She informed us that it was of no importance who was on her team, because she could teach anyone to swim. “I could teach a sheep to swim,” She said scornfully, and we lowered our eyes and laughed sheepishly. We were certain she could do what she said.
She scratched her cheek, and we did the same. As she spoke, we moved our lips with her words. When she tapped her ash into the ashtray, we tapped our fingers. She held her handsome head high like a fist and pressed her broad shoulders back, soldier-like. We sat up and pressed back our shoulders.
Her hair was cropped so short you could see the bristles at the back of her neck, and she had burned her skin dark that summer, the result, she had explained to us, of the reflected light from the snow on a recent skiing trip to her native Wales.
She said that we were not to be deluded that she had chosen us for our innate ability to swim, or for any other particular abilities we had; on the contrary, she maintained, she had chosen us randomly. Anyone else would have done just as well. She said she chose her swimmers by chance, that is, as a manifestation of God’s will.
She told us, “What is important in learning to swim well, as it is in anything, is desire,” and her black eyes flickered mysteriously. She told us we could do anything if we desired it enough. We liked the way she said desire, and we looked at one another and raised our eyebrows and smiled.
She said we could and should break all the absurd rules that governed our young lives; we were to flout convention. “You can do anything you want. The world is yours for the taking. Nothing is impossible for you, my girls. Live your lives to the full. Do you want to be absolutely free? Do you want to escape your suffering bodies? All you need is to desire it.”
She told us to use our imaginations, to concentrate, to think of nothing else, if we wanted to win; that everything was part of the race. She advised us to keep our bodies fit at all times, to eat fruits and vegetables and whole-grain bread and keep ourselves light for the rest of our lives. She told us to swim in the morning, at night, constantly. “Discipline,” she said, “not talent, is what counts.” Potential was simply the willingness to learn what she had to teach. “Don’t let men wreck your bodies or bend your minds; be just like them.” Her grandmother gained just fourteen pounds when she was carrying her mother, who weighed seven at birth; her grandmother was riding a horse at eighty. “You can be strong and beautiful until the day you die. Aim high.” She lifted her big, strong hands and shook them at the high molding, as we all looked up.
She told us to think of the water as our own true home, to learn to do without breath, without air; to be light. We sucked in our stomachs and straightened our backs. She told us not to make any unnecessary movements in the water, not to roll about or twist our shoulders or lift our heads too high, but to suck a little air fast from the sides of our mouths. She said not to make any splash, to slice silently through the water, to cut through it, to kill. “Swim out of rage,” she ordered, “and for God.”
She wanted us to know she was not a failed intellectual but and educated woman, perhaps more educated than our head-mistress with her degree from Oxford. She encouraged all of us to read and promised to lend us books from her library, not the books on our school syllabus, not The Story of an African Farm, not The Tempest or Jane Eyre, but books covered with brown paper, written by writers of whom we had never heard: Lawrence, both D.H. and T.L. She told Ann to read her namesake, Ayn Rand.
We stared up at her, trying to follow what she was saying. We often had great difficulty following her, because she spoke so fast and with so many long words and unusual expressions. “If you can’t bedazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” she said. Miss Lacey told us she was vulgar, having spent some time in America and picked up certain expressions there, but we knew Miss Lacey was jealous because she was old and washed out. We thought Miss G expressed herself brilliantly. If we could only understand her, we could learn the secret of life.
She went on in her mellifluous Welsh voice. She told us both that we were a worthless bunch who would never amount to anything and that we could be the best swimmers anywhere, with our names inscribed in history. She repeated our names. Radfield, Radfield, Miss G said, shaking her head. She used alliteration. She called Di, “Reckless Radfield,” and Fuzzie, “Burls the Bear,” because she was plump and awkward. Ann was “Logical Lindt” and Meg was “Darling Donovan,” because she was beautiful and good and was always helping the little girls who came crying to her about their troubles. Mary Skeen was “Sweet Skeen,” because she was placid and good-natured, and Lizzie was “Lucky Lizzie,” because she got to spend the holidays in England with her father.
Miss G spoke of the importance of honor. She told us about Brutus: that the good of the team should triumph over the good of the individual. She told us that the means justified the end, which was to win and win again.
She spoke of truth and freedom from repression. She said the essential was to look into your heart honestly and to know the truth about yourself and, thus, about life. “If you find the truth within you, it will save you. If you ignore it, it will destroy you,” she said. No one else would tell us the truth; we were brainwashed by a bunch of bland spinsters who knew nothing – or would tell us nothing – about life, who gave us a sugarcoated version of the truth. She imitated Miss Nieven sipping a cup of tea, lifting her pinkie in the air and talking about God the Rushing Wind, making us laugh with a delicious sense of complicity.
She said she would tell us about our headmistress, who, if she was not going mad, was at least more and more disorganized. She closed herself up in her room and did not respond to anyone for days. She was getting worse and worse. “All Sunny Nieven thinks of is taking your money. If I were your parents I would complain. She cannot even answer a letter anymore. And that’s the truth.”
“To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man,” she recited. Now that we were on her team, we had to learn the art of telling the whole truth.
She would even tell us about herself, as an example. She told us her father was a dirt-poor Welsh miner, and a drunk, who made her kneel as a punishment, even when she had the curse, until she fainted; that he beat her mother, who made millinery, sitting up late at night sewing plastic cherries onto felt to supplement their small income; that she, Miss G, stole money from her grandmother’s money box, which she kept under her bed, to buy her boat ticket to Africa.
“No inhibitions here! I will have no inhibitions here!” she said sternly. “Repression of libidinal urges only leads to aggression. Give me your secrets, girls, give me the dark depths of your hearts, and I will give you the light. Search your hearts, for the universe lies therein,” and we searched and searched. “It is always more grubby than you think,” she added, and we nodded our heads, knowing she was right. She said there were certain subjects we should get out of the way, so that we could go about our business. She knew what we were thinking.
“I know what you are thinking about, Darling Donovan, behind that angelic air,” she said to Meg, making her squirm about and blush. “You are a quiet one, a regular little saint. But don’t think I have not been watching you. You’re interested in what everyone else your age is interested in, and it is not swimming.”
She looked around the room for another victim. “And if our little saint is interested in it, just think how interested Reckless Radfield must be! Ah, Radfield, you are entirely honorable and good, but you are the most dangerous of all. Isn’t she now? She is a sensualist. Are you not? I can see it from the way you throw yourself into the water, from the way you run across the veld, from the way you look at Meg.” Di dared to look back at Miss G without blinking.
“And as for Logical Lindt, don’t think you fool me either, my dear. You are far too clever for your own good,” she intoned, shaking her head. “Your nose may be in a book for the moment, but you’re just like the rest.”
She proceeded to tell us in detail about the miracle of a man’s erection. “Observe them as they swell in their bathing suits when they come near you.” We giggled and smirked and imagined men’s mysterious parts swelling like sunflowers in the warm light of our bodies. We were transformed into snake charmers, magicians. As the light faded and night fell, she advised us to adopt the habit of clenching our pelvic muscles after we urinated to tighten them, so that they could give pleasure. “Our muscles are like our minds: we must exercise them again and again,” she said, as we clenched and unclenched them. Mens sana in corpore sano, she quoted. She told us that we must always tell her when we had our periods.
By the time Fiamma arrived, all of us had had our periods for the first time. The hot weather out here makes us develop early, Miss G told us, but Fiamma, being an aristocrat with blue blood, would do so more slowly.
The game of truth
The moon cast its pale light in the long, narrow room as we sat on the floor in a circle whispering. Ann sat on the sidelines and called out “Stop,” and Meg’s hand was found at the bottom of the pile, so she had to answer the question.
It was Sheila who devised the game. Always one who tried hard, she suggested we practice telling the truth in the dormitory at night, as Miss G had suggested.
We all put our hands one on top of the other to make a pile and then pulled them out one by one, starting from the bottom, playing truth. Someone sat on the sidelines and called out “Stop,” and whoever had her hand at the bottom of the pile had to answer a question truthfully. The only one who escaped, because we never asked her to play, was Fiamma – that is , until the day she disappeared.
Ann asked Meg what was the worst thing she had ever done.
Meg had been taught by her Catholic mother and father to keep her mouth shut, to chest her cards, so she said she could think of nothing.
Ann said, “Oh, come on. Out with it.”
Meg confessed to putting a hairpin up her winkie, and then covered her face with her hands in embarrassment.
“You did that!” Di gasped, pulling her lips down at the corners, as though she were about to be sick.
Meg now sat on the sidelines and got to ask Di the same question. That is how we found out that Di had actually allowed a boy to put his finger up hers.
“So you’re not a virgin?” Ann asked her, impressed.
“Not strictly speaking, I suppose,” Di said with a superior air, flashing her strong, white teeth and her rosy gums at us in the moonlight.
After that we followed her around like dogs for days.
When Fiamma first arrived
We had staked out our territory, fought over the best beds in Kitchener, and were bouncing on them, when Bobby Joe spotted a car approaching in a cloud of red dust in the distance.
It was the beginning of the spring term and a long period of drought. The October rains had not come to signal the end of a dry winter. Instead the wind blew across the veld, carrying a fine red-clay dust into the classrooms and dormitories. It settled in a thin film over the basins and dresser tops and windowsills.
Dust was flying from the wheels of the dark green Porsche, which came to an abrupt halt under the oak trees. A man got out, trailed by a blond girl, her head drooping like a snowdrop in the early spring. We had never seen such a handsome and elegant man. He looked shiny, striding up the polished red steps between the sandstone lions, two at a time, followed by a servant carrying leather suitcases of different sizes.
Leaning far out the window, Bobby Joe told us the man looked like a fairy with golden eyes.
Miss Nieven, too, was there on the steps in the full glare of afternoon light. She had not greeted any of our parents on our arrival but remained within the thick walls of her cool study, making up programs, or writing in pencil about God for her Sunday sermon, erasing with her big pink rubber when she made a mistake. She had left the task of greeting newcomers o Matron, the least important member of the staff, who had stood with her cardboard-backed list and licked her fat finger to turn the pages, looking for our names through thick glasses and ticking them off one by one.
But for this latecomer Miss Nieven was standing on the front steps in the sun, waving her white lace handkerchief about in the air like someone in a book, the lavender wafting up to us as we hung out the windows. She was wearing her best mauve dress, the one she kept for chapel on Sundays, and she had even pinned a posy of wilting violets to her flat spinster bosom. Her thin voice rose in greeting: “Welcome, welcome,” she shrilled, shaking the father’s hand, as though she would never let it go.
He was nattily turned out, in tweeds, in exactly the light-colored shirt and pastel tie and shiny shoes that fashion, as we imagined it, prescribed. His dark, glossy hair was perfectly trimmed, and his pale face freshly shaved. Fuzzie maintained his lips had been lightly touched with rough.
“Definitely a poofter,” Bobby Joe concluded, leaning dangerously far out.
We watched him leave, loping down the steps two at a time. The blond girl followed and clung to him. He had to pry her loose, and long after he had gone, we saw her standing there, looking down the dusty driveway, lingering in the shade of the oak trees while the sun set in a rush of red. She was still out there when dark fell swiftly, and we could hear a dog howl with a wild, wolf-like sound. Then she turned her face toward the school and dragged herself slowly up the drive.
Miss Nieven, who had politely refrained from interfering in this parting, was there again with a big smile to usher Fiamma into our dormitory. Tugging at the hair that grew from the wart on her chin, she told us to be sure to make the new girl feel at home, and then stood there as though she wanted to say more. We felt she would have liked to stay all evening to make sure we were kind.
Fiamma came into Kitchener followed by the servant carrying all her suitcases. The moment she entered the room, our eyes turned to her, as though there were something magical about her appearance. She stood there, blinking her dark eyelashes, the tears still on her cheeks, her long neck delicate but not frail, and her oval face tipped to one side. She looked as though she had just risen, naked out of the sea, and stepped into a shell, like the lady we had seen in the painting in art class. We tried to pay no attention to her, but we were all staring.
What drew our attention? Her eyes were unusually big, huge, still disks, a strange shade of light blue and as clear as running water. Her expression, too, was not one we had ever seen. She did not seem to see us, or rather she seemed to see through us, as though she were looking into the distance or listening to some faint sound. She did not look either sad or happy, but removed, as though she had looked us all over, and found us wanting. It was the uncaring look of the outsider.
