‘Where’s my dog?’ I said, alarmed, turning and looking around. I was suddenly ashamed that I hadn’t thought of Tinky once since waking up.
‘In the kitchen, Tom. I gave him almost half a leg of lamb to chew on.’
‘He’ll be sick,’ I said churlishly, then added, ‘We have to go.’
‘It’s a long way to walk, Tom.’
‘I’ve got my bike,’ I said, not thinking.
‘It’s an even longer walk to my grandfather’s place. We left it there, last night, remember?’
What was the use? I wasn’t any good at this sort of bickering, even with guys, never mind the opposite sex. So I grinned and looked at Pirrou. ‘I don’t remember anything about last night, just the first bit beside the stream, and then trees and lights whizzing by. Did I make a bloody fool of myself?’
‘Oh, Tom, you were delightful, you told me about that lovely sheep farmer from the Karoo and how Union Jack the Zulu played “God Save the King” sixteen times on the pianos.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘I’m afraid I quite fell in love with you, darling.’
That was two ‘darlings’ in English, a word I’d never had applied to me before. I know people use it all the time, and I was to learn that in ballet circles it was so common among the dancers that even the men used it among themselves and they weren’t all of them Graham Trubys. ‘I didn’t . . . er, brag about the pianos?’ I asked, feeling myself blush.
‘No, of course not! You just told a lovely story about a nice man who wanted to buy his wife a gift for loving him so much. It was very touching and it’s nice to think this kind of enduring love still exists.’ She smiled. ‘Does this mean our first lovers’ tiff is over? Will Tinky really be sick?’ she asked, switching tack, the two sentences following closely so as to allow the one to ameliorate the other.
‘Yes and no. Tinky will be in doggie heaven. He’d be scratching at the door and yelping long before this if he wasn’t gutsing himself.’
‘Come here, Tom,’ Pirrou said, her arms reaching out to me. My only hope was that my brain didn’t send out the same set of instructions as before, because I would be totally stuffed. She hugged me, then drawing back, planted a kiss on the centre of my forehead. ‘C’mon, let’s have a shower and then breakfast, I’ve stocked up on everything a hungry man could possibly want.’ She tilted her head and looked at me questioningly, to see if I realised she’d gone young-guy-grocery-shopping, anticipating my presence at the breakfast table all along. If all women in conquest were as confident and as prescient as Pirrou, a man was a goner for sure.
Thus started the true education of the brand-new, born-again Tom Fitzsaxby, by definition the shiny new handbag attached to Pirrou in good times and La Pirouette in bad ones. I must say right at the beginning of the relationship and in her defence that she was starting out with very crude clay. I guess I possessed an intelligence way above my knowledge of how to behave in the company of Johannesburg’s wealthy arts patrons. These consisted of older European Jews, the rich part of the locally born Jewish community and others of the wealthy classes that lived in Houghton Ridge, Sandton and the posh suburbs beyond.
Johannesburg for the wealthy white population was a city that is essentially concerned with money, where the arts became a way of outwardly displaying one’s wealth. We were besieged with invitations to cocktail and dinner parties, opera, theatre, symphony concerts, gallery openings, the races, mayoral receptions, parties and the like, and when Pirrou accepted an invitation, her handbag tagged along. She was regarded as good company not only because she was principal dancer in the ballet company, but also because she was a sparkling conversationalist, laughed easily, was witty, had a naughty sense of humour and knew how to flirt with older men. She also possessed wide cultural interests and a very good brain. Added to this, long before it was fashionable for a woman to pick up the instrument, she played the classical guitar very well, and had a clear, clean and pleasant voice. And, of course, she had been right; among the bitchy, of whom there were certainly many, she was referred to not as Pirrou the dancer or ballerina or musician, but as La Pirouette the cradle-snatcher.
Now that I was sharing Pirrou’s bed, though at my own insistence, not her home, I had grown in confidence and could soon hold my own in a conversation involving the arts and a number of other topics, including finance, an essential requirement in the City of Gold. I admit, a lot of it was due to my prodigious memory, grown all those years back by learning verbatim the entire contents of the stolen red book. But I was steadily catching up with the actual experience of the arts and was less often sounding like a fake to myself. Literature, of course, had never been a problem, and in addition I was devouring Smelly Jelly’s enormously eclectic library as well as reading law. I would sometimes surprise myself with what I apparently knew, or I would make an observation or offer a point of view, often in much older company, that made people seem to stop and take notice.
Pirrou was a hard taskmistress, but a good one; she had a wicked temper and she knew how to humiliate me if I messed up. She worked very hard at her profession and suffered anxiety and depression, and I learned to take a fair bit on the chin. Pirrou and La Pirouette were both very much a part of the relationship. By today’s standards, she could be called a control freak. By Mevrou’s standards, she was an angel. By my own standards, I was eager as a puppy to learn and to slough off the uncouth mannerisms of the past. This was not because I was a snob, as Pirrou explained. ‘Tom, you’re too young and too poor and not influential enough to be crude, rude and lack basic manners. People will judge you initially by what they see and while you may have sufficient intelligence for them to alter their opinion when later they get to know you, why put yourself at a primary and unnecessary disadvantage? You have instinctive good manners, but very poor physical mannerisms. Just remember, in essence, everything people react positively to in life is sound, dance and movement. How you speak, how you hold yourself and how you act.’
She taught me how to cook, to drive and how to dress, although it shamed me that she purchased my clothes. In this I had no choice, I simply lacked the means to dress the way her lifestyle and my associated handbaggery demanded. She tried not to humiliate me, though she often succeeded with her quick temper, impatience and outrageous sense of privilege. Of course, there were a great many compensations, among them perhaps her greatest gift of all – the many ways there are to make love, to always attempt to satisfy her needs and by so doing enhancing my own experience and ultimate joy of sex. She taught me that slow and patient was infinitely more rewarding than what she termed ‘the snorting rhino charge’ that so often exemplified the male ego in bed. She also taught me that a rampant phallus isn’t the only physical appendage available to bring about coitus or even necessarily the best one available. I can tell you, this, and the various demonstrations and instructions that followed, came as some big surprise!
She would sometimes pick up the guitar and sing me a song. I suppose refrain would be a better word, more in the idiom of the old English ‘Hey nonny no’ folksong tradition, for it carried with it a gentle nostalgia.
In the Mood
My love is always ‘in the mood’,
His technique is no mystique,
A rhino charge with snorting horn
And then a good night’s sleep!
How very much I’ve come to long
For a gentler style of loving,
For tenderness and slow, soft ways,
Not grunts ’n’ groans ’n’ shovin’!
If only he would sense my mood
Then we could share the fun,
And bed would be a loving place
Where both of us would come!
And so two years went by very quickly and I graduated in law with honours and was awarded the university medal and, more importantly, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford that I was to take up in October the following year. Pirrou was anxious that I do a year with one of the many prestigious law firms that had offered me a place as a
junior in the hope that I would rejoin them after I returned from England.
However, I had decided on quite a different course for the year that I would be free. I suppose this must sound strange, even contradictory. But despite all the culture and splendid occasion, the high society and the wealth I’d been integrated into, the social metamorphosis I’d undergone and Pirrou’s careful tutelage to achieve all of this, I was left with an anxiety and concern that I was losing the sense of where I came from and who I intrinsically desired to be as an adult.
In effect, I was forgetting my roots. Now, you might even ask, ‘Wasn’t that the whole idea?’ Well, yes and no, my roots were not only The Boys Farm, they were also the high mountains and the Volk. I had been fortunate to have the lovely rose-scented Marie, Mevrou Booysens, now Doctor Van Heerden’s wife, and the indefatigable and wonderful Miss Phillips as the equalising element in my life as a child.
These three generous women allowed me to understand that kindness was an emotion that, when given unselfishly by a woman to a child, became the precursor to understanding that a notion such as love does exist. That love wasn’t just between a man and a woman, that it was a universal condition of the heart.
Then there was Sergeant Van Niekerk, who had defended and protected me. His older brother, the headmaster, gifted me with a way to regard myself, ‘To thine own self be true’, together with a compendium of words I would never conquer. Miss Phillips, who discovered and nurtured my intellect and so opened up infinite possibilities for my future life. Doctor Van Heerden, whose stolen red book and patronage had trained my memory and given me protection. Frikkie Botha and the brotherhood were also a part of who I was, they taught me that humans, despite their shortcomings, are worthwhile whatever their status in life. Although I had only known the three of them for a long day on the road, Dippie, Stoffie and Auntie, together with Mr Patel and Mr and Mrs Naidoo, had also shown me a generosity of the spirit I had never once witnessed among Johannesburg’s rich and important people. Finally, there was Mattress waiting for me in heaven. He had given me comfort and the gift of Tinker’s life as well as love and friendship when I lacked all three.
All the glitz and the glory of university and the pampering by the cognoscenti, in effect, was placing me at odds with those essential values in my past. I was living in a city that had managed the dichotomy of rich and poor, black and white so completely that people such as Pirrou could live their entire lives oblivious to the misery surrounding them. As an example, Pirrou had a housemaid called Martha, a laughing, happy woman who cooked and cleaned and with whom I would sometimes share a cup of tea in the kitchen. Martha had been in her employ for five years, yet it was me who told Pirrou that her maid rose at three in the morning, had two children going to school, and lived in a two-room shanty with one other family of four in Soweto. Before she left home she would iron the children’s school clothes, leave their breakfast for them, make their school lunch and then leave in a crowded commuter train at four-thirty in the morning to arrive on time to wake Pirrou with a cup of tea at seven-thirty. She left at six to get home just before nine at night. It was not that Pirrou was uncaring and unkind, it simply never occurred to her to ask about the welfare of her maid. Martha was clean, honest, seemed happy in her presence, was a good cook and cleaner and well paid by the standards of most maids and so, in Pirrou’s mind, each had admirably fulfilled their side of the employer/employee contract.
And so in my year off I decided to go to the copper mines in Northern Rhodesia where copper bonuses were being paid to young guys to work underground with high explosives. I could earn more in one year working in an isolated copper mine than I would in five years at Polliack’s or as a junior in a law firm. I was conscious of what I was giving up, and even that it might ultimately prove to be to my disadvantage, but I needed time and space to reconcile who I was and what I had learned that was worth keeping.
I had discovered that the very rich are unforgiving, accustomed to getting their own way in most things and judgemental in all. To some real extent Pirrou and her coterie of wealthy and influential friends had an almost proprietorial interest in me. As inevitably happens, those with whom Pirrou commonly associated had learned my background and felt as though they should be a part of my future. A joint rehabilitation program for which they could be seen to be responsible or were able to assume the credit.
Of course to some extent they were correct, they had all helped to smooth the edges, modify my vowels, remove some of the guttural intonations, the strong Afrikaner-speaking English accent I had naturally acquired at The Boys Farm, and in various ways turned me into a sophisticated young man. I was grateful to all of them, but stopped short of feeling beholden. Handbaggery on the arm of a powerful and charismatic woman is very hard work if you refuse to capitulate and become the invisible silent partner, and instead are determined to give as much as you receive. The time had come to reaffirm those values I believed were important to me (‘To thine own self be true’) and to walk away from that which was not. More specifically, walk away from those things that were over, where the lessons in life had been learned, and the hardest of these was going to be the wonderful as well as potentially redoubtable Pirrou, who had given me so very much of infinite value.
One other thing occurred that had persuaded me to break away. As I was writing my final-year examinations at university, Tinky became unwell. I needed to wrap him in a bit of a blanket when I put him in his butter crate on the bike, and he no longer barked imperiously at the hoi polloi dogs on the pavement, and he slept most of the day. I took him to a vet who gave him a thorough examination. I had been worried for some time because he had become very grey around his snout and eyes, and was beginning to look and move like an old dog. He appeared to have arthritis in his left hip joint and had developed a constant though mild cough.
When he had first come to the flat he had a bad smell, despite my bathing him regularly. I’d taken him to the vet then too and the poor little blighter had almost everything a neglected fox terrier could have, with the fortunate exception of mange. He needed two teeth extracted and some work on his other teeth and as a consequence had very bad breath, his ears were waxy and infected and he had an anal gland infection that added to his malodorous condition. Finally he had a skin infection known as malassezia in between his paws and on his groin. At the time the vet wanted to put him down. ‘It’s too expensive trying to get an old dog like this healthy again,’ he said to me.
‘Old dog? I don’t think so, it’s just that he’s had a tough life.’
‘No, son, he’s an old dog,’ the vet replied.
‘Can he get better?’ I’d asked.
I remember the vet looking me up and down. ‘Is he a stray you’ve found?’ He hadn’t waited for me to answer. ‘No use wasting sympathy on a stray, better to let him go, only cost you money in the end.’
‘No, he isn’t a stray. Can you make him better?’ I repeated.
‘In time, I daresay, and with sufficient money.’
‘It’s not about money,’ I said, swallowing, ‘it’s about not letting him down.’
He looked at me curiously. ‘He’s been badly neglected, whose dog is this?’
‘Mine now.’ I didn’t wish to explain further.
‘I see,’ he said, but you could tell he didn’t see. ‘He’s an old dog, son, his life is over.’
‘No, it isn’t, Doctor, if you can make him better, it’s about to begin.’
He sighed. ‘It’s your money, son.’
I’d always thought that Tinky had belonged to Frikkie as a puppy and had never asked him how he’d come to own him. I’d always assumed that he remembered Tinker the world-champion ratter with great fondness and had somehow found a puppy who resembled her and had taken it from there. But this evidently hadn’t been the case and, according to the vet, Tinky was around twelve years old when Frikkie got him, which meant that he was now fifteen and coming to the end of a fox terrier’s life. The cough was the worryin
g factor and a visit to the vet confirmed this. It indicated a severe heart condition.
My darling little Tinky died in my arms a week later, like Frikkie, of a sudden heart attack. He’d simply looked up at me with a tiny whimper, and I’d picked him up and held him against my face. He licked me and then I felt a slight quiver and he was dead.
Although I was terribly distraught, this time I had kept the faith. I borrowed the Ford bakkie used by old Mr Polliack’s head gardener, had a small pinewood box built for Tinky’s body and then drove north to Duiwelskrans to arrive just as night came to the high mountains. I drank the last of a thermos of tea and ate the sandwiches I’d made, and then slept in the back of the truck on the outskirts of the town.
I was aware I would have been perfectly welcome to arrive unannounced at the homes of Doctor Van Heerden or Marie and the Sergeant, but I wanted to complete this particular mission on my own. At dawn I drove through the still sleeping little town and passed the nightsoil cart drawn by the same two patient old mules. The three Africans were laughing and chatting among themselves, wearing the hooded hessian sacks soaked with excrement over their heads. I thought how much had happened since the night I’d spent under Doctor Van Heerden’s house and had stolen the red book and then fled into the rising sun back to The Boys Farm to be greeted along the way by these three denizens of the night. So much in life changes, but in the end remains the same.
I started to climb up into the high mountains, passing the Van Schalkwyk farm, and wondered if the six brothers were still incarcerated in Pretoria. With the Nationalist government in power, the nation had been delivered back to the Volk. The six Van Schalkwyk brothers were more likely to be regarded by the present government as the freedom fighters they themselves believed they’d been, rather than the saboteurs for which they had been convicted and incarcerated. The law, I was learning fast, was a matter of popular convention, rigid only in those things that can be based on a past example, mostly small crimes committed by small people. Sabotage is a question of opinion, a notion based on the popular sentiments of the day; that peculiar barometer that measures the febrile temperature of a nation at any given time and which politicians learn to read in order to suitably adjust their principles.
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