A Sport of Nature

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—

— 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.

— D’you know who that was? — Pauline came into the bedroom where Carole and Hillela had holed up.

— Daddy said. Rose somebody. I see she goes to Eastridge High. Horrible school.—

Pauline’s vivid expression waited for its import to be comprehended. — That’s Rosa Burger. Both her parents are in prison.—

Theirs was one of the trials in which Joe was part of the legal defence team. The red-haired handsome woman with the strut of high insteps who had accompanied the Burger girl was also one of the accused, though out on bail, like the old black gentleman who came to stay in Pauline and Joe’s house for a few weeks. There were discussions about this, at table, before it happened; the old man had some illness or other and dreaded, Joe said, the strain of travelling from Soweto to the court in Pretoria every day. Hotels did not admit black people. Sasha’s room was made ready for the guest; then Pauline decided it was too hot, the afternoon sun beat through the curtains, and Carole and Hillela were moved out of their room, for him.

There was a rose in a vase on the bedside table. Although Alpheus occupied the converted garage, no black person had ever slept in the house before. The old gentleman really was that — a distinguished political leader and also a hereditary chief who was to be addressed by his African title specifically because the government had deposed him. The ease of the house tightened while he was there. Other people who came to stay were left to fit in with the ways of the household, but there was uncertainty about what would make this guest feel at home. When he was heard hawking in the bathroom the girls shared with him, they looked at each other and suppressed laughter and any remark to members of the family. Joe put out whisky but the old gentleman didn’t take alcohol; Pauline got Bettie to squeeze orange juice; it was too acid for him. He drank hot water; so a flask was always to be ready, beside the rose. He had a magnificent head, Pauline explained; he ought to be painted, for posterity. She phoned her sister Olga, patron of the arts (let her move on from the 18th to the 20th century for once) who could tell one of her artist friends of the opportunity for sittings with someone a little different from the wives of Chairmen of Boards, someone whose life would go down in history. — My poor sister — her first reaction is always to be afraid of trouble! Would it be all right? Not cause any trouble? I think she was nervous her famous friend would land in jail for so much as committing the shape of Chief’s nose to paper.—

The old man put his hand to his nostrils as one dismayedly adjusts a tie before being photographed.

— More likely her famous friend would be nervous of getting no more contracts for murals in government buildings, after such a commission. — Joe made one of his corrections.

It was not a painter but a sculptor who came. The old black man had agreed to a portrait — Oh I have been photographed I don’t know how many times — as courteously as he accepted every other necessity of being in strange hands. Pauline and Joe’s open-plan house had no doors except those of the kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms; everyone went to and fro, some considerately lowering the volume of voice of activity, past the chosen sunlit corner where the old man sat, one polished shoe slightly extended, the other drawn slightly back so that knee and stout Zulu thigh were at an angle of painfully-maintained relaxation and confidence. The sculptor built up thick clay scales, mealy and dun; the old man’s own great head shone, cast in black flesh and polished with light, the broad shining nostrils wide in dignity, the cross-hatched texture of the big mouth held firm under majestic down-scrolls of moustache, the small fine ears etched against the heavy skull. He felt the presence of the schoolgirl watching; the eyelids came to life and drooped slightly over black eyes ringed with milky grey, as if they had looked at white people so long they had begun to reflect their pallor.

The two guests in the house — the permanent one and the temporary one — met face to face again. She was in her skimpy cotton pyjamas, running barefoot at dawn to the bathroom, he was coming from there, the big slow black man, knotted calves bare, feet pushed into unlaced shoes, wearing an old army surplus greatcoat over his nakedness. Against the indignity, for him, the child and the old man passed each other without a sign. It is not possible he could have lived long enough to have reason to remember; but she might have kept somewhere the impression of the grey lint in the khaki furze of the coat and the grey lint in the furze of the noble trophy, his head.

The trial went on so long it became part of the normal background to the life of adults, Pauline and Joe, while from month to month nothing is constant for adolescents, looking in the mirror to see the bridge of a nose rising (Carole’s), the two halves of a behind rounding (Hillela’s) and changing a gait, the very act of walking, into some kind of message for the world. In the newspapers were photographs of blacks burning their passes, raising fists and thumbs, staring elated defiance. Then there were the photographs that, like memory, hold a moment clear out of what goes by in such blaring, buffeting, earthquake anger and flooding fear that the senses lose it, like blood lost, in an after-shudder that empties all being. Close black dots of newsprint cohered into the shout as it left an open mouth and the death-kick of bullets that flung bodies into a last gesture at life.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people. Hillela was invited by her Aunt Olga to the special dinner connected with Passover (Olga liked to keep up these beautiful old Jewish traditions which the girl, named in honour of her Zionist great-grandfather, would certainly never be given any sense of in Pauline’s house); the talk round the unleavened bread and bitter herbs of deliverance was of Canada, America or England. Olga and Arthur thought of leaving the country. Pauline and Joe cancelled their annual family holiday so that they could donate a substantial sum to funds for victims: maintenance for the dependants of political prisoners and money for needs that could not be publicly earmarked, that they did not want to be told about by those who received it, or to mention in their frank information confided to their children on the question of priorities at such a time: Yet the children must realize — people were living ‘Underground’, which meant they were fugitive, spending a night or a week here or there, always in fear of arrest for themselves and bringing danger of arrest to those who hid them.

There was some sort of argument on the telephone between Pauline and Olga, also not fully explained, but as a result of which Hillela, alone, went on holiday after all — with Olga, Arthur and their sons. Joe annoyed Pauline by refusing to see the holiday in context. — Plettenberg Bay’s beautiful. You’ll have a wonderful time. The beaches are so long you feel you can walk round Africa. And you’ll go to the Tsitsikamma Forest—

Pauline, cutting sweet peppers for a stew and crunching slices as she worked, could not be silenced entirely. — Olga suddenly wakes up to the fact: she has ‘as much right over you’ as I have, I’ve no right to deprive you of a holiday. For reasons of my own. That was her phrase exactly: ‘for reasons of your own’. That’s all Sharpeville and sixty-nine dead meant to her. She is also Ruthie’s sister, etcetera. She has you to dinner a few times a year … but suddenly she’s Ruthie’s sister, she feels responsible — Pauline turned her anger into a grin and popped a wheel of pepper into the girl’s mouth.

Joe put a hand on Hillela’s head in absolution. — Really beautiful. Hillela ought to see it.—

The day Hillela returned from the holiday a woman was sitting with Pauline under the dangling swags of orange bignonia creeper that made private one end of the verandah. The old dog came up barking blindly behind his cataracts, then recognized Hillela’s smell under new clothes and swung about panting joyfully while Pauline jumped up and stopped her where she had approached, hugging her, admiring — Olga, eh? Everything she chooses to wear is always exquisite — her voice whipping around them distractedly, a lasso rising and falling.

— Shall I bring out some tea when I’ve dumped my things?—

— No, no. I won’t be long: As soon as I’m free … I’ll come and hear all about … — Behind her, Hillela saw crossed legs, the stylized secondary female characteristic of curved insteps in high-heeled shoes, the red hair of the woman who had come that time with the Burger girl, Rosa.

Everyone else was out; Carole must have had a friend sleeping over, there were short pyjamas that didn’t belong under the pillow on the second bed. The kitchen was empty; Bettie in her yard room. Beginning to move again along the familiar tracks of life in this house, Hillela went into the dining area of the living-room to see if there was any fruit in the big Swazi bowl kept there. The voices on the verandah just beneath the windows did not interest her much. Pauline’s less arresting than usual, evading rather than demanding attention: —The woman who works for me sleeps in; her friends come and go through the yard all the time … she has to have a private life of her own. There’s someone Joe’s given a job to — we’ve converted the second garage for him. So even if I had some sort of out-house … it’s just not possible … even if I got a promise from Bettie and that young chap not to say anything … how would I know that their friends … We’re right on the street, it’s not a big property. There’s nowhere anyone like that would be safe.—

— It wouldn’t be for long. Haven’t you somewhere in the house; anything.—

— If it were somebody I knew. I’d feel the obligation, never mind the consequences, I assure you. But what you tell me — it’s just a name. And you don’t know the person, either, I mean, through no fault of yours it might just be a plant … a trap.—

— These ‘strangers’ are more than friends. There are times when personal feelings don’t come into it. Now … well, people are expected to put their actions where their mouths have been.—

At supper Sasha was there but Carole had gone with a youth camp project to build a clinic for blacks in the Transkei.

— Tell us about Olga’s house — is it lovely? Up on the hills or near the beach? Oh of course it must be lovely! What heaven, just to run out of bed straight onto the beach, and on that side of the headland, completely private, right away from the crowds. And did you eat lots of gorgeous crayfish — oh crayfish straight out of the sea, with lemon and butter … Pure ozone going down. No wonder you look so well, Olga’s transformed you as only Olga can. Even waterskiing lessons! She just has a gift for giving pleasure, a special sort of generosity of her own. — Pauline herself seized upon a generosity and sisterly pride as if something sadly discovered to have been packed away in herself. Her interest in Olga’s beach house, in the outings and beach parties (—And they liked your guitar-playing in the moonlight, eh? — ) worked up intoxicatingly in her, that glance of hers that always seemed to create its own public found an agitating response invisible to others at table. — So you didn’t only see the dolphins, you actually swam among them? Those wonderful creatures. Joe, what about that record? Wasn’t there once a record of dolphins singing or talking? Made under the sea? Cousteau or somebody. It would be a nice present for Hillela to give Olga, to thank her, I must see if I can get it — She began to eat stolidly, eyes down on the plate like a child who has been forced to do so. The withdrawal of animation left a vacuum from which no-one could escape. Another voice came out of her, for Joe alone. — And there’s your work to think of. That’s what I should have said. That’s the point. If we — all right, I, but it’s the same thing, no-one would separate the culpability, would they — if we were to get involved in this kind of thing … It’d only have to come out once, and your credibility—

He closed his eyes momentarily and opened them again.

— I mean professional integrity would be finished. For good. And what you can do in court is of far more importance—

He moved his head, prompting correction.

— No, well, I’m not making any excuses. We know nothing is more important than what people like that have done … but your work’s absolutely necessary, too, in the same context. One has to be sensible. I should have made that point. She should go to others for this kind of thing. I should have told her. Not lawyers’ houses. I should have said, if you were to be accused of being involved in any way other than professionally, you’d never be able to take on such cases again … would you? They ought to understand they also need people like you.—

— You acted correctly. That’s the end of it.—

The boy and girl saw Pauline’s hands falter on knife and fork. She put them down and her hands sought each other, each stiff finger pushed through the interstices between those of the other hand. — ‘People are expected to put their actions where their mouths have been.’ You can imagine how the word will get around. She’s the kind who’ll see to that.—

Joe dismissed this with a twist of lip and tongue to dislodge a tomato pip from a tooth.

Pauline drew her hair back tightly held on her crown a moment, exposing her nakedness, the temples that were always covered, then dropped the thick hair again. — Dolphins, Hillela. I love those stories about how they save drowning people and push sinking fishing-boats to shore. I wish they were true.—

Whatever the reason, the parents must have gone out later that night. They couldn’t have been there? Sasha and his cousin helped Bettie wash up and gossiped in the kitchen. Bettie’s nails, outgrown the patches of magenta varnish in the middle, flashed through the dirty water. — Did Miss Olga take her girl with her or her boy?—

— Jethro and Emily came. At least, they followed by train.—

— Lucky, lucky. I want to go to the sea. Sasha, why don’t you take me sometimes?—

— Come on, Bettie … when we go on holiday you go on your own holiday, you don’t have to do the same old housework in a different place.—

Bettie’s laughter jiggled her like a puppet. — I want to swim and get a tan same like Hillela. — They all laughed — she flung her arm, wet hand extended, round Hillela and Hillela’s head rested a moment under her cocked one, cradled against her mauvish-black, damp neck.

Sasha had his mother’s insistence on facing the facts. — You wouldn’t be allowed on the beach. Isn’t that true, Hillela?—

— Well, Jethro’s afraid of the sea anyway, but Emily used to go down early in the morning, when nobody was there.—

— They lucky, like I say. Miss Olga gave them a fridge for their rooms. Emily’s pay is very high, very high. I wish I could be working for Miss Olga!—

— Better than your pay?—

— Better than my pay, Sasha? More than ninety pounds a month.—

— My parents wouldn’t take you to a place where you couldn’t even walk on the beach.—

Bettie wiped the sink with the absent vigour of a task performed through a lifetime. — I’m not thinking about walking, I’m thinking about money, what I must pay my mother for looking after my children, what I must pay for schoolbooks, for uniform, for church—

— We’re not rich people like Olga.—

Bettie laughed. — Maybe you not rich, I don’t know.—

— You know how hard my mother works to help — black people, I mean. And she doesn’t get paid.—

— Yes, she works hard. I work hard and I’m thinking about money. Money is the thing that helps me. Are you going to lock up, lovey?—

She took out of the oven a pot containing her man’s supper and a jug with the remains of the dinner coffee and went off across the yard to her room.

The two young people played the records they liked as loudly as they wished. They sat on the floor in the livingroom under rocking waves of the rhythm to which their pleasurable responses were adjusted by repeated surrender to it, as each generation finds a tidal rhythm for its blood in a different musical mode. Hillela gazed at her feet, transformed by the sun and sea into two slick and lizard-like creatures, thin brown skin sliding satiny over the tendons when she moved her toes. Her attention drew the boy’s.

— What was all that about? — A tip of the head towards the dining-table.

She took a moment to make sure he was not referring to Bettie. — Someone was here when I came home today.—

— Someone we know?—

— Not you. You weren’t here when she came before. Quite long ago. Before the Chief stayed.—

— But you don’t know who? — After a moment he began again. — Were you there?—

— I was unpacking my things. They were on the verandah. — She bent her head and began stroking over her feet and ankles. — I heard them talking when I went to fetch a banana—

— And?—

— I was thinking about something else.—

— A-ha, some chap you got keen on at Plett, mmh?—

She mimicked Bettie. — Maybe, I don’t know.—

He rolled onto his stomach and began playing with her toes to help her remember. — But you understand what they were talking about, now.—

— Well, I remember some things.—

— Such as? — He scratched suddenly down the sole of her foot and her toes curled back over his hand in reflex.

— Oh you know.—

— Me? How could I?—

— You heard what Pauline said, at dinner.—

— Yes. It’s about someone on the run from the police, isn’t it. — He traced down her toes with his forefinger. — Look how clean the sea has made your nails. You’ve got a funny-looking little toe, here.—

— Pauline told me that toe was broken when I was two years old, in Lourenço Marques with my mother.—

— Do you remember?—

— I was too small.—

— Not your mother either? What’s she like?—

— No. — I suppose like Olga and Pauline—

He laughed. — Olga-and-Pauline, how’s it possible to imagine such a creature!—

— She’s a sister.—

— Well, yes. I don’t remember her, either.—

— Sasha, would you say I look Portuguese?—

— How does Portuguese look? Like a market gardener?—

— My short nose and these (touching cheekbones), my eyes and this kind of hair that isn’t brown or black; the way it grows from my forehead — look.—

He took her head in his hands and jerked it this way and that.

— Yes, you look Portuguese — no, more like an Eskimo, that’s it, or a Shangaan or a Lapp or a—

— I don’t look like you, any of you, do I.—

— But why Portuguese?—

— She had a Portuguese lover.—

— But you were already born, two years old, you ass.—

— She could’ve been there before.—

— Did they ever say anything?—

— They only tell us what they think we ought to know.—

— And your father?—

— They wouldn’t tell Len, would they?—

Sasha still had her head between his hands. — So you’re not my cousin after all.—

— Of course we are. You dope. She’s still Pauline’s sister.—

He let go her head and rolled back on the floor. Slowly he began to play with her toes again. He spoke as if they had not been alone together all evening, and now were. — Maybe I’ll also be on the run. As soon as I leave school next year, I could be called up in the ballot for the army.—

— You’ll have to go.—

He rested his cheek on her feet. She put out a hand and stroked his hair, practising caresses newly learned. He moved in refusal, rubbing soft unshaven stubble against her insteps: —No.—

— Yes, you’ll have to go.—

— I don’t understand them. They send me to school with black kids, and then they tell me it can’t be helped: the law says I’ve got to go into the army and learn to kill blacks. That’s what the army’s really going to be for, soon. They talk all the time about unjust laws. He’s up there in court defending blacks. And I’ll have to fight them one day. You’re bloody lucky you’re a girl, Hillela.—

She drew away her feet and swivelling slowly round, lay down, her chin to his forehead, his forehead to her chin, close. Sasha, Carole and Hillela sometimes tussled all three together in half-aggressive, giggling play that broke up the familiar perspective from which human beings usually confront one another. She righted herself, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. The knowledge that they were cousins came up into their eyes, between them; she, his cousin, kissed him first, and slowly the knowledge disappeared in rills of feeling. It washed away as the light empty shells at the Bay were turned over and over by films of water and drawn away under the surf. He touched her breasts a little; he had noticed, living with her as a sister, that her breasts were deep and large under the token family modesty of flimsy pyjama top or bath towel tucked round under the arms. She slid the delicious shock of her strange sisterly hand down under his belt; her fingertips nibbled softly at him and, busy at her real mouth, he longed to be swallowed by her — it — the pure sensation she had become to him: for them to be not cousin, brother, sister, but the mysterious state incarnate in her. After a while they were Sasha and Hillela again; or almost. Light under the bedroom door showed Hillela was still up, preparing her books for the new term, when the parents came home; locked in the bathroom, Sasha had buried, with pants thrust to the bottom of the linen basket, his sweet wet relief from the manhood of guns and warring. Tenderness was forgotten: like any other misdeed undetected by adults.

Forgotten and repeated, as anything that manages to escape judgment may be repeated when the unsought opportunity makes space for it again.