Frankie and Stankie (34 page)

In the event, both girls are allowed to stay, though the reprieve is not of great significance for Maud who, with the coal miner dead and her mother returned to the hotel, has just confided to Dinah that she's leaving school come Christmas. Dinah's own feelings of shock and loss aside, she naturally understands this move as having to do with Maud's much greater sophistication and general grown-upness. Maud will get a job and have real money and even more boyfriends and fabulous clothes and a bank account. Most glamorous of all, Maud and her mother will first take a Union Castle boat to Southampton and proceed by train via King's Cross Station to Aberdeen where Maud's mum after an absence of nearly three decades will reconnect with the siblings she left behind at seventeen.

‘Now the teacher's pet will try to be your friend,' Maud says.

‘Rubb – ISH,' Dinah says. ‘She hates me.'

‘Correction,' Maud says. ‘She hates me. And that's because I'm your friend. Can't you tell by the way she looks at you? Anyway she thinks you're the only person who's cultured enough to be her friend. So just you mark my words.'

They giggle their way through a final assembly, and get especial satisfaction from the line in ‘Lord Dismiss Us' that exhorts the Almighty to keep them free from ‘sloth and sensual snare'.

Maud has brought a blanket to school into which she shovels her heap of possessions and they carry it between them like a hammock down the long hill. On the way Maud stuffs her panama hat into a letter box and throws her blazer into a hedge. Then, four days later, Dinah is watching the
Warwick Castle
being tugged out from Durban harbour. It's carrying Maud and her mother out, out into the open sea.

School is different without Maud. Without Maud, there's no option but to sink yourself in the work. So Dinah becomes, once again, a sort of modified Al rosette girl. This for all that she's been all at sea in maths for the last three years. She's always done well in Miss Byrd's art history classes and now she really starts to shine. Plus she's found favour with the senior English teacher who regards her as one of the elite: one of the girls she'll always call upon to
deconstruct ‘Sailing to Byzantium' in class and whose essays she'll read out loud. And the bliss, now, of the poetry lessons is that the suitable narrative verse has finally transmogrified into
Palgrave's Golden Treasury
which provides a feast of Robert Herrick and Ben Jonson; of Byron and Shelley; of Yeats and Hopkins and Auden. Dinah learns a lot of the poetry by heart, just for the pleasure of having it as furniture in her head, but mostly it just sticks in there without her making any effort. If you can recite ‘Felix Randal the Farrier' to yourself, inside your own head, she's discovered, then standing alone at the school bus stop – standing there without Maud – well, it helps you not to get bored. It helps you not to feel alone. But Dinah is not alone for long.

It's being chosen to read the lesson in assembly that brings the teacher's pet to her side.

‘I've been talking to Miss McAllister,' she says. Miss McAllister is the drama teacher. ‘And both of us agree,' she says, ‘that your voice production's all wrong. Miss McAllister says that you'll probably
have
no voice by the time you're thirty-five.'

The warning has little effect on Dinah, who can't envisage ever being thirty-five, though the put-down is slightly bruising to her confidence about public performance. And she hasn't failed to notice that the teacher's pet, even as she speaks, is moving her chair alongside Dinah's for the start of the day's English lesson. By the end of the day she's sitting beside Dinah for all the lessons they share. The teacher's pet is alongside Dinah in all the breaks as well. And it's during the breaks that she's always clutching the small vocabulary notebook in which she composes poetry. She writes it very fast, on the wing. The teacher's pet sits very close to Dinah and sometimes she likes to hold hands.

Yet she continues to be as put-down as possible at every opportunity. Dinah's performance in the title role of Miss Bardsey's production of
The Mikado
has the teacher's pet observing that her stage movement is ‘embarrassing'. And her part in the chorus of T.S. Eliot's ‘Coriolanus' elicits the observation that her facial expression is ‘dopey'. The teacher's pet, in her friendship with Dinah, is pretty well analogous with a 1950s husband. In all the women's magazine stories Dinah reads at this time, a husband, or a would-be husband – because all passion must needs lead on to marriage – will require the female object of his love to be an endearing, frothy creature, a pretty
thing who pines for frippery in the form of shoes and jewels and trinkets. And then, once her sparkly magpie hoard is outed, Mr Masterful can play the benign custodian and guide.

‘Oh you adorable little fool,' he'll say. ‘How I
dote
on you, dearest silly-billy. A week's wages on a pair of shoes! What next?'

And then Mr Masterful will embrace Miss Frothy and offer his hand in marriage. Of course, Miss Frothy mustn't really be a fool or she wouldn't be a credit to Mr Masterful – and she has to be able, in her role as wife, to advance Mr Masterful's career. She has to be like the female spouse in the cartoon-strip Horlicks advertisements that Dinah reads in the newspaper. Mrs Horlicks, who is always experiencing a period of inexplicable lethargy at the beginning of the strip, is reneging on her household chores and causing Mr Horlicks to think, in several worried thought bubbles, that She's not the girl I married.

She then goes on to take tea in a café with a wise woman friend. Both Mrs Horlicks and her wise friend are always depicted taking tea in their gloves and smart little head-hugging 1950s hats. The friend recommends a regular nightly mug of Horlicks which rescues Mrs Horlicks from the perils of ‘night starvation'. The time leap in the story is then indicated by a square box that says, ‘HORLICKS EVERY NIGHT UNTIL…'

Once the night starvation's been dispatched, Mrs Horlicks is completely revived and she can once again exhibit the guile, wit and prettiness to charm her husband's boss at the works Christmas party and to give his promotion a helping hand. And naturally, he's very proud to be the envy of his colleagues for having the most enchanting wife in the firm. A female consort, all the messages read, is required to be both a career leg-up and a trophy to carry on one's arm.

This is more or less what the teacher's pet seems to have in mind for Dinah, though neither girl, at the age of sixteen, is able to see these matters quite as clearly and straightforwardly as this.

On the first Saturday that the teacher's pet asks Dinah home to tea, she doesn't wear a hat and gloves but, because she's addictively dressy, she's as dolled up as usual for a day out of school uniform. She's wearing her newly made apple-green lawn shirtdress with high waist and full skirt and little amber buttons. She's wearing it with her new T-bar shoes, the shoes that – hopelessly Miss Frothy-wise – she
loves with such a degree of passion that she's still taking them to bed in their box filled with crumpled tissue paper. Plus her hair is newly silvered and rollered into an acceptable state of studied, bouffant touslement. Dinah's teenage love affair with clothes is far more necessary to her and far more sensually rewarding than anything she might hope, right then, to get going with a boy. And, unlike the boy thing, it's a love affair in which she feels the joy of getting it right.

She takes two buses to the teacher's pet's house: one to the town centre and one from there to the north of the city. As she steps off the first bus into the bustle of the Saturday crowd, a photographer swoops and starts to take her picture. ‘Do this, do that,' he says. Click click. Then he picks her up, shoulder high, and carries her ten yards down the road where he plants her on top of a silver Buick with a shiny wide chrome grin. ‘Do this, do that,' he says. Click click. Everybody is turning and looking at her. Click click. ‘Lovely,' he says. Click click. ‘Terrific' Click click. ‘Superb.' Dinah doesn't think to ask him what he means to do with the pictures. She's too busy walking on air. And when she gets to the teacher's pet's house, she's still sufficiently upbeat about it to tell her story there.

The teacher's pet rolls her eyes to denote the degree of Dinah's witlessness and she's making a pull-down mouth. ‘God how can you be so
stupid
?” she says. ‘Don't you know that he does that to
every
body?”

The teacher's pet doesn't do clothes much, but she's got a high-school boyfriend whose picture's in a frame beside her bed.

Next time Dinah visits the teacher's pet she's wearing the bottle-green plaid wool suit which is the first thing she's ever made with linings. The suit has a short wide swagger jacket and a skin-tight skirt with a long kick-pleat which makes it just about possible to walk – even in the four-inch-heeled black winkle-pickers whose current torture of Dinah's toes is worth every moment measured in agony.

‘
Chelsea
!' says the Payne Brothers make-up lady where Dinah has dropped in to buy herself a lip brush. She claps her hands in the rarefied atmosphere of pinkish fluorescent light and dry-ice air-conditioning. Then she's emerged from behind her mirrored counter to give Dinah a girlie little twirl.

‘My
dear
,' she says, sounding utterly ex-pat. ‘You look as if you've stepped
straight out of Chelsea
!'

Dinah has naturally never been to Chelsea, but, in her own personal version of Mrs Cleary's cultural cringe, she knows for certain that it's exactly where she most wants to be in this life. She knows all the names of places in London – the ones she's just been reading about in Iris Murdoch's first novel – names like Vauxhall and Pimlico and the Embankment – and she knows that one day she and Maud will be Chelsea girls, sharing a flat and going to the Billingsgate Fish Market to buy mackerel heads for the cat that they're going to keep for sure – a detail they've added to their London-life fantasy ever since T.S. Eliot's
Old Possum
has provoked in them a passion for the feline species.

In general English landscapes are more familiar to her, via J.M.W. Turner and John Constable and John Piper, than anything she sees – or does not see – in her own backyard. Something about the menace inherent in the local white agrarian class; in the patent horrors of local notions of manifest destiny; in the too recent expropriation of land – all newly compounded for her by the coming to office as Prime Minister of mad, blond, perpetually grinning Dr Verwoerd, the man who believes he's the black man's best friend, the man who, like Joseph Stalin, looks as though he's awaiting those garlands from smiling black schoolchildren even as he's signing the death warrant for the same children's education, downgrading a graduate black teacher's pay to the sum of two pounds per week; ‘Thank you for my happy childhood'; ‘Ninety-eight per cent of South Africa's Bantu approve of our policy of apartheid' – these things have made Dinah shut down on the terrain which she ought to feel is her own. So she doesn't see the beauty of the banana palms and the flame trees and the spiky orange aloes that grow wild on the vacant lots with their two-tone, razor-edged leaves. In fact she doesn't see them at all. Nature isn't her thing. Yet she's capable of getting quite swoony on reading
A Shropshire Lad
, or on the opening lines of
The Prelude
. Or on Hopkins's thrush's eggs, those ooh-aah ‘little low heavens'; ‘that English thrush who, through the echoing timber, does so rinse and wring the ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing'. And yet, and yet, there are no lightnings anywhere that strike like the lightnings of coastal Natal.

She says nothing to the teacher's pet that Saturday – nothing about the Payne Brothers lady dancing her round the floor. Instead Dinah sits stiffly on the edge of the teacher's pet's bed and watches as she removes the boyfriend's photograph from the frame. Then she inserts a photograph of Dinah instead. In the picture Dinah is wearing lilac gingham of the sort just then made fashionable by the fabulous Brigitte Bardot. She's sitting alone on a garden bench in a shaft of dappled sunlight. On the bed beside her Dinah notes that the small vocabulary notebook is filling up and filling up with poems.

Dinah's relationship with the teacher's pet reaches its pitch of killjoy claustrophobia when they go together, just the two of them, to undertake that ultimate English-language schoolchild's nightmare: the language-learning sojourn on the Afrikaner farm. The teacher's pet has arranged it all and has presented the scheme to Dinah's parents as an efficiently organised project. She has Afrikaner relations via her maternal line. Her mother, a pretty blonde Afrikaner woman who goes about the house in fluffy pink mules, has given Dinah the strong impression that she feels somewhat exiled in Durban, with her brisk English-speaking husband who looks exactly like his daughter. He does the books in a downtown office and makes unpleasant jokes at table. Jokes about having to take his wife off the shelf and dust her; jokes about having to buy a ‘mole bomb' for his daughter who has a small, unobtrusive facial mark. The teacher's pet's mother likes to collar Dinah for the odd stolen moment of furtive girl-talk. So they whisper about lacy knickers and bras.

The farm is located in the furthest outpost of the Orange Free State. It's on land that's been carved out of what is rightfully Basutoland: high green mountain country where the indigenous Basuto wear wide conical hats and ride horses while wrapped in blanket cloaks against the cold, blankets made in Witney for the far-flung native trade. And for all that nothing awful happens during the language-learning fortnight, Dinah, doubtless through her own feebleness and inadequacy, remembers the weeks as a horror experience in Rip Van Winkle land, a fortnight of endlessly visiting neighbouring farms and sitting down to those prolonged afternoon teas in huge time-warped dining rooms with
riempie
-seated
chairs and white lace tablecloths and ticking clocks. Glass-fronted bookcases carry whole runs of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens along with brass-edged family Bibles. Bearded patriarchs glare in sepia from the walls.