— I remember those dorps, with Len.—
— Oh you can’t! Really, Hilly? But you were only three or four. — Olga rearranged her social commitments in order to spend time with her sons and adoptive daughter during the holidays. On summer mornings she oiled herself, spreading her toes to get at the interstices and twisting her neck, over which a string of pearls bobbled, while the four youngsters played waterpolo in the pool. When they came out to dry off and her attention slid from her Vogue or Hebrew grammar, there were those interludes of shared physical well-being that melt the inhibitions between generations.
— He used to talk to people in a language I didn’t know. And there was the boy who carried the boxes in and out, I didn’t understand what he was saying, either. Of course Len was speaking Afrikaans, and the native boy whatever his language was. So English was ours. Len’s and mine. I’m sure I thought only we could talk it. And the wife of one of the hotel owners once gave me an Alice band for my hair, it had Minnie Mouse on it.—
— When was that? — Mark looked at his cousin and saw a stranger in their midst, now and then, sometimes with a resentful curiosity, sometimes with envy of experiences not shared.
— Oh, when I was little.—
Olga impressed the discipline of her smile on her second son. — I said. Three or four, that’s all.—
— And she used to travel about with Uncle Len?—
— For a short while. It was before he went back to Rhodesia.—
Brian stretched out his small hand and clasped Hillela’s ankle, claiming her. His face appealed to his mother. She acknowledged him with a chummy tilt of the head.
Jethro came across the lawn that day carrying a tray of fruit juice and hot scones. His waiter’s flat feet and the rubber soles of his blancoed tackies on the dense clipped grass gave him an endearing bouncing gait. The girl broke the water, having won by the length of an outstretched hand a race against the boys. It seemed she emerged for him. Jethro’s home was in Rhodesia and every time she returned from school she had the aura of an emissary. — They teaching you so nice to swim there. — He put down the tray and stood shaking his head and smiling at the dripping, heaving girl.
Through water-matted lashes she saw the face magnified like some dark friendly creature bumped against in the deep. — I’m in the first team. (Blew her nose in her fingers, and Olga’s forehead flickered a frown.) We beat Marandellas and Gwelo last term.—
— And Bulawayo? You not going to Bulawayo?—
— No, I still haven’t been to Bulawayo.—
Olga kissed a damp cheek as she handed her a glass of juice. — Why don’t you pretend you’ve been to Bulawayo, darling, for heaven’s sake. It means so much to him. He thinks of you children as his own.—
Olga took Hillela with her to the hairdresser as if she were a sister — one could hardly say that Olga, who was the one with strong family feeling, had sisters: Ruth in Lourenço Marques somewhere, Pauline someone she had grown away from, their interests so divergent. At eight or nine the salon — as it was referred to by the man who did Olga’s hair — with its chemical garden-sweetness and buzz of warm air from the dryers, fuzz of sheddings on the floor, made the child drowse off as a little animal curls up, recognizing a kind of safety. All was comfortably ritualistic, pampered, sheltered in the ideal of femininity constructed by the women entrapped there. Olga gave her money to go out and buy sweets; she tripped back quietly happy in anticipation of the soothing, sucking comfort to come as she lolled, humming or whispering to herself in the company of ladies deaf within their second, steel crania.
Fashions changed; she was older. Olga’s hair, pulled with a crochet hook through holes in a rubber cap, was being tinted in streaks while her nails were steeping in tepid oil. Olga was still learning Hebrew (made fun of her attempt to speak it on her visits to Israel) but instead of her grammar was now reading a manual about isometric exercises a friend had brought from New York. Every now and then her concentration and the pressure of her elbows against the steel tube frame of the chair she occupied, the empty shape of her shantung trousers as she pulled in abdominal muscles stiffly as a bolt drawn, showed she was putting theory into practice.
It was the time when beautiful girls, by definition, had hair as long and straight as possible. When Olga and her sisters were adolescent, on the contrary, curls had been necessary, and they had suffered the processes that produced them. Hillela had curly hair like her father, but of course she would want to look like everybody else; boys instinctively are attracted to what they don’t even know is the fashionable style of beauty. Olga was paying for Hillela’s hair to be heated and ironed straight.
Hillela no longer falls asleep at the hairdresser’s.
A jaw with a well-turned angle on either side, a slightly prognathous mouth and the full lips that cover with a tender twitch the uneven front tooth; it has defied an orthodontist who made conform perfectly the smiles of Clive and Mark. The cheekbones lift against the eyes at the outer corners, underlining them, aslant. All right so far. But it’s difficult to meet the eyes. They are darkness; there is a film to it like the film of colours that swims on a puddle of dark oil she has seen spilled on the earth at a garage. They react under their own regard as pupils do under an oculist’s light; but doubly: the change observed is also experienced as a change of focus. Nothing can be more exact than an image perceived by itself.
The face is small and thin for the depth from the cup at the base of the collar-bones to the wide-set breasts. In the trance of women gazing at themselves in the mirrors they face, she is seeing herself. The mirror ends her there.
On Saturday afternoons when there were no sports meetings the songololo made its way to one of the parks in the city of Salisbury. In traditional school terminology imported from Europe the procession of girls was known as a crocodile, but the boys of their counterpart school dubbed them collectively by the African name for the large earthworm in its shiny hoops of articulated mail that is part of the infant vocabulary of every white child in Southern Africa, even if it never learns another word of an African language. The boys’ image was based on accurate observation. The brown stockings the girls wore gave their troop the innumerable brown legs on which the songololo makes its undulating way round obstacles. So it was the girls flowed round people on the pavements, and over pedestrian crossings. In the park the image broke up joyfully (the littlest girls), cautiously (the solemn, hand-holding ten-year-olds), slyly (the adolescents skilled in undetectable insubordination). The first stage on the escape route was the public lavatories. Miss Hurst, we have to go. The teacher who accompanied the songololo sat on a bench and read, looking up now and then to enjoy the luxury of huge shade under a mnondo tree that came down over her like a Victorian glass bell. She was the only one who saw the gigantesque beauty of the park, in one season its storm-clouds of mauve jacaranda, in another the violent flamboyants flashing bloodily under the sun, or the tulip-trees and bauhinias that in their time shimmered, their supporting skeletons of trunk and branches entirely swarmed over, become shapes composed of petals alive with bees as a corpse come alive with maggots. The adolescents were excited by the humus smells, the dripping scents of unfolding, spore-bearing, dying vegetation in clumps and groves of palms, man-high ferns and stifling creepers where the sun had no power of entry and leaves transformed themselves into the pale sticky cobra-heads of some sort of lily. The darkness sent the girls off giggling urgently to that other dankness, of Whites Only, Ladies, Men, housed separately from Nannies—for the black nursemaids sent to air white infants in the park. When the girls at last came out of Ladies the boys from the counterpart school were already emerged from Men, and pretending not to be waiting for them. Disappearing into the fecundity of municipal jungles, there the girls wore the boys’ cheesecutters, wrestled in amorous quarrelsomeness, smoked, throwing the forbidden cigarette pack in forbidden pollution into the gloomy, overhung ponds, swatted mosquitoes on one another as an excuse for fondling, and — one or two who were known to be ‘experienced’—managed to find a spidery hideout to vry. Like songololo, a Zulu word foreign to English-speakers, this Afrikaans one was used by every English-speaking adolescent. To vry was to excite each other further; sexually, with kisses and limited intimacies. There were indiscretions less private than vrying. Dares, too, provided heightened excitement. Hillela once led a move to tuck the school dress up into pants and wade in a green bog of water-plants and slime. The boys were challenged to follow. Their narrow grey trousers wouldn’t roll up beyond mid-calf; somehow, one of them was overcome by boys and girls as the vigorous big ants on the ground on which he fell would overcome a beetle or moth, and his trousers were taken off him. He was pulled slithering to join Hillela and his distress caused his flesh to rise. The other boys, and some of the girls, almost forgot the danger of shrieking with laughter. They pelted uprooted lily pads on the poor blind thing Hillela saw standing firm under baggy school underpants. She came out of the water at once, pulled down her dress, dragged stockings over her dirty wet legs, and burst from the thicket, not caring if her bedraggled state were noticed. She did not speak to her friends for the rest of the afternoon, but apparently had ready, loyal to her peers, her answer to Miss Hurst’s question about her wet stockings. She had slipped and fallen; very well, then, she had permission to take off her stockings. Just this once.