Whitethorn (72 page)

How very much I've come to long
For a gentler style of loving,
For tenderness and slow, soft ways,
Not grunts 'n' groans 'n' shovin'!

If only he would sense my mood
Then we could share the fun,
And bed would be a loving place
Where both of us would come!

And so two years went by very quickly and I graduated in law with honours and was awarded the university medal and, more importantly, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford that I was to take up in October the following year. Pirrou was anxious that I do a year with one of the many prestigious law firms that had offered me a place as a junior in the hope that I would rejoin them after I returned from England.

However, I had decided on quite a different course for the year that I would be free. I suppose this must sound strange, even contradictory. But despite all the culture and splendid occasion, the high society and the wealth I'd been integrated into, the social metamorphosis I'd undergone and Pirrou's careful tutelage to achieve all of this, I was left with an anxiety and concern that I was losing the sense of where I came from and who I intrinsically desired to be as an adult.

In effect, I was forgetting my roots. Now, you might even ask, ‘Wasn't that the whole idea?' Well, yes and no, my roots were not only The Boys Farm, they were also the high mountains and the
Volk
. I had been fortunate to have the lovely rose-scented Marie, Mevrou Booysens, now Doctor Van Heerden's wife, and the indefatigable and wonderful Miss Phillips as the equalising element in my life as a child.

These three generous women allowed me to understand that kindness was an emotion that, when given unselfishly by a woman to a child, became the precursor to understanding that a notion such as love does exist. That love wasn't just between a man and a woman, that it was a universal condition of the heart.

Then there was Sergeant Van Niekerk, who had defended and protected me. His older brother, the headmaster, gifted me with a way to regard myself, ‘To thine own self be true', together with a compendium of words I would never conquer. Miss Phillips, who discovered and nurtured my intellect and so opened up infinite possibilities for my future life. Doctor Van Heerden, whose stolen red book and patronage had trained my memory and given me protection. Frikkie Botha and the brotherhood were also a part of who I was, they taught me that humans, despite their shortcomings, are worthwhile whatever their status in life. Although I had only known the three of them for a long day on the road, Dippie, Stoffie and Auntie, together with Mr Patel and Mr and Mrs Naidoo, had also shown me a generosity of the spirit I had never once witnessed among Johannesburg's rich and important people. Finally, there was Mattress waiting for me in heaven. He had given me comfort and the gift of Tinker's life as well as love and friendship when I lacked all three.

All the glitz and the glory of university and the pampering by the
cognoscenti
, in effect, was placing me at odds with those essential values in my past. I was living in a city that had managed the dichotomy of rich and poor, black and white so completely that people such as Pirrou could live their entire lives oblivious to the misery surrounding them. As an example, Pirrou had a housemaid called Martha, a laughing, happy woman who cooked and cleaned and with whom I would sometimes share a cup of tea in the kitchen. Martha had been in her employ for five years, yet it was me who told Pirrou that her maid rose at three in the morning, had two children going to school, and lived in a two-room shanty with one other family of four in Soweto. Before she left home she would iron the children's school clothes, leave their breakfast for them, make their school lunch and then leave in a crowded commuter train at four-thirty in the morning to arrive on time to wake Pirrou with a cup of tea at seven-thirty. She left at six to get home just before nine at night. It was not that Pirrou was uncaring and unkind, it simply never occurred to her to ask about the welfare of her maid. Martha was clean, honest, seemed happy in her presence, was a good cook and cleaner and well paid by the standards of most maids and so, in Pirrou's mind, each had admirably fulfilled their side of the employer/employee contract.

And so in my year off I decided to go to the copper mines in Northern Rhodesia where copper bonuses were being paid to young guys to work underground with high explosives. I could earn more in one year working in an isolated copper mine than I would in five years at Polliack's or as a junior in a law firm. I was conscious of what I was giving up, and even that it might ultimately prove to be to my disadvantage, but I needed time and space to reconcile who I was and what I had learned that was worth keeping.

I had discovered that the very rich are unforgiving, accustomed to getting their own way in most things and judgemental in all. To some real extent Pirrou and her coterie of wealthy and influential friends had an almost proprietorial interest in me. As inevitably happens, those with whom Pirrou commonly associated had learned my background and felt as though they should be a part of my future. A joint rehabilitation program for which they could be seen to be responsible or were able to assume the credit.

Of course to some extent they were correct, they had all helped to smooth the edges, modify my vowels, remove some of the guttural intonations, the strong Afrikaner-speaking English accent I had naturally acquired at The Boys Farm, and in various ways turned me into a sophisticated young man. I was grateful to all of them, but stopped short of feeling beholden. Handbaggery on the arm of a powerful and charismatic woman is very hard work if you refuse to capitulate and become the invisible silent partner, and instead are determined to give as much as you receive. The time had come to reaffirm those values I believed were important to me (‘To thine own self be true') and to walk away from that which was not. More specifically, walk away from those things that were over, where the lessons in life had been learned, and the hardest of these was going to be the wonderful as well as potentially redoubtable Pirrou, who had given me so very much of infinite value.

One other thing occurred that had persuaded me to break away. As I was writing my final-year examinations at university, Tinky became unwell. I needed to wrap him in a bit of a blanket when I put him in his butter crate on the bike, and he no longer barked imperiously at the hoi polloi dogs on the pavement, and he slept most of the day. I took him to a vet who gave him a thorough examination. I had been worried for some time because he had become very grey around his snout and eyes, and was beginning to look and move like an old dog. He appeared to have arthritis in his left hip joint and had developed a constant though mild cough.

When he had first come to the flat he had a bad smell, despite my bathing him regularly. I'd taken him to the vet then too and the poor little blighter had almost everything a neglected fox terrier could have, with the fortunate exception of mange. He needed two teeth extracted and some work on his other teeth and as a consequence had very bad breath, his ears were waxy and infected and he had an anal gland infection that added to his malodorous condition. Finally he had a skin infection known as malassezia in between his paws and on his groin. At the time the vet wanted to put him down. ‘It's too expensive trying to get an old dog like this healthy again,' he said to me.

‘Old dog? I don't think so, it's just that he's had a tough life.'

‘No, son, he's an old dog,' the vet replied.

‘Can he get better?' I'd asked.

I remember the vet looking me up and down. ‘Is he a stray you've found?' He hadn't waited for me to answer. ‘No use wasting sympathy on a stray, better to let him go, only cost you money in the end.'

‘No, he isn't a stray. Can you make him better?' I repeated.

‘In time, I daresay, and with sufficient money.'

‘It's not about money,' I said, swallowing, ‘it's about not letting him down.'

He looked at me curiously. ‘He's been badly neglected, whose dog is this?'

‘Mine now.' I didn't wish to explain further.

‘I see,' he said, but you could tell he didn't see. ‘He's an old dog, son, his life is over.'

‘No, it isn't, Doctor, if you can make him better, it's about to begin.'

He sighed. ‘It's your money, son.'

I'd always thought that Tinky had belonged to Frikkie as a puppy and had never asked him how he'd come to own him. I'd always assumed that he remembered Tinker the world-champion ratter with great fondness and had somehow found a puppy who resembled her and had taken it from there. But this evidently hadn't been the case and, according to the vet, Tinky was around twelve years old when Frikkie got him, which meant that he was now fifteen and coming to the end of a fox terrier's life. The cough was the worrying factor and a visit to the vet confirmed this. It indicated a severe heart condition.

My darling little Tinky died in my arms a week later, like Frikkie, of a sudden heart attack. He'd simply looked up at me with a tiny whimper, and I'd picked him up and held him against my face. He licked me and then I felt a slight quiver and he was dead.

Although I was terribly distraught, this time I had kept the faith. I borrowed the Ford
bakkie
used by old Mr Polliack's head gardener, had a small pinewood box built for Tinky's body and then drove north to Duiwelskrans to arrive just as night came to the high mountains. I drank the last of a thermos of tea and ate the sandwiches I'd made, and then slept in the back of the truck on the outskirts of the town.

I was aware I would have been perfectly welcome to arrive unannounced at the homes of Doctor Van Heerden or Marie and the Sergeant, but I wanted to complete this particular mission on my own. At dawn I drove through the still sleeping little town and passed the nightsoil cart drawn by the same two patient old mules. The three Africans were laughing and chatting among themselves, wearing the hooded hessian sacks soaked with excrement over their heads. I thought how much had happened since the night I'd spent under Doctor Van Heerden's house and had stolen the red book and then fled into the rising sun back to The Boys Farm to be greeted along the way by these three denizens of the night. So much in life changes, but in the end remains the same.

I started to climb up into the high mountains, passing the Van Schalkwyk farm, and wondered if the six brothers were still incarcerated in Pretoria. With the Nationalist government in power, the nation had been delivered back to the
Volk
. The six Van Schalkwyk brothers were more likely to be regarded by the present government as the freedom fighters they themselves believed they'd been, rather than the saboteurs for which they had been convicted and incarcerated. The law, I was learning fast, was a matter of popular convention, rigid only in those things that can be based on a past example, mostly small crimes committed by small people. Sabotage is a question of opinion, a notion based on the popular sentiments of the day; that peculiar barometer that measures the febrile temperature of a nation at any given time and which politicians learn to read in order to suitably adjust their principles.

I finally arrived at the waterfall around seven o'clock. The sun had risen sufficiently to send its light into the dark
kloof
to reach the old tree where my darling Tinker lay sleeping. Tinky was laid to rest beside the little lioness, to become a great black-maned lion to partner her in their celestial life together. The circle was complete, the two of them, Tinker and Tinky, safely in the happy hunting grounds of eternity where she would teach her city partner the good, clean ways of the country, where no brutal concrete towers bruised the perfect blueness of the African sky.

It took me nearly two weeks to gain the courage to inform Pirrou of my resolve to leave Johannesburg, and therefore remove the handbag from her shoulder. My decision to leave was made all the more difficult because, while I had never loved her in the infatuated way of first love, I had most certainly loved her and would always do so. I mean this in a quite separate way to being grateful to her. In my mind, my gratitude for what she'd done for me was more than offset by her demanding nature, fiery temper and mood swings. I had paid back, in patience, calmness and loyalty, the debt I owed her for all her generous instruction. I'd learned how to calm her sudden anger, and I think I'd even gotten rid of the foot-stamping, tantrum-throwing little brat that I could clearly see would eventually cut short her career. La Pirouette was no Margot Fonteyn and, prima ballerina or not, there was only so much the directors of a ballet company would tolerate. But Pirrou was still someone who insisted on getting her own way, and the idea of me walking away from our association would not be the way she saw things happening.

She'd often laughingly said to me, ‘Tom, the time will eventually come when you'll be too old for me, when you'll take me for granted as all men eventually do when they come to believe they own a woman. When that time comes I'll throw you out without the slightest compunction and find myself another young lover.'

‘Sure, like in some of your songs,' I said, not believing her, then added, ‘but then you'd have to train a brand-new handbag.'

She grinned. ‘No woman can have too many new handbags, darling,' she'd replied, one eyebrow slightly arched.

I was to have dinner with Pirrou the Saturday night after returning from burying Tinky and so I'd purchased a bottle of Bollinger, wincing at the cost. I arrived at Pirrou's place with my heart more or less in my mouth. I'd much rather say I arrived with a firm resolve to end things as nicely as possible. But tame endings were simply not a part of her nature and I knew my farewell, or rather confrontation, would be made to La Pirouette and not to Pirrou. I'd once met her erstwhile doctor husband who'd seemed a really nice guy. He'd wished me luck with La Pirouette. ‘Tom, you will one day appreciate, as I have, that you were fortunate in your youth to have experienced one of the most exciting women in this country.' He'd paused, thinking, then added, ‘However, you should be aware that you are sitting on top of a barrel of dynamite watching the fuse burning. My advice is not to become fascinated with its sparkle and fizz until it becomes too late to jump.' So this was the Saturday night I proposed to jump from the barrel and, quite frankly, I was pretty scared.