— All right, that’s what she meant—‘she is quite sure such behaviour wasn’t learnt at home’. Well, then, must have been learnt at school, mmh? You heard me put that to her. How absolutely ridiculous, anyway, that schoolgirls shouldn’t wait on themselves. But no, the procedures of the Northern Suburbs dinner table are those into which young ladies are to be inducted — she didn’t like it at all when I told her that, did she? — And the reaction of that Calder child comes from the attitudes that secretly go with those procedures: she said what she did innocently. In case you’re ever tempted, girls, that’s what’s called gracious living.—
Hillela and Joe laughed but Carole’s pallor as she withdrew into herself made her freckles stand out all over her face like a rash. In the car, she was suddenly weeping as she did when she reported: Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
— Good god, what is it now? — Pauline accused Joe.
— It’s all right for you. Now she won’t speak to me again.—
At Olga’s house, arguments, confessions or chastisings never took place in front of others, but Pauline didn’t believe in confining weak moments and dark thoughts behind bedroom doors. — Now listen, Carole. And you too, Hillela. When you do what’s right, here, you nearly always have to give up something. Something easy and nice. You have to accept that you won’t be popular — with some people. But are they really the kind of people you want as friends? And there are a great many other people with whom you’ll be popular just because they appreciate what you’ve done.—
— Where? I don’t know where they are. You, and daddy — your friends. It’s all fine for Sasha, over there up on a nice green hill in Swaziland. It’s easy for him to be what you want.—
— Bettie. Alpheus. The waiters at the school — yes, maybe they’ll never know you’re the one who did it, but they’ll appreciate the change when they’re not treated like dirt by little schoolgirls any longer.—
— At school they’ll all just say I got Annette Calder into trouble over a kitchen boy. She won’t speak to Hillela, either, now.—
Hillela did not know for whom, her cousin or Pauline, she spoke up. — I’m not keen on Annette, anyway, she’s the one who had the idea all the boys must wear suits to the end of term dance. And when we had to draw a self-portrait in the style of a famous painting, she drew herself as the Virgin Mary, blue veil and all.—
Joe settled the back of his neck, appreciatively.
— Hillela’s kicked out of that Rhodesian place (Carole stopped, to look for her way of escape if the others were to close in on her) and at this place, now, people won’t speak to her because we stick up for Africans all the time.—
Joe drove with drooping head, as, in the political trial in which he was appearing for the Defence, he listened to State evidence. — Let us drop it, now, Pauline.—
— No, no. I don’t want Hillela to be confused in any way about this. What Hillela did in Rhodesia wasn’t wrong — nothing to be guilty about, nothing — but it didn’t mean anything. She was pleasing herself, showing off a bit and taking a silly risk. When one’s very young one gets a kick out of just being defiant. But that’s anti-social, that’s all. It’s quite different from what we’ve all decided and done today. If the girls are made to suffer in some small way at school now, it’s for something, it’s principled. I don’t have any time for rebels without a cause.—
But there was no consequence at the school. If the Calder girl and her parents were summoned to the headmistress’s study, the girl herself was so well-brought-up that she had already the confidence of her kind to avoid any challenge of it. Nothing short of a revolution, the possibility of which was inconceivable to such confidence, could really harm it. So why bother to defend oneself? She and her accuser, Carole, took the opportunity to pretend the words had never been said or heard. Carole, as she moved up into senior positions in the school, became influential in the debating society and was able to introduce such subjects as ‘Should there be censorship?’ to girls whose parents read detective stories and best-selling sex novels while in her home banned books about South African life and laws were passed around and discussed. She even managed to have approved for debate ‘Should there be different standards of education for black and white children?’ though most of the girls had not heard that ‘Bantu Education’ had been introduced in the country, and there was a better attendance for ‘Should we have sex education at school?’ A self-service canteen had replaced the black waiters, for reasons of economy. Carole and Hillela, at Pauline’s suggestion, arranged to have black children invited to a special performance of the school’s production of Peter Pan; still schoolgirls themselves, Carole and Hillela were so advantaged (as Pauline reminded them) by their educational opportunities at school and by home background that they were able to help coach black students who came in from the townships to the centre run by Pauline’s supplementary education committee, KNOW. The two girls were kept occupied on Saturday mornings in a red-brick church that once must have been in the veld outside the black miners’ compounds but was by then hemmed in by workshops and industrial yards. Its ivy hung ragged from its porch and in the bushes that had been a garden were trampled places where, Pauline told, homeless black people slept. Their rags and their excreta made it necessary to watch where you set your feet; but the black boys and girls who came up singing in harmony — now mellow, now cricket-shrill — between the broken ornamental bricks of the path gave off the hopefulness of sweet soap and freshly-ironed clothes. It was in return for their lessons that they sang, and whenever they sang those whose enviable knowledge subdued the children into shy incomprehension in class became the uncomprehending ones: Mrs Pauline and her colleagues, and the two white schoolgirls, smiling, appreciative. Pauline asked what the songs meant and wrote it down for quotation in the committee’s letter of appeal for funds. (—Look at this tip left under the plate. — She waved before her family Olga’s response: a cheque for ten pounds.) Hillela was heard singing the songs in the shower. Recalled — by this sign of musicality he had not had the chance to develop in himself — from absorption in documents of the treason trial whose level of reality made all other aspects of the present become like a past for him, Joe bought her a guitar.
— Where on earth’d you find time to look for that?—
He answered Pauline gravely as if under oath. — In Pretoria. During the lunch adjournment. In a music shop.—
— And now? — Pauline’s smile quizzed gestural asides; she was the one who had to complete these for their initiators. Hillela and her uncle came together and hugged — people who have fallen in love for a moment; but it was Pauline who arranged for Hillela to have lessons with the folk-guitarist son of one of Pauline’s friends. Hillela was soon accomplished enough to play and sing in a language she understood, performing Joan Baez songs at protest meetings to which Joe and Pauline gave their support: against the pass laws, apartheid in the universities, removals of black populations under the Group Areas Act. Carole, like her cousin, was under age to be a signatory to petitions but could take a turn at manning tables where they were set out. The two adolescents were absorbed into activities in which a social conscience had the chance to develop naturally as would a dress-sense under Olga’s care.
Family likeness was to be recognized in Pauline, for one who had once been the daughter Olga never had. A girl younger than Hillela was brought to the house by Joe; but a schoolgirl with the composure of someone much older. On her the drab of school uniform was not a shared identity but a convention worn like a raincoat thrown over the shoulders. She turned the attention of a clear smile when spoken to yet, as an adult gets out of the way polite acknowledgement of the presence of children, firmly returned the concentration of her grey eyes to Joe, who read through documents those eyes were following from familiarity with the contents. Pauline spread cream cheese, strewed a pollen of paprika, shaved cucumber into transparent lenses and opened a tin of olives. She sniffed at her hands and washed them in the sink before carrying into the livingroom the mosaic of snacks worthy of her sister Olga. The girl drank fruit juice and ate steadily without a break in the span of the room’s preoccupation, while Pauline hovered with small services in the graceful alertness of a cocktail party hostess.