Don’t Lean Your Smelly Arm Over My Face
Clumsy with emotion, wrenching her hands out of Olga’s, the girl knocked against the bookshelf and sent down one of a pair of charming 18th-century Imari cats Olga had thought to put in the room during the last school holidays because the girl was fond of cats: The little porcelain animal fell on the long-haired carpeting that was soft under bare feet in a bedroom, but the upraised paw and one end of the gilded bow on the collar broke.
Olga agitated defensively, as if the destruction lying there were not a loss but an accusation made by Olga against herself. — It doesn’t matter. Oh I didn’t mean to upset you … and over Billie … Doesn’t matter. It can be put together again. Oh darling, I’m so sorry! Please!—
— You don’t have to watch out for any treasures here, anyway. — Pauline trod on silverfish that ran from the pages of stacked journals she moved to make room for the girl’s clothes in a cupboard.
— It’s going to be repaired.—
But Pauline intended to start the girl off the way she should go on; it didn’t help anybody to be protected from the facts. — Things like that can’t be put together again. Oh yes, you can glue them, they look the same as before, to you and me; but their value for people like Olga is gone. They can’t take pleasure in anything that hasn’t got a market value. If they can’t look at it and think: I could get so-and-so for that if I wanted to sell it.—
— So now Olga won’t be able to sell it?—
— You don’t have to worry your young head over that. Olga doesn’t need to sell anything; it’s just that she needs to own things whose price is set down in catalogues.—
Pauline and Joe’s house was not nearly so beautiful as Olga’s, and fewer services were provided. As if still at boarding-school, Hillela had to make her own bed in the room she shared with her cousin Carole; there was no Jethro in white suit serving at table, and no cook in the kitchen. Bettie, the maid-of-all-work, was helped by members of the family, the swimming pool was old and pasted your flesh with wet leaves. Alpheus — son of the weekly washerwoman — lived in what had been the second garage (Pauline’s old car stood in the yard) and doubled as gardener at weekends: Joe was giving him a chance as a clerk in his law office and Pauline was paying for him to take correspondence courses.
But in the shared bedroom a kind of comfort the girl had not known before built up. Categories kept separate by the institutional order of boarding-school and the aesthetic order of the room with the fresh flower were casually trampled down. Clothes, schoolbooks, hairbrushes, magazines, face creams, Coke bottles, deodorants, posters, tampons, oranges and chocolate bars, records and tennis rackets — all were woven into an adolescents’ nest nobody disturbed. Pauline respected its privacy but assumed participation in the adult world. Before Olga’s dinner parties the children were given their meal in another room; Carole had been accustomed, since she had wandered in sucking her bottle, to dipping in and out of conversations among her parents’ friends in gatherings that cropped up at meals, in the livingroom or on the verandah. There was nothing to giggle over hotly in secret, in this house, because sexual matters were discussed openly as authority was criticised.
Pauline and Joe had been able to avoid segregated education for their son Alexander by sending him to a school for all races, over the border in an independent neighbouring black state. But there was some reluctance, even at the expense of this advantage, to part with both their children. The other was the younger, and a girl — they decided to keep her under the parental eye at home, although to spare her, at least, the education primed with doctrinal discrimination at South African government schools. Olga (even in her sister Pauline’s house nobody denied the generosity of Olga when it came to family obligations) must have been paying the fees for Hillela at the expensive private school at which she had joined her cousin. From there one day Carole came home in tears because at the school refectory where black waiters served lunch to the schoolgirls, one had said to a black man, Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
Pauline made Carole repeat the remark.
Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
Pauline was staring at her husband to impress upon him every syllable.
— That’s what we pay through the nose for. Serves us right. Let’s take them out of that place now and put them in a government school. Take them away at once.—
Joe’s small features were made smaller and closer by the surrounding fat of his face. His dainty mouth always moved a moment, sensitively, before he spoke. — Where to? There’s nowhere to go from anything that happens here. — He put on his glasses and gently studied the two girls, his daughter and his wife’s niece, while Pauline’s voice flew about the room.
— Exactly! Idiots we’ve been. No possibility to buy your way out of what this country is. So why pay? Racism is free. Send them to a government school, let them face it as it’s written in your glorious rule of law, canonized by the church, a kaffir is a kaffir, God Save White South Africa — anything, anything but the filth of ladylike, keep-your-little-finger-curled prejudice—
It was the first time the niece saw the full splendour of this aunt. Pauline’s eyes rounded up attention; her long, rough-towelled hair, prematurely and naturally marked with elegant strokes of grey while Olga’s blond streaks required artifice, seemed to come alive, stirring and standing out as physical characteristics create the illusion of doing in people possessed by strong emotion. The maid Bettie, bringing in a parcel that had been delivered, changed expression as if she had put her head through a door into the tension of air before thunder.
Joe heard Pauline out. — No, we won’t concede, we’ll confront. We’ll explain to Miss Gidding what we expect of the school; what we mean by table manners. — (He caught Hillela’s eye to bring a smile from her.)
Again the two chairs turned to one another facing the desk in a headmistress’s study.
Pauline’s rising inflections, the text of which her daughter and niece could supply like words that go along with a tune, came through the walls to the anteroom where they waited, but no doubt it was the cross-examination technique of inaudible Joe that must have convinced the headmistress of need for the course she took. Hillela had not witnessed the incident at school, she had been eating at another table, but she was a member of the family and was called with Carole into the presence: parents, headmistress behind the desk. The headmistress wished to apologize for the offence given by the behaviour of one of their fellow pupils. Lack of politeness to the staff, whether black or white, was not tolerated at the school. The girl in question would be informed, and so would her parents. But it was to be understood by Carole and Hillela that the matter was not to be spread about as a subject for school gossip. Humiliating a fellow pupil would be a repetition of the original offence. — We want to guide, not accuse.—
Joe took them all off for an icecream before he returned to his office. Pauline was elated and sceptical, every now and then drawing a deep breath through narrowed nostrils, her black eyes moving as if to pick out faces in an invisible audience. — ‘The parents are such important people’—
— She did not say important, she did not say that—