Frankie and Stankie (26 page)

‘Why?' Dinah says, but Catherine ignores her.

‘It's all right,' she says. ‘Well, I think it's all right. Just about. I managed to persuade her it was another Dinah. Somebody at school. So I've saved your bacon for now. God, if she
really
thought it was you, you'd
never be allowed to come to my house again
.'

‘Why?' Dinah says again.

‘She's forbidden me to ever have anything to do with that person – so for heaven's sake, pretend you know absolutely nothing about it. That's if she ever asks.'

‘All right,' Dinah says, thinking that maybe one day –
one
day – she'll be a little bit less green and she'll understand why the Marmite pun is so smutty and unacceptable but, as time passes, Dinah never does get to understand. Instead, it comes to her that, underneath the pursed-up exterior and the social climbing and the would-be vowels, Catherine's mother is just about as vulgar as her own winking Toby Jugs. She has a one-track mind, like her daughter.

‘You've got a one-track mind,' Dinah's peers at school have
started saying to each other. ‘Honestly, Michelle, you've got a one-track mind. And it's a dirt track.'

Every Sunday Catherine goes to St Paul's Anglican Church in the town centre to attend the Sunday school where the ethical issue of sitting beside the small smattering of not-white children is a big one for Catherine and all the other white attendants. Barney, whose hobby is knocking out street lights, says that it's disgusting, but Catherine says, piously, ‘It's all right in the House of God, Barney. It's only outside church that He doesn't want us to mix. It's got to be whites on top.'

Blood and water don't mix. Catherine quite often employs this maxim, but Dinah has never managed to work out if it's whites who've got blood and blacks who've got water, or whether it's the other way round. It reminds her of the lines in one of the morning hymns at school:

Let the water and the blood
From Thy riven soul which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Save me from its guilt and power.

Because Dinah still harbours her religious passions, she confides these to Catherine who has a plan. She's talked a lot about a handsome, dark-haired young curate at St Paul's whose name is Andrew Dalkeith. She arranges a meeting between Dinah and the Revd Dalkeith who, as Dinah understands, has agreed to baptise her without involving her parents. So Dinah, after several sessions at matins and evensong, where she soon knows the Common Prayer liturgy by heart and can point all the psalms to perfection, conquers her shyness and meets the Revd Andrew Dalkeith in a small, curtained ante-room off the sacristy. Revd Dalkeith is just as handsome as Catherine has told her, but it's soon perfectly obvious that he's not intending to baptise her and risk her father's wrath. He doesn't have the decency to say this to Dinah, so, instead, he tells her that it wouldn't be enough for him to save just her soul. He needs her father's soul as well. What he needs is for her to do him a favour and convert her father first. This is clearly God's purpose for her.

So the Revd Andrew Dalkeith sends Dinah away with a bunch of tacky tracts and a copy of
The Screwtape Letters
by C.S. Lewis which she's to leave in her father's path. Dinah obediently does what he asks, knowing that it can't possibly work and that all it'll do is make her feel an idiot, because her father will think it a great joke. Her dad duly piss-takes over the pamphlets and picks several holes in
The Screwtape Letters
before settling down to pick more holes in the moral fibre of the current Archdeacon of St Paul's Church, whom he considers to be as mealy-mouthed on the race issue as most of the local Anglican clergy. That's with a few honourable and sometimes heroic exceptions. Archdeacon Eustace H. Wade of St Paul's, soon to be better known as the father of Virginia Wade, future Wimbledon champion and right now the crowning glory of Dinah's high-school tennis team, is not one of Ta's heroic exceptions and is rewarded by Dinah's dad with the title of Archdeacon Useless H. Wade whenever he comes on the radio to conduct the morning service.

In spite of the Revd Dalkeith's let-down response, Dinah loyally goes along, year in, year out, to matins and evensong, until the rhythms of Thomas Cranmer's prose have burned their way into her mind. She endures three hours of Good Friday devotions although the dust in the hassocks always gives her hay fever and she's never brought along enough tissues. She does this, although she and the Revd Dalkeith never exchange a glance. Then one day she suddenly stops going and it's hard, thinking back, to know why. The baptismal business really bugs her. She's too shy to re-ignite the issue and she's demoralised by always feeling marginal. It's sort of like the Brownies business all over again. Before you got your Brownie uniform, you were called a Tweenie. These days Dinah feels that she's been a C of E Tweenie for far too long to be comfortable.

Catherine Cleary's mother decides to take in a lodger to help make ends meet. The lodger is a balding engineering student who is one of Ta's more hopeless serial repeats. The repeat has re-taken each year of the degree course because he keeps on failing maths. Ta, who has the art of teaching maths to almost anybody, is nonetheless always in jaunty mood when confronted by a truly hopeless failure. While marking exam scripts, he mutters triumphantly out loud as he strikes errors through with red ink.

‘Ah-ha! So you're a fool!' he'll say and he'll pause to chortle over the unfortunate's algebraic
faux pas
. ‘Give up. It's wrong from beginning to end!' he'll say. ‘Zero for you, my boy. Ha!'

Sometimes Dinah's mum will intervene, because she always feels sorry for the students.

‘
Ach, Tächenherz
,' she'll say. ‘But he has such beautiful handwriting.'

Dinah's dad always takes especial pleasure in marking down a fool with beautiful handwriting, though just sometimes he'll say, in response to her interventions, ‘Oh all right. We'll give him three. Three per cent. Much good may
that
do him!'

Mrs Cleary's repeat is so prematurely aged and so painfully polite that Catherine and Dinah can't help but giggle in his presence. Catherine's mother is contracted to give the repeat an evening meal and his perfect conduct at mealtimes makes Catherine play up really badly. Catherine tells Dinah that the repeat is so polite that he bends his head almost under the table in order to blow his nose. Catherine copies him at once, getting right under the cloth and blowing a few rousing fake blasts that make her mother send her out of the room. Catherine's mum is always sending her out of the room at mealtimes.

Mrs Cleary, though she never has dinner parties, does occasionally have her much younger sister Nan and brother-in-law to supper, who live in the twin house next door. Once Catherine reports to Dinah that she has been sent out when her Uncle Philip has made a remark which is not altogether in keeping with Mrs Cleary's sense of propriety. Philip Herbert is a handsome young man, slightly touched with a hint of blue-collar – because clever, competent sister Nan is thought to have married down. Philip goes to work on a push bike which is definitely not quite the thing in a place where bicycles are a mode of transport only for black delivery persons. Or else they are white children's toys.

‘Somebody's farted,' Philip says, possibly to wind up Catherine's mother. Or it could be that the culprit is Tinker who is given to inopportune venting.

‘A fox smells his own hole first,' Catherine quips.

She's sent to her room, but climbs out of the unbarred bathroom window to report the matter at once, though Dinah is not quite sure, from Catherine's account, if Mrs Cleary is shocked because
Catherine has insulted her uncle by the use of a foxy metaphor, or if there's a connection in Mrs Cleary's mind between the words hole and anus. Does Mrs Cleary think that Catherine was saying her uncle could smell his own anus?

When Mrs Cleary gets a gentleman caller, Catherine's behaviour reaches heights of vulgarity. The gentleman caller has come to canvass for the newly constituted Federal Party which has in mind, in the event of Mr Strijdom's declaring a republic, for royalist Natal to secede from the Union of South Africa. The airing of the republican idea has been causing one of Durban's periodic flurries of Union Jack planting in suburban flowerbeds and Mrs Cleary now has one, thanks to the help of the gentleman caller. But after planting Mrs Cleary's flag, the canvasser just keeps on calling. Mrs Cleary obviously welcomes his visits. She wears lipstick and smarter clothes and she smiles more often and asks the canvasser to stay for meals. But Catherine behaves so offensively that she drives the canvasser from the house. Her incessant fake burps at table finally do the trick and the battle is won.

Poor Mrs Cleary is miserable. She can clearly no longer stand the sight of Catherine who has wrecked the only second chance for happiness that has managed to come her way. She rises to heights of nagging and nitpicking until, some months later, she dispatches Catherine to an up-country convent boarding school. And it's at the school that Catherine, possibly in an act of revenge, or merely while falling under the influence of her namesake, Sister Catherine, the art teacher – an emotionally, morally and intellectually more impressive woman than her own mother – converts to Catholicism, a faith which she practises devoutly and conscientiously for the rest of her life.

GHS is trying to be like an English girls' grammar school, but the time-warp factor plus the colonial cringe are making it very different. While the school's original building looks quite English – a little brick schoolhouse in the town centre, with low sash windows and a tarmac playground and its motto carved into the stone lintel over the front door – the current building, Dinah's building, stands, gleaming-white, in six acres of landscaped grounds, high on Durban's airy south ridge, with panoramic views over the bay. Inside the building, several past headmistresses are staring down at you from the walls and most of them are Scottish. This is because the British Imperial project in South Africa has ensured that education is dominated by Scots. When the British swiped the Cape off the Dutch in 1795, it seemed to them like a good idea to anglicise Dutch Calvinists. So they introduced British Calvinists to do all the preaching and the teaching. This means that, in addition to the predominance of Scottish headmistresses, there are lots of Afrikaners called Murray.

Girls' High still has the motto and there's also a school song. The motto is ‘Time Lost is Never Regained'. Dinah can't really relate to this because she knows that time goes on for ever and, however much of it she wastes, there always seems to be more of it. The school song was composed by one of the dead Scottish headmistresses and it's all about dead male war heroes. That's except for Joan of Arc. The school song is all about Nelson and Napoleon and Coeur de Lion. Plus there's a line about ‘stout courageous Wellington', which is why Dinah knows that the Duke of Wellington was a fat man. Cortez, she knows, was fat as well, because it says so in the Keats poem: ‘like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he star'd
at the Pacific'. Cortez was a fat man with pop eyes. She's recently found Keats and the Romantics for herself, because the syllabus keeps the junior girls on ‘suitable narrative verse'.

Dinah likes the assembly hall which has a proper stage with wings and a proscenium arch and thick velvet curtains with gold tassels. There are sets of French windows to right and left that give on to shady loggias, beyond which are gardens with frangipani trees and there's an exciting upstairs gallery as well. Theatrical productions at GHS always have the taller girls dressed up in buckled shoes and cravats and wigs pretending to be men. There's a production of
She Stoops to Conquer
and one of
The Dueña
and a play about Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett falling in love. Shakespeare doesn't happen on stage, because he's kept for reading round the class over periods of roughly nine months per play. Dinah's first Shakespeare is
Twelfth Night
which takes from January to September. So come September, the play has lost any shape. Plus she's got no idea why the characters keep on saying ‘Marry' and ‘Sblood' to each other.

Miss Bardsey puts on Gilbert & Sullivan operas and Miss Byrd, the art teacher, does Living Art which is a series of tableaux in which she recreates Old Master paintings on stage with pupils in costume. She gets the art girls to help with the painted backdrops and she finds suitable props and does artful lighting effects. Dinah has a part in Rembrandt's
The Night Watch
and another in Poussin's
Dance to the Music of Time
, but everybody envies beautiful Pat Slavin because she's Queen Nefertiti. Quite often the audience doesn't recognise the art works on which the tableaux are based, but Pat gets a lot of applause, because the recent, much photographed London exhibition of artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb means that she's a well-known celebrity icon in her necklace of Plasticine lapis lazuli.

Mostly the stage is used, day-to-day, for seating the staff during assembly. The teachers sit in a wide arc with Miss Maidment always dead centre, a bit like Christ in Glory. Then there's a sort of age-before-beauty arrangement that falls away from her to left and right. When Miss Maidment gets up to address the girls it's always from the lectern. She exhorts them to heights of achievement and good behaviour with certain favourite repeating refrains.

‘You gels are the mothers of the future,' she says.

Her point is that GHS girls must excel in order to make
themselves capable of producing the right sort of daughters who will then become pupils at GHS and go on to produce yet another generation of suitable GHS girls. This is pretty well the beginning and end of the GHS careers advisory service, but somehow, the brainy Jewish girls don't need a careers advisory service to know that it's important to take Latin as one of your subjects, because then you can go on to become a doctor or a lawyer. The glossy airhead Jewish girls never bother with Latin. They have nose jobs and do flirting on Durban's North Beach. They have beautiful tans and they spend the breaks comparing gold neck chains with Star of David pendants. They hide these under their school shirts, because at GHS it's strictly no-jewellery-allowed.