Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

— Hillela, the best thing’ll be to go back, now, you know that.—

He felt her attention all down the side of his body.

— Not to the school. Of course, you can’t … that’s over. Back to Johannesburg. It’s decided that’s the best thing. Olga knows the good schools, somewhere you’ll like. I’ve discussed it all with Olga.—

The rocks, passing, passing, were still balanced. They leaned out far, they held, sometimes on a single precarious point of contact, in tension against the pull of the earth that wanted to bring them crashing down.

— It wouldn’t be fair to Billie. She’s on her feet for long hours and she’s very tired when she gets home — you know that. And with me out of town all week. The flat is small … it really would be too much for her if we found a bigger place. Billie’s young, and she’s right … she can’t be expected to take on …—

He slowed to turn a corner. His face came round full upon her. — The two of us.—

*

Arthur, Olga’s husband, acknowledged her presence while taking off his glasses and cleaning the inner corners of his eyes between thumb and forefinger; when he replaced the glasses she was a closed subject. The elder cousins had the reined air of being under constraint not to question her about what had happened. The innocents, the servant Jethro and little Brian, surrounded her with pleasure at her unexpected arrival. In the kitchen, grinning and chewing the Italian salami left on plates cleared from the diningroom: —Is very, very good you come to us in Jo’burg now. — Moving back and forth about his mother like a cat turning against table legs: —Is Hillela staying for always? In school-time, too? Is she going to boarding-school, is she going to be home every afternoon with Clive and Mark and me?—

Olga had a series of bright and authoritative prepared statements. — She’s going to live in Johannesburg. We don’t know yet if she’ll board.—

The rose was in its vase and the guest sweet-dish filled. Olga came in and closed the door behind her. She was the one who had explained menstruation as natural and sexual intercourse as beautiful, when the right time had come for information about these. Olga was the one who had paid for her teeth to be brought into conformation, bought her clothes chosen in good taste, and cared for her hair and skin so that she should grow up pleasing in the way Olga herself was and knew to be valued.

Olga’s lips pressed together until the flesh whitened to a cleft on either side of her nose and she began to cry. She became even more distressed when she saw the girl was afraid of this amazing evidence of disorder in an adult who knew how to arrange everything comfortably and safely. She drew Hillela to sit down beside her on that bed with its little heart-shaped cushions, quilted satin coverlet and posy-printed muslin skirts, and gripped her hands.

— I wish I knew what I did wrong — what I didn’t do for you, darling Hilly. But I never understood Ruthie — I adored her but I couldn’t … I just never … And now I’ve let my sister down again, I know it. It’s not your fault, I don’t blame you for anything, please believe that, I blame myself , you are like my own child, but sometimes you can’t do the right thing even for your own — you see that with lots of parents. There must be something I should have done, something I didn’t understand. But I just have to face the fact that maybe we’re not right for you … You know your Aunt Pauline and I don’t have much to do with each other — not because we don’t love each other, we do, we do! — and anyway we both still love our sister whatever anyone says about her — but maybe, well, we agree perhaps you’ll fit in better with Pauline’s family. Pauline doesn’t like Arthur, or our kind of friends or this house — you must have sensed it, even in the few times the whole family has been brought together. She thinks (a cough of laughter among the tears) — she says what you need is ‘a breath of air’, the kind we don’t breathe here. So you see how it is. Maybe you’ll have more to occupy your interests. Keep your mind busy. Pauline leads a more varied life — oh yes, I’m the first to admit it. My temperament is different. In that way, she and Ruthie were alike — adventurous. But of course with Pauline, I mean Pauline’s serious-minded … Anyway — it’s out of the question you should be in the care of someone like Billie.—

Adults go on talking, all through childhood the monologue never stops.

When she who people say was once Hillela thinks of that time — and no-one who knew her then knows whether she ever does — that is all she retains of it. The tantrum that blew up inside her so bewilderingly that morning has long since been transformed, as electricity goes through pylons from voltage to voltage astride space and in time, and merged as the energy of other passions. Only those who never grow up take childhood events unchanged and definitive, through their lives. It is only in the memory of someone who claims to be her Aunt Olga that the actual tantrum exists, in static anecdotal repetition, in its form of a mysterious defence of Billie , Billie of all people! — poor Len’s tarty second wife.

Clumsy with emotion, wrenching her hands out of Olga’s, the girl knocked against the bookshelf and sent down one of a pair of charming 18th-century Imari cats Olga had thought to put in the room during the last school holidays because the girl was fond of cats: The little porcelain animal fell on the long-haired carpeting that was soft under bare feet in a bedroom, but the upraised paw and one end of the gilded bow on the collar broke.

Olga agitated defensively, as if the destruction lying there were not a loss but an accusation made by Olga against herself. — It doesn’t matter. Oh I didn’t mean to upset you … and over Billie … Doesn’t matter. It can be put together again. Oh darling, I’m so sorry! Please!—

— You don’t have to watch out for any treasures here, anyway. — Pauline trod on silverfish that ran from the pages of stacked journals she moved to make room for the girl’s clothes in a cupboard.

— It’s going to be repaired.—

But Pauline intended to start the girl off the way she should go on; it didn’t help anybody to be protected from the facts. — Things like that can’t be put together again. Oh yes, you can glue them, they look the same as before, to you and me; but their value for people like Olga is gone. They can’t take pleasure in anything that hasn’t got a market value. If they can’t look at it and think: I could get so-and-so for that if I wanted to sell it.—

— So now Olga won’t be able to sell it?—

— You don’t have to worry your young head over that. Olga doesn’t need to sell anything; it’s just that she needs to own things whose price is set down in catalogues.—

Pauline and Joe’s house was not nearly so beautiful as Olga’s, and fewer services were provided. As if still at boarding-school, Hillela had to make her own bed in the room she shared with her cousin Carole; there was no Jethro in white suit serving at table, and no cook in the kitchen. Bettie, the maid-of-all-work, was helped by members of the family, the swimming pool was old and pasted your flesh with wet leaves. Alpheus — son of the weekly washerwoman — lived in what had been the second garage (Pauline’s old car stood in the yard) and doubled as gardener at weekends: Joe was giving him a chance as a clerk in his law office and Pauline was paying for him to take correspondence courses.

But in the shared bedroom a kind of comfort the girl had not known before built up. Categories kept separate by the institutional order of boarding-school and the aesthetic order of the room with the fresh flower were casually trampled down. Clothes, schoolbooks, hairbrushes, magazines, face creams, Coke bottles, deodorants, posters, tampons, oranges and chocolate bars, records and tennis rackets — all were woven into an adolescents’ nest nobody disturbed. Pauline respected its privacy but assumed participation in the adult world. Before Olga’s dinner parties the children were given their meal in another room; Carole had been accustomed, since she had wandered in sucking her bottle, to dipping in and out of conversations among her parents’ friends in gatherings that cropped up at meals, in the livingroom or on the verandah. There was nothing to giggle over hotly in secret, in this house, because sexual matters were discussed openly as authority was criticised.