Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

No decision could be made by Pauline and Joe alone. She did not know whether to write to the father, to Len. It was not proposed to pack the girl off to Rhodesia, to end up a glorified waitress, like the new wife. — She’s still Ruthie’s child. — For Pauline, if love failed, became incomprehensible, there was still justice. It was necessary to speak to Olga. It had to be done; hadn’t Olga always said she had as much right to Hillela as Pauline? Olga, too, bore the charge of Ruthie’s child. Olga must face facts, like anyone else, once or twice in her life.

Everything Pauline found it impossible to be, at home, now, she was restored to the moment she found herself in Olga’s presence, in Olga’s room with the Carpeaux Reclining Nude and (an acquisition she noted with the subliminal attention that stores such things) a gilt-turbanned Blackamoor holding up a lamp. — Sasha and Hillela have been sleeping together. Don’t ask me the details. They don’t help at all. It happened; we know; that’s all there is to it.—

Olga didn’t want to believe what she was told so bluntly; Olga wanted to get out of believing. They almost quarrelled. How could Pauline say such a thing, and about her own child, too — as if it were nothing! Matter-of-fact! That’s all there is to it . Pauline was so hard . Pauline grinned shockingly at her sister. — What do you want me to say? Weep and wail? I’ve come to discuss what we ought to do next, as Ruthie’s sisters. These things happen, they happen within closed walls, like these, you can’t shut them out as you do so much else. They are in the family, Olga.—

— To think she grew up with Clive! And they’re still together quite often! He’s teaching her to drive — but Clive’s a very steady, sensible boy—

— Of course, all parents are quite positive that the way they’ve brought up their children has produced models of virtue. I don’t excuse Sasha, I don’t exonerate him, it’s all beside the point. And he’s no concern of yours. We’re talking about Hillela.—

Olga had a loose cashmere jacket over her shoulders, there was underfloor heating in her house and no need for the bulky winter clothing Pauline wore. Olga stood up giddily, taking courage in one certainty. — I can’t take her, Pauline. — Pauline watched her pressing her oval red nails into the flesh of her slim arms.

— Even though Clive is so sensible. But Olga, no-one expects it, you handed her over to me the moment adolescence arrived, don’t you remember? But now I’m asking you: what about her future? What do you suggest?—

Olga dug her nails testingly into her flesh because she was afraid of telling Arthur. All the time she was talking to her sister, she was anticipating the dread of telling Arthur. She feared something from him, and did not know what it was until it came: —A little tart, like her mother. I could always see it. Bad blood.—

Olga, who had tears of excitement in her eyes when she bid successfully at an art auction, who cried at school prize-givings, did not burst into tears but took on the force that appalled her in Pauline. — Like me. My bad blood. My sister, you bastard. You talk about breeding. I had to teach you how to hold a knife and fork properly. This house is full of beautiful things I work so hard to find and you never even look at. You bring people here you don’t know how to talk to. D’you know how many times I’m ashamed of you?—

Pauline and Olga met again, with Joe as adviser; Arthur had business engagements and did not appear. Olga clung to the idea of getting Len to come down from Salisbury; this was not something to be discussed over the telephone, and a letter would be such a shock to him, poor devil, because he wouldn’t be able to respond immediately, ask questions. Pauline and Joe were sceptical — Olga was stalling, as to be expected. Len would come, perhaps the solution already existing would be found; maybe boarding-school, once again, was the answer that would serve. Ah, and in the holidays? Where would she go in the holidays?

But Hillela herself provided the solution. She was leaving school. Yes. She had a job, ‘somewhere to stay’; she was going to move in with other young people who had rented a house.

It was Joe she told. Joe who had bought her a guitar during the court lunch-break in Pretoria. She knocked and came into his study, as she had done so many times, with a cup of tea, and when he murmured thanks, she told him.

— Not before matric! What can you do without matric? Your whole life, Hillela. You’ll prejudice your whole life! You can’t do that! For god’s sake, what do you want to become of you! It’s only just over another year—

She gave him a schoolgirl’s answer that made it easy for them both: —I’m sick of school.—

The pen he held between second and third fingers seesawed, tapping at the desk. There was a strange sad echo between them. — You’re in a hurry to live, Hillela. You don’t stop to think.—

She chewed at the inside of her cheek, and looked at him boldly, openly, appealingly — he never decided which it had been. He was ashamed to see she understood that although he used the present tense, he was referring to what he and she could not talk of, in the immediate past.

What could they be expected to have done about Hillela at that time? Her father had been reached after some difficulty; he no longer lived at the flat, his second wife had left him and he was working as a mine storeman up in Ndola. Len was clearly in no position or state of mind to take any responsibility. So there was nothing for it but to let a seventeen-year-old girl think she was the one who knew what to do.

Pauline believed it her duty, for Ruthie’s sake, whatever might have happened, to see the place where the girl was going to live. Hillela took her obediently to an old house with peeling wallpaper, sash windows propped open with rolled newspapers, and in the bathroom (Pauline asked to see the bathroom) a lavatory bowl stained the colour of iodine. Olga, through Pauline, offered a small monthly allowance, to be sure the girl would have a roof over her head. The girl did not refuse; it was arranged that Olga would open a bank account in her name. It is unlikely that she ever saw Olga again; Olga could not very well invite her to Friday evening dinners at Arthur’s house. Pauline telephoned, for Ruthie’s sake, every week or two, while she could reach Hillela where she worked in some mail-order business, but she did not last long in that job and there was no information about where she was to be found next. She had been told that if ever she had any problems, she should come to Joe — problems were Joe’s profession, he could deal with them disinterestedly; that was the one advantage she had left them to offer her. It would have been against Pauline’s principles to forbid any child of hers anything, but Carole was kept so busy between school and the communal activities she shared with her mother that there couldn’t have been much time or opportunity for her to seek out her cousin. And Sasha — Sasha was out of the way at school. When he came home for the Christmas holidays, Hillela had left her first job, moved from the old house, and — unless she had written to him? Hillela had never been known to write — it was unlikely he could seek her out, even if he had ‘had the heart to’.

That was Joe’s phrase, when they worried about the probability, and Pauline was somehow offended by it. What harm had been done Hillela? In that house, Pauline and Joe’s, she had been treated like one of their own, as long as this was possible. Pauline could not resorb into mental balance the confusion of that Saturday night’s return from the mountains — the eagles’ air, so easily invaded by cackle of a cheap little radio, the fear of the State and police that roused a whole resource of heightened alertness, craft and strategy working above daily life, and then the unbelievable sight that stared from within the safety and familiarity of that daily life — a child’s bed with the cheerful blanket crocheted by a black women’s self-help group, on the floor the shirt she chose for him only last week, the telescope bought and kept concealed as a loving surprise for a birthday; the house cat purring in the aghast vacuum. Pauline did not allow herself to think about the last time in her life she had felt a like confusion. That was the sort of trite matching for Olga to go in for — Pauline had a lifetime of clear-headedness, passionate desire to face facts, in between, separating her from the ancient history when she was a young woman and their sister Ruth forsook them all, everything they knew, for a dockside nightclub in Lourengo Marques. Let Olga and Arthur compare the mother and daughter, if it would make them feel any better. Pauline loathed sanctimonious self-justification. She never abrogated her responsibility for that stage in Hillela’s life. Never. It was not because of Ruthie they had failed with Ruthie’s daughter.