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 schooclass="underline" ‘… 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 had 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.)