Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Bobby, do you . . . you know, also . . .’ I’d once attempted to ask him.

  Bobby’s hands shot up in protest. ‘Tom, it’s not a question you can ask a person. I’m supposed to be there as the company’s representative, you know, strictly kosher. Also the Bobby Dazzlers, they one of the official bands. It’s the three monkeys, you understand? No see, no hear, no speak.’ He hunched his shoulders, rolled his eyes and wiggled his hands. ‘But I’m a jazz musician, man! What else can I say, does a bird fly, does a camel fart in the desert?’

  I must say, with such a famous wicked event going on and the Nationalists now in power I wondered why the Government allowed something like this to happen in front of their very eyes. The South African police force was not exactly known for its unconventional viewpoint, such goings-on would, in their opinion, have the potential to undermine the whole society. Boy, oh boy! If the Dominee was still alive and he happened to get a hold of the details! Magtig! What a well-rounded sermon Polliack’s Annual Musicians’ Garden Party would make, with old Mr Polliack starring as the solid-gold-toothed, dark-haired, black-bearded, diamonds-concealed ‘you know where’, Christ-killing, devil-incarnate Jew!

  For days after this company-sponsored musicians’ afternoon champagne gargle and subsequent drunken sexual soiree, Bobby would hold his head in his hands as if his hangover still persisted, and recount yet another lurid tale involving the opposite sex. I listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed, while at the same time I tucked away in my memory the conclusion that French champagne and a woman was a deadly effective combination. One to be resurrected, if ever I could afford the first and was fortunate enough to find myself in the company of the second. I also knew that even should I know the lyrics to every pop song in the world, with me unable to sing a note I was unlikely to ever receive an invitation to this simultaneously famous and infamous garden party.

  So you can imagine my surprise when Mr Fisher called me into his office and told me that Mr Polliack had personally suggested that I be invited. ‘Tom, I’m not at all sure it’s a good idea, but the old man was fairly adamant.’ Mr Fisher grinned and his voice changed. ‘ “Let me tell you something for nussing, Lew. Any vun vat can sell already three Steinways for cash, this is a mensch! A boy who is goink right to the top, I guarantee it. Invite away, believe me, for such a boychick, it can’t harm.” ’ But you could see he mimicked the founder in the gentlest possible way, drawing me into a mutual conspiracy of laughter.

  Now I have to mention something else. With Frikkie dead I had the responsibility for Tinky who, like his late master, was not accustomed to being left on his own in a dark little flat. Like the great Tinker, he wanted to be in on all the action. But this meant I couldn’t use public transport to get to university. So I bought a second-hand bicycle with a carrier stand at the back to which I wired a butter crate lined with a piece from one of Frikkie’s oft-scrubbed and constantly laundered blankets. Tinky took to it like a duck to water, viewing the world whizzing by with imperious disdain and giving any hoi polloi dog we happened to pass on the way a piece of his exalted mind. He attended university with me, and was even allowed to come to Polliack’s where I trained him to do the ‘Woof! Woof!’ part in Patti Page’s ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window?’, which almost doubled our sales of the hit record, as well as turning him into a star in his own right. Bobby even had a sign made that we put outside the lifts on the ground floor:

  The Music Basement. Mr Lyrics and Tinky, the singing dog!

  It was a stroke of genius and we continued to sustain big sales of the record long after it had lost the number-one spot on the charts. Although this was Bobby’s idea, I seemed to get all the accolades these days. I was discovering that in life you only had to do one big thing and people would give you credit for successes not of your own making. My one big thing was, of course, the three pianos and now, all of a sudden, I was the boy genius, the super-salesman around the place. When you protested and gave the credit where it was due, they quietly added modesty to your virtues.

  So when the big day of the garden party arrived, I gave Tinky a wash and a good brushing and we set out on the bicycle for the Polliack mansion situated in a new posh suburb named Emmarentia that was miles out of town. As it turned out, it was on five acres of landscaped gardens with a natural stream running through it. When we got to the elaborate iron gates, wrought with a motif of two peacocks with their tail feathers flared, facing each other, the security guard looked highly doubtful, holding his hand up in a command to us to stop. You could see he was thinking, how could a low-down like me with a dog in a box, arriving on an old bicycle, possess an invitation to such a swish affair? Fortunately, moments later, Mr Fisher and his wife arrived in a brand-new Chevrolet. Sticking his head out of the car window, he called, ‘Glad you and Tinky could make it, Tom!’ So the big Afrikaner in a pretend-policeman’s uniform reluctantly allowed us through the massive gates and pointed to the garages where he said I must put my bicycle. If only he’d known that he’d been right, I was really and truly an imposter, a mere lyric-spouter and about as far from a musician as you could possibly get.

  The garages alone were bigger than Doctor Van Heerden’s house, and the house itself was nearly as big as The Boys Farm hostel. Later I would be told it was built in the Spanish colonial style, though when, on one occasion, I mentioned this to Graham Truby, he raised one eyebrow as usual and quipped, ‘My dear, pure Hollywood Spanish! Straight off the Paramount set, à la Cecil B. De Mille!’, whatever that was supposed to mean, other than bitchy. Let me tell you it was a house-and-a-half and I’d never seen better! Though, of course, I didn’t see inside.

  The gardens, for there appeared to be several, each in a different style, lived up to Bobby’s description. Neatly trimmed and flowering hedges divided one garden from another. When eventually I found and entered the maze you could easily imagine how all these little secret nooks tucked away under the stars were perfect for doing ‘it’ on a camomile lawn as soft as a double pile carpet. As for the cabana, it was huge and filled with spare sun lounges and, believe me, you didn’t have to have too much imagination to know how they would be employed soon after sunset!

  As for the rest of the set-up, it was just the way Bobby said: the marquee with a long table groaning with food, lots of stuff I’d never eaten before, such as lobster and prawns flown up from the Cape that tasted like you wondered what all the fuss was about. But also lots of really good things to eat that you’d never get normally. Black waiters in white mandarin-collared jackets with polished brass buttons and cotton gloves served French champagne and any other kind of drink you wanted. I had a Coke and they didn’t seem to mind getting it for me specially.

  When I arrived, the Bobby Dazzlers were already on the bandstand and were going at it hammer and tongs with people jitterbugging on the dance floor, so I couldn’t say hello to Bobby. Apart from Mr Fisher, who must have gone into the house, I didn’t know anyone. I was later to discover that the older musicians attended a separate cocktail party. The posh inside-the-house classical-music people, such as hailed from the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra and the ballet orchestra, naturally wouldn’t have been too interested in what was going on in the garden, especially after dark. But I didn’t mind being on my own because Tinky proved to be the number-one hit of the day. All the pretty girls – Bobby was right, they were everywhere – wanted to pet him. I’d since learned that smelling of roses didn’t mean you were pregnant because if it still did, then every beautiful woman there was going to have a baby. Talk about nice smells around the place!

  Tinky must have thought he was back on the pavement outside Park Station begging for alms and photo opportunities for the hooded Frikkie. He’d sit up with his paws held up with his best pleading look accompanied by a soft whimper that was designed to evoke the maximum sympathetic reaction from the punters. Beautiful creatures would come up and kneel down and pat him and say, ‘What an adorable little dog! What’s his name?’ When this happened,
a person could tell them and look them in the face. Which was something someone like me wouldn’t normally do, except, of course, when they weren’t looking or in the music basement, when I was hiding behind the lyrics of the latest pop song and wasn’t being the real me.

  I watched the dancing for a bit, but then an older lady came up to me and asked me to dance and said her husband wouldn’t dance with her so would I? I felt a real fool. ‘I’m sorry, madam, but I’ve got a badly sprained ankle,’ I lied. So I had to leave, affecting a pronounced limp in case someone else who might be beautiful asked me. One day you’re going to learn to dance, I told myself. Sometimes in the newspapers you’d see these ads for Arthur Murray – ‘Why be the one left out of the fun? Learn to dance the Arthur Murray way. Guaranteed results in six easy and exciting lessons!’ There was this photograph of a beautiful girl and above her head in quotation marks it said: ‘Will you dance with me?’ I had written this down on the mental list I kept, along with the deadly effect champagne had on girls, as one of the things I was definitely going to do one day.

  It was a hot day and the sun hadn’t set, but you could see there was a lot of spontaneous laughter going around the place and the girls seemed to be getting very friendly with the guys, grabbing their arms and sometimes putting their heads against their chests. You could feel it in the air that things were about to happen the moment the sun went down.

  From all the excitement and the heat Tinky’s little tongue was hanging out and he was panting, so we walked through two of the gardens and passed the maze to get to the little stream so he could have a drink. We found this lovely spot with a rock and waterlilies with a tiny fall of water turning the stream into a quietly tinkling brook. It was late afternoon and the sun was now pleasantly warm on my back, and I thought I’d probably had enough of the crowd for a little bit, so Tinky and I decided to sit there for a while. Sometimes it’s nice to be just on your own in a pleasant place like that, like some good days at the big rock when you could read a Miss Phillips book or sit beside the creek coming down from the high mountains.

  I must have been sitting daydreaming for a while when suddenly I heard this nice voice call, ‘Hello! Would you mind if I joined you?’

  I turned around, and I suppose my mouth must have fallen open. I’m not saying she was beautiful because it was more than that, perhaps she wasn’t even pretty, she was startling. Jet-black hair, cut almost like a boy’s, and green eyes highlighted with what I later learned was eyeliner and mascara to emphasise their vivacious beauty. She also had full lips with a very red lipstick and her face was lightly tanned. I must have looked the full dumbstruck idiot because the next thing she said was, ‘Move over, handsome.’ Then I saw that she was carrying two glasses of champagne. ‘Here, hold these,’ she instructed, holding them out. I accepted the champagne and she sat down beside me and arranged her skirt, then reached out and picked up Tinky and placed him on her lap, natural as anything. Tinky seemed to think it was perfectly normal to be seated in the lap of this astonishingly exotic creature because he simply settled in. She reached out again and took one of the glasses of champagne. ‘Cheers,’ she said, holding it out towards me.

  What could I possibly do? Here was this startlingly beautiful person, arriving out of the blue, and now sitting so close to me that I could feel the warmth of her thigh, and my first words to her were going to be ‘Er . . . Miss, I don’t drink.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I replied, touching her champagne glass lightly the way I’d seen it done all afternoon. She took a tiny little sip and I followed suit. It tasted like sour lemonade and, as with the earlier lobster and prawns, I wondered briefly what all the fuss was about. Now my big problem was what to say next. ‘I’m Tom Fitz-harrumph-saxby,’ I said, my voice faltering in the middle of my own surname.

  ‘Yes I know, three Steinways for cash already,’ she laughed.

  I guess I must have turned completely beetroot. Tinky was licking the back of her hand and I wanted to die on the spot. ‘June Hayes,’ she said, offering me her Tinky-licked hand. ‘I’m Mr Polliack’s granddaughter.’

  Now instead of saying ‘Pleased to meet you, June,’ I took her hand and blurted out, ‘But that’s not a Jewish name!’

  She smiled and my heart skipped a beat. ‘In one of the more stupid of the many mistakes in my life, I was married to a gentile doctor named Hayes.’ She laughed. ‘My mother liked the doctor bit, but wasn’t at all happy about the goy. The trouble with Jewish mothers is that they usually turn out to be correct about their daughters and affairs of the heart.’

  ‘Goy?’

  ‘It’s a not very polite Yiddish word for a gentile,’ she laughed again.

  I was still a long way from ‘Y’ in Meneer Van Niekerk’s Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and my stupid brain couldn’t help itself. ‘Yiddish?’

  ‘It’s a patois, no, not really, probably a complete language that German and Polish Jews use among themselves.’

  Thank God I knew what patois meant. ‘Oh,’ I replied, continuing my brilliant monosyllabic dialogue.

  June Hayes laughed again, then throwing back her head she emptied her champagne glass. ‘Bottoms up, Tom,’ she commanded.

  I wasn’t caught out this time, it was an expression I’d read in some book or another and I knew what it meant. Besides, her meaning was obvious. So I upped my glass and swallowed. Suddenly there was champagne issuing spontaneously in a fine spray from my mouth and bursting through my nostrils in an exit that landed partly in my lap and partly on the rock. ‘Shit!’ I cried. Another single word!

  ‘Well, at least that’s an exclamation and not a question, Tom,’ June Hayes quipped, plainly amused and seemingly not at all concerned with my dreadful champagne accident. ‘My turn now, Tom. Is this the first time you’ve had champagne?’

  ‘Yeah, afraid so,’ I said, sheepishly, finding my handkerchief and wiping my dripping, snotty nose.

  ‘Any alcohol ever?’ I shook my head. ‘How old are you, Tom?’

  ‘Seventeen, eighteen next month.’ I’d made such a complete balls-up of everything that there seemed no point in lying.

  ‘Eighteen, that’s a perfect age for a young stud.’

  ‘Stud?’ Shit, here we go again!

  ‘I tell you what, Tom, why don’t we start all over again? You go get two more glasses of champagne and we’ll take it from there.’

  ‘Tinky, stay,’ I commanded. At least I was in control of something around the place. I rose and made my way through the two gardens to the main party area and returned without having spilled a drop.

  ‘Salut!’ June Hayes said this time as we touched glasses. ‘Just take it slowly, Tom, it was vulgar of me to quaff it like that.’ The smile that followed was stunning, all teeth and mouth and virescent eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologised.

  ‘Shush! Never say you’re sorry, Tom. It’s a word that’s lost its true meaning. Besides, nobody will believe you. When we’re really sorry we usually lack the courage to say so.’ She paused, taking a sip from her glass. ‘Now, starting all over again, my name is June Hayes, née Polliack, my friends call me Pirrou and when they don’t like me, which is quite often, they call me La Pirouette. That’s because I can be a spoilt bitch and, besides, I’m a professional ballet dancer. I’d very much like you to call me Pirrou and to try to like me.’ She looked at me, tilting her head. ‘Now, it’s your turn, Tom.’

  What was I supposed to say? ‘I’m Tom Fitzsaxby, otherwise known as Voetsek the Rooinek, world-record-holder of Chinese writing on my bum, internationally successful gospel-tract writer, tone-deaf lyric-spouting phoney pop-music salesman and a member of the brotherhood of derelicts’? ‘I’m a second-year law student at Wits and in my spare time I work for your grandfather,’ I said lamely.

  ‘And what do you do for fun, Tom?’

  ‘Fun?’ Oh, Jesus! Another monosyllabic answer! To my surprise, in the process of all this questioning I had emptied my glass. ‘Shall I get another glass of champagne?�
� I asked, stupidly examining my empty glass with some bemusement as I hadn’t remembered taking a single sip from it.

  ‘You’re making me quaff again, Tom!’ Pirrou accused, smiling, then downed her glass instantly and handed it to me. ‘After all, a girl has to protect her virtue.’ She glanced at me out of the corner of her beautiful eyes, absently fondling Tinky’s ears.

  There it was! The deadly effect of champagne on members of the opposite sex working in front of my very eyes! After one glass of sprayed-all-about champagne and another I’d managed to drink down effortlessly, I was feeling quite good and the sour lemonade taste seemed to have completely disappeared.

  ‘Ask them for a bottle of Bollinger, Tom,’ Pirrou suggested. Only it was the kind of suggestion that suggested that she expected me definitely to return with the bottle. I wasn’t at all sure that I could command sufficient authority to grant her request. But a man has his pride and so off I went through the two gardens again. It was beginning to grow quite dark, but I couldn’t hear any moaning and as I passed several hedges and the maze on the third lawn with the double-pile camomile lawn, it was completely silent.

  Back at the marquee I looked around for a waiter who appeared to be Zulu. Soon enough I found one. ‘I need a bottle of champagne for Miss Polliack, the little madam of the big baas, the big induna, who owns this place,’ I said in Zulu, pointing to the house. He glanced at the Polliack mansion and then looked back doubtfully, so I quickly added, ‘I think you better come and see her yourself, she’s a very angry person and could have you fired like this.’ I snapped my fingers and gave him a meaningful look. I was using authority I didn’t have again, and I wasn’t sure whether this would be meaningful as a threat. I imagined that a waiter employed by the Carlton Grill was probably a very prestigious position in the Johannesburg waiter scene, and that a quiet word in the right place from a high-up such as a Polliack could see him on his way back to Zululand with his last pay packet in his pocket.