Frankie and Stankie (20 page)

So the emigration scheme was in ruins and the family that had left Germany to see the last of Hitler's Reich was once again in pocket – though Herr Jacobsen had become a migrant worker for the
Luftwaffe
and his daughter was working for a career diplomat who was signed up with the Party. The Party flag hung over the desk in the Consul's office. The Party newspapers appeared with regularity in the post. But Dinah's mum never looked at them. She threw them straight in the wastepaper basket. Why should she have to look at them, she said, when she already knew that they were common?

Meanwhile, the house in Oranjesicht, sold for peanuts by the con-man's repossessors at a time of worldwide slump – sold ‘
für einen Apfel und ein Butterbrod
', as Dinah's mum always put it, ‘for an apple and a slice of buttered bread' – continued to stand on its corner, on its airy ridge, and would presumably go on standing there; its simple curved lines giving it the look of a Cunard liner, a hint of romantic journeys to exotic faraway places. Dinah, in later years, would hazard that it was probably the only one of Herr Architekt Jacob Bahne Jacobsen's buildings to have escaped the fall of bombs.

Now that there was only one of them, the remaining Cape Town Jacobsen began to have a seriously good time. She took the rent on a flat with a view over Bantry Bay and felt herself to be an independent, confident, stylish young woman with money to dispose of as she pleased. Her indelibly accented English was by then as fluent as it would ever become and she was learning, day by day, to put Berlin and Wilhelm behind her. In a gesture of commitment to her adopted country, she determined, now, to teach herself South Africa's second official language. She set out to learn Afrikaans.

Marianne began the project by borrowing books from the Afrikaans section of the public library, but she couldn't find anything to suit her. All the fiction she lit upon was too folksy, too down-on-the-farm. She couldn't relate to the heart-warming stories
about loyal and knockabout
klonkies
, nor to the bushveld dramas for boys. The one Gothic-historical romance she had embarked upon had been set in a Rhineland castle and – perhaps irrationally – she had found it disturbing that the court's medieval intrigues were all being conducted in colloquial Afrikaans. Having twice reread the only book that gripped her, on the elephants of the Cape's Knysna Forest, she didn't know where to turn next. The language was simply too new, too recently severed from Netherlandish Dutch, too long regarded by white Dutch-speaking settlers as the downmarket dialect-vernacular of their brown kitchen servants. Now, conversely, it was suddenly too dense with its recent transformation into a weapon in the struggle for white Afrikaner supremacy to support a decent body of literature. In short, all the books she tried were dire.

So Marianne revised her plan and sought out a specialist foreign-language bookshop that someone had told her about. She reasoned that, since Afrikaans was a Dutch-derived language, with a mere handful of Malay and Huguenot French words thrown in, she'd simply read Dutch books instead – and from there it would be a very small step to mastering the langauge itself.

What happened then was that Marianne was immediately swept off her feet by the exquisite male Hollander who ran the specialist bookshop. His name was Willem Klopper – Willem/Wilhelm – the irony couldn't escape her, though this William, also tall and blond, was leaner and more delicately made. He began at once to carry her off to his pretty old beach house at weekends. The house was along the meandering Atlantic coast and, in it, he had collected a sort of home-boy salon of arty young Hollanders: painters, poets and intellectuals. They were all of them recent arrivals at the Cape and not one of them could yet believe his luck that he should have suddenly found himself able to live like this, in a sunshine paradise where figs, apricots and nectarines were there to be plucked from trees, where wine flowed cheap and plentiful, while all over Europe the lights were going out.

The company was almost exclusively male, which suited Marianne, who had no sisters and had always been more comfortable with men. She enjoyed it all the more, because the men so patently loved her. She became their trophy, their female find. So her Afrikaans was straightaway doomed and, in any attempt she ever
made to speak the language thereafter, it always emerged sounding more like Dutch. This was a thing that, later on, made Lisa and Dinah giggle.

‘She says “neigh” for
no
,' they'd mock. ‘She doesn't know how to say “knee-uh”.' Though they themselves would not utter a word in Afrikaans out loud – not outside of school lesson time – they knew, from Mrs van Heynigen's
uitspraak
instruction, that the word for
no
was not ‘neigh'. ‘Horses neigh, twice a day,' they'd chant.

For Marianne there was a larger problem looming, because Willem, though for three years he took her to the theatre and to the ballet and to the opera; though he took her to every private view; though the two of them hosted lunch parties together and walked together in Kirstenbosch with Willem's lean and loping Irish setter; though he was entirely proprietorial with her, he never suggested marriage. He also never made a single advance upon her body, though for a woman of Marianne's upbringing this last didn't strike her as odd.

Then, one Saturday morning, just a week before her thirty-second birthday, she found herself sitting alone on Willem's beach. She had, earlier, been scrutinising her face and she'd decided that, yes, she'd got crow's feet.

I've got wrinkles, she thought. I'll be losing my looks.

She was suddenly alarmed to think that her bloom was on the wane and that Willem was consuming the last of her youth. When one of the beach-house guests came to join her, she noted that he had goggle specs and so many freckles that they covered all of his eyelids and his earlobes. It was the mathematician from The Hague, who was very new to the beach house. And then, to her embarrassment, she found that she was crying.

‘What's the matter?' he said and he sat down.

Then she surprised herself by telling him all about her wrinkles and her fading looks. She told him it was her birthday later that week and that she was about to turn twenty-nine, because Dinah's mum was always the sort of woman who felt the need to tell lies about her age. Please, she said to the freckly mathematician, could he possibly try and explain to her why Willem had not proposed marriage. What was the matter with her?

The mathematician was seven years her junior, though he thought that the difference was only four. He was astonished by
what she was telling him, because he'd thought from the moment he'd entered the beach house that Marianne was gorgeous. She looked just like Marlene Dietrich, he thought, but without the pencilled eyebrows. And here she was, crying all over him about her age and her fading looks. But most of all she was displaying a degree of mind-boggling ignorance about Willem Klopper's sexual orientation.

When he explained to her, as delicately as he could, why Willem would not marry her, it was Marianne's turn to be astonished because, even with three brothers in the house, she had managed to reach the age of thirty-two without ever encountering a reference to boy-on-boy sex.

And then the mathematician caught a glimpse of her feet. She was always so careful to keep them covered but, just then, she had had to expose them to get the sand out of her shoes. She had once had slim long elegant feet with toes to match her long fingers, but by then each big toe was distorting inwards at an angle of sixty degrees and each was glowing with an angry red bunion. The four lesser toes on both feet were very badly deformed. They all pushed sideways; all were buckled and twisted into hillocks that folded over one another in a septic-looking, angular tangle. Each toe's nail was jabbing into the flesh of its neighbour and each had a raised red corn with an oozy yellow surround glowing on its summit. He had never in his life seen such terrible feet. It made him wonder how on earth she could walk – and how she managed to do so without showing signs of pain. It made him feel suddenly protective of her and he was just as suddenly furious with Willem.

‘What's happened to your feet?' he said and then she started to cry all over again.

Soon after Marianne had turned thirteen, a gang of schoolboys had started pelting her with snowballs on her way home from school. Or, mostly, it was snowballs with stones in them, but sometimes it was just stones. They called her ‘Banana Feet' and ‘Lanky Lottie' and ‘Freak' – and they waited for her, day after day. Much as she tried to avoid the boys by walking the long way home, they always managed to find her. And it never crossed her newly adolescent mind that her beautiful face had begun to glow with something that went beyond childhood, or that her height and her hips and her small high breasts could be disturbing to a bunch of
rough fifteen-year-old boys whose hormones were on the rampage. She couldn't see that their only devices for attracting her attention were inarticulate and counter-productive acts of oafish bullying.

Instead, Marianne came to the conclusion that her body was becoming deformed. She was much too tall and her feet were probably destined to be as long as boats. Her solution was to return in secret to the shoe shop with her newly purchased size seven winter boots and to trade them in for an identical pair one size down. She did this, of course, without saying a word to her parents. What followed was a winter spent in unconfessed agony, as the bones of her toes began to knit themselves together and violent shooting pains ran in spasms up and down her legs.

Of course, she knew as well as anyone that there was no way she could now change her mind and get new boots. She was growing up in the wake of Germany's First World War defeat, when clothing coupons were rationed and no one was entitled to the purchase of a second pair of boots. So, by the time she'd realised the seriousness of what she'd done, she'd accepted that her fate was sealed. All she could do was suffer in silence and try her best to bear the pain.

It was her father who finally noticed her agony and he made her take off her boots. Then he made her peel off her stockings. Dinah's mum never forgot how it felt to stand there in front of him and watch him start to cry. Marianne was his favourite child, his absolute pride and joy.

‘My poor, poor, stupid girl,' he said. ‘For this, my Marianne, you will suffer for the rest of your life.'

And, of course, she did. Sometimes Dinah used to watch her mum attacking her corns with a double-edged razor blade that she kept in the sewing basket. She would put wads of cotton wool over the gouts of blood and she'd interlace strips of cotton lint between the tangle of her overlapping toes. She would try not to wince as she'd push her feet back into her shoes. Dinah's mum never allowed herself to go barefoot. Not ever. Not even in her own house.

Meanwhile, there on Willem's beach, Marianne began to recover herself – by which time she and the freckly mathematician had begun to draw quite close. They went back into the beach house, talking and laughing like old friends, and they volunteered to wash up. He washed, she dried. This was the pattern that maintained itself throughout their subsequent marriage. And very
soon it was obvious to the inhabitants of the beach house that Marianne and Fred were an item.

Willem was furious and began to raise Cain. For both men it was antlers locked. And the end result was that poor Marianne was cast out from the beach house, cut off from paradise for ever.

‘And if you
must
marry him,' Willem spat, ‘then promise me that you'll never have his children.'

He sent her a wedding present signed in bitterness, a set of leather-bound Shakespeares in which various pertinent passages had been meaningfully underscored – and she never saw him again. Willem Klopper sold up the bookshop and removed himself from the beach house. Then he moved to Johannesburg, leaving no address.

And, sixty years later, when her mum had just died, Dinah, who was passing through Johannesburg, remembered this story of her mother's golden time and she suddenly thought, Good Lord. She looked up Willem Klopper in the Johannesburg telephone directory and she found a bookshop listed under his name. It was in Braamfontein, just across the road from the Wits University campus. So with a sudden, ridiculous urgency, she jumped into a taxi. But she found the bookshop cleared of its stock and the door just recently padlocked. There was a newish notice fixed to the door, addressed to the bookshop's customers. Willem Klopper had ceased trading, it said, just a month before Dinah's arrival.

Dinah repaired, frustrated, to the university's staff canteen where everyone knew about the bookshop.

‘Old Dutch guy,' they said. ‘Great bookseller. Always knew everything. Could get you any book you wanted.'

Willem Klopper had closed his doors and gone off to enjoy his retirement, his well-earned place in the sun. So the meeting was clearly not meant to be and, after some sober reflection, Dinah felt relieved. Because what was she going to say to him? And what would he have said to her? I never wanted you to be born? I can see that you've inherited the freckles? Your eyesight's clearly not up to much – does that mean you're very good at maths? Dinah hoped that the place to which he'd gone was nothing short of a pretty old beach house somewhere on the Cape's Atlantic coast.

Marianne and Fred got married on the day before South Africa entered the war. The marriage was a hasty move – a lunch-hour
registry affair. The intention was to stop Marianne being declared an enemy alien – and the date of the country's going to war was fairly easy to get right. Britain had already declared war on Germany two days before. And, since then, the South African parliament had been delaying and prevaricating, its MPs swinging both ways, the margin between the pros and the antis always too close to call. So, for the first days of September, the two party leaders, the generals Smuts and Herzog, were slogging it out, back and forth.