Leopold Blue

by Rosie Rowell

  Xanthe sat next to me with her head in her hands. Her science result was still bothering me. If I didn’t ask her about it now, it was going to bother me all summer long. I jabbed her in the ribs.

  ‘What?’ she said after a pause and I realised she’d been asleep.

  ‘You know the afternoon on Park Road … ’ I whispered.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘When I told you about the printing room door that didn’t lock –’

  Elmarie turned around. ‘Sshhhh!’

  ‘What about it?’ whispered Xanthe.

  ‘It’s just … ’ Now that I had my opportunity, I froze. What was I doing? I was about to accuse her of stealing an exam paper and cheating. What if she hadn’t and was so insulted that she never spoke to me again? What if she had? Did I honestly want to know?

  Somebody poked my back. I turned around. Isabel pointed to Juffrou Kat who was glowering at me from the side of the hall.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I whispered quickly.

  ‘Why don’t you join us for lunch?’ said Mum to Shirley, as we stood outside again, released for the holidays.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice of you … ’ said Shirley, ‘But we should really be going.’

  ‘You don’t want to set off in the midday heat,’ said Dad.

  ‘The air-conditioning helps,’ said Shirley with a little smile.

  ‘Of course!’ Dad made a funny face to cover up his embarrassment. ‘But you cannot leave Leopold without trying the hotel’s mutton curry. It’s a tradition!’

  ‘Oh!’ said Shirley, fanning herself with the paper programme.

  ‘Come on, Mother,’ said Xanthe, ‘It will make a good story for your bridge club.’

  We sat in the cool interior of the hotel dining room. The Royal Hotel was where one marked an event in Leopold, and prize giving was one of their busiest days of the year. Every table was occupied. The heavy air-conditioning boxes, turned up to maximum, hummed in their efforts. A constant stream of serving staff emerged from the kitchen door with steaming plates of tomato bredie[*], frikkadel[**], bobotie[***] and of course, mutton curry, despite the outside heat. They snaked silently around the dining room in their starched white aprons over black uniforms, ducking out of the way of old friends greeting each other, pushing in chairs, picking up dropped knives off the floor. As our waitress moved around the table, adjusting our knives and forks, I saw Beth peering at the top of her bent head, at the starched white hat pinned onto her hair smoothed back with coconut oil. I caught her eye and smiled. We used to fold up Mum’s napkins to look like those hats. We thought them very sophisticated.

  To Dad’s dismay, Shirley and Xanthe both ordered a Greek salad. Beth and I, as ever, chose burgers. Mum, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance in the direction of Shirley, settled for the yellowtail line fish.

  Shirley was a talker. She talked her way through her salad and a glass of wine, ‘Oh, why not!’ she’d replied to the offer, with a twinkle. She talked about her garden and the trouble she was having with the aphids. She told us about her recent trip overseas and how nice it was to get back home after all that travelling. She talked about tennis and her and her husband’s love of golf.

  ‘What line of work is your husband in?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Alan works for Shell. Been there for years. He’s very happy there but he does have to travel a lot.’

  ‘Sounds important,’ said Mum. Shell was on her list of Large Bloodsucking Companies to Hate.

  ‘Pppf,’ said Shirley, waving the comment away, but a blush rose in her cheeks. She revealed her world in one story after another – bridge and book clubs and the rising cost of her weekly Pick ’n’ Pay shop and the election next year. ‘Let’s not talk about that, we’re having such a lovely day.’ When she became animated, the red wooden bangles clunked against each other as her hands joined in.

  Near the end of the meal, as Dad was sunk into his Malva pudding, Shirley took a spoonful of pecanut pie from Xanthe’s plate, closed her eyes as she allowed herself a moment of bliss, then said: ‘Alan and I are so grateful for the care you have shown Xanthe this term. We would love to have Margaret to stay these holidays, if it doesn’t upset your existing plans.’

  I sat up. I looked at Xanthe, who made a face. I looked back at Shirley, who winked at me. I looked at Mum and Dad, who were momentarily lost for words. I looked at Beth. She looked very glum. I looked back at Mum. ‘Please, please, please!’ I mouthed. She turned to Dad, who smiled and shrugged. At last she turned to Shirley.

  ‘Why not,’ she said, smiling.

  I breathed out and gave her my most lovely smile. Shirley opened her diary and they agreed that I would spend a week with them after Christmas. In that moment my holiday was transformed from five weeks of an endless repetition of trips up the mountain, swimming and picnics on the dam, with a catalogue of chores for the sake of it, into what would most likely be the most exciting week of my life.

  *. Stew

  **. Meatballs

  ***. Curried mincemeat

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Marta stood at the washing line, taking down the dry linen at the end of the day. She pulled down a pillowcase with one hand while returning the pegs into the waiting bag with the other. With a flick-yank-pull she folded it up into a perfect rectangle and deposited it on the pile of magnificent white that was already taller than the basket beside her.

  She barely glanced at what she was doing. Her eyes flickered back and forth, her head tilted in response to a banging door. She swatted away flies, she shouted comments at Ethel next door. Eventually she turned to me, lying under the pecanut tree a few metres off. ‘Make yourself useful, child.’

  We faced each other across the breadth of a double sheet. ‘Take the corners – not like so – like so. Pull tight.’

  I pulled backwards.

  ‘Tight!’

  I yanked the corners, so that she had to take a step forward to steady herself.

  She laughed. ‘Now, drop the one side and pick it up with the other hand.’

  I fumbled with the folded sheet.

  ‘Goeie hemel[*],’ she muttered as the folds twisted between us. ‘Start again. Drop, pick up, fold and fold.’

  Her small hands manipulated the folds of the expanse of crinkly white sheet with the expertise of an artist, nimble and confident against my thumby attempt.

  ‘I’m going to Cape Town after Christmas,’ I said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Marta,

  ‘To stay with Xanthe. For a week.’

  ‘Even more reason to help out now,’ she replied.

  I laughed. ‘Do you want me to bring you anything?’

  ‘There’s nothing I need in this life that I can’t get here.’

  ‘It’s not about what you need.’

  ‘Ha!’ She dumped half of the sheets in my outstretched arms, picked up the basket containing the rest of the pile and marched off towards the house. ‘That’s what you young people think,’ she said as she climbed the steps, ‘You want to buy this, you want to go to travel the world, you want a big job with lots of money.’ She dumped the basket on the stoep and turned around to face me. ‘I hope that when you’ve finished running after all your wants, you’ll turn your attention to what you need to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Looking after your own, settling down to a sensible life and a job and responsibility.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time for all that,’ I said with a laugh.

  ‘So I hear. Has your report arrived?’

  ‘Ja,’ I said looking away.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing like Simon’s,’ I said before I could stop myself.

  Marta wiped her nose in a business-like fashion and stuffed her hankie back into her pocket. ‘There’s a lot more what goes into making a clever person than an “A” aggregate.’

  ‘If you could have done anything, what would it have been?’ I asked.

  ‘Ha!’ She smiled. ‘I wanted to be a ballroom dancer. P
rofessional.’

  ‘A dancer?’ I looked at her. There was not much of a dancer to be found underneath her yellow and green maid’s uniform and brown lace-up shoes. I could not imagine Marta with her creaky knees and jammy hip being twirled around a ballroom.

  ‘Oh, I could dance!’ she said, so sharply that I blushed.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ I said.

  She launched a pitying look before disappearing inside.

  I knew that Marta’s life was hard, but I didn’t want to know that she would rather have done something else. It was like hearing about Mum’s Lawrence. My world was fragile enough. My very existence seemed nothing more than a random selection of multiple-choice answers. If there was no order in the way the pieces were put together, how could I ever hope to keep them in place?

  Everyone was in the kitchen, including Simon, who had become Dad’s official apprentice. He was sprawled out in one of the kitchen chairs, with his back to the door. The rooms in our house seemed to shrink in his presence. I couldn’t imagine how he fitted in Marta’s tiny two-roomed cottage.

  ‘Excuse me, Simon,’ I said. It was impossible not to touch some part of him. ‘Thank you,’ I added, safely on the other side, loudly enough to make sure Mum heard.

  Mum was engrossed in the newspaper. ‘Look at this.’ She held it up. The page was taken up by a photo of F.W. de Klerk and Mandela shaking hands and smiling. The headline read: PEACE LAUREATES – A TRIBUTE TO CONCILIATION AND PEACE.

  ‘That’s not something I thought we’d ever see.’

  ‘The prize belongs to Mandela,’ said Simon quietly.

  ‘That’s not quite true,’ said Dad, ‘FW let Mandela out and unbanned the ANC. Brave moves.’

  I sat down next to Dad, only to find myself opposite Simon.

  ‘He had no choice,’ argued Mum, ‘the country was grinding to a halt.’

  ‘If nothing else, it sets a good example,’ said Dad. He looked pointedly from Mum to me.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Simon, looking across at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think they both deserve it?’ His voice was quiet, yet crowded the room.

  I looked around, expecting a reaction from Mum, but no one seemed to have heard the question. ‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged.

  ‘You must have some opinion.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it affects your future.’

  ‘No it doesn’t. I didn’t make the rules, and I can’t change them. Why should I care?’

  Simon laughed. ‘What do you care about?

  I looked around the kitchen, thoroughly annoyed. Simon didn’t deserve an answer to such a stupid question and yet I had to say something. He was waiting. ‘I care about lots of things, Simon, like being happy. Not some stupid politicians.’

  Simon raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Delirious,’ I snapped.

  Simon shrugged away my answer and turned back to the newspaper. I stared at Simon, resentfully. This was my house, why was he here?

  ‘The cake!’ Mum jumped up, ‘Sweet Jesus, the cake!’

  ‘Plenty of time, Vivvy,’ Dad responded in his mildest voice, ‘it’s only just December.’ He turned to the back page of the paper.

  Mum pulled down the egg-and-flour-encrusted recipe folder from the shelf above the stove. ‘This year I’ve really done it,’ she admonished herself. ‘It will be a disaster.’

  ‘Isn’t the cake supposed to be made in October?’ asked Beth.

  Dad flipped down the side of the newspaper page and shook his head at her.

  Beth continued: ‘Why don’t we have a chocolate cake this year? Or, or, an ice-cream Christmas cake!’

  Mum shrieked. ‘If your grandmother could hear you now!’

  ‘But she can’t,’ Beth sang back at her under her breath, ‘And she never will.’

  ‘What was that?’ Mum turned around, clutching a large packet of fruit mix. There was a smear of flour across her brow, like battlemarks.

  ‘I love your fruitcake,’ said Dad firmly. ‘In fact this year I want two.’

  ‘Two!’ she shrieked again, ‘You’re out of your mind, Timothy.’ She only ever shrieked at Christmas.

  I left the room. Mum forgot that stupid cake every year. From the moment she shrieked, ‘My God, the cake!’ a mania gripped her, demanding that we play out a pantomime only she understood. It began with an enormous Christmas tree from Hannes’ farm. As she decorated it with her precious overseas decorations she’d say, ‘Of course a real Christmas tree is a fir tree.’ On Christmas morning as we’d tear into our stockings, which always contained oranges, for God’s sake, in December, she’d shriek, ‘Be careful, those are real stockings!’ These bizarre rituals had seemed magical when we were little – no one else in my class had ever heard of a stocking. But the plastic sprigs of mistletoe and holly and ‘ever-so-expensive’ baubles from Harrods were out of place. Our Christmas Day lunch of turkey, gammon, roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts and bread sauce eaten in temperatures of forty degrees celsius, while the King’s College Choir Cambridge belted out ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ belonged in deepest, darkest Salisbury. Sometimes I imagined that it wasn’t even us she was smiling at as she turned off the lights in anticipation of the flaming Christmas pudding.

  There was no avoiding it. The yuletide machine had begun to grind. Dad woke me the next morning. He was standing at the end of my bed, jangling the car keys.

  ‘I’m not a dog.’ I sat up. He was wearing his long socks, veldskoens, too-short navy rugby shorts and a khaki short-sleeve shirt. It could mean only one thing. Today was the trip to Hannes’ farm to cut down the Christmas tree.

  ‘We’ve got to get over the pass before the farm traffic starts.’

  ‘Take Beth,’ I said and flumped back onto my pillows.

  ‘Beth says it’s your year to choose the tree.’

  ‘Hooray!’ I shouted, but Dad had left the room. The trip to Hannes’ farm was what many years ago Dad had named ‘the first day of Christmas’ but I knew it was his way of escaping a day of Mum in her altered condition. It began with a hot and airless trip over the pass and into the next valley, windows closed against the dusty gravel spitting up around us. It involved sitting on Hannes’ front stoep, which smelt of cattle dip, while he and Dad put the world to rights. This could require anything between one and four Castle lagers while Beth and I were left to sip flat Coke and try to outstare his two terrifying ridgeback dogs. Now and then the party line telephone would trill out a short-short-short-long or a short-long-short-short pattern. But it was never for Hannes. Eventually, Dad would slap the arm of his chair with a decisive, ‘Ja-nee!’ This was our cue that the worst part of the day had arrived, where we trudged up the mountainside to the pine forest. More often than not the tree was too big to fit in the car and stuck out the back of the open boot and we would arrive home scratched and scarred and covered in a thick paste of sweat and dust.

  All of which was why, fifteen minutes later, I stropped my way into the garage. ‘This is grossly unfair,’ I said and kicked the door for effect. This is –’ I stopped.

  Sitting in the passenger seat, alongside Dad, was Simon. A lazy, patronising smile zig-zagged across his face as I passed his door.

  I gathered the little dignity I had left and resolved not to say another word for the rest of the day.

  After a few minutes, Simon pulled out an envelope.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Came in the post,’ replied Simon.

  ‘BP?’ Dad leaned over to get a better look. ‘Hey! The full scholarship?’

  I watched Simon’s shoulders shrug up and down in an awkward, throw away action. It was what he did after winning a race at sports day, or hearing that he’d been accepted at the Cape Town school.

  ‘You did it!’ Dad hooted in delight. I sank lower into the seat. Simon didn’t say anything but I could tell he was smiling.

  ‘That’s my boy!’ said Dad. In a r
eflex action of long ago, Dad reached over and ruffled Simon’s head, although this time he had to reach upwards to do so, which made them both laugh. Dad whistled. ‘To be eighteen years old all over again!’

  We left the town behind. As we began climbing the pass I watched the ribbon of green that the river fed as it snaked its way up the valley. Here and there a koppie[*] pushed up through the earth, between the concentric circles of brown farmland. Higher up the valley the farmland gave way to scrub bush. Dad claimed that there were a hundred different shades of brown in the veld. But that was rubbish. Brown was brown.

  A few kilometres after we passed the turn-off to the agricultural college, the tar stopped. The gravel made me feel sick. How would I possibly spend the whole day with Simon when I felt so angry with him that I could smack him? Last night I’d made a list all the things I cared about. I cared about my family, despite them being annoying. I cared about my friends. Or my one friend. I cared about the four little graves in the corner of the churchyard. I cared about getting out of Leopold and never having to see Simon again.

  ‘That’s really good news, Simon,’ Dad broke the silence. ‘Now all you need to do is keep your head down, and stay out of trouble.’

  When Simon didn’t reply, Dad laughed. ‘Not what a young man wants to hear.’

  ‘This is our time,’ Simon said softly.

  ‘Quite right.’ Dad sighed. ‘I’m no revolutionary, as you know. I spend my time studying rocks after all.’

  ‘You married Mum,’ I said.

  Dad laughed. ‘The true revolutionary speaks!’

  I pulled a face at his back and plunged back into my sulk.

  We clattered onto the narrow farm road. Dad said, ‘You and Simon can go get the tree while I chat to Hannes.’

  ‘Terrific,’ I mumbled as my insides bit into themselves.

  Dad shot me a warning look in the rear-view mirror as he pulled up in front of the farm gate. There was a rule in our house that the youngest in the car got to do the gates. But the revolutionary spirit had taken hold. Instead of clambering out, I stared down at my stubby fingernails. After a few seconds of standoff Dad turned around and snapped, ‘Meg!’