A Sport of Nature Read online

  Now and then one of these school-worldly girls went too far; for example, the one who went for a ride on a motorbike down Jameson Avenue during her turn to slip away from Sunday-school duty. She was seen by a parent as he came out of a Greek shop with cigarettes and the Sunday paper; seen in her school uniform with her spread thighs ‘clinging to the back of a boy’. The headmistress floundered embarrassedly through all the moral props; feminine modesty, the honour of the school, bad example to the innocent Sunday-school charges, and then, in a complicity both she and the girl understood perfectly, let her off just this once (with the punishment that would satisfy everyone: docking of half-term holiday) because the transgression was one accepted within their recognized code of virtues and concomitant vices.

  Among the privileges granted to the senior girls was permission to go in mufti, in groups of not less than four but unaccompanied by a teacher, to a Saturday-afternoon cinema. The housemistress had to be told the title of the film to be seen; it was supposed to be an educational film, but there was not much choice in the few cinemas of Salisbury in the late Fifties. The housemistress had to approve Elvis Presley and James Dean. At the cinema the schoolgirls met a wider circle of boys than that of their counterpart school. Although Hillela’s hair, once out of the care of her aunt’s hairdresser, sprang elastically back to ripples again, she was as sought-after in the popcorn-smelling dark as anyone else. The cinemas were always full on Saturdays, right up to the back rows, which blacks and coloureds were allowed to occupy. There was the day she was struggling back through the crowded foyer at intermission with five icecream cones for her friends, and the tall boy with the sallow face and strange blond hair asked so nicely if he could help her. When they reached the row where her friends were sitting, he handed over the cones and disappeared to wherever his seat was. But she knew he had been looking at her, before, a number of times, while she had played her part: of not being aware of him. Then he began to smile at her when he saw her queueing for tickets, and she even waved casually back. Arriving for a James Dean she was to see for the second or third time, she said, Where’re you sitting? preparatory to asking if he wouldn’t like to sit with ‘us’.

  He had promised to keep a seat for a friend; wouldn’t she come along with them, instead? His friend did not arrive, or did not exist. He did not shift his leg towards hers or take her hand. Now and then both had the same reaction to the film and instinctively would turn to smile at one another in the dark. The look of him, that had attracted her attention for some weeks, took on a strong bodily presence beside her. She did not expect this one to touch her, was not offended that he didn’t. When the lights went up she was glad to see his face. She liked particularly his eyes, a greeny-grey with hair-thin splinters of yellow sunburst in the iris, whose charm was that they seemed too luminous for his sallow skin and tarnished curly hair—like lights left burning in a room in daylight. His name was Don; he was an apprentice electrician. It was considered a catch to have a boy who was no longer at school; a grown-up. He spoke with an unfamiliar accent—Afrikaans, perhaps, but different from the Boere accent from South Africa that was made fun of at school. He explained that his family came from the Cape; they had lived in Salisbury only for the last five years. He had passed his matric in Salisbury; they discussed the subjects he had taken, and those she was studying for a more junior exam, now. He said he really wanted to be a lawyer; he was going to start studying by correspondence; but that wasn’t what he wanted, he wanted to go to a real university.

  A lawyer? —One of my aunts is married to a lawyer. Not the aunt I stay with in the holidays—the other one.—

  He nodded, looking first at her, then away from what he read there. —You’ll go to university, then.—

  She did not seem to like being reminded of what lay beyond school. —Don’t know.—

  —Well, maybe you’ll get a job.—

  —Maybe.—

  —My sisters want to be models and that. But girls like you … you can be anything.—

  She had the instinct to console without thinking for what. —Oh I’m not rich. My father’s a rep, and he’s married again.—

  —But your aunt?—

  Out of her mouth came the words she had heard many times: —I’m like the daughter she didn’t have.—

  It was taken for granted that you brought any new conquest into the Saturday group. But this one was very quiet among them; and she wanted to hear him talk. He had told her he played the guitar. She wanted him to play for her, but how could he keep a guitar at his feet in a cinema? They laughed; but halfway through the film they were seeing that day, she put her mouth very near his ear and whispered—Can’t I come to your place and hear you play?—The girls were used to covering up for one another, if someone had something better to do than sit in the cinema. He was silent; then he whispered, Come. They crouched out along the row.

  The walk was long; she thought it would have made more sense to take the bus. He talked less and less, and every now and then touched at the ear as if her breath had burnt it. Soon she saw they were in a coloured township and he didn’t need to say what he couldn’t bring himself to. They came to a small house natty with careful paint and souvenirs—a mailbox in the form of a miniature windmill, a brass bell with imitation pine-cone strikers. There were signs on the doors along the passage: CHARLENE’S PAD, KEEP OUT SLEEPERS AT WORK. In a room with three neat beds Don shared with smaller brothers, he made solemn preparations with the guitar while Hillela sat on a bed and read over a framed illuminated text of that poem she had had to learn at primary school: ‘… If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch; / If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; / If all men count with you, but none too much; / If you can fill the unforgiving minute, / With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, / Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, / And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!’ It hung where Don would be able to see it when he lay in his bed. He sat there with one foot on a fruit-box to support the leg on which the guitar rested. She grew excited at the surprise of how well he played—a different kind of excitement from that roused by the park. —But you should be in a band! If I closed my eyes, I’d swear there was a record on!—Under his achievement and her admiration he expanded into ease and hospitality. He fetched two bottles of Pepsi and the end of a banana loaf from the kitchen—My mom bakes on weekends, when she’s home from work—and cut the piece share-and-share-alike. They were alone in the house. He took her into the family sittingroom, folded back the plastic sheet that covered the sofa so that she could have the best seat, and showed her how he had taught himself to accompany a Cliff Richard recording. She couldn’t tell the difference between the two performers. In the patronage that is the untalented’s surrogate achievement, she had the wonderful idea that he should get together a band and play for the end-of-term dance. Why not? He went solemn at the responsibility; and then something in him lifted, the light eyes pale-bright, the lips and teeth fresh and sweet in that twilit face.

  But she herself was no longer at the school at the end of term. She went only once again to the house with the windmill mailbox. A little girl with woolly pigtails was told—Charlene, don’t stare.—A middle-aged woman with Don’s eyes brought milky cups of tea and called Hillela ‘miss’. —My mom’s shy with people.—He said it as if she were not there; and the woman addressed Hillela in the third person: —Wouldn’t the young lady like a cold drink instead?—

  The following week she was sent for by the headmistress. Len was sitting in one of the two chairs that were always placed, slightly turned towards one another, in front of the desk at which the headmistress sat. So someone had died; not long before, a girl had been summoned like this to the presence of a parent, and learned of a death in the family. Hillela stared at Len. Olga? Her other aunt, Pauline? The woman—somewhere—who was her mother? A cousin? She woke up, and went over mechanically and kissed him; he kept his face stiff, as if he ha
d something to confess that might spill.

  The headmistress began in her classroom story-telling voice. Hillela had been seen with a coloured boy. While she was enjoying on trust the privilege of going to the cinema with her classmates, she had used the opportunity to meet a coloured boy. —A pupil at a school like this one. From her kind of home. The Jewish people have so much self-respect—I’ve always admired them for that. Mr Capran, if I knew how Hillela could do what she has done, I could help her. But I cannot comprehend it.—This was not a matter of just this once. It could not be. It was not something that happened within the scope of peccadilloes recognized at a broadminded school for girls of a high moral standard. Len took Hillela away with him. All he said was (with her beside him in the car again)—I don’t understand, either.—

  She felt now the fear she had not felt in the headmistress’s study. She hid in the image of Len’s little sweetheart. —I didn’t know he was coloured.—

  With a father’s shyness, Len was listening for more to come.

  —We all meet boys in town.— She was about to add, even when we’re supposed to be in Sunday school with the little kids. But the habit of loyalty to those who at least had been her kind, even if she couldn’t claim them any longer, stopped her mouth. She did not know whether her father knew she had been to the boy’s home. She didn’t know whether to explain about the banana loaf, a little sister who stared, the mother who called her ‘miss’. An opposing feeling was distilled from her indecision. She resented the advances of that boy, that face, those unnatural eyes that shouldn’t have belonged to one of his kind at all, like that hair, the almost real blond hair. The thought of him was repugnant to her.

  Hillela stayed in Salisbury for a few days that time with Len and his wife, Billie, in their flat. He had married the restaurant hostess of an hotel—inevitable, Olga remarked, as a second choice for a lonely man in his job. What other type did he have the chance to meet? Len had brought Billie down to Johannesburg once; Hillela heard talk that she was found to be a good-hearted creature, much more sensible than she appeared, and perfectly all right for Hillela’s father. To Hillela she looked, in the tight skirt that held her legs close together as she hurried smiling between tables, like a mermaid wriggling along on its fancy tail. Olga smelled lovely when you were near her, but the whole flat and even the car smelled of Billie’s perfume, as smoke impregnates all surfaces.

  Billie was exactly the same at home as in the hotel restaurant where Len treated his daughter to a meal. It was part of her professional friendliness, jokiness, to be familiar without ever prying; she no more allowed herself to mention the reason for the girl’s absence from school than she would have let a regular arriving to dine with his family know that she remembered seating him at a table for two with his mistress the week before. But on the subject of herself she was without inhibitions. At home she kept up a patter account of near-disasters between the kitchens and restaurant—‘I almost wet myself’ was her summing-up of laughter or anxiety—and expressed exasperation with those bloody stupid munts of waiters indiscriminately as she showed affection for ‘my Jewboy’—kissing Len in passing, on ear or bald patch. Neither did she care for physical privacy; ‘Come in, luv’—while the schoolgirl made to back out of the bathroom door opened by mistake. A rosy body under water had the same graceful white circlets round the waist as round the neck, like the pretty markings on some animal. The poll of fine hair dipped blonde, the same as the hair of her head, but growing out brown, was an adornment between the legs. Gold ear-rings, ankle chain and rings sent schools of fingerling reflections wriggling up the sides of the bathtub. —I could stay in for hours—I don’t blame Cleopatra, do you, fancy bathing yourself in milk … but I don’t care for the bubble stuff, Len buys it … dries out your skin, you know, you shouldn’t use it, specially in this place … my skin was so soft, at home, that rainy old climate. My sisters and me, we used to put all sorts of things in the water, anything we read about in beauty magazines. Oh I remember the mess—boiled nettles, oatmeal, I don’t know what—a proper porridge, it turned out. But we had a lot of fun. That’s the only thing I miss about England—me sisters, two of them’s still only teenagers, you know—your age. It’s a pity they aren’t nearer—(a gift she would have offered.)

  The girl sat on the lavatory seat, as one of them might have done. —What are they called?—

  —Oh there’s Doreen, she comes after Shirley, there’s only eleven months between them (my pa was a lively old devil). People think they’re twins, but they’re very different personalities, very different …—

  —Still at school?— In the cloudy blur of the bathroom, the taboo subject lost its embarrassing reference as the woman’s body lost any embarrassment of exposure.

  —Doreen couldn’t take it. She’s doing hairdressing. Shirley’s the ambitious one. She’s Scorpio. She’ll go for an advertising job, you need A-levels to get a foot in there. Or maybe a travel agency. Oh she’s always moaning how lucky her old sister is, living out here. But they’re both full of fun. A pity you don’t have any sisters … and it’s a bit late for Len and me to make one for you!—

  They laughed together; like the sisters. —Oh have a baby, Billie, it doesn’t matter; have a baby. Even if it’s a boy—

  —Will you come and mind it for me? Change its smelly napkins? Oooh, I’m not sure I like the idea, don’t talk me into it—In her bedroom Billie offered the loan of anything ‘you have a yen for’ in her wardrobe; like the cardboard doll on which Hillela had tabbed paper dresses when she was a small child, she held up against herself successive images of Billie, in her splendid female confidence either never naked or never dressed, advancing down the aisles of the restaurant.

  Len must have cancelled his usual long-distance sales trip that kept him away from home up in Northern Rhodesia, Lusaka and the Copper Belt, from Tuesdays to Fridays. Bewilderment took the form of tact in what was—Hillela had caught the resonance of Olga’s tone in bland remarks—‘a simple soul’; he seemed to have fallen back on regarding the girl’s presence as if it were that of a normal half-term break. He did a little business round about, and kept Hillela with him. She smoked a cigarette from the pack in the glove-box and he made no remark. When she had put out the stub he turned his head away from the road, without looking at her. —My little sweetheart.— Both knew, not seeing each other, that both smiled. Balancing rocks were passing; he did not see them, either, the routes he took were worn to grooves that rose over his head and enclosed him. The moments balanced, for her, rock by rock.

  —Hillela, the best thing’ll be to go back, now, you know that.—

  He felt her attention all down the side of his body.

  —Not to the school. Of course, you can’t … that’s over. Back to Johannesburg. It’s decided that’s the best thing. Olga knows the good schools, somewhere you’ll like. I’ve discussed it all with Olga.—

  The rocks, passing, passing, were still balanced. They leaned out far, they held, sometimes on a single precarious point of contact, in tension against the pull of the earth that wanted to bring them crashing down.

  —It wouldn’t be fair to Billie. She’s on her feet for long hours and she’s very tired when she gets home—you know that. And with me out of town all week. The flat is small … it really would be too much for her if we found a bigger place. Billie’s young, and she’s right … she can’t be expected to take on …—

  He slowed to turn a corner. His face came round full upon her. —The two of us.—

  *

  Arthur, Olga’s husband, acknowledged her presence while taking off his glasses and cleaning the inner corners of his eyes between thumb and forefinger; when he replaced the glasses she was a closed subject. The elder cousins had the reined air of being under constraint not to question her about what had happened. The innocents, the servant Jethro and little Brian, surrounded her with pleasure at her unexpected arrival. In the kitchen, grinning and chewing the Italian salami left on plates cleared f
rom the diningroom: —Is very, very good you come to us in Jo’burg now.— Moving back and forth about his mother like a cat turning against table legs: —Is Hillela staying for always? In school-time, too? Is she going to boarding-school, is she going to be home every afternoon with Clive and Mark and me?—

  Olga had a series of bright and authoritative prepared statements. —She’s going to live in Johannesburg. We don’t know yet if she’ll board.—

  The rose was in its vase and the guest sweet-dish filled. Olga came in and closed the door behind her. She was the one who had explained menstruation as natural and sexual intercourse as beautiful, when the right time had come for information about these. Olga was the one who had paid for her teeth to be brought into conformation, bought her clothes chosen in good taste, and cared for her hair and skin so that she should grow up pleasing in the way Olga herself was and knew to be valued.

  Olga’s lips pressed together until the flesh whitened to a cleft on either side of her nose and she began to cry. She became even more distressed when she saw the girl was afraid of this amazing evidence of disorder in an adult who knew how to arrange everything comfortably and safely. She drew Hillela to sit down beside her on that bed with its little heart-shaped cushions, quilted satin coverlet and posy-printed muslin skirts, and gripped her hands.