bookshelf and sent down one of a pair of charming 18th-century Imari cats Olga had thought to put in the room during the last school holidays because the girl was fond of cats: The little porcelain animal fell on the long-haired carpeting that was soft under bare feet in a bedroom, but the upraised paw and one end of the gilded bow on the collar broke.
Olga agitated defensively, as if the destruction lying there were not a loss but an accusation made by Olga against herself. —It doesn’t matter. Oh I didn’t mean to upset you … and over Billie … Doesn’t matter. It can be put together again. Oh darling, I’m so sorry! Please!—
—You don’t have to watch out for any treasures here, anyway.— Pauline trod on silverfish that ran from the pages of stacked journals she moved to make room for the girl’s clothes in a cupboard.
—It’s going to be repaired.—
But Pauline intended to start the girl off the way she should go on; it didn’t help anybody to be protected from the facts. —Things like that can’t be put together again. Oh yes, you can glue them, they look the same as before, to you and me; but their value for people like Olga is gone. They can’t take pleasure in anything that hasn’t got a market value. If they can’t look at it and think: I could get so-and-so for that if I wanted to sell it.—
—So now Olga won’t be able to sell it?—
—You don’t have to worry your young head over that. Olga doesn’t need to sell anything; it’s just that she needs to own things whose price is set down in catalogues.—
Pauline and Joe’s house was not nearly so beautiful as Olga’s, and fewer services were provided. As if still at boarding-school, Hillela had to make her own bed in the room she shared with her cousin Carole; there was no Jethro in white suit serving at table, and no cook in the kitchen. Bettie, the maid-of-all-work, was helped by members of the family, the swimming pool was old and pasted your flesh with wet leaves. Alpheus—son of the weekly washerwoman—lived in what had been the second garage (Pauline’s old car stood in the yard) and doubled as gardener at weekends: Joe was giving him a chance as a clerk in his law office and Pauline was paying for him to take correspondence courses.
But in the shared bedroom a kind of comfort the girl had not known before built up. Categories kept separate by the institutional order of boarding-school and the aesthetic order of the room with the fresh flower were casually trampled down. Clothes, schoolbooks, hairbrushes, magazines, face creams, Coke bottles, deodorants, posters, tampons, oranges and chocolate bars, records and tennis rackets—all were woven into an adolescents’ nest nobody disturbed. Pauline respected its privacy but assumed participation in the adult world. Before Olga’s dinner parties the children were given their meal in another room; Carole had been accustomed, since she had wandered in sucking her bottle, to dipping in and out of conversations among her parents’ friends in gatherings that cropped up at meals, in the livingroom or on the verandah. There was nothing to giggle over hotly in secret, in this house, because sexual matters were discussed openly as authority was criticised.
Pauline and Joe had been able to avoid segregated education for their son Alexander by sending him to a school for all races, over the border in an independent neighbouring black state. But there was some reluctance, even at the expense of this advantage, to part with both their children. The other was the younger, and a girl—they decided to keep her under the parental eye at home, although to spare her, at least, the education primed with doctrinal discrimination at South African government schools. Olga (even in her sister Pauline’s house nobody denied the generosity of Olga when it came to family obligations) must have been paying the fees for Hillela at the expensive private school at which she had joined her cousin. From there one day Carole came home in tears because at the school refectory where black waiters served lunch to the schoolgirls, one had said to a black man, Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
Pauline made Carole repeat the remark.
Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
Pauline was staring at her husband to impress upon him every syllable.
—That’s what we pay through the nose for. Serves us right. Let’s take them out of that place now and put them in a government school. Take them away at once.—
Joe’s small features were made smaller and closer by the surrounding fat of his face. His dainty mouth always moved a moment, sensitively, before he spoke. —Where to? There’s nowhere to go from anything that happens here.— He put on his glasses and gently studied the two girls, his daughter and his wife’s niece, while Pauline’s voice flew about the room.
—Exactly! Idiots we’ve been. No possibility to buy your way out of what this country is. So why pay? Racism is free. Send them to a government school, let them face it as it’s written in your glorious rule of law, canonized by the church, a kaffir is a kaffir, God Save White South Africa—anything, anything but the filth of ladylike, keep-your-little-finger-curled prejudice—
It was the first time the niece saw the full splendour of this aunt. Pauline’s eyes rounded up attention; her long, rough-towelled hair, prematurely and naturally marked with elegant strokes of grey while Olga’s blond streaks required artifice, seemed to come alive, stirring and standing out as physical characteristics create the illusion of doing in people possessed by strong emotion. The maid Bettie, bringing in a parcel that had been delivered, changed expression as if she had put her head through a door into the tension of air before thunder.
Joe heard Pauline out. —No, we won’t concede, we’ll confront. We’ll explain to Miss Gidding what we expect of the school; what we mean by table manners.— (He caught Hillela’s eye to bring a smile from her.)
Again the two chairs turned to
one another facing the desk in a headmistress’s study.
Pauline’s rising inflections, the text of which her daughter and niece could supply like words that go along with a tune, came through the walls to the anteroom where they waited, but no doubt it was the cross-examination technique of inaudible Joe that must have convinced the headmistress of need for the course she took. Hillela had not witnessed the incident at school, she had been eating at another table, but she was a member of the family and was called with Carole into the presence: parents, headmistress behind the desk. The headmistress wished to apologize for the offence given by the behaviour of one of their fellow pupils. Lack of politeness to the staff, whether black or white, was not tolerated at the school. The girl in question would be informed, and so would her parents. But it was to be understood by Carole and Hillela that the matter was not to be spread about as a subject for school gossip. Humiliating a fellow pupil would be a repetition of the original offence. —We want to guide, not accuse.—
Joe took them all off for an icecream before he returned to his office. Pauline was elated and sceptical, every now and then drawing a deep breath through narrowed nostrils, her black eyes moving as if to pick out faces in an invisible audience. —‘The parents are such important people’—
—She did not say important, she did not say that—
—All right, that’s what she meant—‘she is quite sure such behaviour wasn’t learnt at home’. Well, then, must have been learnt at school, mmh? You heard me put that to her. How absolutely ridiculous, anyway, that schoolgirls shouldn’t wait on themselves. But no, the procedures of the Northern Suburbs dinner table are those into which young ladies are to be inducted—she didn’t like it at all when I told her that, did she?— And the reaction of that Calder child comes from the attitudes that secretly go with those procedures: she said what she did innocently. In case you’re ever tempted, girls, that’s what’s called gracious living.—
Hillela and Joe laughed but Carole’s pallor as she withdrew into herself made her freckles stand out all over her face like a rash. In the car, she was suddenly weeping as she did when she reported: Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
—Good god, what is it now?— Pauline accused Joe.
—It’s all right for you. Now she won’t speak to me again.—
At Olga’s house, arguments, confessions or chastisings never took place in front of others, but Pauline didn’t believe in confining weak moments and dark thoughts behind bedroom doors. —Now listen, Carole. And you too, Hillela. When you do what’s right, here, you nearly always have to give up something. Something easy and nice. You have to accept that you won’t be popular—with some people. But are they really the kind of people you want as friends? And there are a great many other people with whom you’ll be popular just because they appreciate what you’ve done.—
—Where? I don’t know where they are. You, and daddy—your friends. It’s all fine for Sasha, over there up on a nice green hill in Swaziland. It’s easy for him to be what you want.—
—Bettie. Alpheus. The waiters at the school—yes, maybe they’ll never know you’re the one who did it, but they’ll appreciate the change when they’re not treated like dirt by little schoolgirls any longer.—
—At school they’ll all just say I got Annette Calder into trouble over a kitchen boy. She won’t speak to Hillela, either, now.—
Hillela did not know for whom, her cousin or Pauline, she spoke up. —I’m not keen on Annette, anyway, she’s the one who had the idea all the boys must wear suits to the end of term dance. And when we had to draw a self-portrait in the style of a famous painting, she drew herself as the Virgin Mary, blue veil and all.—
Joe settled the back of his neck, appreciatively.
—Hillela’s kicked out of that Rhodesian place (Carole stopped, to look for her way of escape if the others were to close in on her) and at this place, now, people won’t speak to her because we stick up for Africans all the time.—
Joe drove with drooping head, as, in the political trial in which he was appearing for the Defence, he listened to State evidence. —Let us drop it, now, Pauline.—
—No, no. I don’t want Hillela to be confused in any way about this. What Hillela did in Rhodesia wasn’t wrong—nothing to be guilty about, nothing—but it didn’t mean anything. She was pleasing herself, showing off a bit and taking a silly risk. When one’s very young one gets a kick out of just being defiant. But that’s anti-social, that’s all. It’s quite different from what we’ve all decided and done today. If the girls are made to suffer in some small way at school now, it’s for something, it’s principled. I don’t have any time for rebels without a cause.—
But there was no consequence at the school. If the Calder girl and her parents were summoned to the headmistress’s study, the girl herself was so well-brought-up that she had already the confidence of her kind to avoid any challenge of it. Nothing short of a revolution, the possibility of which was inconceivable to such confidence, could really harm it. So why bother to defend oneself? She and her accuser, Carole, took the opportunity to pretend the words had never been said or heard. Carole, as she moved up into senior positions in the school, became influential in the debating society and was able to introduce such subjects as ‘Should there be censorship?’ to girls whose parents read detective stories and best-selling sex novels while in her home banned books about South African life and laws were passed around and discussed. She even managed to have approved for debate ‘Should there be different standards of education for black and white children?’ though most of the girls had not heard that ‘Bantu Education’ had been introduced in the country, and there was a better attendance for ‘Should we have sex education at school?’ A self-service canteen had replaced the black waiters, for reasons of economy. Carole and Hillela, at Pauline’s suggestion, arranged to have black children invited to a special performance of the school’s production of Peter Pan; still schoolgirls themselves, Carole and Hillela were so advantaged (as Pauline reminded them) by their educational opportunities at school and by home background that they were able to help coach black students who came in from the townships to the centre run by Pauline’s supplementary education committee, KNOW. The two girls were kept occupied on Saturday mornings in a red-brick church that once must have been in the veld outside the black miners’ compounds but was by then hemmed in by workshops and industrial yards. Its ivy hung ragged from its porch and in the bushes that had been a garden were trampled places where, Pauline told, homeless black people slept. Their rags and their excreta made it necessary to watch where you set your feet; but the black boys and girls who came up singing in harmony—now mellow, now cricket-shrill—between the broken ornamental bricks of the path gave off the hopefulness of sweet soap and freshly-ironed clothes. It was in return for their lessons that they sang, and whenever they sang those whose enviable knowledge subdued the children into shy incomprehension in class became the uncomprehending ones: Mrs Pauline and her colleagues, and the two white schoolgirls, smiling, appreciative. Pauline asked what the songs meant and wrote it down for quotation in the committee’s letter of appeal for funds. (—Look at this tip left under the plate.— She waved before her family Olga’s response: a cheque for ten pounds.) Hillela was heard singing the songs in the shower. Recalled—by this sign of musicality he had not had the chance to develop in himself—from absorption in documents of the treason trial whose level of reality made all other aspects of the present become like a past for him, Joe bought her a guitar.
—Where on earth’d you find time to look for that?—
He answered Pauline gravely as if under oath. —In Pretoria. During the lunch adjournment. In a music shop.—
—And now?— Pauline’s smile quizzed gestural asides; she was the one who had to complete these for their initiators. Hillela and her uncle came together and hugged—people who have fallen in love for a moment; but it was Pauline who arranged for Hillela to have lessons with the folk-gu
itarist son of one of Pauline’s friends. Hillela was soon accomplished enough to play and sing in a language she understood, performing Joan Baez songs at protest meetings to which Joe and Pauline gave their support: against the pass laws, apartheid in the universities, removals of black populations under the Group Areas Act. Carole, like her cousin, was under age to be a signatory to petitions but could take a turn at manning tables where they were set out. The two adolescents were absorbed into activities in which a social conscience had the chance to develop naturally as would a dress-sense under Olga’s care.
Family likeness was to be recognized in Pauline, for one who had once been the daughter Olga never had. A girl younger than Hillela was brought to the house by Joe; but a schoolgirl with the composure of someone much older. On her the drab of school uniform was not a shared identity but a convention worn like a raincoat thrown over the shoulders. She turned the attention of a clear smile when spoken to yet, as an adult gets out of the way polite acknowledgement of the presence of children, firmly returned the concentration of her grey eyes to Joe, who read through documents those eyes were following from familiarity with the contents. Pauline spread cream cheese, strewed a pollen of paprika, shaved cucumber into transparent lenses and opened a tin of olives. She sniffed at her hands and washed them in the sink before carrying into the livingroom the mosaic of snacks worthy of her sister Olga. The girl drank fruit juice and ate steadily without a break in the span of the room’s preoccupation, while Pauline hovered with small services in the graceful alertness of a cocktail party hostess.
—D’you know who that was?— Pauline came into the bedroom where Carole and Hillela had holed up.
A Sport of Nature Page 3