‘Twenty per cent,’ I told her, ‘and that really is final.’
Mrs Hillebrand disliked me after that, but she did like my business, even at a twenty per cent discount. Of course, she already had quite a lot of the business I was bringing her, but with my special service she would have lost it had she not come to terms. I was ministering to the forgetfulness of our mutual clients, whereas she was only selling them flowers.
thirty-six
While Dog Box Flowers bloomed, my clandestine relationship with the entire Peterson family developed. Ruthie was never alone on Saturday afternoons though. It seemed that Ma Peterson had decreed that a chaperone always had to be present. Most often she was away at her samoosa kiosk, but there had to be a family member on hand to see to it that Ruthie and I did not cause an unplanned expansion to the family.
I got to know Johnny well. If he thought there was anything strange about me, a white boy, visiting his sister, it never showed. He liked football and building model aircraft. When I was there, he would always try to arrange a game. Considering the problem with Stefanie Palmer, I was less enthusiastic about soccer now, trying to avoid it as far as possible. Failing a soccer game, Johnny would try to interest me in gluing little strips of balsawood together in the shape of an aircraft. I could not work up much enthusiasm for that either.
On the first of the rare occasions when we were alone for a few minutes, Ruthie came close to me and, with shining eyes, said, ‘You told Ma you love me.’
‘Of course.’
‘You never said it to me.’
‘But you know I love you.’
‘But you never said it.’
‘But you know. You were there when I said it in front of your ma.’
‘But I don’t know it. You never say it to me.’
‘But it would be silly if you know it already.’
‘But it won’t be silly, because I don’t know it. So say it.’
‘Now?’
‘Quickly, before they come back.’
‘I love you.’
‘That’s better. I love you also.’
Sometimes the only ones at home with us on a Saturday afternoon were the two smallest siblings, Solly and Delicia. It was clear that they had received strict instructions on how they were to spend the afternoon. Whatever Ruthie suggested as an alternative to watching us had no effect. After a few Saturdays on which they kept us under close surveillance, I asked Delicia why they were doing it. ‘Ice cream,’ she told me.
‘Ice cream?’ I asked, perplexed.
‘Ma gives us ice cream if we watch nicely,’ Solly said.
Having established the cause of the problem, I did a little bribing of my own, sending them off to the shop with ice cream money. On those Saturdays, Ruthie and I did have some time alone. The first occasion was perhaps six weeks after our Saturday afternoon meetings had moved to Ruthie’s home. With all the mundane activities we now took part in and the little physical contact we had, I had not realised how eager I was to be holding her against me again. Even less did I know that she was as eager to be touching me. No sooner were the two younger siblings out of the front door than we were in each other’s arms.
‘Not here,’ Ruthie whispered in my ear. ‘Someone may see us from the road.’
Her room was the smallest bedroom I had ever seen. There was just enough space for her narrow single bed, a shallow built-in cupboard and one straight-backed chair. Her bottle-green school uniform was hanging over the chair.
By the time we heard Solly and Delicia coming back, we were lying on Ruthie’s bed, clothing and hair dishevelled, breathing coming fast. I had undone the clasps of her bra far more easily this time, having studied those belonging to my sisters as they hung on our washing line. I had experienced the unprecedented softness of her breasts again, altogether without resistance from her. I had felt the smoothness of her body when she pressed herself against me.
At the sound of the little kids coming through the front door, we leapt off the bed and hurried into the living room. Neither of them seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
On a few of those afternoons, Ruthie’s mother arranged for someone else to take over the samoosa stall and spent the time with us. She seemed to have the need to say so much to us, but did not know where to begin or how to put into words everything she felt.
One afternoon, playing rummy around the kitchen table, she at last found her voice. ‘You two will have to leave the country. You know that, don’t you?’ Neither of us had thought of that. We must have looked to her as if we had been struck dumb. ‘You two never think of nothing. You so excited now I got to keep somebody watching you all the time. But you got to think about what can happen.’ She turned her attention to me. ‘You, boy, does your pa know?’
‘No, Mrs Peterson.’
‘What’s he going to do if he finds out?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Peterson.’
‘What’s he going do when he knows you hot for a coloured girl?’
I could only imagine, but I had been careful to keep my imaginings in check.
Ruthie tried to come to my defence. ‘Ma, don’t speak ugly like that to Chrissie. Saying he’s hot for me and everything.’
Her mother looked genuinely surprised. ‘I’m not speaking ugly. This boy’s so hot for you it’s a wonder he doesn’t explode. And you not much different. You think I’m blind? If I want a pregnant Ruthie, all I gotta do is leave you two alone. You think I don’t know what it’s like to be your age? You think I can’t see? I got eyes, you know.’ Neither Ruthie nor I could find even the pretence of a response. ‘My Lord Jesus, kids, why couldn’t you wait another five years, even better another ten years?’
‘I won’t get pregnant, Ma,’ Ruthie said rather plaintively.
‘You won’t get a chance, if I can help it.’
Ruthie’s face had reddened and her eyes were shining with the first sign of tears. ‘Ma, I wish you wouldn’t talk dirty like this in front of Chrissie.’
Her mother lifted both hands in exasperation. ‘I’m not talking dirty, child. I’m talking realistic. Do you understand what I been saying to you?’
‘Yes, Ma.’ Ruthie was looking down at the floor.
‘And you, boy, do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mrs Peterson.’
‘You got nice manners, Chrissie. I like that, but it doesn’t mean you got ice water in your veins. I can see the heat inside your eyes. They glow hot when you look at my Ruthie. You not taking her there by the sugar cane no more, you hear?’
‘Yes, Mrs Peterson, I promise.’ I was ready to agree to anything if she would only find another topic of conversation.
After that afternoon she dropped the subject, but she also kept her promise of watching over us. If anything, the surveillance intensified. Solly and Delicia got the job very rarely. There was almost always an adult in the house with us. If no family member was available, one of the ladies from the neighbourhood usually stood in. It seemed to me that all of Greenwood Park was conspiring to prevent me from making Ruthie pregnant.
The biggest surprise in Ruthie’s family was her aunt, Pearl Infantino. She was Ma Peterson’s younger sister and she looked like what I imagined Ruthie would look like when she reached her thirties. To my eyes, she was the most beautiful older lady I had ever seen. She was as fair as Ruthie, but there was some natural pink in her face. I knew by now that Ruthie’s sallow, olive complexion would be seen as suspicious by my father and his colleagues.
When Ruthie saw my surprise at seeing Auntie Pearl, she explained how her great-grandfather had been Irish and had been executed by the British during an uprising sometime in the 1920s, but not before he had fathered her grandfather. As a young man, her grandfather had emigrated to South Africa and married a Malay woman. By the time mixed marriages were outlawed, their eldest, Ruthie’s mother, was already fourteen years old. The skin tone of the old man’s descendants had varied with every new birth since then. His daughters, Sarah and Pear
l, were on opposite ends of the family colour spectrum. I learnt later that Ma Peterson had left school early to work and help pay for some education for Auntie Pearl.
The surname, Infantino, came from Auntie Pearl’s husband, Courtleigh, whose grandfather had been an Italian prisoner of war, but had married a Zulu woman in those innocent days. I always thought that his surname suited him well. He had a motorbike, an old Harley that he kept in perfect condition. As far as I could see, he loved it more than he loved his beautiful wife. From the first, he made no secret of his contempt for me. If he saw I was visiting, he would glance in my direction and leave the room with an ostentatious curling of the lip and often a remark along the lines of ‘Well, I see we have intellectual company again.’ Once Ruthie’s mother followed him into their bedroom and I heard her shout at him that Chrissie was a guest and he would not treat a guest in her house that way. My face must have betrayed my pleasure at her defence of me, because as soon as she reappeared she pointed that finger at me, saying, ‘Don’t think you so special. Any guest is a guest here.’ It took a few months before I realised that Courtleigh’s resentment of me came from the fact that he had landed on the wrong side of the colour divide, while I was safely on the white side. Safely? I wondered. Maybe that was a poor choice of words.
Auntie Pearl liked me from the beginning and I liked her. The first time she met me – it was her turn to chaperone us – she shook my hand vigorously and said, ‘So this is the young man who’s causing all the trouble.’
I just smiled and said, ‘How do you do?’
‘How do you do?’ she repeated. ‘Isn’t that nice. It sounds so British. A little Afrikaans accent there, but still something British about it.’
I wondered what my father’s reaction would be if he heard me being complimented for sounding British.
Auntie Pearl was not finished with me yet. ‘So, you’re the one my sister wants us to watch when you are near Ruthie.’ She raised an eyebrow archly. ‘And you, Ruthie, what does your ma think you two might get up to – or should I say down to?’
‘Auntie, man,’ Ruthie mumbled, looking down at the floor, but smiling through her blushes.
After my first meeting with Auntie Pearl, Ruthie confided a family secret to me. ‘At work Auntie Pearl passes for white,’ she whispered. It is not easy, at this distance, to understand my failure to grasp the significance of this, but I had to ask Ruthie to explain. ‘She has a job that’s only for white people. She is head of the typing pool where she works. All the girls under her are white. And nobody suspects anything.’
There was another member of the family whom I had seen only once. He arrived one afternoon while Ruthie and I were playing Monopoly with the two small kids. Ma Peterson was lying down in the bedroom. He came in without knocking and stopped in the doorway of the living room. He was as fair as Auntie Pearl, a stocky man, maybe a little overweight and balding. In that first moment I thought he was a white man who had business with the family. But it was only for a moment. A strong family resemblance between him, Ruthie’s mother and Auntie Pearl revealed that this was no casual visitor. He looked about the same age as Ruthie’s mother. His eyes fixed on me with obvious surprise but he spoke to Ruthie: ‘Your mother here, Ruth?’ There was no movement on the part of either of them to come closer, to touch or hug each other.
‘Hello, Uncle William,’ she said. ‘Ma’s in the bedroom.’
He started in that direction, but stopped and came back. ‘Nice to see you again, Ruth,’ he said almost sternly. It was not that he seemed hostile, only very serious, as if there were important matters on his mind.
He spent perhaps fifteen minutes with Ruthie’s mother, speaking in undertones. All we could hear was the hum of their voices. On his way out, he again looked in at the door. ‘Goodbye, Ruthie.’ Then he nodded at me. ‘Young man.’ And he was gone.
The next Saturday Ruthie found a quiet moment in which to explain about Uncle William. ‘He’s my mom’s other brother. He also passes for white.’ I was soon to learn that he was manager of an Umhlanga Rocks hotel. The family saw him as being rich. It was through his influence that Ma Peterson had her kiosk inside the hotel.
In those early days with the Petersons, I discovered how much, in really surprising ways, the coloured people of Greenwood Park were like us. The sort of thing that formed the professional core of my father’s life arose quite regularly in their conversation. One Saturday afternoon, as I was leaving, I heard Ma Peterson talking about a baby that had been born to the daughter of a family that lived further up the street. ‘White father,’ she was telling Auntie Pearl with the sort of certainty I had often heard from my father. ‘When there’s a white father and a frizzy-hair, coloured mother, the hair can come out blonde, but it’s always frizzy. But when it’s the other way, coloured father and white mother, the hair comes out dark, but not frizzy.’
‘That doesn’t happen very often,’ Auntie Pearl said.
‘It happened in the old days. Mrs Robertse’s mother was white and her father was coloured. He had frizzy hair. But her hair came out dark like her father and straight like her mother. That’s how you tell which parent was white and which was coloured.’
I wondered briefly if my father was aware of this piece of knowledge, but dismissed the thought. He probably did know. There was nothing about that subject of which he was ignorant, I believed. But whether or not he knew, I was not likely to be discussing Ma Peterson’s pronouncements with him.
thirty-seven
I slept poorly in those days. The reason was not my visits to the Petersons or even the fear of Stefanie Palmer’s rumour reaching my parents. The reason was the improvement in my relationship with my father. To my surprise and that of everyone else in our household, we had found common ground. He loved to listen to the songs on my Placido Domingo recording. Then one day he came home with a long-playing record of the great tenor singing twelve Neapolitan songs. I loved the record and from time to time we sat together and listened to it. He was no more demonstrative than he had ever been, but he seemed to feel that he owed me something for introducing him to that wonderful music. Until then, I felt that my relationship with Ruthie had nothing to do with him. This new warmth, or at least this new contact, was changing that.
At the same time the revenues of Dog Box Flowers were growing by the week. I had to recruit Annie to help by ordering the flowers on days when I was at rugby practice. I offered her a salary, but she was always a tough negotiator and eventually I had to cut her in for twenty rands a month plus twenty-five per cent of the take. The money made it possible for me to add to my own collection of operatic songs from time to time. My father would listen to every new purchase with me, often showing real pleasure.
One Sunday afternoon he invited me for a walk on the beach with him. I thought that all the other family members would be coming, but he had invited only me. We parked near Country Club Beach and strolled in the direction of the hotels along the Golden Mile. The tide was low, so we carried our shoes and walked on the hard, damp sand, just out of reach of the flat ripples coming up from the sea.
After walking in silence for a while, he said, ‘This music you found is a wonderful gift, Chrissie. It’s good that you brought it into our family.’ Immediately after that he fell silent again, alone as always with his thoughts. When he did again break the silence it was with what sounded almost like an apology. ‘We have not spent enough time together.’
‘We went hunting together,’ I said.
‘Three times in your life, if I remember correctly.’
‘That eland. I remember that eland.’
He chuckled softly. ‘I remember him too. He was a big one.’
‘Even Oupa had never seen a bigger one,’ I said. ‘They had his biltong on the farm for months afterwards. Oupa gave us some too.’
‘I remember. We should have done more such things together.’
‘The things we did were very good.’
‘And the time you came to work wi
th me, did you get something out of that?’
‘Very much.’ I would have done or said anything to keep the conversation going. ‘I learnt a lot.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant did you find pleasure in it.’
‘I did. I really did. I liked being part of Pa’s work.’
Again he slipped into one of those silences that I knew better than to interrupt, but this one was shorter. ‘I wanted to take you to work so that you could learn something about life, but not so that you would do the same work that I do. I want you to do something that really interests you. What does interest you, Chris?’
‘Money,’ I said. ‘I want to make lots of money. I want to be a businessman, or maybe an advocate. They make lots of money. You can’t tackle big things, projects, unless you make lots of money.’
‘That may be so,’ he said. He was frowning deeply. We both knew that this was not an area in which he was expert. There was not a lot of money to be made by saving the country from coloureds who were trying for white identity documents. Before my ambitions could be explored any further, his mind wandered in a different direction. ‘I want you to come with me to work again in the next school holiday. I don’t think it is good for you to have so much free time.’
This was not good news. Could it be that he knew what I had been doing in my free time? I had already been planning what Ruthie and I were going to do during the holidays, wondering how often we would be able to get away from our families and where we would be able to meet without being noticed.
‘Your weekends could also be used more constructively.’
My weekends? It sounded as if he was talking about my Saturday afternoons. I was still trying to grasp this new possibility, when an incident took place that at the time served only to add to my already great confusion. I was wondering how I could respond to his doubts about how I spent my weekends, when I saw him stiffen.
Following the direction in which he was looking, I saw what had caught his attention. Forty or fifty metres down the beach on the soft dry sand above the high-water mark, a shirtless white man, his body covered in tattoos, his fists raised to shoulder height, was standing over an old Zulu man. The Zulu was on his back on the sand, having clearly been struck a moment or two before. Not far from them, along the top of the beach near the parking, a group of four men was watching. They were all of the shirtless or T-shirt, tattooed variety, obviously friends of the one tormenting the old Zulu. ‘Let him have it again,’ I heard one of them shout in English.
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