No one mentioned Miss G.
Miss G’s departure
Miss G drove off in her old, square, maroon Buick as we watched from the same dormitory window from which we had watched Fiamma arrive. Only Di went to say good-bye. We saw them sitting on the red polished steps between the sandstone lions for a moment, before Miss G rose, squared her shoulders bravely, soldierlike, and strode off to her car in her lacquered boots.
Afterward we asked Di what Miss G had said to her. Did she mention where she was while we played the game of truth? Had she heard what Fiamma had said?
Di told us that Miss G had said that she could understand very well why she had been fired. “They needed a scapegoat, and, of course, it had to be me. With their inhibited imaginations, they could not simply accept that she had disappeared. Why, she might have gone off anywhere. Anywhere there is a scandal, someone’s head must roll.”
Di went on to say that she had objected strenuously. “The injustice of it! After all those years of hard work. This school has never had such a successful swimming team. All those trophies we won for them! And all because of your coaching. You would have left anyway, I know, after what happened. You always sacrificed yourself for us.”
Our parents’ reaction
Miss Nieven experienced a brief period of difficulties after Fiamma’s disappearance. When the name of the school was linked to the disappearance in several articles that appeared in the local papers, there were long telephone calls; telegrams arrived in stacks. There were descriptions of Fiamma’s prominent family, the area where she disappeared, the isolation and lack of supervision in our school.
The Johannesburg Star wrote indignantly: “What was a band of innocent young girls doing, marching for miles across bare veld in the burning heat? Why were they left to their own devices by the banks of a bilharzias-infested river? Where were the teachers? And all of this during the polio scare, which has already wrecked so many of our precious children’s lives.”
Initially, many of the girls’ parents threatened to take them out of the school. Meg’s father arrived and wanted to take all five girls home. A teacher himself, he had driven up all the way from Barberton. We watched him jump out of his battered old car in the driving rain, slamming the door, holding his worn tweed jacket with the patches on the elbows to cover his and his wife’s heads, though covering more of his than hers, so that her hair clung to her damp forehead. He charged ahead, driven by righteous indignation – how could the school have been so negligent? – ascending the stairs two at a time, dragging his frumpy and faded wife between the sandstone lions, dispatching her to pack up the girls’ belongings in their cardboard suitcases and to wrap up their books in brown paper parcels.
He closeted himself with Miss Nieven in her study. She had just placed a frantic call the hospital where Fiamma’s father was confined with his recurrent fevers, trying to communicate to him what she knew, and to gather his responses.
She persuaded Meg’s father to leave the girls by hinting that Meg would most likely become head girl, and she did; most of the other parents eventually followed suit. It was said that if a father of five had confidence in our school, the other parents could too. None of our parents came to take us home.
Our reactions to Fiamma’s disappearance
Di said she could not feel anything, anymore; nothing made her sad or happy. Meg acquired that blank look in her aloe eyes. She told everyone she was going to marry a rich husband, and of course, she did. Sheila stopped telling stories of doom and destruction at night in the dormitory. It was only many years later that she dared to take up her pen again, and then only to write thrillers. Mary gave all her horse books to the twins and said she was never going to ride again. Lizzie said she would become a librarian and found work in a bookstore. Fuzzie sat and stared in silence. But it was Ann, our Logical Lindt, who was the one who could not get over the loss. Sobs shook her thin body through day and night. Mrs. Looney sent her to the san, but the respite did not help. After some weeks Miss Nieven wired her parents, and she was sent alone on the endless train ride back to Salisbury. She went back to the mother who had drooping bosoms and hair on her upper lip and a maths degree form Oxford.
Ann was told not to take her books along, because she had overreached herself. Her weeping was put down o excessive reading and ambition. She was given a piece of cross-stitch and told to do it on the train and to lie down in her room on her arrival with the curtains drawn. She told us she stuffed the cross-stitch down the back of her train seat.
None of us wanted to stay on the team, now that Miss G was gone. We dropped out, one by one. We became studious, diligent. We took to listening in class and copying down exactly what the teachers said. We repeated their words verbatim in our examination papers. We toned down our natural rebelliousness. We wore pale powder to cover our blemishes. We walked in silence down the long corridors, our head lowered slightly, our gaze on the ground, our books clutched to our chests. Even Di spoke softly, and blushed, and began stooping to hide her height. We spent our time bent over our books, trying to absorb all the facts we had avoided until then, too busy swimming for Miss G and God.
We spent our free time preparing for the school dance. Some of our parents ordered our dresses from overseas. Di’s white, strapless dress, which showed off her smooth, broad shoulders, came from Harrods, Sheila’s, from Liberty’s. Meg made her own dress out of pink taffeta and sewed seed pearls around the high neck, and she looked lovelier than anyone else.
We decorated the hall with an Oriental theme: we put fans on the walls and Chinese lanterns around the lights. We invited boys this time, and we rehearsed the presentation of our choices to Miss Nieven over and over. Sheila kept muttering, “Miss Nieven, this is Mark Bell. Miss Nieven this is Mark Bell,” as she walked up and down the pergola, but when the time came, she said, “Mark Bell, this is Miss Nieven.”
Miss Nieven wore a long Black Watch tartan skirt and a black velvet top. To our surprise and amusement, she joined in when we did the hokeypokey. She put her left foot in, took her left foot out, then shook it all about, lifting her scrawny arms and turning herself. We all joined in.
Our bodies had grown soft, curvaceous, by then. We lollopped around in the water and tittered for effect. No one swam the crawl, that powerful oceangoing stroke; we swam sidestroke or breaststroke, or we did not swim at all. We all feared muscles in our arms and legs. We decided that what Miss G had had to teach us was not very useful for the business of living, after all. We were too old for cracks now. We were worried about our future. Some of us wanted to go on to the universities, where we hoped to meet a mate.
We no longer ran across the veld out-of-bounds to the river and the graves. We avoided the graves. We never climbed up on the gave and played dead again; we never played the game of truth; we kept our secrets to ourselves. We had no secrets; we no longer dreamed, or if we dreamed, it was of boys, real boys with crew cuts and thick white socks and thick-soled boots.
Part Six: Remembrance
Sunday morning
It is already hot, and the palms beyond the window rustle. We sit in the dining room and sip our tea from tin mugs that scald our lips. There is the familiar odor of oranges and dust.
Ann’s gray hair is still wet from her shower and falls over her high, shiny forehead. She cracks open an egg, and her small eyes squint in the bright light. Fuzzie has forgotten to brush her hair. She dusts bread crumbs from her chest. Di stares in gloomy silence, writing with a thick silver pen. She coughs her smoker’s cough. Meg and Mary, still late sleepers, have not yet come down from the dormitory.
Miss Nieven wanders in for a moment, wearing the same mauve dress with the amber beads, as though she has not slept all night. She hovers, a dark figure, with the sun at her back. She books so frail we feel death could come at any moment and whisk her away from the thin anchorage of her cane. She whistles as she wishes us a good day. We start to rise from our seats, scraping back our chairs as we did so many years ago, but she gestures to us to sit down. We expect her to say grace as she always did: “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” but instead, she suggests we take a picnic to the riverbank. She says, “You will find the place quite unchanged,” and she looks at us blindly, until Di rises and goes over to her and gives her our check. She clutches the folded paper in her knotted hands. She puts on thick glasses and opens it and holds it up close to read the sum and then slips it into her pocket. She leans toward Di and whispers something in her ear and kisses her cheek. She smiles at us, nods, and then wanders out the door into the bright light, tapping with her cane on the stone floor.
Fuzzie says she dreamed her old dream of the child drowning, but this time she knew it was Fiamma she was trying to rescue from the water. She was trying to hold on to her, but she was slipping from her arms. Her body was naked and slippery as though she were covered with grease, and she was falling down into the darkness at the bottom of the sea.
Di tells us how she met up with Miss G years later, when Di was out here to visit. She found Miss G sitting in a faded raincoat on the steps of a department store. Miss G rose and accosted her and insisted she have tea. They took the double-decker but to her small but spotless studio in Hillbrow. Di had had no desire to have tea with her, but she had insisted. She told Di she had not been able to find work teaching after they fired her. She said she had been obliged to take a housekeeper’s job. She kept feeding Di one slice of cake after another and bringing out more sandwiches and little packets of sugar she must have stolen from some tearoom.
She brought up Fiamma. She said that Fiamma, to her surprise, had thrown herself at her wildly. “The truth is, she seduced me. At fourteen she was no virgin. She knew how to go about it, I assure you. She was such an exasperating brat, after all, and yet…”
At the graves
The mixture of flies, mosquitoes, and heat is the same as it was years ago, as it is, everywhere, in places of this sort. We can hear the buzzing of the fat flies from the latrines – the kind with glossy, green wings – and the hum of the mosquitoes. “Enough to drive you mad,” Ann says, as we all walk up from the riverbank toward the graves.
We are here together again, gong through the long, wet grass and the low scrub, up the bank to the graves of Sir George Harrow and his dog, Jock. The gray-branched frangipanis still spread their pale blossoms. Nothing seems changed except the dog’s gravestone, which has been spray-painted yellow.
First we talk, then we fall silent. It is the dead quiet we noticed when Fiamma first walked into the dormitory and stood there, blinking her dark eyelashes, and it all began.
We are crowded together around the cracked marble tombstone with its worn inscription. We can hear the soft gurgle of the slowly flowing water and the call of the dove. There is the dreamlike intensity of things.
Di stands at one end of Sir George’s tomb and says, “Meg, perhaps you should say a proper prayer.” Meg kneels down and recites the Twenty-third Psalm.
We all remember how Meg spread Fiamma’s loose hair around her shoulders and crossed her hands on her still chest. We covered her slender body with the white irises that still grow here, and the honeysuckle that climbs around the tomb. We had never seen Fiamma look as lovely: her delicate features, her flaxen ringlets, her oval face – as exquisite a countenance as we had ever beheld, with her chin tilted slightly upward, as though there were something she still wanted to offer us.
Together we manage now to move the slab of heavy marble that covers the airtight tomb. We make an opening wide enough to slip through, as she did years ago. Dust rises in the air and drops onto the gray branches and leaves of the frangipani. We look down into the darkness, and see Sir George’s bones, which have been lying there for so long, so peacefully. They are as white and dry as shells, and beside them lies another set, along with the scraps of brown tunic and the shriveled brown lace-up shoes.
We remember
While Fiamma was talking about Miss G during the game of truth, Di says she passed out. For a moment Di saw black as Fiamma spoke about Miss G. When Fiamma said Miss G did not tell the truth, Di lost consciousness for a moment. When she came back to herself, she told Fiamma that if she could be Miss G’s Madeline, she could be ours, too. “You have to be our Madeline now,” Di said firmly and put her hand over Fiamma’s mouth.
Fiamma started up and struggled with Di. They wrestled, holding on to each other, pulling and scratching and biting, but Fiamma was no match for Di. Di had her by the arm; she was twisting it. All Fiamma could do was escape from her grip. She broke loose and smacked Di hard across the face, panting. For a moment Di, stunned, stood motionless.
No one moved.
Fiamma ran from us. She bolted through the circle and ran out of the picnic hut up the bank toward the graves. She ran as fast as she could in her brown tunic, her little camphor bag bouncing on her back, her heavy lace-up shoes sinking and slipping in the red mud, the long grass, wetting her legs but racing on in the steamy air.
Fiamma, who was so fast in the water, was no fast on land.
“After her,” Di yelled. We shouted and rushed forward as a group, running through long grass and scrub, excited by the chase. “Madeline, Madeline, you are going to be our Madeline,” we shouted wildly.
The shouting made us feel brave and reckless. Our faces were shouting masks. In the hot, steamy sunlight we were running and slipping and jumping over everything in sight: deep dongas, rocks. Our sweating bodies were close, but we were running separately, in our distinctive ways. Meg ran gracefully, her well-turned ankles and her wasp waist revolving swiftly; Di ran aggressively, long-legged, knobby-kneed, arms swinging; the twins, side-by-side, indistinguishable, snub-nosed, white-haired, their sinewy calves shining; Ann, spindly and thin, coming behind; Sheila, like an ostrich, as if on stilts; and finally Fuzzie, her peg legs visible in the glare. We were a pack, giving off high-pitched screams.
The sound of our voices came back to us, bouncing off the wattle trees. We were hot, feverish, nauseated. Our minds were blank. Our nerves were jangled from lack of sleep, the long walk, the singing, Fiamma’s words. For a moment, we lost her under the trees. It was cooler and darker there. We all stopped and looked about, our eyes glinting. “Where did she go?” Di cried and wiped her forehead and blinked. We could see the red imprint of Fiamma’s fingers on Di’s cheek. The faint smell of Miss G’s smoke hung in the air like a pall.
