“We even beat Kingsmead,” Di says, her pebble blue eyes turning bright as she remembers our many triumphs. She coughs her smoker’s cough and turns her head to the light. Her swollen face has a look of ill health. Her long, blond hair is cropped short and dyed copper. She still presents herself as if she had certain rights. She has to be taken into account in her black shantung suit with the padded shoulders and the large, unicorn-shaped diamond pin the lapel. She has rubbed some dark rouge on her cheeks, and it makes her look much older – hard in a deathly and impressive way. Her once-slender body has run to fat, though she still has her broad swimmer’s shoulders.
Miss Nieven says, “I used to watch you. If I saw one, I always knew where to find the others. It was almost a sunny dance, perfectly choreographed, a lovely garland of girls! You reminded me of that Matisse painting, you know the one I mean, with the blue background and all the pink figures holding hands, rising lightly into the air. There you were, swallow-diving from the high board in your black racing costumes, doing double back flips, one after another. Up, up you went into the air, light as light can be. I can almost hear the splash. You were so full of energy, enthusiasm, and life!”
No one cries out, “a dance? You call all those furtive, passionate wirthings a dance?”
No one speaks of Fiamma’s swallow-diving, opening her arms wide on the sky and earth, while Miss G gazes raptly up at her.
Di, who has dared to smoke, now stubs out her half-finished Craven “A” with its crimson smudge, pressing down hard, crushing it out with a spark of her old, uncontrolled temper. It lies smoldering in the dark earth around the potted palm next to the bench, while she crosses her arms, scowling.
Miss Nieven says, “And loyal, so loyal to one another! Always owning up, taking the blame. Diligent, too, and not only at swimming. I remember you, Ann, getting up before daybreak to help Fiamma with her Afrikaans, whispering to her in the window seat.”
And Lindt, our vice captain, still sallow and thin, stands alone near the parapet, removes her thick glasses, and wipes her small, protuberant, pink-rimmed eyes. She laughs nasally and moves closer into the circle of women around Miss Nieven. Ann says in her pinched, secretive voice, “Fiamma was the best friend I ever had.” Di looks at her askance and wipes the trace of crimson from her teeth with her tongue. There is a moment of silence.
Miss Nieven gazes blindly across the damp lawn and says, “Sometimes I think she is still out there and will come gliding across the lawn in her turned-down panama hat.”
Sheila’s cheeks flush as she says, “If she had to go off, it should rather have been to someplace grand. I can see her married to a handsome Milanese with lots of children, wearing a cloche hat, living in a grand house by a lake like the one she used to tell us about.”
Miss Nieven turns toward the sound of Sheila’s voice. “You were always making things up. I remember one of your Latin translations, which started out In sylva, which you translated “in heaven,” and you went on to write of spirits wandering around the Elysian Fields.”
No one says anything, but we all look at Sheila and remember how she used to make up long stories in the dark of the dormitory. We would fall asleep to the sound of her voice telling tales of Zulus with skin as pale as lilies or Chinese girls with blue eyes and fair hair. All her stories came to the same dramatic finale: violent death, whole families wiped out by Zulu impis or left to be eaten alive by red ants in a dry donga.
Why did Miss Nieven bring us back?
“You find the school much changed?” Miss Nieven asks. We evade her eyes and deflect her question. Ann opens up her small handbag and hunts inside, dipping her head and exposing the gray roots of her hair.
Ann had come to our school on a scholarship and had never swum in anything but the brown water of a ditch. She has married a rich black politician and lives in Harare, where she teaches political science at the university. She is one of the richest of us now and wears large corals around her thick neck and a square blue-white on her finger but still looks poor in her crumpled tartan with the big pin and her short-sleeved white shirt. No one asks her if it was Miss Nieven’s letter, on the school’s pale blue stationery with the dark blue crest at the head, which obliged her to come back to the school she disliked. No one mentions the contents of the letter that has brought us all back.
Miss Nieven says, “Tomorrow you must walk back to the river and visit the graves. Nothing has changed there – so far – but they may have to be dug up completely, as I told you in my letter.” She leans her head back against the chair in a thin beam of light, as if overcome by the weight of it all. She stares blindly across the terraced lawns at what is left of the wild veld. She has suffered recently from fainting fits and for weeks has hardly ventured out of her room.
She sips water, pants, hauls herself up, and leans on Meg’s arm. She makes an effort to straighten her back. She says that for this school to continue, it needs our help. Of course, it has been in difficulties before: there was all that trouble over Fiamma, she reminds us, blinking her small eyes blankly.
For a moment we think she has lost the thread of her thought. But she puts one hand to her flat, spinster breast, clutches at her amber beads, and says she thinks of our school as one of those monasteries that kept learning alive in the Dark Ages. There are few such places left, where the flames of Christian values, of love and learning, are kept alive. Half the student body comes here from farms with nothing: no money for books or even uniforms. They are beating at the gates.
However generous we may have been in the past, the school now needs our help more than ever. Without it a precious part of our past will be sacrificed. “The next things you know they’ll let a developer bulldoze those graves and turn up those bones.” We look at one another, our faces pale.
It is, after all, a splendid summer evening, and the light is dazzling. There is no longer any hint of a storm. The sun, a lambent gold, is sinking beneath the horizon. Beneath it our old school grounds are disappearing into the twilight. The wind has dropped again. The air is sweet with honeysuckle, jasmine, and orange peel. The lawns are incandescent with heat and sheen. The red-hot pokers blaze. The dahlias smolder darkly. We stand and stare in silence. Only Ann is unimpressed. She turns sidewise to the lawns, cranes forward, and shortsightedly studies our faces, carefully. She is muttering some obscure line of poetry: “Les deserts tartares s’eclairent.”
Miss Nieven moves toward Di and takes Di’s gloved hands in hers, saying, “I am so glad you found the strength in your heart to come back.” Then she turns, grasps her shiny black cane with the head in a shape of a bird, and totters through the door into the shadows. We hear the tap of her cane, as we stand, gazing into the distance across the veld toward the river.
Part Two: Distance
How we first heard about Fiamma
We were thirteen and fourteen years old. Meg, who had been held back because she took a little longer to learn, and Pamela Richter, the thin girl who always got less than 10 percent in maths, might have been fifteen. Sheila and the Trevelyan twins were probably still twelve.
Most of us had been confirmed in our white Sunday dresses and panama hats, because Miss Nieven had said this was not a fashion show. We had made our first and last confessions. Sheila had confessed to reading banned books but said she was not sorry, because they told you the truth about life, and burst into tears. Ann had told her to stop showing off. Most of us had had our periods for the first time by then and spent much of our time peering anxiously at the backs of our tunics, afraid we might find a dark stain spreading shamefully there.
From the dusty teacher’s platform, Miss Lacey, our English teacher, was saying something about the arrival of a new girl, Fiamma Coronna. We were probably in the second year of the senior school. We were all in the classroom, sitting two-by-two at our wide wooden desks with the tops that lifted to store our books and our comics, and holes cut out to hold the inkwells.
Ann, who came first at maths, Latin, English, French, history, and backstroke – everything except science, music, recitation, ballet, and gym – was sitting in the front row beside another brainy girl who never made the swimming team. Ann was the only one who read the Manchester Guardian, which was sent to us from England on special, thin airmail paper and got pinned to the bulletin board, where it was flapping about in the cold morning air that came in through the open windows. She was wearing the thick glasses she had to wear because she was always reading. She read books by Winston Churchill, who was attacked in an armored train in the Boer War. She sat in the window seat in the early morning before we got up, reading his Great Contemporaries and looking up all the words she did not know, like internecine and belligerent. It was Ann who had asked Miss Nieven why the natives did not have the vote. Miss Nieven had said that democracy took a long time to develop.
Di, who could turn fifty cartwheels on the lawn and do pirouettes all around the assembly hall platform and was first at ballet and gym, was rocking on her chair in the back of the classroom, stretching her long legs. Beside her was Meg, who was reading comic books beneath her desk. Mary Skeen was best at science; sprawled beside Pamela, who was not good at anything then but later took a First at sex. Fuzzie was first at music and recitation. She sat, peering out the window, next to Sheila in the gold glare of the winter sun. Fuzzie had a lovely voice for both singing and speaking. Miss Lacey often made her recite “Ozymandias” by Shelley at the end of class in order to curb any excessive ambition, not considered seemly for Christian girls. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair,” Fuzzie would say, stretching out her hat, freckled arms and lifting her hands toward us, imploringly. Ann, who knew much poetry by heart, was tone-deaf. The Trevelyan twins, who were orphans, sat side-by-side in the middle of the classroom and were, like her, on scholarship. Miss Nieven said money had no importance and should not be mentioned in polite company. On ne parle pas de l’argent, she said then, in the days when the school had money.
Miss Lacey was saying, “May I have your attention, please, girls. I am trying to tell you that a new girl is coming all the way from Italy to our school, after the holidays. I want you to welcome her on her arrival. Girls, are you listening to me?”
It is almost certain we were not listening when Miss Lacey told us about the exceptional circumstances – something about a business trip – under which Fiamma was to arrive. We rarely listened. We had difficulty just keeping still. We bit our nails, the skin around our nails, the ends of our pens, the ends of pencils; we sucked our plaits and sometimes even smooth stones; we craned our necks to check for period stains; we scratched, picked, and peeled, at our scabs, our teeth, and our noses. Bobby Joe was presently busy surreptitiously wiping what she had discovered in her snub nose onto the bottom of her desk.
The gold glare of the winter light was coming in slantwise through the north-facing windows. We were sitting in our long-sleeved winter shirts and brown cardigans and striped ties, our breath misty in the early morning air, and muttering about it being worse than Jane Eyre in our unheated classroom. The highveld winter mornings were bitter cold, but by midday we would tie our cardigans around our waists, roll up our long sleeves, and lounge on the dry grass in the strong sun. Heating was not considered necessary where the winters were short and the summers long.
“Now I want you to be particularly nice to this new girl, who is coming from such a distance, from another country, another…background.” Miss Lacey’s voice rose in a vain attempt to persuade.
She knew that we were not nice to new girls, wherever they came from. We teased, tormented, and tortured them. We made them eat bitter aloe or swallow something nasty like cod-liver oil, or we gave them the black spot, which was supposed to frighten them, but, because most of them had never read Treasure Island and therefore did not know that if someone gave you the black spot it meant you were about to die, they only looked at us blankly.
Sheila told Bobby Joe, when she was a new girl, to put her towhead in the toilet and flush. She reused. “You have to,” Sheila said, looking surprised, but Bobby Joe just walked away. Lizzie Turner broke Pamela’s doll furniture for no reason at all when she was ten years old.
We were nasty to all new girls, especially foreigners. We were proud of our new country’s independence, even if our mothers still called England home; after all, they had never been there. There was a new girl from England, pasty and plump, whom we called a killer. We made a circle around her and chanted, “You killed Joan of Arc.” There was an American, Ramona Landsberger, whom we all called Ramooona Hamburger, imitating the way she answered all questions with a drawl, while she spat on her big, red mosquito bites. She did not stay long. The mosquitoes were too much for her. Africa was too much for her; we were too much for her.
We thought of all foreigners as “drips,” whose soft feet made them unable to walk barefooted, as we could, across the hot, hard ground. We were sure they would get lost in the veld or fall into a deep donga or eat poisonous berries and die.
Miss Lacey was even older than Miss Nieven. She had blue-white hair and violet-blue eyes and wrinkled skin. She had told us that in her youth, at Oxford, Yeats had fallen in love with her violet-blue yes. She was always quoting him, particularly his poem “When you are old and gray and full of sleep.”
She was not quoting him this morning but informing us in hushed tones that Fiamma was actually a real princess. She told us that Fiamma was from an old, aristocratic Italian family, from the lake district not far from Milan. Her father owned great tracts of land, a large villa on the edge of a beautiful blue lake, famous paintings, rare jewels, a huge fortune. He was himself a prince, she went on, in her breathless way.
No one knew exactly why Fiamma’s father had chosen this particular school, so far away from home, but Miss Lacey presumed he had his reasons; perhaps he had come across it in his travels, while searching for something else he wanted.
We shifted about and pulled at our socks and flared our eyebrows and sucked in our cheeks and goggled in mock amazement and awe. Di shrugged her broad shoulders and lifted the top of her desk as though she were looking for a book and mumbled, “So what” to Meg, who grinned. Ann, who never missed anything, turned around and gave Di her twisted smile. Pamela snickered.
