Fiamma sat up in the moonlight in her smocked nightdress. She looked around at us and said in her bored English voice, “I am not sure you know what you are suggesting.”
Di said, “You shouldn’t be so bloody superior all the time. You think you’re better than everyone else, don’t you – even better than Miss G. What right do you have to be so bloody stuck-up?”
Fiamma flopped down again on the bed and turned her narrow buttocks into the air and her face into the pillow.
Meg said, “You could be nicer to her for our sakes, don’t you see, just to make our lives easier, even if you don’t want to.”
Mary said, “The means justifies the end, like she says.”
Ann dusted the back of Fiamma’s head with the beam of her yellow torch and said, “Lots of people in history have sacrificed themselves for others. God even asked Abraham to kill his own son, and he was going to do it. Judith sacrificed herself, and so did Cleopatra with the asp at her bosom, and so did Lucretia. We should all sacrifice ourselves for the common good, to relieve the suffering of others. I would be happy to sacrifice myself for others, if someone wanted me to do it.”
Part Three: The Dinner
What we talk about
A starched white tablecloth, willow-pattern plates, cut glass, and shimmering cutlery array the trestle table that has been set up in the shade for our feast. White printed menus are propped up in silver holders. Frosted silver pitchers of iced water lie at either end. There are camphor candles in glass bowls all along the table to keep off the mosquitoes.
Meg, the only one wearing a low-cut dress, waves her hand smoothly in the air and lisps, “It looks like a wedding.”
Fuzzie has never married, though she has been in love so many times: “Every four weeks, when the moon is full.” Her freckled skin is still smooth, and she is no longer ungainly, but she still has the apprehension in her close-set green eyes that makes us, too, apprehensive, as it always did.
“Let’s hope the food’s improved. Do you remember that ghastly, lumpy porridge they made us eat every morning?” Meg says, pulling a sour face. Di reminds us what wonderful scones Meg made in domestic science. Ann, with that twist to her thin lips that makes her seem detached from what she says, reminds us that Meg, despite her romantic air, was a practical girl, a realist, who said she would marry a rich man. Meg looks from Di to Ann and laughs. “And I did.” She still has her leafy scent.
Fuzzie says, “I’m starving.” As she leans across the table to reach for the menu, she looks almost willowy. Fuzzie, so fat as a young girl, has become thin. Her hem hangs sadly to one side, and she has tied around her neck a cheap pink scarf, which clashes with her hair, cropped short now but still very red and curly.
Ann whispers to Sheila that she wonders if Fuzzie gave her fortune away to charity in a manic fit. “Do you suppose she still wears her vest as she did as a child, even in the worst heat?” Ann asks.
“Probably,” says Sheila, who believes what has happened before will happen again.
“Sit by me, Meg,” says Di, now heavy, sitting down at the head of the table. “You sit over there, Fuzzie.”
Fuzzie has spent years sitting on the veranda staring at the morning glory creeping up the walls of the mental hospital. Now she sits in the middle of the long trestle table between the snub-nosed Trevelyans. Her years in the asylum, in spite of her repeated shock treatments, seem to have preserved her youthfulness. She looks like a fawn, gentle and timorous, as she bends over the bright anemones in the center of the table and sniffs, saying with surprise, “But they have no smell!”
Sheila sits at the other end of the long table beside Mary and Pamela, the girl who always got less than 10 percent in maths. Pamela is still as thin as ever but now has varicose veins in her legs from all the standing she has had to do while binding books. Sheila frowns. Perhaps she is thinking of her work. She wanted to be a writer like Alan Paton, and write a sentence like his about all the roads leading to Johannesburg, but she has only written thrillers, all of them about murdered girls.
Mary, who has become a doctor, looks jowly, but we recognize elements of the uncomplicated girl in her smile, bowl-cut hair, and shapeless dress.
We sit down, one after the other. Everyone sits apart. We gaze blankly at one another. Ann still has her perpetual cold. She looks slightly feverish, and her high forehead and protuberant eyes shine.
We are all bored. We have nothing to say to one another, after all this time. And if anyone wanted to speak, where on earth would she begin? What do we all expect?
Di jerks her head back and says to Meg, “Tell me what has happened to you.”
Meg sits very stiffly, in silence, her shoulders pressed back, her head held high. She looks as though she has practiced this position before a mirror and found it advantageous. She shakes her head and says, “Nothing much, really. It’s extraordinary. So many years, without anything special happening.”
Ann, who sits opposite Meg, blows her nose and says in her nasal voice, “Oh, come on, Meg, something must have.”
Meg says, “Well, I did marry a lovely, rich pediatrician. I actually fell in love with hem when I saw him with children. It was the way he put his hand on their heads, ever so gently.”
Di looks at Meg and says sadly, “Ah, Meg in love.”
Meg goes on, with her slight lisp, “But we have not had shildren, ourselves. We tried everything, even hormones from menopausal Italian nuns. But we do have one another. We are very happy. We travel. We have a lovely house; I grow roses, you know. You see, nothing out of the ordinary.”
Di says, “Really so happy? It seems to me I am left with only objects. Two of my husbands have gone, my children are scattered, and my dog has died.” She looks around the veranda, as though the missing might be here in the shadows.
The veranda has grown shabby; the damp has peeled the paint; there is dust in the corners – even the proteas in the brass bowl look dusty; spiderwebs hang from the beams. We sip drinks in the late afternoon shadows. There is the smell of damp earth. Lizzie rises suddenly, scraping back the long bench on the polished floor and making off with an air of secrecy. She is still slim and elegant, and her gray hair hangs straight to her shoulders. We watch her walking out into the garden, alone.
We break the silence again by speaking about the condition of the country. Ann, who was always interested in it and always went into things in depth, has written several books on the troubles of our country, which were translated widely, even into Japanese. She removes something from a tooth with her nail and says the place is less changed than it should be.
“To tell you the truth, I am sick and tired of talking about this country, sick of it!” Di says.
The silence drops again. We watch the breeze lifting the branches and the lawns running down and down, falling away, strange and gray in the twilight like the mountains of the moon. We listen to the chiming of the clock. Something silver glimmers in the distance and is gone.
Meg reminds us how Di wanted to be a dancer like Margot Fonteyn and kept hoping she would stop growing, but she didn’t. She looks as tall and as broad-shouldered as a man.
Di drinks hard liquor fast, swinging her crossed leg. She has married three times: Number one, one of her teachers at the Royal Ballet, left her for a black professor of mathematics; number two, a very rich American, died and left her a fortune. Now she has her vast house, acres and acres of empty corridors, the English furniture and the silver. “My second husband was a prudent man. He never ate meat, rode a stationary bicycle every day, and took handfuls of vitamins.” She found him on the floor in the bathroom one summer morning in their house by the sea. She remembers the dead weight of his head when she tried to lift it onto her lap.
“How awful for you,” Meg says, putting her hand on Di’s arm. “Let’s not talk about the past; it’s too depressing.” Meg lifts her lovely hands in the air with the fingers spread, as though she wishes to keep the past at bay.
Ann rattles ice in her glass and says, “Why do you think Sunny brought us here?”
Di says, “Not to talk about our lives, I hope! Perhaps I came here to see Meg.”
Meg says, “I came here to see all of you and to have a good time. Let’s do it.”
Ann, whose husband is as handsome as he is unfaithful, says, “Oh, for God’s sake, Meg! You were always having such a fuckng good time, weren’t you? It was always such a fucking lovely day.”
Mary says sternly to Ann, “It’s a question of attitude. Some of us see the glass as half full, others, as half empty.”
Ann lifts her gin and tonic and lime and squints at it through her thick glasses in the muted light. “It has been said, of course, that there is no such concept as a thing itself.”
Meg, as though suddenly inspired by a deep thought, says, “What do things matter when compared with love?”
Fuzzie leans forward to lift her glass, and for a moment, we see the fat little girl with her shiny tunic stretching across her stomach. She says, “Too much pineapple juice.”
No one speaks, but we all remember, surely. We see Di moving through the half dark of the dormitory in her disguise as a man, her painted mustache running into her mouth, a glass of spiked pineapple juice in her hand.
Di rises. Despite her weight and her elegant suit, she swings a long leg easily over the bench. She says she has to “cross the bridge,” using the school euphemism, though there is no longer any bridge to cross. We listen to her firm, rapid steps. Meg rises and goes after her, moving smoothly and swiftly, as she always did, in the water and on land, flitting slim and specter-like through the shadows. When they have left the veranda, Ann, too, rises in her crumpled tartan and short-sleeved shirt and walks down the table to Sheila. “Di’s husband had just taken out an insurance policy in her name for a million rands, the day before he died. Et comme c’est estrange et quelle coincidence, hey?”
Sheila, who once signed her letters “From an undiscovered genius,” has perhaps just had an idea for another book she always wanted to write, for she says, to no one in particular, “I have my work. I do have my work, you know.”
The candles are lit
Under the star-wild sky we sit on the long veranda, listening to the myriad sounds of the dusk: rustlings and creakings, chirping of the crickets, a door slamming. Our voices seem to come and then flow away like an echo. There are nighthawks. There is the smell of damp earth and cut grass. There is a slight mist rising low and thin, like gauze in the blue air.
Fuzzie says, “The mosquitoes are attacking my calves and eating me alive.”
“Light the camphor candles, please; they’;; ward off the mosquitoes,” Di orders the ancient servant.
He lights them all along the table, bending over in his wrinkled white uniform, his hands shaking, fumbling with the big box of kitchen matches. He shades the flare of the match from the breeze with one pink-palmed, black hand. The candle flames twist and brighten in the air. We lean across the table toward the flames, drawn toward them, as if they could protect us from the dangers of the encroaching dark, and our white faces are brought closer, so that for the first time we form a group again, like people on a dark night on a dark beach, taking their holiday.
Then, half bent, he brings the heavy silver platters, laying them out on the side table. There is a fat brown turkey, its shins frilled and crisp, a great ham, its skin scored and dotted with dark cloves, a whole leg of lamb, cooked English style, dark outside and in. Between the meat and poultry are dishes of roast potatoes, gem squash, butter melting in the scooped-out halves, of fat floating on their surface. There are dishes of custard and pears cooked in red wine and a white, iced granadilla cake on a frilled doily.
We serve ourselves abundantly, refilling our wineglasses, and rising for seconds. Our faces flicker and change in the strange light, as we heap the food high on our plates. There is grease around our mouths, down to our chins; our lips are stained with red wine, our lipstick, smudged, our camouflage, undone. We are transformed, unmasked by the fatigue, the food, the candlelight. The breeze picks up, and the candles send shifting shadows across the table. The stars flame brightly above us. The moon rises.
Someone says, “Remember St. Agnes’s Eve?”
Each one remembers the night differently, but vaguely, because we were so drunk. Everyone agrees that no one wanted to hurt Fiamma. We just wanted to have fun with her. We wanted Miss G to have fun with her, too.
We remember with a sense of exhilaration, as though we were once again celebrating an ancient ritual. We laugh, and we feel better. We remember the long, narrow dormitory. We see the Trevelyans embracing, their thin shoulder blades milk white in the moonlight, like wings. We hear Meg and Di make the moans we associated with love.
Fuzzie sits before the low bowl of anemones, which seem to glimmer mysteriously with the light of their deep reds and purples. They flutter in the breeze, opening and shutting their petals like their sea cousins, drifting back and forth in dark waters, as she sings the pure, clear notes of an ancient madrigal.
How horrible is it?
The candles burn low. Di has removed her black shantung jacket. Grease marks her blue scarf. She is the only one left eating.
Ann says the worst part of her husband’s job is the awful, dull dinners for visiting dignitaries they have to attend. So much wasted food, when so many are starving. She says her politician husband wants her to buy expensive frocks from the Faubourg St. Honoré to wear at these dinners. But what use would such frocks be on her frumpy figure? Besides, whatever she does, her husband leaves her on the weekends for the village where he was born. He dons the loincloth of his childhood, sits in the dust, and smokes dagga. She would love to go with him, but he does not want her there. “You do not belong,” he says.
“The villa is empty as a tomb,” Ann says, shuddering.
While the moon slips through clouds, Di finally pushes her dish away and speaks slowly, as though she is regaining her memory. She tells us that the irony is that she threw herself into dance after she left school, although she was too tall. She wanted nothing to do with men, but her first husband told her he found her irresistibly attractive. Perhaps it was her fortune he actually found irresistible, she says, laughing. “One was supposed to marry, wasn’t one? Besides, I was pregnant,” shy says, drinking another glass of red wine, surrounded by the remnants of the huge meal she has consumed.
Fuzzie, resorting to the language of our youth, says, “Do you know, when I got excited, I actually believed I could make myself preggie. All I had to do was cross my legs and shake the bed.”
