“You don’t?” Meg gasped in disbelief, watching her pump.
Fiamma suffered from a condition that made her use the inhaler. From time to time she placed it in her mouth and pumped on the soft brown bag. The other teachers said she had asthma and allowed her to climb out of the pool and lie down in the shade with her towel over her back or to sit on the bench and run her fingers through her blond, wavy hair, reading a book in gym in her bloomers, which showed off her slender legs, while we sweated and groaned on the hard floor, vaulting over the pommel horse or doing endless jumping jacks, sit-ups, and press-ups, which were supposed to combat any excessive interest in sex. We believed Fiamma was pretending most of the time, using her supposed illness to avoid whatever she wished to avoid.
“I like swimming fast. It feels like flying,” she told us. She swam until she felt one with the water. She liked its mysterious wound in her ears – a sound like music, she said. She like the way her mind floated free. She was never tired out swimming, except when she had her asthma attacks. On the contrary, swimming invigorated her. She was addicted to it, she said, it was like a need for air. If she could not swim she became restless, bored, edgy. Swimming was not a sport for her; it was where you could be who you really were. Besides, it was the only place where you could be on your own in this school Fiamma said she found the lack of privacy unbearable.
We were not supposed to go off on our own. It was considered dangerous. We were not even allowed to lock our doors. The toilets and the small white cubicles where we washed for exactly ten minutes – baths were no longer allowed because of the drought – remained unlocked. We even took brief showers together in the bathroom under the stairs – Meg, Ann, and Di, all together, scorching themselves under the old shower that was impossible to regulate. Wherever we went, we heard the teachers’ low voices and the high-pitched ones of girls. We were together day and night, eating, washing, learning our lessons, reading, sleeping, whispering in the dark, even going to the lavatory in the stalls where we could see feet and heads and talk to one another, while we strained and pushed. It would be unbearable here without the swimming, Fiamma said.
She told us she had no memory of learning to swim. Her father, who had been a championship swimmer himself, even swimming the channel, had thrown her into the water before she could walk. She kept a photo of him in his full-length swimsuit in a beaten-silver frame by her bed. His head was flung back, his dark, wet hair swept from his forehead. There was a towel slung around his neck. He appeared to be laughing.
She had no desire to compete in races, Fiamma said. In all her life she had never had to compete. She had grown up alone in her father’s house with only an old servant for company. She had seen her mother and her half sister infrequently on visits to Milan, and neither of them could compete with her. Her father hated the one and refused to recognize the other, rarely mentioning her name.
Furthermore, she told us, she liked to swim because she had been found near the water, or so she was told by the old servant. He was a teller of tales. He was cleaning the changing huts near the lake, he said, when he heard cries. He was afraid some peasant had tried to drown a kitten, as they often did, weighing them with heavy stones and throwing them into the lake, where they would sink down into the dark of the soft silt of the lake bed. Instead, he found a newborn baby in a basket. “Like the story of Moses in the bulrushes. Only there was no massacre of babies, just a not from my mother in my shawl, which read, “Returning that which belongs to you,” she told us in her deadpan voice.
How Fiamma came to join the team anyway
The long desks stretched all the way across the laboratory. There was a faint smell of smoke and methylated spirits in the dusty air. Ann was standing very straight and small in front of the class and succinctly and clearly explaining some experiment that no one else had understood when the laboratory door swung open abruptly, and Miss G put her dark head inside. She needed to see Fiamma urgently, Miss G said to Mrs. Willis, the science teacher.
Miss G had been Mrs. Willis’s particular friend, but now she hated Miss G passionately. Mrs. Willis, the science teacher, had told us that the story about Miss G’s parents was utter nonsense, that it was like something out of Dickens, and that Miss G’s parents were very much middle-class and doted on Miss G and had sacrificed to send her to the best schools in Wales, where she continuously broke all the rules and was sent home. Mrs. Willis maintained Miss G had been shut up in a mental asylum for a while, that she had been institutionalized, held in a straitjacket. Her parents died alone and unloved but respectably in an old-age home, according to Mrs. Willis.
Miss G had told us that Mrs. Willis was a lesbian. She had seen Mrs. Willis in the driveway making out with Miss Lacey, the English teacher whom Yeats had once loved.
Everyone said Mrs. Willis was very brilliant. She was sent down from Oxford because of some mysterious scandal, but she still received parcels of books with strange titles from England. Ann maintained Mrs. Willis read Marx and was probably a Communist, and Fuzzie that she was a spy, but Fuzzie always exaggerated. Di believed that Miss G was right, and that Mrs. Willis was a lesbian.
Whatever Mrs. Willis’s sexual preference, she was always leaving us to cope on our own with our Bunsen burners, endangering our lives, while she disappeared into the science closet to have a quick drag on a cigarette. She wore a white coat without bothering to do up the bottom buttons, so that you could see her slim knees in her pale gray stockings. She was pacing before the blackboard, a piece of chalk in her hand, listening to Ann explain the experiment, while no one else except Mary listened, at the moment when Miss G put her head in the door to ask for Fiamma.
Mrs. Willis hissed at Miss G in her raspy, smoker’s voice, “I am in the middle of a science lesson, if you don’t mind,” and gave her a furious look with her small, gray eyes. Miss G glanced over the rows of long desks that stretched from one side of the room to the other. Fiamma sat by the wall with her head down on the desk, apparently asleep.
Miss G said, “I don’t think Fiamma will miss much of your science lesson. This won’t take more than a minute. It’s urgent.” She told Fiamma to come with her. Fiamma lifted her head and looked up blankly, glancing from Mrs. Willis to Miss G, and blinked her big eyes. Then she shrugged her shoulders with her usual indifference and rose, yawning as she made for the door, almost knocking over a Bunsen burner as she went.
Fiamma was always careless in class. She wandered in late and forgot to bring the right books or dropped them on the floor while someone was reading aloud. She was always losing her pen and borrowing one from Sheila, who had several in preparation for her future career. Fiamma rarely bothered to answer questions, or when she did, answered the previous one. She always got up the moment we were dismissed, sauntering out without her books. She regularly fell asleep over her homework in the eveing, her head in her arms. Yet the teachers would watch her, smiling fondly and indulgently, without ever scolding her.
Still, she could answer questions no one else could about history, and she surprised us with her knowledge of the ways of the world. She possessed odd information: she knew about Garibaldi and the Carbonari and Mazzini and about some old Italian king who had said, “Avanti Savoia!” She played the Moonlight Sonata so that we were moved to tears, but she did not care for it. When she recited Keats’s “The Eve of Saint Agnes” at the drama competition, she forgot her lines halfway through, but the judge commended her on the sweetness and musicality of her voice.
Under the loquat tree at break we formed a circle around her and questioned her. She told us how Miss G had persuaded her to join our swimming team.
In her splendid, sunny room with the big photos of her dead Welsh terrier on the walls, Miss G told Fiamma to sit down in the comfortable armchair and offered her a glass of wine, which she declined. She asked Fiamma if she were happy at our school. Fiamma said she had not expected to be happy here, and hoped not to have to stay for more than a few months. Miss G knew it must be very lonely for Fiamma so far away from her home. She knew how Fiamma must feel, for she, too, was a foreigner, after all, and she, herself, was often lonely out here.
Fiamma said nothing. What was there to say, after all? Then Miss G asked if there was not something – any little thing – she could do to make Fiamma’s stay more comfortable, to make her feel more at home. Fiamma said she thought for a while and then confessed that there was one thing she particularly missed.
And what was that? Miss G wanted to know, leaning forward eagerly, her elbows on her knees. Fiamma said it was her breakfasts: the crispy sweet rolls and coffee with steamed milk, brought to her in bed on a tray by the old servant. He always tapped the spoon against the cup to wake her, before he entered. Then he would throw up the shutters to let the sun stream in pools into the room.
“If you promise to swim for me, I will see what I can do,” Miss G said, raising her eyebrows and wagging a finger at her, smiling, as Fiamma left the room.
In the long, narrow dining room with its odor of oranges and burned porridge, we cast hostile glances at Fiamma as the servant brought her special breakfast on a tray: sugarcoated white rolls and coffee with steamed milk, served on blue-and-white willow-pattern china. We whispered about Your Royal H – as we shoveled the dark, lumpy porridge called maltabella into our mouths, washing it down with weak, milky tea from tin mugs that scalded our lips. Even Darling Donovan, who had such a sweet tooth, managed to complain that it was just too unfair.
Now our team had thirteen girls, not twelve. Inevitably, when we lined up double-file to walk to the bus, one of us would be left out. Inevitable, as best friends were formed, one of us would have to be rejected.
Was Ann Fiamma’s best friend?
Ann did not want to be Fiamma’s friend, but she had little choice. No one else wanted to be her friend. No one invited her out on Sundays, when we were allowed to go home. No one invited her for half term. No one ever invited her, because of her small, protuberant eyes, her shiny forehead, and her stilted conversation: she could not chatter inconsequentially, as the rest of us did, but could only hold forth about the French Revolution and the Rights of Man.
“Your head’s always in the clouds,” Miss G told Ann, as they walked under the heavy leaves of the oak trees along the driveway to the bus. “You ought to think about more practical things, Lindt. For example, your skin. You ought to take care of it. Looks are more important than thoughts, you know. Why don’t you ask Sister to give you some medicated soap for your blackheads, my dear,” she suggested, looking at Ann’s blighted nose and cheeks. “And, I feel obliged to tell you, your nails are not very clean, either, dear. Your fingers are always stained with ink, and you have a big blue bump on your writing finger from pressing too hard.”
Miss G told her to pair off in the future with Fiamma. “Walk with her from now on, Lindt; it will do you good. Study her. Learn to put your shoulders back, as she does. Carry your head high. Imitate the way she carries herself. It will improve your prospects.”
But Ann could not carry her head high, as Fiamma did, and though she brushed her hair as much as she could and rubbed her skin with Trushay, her hair remained dull and her big forehead shiny and bulbous as ever. She could not write a line that looked the way Fiamma’s did, flowing in royal blue ink with rhythmic Italian curves.
Miss G wanted to make sure that Fiamma was never the thirteenth girl, the one rejected. She was determined to spare her any unhappiness. But she was punishing both of them, unwittingly, in throwing them together. She probably thought Ann and Fiamma would talk about books, never bothering to notice that they did not like the same ones.
Fiamma was always reading. Like all of us she read Keats and Wordsworth and Browning, but she also read Italian and French novels of which we had never heard. These, even Ann did not know.
Sitting in the long, narrow dining room in the glare of early morning light, after breakfast, digesting lumpy porridge, we listened hopefully as the prefect read out the names of girls who had received letters or parcels. We hoped for our names to be called, so we could walk up to the head table to pick up our items. Fiamma’s name was called every day. So every day she sauntered through the crowded dining room to pick up the fat letters or parcels of dried fruit and cake and nuts from Italy; the chocolates called kisses in large boxes with many layers; the brown-paper parcels covered with stamps, which she opened after breakfast on the lawn, carelessly letting the paper fall to the ground; the piles of gold-embossed, leather-bound books in Italian of French in beautiful, rich colors with silk ribbons in them to mark her progress. She smelled their pages as though they were flowers.
What were the books about? We wanted to know. Fiamma told us Maupassant’s story of the fat prostitute who is made to sleep with a Prussian, even though he is the enemy; Manzoni’s story of the nun who is closed in the convent against her will; Dante’s story of the visit to the underworld led by a slip of a girl. She shut the book with her finger between the pages and quoted the first verses of Dante’s Inferno by heart in Italian in her singsong voice, when all most of us could quote were the lines we had been forced to learn as a punishment from “The Ancient Mariner”: “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
Ann, whose mother and father were too busy on the farm to write and too poor to send parcels, borrowed her books from the library. She preferred history and philosophy and psychology, not poetry and novels, but she was obliged to ride on the bus beside Fiamma when we went to the swimming meets or on our rare visits to town. She was obliged to walk with her when we walked back to the bus, double-file. They walked side-by-side in uneasy silence. The role of the reject was left to Fuzzie, who was confused anyway.
Fiamma’s visit to Ann’s home
Miss G called Ann to her room and suggested she invite Fiamma home for the short spring holidays. Apparently, Fiamma’s father had come down with a bout of malaria during his visit to a game reserve and was in the hospital somewhere, delirious with fever. What could Ann say? She asked us. She knew it would be disastrous, but it was much worse than she had envisaged. To start with, there was the long, slow train ride together all the way to Salisbury, with Fiamma just sitting there, staring sulkily out the window at the veld and complaining about the heat, or reading obscure Italian novels, or writing endless letters to her father, lifting her slim, silver fountain pen to her lips and writing smoothly in royal blue ink.
