Frankie and Stankie (35 page)

Tea-times are when she sits in an idiotic cold sweat of terror lest someone, addressing her in Afrikaans, should expect a reply in kind. Dinah sits listening to the cut and thrust of humorous racist anecdotes being swapped between huge white farming men with hairy arms like joints of meat and those faces on which hornrimmed glasses sit as if permanently wedged in tightness there, like youthful wedding rings on old swollen fingers. She watches the to and fro of the barefoot Basuto housemaids, the gaunt and gap-toothed female serfs who shuffle silently back and forth with platters of tea bread on doilies and custard tarts and
koeksusters
– those especially horrible plaited doughnuts that get soaked in Lyle's Golden Syrup.

Meanwhile the teacher's pet is revealing herself as a grand master of the bilingual interface – a tea-time star who clearly has no need of intensive immersion. But the
boereplaas
experience is providing exclusive and uninterrupted access to Dinah. Dinah who is now both audience and recipient of the ever-burgeoning contents of the small vocabulary notebook. So the fortnight drags unbearably as the teacher's pet is sunk in gloom because she's in the grip of an emotion she can't yet begin to understand. And Dinah's head is about to explode because she finds herself in no position to tolerate or to fathom the weight of the teacher's pet's constant presence, the presence of a person who thrives on wrong-footing her at each and every opportunity and yet is always there.

Yet the horror farm yields a keepsake in the form of a six-week-old marmalade kitten. Dinah claims it and calls it Muschka and carries it home, hoping that a small orange puffball will tug at her parents' heartstrings and fill the hole that's been left by the death of Punch. She cuddles the kitten through the night on the endless, rackety train journey that carries her back to Durban. Modder-poort – Ficksburg – Fouriesburg – Bethlehem – Harrismith – Van Reenen – Ladysmith – Colenso – Estcourt – Mooirivier – Nottingham Road – Howick – Pietermaritzburg – Nelsrus – Cato Ridge – Drummond – Kloof – Pinetown – and then she's home! And then it's the new term. And then, exactly four days late, Jenny Stern
walks into Dinah's classroom and her life, once again, turns around.

Jenny's family has relocated from Johannesburg, her mother, her stepfather and her younger brother Sylvester. And the reason why Jenny's four days late is because of Carmen Shapiro. Jenny's mum, on the eve of the move, has thought to reacquaint herself with a girlhood friend, because three decades earlier, she and Edie Shapiro, née Klingmann, were the only little Jewish girls at the Transvaal's Rosetta Convent, preparatory branch. Struck, as they were, by the convent's awesome religious rituals from which they were exempt, Jenny's mum and her friend Edie conceived the idea that God was manifest in the gold silk tassels of the school hall curtains, around which they invented their own ingenious rites.

‘Edie,' says Jenny's mother into the telephone. ‘Long time no see.'

‘But, Pansy, dear,' says Carmen Shapiro's mother. ‘What a lovely surprise. And if your Jenny's starting at GHS – why my little girl's there as well. My Carmen can fetch her and take her to school.'

So, for the first three days of term, as Jenny tells her new friend Dinah, Carmen Shapiro has fetched her from her family's maisonette at the top of South Ridge Road and taken her off to the amusement arcade on the beachfront near the burger bar. There they disport themselves in the Hall of Mirrors and eat candyfloss and hot dogs and play on the pinball machines.

‘Achtpenny-achtpenny-achtpenny-see-yourself-in-the-hall-of-mirrors-scream-of-your-life,' screeches the poor white crone with the varicose veins who's hired to lure people in.

But Jenny is not by inclination a rebel and by the fourth day she's decided to make her own way to school. It's two days before her seventeenth birthday and one of the things that impresses Dinah, along with Jenny's lovely looks, is the fact that she's straightaway pinned a notice to the classroom newsboard listing all the gifts that she'd like to receive. As an icebreaker this has worked wonders and Jenny is popular and integrated at once. So it's flattering for Dinah that Jenny has chosen her. Plus Jenny isn't a wimp like Dinah, so for her to usurp the teacher's pet's chair is simply not a problem.

‘I'm being your friend because I like your silver hair,'Jenny says. ‘And because I'm planning to copy all your essays.'

Jenny is not as intellectual as Maud, but she's directed and she's oozing charm and flair. Jenny has independence of mind and she likes to do her best. She's always eager to answer questions in class, so sometimes she'll shoot up her hand before she's thought of any answer. Then she'll utter a sort of highbrow jabberwocky that sounds like abstract poetry.

‘Sorry?' the head of English will say. ‘Can you say all that again?'

‘I think what Jenny is saying,' Dinah says, ‘is that she thinks as follows – '

‘Well, yes,' Jenny says. ‘Yes,
exactly
. In fact, that's exactly what I've just said.'

All the teachers love Jenny, even though she'll speak her mind most forcefully on the subject of some of their sacred cows.

‘Frankly,
Lycidas
is boring,' Jenny says. ‘So I've brought you a much better elegy. See, if Milton could've only written like e.e. cummings, Miss Holdsworth. Listen.'

And then she recites that poem about the defunct Buffalo Bill, death's blue-eyed boy and paramount pigeon-slayer.

Jenny's an older sister and she's older-sister-ish with Dinah. It's Jenny who swiftly introduces Dinah to Tampax, instructing her from outside the cubicle in the school lavatories at break.

‘Left leg on the lav seat and keep your right knee bent,' she says. ‘Just keep thinking gorilla. And make sure the string's hanging out.' And then, half an hour later, when Dinah says, ‘I feel sick,' Jenny says, ‘Well, go to the bathroom and pull out the plug, you feeble creature. You'll get used to it. You've got to. Because you can't walk around with a hammock between your legs. Jesus, where do you
come
from?'

And it's Jenny who pushes Dinah into the optician's. ‘You're as blind as a bat, you fool,' she says. ‘And not having glasses is just helping to make you look goofy. Christ, if I was a gorgeous leggy blonde like you, d'you think I'd go around looking goofy?'

‘No,' Dinah says. ‘No, you wouldn't.'

‘Well, don't you know that you always screw up one of your eyes?' Jenny says.

This is true. Dinah screws up her much less myopic right eye for close work and her much more myopic left eye for distance viewing.
If she doesn't use just one eye at a time, then she always sees everything double. In the optician's Jenny and Dinah choose her a pair of gigantic men's horn-rims in defiance of the current fashion for up-turned pastel glitter wings. They do this though the glasses keep sliding down Dinah's nose and the optician thinks they're both insane. Dinah imagines Gregory Peck taking the horn-rims off her face and saying, ‘Oh, but, Dinah, you're so beautiful. For two pins I'd put you in my rucksack.' Gregory Peck is her number one male turn-on. Gregory Peck and Lord Byron. And maybe Rupert Brooke.

Jenny is small. Her feet are size four and she's only five foot two. She's a pale but luscious beauty with curvy hips and proper bosoms. Jenny has a perfect, straight nose like something from a Greek vase painting and beautifully incised heavy eyelids. She has a fine pearly skin and fine small pearly teeth and the pearliest of sweet-girl smiles. A mass of dark-brown corkscrews grows on her head, which she can bundle up with one hand and hold in place with a single gigantic hair clip, or with a twisted pipe cleaner. Dinah loves the hair but Jenny's often cross about it because the humidity in Durban makes it much more curly than it ever was in Johannesburg, so she gets her hair straightened all the time and she stretches it after every wash over enormous steel rollers that tug at her roots. Jenny never totters about on winkle-pickers, but has good-quality, well-polished court shoes with two-inch kitten heels. There's no way Jenny and Dinah could ever share their clothes, but Jenny wouldn't want to because she's much too fastidious for that.

In her bedroom Dinah is amazed to find that the drawers are lined with tissue paper and that everything is folded – knickers, bras, stockings and cashmere jumpers (cashmere!), along with scarves and gloves (scarves and gloves!). Where Maud and Dinah have always rushed their garments to completion on Saturday afternoons, always ignored the need to finish the inside edges of seams, always stitched each other, at every emergency, into tight-bodiced party dresses with a quick snatch of green or black tacking thread – that's when time has run out on them and a zip would take too long – Jenny teaches the merits of neatly bound seams and self-covered buttons and silk linings and tailor's tacks. Inside neatness will make for outside confidence, she says. You can't feel good if you're a slob. And Jenny has the perfect minimal wardrobe. Not a
teenager's wardrobe at all. She has three good-quality basic garments in black, navy and cream which she dresses up with Hermes scarves and shoes and different lipsticks.

Dinah knows that Maud and she and Jenny will love each other and be a threesome of best friends. She knows that Jenny will join them in the flat in London and they'll be a trio, not a duo, of Chelsea girls. To this end she already has Jenny writing postscripts to her long regular letters to Maud and Maud writes back to the girl she's never met. Maud's letters have started out full of descriptions of the Aberdeen aunties and their high-stodge high teas, all arranged on high, three-tiered serving plates: baps, buns and bannocks galore along with several scarcely credible follow-ups like cloutie dumplings and cullen skink. But now her letters are full of London life: London, where she's got herself locked inside Hyde Park all night by mistake, in the company of an adoring young police constable; London, where she sits for an hour in Lyon's Corner House in Charing Cross Road and writes her letters on a two-yard scroll of scratchy lav paper, stamped at all the perforations ‘London County Council – Now Wash Your Hands'. Maud and Dinah have a project for Jenny who is phobic about using escalators. She can't use the London Underground without conquering this phobia, Maud writes, so she's to practise every day. Every day Dinah's to take her up the John Orr's escalators. Up and down. Up and down.

But Jenny's not one for mooching round the town and besides she has other calls on her time. Dinah understands that Jenny, just like Carmen Shapiro, is required to make periodic forays into the North Beach airhead set as an ethnically specific form of courting ritual. Without this her mother will fear that Jenny is becoming a blue stocking and won't learn how to flirt.

Dinah soon gets to meet Jenny's mother because visiting Jenny is so easy. Her family lives just round the corner, in one of the classy two-storey maisonettes made out of the converted old Manor House. So the girls always walk to school together. Jenny collects and is always punctual. Dinah dawdles and threatens to make them late. On all their outings Jenny will set off, always in front, her buttocks ball-bearing along, her whole person bristling with energy and purpose – yet just sometimes she'll stop and turn round.

‘So where are we going?' she says.

‘Don't know,' Dinah says. ‘I was following you.'

‘Well, don't!' Jenny says.

Jenny has no time for Dinah's sub-standard health, so she'll phone over weekends and say, ‘Please come to my house, Didi. But not if you've got that boring hay fever. If you're snotting and sneezing, then you can bloody well stay at home.'

En route to school the girls always pass a big corner house covered in bougainvillea where there's a sports car in the drive owned by a dark, smouldering student with craggy facial bones like a man on a Mills & Boon cover. The girls entertain themselves with fantasies about him and then in no time Jenny's got a date.

‘His name's Richard Mason and he's a drip,' she says next morning. ‘No, I assure you. He's the drippiest drip alive.' Jenny, who has the art of attracting men with every turn of her head, will nearly always find them wanting unless they're old and pompous, or else if they're unattainable.

Jenny's parents are a little bit scary because they've got money and worldly wisdom. And they're the first people Dinah's met who have ‘drinks'. She knows that all her own parents ever drink is Nederburg Stein for a special treat at Christmas. The drinks live in a special glass-fronted cupboard: whole rows of coloured liquids, some in bottles, some in decanters wearing pewter necklaces with labels. Until she meets Jenny's parents, Dinah has never seen a soda syphon and she has no idea that bourbon can be anything other than a dynasty of French royals. Sometimes Jenny's stepfather will refer to a drink as a snifter, or a snorter – or that's what Dinah thinks she hears him say. Jenny's parents have drinks before dinner, and drinks after dinner, and then they go rosy and shiny-eyed and they get flirty with each other.

Jenny's stepfather is not a big favourite with either of the children. He's dark-haired and plummy-voiced and he's got a coal-black RAF moustache of fairly monster proportions. He sometimes does anecdotes about the war, because he was demobbed in London, so he's got a story about how the Queen Mum bore down on him with one of her radiant smiles, when he and his two comrades were almost too drunk to stand up. So they all held on to each other and swayed mightily to left and right. Yes, Ma'am, and No, Ma'am, they said to her, before they collapsed in a threesome at her feet.

‘Old trout was so thick with make-up, she looked like a freshly plastered wall,' Harold says.

He has anecdotes about lovable cockney tarts in bars plus lots of local anecdotes, because Harold is a raconteur. He knows how to mix any kind of drink and how to be attentive to a lady's needs. He's always ready with the flick of his silver cigarette lighter, or to offer an arm into dinner. He knows how to arrange a fur wrap around a lady's bare shoulders. Harold is very comfortable in the company of comfortable widows and Jenny's mother adores him.