At the small, hot station with the sun-blanched walls, Ann’s mother and stepbrothers emerged from the shadows of the russet tin roof. Ann saw them through Fiamma’s eyes: two louts with long khaki socks and short khaki shorts and thick, red necks and white eyelashes and small eye. Ann suddenly found herself hating them passionately as they stepped forward onto the platform, blinking their sheep’s eyes stupidly in the sunshine.
From the moment Fiamma stepped delicately off the train into the sunlight, with the brim of her panama hat turned down to shade her white skin, and the lovely oval of her face tilted slightly to the side, and her long, blond plait on her shoulder, Ann could see that her stepbrothers had fallen in love with her. They were in love as they both reached for Fiamma’s big leather suitcase at once. They were in love as they banged their thick heads together, laughing like idiots. They were in love as they squeezed their long legs and thick knees up to their chins, one on each side of her, in the back of the old, narrow Morris, which bumped over the dust strips all the way to the tobacco farm, where Ann’s father kept losing his tobacco crops to the locusts and the heat and drought.
Worse still, Ann saw her mother, as well, through Fiamma’s eyes. She had a maths degree from Oxford but had given it all up for love. She had married Ann’s father, an impoverished farmer with sandy hair and freckles and these two big, ungainly boys from a previous marriage. Ann saw her mother standing there in the unforgiving sunlight, looking harassed and shabby, her shirt coming out of her drab, gray skirt, her unsupported breasts drooping, and her mousy hair caught back and hanging mournfully on her neck. Ann was ashamed of her shame.
For her amusement Fiamma was taken riding with Ann’s mother, leaving Ann behind, for there were only two riding horses. When the horse stepped on a twig and startled a bird into rising suddenly in the air with a great flapping of wings and galloped off, she hung courageously on to its back and was praised for her excellent horsemanship. Ann’s mother never praised Ann for anything, despite her consistently high marks. She took Ann’s extraordinary brain for granted and always felt obliged to give the tastiest morsels of meat to the two big boys who were not hers.
She suggested the girls help her bake a cake. Fiamma lolled about the big farm kitchen, with its beams and thatched roof, striking interesting poses, one hand on her hip. She looked out the window at the chicken, clucking in the dusty sunlight, or she perched on the side of a table, swinging her slender legs slowly back and forth. When Ann’s mother asked her to break an egg into the mixing bowl, she took the egg and held it delicately between her finger and thumb and lifted it up to the sunlight and considered it for a while, as though it might be something precious. Then she broke it on the stone floor, not in the blue-and-white-striped mixing bowl, and stood there, looking slightly surprised, while Ann was made to clean it up.
Fiamma strode off for a walk one morning, taking only the two big ridgeback dogs, a book of Italian poetry, and a bottle of water up the koppie. In those days leopards often came down from the hills to steal a sheep. When she did not come back by dusk, the whole family was in a state of anxiety. The two brothers rushed around, pulling at their hair and searching everywhere, as did Ann’s father, when he came back up to the house from the land in the eveing.
It was he who found Fiamma lying idly under a baobab tree, resting her head on its roots reading her book of Italian poetry. “You shouldn’t have worried. The dogs would have looked after me,” she said, when Ann asked her what on earth had made her stay out for so long.
Worst of all were the dinners, Ann told us later. Fiamma sat between Ann’s brothers, wearing her lovely blond hair loose on her shoulders. It glowed in the kerosene lamplight, and her skin shimmered like milk, and her clear, blue eyes gleamed. Each time she lowered her lashes, the whole table seemed to tremble.
In the evenings she dressed herself up in the red silk kimono her father had brought her back from a business trip to Japan, all hand-embroidered with dragons and flowers. She wore little pointed silk slippers. Every time she reached across the table, as she did repeatedly, the sleeve of her kimono would fall away, revealing the way up her white arm to her budding bare bosom. The stepbrothers, and Ann’s father as well, angled their necks to look.
On her last night, he opened a bottle of white wine, for the first time Ann could remember, and told Fiamma stories about his experiences in the war that he had never told Ann. He looked more handsome than ever to Ann with his sandy hair and freckles and his big, boyish grin. Looking at Fiamma closely, he said, “Those were the happiest days of my life,” as Ann’s mother pursed her lips into a thin line.
Swimming at midnight with Miss G
Oh, Miss G, we will love you forever,
For you we will swim night and day.
Oh, Miss G, we will desert you never,
For you we will fight in every way.
In our dreams we heard Miss G calling us softly. She stood in the moonlight in the door of the dormitory. She made us get out of our beds in the white light of the moon. We rose, dazed, but in her surprising presence immediately awake and ready to follow. She said “Going swimming. Too hot to lie in bed.”
The summer term had hardly begun, and already our hair stuck to our sweating foreheads, our pajamas to our backs. We stumbled about half asleep, looking for our swimming suits in the dark. Miss G told us no to be so absurd. We would not need swimming suits; we sould swim in our birthday suits.
“Don’t wake Mrs. Looney,” Miss G said as we tiptoed down the neon-lit corridor past her door, leaning forward in an attempt to make ourselves small.
In the night-scented garden we huddled close. We whispered and giggled in the hot half darkness, following Miss G. She glanced behind with her dark, restless eyes. “Where’s the new girl?” she asked, while Fiamma lingered languidly, staring up at the vast jewel tree of stars. Finally she spoke up. “Present,” she said. She adopted the clipped accents of the English, though she had never been to England. She said “drawing room” for lounge and “sand shoes” for what we called takkies.” She did not end her sentences with “hey,” as we did, and she never used the word “man” as a form of address.
“One finger on my back, Fiamma,” Miss G commanded, as we climbed up the hill, going toward the pool in the pale light of the moon. Fiamma looked at Miss G for a moment, not understanding perhaps that Miss G would always have one of her girls pretend to push her up the hill with one finger to her back.
“Just one finger, to get me up the hill, dear,” Miss G reiterated, and smiled her munificent smile. Fiamma obeyed, walking behind and pushing Miss G up the hill with her second finger on her back.
“Take off your things, girls; go on,” Miss G said, as we gaped at the edge of the water, hesitating.
She unzipped her jumpsuit with one quick gesture, standing firm and lithe, her toes curling over the edge of the concrete. She was smooth and straight as a statue. Her bronzed skin was strange in the moonlight, the deeper dark of the shadow between her legs as quiet and mysterious as a shell.
“You’re going to catch a fly,” she told Fuzzie, who stood with her big mouth wide open.
“Do you think you’re going to be run over by a bus and found without your knickers?” she asked Pamela, who was later to be so good at sex but now clutched her pajama bottoms, protectively.
Miss G lifted her arms, rose on her toes, and dived into the water. She splashed us and told us to get in. “What are you waiting for, kingdom come?” she asked. Then she turned and struck out strongly across the water, reaching valiantly with long arms, kicking up a silver spray in the moonlight.
Fiamma was the first to step out of her pajamas, unashamed. Naked in the moonlight, her white body shone softly. She was slimmer than most of us and lighter-boned. She carried her head high, tilted slightly to one side as though it might roll off. Because we were reading The Tempest that year, Miss Lacey called her Ariel.
We watched her open her arms to the stars and the night, and enter the water, her glittering body all gathered together like a white, lacquered bud.
For a moment we stood in silence and watched her swim. She was more at ease in water than on land. She was not good at any of the land sports we played: hockey and netball and rounders, but we had often found her in the pool at dawn, as though she had been there all night, beating back and forth, sending up a rainbow spray into the air, while the sun striped the sky pink and orange and red.
Di muttered, “She swims bloody fast,” and threw off her dressing gown and pajamas. We all followed, throwing off our slippers into the wilting hydrangea bushes. We could see Pamela’s ribs. Even Fuzzie threw off her vest and stood clutching her plump little boosies, trembling with embarrassment.
We plunged in a pack behind Fiamma, diving into a dream. Di swam breaststroke, her long, strong arms and legs stretched, lithe and fast; Meg swam sidestroke swiftly beside Di, her beautiful head, long neck, and big breasts dipping and rising over the water. Mary plowed through the pool, splashing, doing fast butterfly, and Ann, quick and neat and efficient, swam backstroke, with little splash, while Fuzzie, keeping her face in the water, not taking a breath for long stretches, her body wriggling like a worm, somehow kept up with the rest of us, swimming a crazy crawl. Sheila, too, who always tried hard, swam as fast as she could to keep up. Fiamma, who swam crawl so much faster than anyone else, swam out ahead of us, alone.
In the dim light and the warm water, we slipped back to a timeless time: we were small again, swimming through water to catch Miss G’s phosphorescent, shining body. Soon we were swimming around her, under her, Fuzzie at her feet, Di at her head, Meg at her waist. Like minnows around the mother fish, we circled her, we brushed against her smooth bogy; we touched an arm, a leg, a toe; we felt her all over us in the water. She was swimming fast, turning her head back and forth, breathing in and out, beating the water evenly, surging beside us, and then she was lying still on her back, arms outstretched, staring up at the swirl of stars in the deep blue sky. We too lay on our backs and stared up at the stars. We thought we could hear the music of the spheres; the stars were singing to us; our mothers were chanting to us, we could hear the beating of Miss G’s heart. Our heads spun. We floated on beside Miss G in the moonlight and the mysterious quiet of the night, the lights of the school glimmering faintly in the distance, only the crickets chirping.
We saw our mothers waving to us from afar; we saw them coming toward us in the starlight, their silver skirts blown against their bodies; we heard them calling our names with surprised delight. We watched them bending over and reaching out their arms and catching us up and swinging us through the air. We were flying. We were light as light can be. We left our chlorine and the jasmine and the mysterious verbena scent of Miss G’s skin. We felt the water ripple against our naked bodies like air, and we watched our mother’s heads come down over us in the half dark to kiss our foreheads, our cheeks, our noses, our chins, and our lips, and their voices whispered, Good night, good night. The slapping and the splashing of the water kissed our faces, and the beating of our hearts said, Good night, good night.
Miss G was calling us softly. She made us get out of the water and stand by the edge of the pool in the pale white light. Water dripped from our hair. The moonshine was as warm as sun on our faces and on our new breasts. We stared at Miss G’s strong, brown legs, the shadow of the shaved hair at the tops. She told us we were her girls. Otherwise she felt far away, removed. She paused. A blankness had come over her face. She said, “I feel at such a distance from the rest of the world.”
What Miss G said about Fiamma
“Come up here and sit by me,” Miss G said, when Fiamma attempted to slip in late unnoticed and sit at the back of Miss G’s room. Her face had a bright, soft look, and when she said Fiamma’s name, her voice lingered. Fiamma moved slowly forward. “Burls, make room for her,” Miss G told Fuzzie, who had to get up and move elsewhere.
We all sat quietly, waiting for Fiamma to take the only comfortable chair and settle herself down. Meg sat very upright on the floor, her shoulders pressed back and her head held high. Di lounged on Miss G’s bed. Sheila sat on a hard stone step and squinted miserably. Mary sprawled on a stool with her legs open.
“Sit where I can see you. Perhaps you can save us, Fiamma,” Miss G said.
“I am just a swimmer,” Fiamma said.
“No, no false modesty here,” Miss G said. She said Fiamma had great style; she had speed and endurance; only she could stay the course (Miss G was fond of nautical metaphors); only Fiamma had attained a consistent level of excellence. She was dedicated to the sport of swimming, despite her breathing problems, her homesickness, her father’s illness. “You do not catch Fiamma lolling about in bed in the morning. She is up there, rising with the sun, in the water at first light, doing her fifty lengths,” Miss G said, looking critically at Meg, who was sitting in her faded pink pajamas, stretching her neck, head to one side, pursing her lips, trying to look like Brigitte Bardot.
Meg slept heavily and late at school, with her dark hair hiding her flushed face, her body sprawled beneath her thin sheet, because she had to rise early at home in Barberton in the Eastern Transvaal. She was obliged to help with the family chores in the humid heat on holidays. She had to make the morning tea for her mother and father, help dress her little sisters, hang all the washing to dry, heap the furniture into the middle of the lounge and polish the floors.
“Unlike Burls, who never gets her racing turns right, Fiamma can turn in a flash. Why can she turn so fast, while Burls takes her sweet time and creates such a lot of unnecessary splash? Watch how Fiamma does it,” Miss G advised Fuzzie, who sat pressing her fat knees to the floor. “Of course, if you were to lose a few pounds, now, that would also help, you would not have so much mass to move.” Fuzzie blinked her close-set, green eye.
Only Fiamma could make a straight enough dive, Miss G pointed out to Mary, who was clumsy but quick, who had trouble keeping her long body in a straight line and her feet together when she entered the water.
“As for Lindt, she’s not willing to take a risk: too cautious, too crafty, too busy weighing the odds.”
Miss G said only Fiamma could open her arms wide enough to the sky when she swallow-dived. Only Fiamma was willing to five her all, to throw herself into the air with reckless abandon. What was the matter with the Trevelyan twins? She wanted to know. Why did they not have the necessary spring, the surge, the courage? What was wrong with Lizzie? What made her so precious? Why was she trying to be so perfect? What was wrong with all the rest of us? Why were we so ordinary, so dull, so reluctant to take a chance, to do something reckless and wild? Why did we leave Fiamma to blaze our trail?
