Mary watches Fuzzie sip more wine and says, “You should probably not drink so much, with all the medicine you have to take.”
Fuzzie stiffens, and her close-set eyes flash. She says, “I don’t feel I need my medicine anymore. I haven’t felt so good for years,” but she looks at us as though she sees some horror about to surface.
Di says, “At first I thought he might have suffered a slight stroke,” referring now to her third and present husband, the German industrialist. “He walks in his sleep. I have to keep my door locked at night, because he once sat on my face and almost suffocated me. He forces me to make love to him in odd ways – he is still a large, strong man. I can hear him shuffling in the acres of corridors, bearing down on me. Can you imagine? He wants me to call him my stallion,” Di says, lighting her cigarette. He summons her urgently and has her attend to his needs. He wants her to press her naked back against his fat stomach, while he shouts words at her that she does not understand, words that sound harsh and cruel. She has never managed the language, such a difficult one, she complains, even worse than Afrikaans, which she hated, too. She has to let him clamber up on her back and take her coarse, dyed hair in his hands and yank her head back, while she calls him the German word for stallion, a word she always forgets. Then he pushes and prods into her orifices with his thick, gnarled fingers.
“It is horrible, horrible,” Di says, bursting shamelessly into tears, to our utter surprise, and putting her head down in her arms on the trestle table with the bread crumbs, the gravy-stained tablecloth, the empty coffee cups, and the cigarette butts.
“Don’t worry,” Meg says and puts her hand on Di’s arm, but Meg is weeping, too. She weeps not only for Di, or for her unborn children, but also for Fiamma, who is not here. Di lifts her head, the paint running across her bloated cheeks, as it did years ago. She says, “You understand, because you are good. You would understand, too, Ann, because you understand everything. I don’t. I only know that everything is gone. It came to an end a long time ago.”
Sheila, who lived in France for a while, says, “Tout passé, tout casse, tout lasse.”
“And what about desire?” Fuzzie says, throwing back her head and laughing, as we all hear the echo of Miss G’s exhortation.
We remember the moonlit night when Miss G strode suddenly into the dormitory. We can still hear her voice calling Fiamma, and our drunken giggles. We all laugh in the moonlight, our faces glowing. We are suddenly unaccountably lighthearted. A mood of revelry has taken hold of us, as though all this talk has washed us as clean and pure as the light of the moon.
Fuzzie is queen of the May
Pamela says it is a pity there is no piano out here; Fuzzie could play us a tune. But Di says, “It’s late. Let’s go to bed,” and rises from the bench.
Fuzzie, also rising, recites in her lovely voice:
You must wake and call me early,
Call me early, mother dear;
For I’m to be Queen of the May.
The rest of us rise together and leave the table, going through the hall, hurrying past what had been Miss G’s door, like the tide rising, flowing up the dusty stairs, going fast, in silence, along the corridor leading to the dormitory now called Mandela, back to where we slept so many years ago. In the muted light of the corridor our middle-aged faces look gray and worn – even Meg’s, her dark curls falling lankly into her slanting, Asian eyes.
She says she remembers how her father used to say they should have named a wing of the school Donovan because of all the tuition he had to pay for his five girls. Meg no longer hears from him. He left her mother for a younger woman soon after her little sister died. “It was too much for him,” she says sadly. No one speaks.
We hesitate on the threshold of the dormitory once called Kitchener. No one wants to go in first. Someone turns the brass handle of the door gingerly. Slowly we release the tongue of the lock and open the door onto half darkness. We enter and look into the deeper darkness at the row of neat, narrow beds that await us and the basins that run down the center of the room.
The moon has sunk; all the lights are out. It has begun to rain again, a hard drumming on the roof. A great, dark downpour has begun. In it we all see Fiamma, floating toward us, half naked, the crown of daisies aslant on her forehead, gliding across the parquet, her head slightly to one side, her cheek almost caressing her shoulder, playing “St. Agnes’s Eve.”
Part Four: Disguise
Why Miss Nieven called us into her room
On the night Fiamma disappeared, Miss Nieven called the twelve of us into her study. We were only summoned there if we had done something seriously wrong, or if there was very bad news.
Before we went in, we were told to shower and change our stained clothes. We were allowed to stay in the shower for as long as we liked, feeling the water on our bodies. We washed our hair for the first time in weeks, because of the drought. We scrubbed. We stared up at the ceiling and thought about Fiamma. We thought of the mosquitoes and the flies – so many of them; we could still hear the hum.
In the study there were no mosquitoes. The windows were kept closed, and the heavy red velvet curtains were drawn in the evening light. We could hear the grandfather clock in the hall chime the hour, and the wind beat in the palm fronds.
A green-shaded lamp cast a pool of light on the baize of Miss Nieven’s large mahogany desk. Leather-bound books lined the walls, and a fern grew in a wooden pot. Her personal servant, an ancient black man in a rumpled white jacket, brought a bulb-shaped bottle of water and a glass on a silver tray and placed it beside her, slowly and solemnly, as we, too, filed in solemnly.
We sat cross-legged on the red carpet and spoke in hushed voices. We darted quick glances at one another. We looked changed: cleaner, lighter, paler, ashen beneath the eyes.
We floated in the dim light of the room. It was as though we were dreaming, or had left our bodies behind with Fiamma under the frangipanis. We kept seeing the filtered light, the still water, and her clear eyes staring up at us. We huddled close in our thin dresses. We sweated in the thick heat, filled with the coldhearted thrill of tragedy.
Miss Nieven spoke about Fiamma, pulling as usual on the hair that grew from the wart on her chin. We found it hard to pay attention. We shifted about while she stretched out her sentences. She thought she was reassuring us, but she was not.
She told us that she wanted to hear exactly what had happened on the walk. She hoped, she said, that Fiamma would be found before nightfall, that everything was being done to find her, but that, if she were not, and if we did not clear up the mystery, she would be obliged to call in the police.
Search parties had already been sent out. They had dogs with them. They might have to drag the river, but she was still hoping nothing worse than a sprained ankle had befallen Fiamma. There was always the possibility that she might have got lost out there, and that someone would have found her and would call the school at any moment. Her voice trembled as she added that Fiamma was not a very strong girl, with her breathing disorder, nor was she familiar with our veld. She may have underestimated the dangers of the terrain, the wide open spaces, the heat, the monotony of the landscape. She may not have been aware of how easy it was to lose oneself out there.
Fiamma had been protected from danger. She was used to straight paths and gardens with clipped hedges and ancient, shady trees. She might even have fallen asleep in the sun; it might be a case of simple sunstroke. There was no reason to panic, or to think she could have drowned in that little stream, superb swimmer that she was. There was no reason to jump to the worst conclusions.
Nothing like this had happened before at this school. Still, all necessary precautions had to be taken, and it would be very helpful if we would tell her what we knew. We were, after all, not only the last ones to have seen her but also her teammates, were we not? We were likely to know if Fiamma had said anything unusual, if something had upset her, or if she had taken it into her head to go off to telephone her sick father. She was headstrong.
We shifted about and looked at one another and stared blankly. Ann took off her thick glasses to wipe her small, red eyes, and her face looked naked. She was sweating. Two tears ran down her sallow cheeks. Fuzzie whispered to Sheila something about her mother just wanting to grow dahlias and not orchids, but Sheila told her to shut up. Di looked almost green around the lips. She was holding on the Meg’s arm so tightly that Meg winced. The Trevelyans said they had to cross the bridge and walked out, holding their stomachs. They looked deathly pale from all the fermented pineapple juice they had drunk the night before.
Miss Nieven said, “Everything will remain between us, intramuros. We are all on the same side, after all,” whistling again when she pronounced the s’s and exposing her row of yellow teeth.
She told us no to try to protect anyone. We knew to whom she was referring: one who had pulled at one cigarette after the other, grinding them out beneath the hell of her boot, whose eyes were as dark as midnight and showed a gleam of terror, a wild hare’s look.
Miss Nieven told Di that as captain of the swimming team, she should speak up first. What did she remember about the walk to the river? What had happened in the dormitory, last night?
There was a long silence. The stilled sounds of evening were all that came to us, the sounds of the rain-stunned garden. Di stared ahead. Her deep blue eyes looked black, and her light skin seemed to have lost all its glow. Miss Nieven looked her in the eye and said in a sweet voice, “Well, Diane, what do you have to say?”
Di rose to her feet, and we all turned to look at her. She seemed to have grown ungainly in her height and the heavy muscles of her brown legs. She caught her spill of thin hair and pulled it from her face. She said what we already knew. She said the girls on the swimming team had organized a midnight feast, that we had spent most of the night eating a lot of oily sardines and peaches in sweet syrup, and drinking condensed milk and fermented pineapple juice. Fiamma had had a good time along with the rest of us. No one had slept well after it, because we all felt sick. She said it had started to rain very hard, this afternoon on the walk, and we had taken shelter in the picnic hut. Then the sun had come out again, and there were lots of mossies, and it got very hot. We had last seen Fiamma lying in the shadow of the frangipani trees. She’d seemed quiet and clam. When Miss G had asked if anyone had seen her, we had hunted for her everywhere. Then Miss G had told us to line up, and we had come back to school. Di sat down again, and Ann, who had lost her handkerchief that afternoon, borrowed Di’s and blew her nose loudly. Fuzzie let out a little noise that might have been either a giggle or a sob.
We trooped out of the study and stumbled down the wisteria-covered pergola. The school was very quiet, more so than usual for a Sunday evening. The place seemed empty, as if the girls were absent and the constant hum of their voices, silenced. The seringa tree drooped lifelessly over the wooden bench; ivory clouds were pinned to a still blue sky. We listened to the hollow sound of our shoes on stone. A group of girls was huddling together in the shadows and light of the long pergola. They were whispering. One of them bent down to pull up a brown sock and lifted her head to stare at us, as the others did when we filed past. They went on staring at us sullenly, as we walked down the steps that led into the long, covered corridor. Slowly we descended them, linked like a chain, one after the other.
Whose idea was the feast?
The idea for a midnight feast came to Di after she had seen Miss G and Fiamma together in the changing hut. She immediately told the twins, and they eagerly agreed, because they were always starving, because they did not receive any parcels with extra sweets an biscuits, as everyone else did. Orphans, they sat in agony after each breakfast, hearing the long list of names called out; their names were never called. They did not even receive books about horses. They were always trying to borrow Thunderhead or My Friend Flicka from Mary, who had the whole series and would part with them only grudgingly, because she was also horse-mad. Sometimes the twins slipped out of their beds at night and went and lay down in the stables on the straw to be near the horses. The smell of manure and sweat, the swish of the tails, the stamping of hooves on the stone floor, a sudden sweet whinnying, comforted them. They were the ones who spiked the pineapple juice by leaving it to ferment for ages under the oak tree by the hockey field.
Di suggested the dancing and the dressing up, because she wanted to dance with Meg in the disguise of a man.
And, certainly, it was Sheila who thought of acting out the roles of all the characters in Keats’s poem, which was her favorite. She thought it was brilliant. She said, “Some of us can be Madeline and some, Porphyro. We can dress up and have a beadsman and a beldame. Someone can hobble around.”
Mary said, “I’ll be Porphyro with his steed,” and began rushing around the room, waving an imaginary whip in the air.
Meg murmured, “I will be Madeline and pray for a dream lover in the moonlight,” getting down on her knees, spreading her dark curls on her shoulders, and putting her hands together in mock prayer.
Pamela said, “Fiamma can be Madeline, and Miss G can be her Porphyro,” and we all clutched at one another feverishly and giggled.
Then Ann recited the part of the poem we liked best:
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
St. Agnes’s Eve
Fuzzie sang songs of long ago.
Ann recited to the moon.
Never before had Fiamma feasted so,
While we, in lovers’ arms, swooned.
We drank, we ate, we discarded our clothes
The moon shone on our flesh.
We lay together, we dreamed of love,
We lost ourselves, enmeshed.
We had never seen Fiamma have as much fun as she did the night before she disappeared. It was the same for most of us. We liked the food, the dressing up and pretending, the drink, the excitement, and the dreams of love in the moonlight. The languid moonlight advanced, as we lay side-by-side in the dormitory, trying to stay awake until midnight.
We waited up impatiently with the windows and curtains open. We sweated in the heat. Some of us hid in the bathrooms, reading our books to pass the time and swatting at the mosquitoes, jumping up the kill them with our slippers, the blood marking the walls. We listened to the grandfather clock in the hall chime midnight. Then we rose and slipped down to fetch the flowers from the bathroom under the stairs.
