Frankie and Stankie (42 page)

Dinah and Lindsay are so pleased to be alive that they make the mistake of shaking off their dew-damp blankets and dancing together under the tree, their sleeping tree. They take hands and skip like flower fairies, barefoot on the broad-bladed grass. Then, with their stomachs growling healthily, they sit waiting for the residents' doors to open. Because by now they're longing for breakfast. Once they're back inside, showered and dressed, they proceed to the dining hall and feast on slices of pawpaw and scrambled eggs. End of story – or so they think.

At this stage they've got no idea that the large-bosomed harridan from the Freshers' Reception Committee is an early-rising competitive swimmer with special dispensation to practise her aquatic arts outside official door-lock times. So she's up with the lark and heading out for the pool to do her daily lengths while the two girls are still out dancing under their tree. Without them being aware of it, she's immediately returned to alert the Lady Warden, who has checked their empty bedrooms.

By mid-morning, Lindsay and Dinah are both in serious trouble. They're side by side in the Lady Warden's office and it's just like
school all over again, except that Maud isn't there. Plus, instead of Miss Maidment, there's Dr Maisie Home, the stout-brogued social-work tutor who takes Lindsay for social administration. Dr Horne has a very straight, very wide parting in her very straight jaw-length hair. Lindsay has always made reference to the wide parting as Dr Home's firebreak.

‘And you,' says the Firebreak, indicating Dinah, ‘and you. Given the masculine company you're keeping, I can only conclude that you'll have spent the night in the men's halls of residence.'

Dinah can somehow not reply to this. It's too massively off-beam. The remark merely causes her to wonder whether she's the only virgin left in the Florence Powell Hall of Residence – that's with the exception of Lindsay's training-college girl who put the oranges down her blouse. She knows that even Jacinta-May has recently succumbed to her boyfriend, because Jacinta-May has told her.

‘Itth so
howwid
the way boyth pant when they're thekthually a-wow-zd,' she says. ‘I hate it becauth itth jutht like dogth. I've alwayth hated dogth.'

‘Dinah slept under a tree,' Lindsay is adamantly insisting to the Firebreak. ‘We both did. She was with me.'

‘Kindly be quiet!' the Firebreak says, but Lindsay can't be quiet.

‘Honestly,' she says. ‘She was with me. All night. I'll show you the tree, Dr Horne.'

But the Firebreak is busy with Dinah. ‘Look at me!' she says, because Dinah is observing her schoolgirl practice of staring at her feet while trying to fit them into the shapes of the woodblock floor.

She makes an effort to look up into the Firebreak's eyes, but all she can manage is to raise her own eyes until she's fixed them on the wide firebreak parting.

‘What is the name of this residence?' the Firebreak says, but Dinah isn't sure which one she means. Does she mean this residence?
This
one? Or does she mean the men's hall of residence? The one in which Didi will be currently fast asleep?

Dinah's hesitation has given the Firebreak her chance. ‘The residence which you have disgraced!' she says. ‘I see that you don't have the temerity to pronounce its name.'

‘Oh,' Dinah says. ‘Oh sorry. Do you mean Florence Powell Hall?'

‘Yes,' says the Firebreak. ‘Florence Powell Hall. Fast becoming better known as Fleshpots Hall.'

Dinah is still staring hard at the Firebreak's firebreak.

‘
Fleshpots Hall!
” the Lady Warden says. It's as if she likes the sound of it. ‘We have you to thank for that, Dinah de Bondt.'

Though she hears Lindsay's muffled snort, Dinah doesn't dare to look sideways. She's wondering whether the Firebreak has suddenly gone mad. Is ‘Fleshpots Hall' her own bizarre invention? One she's been working on since dawn? Or has the somewhat pedestrian Firebreak been liaising with her opposite number, the Lady Warden of the older women's hall of residence? The empire-building drama exponent who speaks almost entirely in catch-phrases culled from the writings of Rudolph Laban?

‘You may go,' says the Firebreak suddenly. ‘You will find that your rooms have both been cleared. Your effects will have been boxed. They will be waiting for you in reception.'

‘Sorry?' Lindsay says. ‘Excuse me?'

‘GO!' says the Firebreak. ‘Leave the premises! You're very lucky, both of you, that you're being permitted to continue with your studies.'

‘But where are we supposed to go?' Lindsay says. ‘I've got nowhere to go.'

The Firebreak ignores her. Instead she addresses her final remark to Dinah. ‘Think carefully about the company you keep.'

And, with that, the girls are dismissed.

The expulsion is more dramatic for Lindsay who's got nowhere to go and her finals to write within the fortnight, but Maud comes to the rescue. She's back from Swaziland and living in a one-bedroom flat off Musgrave Road. So that's where Lindsay goes. Maud's got a job as a vet's assistant with the man who always patched up Punch. And she's also designing a range of garments for one of Jenny's older female friends. The female friend has an interior-design boutique which is funded by a wealthy husband. The idea is that she will launch Maud's collection as a small experiment on the side. But the wealthy husband pulls the plug on the project after Maud has made up all the clothes, so Maud shares them out between herself and Dinah and all of them are fab. Some are in two pieces with hipster trousers and little truncated tops that stop short of the
waist, so they show five inches of your midriff every time you reach up. The clothes are made out of quality curtain fabrics. Heavyweight calico and chintz and corded silks. Or else they're made of denim. There's a pillow-ticking jacket for drowning in that Maud has lined with flowered chintz and piped with geranium red.

Dinah's wearing the jacket to go back home in, back home to share a bedroom with her sister. Her mum has come to fetch her in the new Renault Dauphine. It's the family's first car. But Dinah's dad can't drive the car because he's too myopic. Dinah's mum says nothing to her on the short journey home. She utters repeated heavy sighs and does little disapproving sniffs. The whole family is fed up with Dinah. Dinah the Bad Daughter. Bad Sister. Always a nuisance,
Zänkisch
. Scorpio
zänkisch
. What can be the matter with her?

‘And
don't
disturb your sister.' That's all her dad says to her when she walks in through the door. ‘She's got exams to write.'

Dinah's got exams as well, but everyone in the family knows that Dinah doesn't mind exams. It's Lisa who hates exams, Lisa who turns into a bag of nerves at the very idea of them. Lisa gets so bad during exams that she can't concentrate for worrying about how much she can't concentrate, so it's Lisa now, not Dinah, who's the focus of their mum's anxieties. Dinah's mum is taking Lisa on lots of soothing little shopping trips and treats. She's trying to help poor Lisa to remember that there's life beyond exams.

So Dinah's mum, Dinah's special person; the mother of Poor Little Dee – frail, artistic, non-eating Little Dee – has clearly transferred her allegiance. Little Dee has been a disappointment to her. She's far more comfortable with Lisa now, because Dinah's gone off the rails. Plus Dinah's not even artistic any more. She doesn't paint and sketch. She doesn't do any of that little-girl stuff with paper and felt and clay. She talks about English poetry and English plays and English novels, books written in a language that, for her mother, will always be a not quite comfortable medium of exchange. Neither does Little Dee appear to be her usual frail and sickly self, not now that the hall of residence has provided her with nine months of utility foam pillows and cheap acrylic blankets in place of the Kaiser's feather beds. Dinah's allergies, for the moment, seem to be taking a break.

So, wrong-footed and shamefaced, Dinah has come home to find
that her mother is more than ever bonded with her sister. They're two adult women together. They're the women of the house. Dinah is the kid sister who is always in the way. Plus Lisa is certainly not best pleased to be back sharing the bedroom that she's got used to considering her own.

‘You're such a pain,' she says. ‘God knows why you've always got to be such a pain.'

There's only one person who's really pleased about Dinah's eviction from the hall of residence and that's Didi von Schweiten. Dinah can tell that he's flattered and that he's trying not to preen.

‘Fleshpots Hall, eh?' he says. ‘Fleshpots Hall? Well, given your terrible reputation you might as well sleep with me now.'

And so she does. They borrow Maud's bed. And Dinah feels absolutely nothing. That's except for a certain excitement about a very significant surrender. Didi's a bit disappointed because there's no spillage of maiden blood, no virginal gasps of pain.

‘You must have done this before,' he says. ‘That's unless you've fallen off a horse.'

But Dinah has never been on a horse, so she knows that she's never fallen off. ‘I used to climb a lot of trees,' she says. ‘When I lived on the Butcher Estate.'

Naturally, she's been far too modest to gawp at Didi's body parts, so she's no idea whether he has used any form of protection. Has he or has he not spun his half a crown on the counter of the local chemist shop, as described to her so graphically by Catherine Cleary? How on earth should she know? As the days and the weeks go by, Dinah gets so anxious about the possibility of being pregnant that she misses out a whole month's period. And naturally she can't discuss this with Didi – because you can't talk periods with boys. Instead she freezes over. The ice maiden returns. And just when Didi has come to expect that, from now on, access will be assured.

Yet once she's done sex with Didi, the effect on Dinah is as dramatic as the sex is understated. Because she finds that she's lost all her power. She's over night become Didi's zombie. He is the man she's got to marry now, so she'll just have to keep on working at moulding herself until she becomes his ideal consort. She'll practise playing female back-up and second fiddle to a man who, for all his undeniable charm, is unexcited by the very things that she herself holds most dear, a man who doesn't read anything
except for
The Kinsey Report
. And then of course there are Didi's parents, who require quite a lot of moulding.

Mutti
, the Archbishop's daughter, is an almost spherical person with yellow, bleach-blonde hair. Her major talent, as Dinah sees it, is her ability to make any edible substance absorb up to three pints of double cream by a process of slow cooking. And
Mutti
has right away sussed Didi's girlfriend as a person with too much intellect to make him a proper wife.

‘A man can't live on poetry,' she says, having come upon Dinah in the garden reading ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. This, even though Dinah has chosen a safe and faraway spot, one from which she's not able to see the guard dog in his zoo-sized cage, who hurls himself salivating against the bars at the appearance of black service persons. It's
Mutti
's firmly stated belief that Dinah should be learning how to darn a man's sock – but Dinah can darn a sock already. Dinah, as Didi hastens, appeasingly, to point out, is a girl who makes her own clothes.

“Hmm,” Mutti
says. ‘Hmm.'

Because Dinah's clothes are something else that
Mutti
and
Vati
don't care for.
Vati
is not one to bother much with ‘Hmm'. He has no need of innuendo.
Vati
always claims the right to say whatever he likes – and especially to any person who is residing under his roof.
Vati
is a big man, heavy and gouty-looking. He has a huge bald head and a tongue that's too big for his mouth which makes him speak with a spattery sort of lisp and leaves foam deposits on his lips.
Vati
looks like a carousing country squire who's spent his life in the saddle. He has the look of a man who eats devilled kidneys for breakfast, followed by a brace of partridge.

‘
MahlzeitV
!' he cries with boyish enthusiasm, as he sits in his outsize carver chair, napkin tucked in at the chin. He waits at the head of the table for
Mutti
to appear from the kitchen with her platters of pork loin seethed in cream, her dishes of plump, white Alsatian sausages, which she serves with sliced potatoes layered and baked in cream.
Vati
is especially affronted by the pillow-ticking jacket.

‘You come out viss me in your
mornink
gown?' he likes to say, meaning to imply that the fabulous jacket looks like a dressing gown.

Vati
wears his trousers belted firmly below his paunch.
Mutti
wears what looks to Dinah like a car coat of karakul lamb.
Mutti
likes Dinah to be in the kitchen, learning how to make fifteen mushrooms absorb two pounds of butter. But what Dinah remembers most about the kitchen is that Seraphina, the Zulu maid, is always in there, ironing while bent double. This is because the ironing board is made for a person three feet high and Dinah thinks that it probably pre-dates the Battle of Blood River. Yet
Mutti
and
Vati
are forking out for their daughter to be ‘finished' in Switzerland. Didi's sister Lottie is currently at an educational establishment for young ladies somewhere near Lausanne.

Didi won't do sex with Dinah when he's in his parents' house, because this would be insulting to
Mutti
and
Vati
. So he beds her in the stables on a heap of hessian feed sacks. The sacks cause instant bursts of hay fever, because, by then, she's already been re-sensitised by
Mutti
's Austrian feather beds. These are more potent than the Kaiser's dust-mite versions. Plus
Mutti's
pillows are of so venerable an age that the duck down has crumbled into a lethal powdery dust in which the mites are having wholesale orgies. For Dinah, it's like burying her face in the contents of a well-used Hoover bag. It induces the kind of excessive seizures that she hasn't had since childhood. Through the night in Didi's house, gasping for breath and trying hard to smother her every sneeze, Dinah creeps along the squeaky corridor to grab herself hanks of lavatory paper with which to mop her nasal flow. And she's got that asthmatic's little cough. Short and dry. Non-stop. Cough-cough. Next morning
Mutti
's in a fit of the sulks but she won't tell Dinah why.