Frankie and Stankie (7 page)

Sometimes she takes the opposite line and argues against God's unimaginable largeness.

‘Well, Lisa, you see,' she says. ‘You can't see God because he's just like a teeny, tiny flea in the carpet.'

‘But I
can
see a flea,' Lisa says. ‘I'll bet you anything I can see a flea.'

Dinah's mother has spiritual leanings as well, but she's too timid to be assertive about them in front of the girls' dad, who has a much more forceful personality. For a while she goes off on Sundays to play the organ for morning service in the Congregational church in Aliwal Street, but even then Dinah's dad suspects this as a cover for her leanings. He interrogates her on theological matters whenever she comes home and, naturally, he always knows lots more than she does about the Trinity and the Virgin Birth and the House of David and the Sermon on the Mount, et cetera, so after a while she stops going because she doesn't like having arguments.

Dinah's mum always thinks that an argument is the same as a fight. She's not really a very talkie person, in spite of all the family stories. She likes reading books about plants and animals best, because plants and animals don't talk. She has a conservationist instinct long before it's in fashion and she gets very agitated about felled trees and whaling fleets. Whaling is an outrage to her and she passes on these feelings to the girls, so that the day Dinah's class gets taken on a school outing to visit the local whaling station it's a memorably horrible experience – especially as they get made to have their photograph taken standing on the body of a dead whale that's gone sort of phosphorescent. The whole class is in Wellington boots, standing on a lump of dead mammal. And the smell is making Dinah gag.

Otherwise, the only school outings Dinah remembers – that's other than the ones to see the Health Education films – are the one to the sugar refinery when the whole class is photographed standing on a mountain of white sugar, and the one to Durban Airport when they all stand on the wheelie staircase that's hooked on to the plane they've just been allowed to see inside of. Dinah's mum's favourite books, other than
The Kon-Tiki Expedition
, are those written by Albert Schweitzer and Laurens Van der Post. Both authors commune with Darkest Africa, but only one is any good at playing the organ.

One day, Dinah asks her mother about God when they are alone together.

‘Of course there's a God,' says her mother, speaking in whispers. ‘Of course there is. God is in the trees and in the flowers. He's everywhere. But please don't tell your father.'

So Dinah and her mum have a God conspiracy. God is a secret for them to share. Dinah loves it that they have a secret. It makes her feel even closer to her mum – just like when they go into town together and have tea in Anstey's Tearoom, but they never tell about it back home.

‘I fiddle a bit on ze greens,' her mum says.

Ta is very good at sums and he likes to keep tabs on the household outgoings. He's very good at everything. This is because his own father was the opposite. Ta's dad was a tall, swashbuckling, brainy rebel who ran away from a strict Calvinist home in Utrecht and married the daughter of a family of one-time diamond cutters in Amsterdam. The diamond cutters were pale, auburn-haired Sephardic Jews and most of them, by then, were unemployed and on the skids. The daughter worked as a shop assistant: a tiny, dainty red-head. Having no qualifications, and having got three boys upon her in quick succession, the Brainy Rebel then spent the next two decades drudging as a teacher for unskilled wages in a slum school in The Hague.

Since the university students in Durban are always saying that Dinah's dad is a brilliant teacher, the Brainy Rebel was probably the same, except that he had no option but to teach children with knuckle dusters whose dads were on and off in jail. But he gambled away his wages on the horses and, being a gregarious type, lent money whenever he had it to needy half-acquaintances. This meant that Dinah's dad's childhood was a succession of humiliating events like having the furniture dragged out on to the street by creditors, or like being sent out by his mother to borrow cups of rice from neighbours when the food cupboard was empty. This is the second of his family stories. And it was the same need for ready cash that is responsible for the third. It caused a visit one day from a rough giant in cracked boots who came to take away Dinah's dad's pet rabbit. With a fist as big as a cabbage, the rough giant crammed the pet rabbit into a grimy sack that was already full of other people's rabbits.

‘He'll be going to the farm, sonny,' said the giant, leering toothlessly at Dinah's dad.

Then he winked at Ta's mother and gave her a coin. After that he tied up the sack and left. Tramp, tramp, tramp.

By the time Dinah's dad was thirteen and had won his place in the gymnasium, his own father's headmaster called him in.

‘You're a bright boy, aren't you?' he said. ‘You've got your head screwed on? From now on I'm paying your dad's wages to you. You give him his beer and cigarette money, OK? And you dole out the rest of it, day by day, to your mother. Do you understand? Day by day.'

Dinah's dad understood perfectly. It was a system that worked until Ta left home, and after that his dad disappeared in the Dutch Resistance throughout the Occupation. Missing Presumed Dead. This is his fourth family story. Then, one day, Dinah's dad gets a black-edged telegram while they're all having breakfast in Durban. It's from an elderly heiress whom the Brainy Rebel had met in the Resistance. He'd been co-habiting with her ever since. But the Brainy Rebel had done his wife one huge favour. He'd caused her to lose her Jewish identity, so that, though the Gestapo came looking for him as a listed Communist, though they ripped up all her floorboards, though they carted off her sisters who died in Nazi concentration camps, she herself survived the war and now, without knowing any English, she sends Lisa and Dinah all their favourite English children's books.

Guided by the owner of her local bookshop in The Hague, she sends all the Flower Fairy books and all the Beatrix Potters. She sends
The Lord of the Rushie River
and
The Tale of Perez the Mouse
. She also sends Lisa and Dinah the most wonderful mouth-watering sweets: flat, dark-chocolate discs the size of half-crowns and covered in hundreds and thousands. They come in a blue-and-white oval tin with a Delft pattern and on the outside it says Drosdy. She sends some intensely sweet black-coffee bonbons textured like glacier mints in little twists of paper. These are called
Raademaker's Eenichste Echte Haagschse Hopjes
. The Hague's Only Authentic Little Jumps. Dinah loves the bonbons' names almost as much as their flavours.

The reason why Dinah's mum has to ‘fiddle a bit on ze greens' when they go out to tea in Anstey's is that, because the girls' dad has been keeping household accounts since he was thirteen, he's very good at it. He issues Dinah's mum with a small notebook, and in it she has to write down every penny she spends. Then at the end of each week she and Dinah's dad sit down at the table and check
over their incomings and outgoings. Dinah's mum's figures never add up right – she's always got too little money left over or too much. The girls' dad gets really cross about this and bangs on the table either way, even though Dinah's mum is delighted when she's got too much money left over. Lisa and Dinah cower in their bedroom during these sessions, which nearly always end with Dinah's mum in tears.

Another two things that often end with Dinah's mum in tears are the songs at the piano, or when she buys herself a new dress. They'll do romantic love songs together for hours, not only those from the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, but Schubert
Lieder
and Schumann. Dinah's mum plays the accompaniments and her dad sings in his nice tenor voice. They go through all the song cycles and everyone who hears them thinks they sound great, but Ta will suddenly stop. She's getting the timing all wrong again, he says. It makes him so angry that he'll start yelling. Usually he yells in German which is their predominant medium of exchange.

‘Can't you SEE,
Popchen
, it goes “ta-TA ta ta ta ta?” ' he says. ‘You're playing “TA ta ta taa TA”!'

About the dresses, he'll always say that what she's bought is not only wrong, but so way-out wrong that it makes him despair of the human race. Sometimes he'll slap his forehead with the palm of his hand because his sense of despair is so intense. One dress Dinah remembers is made of lovely yellow linen and it has a full, swirly skirt with a sort of apron across the front that is swept up to one side and caught in a knot, so that the effect is asymmetrical. The swirly apron drives Ta into a frenzy. He cannot credit his own wife's bone-headed stupidity that she could have come home with such a thing. So she takes it back next day and changes it for something else.

He never minds about Lisa and Dinah's dresses, so their mum can express her creativity through her daughters. She designs little numbers for the girls which get made up for them by Mrs van der Walt. Mrs van der Walt is a parrot-voiced Afrikaner woman who lives in a poky flat off Umbilo Road where the flour mills are and to get to her you have to go on the bus and then climb a flight of scary concrete stairs that are stuck to the outside of the building. Mrs van der Walt talks with a cigarette in her mouth and she likes to wear her slippers all day with the backs trodden down. She pokes the girls in the ribs and calls them lovey in loud parroty squawks.

Their dresses are usually the same, only where Dinah's have two short puff sleeves, their mum whispers to Mrs van der Walt to make Lisa's sleeves a little longer so that her Born Arm will be covered.

Mrs van der Walt nods and says, ‘Ach shame!' about Lisa's arm and she directs an extra puff of ciggy smoke at Lisa in sympathy.

When she says shame, she doesn't mean ‘It's a disgrace', because in the local idiom shame means a combination of ‘What a pity' and ‘Isn't she sweet?', so people will always say shame to babies in prams and to cute little puppy dogs. That's as well as to people with funny arms.

The reason Lisa and Dinah know about fleas in the carpet is because of Punch the dog. Punch sometimes has fleas and even ticks, but he's worth any degree of infestation because Punch is a dream dog who comes in answer to wishes the girls haven't dared to express. He arrives unexpectedly, in the year Dinah starts school, and it's all because of her dad's maths walks. The girls' dad is in the habit of going on walks with his colleague Peter Bullen. A big favourite with Lisa and Dinah, Peter is younger than their dad and he's, as yet, unmarried, which makes him extra generous with his time. He's a lanky blond who lets the girls tease him and sit on his knee and torture his hair into bunches and ribbons. Peter is always gracious about watching their amateur theatricals, for which the girls get into costume and announce each other in turn.

‘Miss Lisa de Bondt will now sing “Blow The Wind Southerly”.'

‘Miss Dinah de Bondt will now recite “A Birdie with a Yellow Bill”.'

‘Miss Lisa de Bondt and Miss Dinah de Bondt will now dance “Beetles and Crickets”.'

Peter appreciates that making the illustrated programmes for the theatricals has taken all afternoon and, unlike Ken Hill, their dad's other colleague, he will sit patiently in the centre of the row of dining chairs and study his programme respectfully. He never criticises their spelling – not like Ken Hill who says out loud, ‘Beetles and Cry-kets?' in a sniffy sort of way, just because they've spelled it ‘crikets' by mistake.

One day Peter and the girls' dad go walking. They do a lot of puzzling as they walk and they forget how far they have gone. They
walk all along Musgrave Road, as far as Mitchell Park where the air is thick with screaming mynah birds descending on their appointed roosting tree. Only then do they realise that they've been followed by an eager little black dog – a Scottish terrier crossbred with something a little more elongated – though in the years to come Lisa and Dinah will always say firmly, ‘He's a pedigree,' whenever people ask. Peter and the girls' dad retrace their steps hoping that the dog will go home at some point, but he follows them all the way back to the Butcher Estate and walks in through the front door. He's wagging his tail expectantly. Lisa and Dinah are ecstatic. They hug him and roll around on the floor with him, while their dad says, ‘Don't encourage him.' The dog has a drink of water out of a pie dish and he spends the night on a folded blanket on the kitchen floor. In the morning he's still there, wagging his tail and running his tongue along his muzzle most charmingly to suggest that it's time for some breakfast.

That afternoon the girls' dad and Peter Bullen retrace their steps once more. They do this for three days running, and each time the eager little dog just walks along with them all the way to Mitchell Park and all the way back again. Each time Dinah and Lisa are in a fever of anxiety, lest their dad should return without the dog. Finally, on day four, he does. The dog has heard a faint whistle from within a house on Musgrave Road. He's pricked up his ears and scurried off inside. Lisa and Dinah can't stop themselves from crying. They just know that he's meant to be their dog and now he's gone. They are still crying an hour later, when there's a familiar scratch at the front door, and there is the little black dog, panting and smiling and wagging his tail fit to burst.

Next day, Ta walks the dog back to the house on Musgrave Road, where he introduces himself to the occupants and tells his story. The occupants are an old retired doctor and his wife, who thank him and promise to keep the dog locked up for a few days until he changes his ways. The dog's name is Punch, but it should really be Houdini because, by the time Ta gets home, Punch has already made it back to the Butcher Estate before him. For two weeks the girls' dad goes back and forth; Punch is tied up and locked up, until the elderly couple finally admit defeat. Punch has always been very fond of children, they explain, and now that their own children have grown up and flown the nest, Punch has got itchy feet.