Frankie and Stankie (36 page)

Pansy Kaufmann is a gorgeous creature who's a lot younger than Dinah's mum. She has dark hair and scarlet lipstick and scarlet nails and she's never not looking glamorous. Even when she's just washed her hair she'll have on a purpose-built terry-cloth turban and a slinky Hollywood dressing gown and all her rings will be in place. She's got a dazzling wide smile and, more than anything, she likes to have a good time. Pansy's impatient with motherhood, so she talks to Jenny and her friends just as though they were a clutch of wised-up girl pals out on the pull together. She's the only mother Dinah knows who's always on at her daughter to wear sexier shoes and plunging necklines. She wants Jenny to walk with a more come-on swagger. She thinks Jenny's clothes are too severe and if Jenny's ever wearing flat shoes then she'll never let it go by.

‘What's with the orthopaedic shoes today, Jen?' she says. ‘Aren't those shoes for a person who's got a sickness?'

Or she'll come home from the shops with handy new seduction ideas.

‘Jenny, I want you to go without your bra,' she'll say one day. ‘I've just seen a young girl in town today. Luscious bosoms, just like yours. She was bouncing all down West Street admiring herself in the shop windows. Try it, Jenny. Don't be boring. What do you think, Didi? Should my Jenny take off her bra?'

Dinah spends most of her time with Jenny's mother trying hard not to blush. And mealtimes are the most dangerous because Harold will suddenly pounce.

‘Got any boyfriends, then?' he'll say, while you mumble and try to look suave. ‘More than old Jenny here, I hope?' Or he'll say, ‘Tell me. What do you put on your pimples? Anything good? You girls know all the tricks.'

Harold is especially horrid to Jenny's brother Sylvester, who is
thirteen and bulging with the beginnings of awkward adolescence.

A small skinny boy with new black down on his upper lip and a new, unreliable breaking voice, Sylvester has a huge new Adam's apple and a clump of new, fuzzy underarm hair in each of his small-boy armpits. The hair is revealed whenever Sylvester does his Tarzan swings from the bars of the open staircase that rises up from the dining room.

‘
Armpits
, Sylvester,' Harold says, delicately sniffing the air. ‘Armpits … armpits… Not in front of the ladies.' He likes it when Sylvester gets embarrassed and lets go and crumples to the floor.

Harold is like a new tomcat on the block, putting his smell on Pansy's things. So Sylvester escapes to his soapbox cart and zooms down the steeply gradiented pavements of South Ridge Road, while Jenny escapes to her friends. Jenny and Sylvester are children who've been displaced by their mother's passion for Harold – and there's damn all that they can do about it, though Jenny's poise has provided her with better coping strategies. She's always motherly towards Sylvester who has the air of a wounded bird.

Sometimes Jenny's mum will press Dinah to sit beside her on one of the gilded bergère sofas and she'll grow expansive on her life story.

‘–and then my father lost all his money,' she says. ‘So I was forced to go and work in Ackerman's.'

Pansy worked as a shop assistant in Ackerman's – a large downmarket chain store that's never got a foothold in Durban. But she wasn't there for very long because she caught the eye of Jenny's dad, who was an older man with means. Jenny's dad is dead, but Jenny has lots of pictures of him that she's stashed away in her bedroom: precious pictures of the two of them together, pictures of a solid, bald, imposing man, like a handsome version of Alfred Hitchcock. And alongside him, locking eyes with him, is an adorable smiley moppet, a dainty doted-on Jenny Wren in expensive little smocked frocks and shiny patent-leather shoes. Jenny says that she always helped her dad to choose his ties for the office. She'd stand on a stool in his dressing room and pick out the one for that day.

Some of the pictures are of Jenny and Sylvester with that almost unheard of local status symbol, a white English nanny. In the
pictures, when Sylvester is in his going-out clothes, he's dressed up in a white suit like Richie Rich, but without the dollar signs in his eyes. Some of the pictures are of Jenny's dad with Pansy on foreign cruises, or on shopping trips in Manhattan. Pansy looks like a film star in the pictures, a gorgeous rich man's wife in Dior costume and lots of jewellery, holding on to striped cardboard hat boxes. Whenever Dinah thinks about Pansy, she thinks about Cunard Liners.

Pansy has a lot of sayings and one of them's about her late husband who died when Jenny was nine. ‘He came from Russia with a piece of string,' she says.

It takes Dinah a while to understand what Pansy means, but she uses this expression about Jews who left Eastern Europe with no money in their pockets. She means that they were part of the vast migration of penniless early twentieth-century Jews to the Rand where the streets were – of course – paved with gold. If Pansy talks about immigrant Jews who, unlike her late husband, have failed to acquire bourgeois finesse, then – for reasons Dinah doesn't understand – she calls such persons Peruvians. So Pansy is having a dinner party one day and she says to the early arrivals at the event, ‘I must tell you that the Pikaskis are coming. They're dreadful Peruvians, I'm afraid.' And then, of course, the Pikaskis turn up and one of the earlier guests is disposed to try a little conversation.

‘Mrs Kaufmann tells me you come from Peru,' he says. ‘Is that from Lima?'

‘No, no,' says Mr Pikaski. ‘Not Lima. Fanny and me, we come from Riga.'

Pansy does lots of entertaining but she never enters her own kitchen and she doesn't know how to cook. She's never heard of washing-up liquid, so her maid is still grating bars of blue mottled soap every time she's got a sink of dirty dishes. Pansy has a large black woman in the kitchen whom she refers to as ‘the slave'. The slave has a limited culinary repertoire, so it's nearly always shepherd's pie and orange jelly for pudding with sliced bananas set into the mould. Jenny and Dinah have noticed that the grande dame in the next-door maisonette has a variation in servant terminology. She calls her maid ‘the savage'.

‘Oh my
dears
,” she says one day to the girls. ‘Have you set eyes on my new savage? Her name's Aurelia.'

Blacks often have the nicest names, Dinah thinks – elegant, Old World names like Seraphina and Theodora, or long biblical names like Ezekiel and Hepzibah. Whites are called Lynn and Terry and Barry and Eileen. The grande dame in the next-door maisonette is a striking Rubens beauty, an ample pink-and-white goddess with dangly gemstone earrings that aren't clip-ons, because she's the only bourgeois person Dinah's ever met who's got pierced ears. She's also the first person Dinah's met who likes to use daring language, so if Jenny is climbing over her gate instead of undoing the clasp, she'll say, ‘Jenny will you stop
raping
my gate?! I will not stand over your marriage bed and vouch for you!'

Jenny's dad was a poor but brainy immigrant who got rich inventing something that was vital to the wheels of industry but Dinah doesn't know what it is. She knows that he took out a patent which, like bourbon, is all new to her. Jenny's family have moved from a grander house in Johannesburg to the maisonette in South Ridge Road, so lots of their stuff is really big. There are large looming oil landscapes in chunky stucco frames and all the furniture looks a bit as though it's come from a French château. Jenny tells Dinah that she hates it. She likes Dinah's mum's fixtures and fittings better because everything comes in several tasteful shades of beige. That's except for the row of black-and-white woodcuts that she's hung over the sofa, woodcuts sent by handsome Wilhelm from the Harz Mountains, the skiing champ who'd turned her down in the rain in pre-war Berlin.

Married, middle-aged and the father of teenage sons, Wilhelm has once again decided that Marianne is the only girl for him. He writes her long extravagant love letters and bombards her with cardboard rolls full of lithographs, etchings and woodcuts. Dinah's dad has got exercised about all the letters and the art works and he's made Dinah's mum tell him to stop. So Wilhelm has gone to ground once again, but Dinah's mum has kept a few of the prints for old time's sake. Some of them are in the frames on the wall and some are stashed in a cardboard box under her bed, along with all the old photographs of the young Jacobsens fooling at the Tiergarten or on the deck of the motor launch. All of them are being eaten away by Durban's ubiquitous green mould.

Jenny is the only person Dinah knows who calls her parents by their first names and Pansy insists on it with all of Jenny's friends so
there's no ‘Thank you for having me, Mrs Kaufmann.' It's all ‘Thank you, Pansy,' and ‘Thank you, Harold.' Sometimes Jenny's mother, when she sits Dinah down, will hint at bedroom talk.

‘My first husband was a
good
man,' she'll say with meaning. ‘But if I'm truthful with you, Dinah, I never ever
felt
for him the way I feel for that swine Harold. Tell me, Dinah. What do you think? Am I a fool for love?'

Sometimes, as they sit drinking together in the evenings, Jenny's mum, with her tinkly glass of amber liquid in hand, will make significant faces at Harold to try and coax him upstairs. But Harold always likes to hang back, like a child delaying his bedtime. It's at times like these when there's something about them – and maybe it's nothing more than the high-backed gilded chairs – but there's something about them, Dinah thinks, that causes one to call up images from Hogarth's
Marriage à la Mode
.

And then it's time for Maud to come back. And she's a grown-up, a working girl, with packets of ciggies in her handbag. Maud gets a series of crappy short-term jobs by pretending to employers that she can type. Then she meets two gay boys who are planning a café. Maud runs the coffee bar – Durban's first. It's a chic little arts café, with the first espresso coffee machine that anyone local has ever seen. The boys look after the art gallery upstairs, because one's a potter and the other one does textiles. Maud's mum gets a job in a bun shop in town and Maud soon has her own little studio flat in a central high-rise block where the girls, now a threesome of best friends, can do their sewing and practise keeping house. Jenny likes to make cheese soufflés a lot, while Maud and Dinah do chilli con carne and shortcut casserole things from the
I Hate to Cook Book
using onion-soup mix and tinned pineapple chunks. And they do those deadly post-war risottos where you mix pre-cooked long-grain rice with pre-cooked chicken and frozen peas.

People always talk to Maud, especially intense, creative people, and one day she's got a new playwright in her flat. He's a small, wiry man with too-big trousers and a beard and, to look at him, you'd take him for a poor white railway worker. His name's Athol Fugard and he's worked as a clerk in the Native Commissioner's Court, watching the endless parade of black South Africans getting done for Pass Law offences. He's right away seen that the real
drama is in the lives of urban blacks and suddenly, thanks to him, theatre is transformed from
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
and
No No, Nanette
into
No Good Friday
and
Nongogo
and
The Blood Knot –
electrifying plays that come like a passionate scream, out of the Bantu Men's Social Centre and the African Theatre Workshop.

All the while Jenny and Dinah are swotting for the final exams that will take them on to the university, they hope, the place where Lisa has already done the first year of a degree in geography. Durban is always so hot around exam time that sometimes they fill Dinah's bath with cold water and immerse themselves in it naked with their notes on a plank across the tub. ‘The first shipload of coolies arrived in November 1860…' Dinah's mum takes pity on them and brings them grapes and cold-sausage sandwiches and iced orange juice that she's squeezed with her new Estrella citrus press.

Dinah's decided that she'd like to be an architect. This is because she loves shapes. She loves to make pop-up books for the neighbours' children and she unpicks cardboard boxes to copy their various intriguing groundplans. Besides, she's never stopped being seduced by the memory of her pipe-cleaner doll's house, the many-roomed margarine-box mansion with its rooms full of matchwood Chippendale and matchwood grandfather clocks. So she goes to talk to Miss Byrd.

‘It's not a career for a girl,' Miss Byrd says. ‘They don't want women in the profession.'

‘But,' says Dinah. ‘But… but – '

‘They won't have you, my dear,' Miss Byrd says. ‘They won't have women in the architectural school.'

And that's the end of that. Dinah right away gives up, collapses on the first round – and has, of course, never mentioned the idea at home, has never confided any of her affairs – and this, even though she knows that her dad greatly admires his only female engineering student, a brave girl in a boiler suit with blonde hair, called Georgette.

‘I'm going to major in English,' Dinah starts to say from this time on.

The only hitch with regard to the exams is that Dinah doesn't know any maths. And without maths she can't get a Matric. This is something which slowly dawns on her once the time is almost up.
For nearly four years she's sat there daydreaming in the maths class and she's never once done the homework.

‘I don't know any maths,' she says, one night at dinner, in front of her dad. It's four weeks, to the day, before she'll have to sit the exams.

‘Well, you've been in the maths class for four years now,' he says. ‘Come on, you must know something.'

‘I know nothing,' Dinah says.

‘So what's a plus b into a minus b?' he says.

‘Don't know,' Dinah says.