Following Fiamma
Miss G followed Fiamma,
Watched her with dark eyes
Hurrying down the corridor,
Brightening when Fiamma she spied.
The grass was dry and dusty now. The seringa tree drooped over the wooden love seat in the corner. The pale wisteria petals fell to the ground. We watched Miss G walk behind Fiamma as she sauntered down the stone steps and along the edge of the prefects’s square lawn. When Fiamma paused to look at a dry leaf stirring, a dove’s wings beating, a swirl of dust, Miss G paused, too, and stared at a boot or flecked an imaginary spot of lint from her jumpsuit. When Fiamma turned around, feeling Miss G behind her, Miss G hurried by.
It was clear to us, she was no longer satisfied to see Fiamma in her room in the evenings or in the afternoons at the pool, gazing at Fiamma as she did a back flip from the high board, her luminous eyes straining in the sun. It was not enough for her to turn her head back and forth, as though she were watching a tennis match, as Fiamma skimmed up and down the water, the spray splashing Miss G’s face, or to run up and down the edge of the pool through swimming heats, shouting her name like a rallying cry. It was not enough for her to feed Fiamma glucose with a spoon out of the blue-and-white tin between races or massage her feet, so that she did not get cramps, or rub her back with a towel. It was not even enough to call her by her Christian name.
If Fiamma were unable to sleep in the hot, dry nights, if she had one of her frequent attacks, her shallow cough keeping us awake, her breath coming in short, sharp pants, it was not into Mrs. Looney’s room that she went for comfort. Night after night Miss G would come to see if Fiamma were well. She would tell Fiamma to follow her to her room. She would allow her to sit in her white smocked nightdress in her wide wicker chair and sip hot cocoa or wine. She slipped Fiamma past Mrs. Looney’s room quietly and brought her back into the dormitory and sat on her bed and waited while she knelt and said her prayers in Italian and asked God to make her father well. Miss G tucked the sheet around her gently and arranged her mosquito netting over her bed carefully, so that she would not be bitten.
She made Fiamma promise that if anything were wrong she would come to her, but she never did. We would hear her ragged breathing and the pumping of the inhaler in the night. We could hear her tossing and turning. Miss G came so often that Fuzzie giggle, and Pamela jumped out of her bed and twitched her thin hips suggestively in the shadows, and all the rest whispered.
And now she had taken to following Fiamma about in the day as well. Ann watched her follow Fiamma along the pergola and said, “She’s cracking up.” We all watched her striding out, slightly flat-footed in her boots, blinking her dark eyes in the glare of light, hunting for Fiamma in the vast garden.
It was easy to lose a girl out there, and Fiamma always managed to disappear. We did not know where she went, or how she did it. Despite the rules, she was always going off on her own. We considered that she made no effort to fit in, to join our group. Before we could snub her, she snubbed us. Even worse, she seemed simply to ignore us. She was thinking of other things. She did not even notice our slights or understand our sarcasm. She smiled at us as she slipped by, dreaming, perhaps, of the cannas flaming orange and red at the edge of the terraced lawns of her villa by the lake.
It was not that she was unkind to us. She never raised her voice, or said anything hurtful. On the contrary, she was given to sudden and unexpected acts of kindness. When Bobby Joe had the chicken pox, Fiamma rose early and picked flowers and thrust them, still wet with dew, through the window at the san. She gave up the role of sleeping beauty to Meg in the school pageant even though the whole class had voted to give it to Fiamma. “You will do it much better than I will,” she told Meg, who afterward bore a grudge against her.
Fiamma spoke of honor and loyalty and fidelity, but we considered she was playacting, and thought her kindness was condescension and her talk of higher things showing off and silliness. “Her Royal Highness is holding forth again,” Di would say.
We thought her clothes pretentious and strange. In the evenings when we were allowed to change out of our uniforms, she wore dresses with labels from the big London shops: Liberty’s or Harrods, dresses that looked babyish and odd with flowers embroidered in the smocking on her budding bosoms. She wore shoes with bars across the insteps and buttoned with a buttonhook. She threaded silk ribbons through her thick plait. She liked to dress up and act, and she loved the films they showed us once a month in the assembly room through a flickering projector, which was always breaking down.
Fuzzie sometimes said, “Perhaps she is not used to girls, to young people; she is accustomed to being shut up in an old house with her peculiar father and some old servant. Perhaps she would like to be our friend.” But no one paid attention to Fuzzie.
We watched Miss G stride through the garden anxiously, hunting for Fiamma in all the cool, shady places where she sometimes hid from us: behind the hydrangeas, or in the dark, heavy branches of the loquat tree, which hung down so low they touched the smooth, dark earth.
We followed Miss G as she followed Fiamma. She went so far as to walk across the veld to the river and the graves in search of her. We were not allowed to swim the river because of the bilharzias, which infected many of the waters of that region, and the area around the graves was out-of-bounds, but as the heat increased in the summer months and the drought continued, and as the pool was not always available to the girls on the swimming team, we took to tucking up our tunics in our pants and running across the veld to linger in the shade of the wattles and the willows along the riverbanks. We would wade in the river, the brown, half-stagnant water rising up to our thighs.
None o of the elderly spinster teachers remonstrated. None of them came to look for us. None of them cared. They did not care about much, during those dog days. They dragged themselves into the classrooms in a state of disarray in the mornings, sitting on dusty platforms, their legs carelessly apart, with the girls giggling and peeping up their skirts. Even Miss Lacey sat mopping her pale brow, stunned by the heat, the dry air, the continuous drought, letting us read popular novels in class. A general lethargy had crept over the staff.
Ann said there was more wine drinking than there should have been in the staff room at night. She had heard raucous laughter. She had seen bottles. She had glimpsed Mrs. Keilly, the geography teacher, staggering down the corridor as though she had no idea where she was. Miss Nieven herself seemed permanently unavailable, shut up in the fastness of her cool study. It was said that she was ill, though no one was able to confirm this report. We were left to our own devices much of the afternoon.
When Miss G caught sight of us following her, she asked what we were doing, but before we could answer, she said, “Has anyone seen Fiamma?” putting her hand up to shield her eyes from the blinding glare. “Have you not seen her anywhere?”
“No,” Meg said, she had not. Could we not help in some way, perhaps, Meg asked, but we lowered our gaze, looked away so as not to see the expression of despair in Miss G’s eyes. We were ashamed of her shame.
The air near the river was heavy and redolent with the odors from the latrines and the thick smell of stagnant water. The water was evaporating fast, leaving the banks slimy and slippery, the drying mud gray and cracked. The sun burned down through the slated gray haze. Several girls from the matriculation class, who should have been studying, sat by the water, half naked, their bare feet dangling, their fair arms and legs and unprotected faces burning, their skin peeling in wide strips from their shoulders, exposing livid patches of purple. Sheila walked in the river bed with her tunic tucked up in her pants, the mud seeping up her calves, pretending to be a pirate.
“Over there,” Bobby Joe said suddenly, “there she is!” and pointed to where Fiamma lay in the river. She was lying naked in the dark water, her light hair loose, letting the sluggish current catch her up and carry her slowly along for a way, reaching out lazily to grasp at overhanging willow branches.
We heard Miss G cry half in warning, half in salute. “Oh! Fiamma!”
How Miss G made Fiamma talk of her home
It was late, and we were weary and hot, worn out with swimming, wine, Miss G’s words, and the increasing heat. We had been sitting cramped and uncomfortable on the floor in her room for hours, or, if we were lucky, perched on her bed.
Only Fiamma sat in the comfortable chair, staring absently before her. She had come in after everyone else and nodded off in her chair by the window. Only she was allowed to come in late; to swing slowly out of the swimming pool in the middle of swimming practice and stand, dreaming, in the sun, staring into the middle distance while the water ran off her white body in silver strands; to lie by the side of the pool during practice in the shade of the mimosa tree with her towel over her shoulders.
“How much land did you say your father owns?” Miss G asked her once again, leaning toward her in her wicker chair. Miss G was fascinated by the aristocracy. We often saw her reading women’s magazines with pictures of the Royal Family on the cover, holding the magazine under the desk when she had to supervise our homework. She claimed to have been presented to Prince Philip at court when she had won her medal. She told us that he was from a much better family than that of the Queen, whose ancestors could hardly speak English, coming as they did from a minor German family and having to change their name so that it sounded English.
It was Miss G who told us about Fiamma’s pedigree, the history of her family, her place in society. She loved more than anything to make Fiamma describe her house by the lake.
We sat before her and rolled our eyes and flared our eyebrows at one another, blew out our cheeks, sighed, and shifted about, but Fiamma went on and on in her singsong voice. Perhaps she was carried away by her own words, her memories of home, of happier days with her father, who was increasingly ill with bouts of high fever and delirium. While she spoke, Miss G moved her lips as though she were the one speaking.
Fiamma said her house was surrounded by beautiful, regular gardens with gravel paths and ancient trees and a stone wall. It was old and very large. One day it would all be hers, although she knew her mother would try to lay claim to it for her half sister’s sake.
There was a profusion of cut flowers in every room – roses and sweet peas and lilacs, lilies and peonies and baby’s breath. In the entrance hall there was a forest of flowers. It was like a hothouse, and there was the sweet smell of the many flowers mingled with some other smell, like that of incense. It made Fiamma think of funerals and weddings at the same time.
There were many old, dark paintings in niches, lit up with little lamps hung over the gold-embossed frames. Many were old still lifes where the half-peeled fruit or bleeding hare was barely visible. In one of the paintings two French sisters stare out of the canvas with a pleased expression, as though they are proud of what they are doing. Their hair is coiffed high on their head, and their stiff breasts are completely bare. One of the women holds the nipple of the other delicately between her curved white finger and thumb.
Her father also owned a famous collection of diamonds, Fiamma said. There was a famous yellow one and a famous blue one, which was supposed to bring bad luck. This was why they had come to our country: her father was buying diamonds for his collection. He had visited Kimberley before going on the game reserve where he had fallen ill.
When she stopped speaking, Miss G made her go on. “How many servants did you say there were, tending the garden?” she asked while we covered our yawns with our hands and shifted our weight uncomfortably on Miss G’s carpet or on the hard floor. Fiamma had never counted all the servants. She said she and her father ate dinner on the stone terrace, often alone. In the candlelight, her father looked so handsome in his cream linen trousers, his damp, dark hair brushed back smoothly. He asked her about her life and listened to her with great interest, as though she were a grown-up. He had read everything, she maintained, all the books we read at school. They talked about Rider Haggard and Kipling and Dickens. He knew all about Miss Havisham walking around and around the decaying bridal feast and about Uriah Heep’s damp hands. He, too, loved to watch her swim. When she was a small girl, he had taken her to see walled medieval towns, poppies growing through the stone, the sun setting over the sea at Naples. There she had broken a glass and cut her feet.
Fortunately, Miss G was not as interested in Fiamma’s father as she was in her house, her paintings, and her habits, and we were allowed to go to bed.
We left Fiamma behind in Miss G’s room, imagining her standing and staring out the window while Miss G paced up and down restlessly, in her khaki overalls, or worse.
Miss G made us suffer
“Is Fiamma here?” Miss G said, as we shuffled into her hot room in our pajamas and slippers, half asleep. It was late, but Miss G could not sleep, and so she had called us into her room to enlighten us. The windows were closed on the hot night, but we could hear the dry wind beating in the palms.
“Where is Fiamma? Why has she not come? I told you to bring all the girls on the team, Radfield,” Miss G said, looking anxiously around her room for Fiamma.
Di did not answer. Fiamma had mumbled something rude to her in Italian and refused to rise. “You’ll get me into trouble,” she had said, but Fiamma went back to sleep.
“She must be unwell, poor girl. Is she unwell? Now she swam well today,” Miss G said, looking at Fuzzie. “Why can’t you swim as well as she does, Burls?”
She told us to find a perch, picked up her glass of mixed red and white wine, and wiped her wide lips. We could see she was working herself up. She was trying to distract herself from her agony. For a moment we thought she might find someone else to distract her, but her gaze fell again on Fuzzie.
Her father, everyone knew, had contributed hundreds of pounds to the swimming team fund so that Miss G would put her on the team. Everyone knew, too, that she had been expelled from her former school, though no one knew why.
“Burls-the-Bear, excuse my French, but you swam like shit again today,” Miss G said, and we could not help laughing. We loved it when she swore and said, “Excuse my French.” Fuzzie blushed as bright pink as her pajamas; and her double chins pressed down upon her chest. She sat cross-legged, her fat knees pressing against the floor.
