There was a shuffling at the door, and everyone ran back to her bed. We watched the door open. Miss G came in, wearing her usual khaki jumpsuit and boots.
“What’s all this? You are supposed to be resting. What’s going on?” she asked, as though there had been an outbreak of fire.
No one answered. “Fiamma, are you feeling all right, dear? No bad news about your father, was there?” she asked anxiously, striding over to her. Fiamma shrugged sulkily and said she was fine and went on scrubbing her cheeks.
“Better come with me, darling,” she said in a hoarse voice.
“I’m fine, at the moment,” Fiamma said fiercely, glaring at Miss G and at us as well. We were having a fit of suppressed giggles and making little kissing faces behind our books.
Miss G said, “Just come with me.”
Fiamma sighed, rinsing off her brush and taking her sweet time. She made Miss G wait. She put on her socks and shoes. Then she gathered up her book. Miss G followed each movement with her ardent gaze.
So did we. She crossed the dormitory in silence like a queen, accepting Miss G’s silent tribute, her head tilted very slightly to one side. There was something awesome about her. She was irresistible; she always got her way. We thought she had put a spell on Miss G.
We tiptoed in our socks down the corridor to Miss G’s half-open door. We hovered there, listening and trying to see what was happening inside, pushing one another out of the way. We caught a glimpse of Fiamma, as she sat in state in Miss G’s wide wicker chair. Her head was poised delicately on her long neck, her languid locks on her collarbone. She stared ahead, reading the bound book that lay in her lap and sulkily sipping from a big cup of cocoa, as Miss G sat at her feet. What was she sulking about? We wanted to know.
Miss G got as close as she could, smiling up at her. She had her big hands around her knees. She was glowing, burning; she was on fire.
We watched, our hearts pounding, waiting for something to happen. But it did not: nothing happened! Fiamma went on reading. She rose and stood silently by the window, gazing at the sky, with her head tilted a little, pulling idly at a loose lock of hair. We had no idea what she was thinking about. All we knew was that Miss G adored her.
What did Miss G see in Fiamma?
We lay whispering in the hot, dark dormitory on our hard, narrow beds, troubled by mosquitoes and dreams. Fiamma was with Miss G, once again. As usual, Ann perched with her torch in the window seat, reading her book. She said it was Fiamma’s illness and loneliness, her distance from the rest of us, that drew Miss G irresistibly to her. “She identifies with Fiamma’s incapacity to fit in,” Ann said, twisting her mouth slightly to one side.
It was true that Fiamma took part less and less in our competitions and fierce jealousies. She seemed more interested in inanimate things, trees, rocks, even ants, than in us. We saw her sit for hours, watching the red ants crawl under a log. Was she dreaming of her past, or some unknown future? Did she perhaps see, in her mind’s eye, some old Milanese church, where, pushing aside the heavy leather curtain and breathing in the odors of incense rising from the censers, watching the gold light coming in from a high window aslant, she slipped quietly into a pew beside some dark, unshaven man? Did she enjoy her solitude, gathering herself together and escaping from the din and strife around her? Or was she lonely? Did she find peace? Or did she long to join in our games?
She answered our questions about her life briefly but never asked about ours. She seemed to hear and see us all, but distantly, as through a pane of pebbled glass. We never felt she preferred one or the other of us, not even Ann, who was supposed to be her best friend.
Fuzzie said she did not know about Fiamma anymore. Everything was all confused in Fuzzie’s mind, since they took her mother away, last year. She wasn’t sure what she had made up, and what had really happened. When she came back from a singing lesson one day during the holidays, the house was empty. Her mother was no longer in her room, brushing her long, dark hair, nor was she out in the hothouse, growing her orchids, rather than the dahlias she preferred. They had taken her away to the asylum, and she had died in a fire, which spread because the young psychiatrist had forgotten to do the fire drill properly.
Fuzzie said she kept imagining her mother in her white dress, flitting up and down the corridor, rattling the doorknobs, screaming for help. Fuzzie’s father always made a point of telling everyone that, although his wife was Jewish, he himself was Christian.
Ann said, “Fiamma has secrets like everyone else.” Some of them Ann had learned. She knew most of our secrets. When Fiamma was visiting Ann’s farm for the holidays, Fiamma had told her the story of how her mother had left her father after their wedding night. He had married beneath himself, for love. She may have been the housekeeper or a nurse, a pretty, strong-willed woman with fair, curly hair and a ruddy complexion. She already had a child in tow. His family was against the match, but he married her anyway. After their wedding night – Fiamma never knew exactly what happened but suspected her mother had actually beaten him after he finished forcing himself on her – her mother went off to Milan. Apparently she was pregnant with Fiamma already, and nine months later came back to the villa to leave the baby by the lake.
The mother and half sister lived in Milan with another man, perhaps several men in succession. Fiamma visited them a couple of times in a small, dark flat near the Duomo, and some man was always lurking around behind the thick, green curtains that divided the rooms. All the furniture was highly polished, and there were artificial flowers in vases on the marble mantelpieces. Fiamma’s father did not like her to go there. He was frightened of her mother. “He says she’s unscrupulous and ambitious, that she’s a whore,” she told Ann.
Fiamma’s mother adored Fiamma’s half sister, who lay in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Fiamma had only seen her once. She wore her hair short with a curl matted down with grease on her forehead and spoke in an affected drawl. She smelled of onions, which her mother gave her for her health, and as a result everyone called her Cipolla, meaning “onion.” She was supposed to be suffering from some illness. “She likes to pull the wings off flies,” Fiamma told Ann.
Di said in her opinion Miss G was enamored of Fiamma because she was a rich princess. Di said Miss G was fascinated by status. But Di did not even believe that Fiamma was an aristocrat. She had never mentioned her title, after all.
Lizzie said it was Fiamma’s elegance: the way she walked and the way she moved her hands so smoothly in the air.
Meg, who read romances, said it was a sort of rapture – that was the word that would describe it in a romance. Miss G was enraptured by the way Fiamma flung open a door or a window, stepped out into the light, and seemed immediately to own the place; her high-handedness and haughty stare. It was because she liked to be herself – careless, dauntless, elegant.
Everyone agreed Fiamma was beautiful, but there were other beautiful girls on our team, after all. There was Meg herself and Di, of course. Fiamma was an exceptional swimmer, but we had other good swimmers as well. Di could beat her at breaststroke, and Ann at backstroke, but no one could surpass her at crawl, and crawl, of course, is the fastest one of all.
Despite Miss G’s opinion Bobby Joe was much braver than Fiamma. When Bobby Joe was allowed to exercise the horses that were kept for the paying pupils, she trick-rode. She could stand up on the horse and hang down below its belly. She could do a double back flip from the high board and Fiamma only a single, but none of us was more graceful than Fiamma.
Fiamma told Ann that she found Miss G overbearing, missing the point, which was not lost on the rest of us. “Do you know what she did?” Fiamma said. “She left a pair of swimming goggles on my dresser with a little note, wishing me a happy birthday. I don’t know how she knew it was my birthday.”
Di said, “Whatever the reason, Miss G’s passion is not reciprocated. She does not impress Fiamma at all.” At the same time, we knew perfectly well, Miss G was falling more and more desperately in love with her.
What Di Radfield did not tell the detective
Di did not tell the detective what had happened in the changing hut. She did not want to, when he questioned her after Fiamma disappeared. He was a young man, who must have just finished his training – it was probably his first case. He seemed ill at ease in her presence, as if he were the one who had committed the crime. He sat there chewing gum, sweating heavily, talking about the drought, and smelling of B.O. Di tried to draw back from him, but she was trapped in the corner of the library. There was no air in there, because the windows and the shutters were closed on the heat.
She found something very grating about the stupid jokes he kept making. He even snickered a couple of times. He was an Afrikaner idjut, she told us afterwards.
At first he just sat there with a fat file filled with papers, then he asked her all the wrong questions. He asked her if she had a boyfriend, making her furious. She wanted to slam her fist down on the table, but she just asked him if he had ever heard of the expression “It’s none of your business.” He opened his file and read his notes and questioned her about her father’s drinking and his suicide, and her sister finding him in the bath, his wrists slit, the blood turning the water pink. Miss Nieven must have given him all sorts of information, because he asked why, when Miss Nieven had said she could go home at that time, Di had preferred to go back to swimming practice.
Di could still see her father in the narrow hallway of their house with the “Cries of London” paintings on the walls. He was balding and his pate was shiny, and he had an orange in his hands. He was explaining, “If you cut it in half you have two parts; if you cut it again, you have four.” That’s all she remembered of his words.
Di did not say anything about what happened at the pool that morning early, either. She had just arrived to practice her racing starts and found Miss G striding up and down the edge of the pool in her black bathing costume. She could see the shimmer of sweat on her strong arms and the dark shadow of the shaved hair between her strong, brown legs. Miss G was watching Fiamma dive and swim fast, up and down the pool, doing crawl for one length, making a racing turn, and then doing backstroke for the next. She was showing off, doing back or swallow dives from the high board, fearlessly. There were only a few other girls swimming at that early hour.
The pool lay in the soft shadows of the mimosas and the silting blue hydrangeas. The cool, clear water shone a yellow-green, and dew glittered like splintered glass on the gray grass.
Di tried to keep up with Fiamma, but she could not. She climbed out of the water and practiced her racing starts, smacking her stomach flat on the surface of the water each time. The Fiamma got out of the pool and did a perfect swallow dive from the high board, opening her arms on the rising sun and orange sky. It was too much.
Di went into one of the small thatched-roofed changing huts. She had just removed her black racing costume and tossed it in a crumpled heap onto the polished floor, and was standing naked in a corner under the bare rafters, when she heard the hinges of the wooden door squeak and felt a rush of cooler air. She remained silent, hidden in the shadows, as Fiamma entered.
Di was not sure why she hid there, what she was planning to do, if anything. She watched Miss G follow Fiamma into the changing room with the light behind her. Di could not see Fiamma’s face because she had turned her back. Slowly Fiamma slipped her arms out of her straps and folded down the top of her swimming suit. She spread her arms out on either side and shook her smooth shoulders in a sort of dance. Little drops of water fell onto the concrete floor from the tips of her fluttering fingers. She stepped out of her swimsuit. Di saw her naked back, bare white shoulders, and damp skin, clothed only in the cool morning air.
All the while, Di heard the bells chiming loudly, calling us to assembly, and then, as though awakened by the bells, the crowing of the cocks.
There was not a word spoken. Miss G was watching Fiamma, and her face was wet, her mouth slightly open. Then she moved toward Fiamma, slowly, and put her arms gently around her. She lowered her dark head to Fiamma’s boosie and sucked, making noises like a baby. Di wanted to weep because Miss G had never even touched her boosies.
Then Fiamma pushed Miss G away from her, roughly. “Please,” Miss G implored. Fiamma said, “Can’t you just leave me alone,” and walked past Miss G and out of the changing room, leaving the door ajar. Di saw the grass shining white in the early morning light, and the soft flowers on the mimosa trees, like snow on the thin branches. She put on her tunic quickly and picked up her panama hat and ran down the bank toward the school.
How we upset Fiamma
Ann was perched on the window seat, reading about Winston Churchill and the armored train and the Boer War in the light of her yellow torch. Sheila was telling a story about violent death. All her plots ended violently. The Trevelyans were lying side-by-side in bed, whispering about our team’s recent failures. “Even Helpmekaar High beat us,” Bobby Joe said with disgust.
Ann looked up from her book and whispered, “Miss G’s lost interest in our winning. She doesn’t desire us to win anymore.”
Di said, “She’s all washed up.”
Bobby Joe said, “She’s gone completely barmy.”
Fuzzie said, “She keeps picking on me. She keeps telling me I’m too fat. Does she think I want to be fat?”
Ann said, “She tells me I have a blight of blackheads on my nose, and my nails are dirty, and I should try and walk like Fiamma.”
Meg whispered to Fiamma, who was lying on her back in the moonlight and staring up at the ceiling, “I wish Miss G liked me as much as she does you. What did you do to make her like you so much?” Fiamma rolled over without answering.
Pamela made little kissing noises in the dark, and got up and twitched her thin hips. We all laughed.
Bobby Joe said, “If I hear about Fiamma’s villa one more time, I’ll strangle her.”
Fiamma rolled back and said, “What do you want me to do? She makes me describe it.”
Bobby Jean said, “You could at least keep it short and sweet.”
Meg said, “If you were sweeter to Miss G, do you see, she would be sweeter to us. She’s unhappy, because you are not nice to her, because you either ignore her or are rude to her. That’s why she picks on us.”
Bobby Joe made kissing noises in the dark and rose from her bed and pulled Bobby Jean out. They danced the tango up and down the dormitory, leaning forward and back while Fuzzie sang: Ta-da-da-dada, ta-da-dada. We all laughed loudly. Mary told us to shut up, we would wake Mrs. Looney.
