A Sport of Nature (3 page)

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.)

The girl sat on the lavatory seat, as one of them might have done. —What are they called?—

—Oh there's Doreen, she comes after Shirley, there's only eleven months between them (my pa was a lively old devil). People think they're twins, but they're very different personalities, very different …—

—Still at school?— In the cloudy blur of the bathroom, the taboo subject lost its embarrassing reference as the woman's body lost any embarrassment of exposure.

—Doreen couldn't take it. She's doing hairdressing. Shirley's the ambitious one. She's Scorpio. She'll go for an advertising job, you need A-levels to get a foot in there. Or maybe a travel agency. Oh she's always moaning how lucky her old sister is, living out here. But they're both full of fun. A pity you don't have any sisters … and it's a bit late for Len and me to make one for you!—

They laughed together; like the sisters. —Oh have a baby, Billie, it doesn't matter; have a baby. Even if it's a boy—

—Will you come and mind it for me? Change its smelly napkins? Oooh, I'm not sure I like the idea, don't talk me into it—In her bedroom Billie offered the loan of anything ‘you have a yen for' in her wardrobe; like the cardboard doll on which Hillela had tabbed paper dresses when she was a small child, she held up against herself successive images of Billie, in her splendid female confidence either never naked or never dressed, advancing down the aisles of the restaurant.

Len must have cancelled his usual long-distance sales trip that kept him away from home up in Northern Rhodesia, Lusaka and
the Copper Belt, from Tuesdays to Fridays. Bewilderment took the form of tact in what was—Hillela had caught the resonance of Olga's tone in bland remarks—‘a simple soul'; he seemed to have fallen back on regarding the girl's presence as if it were that of a normal half-term break. He did a little business round about, and kept Hillela with him. She smoked a cigarette from the pack in the glove-box and he made no remark. When she had put out the stub he turned his head away from the road, without looking at her. —
My little sweetheart
.— Both knew, not seeing each other, that both smiled. Balancing rocks were passing; he did not see them, either, the routes he took were worn to grooves that rose over his head and enclosed him. The moments balanced, for her, rock by rock.

—Hillela, the best thing'll be to go back, now, you know that.—

He felt her attention all down the side of his body.

—Not to the school. Of course, you can't … that's over. Back to Johannesburg. It's decided that's the best thing. Olga knows the good schools, somewhere you'll like. I've discussed it all with Olga.—

The rocks, passing, passing, were still balanced. They leaned out far, they held, sometimes on a single precarious point of contact, in tension against the pull of the earth that wanted to bring them crashing down.

—It wouldn't be fair to Billie. She's on her feet for long hours and she's very tired when she gets home—you know that. And with me out of town all week. The flat is small … it really would be too much for her if we found a bigger place. Billie's young, and she's right … she can't be expected to take on …—

He slowed to turn a corner. His face came round full upon her. —The two of us.—

*

Arthur, Olga's husband, acknowledged her presence while taking off his glasses and cleaning the inner corners of his eyes between thumb and forefinger; when he replaced the glasses she was a closed subject. The elder cousins had the reined air of being under constraint not to question her about what had happened. The innocents, the servant Jethro and little Brian, surrounded her with pleasure at her unexpected arrival. In the kitchen, grinning and chewing the Italian salami left on plates cleared from the diningroom: —Is very, very good you come to us in Jo'burg now.— Moving back and forth about his mother like a cat turning against table legs: —Is Hillela staying for always? In school-time, too? Is she going to boarding-school, is she going to be home every afternoon with Clive and Mark and me?—

Olga had a series of bright and authoritative prepared statements. —She's going to live in Johannesburg. We don't know yet if she'll board.—

The rose was in its vase and the guest sweet-dish filled. Olga came in and closed the door behind her. She was the one who had explained menstruation as natural and sexual intercourse as beautiful, when the right time had come for information about these. Olga was the one who had paid for her teeth to be brought into conformation, bought her clothes chosen in good taste, and cared for her hair and skin so that she should grow up pleasing in the way Olga herself was and knew to be valued.

Olga's lips pressed together until the flesh whitened to a cleft on either side of her nose and she began to cry. She became even more distressed when she saw the girl was afraid of this amazing evidence of disorder in an adult who knew how to arrange everything comfortably and safely. She drew Hillela to sit down beside her on that bed with its little heart-shaped cushions, quilted satin coverlet and posy-printed muslin skirts, and gripped her hands.

—I wish I knew what I did wrong—what I didn't do for you, darling Hilly. But I never understood Ruthie—I adored her but I couldn't … I just never … And now I've let my sister down again, I know it. It's not your fault, I don't blame you for anything, please believe that,
I blame myself
, you are like my own child, but sometimes you can't do the right thing even for your own—you see that with lots of parents. There must be something I should have done, something I didn't understand. But I just have to face the fact that maybe we're not right for you … You know your Aunt Pauline and I don't have much to do with each other—not because we don't love each other, we do, we do!—and anyway we both still love our sister whatever anyone says about her—but maybe, well, we agree perhaps you'll fit in better with Pauline's family. Pauline doesn't like Arthur, or our kind of friends or this house—you must have sensed it, even in the few times the whole family has been brought together. She thinks (a cough of laughter among the tears)—she says what you need is ‘a breath of air', the kind we don't breathe here. So you see how it is. Maybe you'll have more to occupy your interests. Keep your mind busy. Pauline leads a more varied life—oh yes, I'm the first to admit it. My temperament is different. In that way, she and Ruthie were alike—adventurous. But of course with Pauline, I mean Pauline's serious-minded … Anyway—it's out of the question you should be in the care of someone like Billie.—

Adults go on talking, all through childhood the monologue never stops.

When she who people say was once Hillela thinks of that time—and no-one who knew her then knows whether she ever does—that is all she retains of it. The tantrum that blew up inside her so bewilderingly that morning has long since been transformed, as electricity goes through pylons from voltage to voltage astride space and in time, and merged as the energy of other passions. Only those who never grow up take childhood
events unchanged and definitive, through their lives. It is only in the memory of someone who claims to be her Aunt Olga that the actual tantrum exists, in static anecdotal repetition, in its form of a mysterious defence of
Billie
, Billie of all people!—poor Len's tarty second wife.

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.—