Sex and Stravinsky (11 page)

And Herman, of course, just keeps on denying that there’s anything amiss with Cat. Daddy’s best baby girl.

‘Just because you’re such a titch,’ he says. ‘Calm down, Snoeks. She’s OK. No worries. Her eating’s just fine. She doesn’t like your cooking, that’s all.’

Hattie finds it a bit of a wind-up these days, the way he’s never stopped calling her Snoeks.

‘I
said
, what are you
doing
, Ma?’ Cat says. ‘Are you deaf, or something?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Hattie says. ‘I heard this music on the radio.’

‘So what?’ Cat says. ‘Who cares about what music you heard on the radio?’

‘It’s a ballet with songs and masks,’ Hattie says. ‘It’s a Harlequin story, called
Pulcinella
.’

‘So what?’ Cat says again.

Then, while her mother still has her eyes on the book, she makes a move for the pedal bin, where she deftly relieves herself of the hamster hoard, before resuming her pose of breakfasting normality, spoon once more in hand.

‘Say, Cat?’ Hattie says, turning from her book. ‘What about masks? That art project of yours. It’s just an idea, but what about doing it on African masks?’

Cat makes an irritated noise in her throat.

‘Masks, for Chrissakes!’ she says. ‘Pur-leez! Like what have masks got to do with anything? You don’t know what you’re talking about, so just butt out, OK?’

Twelve years ago Hattie went to Venice with Cat for a treat, leaving the two older children with Herman and the maid. First they went to England to visit her schoolmaster uncle and her engineer cousin in Norfolk. Then, after that they went, just the two of them, to Venice. A four-day indulgence for herself and her little blonde daughter. Cat was a big hit in Venice, where the waiters kept saying, ‘
Che bella
!’

‘But I’m not Kay and I’m not Bella,’ Cat would explain to them repeatedly. ‘I’m Cat.’

By coincidence her two best friends back home in the preschool playgroup were called Kay and Bella. Cat, who was four at the time of the visit, now says she can’t remember going to Venice.

She stroppily denies having been there, even though she still has the Venetian-glass bonbons she chose, sitting in a bowl on her windowsill. She says that her dad brought them back for her. But Hattie can’t forget. She remembers Cat’s enchanted little face pressed up against the windows of the tourist shops with carnival masks; beaky plague masks, Harlequin masks, leather masks with knobbly foreheads.
Pulcinella
. And she remembers Cat carefully choosing each little glass bonbon, one by one.

Cat has been incessantly unloading moans about the art project ever since the school term began. And she’s in a dilemma, poor girl. Hattie appreciates that. She can’t bear to admit any interest in things that her mother might find gratifying and yet she really wants good grades. Cat is immensely able and she wants to get into the architectural school to become an architect like her dad, so she knows that the project will have to be good. And it’s got to have an African theme, because that’s where she lives, all right? In Africa. No more Eurocentric projects, thank you. This is the New South Africa.

Cat has always been Daddy’s Girl. She’s always preferred Herman to her mother, and now so much of the time he’s not here. It appears to be no longer possible for Hattie to offer Cat anything. All it does is make her abusive – and, when Cat’s in a bad mood, she starts to thunder about so formidably, making the floorboards vibrate so that Hattie can hear her great-grandmother’s china start to tremble and jingle in the cupboards.

All Hattie’s three children are big, like Herman, but right now the older two are carrying it more comfortably than Cat. Then again, they’ve always had each other. Twins. It runs in the family. Jonno and Suz are imposing, tall, and efficient. They are strong, confident eighteen-year-olds, sporty and big-boned, delighting in their new undergraduate lives. Hattie, by contrast, has always been small; marked out from infancy as a dainty ballet girl. And, having spent eighteen years of her adult life teaching at the local ballet school, it’s eight years since she’s packed it in, first to take an arts degree and then to start writing her series of ballet stories for girls.

Unlike most of her women friends, who have broadened around the pelvis, Hattie can still buy her jeans in the children’s department at Stuttaford’s, but this gives her little satisfaction these days, since, like Cat, she’s begun to have doubts about her size. She wonders whether her couplings with Herman were maybe inappropriate all along. Perhaps they were like those of the little shivery whippet she once saw getting it together with a St Bernard in the park? Is this why Herman keeps going off on trips? Could it be that her size has become repellent to him? Has it got anything to do with why Cat hates her? Is it her size that’s recently made her daughter start doing all this funny stuff with food? Hattie once saw a photograph of a post-war classroom in Saigon. Six doll-like Vietnamese eight-year-olds were sitting around a table, along with one little eight-year-old giant. The giant was a pale-brown Afro girl whose mother had got it together during the war with a seven-foot black GI.

What’s slightly unsettling Hattie right now, apart from Cat, is that she’s completely stopped minding about not going along with Herman on some of his trips, where once she would have felt rejected. She likes the way it liberates those parts of herself that she puts on hold when she’s playing Mrs Wife. It means that, as well as sprawling across the bed and listening to the all-night radio, she can more easily get on with her writing.

‘Snoeks, it’s not worth it,’ he began saying – that is, when he still felt it incumbent upon him to make excuses. ‘Snoeks, it’s not much of a trip.’ ‘Snoeks, I promise it’ll bore you stiff.’

He promised her that she would be bored stiff on the trip to Mauritius – that short hop from their home on the east coast of South Africa to the island in the Indian Ocean; white sands and feasts of seafood; indigenous pink pigeons on the terrace; blue-and-white enamelled street signs to make one feel one was in France.

She would get in the way of the golf, Herman said. Golf, as he has repeatedly explained to her, is never simply golf. There is nothing quite like it for clinching a deal. He’s assured her, over the years, that she’d be bored rigid by his business trips to Lagos and New Orleans and Tokyo. Too much golf. Once he took his favourite sister instead. Lettie. Five foot nine and bossy to a degree – that’s under all the master-race charm and the radiant, dimpled smiles. Scary with a tennis racket in her strong right hand.

‘Listen, Snoeks, don’t knock the golf, all right?’ Herman says. ‘It’s always worked for me. Every move I make translates to the boardroom. And what do you think is paying for the kids to be at uni?’

The ‘kids’, to be sure, are pretty high-maintenance. Always have been. It’s the way Herman’s enjoyed bringing them up. Like him, they have always been addicted to those huge American refrigerators with double doors like wardrobes, crammed with iced drinks and top-range snacks. They like tennis coaching and Pony Club and skiing and white-water rafting and deep-sea fishing and holidays in Thailand. They like stuff. High-quality stuff. Electronics and digital stuff and constant, unremitting upgrades. They like clothes with labels. The right labels. They like cars and boats. And now that Jonno and Suz are both at university in the Cape, their dad has seen fit to buy them each their own little brand-new car and their own little brand-new apartment.

‘The halls of residence are not what they were in my day,’ Herman says. ‘You can’t expect our kids to live in places like that.’

By which Herman means to say that, now the halls of residence are racially integrated, the room next door may be occupied by a needy black student on state funding, whose three even needier country cousins will be dossing illicitly on the floor. And the country cousins (unemployed) will not necessarily be familiar with the workings of first-world accessories. The flush toilet, for example.

‘It’s not racist, for heaven’s sake, Snoeks,’ he says. ‘It’s about the great unwashed.’

To be sure, in times past, it could have been the Irish, or Romanian Jews, or itinerant Greeks, like Josh Silver’s father – or poor white Afrikaners, come to that.

And Hattie, for sure, needs no convincing that it’s never been her ballet classes that have funded the children’s lifestyle. Nor, more recently, the royalties from her children’s books, though these have begun to pick up. Even so, it irks her a little that Herman persists in regarding her writing as a little bit of a hobby, now that she’s done with the ballet school. And when, two years ago, she aired the idea of converting the unoccupied servants’ rooms into a work space for herself, Herman didn’t appear to take the idea on board as a serious proposition. He merely said, ‘No worries, Snoeks. One of these days we’ll make a plan.’

Then he suddenly went ahead, without consulting her. He drew up the plans and transformed the servants’ rooms, not into a work room for his wife; not even into the standard ‘garden cottage’. What has emerged within the last few months is a fabulous, opened-up space, a machine for singleton living, which he has arranged to rent out to a young Italian academic. It’s become one of Herman’s projects and Herman loves a project. Naturally, he has no recall with regard to Hattie’s original suggestion. And it’s not as though he needs the rent, but Herman likes to utilise his assets. The tenant is due to arrive during his absence. In fact, on this very day. Giacomo Moroni. Somebody new and junior in the drama department who has come from Milan – and Hattie is expecting him at noon.

‘Snoeks,’ Herman has assured her, just prior to that parting peck on the cheek, ‘my hunch is that you’ll love him. He sounds right up your street.’

By which, she assumes, he means that the tenant, being a drama type, is probably fond of the ballet. Or he’s gay. Or both. A gay boy aesthete would be just the person to take good care of Herman’s property.

Someone in Herman’s company has done the actual conversion, but Herman has managed to carve out the time to be quite hands-on about it, even though he’s on several government committees. He advises the Housing Ministry about this, that and the other. Herman goes fishing with prominent members of the new ANC government. And Hattie can’t not admire his energy, along with his amazing genius for always being in the right place. It’s weird, she reflects, a little sadly, that people like Josh’s adoptive parents – people who spent their whole lives working, at great risk to their personal safety, for the kind of social change that the new government now espouses – have either melted into exile, or invisibility, or they’ve quietly died. And people like Herman, the well-off sons of white farmers; yesterday’s eager upholders of the apartheid state, are now the best of buddies with the new black elite. But of course. One should have predicted it. Because those persons who have the flair to be in there with the in-crowd – those are going to be the same persons who will always be right in there, no matter who’s in charge.

‘Get real,’ Herman says. ‘It’s the way of the world. Anyway, Sam’s a good bloke.’ ‘Sam’ being an ethnic Zulu and Herman’s favourite government minister. ‘He’s a drinking buddy, no more.’

Little point in carping that Herman, along with his parents and the whole tribe of jolly sisters, was yesterday’s comfortable advocate of the prohibition laws. That is to say, the prohibition against the sale of alcohol to black persons.

‘So why dwell on the past, Hat?’ Herman says. ‘What for? Move on. Times have changed. We’ve all changed.’

He likes to talk the jargon of ‘transformation’ and of course he’s got to be right. It’s no sin to trade in one’s value system for a better one. So why is she being such a witch?

‘All this nit-picking,’ Herman says. ‘It’s because you’ve gone and done your history exams. For Chrissakes, there are times when history is best forgotten.’

It’s Hattie’s impression that Herman’s absences have grown more frequent since she became a graduate. At the time she began her degree course he couldn’t seem to see the point. She already had a career, didn’t she? And now she can’t deny that the experience has made her into a slightly different person. She’s sharper and more critical. She’s more assertive and more clued-up. More open-eyed.

Years back; sixteen years back, Hattie had decided that her marriage was a mistake. She’d begun to think about leaving Herman, but then she got pregnant with Cat. And then, once Cat was four, she’d taken that trip to Europe.

Hattie loved it.
Loved it!
Loved her time in England; loved it and longed to stay; was surprised how much she felt it to be ‘her’ place; loved the delicate, shifting light, the shades of grey, the urban terraces, the corner shops; the silver birch trees, the London Underground, the broadsheet newspapers, the chance to wear winter clothes. And little Cat, seated there, in the café at the National Gallery; little Cat in Regent’s Park, wrapped up in her red bobble hat, bright tights, fleecy red coat. Ankle boots with novelty laces. Only that Cat was forever chattering to her daddy on the phone. Daddy, Daddy, my daddy. When will I see my daddy?

So Hattie accepted that she hadn’t the temperament for rocking anyone’s boat. She half suspected herself of having got pregnant in order to hang on in the marriage. Like a limpet, Mrs Wimp. That’s you, Henrietta Louisa Marchmont-Thomas Marais. Don’t you ever go down to the end of the town. Not ever. So, stay if you must, but don’t be pathetic. And she resolved, there and then, that when she got home she would work towards becoming a university student; English and history. She sat the necessary qualifying exams and waited until Cat had started school.