And Gertrude? She never turned up at the house where the Silvers had so carefully arranged for her to be employed; the place for which Bernie had given him the address and the telephone number. Not that he had ever tried to phone his mother, but he had got letters from her would-be employers. They had made efforts to discover his mother’s whereabouts, but all without success. So Jack never heard from his mother, who was in any case near illiterate, for all Ida’s determined efforts at adult education. She simply dropped out of his world. This never really bothered him; not after she’d delivered him up to the mercies of the witch’s hovel. Both Josh and Ida wrote regularly, though his need for them had passed. He’d been schooled by then in emotional self-sufficiency. He was Jack Maseko, Swaziland schoolboy. That was until the day he decided to cross another border and walk out of his schoolboy life. At that point, Jack became Jacques. He moved on. He wore a different mask. It was thanks to Josh, admittedly, that he’d always been so interested in masks.
Jack is not much of a ‘people’ person. And, given how much the turn of his life has been dependent upon a handful of windfall benefactors, it would have been burdensome were he to have embraced all those to whom he was beholden. He would have had to experience the complicated ambivalence that can come with too much dependence; an endless see-saw of resentment and gratitude. So Jack is not grateful and he likes to stand alone. He is himself. He is whichever version of himself he chooses to present. And if he never felt much for his mother, it can’t be denied that the woman had never appeared to feel very much for him. The circumstances of his conception were hardly the most felicitous – not that she had ever properly filled him in on these – and, though she took over Pru’s job as the Silvers’ domestic servant, Gertrude was never a spontaneous and warm-hearted woman like Pru. She entered the household by accident, clammed-up and emotionally opaque; a person who had early on bought into the idea of her own racially inferior and servile status. Gertrude was always a firm upholder of caste barriers and, as such, for all the convenience of her unconventional billet, she resisted the Silvers’ aberrant and colour-blind style. There was nothing for it, since, however unwillingly, she herself had crossed those barriers of caste – and the shaming evidence of this transgression was her offspring’s paler skin.
Gertrude’s taking up residence in the Silvers’ backyard was something that nobody had planned. It was not a relationship that quite dovetailed – which was why, on that first evening, a muted and somewhat suspicious Gertrude watched in puzzlement as the Silvers scurried about finding sheets, pillows and candles for the unused, cobwebby maid’s room at the far end of their small yard. Ida gave Gertrude a Thermos of milky tea and a box of Ouma Rusks. She gave her two bananas and a bath towel and a slice of her home-made chocolate-and-almond cake. There was a mattress in the room on a small iron bed frame, which Josh made up with clean linen, and a rickety kitchen chair. Both were items that pre-dated the Silvers’ purchase of the house.
And early next morning, Ida went and did the thing she was best at. She haggled on behalf of the dispossessed, confronting a besuited Mr Marchmont-Thomas on the doorstep of Marchmont House. He was on his way to go marking time at his club. Ida first presented him with her card. She told him she had come to collect the illegally withheld papers of one Mrs Gertrude Maseko.
‘Mrs?’ said Hattie’s father, knee-jerk sarcastic. ‘Well, bless my soul!’ But he capitulated almost at once. ‘A silly misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘Good Lord, the stupid woman. She only had to ask.’
Ida waited, as grudgingly invited, in the gloomy mould-green drawing room of the amazing colonial villa she had driven past almost every day on her way to work from her own more modest three-bedroom house. As a serious cook, she was disappointed that the interior should smell so much of boarding house; of boiled cauliflower and beef shin; all evidence of a depressing cuisine that comes devoid of tomatoes, or olive oil, or herbs. But this was precisely the kind of time-warped diet that the Marchmont family clung to as ‘plain English food’; admirably non-devious food; food of a kind that would always ensure against what Hattie’s father called ‘gyppo guts’.
Then Mr Marchmont-Thomas, his teeth bared unpleasantly in place of a smile, wanting to be shot of the woman, appeared with Gertrude’s papers.
‘Here we are then, Mrs . . . urm.’ He glanced at Ida’s card. Bloody trouble-maker. ‘Mrs Silver,’ he said. Jewess, of course. Nice little earner. Funny how these people were so often called Silver or Gold. ‘She steals, you know – your Mrs Gertrude Thing,’ he said. ‘Light fingers, I’m afraid.’
Gertrude stayed for the next ten years. It solved the problem of the absent character reference and she was dependable and hard-working. The Silvers doubled her wages and Jack was born three months after her appearance, by which time the still somewhat basic servant’s room had been fitted with electric light, a pair of gingham curtains and a carpet. Ida was not an ‘interiors’ person, but the room boasted a decent new single bed and a small folding cot for the baby, while the adjoining servant’s washroom now had a lavatory bowl and a shower that ran hot and cold. And Gertrude had access to the Silvers’ washing machine so that Jack’s little vests and nappies hung on the line in the yard. Yet Gertrude never loosened up; never accommodated to the family style; never became quite comfortable with her own son Jack, who, in all sorts of ways, was a different kettle of fish.
Since, unlike the garden of Marchmont House, the Silvers’ backyard was small, the servant’s room was not much more than twelve metres from the constantly open kitchen door, which granted Jack ease of entry. Josh loved to play with Jack; welcomed him into the enticing den of his own bedroom where they read stories together, clapped hands and stomped, dressed up in funny hats, drew pictures and did cutting-out. They also did headstands against the wall. For Jack, Josh’s bedroom was an Aladdin’s Cave of puppet theatres, art materials, tape recorders and walls of books, which still included, between the more adult tomes, a feast of childhood favourites that Jack quickly took to heart. Scuffy the Tugboat; The Wind in the Willows; The Little Prince; The Box of Delights. Jack loved Little Bear and the big flat Orlando books. He especially loved Treasure Island. He adored Josh’s electric keyboard. And, across the hall, was Bernie’s study, where before very long the marvellous silver desk with its pear-drop, cut-glass handles yielded up quantities of scrap paper and Sellotape and paperclips, along with scissors, glue and rubber bands.
Jack knew that one day, when he became a white person, he would own a desk like this. He knew that he would be a white person, because the evidence was before him. He was already a whole lot lighter than his mother, so it was clear to him that, while everyone was born dark brown, some people would then start to fade, after which they would go on to own all these beautiful things. People like himself. Special people. Meanwhile Jack’s determinedly barefoot mother cooked pots of maize porridge for his breakfast, but Jack liked toast and marmalade with lots of oozy butter. He liked dates and sugared almonds. He liked the cartons of peach and apricot juice that lived inside the Silvers’ fridge.
For Jack, though it had been better fitted out since its days as an untenanted concrete hutch, his mother’s room couldn’t compete with what he thought of as the ‘big’ house, with its separate kitchen and living room and its special rooms for sleeping. And while his mother maintained the barriers, refusing herself ever to sit on the comfy living-room chairs; yanking little Jack off them with a click of her disapproving tongue, he, on her weekend visits away, curled up there on Josh’s knee, or joined the family in the dining room, where he enjoyed second helpings of Ida’s lemony chicken.
Jack, who spoke to his mother in Zulu, nonetheless spoke English with the Silvers in the accents of a white person – something that always made his visits to the corner shop a problem. And the problematical nature of Jack’s marginal status in a society so rigidly stratified by race had not bypassed the notice of Bernie and Ida Silver. But, being always busy and much preoccupied with more dramatic
human problems among the dispossessed, they were not particularly hands-on with Gertrude’s child, whose dilemmas, for the moment, were fairly low down in the hierarchy of human suffering, examples of which they witnessed day by day.
‘Try not to steal that child from his mother,’ Bernie said warningly to his adopted teenage son. ‘Just take care, all right?’
Meanwhile, Ida’s solution was to raise up Gertrude with one-to-one classes in adult literacy, though Gertrude proved an obdurate pupil and faded out as soon as she could. Jack, on the other hand, thanks to natural talent and to Josh’s copious read-aloud time, could read Little Bear and Cat in the Hat and several of the Blue Pirate books before the age of four. He also loved the epistolary art, as he and Josh wrote letters to each other in an ongoing game in which they posted their efforts into a home-made, red-painted cardboard post box with a slot cut into the top. The box sat on the back veranda, alongside an old stone sink.
Dear Jack
Please will you come and play with me today?
From your loving friend,
Josh
Josh always used an envelope on which he wrote the Silvers’ address, followed by ‘Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Universe’. He made tiny pretend stamps cut out from magazine pictures and faked the graphics of the Post Office franking machines, including the bilingual exhortations to drive safely home. ‘DRIVE SAFELY/KOM VEILIG TUIS.’
Jack, though his mother regarded these items with suspicion, kept a shoebox of paper and fibre pens on a shelf above his pillow on the top bunk bed that had come to replace the cot in which he once slept.
Dear Josh
I will come.
From Jack
Then he decorated his letters with marvellous pictures of tractors and busily crashing cars. He drew Hannibal crossing the Alps with great numbers of elephants. He drew King Arthur and his knights in armour. He drew castles with moats and drawbridges. Jack drew tightrope walkers and clowns. He never drew Zulu warriors with assegais and shields.
Because the Silvers were oddballs, they never demanded of their maidservant that the boy be dispatched, as most black infants were, from the time that they were weaned; sent away as toddlers, back to the ‘native reserve’ – the reserve that, in Jack’s case, had now been redefined as the Bantu homeland of KwaZulu – because a native child was, by law, an unproductive unit who had no automatic rights of residence in town by virtue of parental employment there.
So Jack, devoid of peer-group playmates, lingered contentedly in the Silvers’ backyard through the period of his preschool life – until Gertrude one day without prior consultation simply, unilaterally, removed her son to his maternal grandmother and left him there, her precocious, urban, pale-skinned child, and she beat a hasty retreat. The removal took place towards the end of Josh’s 3rd year at university and in the very week of Jack’s own guest appearance in the drama school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Jack, ‘the little changeling boy’, Titania’s ward, the stolen child. Gertrude took Jack, still dreaming of greasepaint, in the bus along that same bumpy road upon which she had once met Josh; Jack, who had no previous knowledge of rural life, had never met his grandmother, knew nothing of this eroded scrap of washed-up land on which those too old and too young were eking out a half-life at somewhere below subsistence. Gertrude had, thus far, always made her visits there without her son – and Josh’s invariable, eager offers of sleepover had made this easy for her. But now the time had come.
These years of rural exile have etched themselves upon Jack’s brain. They have made their way into the bone and marrow of his being. The grim, joyless grandmother, the ragged, teasing children – several of them, apparently his own nieces and nephews – offspring of a feckless adult half-sister he never knew he had; the hovel that smelled of grass and mud and unwashed bodies and rags stiffened with ancient sweat, where he was required to sleep on the floor along with all the others; all under a low grass roof from which bugs and crawlies dropped on to his face and limbs in the night. Angry red itchy bumps made their appearance on his arms and legs, where they remained as a semi-permanent fixture. He was soon dressed in rags himself, because Grandmother had seized her chance to sell all his good town clothes.
School was a barefoot three-mile walk to a windowless garage-type construction, laid out with rows of backless benches, where the children sat jammed up in rows before a teacher who had, himself, not gone to school beyond the age of fourteen and often reeked of drink. Sometimes the teacher would fall asleep with his head down on the table, allowing the bolder students to creep away before their time. Jack discovered himself devoid of techniques for bonding with other children and it did not help that his reading and writing were glaringly proficient, while those years older than himself were spelling out monosyllabic words in time to the teacher’s dreary tap-tap at the blackboard. All classroom learning was by rote and most of it – for want of paper – was chanted out loud. The teacher kept a big stick and frequently lashed out. Grandmother also kept a stick and she lashed out as well.
Some days he had to skip school and take a turn minding Grandmother’s goats. He didn’t care too much for the goats but he preferred them to the schoolroom. He disliked the smelly intimacy of drawing the goats’ milk, and then the hazardous prospect of carrying it back – what with the terror of spillage, or the other children grabbing the pail to slurp at it before he had made it home. Grandmother would always notice if there was less milk than there should have been and she’d have cause to reach for her stick.
Grandmother, like all the malevolent hags in storybooks, appeared to have only one tooth. Her cheeks were shrivelled. Her eyes had a yellowy film. She went in for mean-minded pinches that left purple bruises on his skin. She grabbed his ears and cackled. Everyone was in threadbare clothes, including Grandmother herself and the teacher. Some of the smaller boys wore grown-up men’s jackets for want of more appropriate clothing; jackets that hung below their knees and were vastly too wide on the shoulders; snot-encrusted cuffs covering their hands.
Food was maize porridge that sometimes came with sharp soured milk curds, or with a smear of sludgy greenish veg. Just occasionally, the porridge came with little bits of animal: chicken’s feet; a boiled head; washed-out innards like those big rubber bands on Bernie Silver’s desk. Oh do not think of Bernie’s desk. Not now; not any more. Everywhere had flies because no one had a fridge and there was no electric light. The lav was a box over a reeking hole in the ground into which small children had been known to fall and drown. His shrunken homeland was a hell of dust and turds and flies, and of the sort of green-eyed watchfulness that can accompany extremes of deprivation. Jack hated the smell of the fermenting grains when Grandmother made her vats of beer. He hated all things to do with local rituals; with skins and feathers and gall bladders tied in a person’s hair, or the skeletons of snakes. There were bent-up old men with bleary eyes and head rings and feathers, who would babble around smoky fires about ancient and glorious times before the white man came and took the land. For toys, the children played in the dirt, skimming dusty stones with dustier hands into dusty hollows in the earth.
Then one day it was three years on and Jack spotted his chance. Kept behind as a punishment for he cannot remember what, Jack observed that the teacher was once again asleep, with his head upon the table. But on this occasion something else was lying there as well. There was a letter, addressed to the teacher, and the envelope, he could see, bore an unfranked stamp. Jack approached and reached out with care, because the teacher would always beat his pupils more readily after he had been drinking. Letters had not been a feature of Jack’s life, not since Josh and the red-painted post box, but in a moment the item was in his pocket and he had tiptoed from the schoolroom.
The relentless absence of privacy in the village, along with the paucity of resources, meant that it was several days before Jack had managed to reseal the back of the envelope and fix a scrap of paper over its existing address with a smear of stolen
schoolroom glue. He still knew the Silvers’ address by heart, though he left off ‘Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Universe’. He fed the teacher’s letter to one of the goats and his own letter was written on the yellowing, torn-out title page of the only book that he had snatched up from Josh’s bedroom three years earlier: a small paperback copy of Treasure Island; the version he’d made off with in preference to the more enticing but less portable illustrated hardback.
Dear Josh
I ask you please to come for me. Please. I ask you to come soon. I ask you to come now. I ask you, please, soon, NOW.
From your old friend, Jack
He entrusted the letter in a last daring minute to a young adult migrant worker, who was returning that day to his packing job in a Durban warehouse. Then he could do nothing but wait, and wait, and hope.
When Josh got Jack’s letter, he had just recently had good news about his application for a graduate scholarship in London. Josh had got himself a little car – his very own third-hand 2CV – along with a driving licence, and Hattie Thomas, his dance teacher, had become his constant companion. At this time, he still had hopes of persuading Hattie to leave the country with him and the two of them occasionally indulged in pleasant fantasies about flat-sharing in Pimlico – or maybe near Hampstead Heath?
‘Hey, remember little Jack?’ he said to Hattie, who had met Jack during the play rehearsals three years earlier and also, just once, on that weekend visit to the Silvers’ house when Gertrude was out of town.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 17