Her pale eyes and her pale plait, which lay on her shoulder, matched her milk white skin, which was that of a redhead. But her hair was not red, it was blond. Her nose was unusually straight and seemed pencil-thin at the tip.
The oval of her face struck us particularly. There was something soft and sweet about the curve of her cheek. We recalled it from the copies of Italian Renaissance paintings we had seen in art class. It was the smooth oval of the Florentine Madonnas, the face of the very young mother with her child. It made us feel lonely.
Fiamma turned to the servant who had brought in the leather suitcases, hatboxes, and vanity cases, all initialed, with combination locks and first-class tickets flying. “Thank you so much for your kindness,” she said to him, and then, speaking to us in the same clipped English tone, she added, “Fiamma Coronna. Good evening,” though no one had asked her her name.
“Good evening, Your Royal Highness,” Bobby Joe quipped from the end of the dormitory. Pamela stood up and curtsied, and we all giggled.
A tear ran down Fiamma’s pale cheek. It was the only time we ever saw her weep. She did not even weep on the Sunday afternoon she disappeared, after we had played the game of truth.
Ann said, “This one is not going to be with us for long.”
Why did our parents send us to this school?
We came here on slow trains from afar,
Traveling through veld day and night.
We followed the evening star.
To arrive at this lonely place in the moonlight.
The only kind of snow we had at Christmastime was made from cotton wool, and the holly was made of plastic. It was so hot we sweated when we ate the roast turkey and potatoes and gem squash, and when they flamed the Christmas pudding, the light outside was so bright you could hardly see the flame. The poem we read did not make much sense to us because April was not the cruelest month and bred nothing out of the dead land.
In those days our school was entirely surrounded by farmland. For miles around there was nothing but a few mangy cows, wattle trees, and pale mud huts, their skeletal frames visible in the blinding light. The dirt roads lay dry and white as shells in the sun. Sandy paths led across the veld to the river and the graves. An iron fate closed on the long driveway, lined with ancient oaks, that led up to the school.
No one was here except the girls and the teachers, who were elderly spinsters from England no longer able to find gainful employ in their home country, because of age or eccentricity or the commission of some minor misdemeanor. They clasped their hands to their hearts and looked across the veld to the distant horizon and longed for the lilac in May. The big girls lolled in the leather chairs in the common room and listened to Elvis singing “Hound Dog,” and talked about boy. They slept over sums in the classrooms or whispered in the library, while they pretended to look up Latin verbs.
We were sent here as boarders at five or six, because there were no proper schools where we lived. We left our parents on distant farms or in small towns and traveled alone or in little groups for days on trains through wild country. We arrived exhausted and confused, stumbling through the long, narrow passageways, lit only by Matron’s torch, and finding our beds among strange sleeping girls. The sheets smelled damp and funny. We lay awake, listening to the clashing of the palm fronds in the dry wind.
We cried for our mothers until Matron came to us in her dressing gown with her gray plait over her shoulder, trying to bring comfort. But she did not smell of flowers like our mothers. She did not feel like them. Her bosoms dangled slackly down to her thick waist under her rough dressing gown with the twisted red-and-white twill. Her hair was not silky like our mothers’ – if we dared to touch her limp braid at all. She clucked her tongue at us. She told us our noise would only wake the others. When we got to the hiccup stage, she took our temperatures with thermometer she took from a small glass of Dettol with a snap of her wrist. Her name was Mrs. Looney, and we thought she was, too.
Night after night we wept for our mothers. If we went on wailing for too long and woke the other girls, Mrs. Looney took us to the spare bed in her small, stuffy room. We lay awake in the dark, sniffing and hiccupping and listening to her stertorous breathing. We stared up at the sky and tried to find the stars that looked down on our homes, remembering where we ate cold sausages with our sisters, sitting up in the bay window after church on Sunday, looking over the lawns, watching the big white tickbirds picking at the dirt.
We saw our mothers standing in the open window. They came to us in the half dark, their soft breaths on our cheeks, as they sang us familiar songs: “Underneath the budding chestnut trees.” They were slipping their rings onto our fingers and toes; they were rocking us on their knees and reciting rhymes: “She shall have music wherever she goes.”
Mornings we saw their faces as we tried to untangle the knots in our hair, or as we lay in the big bath with the claws for feet. We heard their voices coming from down the corridor; they would bring us the cakes of soap we had forgotten in the dormitory. They sat on the branches beside us in the loquat trees and tickled our necks with leaves. We thought we heard them calling our names, and we ran down into the bamboo at the end of the garden, catching glimpses of them parting the bamboo and stepping toward us in green silk dresses, but it was only the cry of a sparrow hawk or the wind in the leaves.
We made up imaginary friends. Sheila’s was called Margaret. Margaret came with her to the toilet to talk her when she had to make number two or ran beside her when she had to run around the hockey field, her breath rasping in her chest.
We felt ourselves spin out into the darkness, round and round, like a leaf on water.
On Miss G’s team
We were all winners and losers at different times, and our status on the team waxed and waned. We were willing to do anything to improve our precarious positions. We were constantly terrified Miss G might dismiss us, cast us out into the darkness of purgatory, lump us with the girls who were not on the team and who hardly seemed to exist at all.
Once on the team, we rarely mixed with the other girls in our class or any of the other classes. They had become boring. They seemed to have been washed away, to have left the school and vanished. Even Sandra du Toit, our head girl that year, who was beautiful and brainy and good at games, but no longer on the swimming team, no longer mattered. The swimmers were the only ones who did, because they were the only ones who mattered to Miss G.
Besides, Miss G had always tried as much as possible to group her team members in one dormitory on the pretext that we would disturb the other girls by rising early for swim practice. She knew well that it was in the whispered conversations in the night that affinities were formed, that it was while sitting in the window seat, staring up at the garlands of starts hanging low and bright in the African sky, that confidences were exchanged.
We stood on the high board for Miss G, trembling with suspense, looking down at the light fragmented in the water, opening our arms in the air, plunging through it, splitting the surface of the water with hardly a splash, toes pointed to the sky.
We rose early to swim before assembly; we swam two hours after rest in the afternoon and again at dusk. We always had cramps in our toes. Our hair was always wet. Our hands were always damp and cold and our fingers crinkled. Our eyes were always bleary with chlorine, as we gazed dazedly down at our damp books. Our pillows were soaked when we lay our heads down to sleep.
Meg and Miss G
Behind her dark head was the sun,
As she leaned across and touched Meg’s knee.
She was marked forever as the one,
Forever branded by Miss G.
The sun lay in a diamond shape on the soft carpeted floor, filling the big tearoom. A glass vase stood in the window with mimosa branches spreading fan-like against the sky. Women leaned close, the flowers in their hats trembling. They whispered and sipped tea, their little fingers lifted in cream leather gloves. Waitresses wore black dresses and frilled white caps, which floated like boats on the backs of their heads. They pushed tea carts on wheels, piled high with wondrous cakes: éclairs and little tarts with whipped cream and big, ripe strawberries, the kind Meg adored and almost never got to eat, she told us later. Miss G bought her several of them – one with cream and strawberries – and several cups of tea poured from a shiny silver teapot with straight sides and a little matching pitcher of milk. She noticed how Miss G slipped several packets of sugar into her many pockets and patted them with satisfaction.
Miss G leaned forward and asked Meg, who was stuffing cakes into her mouth, about her family. She was glad Miss G was asking her this and not, as she often did, something more difficult that she might not understand. “How on earth does your poor father cope with so many girls?” she wanted to know.
Meg took another quick bite of cake and a sip of tea before answering. She felt warm in the sunshine, and started to explain how she tried to help her father by doing as many of the household chores as she could, rising early to clean the floors. Then she remembered how Miss G had said that we should tell all the truth and bring the dark parts of our lives into the light, and though she was not quite sure what a dark part was or whether she had any to be brought into the light, she found herself revealing what she had never told anyone before.
She told her how her father beat her and her sisters, making them lean over a chair once a week out on the veranda so that he could beat them with a sjambok, one after the other; the worst part was watching. She could not stop herself from watching. She drew aside the muslin curtain at the window and watched her father beat her sisters, starting with the youngest girl, the delicate one, watching and listening to their desperate cries for mercy. She knew that her father knew she was watching, that he wanted her to watch – indeed, needed her to watch, and that he would beat her harder than all the rest because she had been doing so, beat her until she lay unconscious on the floor.
When she stopped speaking, she waited, a little breathless and flushed, for Miss G to murmur words of sympathy or approbation for bringing forth into the light such a dark part of her life. She thought Miss G would pat her on the back and tell her how reckless and brave she had been, or perhaps even order a few more cakes as a reward, but Miss G did nothing of the sort. She leaned forward slightly and briefly placed her hand, lightly but unmistakable, on Meg’s knee.
“There wasn’t anything sexy about it,” Meg told us, but it seemed to her that something enormous had happened. She had the strange but certain impression that Miss G was branding her as one of her own. Everything spun around her: the waitresses in black dresses, their little, frilled white caps, the shining silver teapot, the strawberries on the cream cakes, the yellow of the mimosa branches in the vase by the window, even the light in a diamond pattern on the carpet. Meg wanted to hold on to the moment like a precious gift, a jewel, something to be kept wrapped up forever in pink tissue paper.
How Fiamma made the swimming team
For Fiamma she could skim across the water,
As fast as can be,
For she was a prince’s daughter,
And Miss G loved her most passionately.
Miss G told us she was not entirely satisfied with her new team. She might choose some new members, or get rid of some of those she had already chosen. She was going to make the girls on the team race with the rest of the class. We could choose the stroke we liked and had to swim two lengths of the long pool. She told us to wait on the dry grass by the pool in our thin, black racing costumes, the spring sun burning our tender skin purple.
She liked to keep us waiting, for it enabled her to see who had real character and would stay the course. She said it was character, not talent, perseverance, not promise, that counted.
Fuzzie swatted at mosquitoes, which seemed drawn to her plump, bare legs and arms. Di tossed her long, thin hair impatiently. Lizzie practiced her crawl in the air, stretching her long, white arms. We rose up on our toes or crouched down on our heels with our elbows on our thighs and hands between our legs. We milled around, licking from the palms of our hands the powdered sugar we had obtained from Di.
Miss G called out the names of the whole class alphabetically and had us line up: “Allenby, Arkright, Bell, Burls, Fiamma Coronna…,” she called. Our legs felt watery, like the reflections of legs in water. We squirmed. We pulled the straps of our green plastic caps away from our chins. Color washed from the sky. Finally, she raised her black gun in the white air. The water glittered; the sun blazed. We saw birds shoot up in the air and heard the crack of the gun. We flung ourselves across the water, crowding together. We splashed and kicked and crashed into one another, struggling breathlessly in a series of races, one after the other. When she was that she was not winning, Sheila threw up her arms and sank down into the water, pretending to faint, so she would have to be dragged out.
The winners of each heat then swam a final one. Fiamma left all the rest of us behind after a few strokes. Miss G had her swim alone, timing her with her stopwatch, while we had to stand and look on. The spring sun was burning our cheeks, and the sweat was dripping into our dazzled eyes. We put up our hands to shade them, watching Fiamma flying back and forth across the surface, silvered by sun and spray.
Miss G stood in the shadows of the changing huts, her arms crossed, her wide lips trembling, and her yellow whistle dangling unused on her chest. The light in her dark face was strange and cast a glow. There was an expression of joy and pain at the same time.
She strode to the edge of the pool and leaned over to five Fiamma her broad hand and pull Fiamma’s white skin like silver ribbons. She stood in the sun on the sides of her narrow feet on the hot concrete around the pool, gazing at us directly, as though it had been the easiest thing in the world.
“Hurry up and get her a towel,” Miss G shouted imperiously. She draped it carefully around Fiamma like a royal cape and flung her arm around Fiamma’s shoulders. She led her away, talking earnestly, bending her dark head toward Fiamma’s blond one. They went together toward the changing huts, their shadows mingling in the dry grass.
What Fiamma liked about swimming
Sitting on the wooden bench in the changing room, where Miss G had left her after the tryouts, her think wet racing costume clinging to her narrow body and her pale plait lying on her shoulder, Fiamma lifted her inhaler and pumped to get her breath. She told us she did not want to be part of our team. “I don’t want to swim for Miss G,” she said.
