Frankie and Stankie (41 page)

Then, just as she's about to hand the items to the harridan, there's somebody standing beside her and he's putting his arm around her waist.

‘It's all right, Vee,' he says soothingly to the harridan. ‘Just back off a bit, OK?' It's the Continental smoothie. The man with the ice-blue eyes. ‘She's coming to Freshers' Dinner with me,' he says.

‘No I'm not,' Dinah says.

‘Yes you are,' he says. Then he turns back to the pair on the path, talks to them, man-to-man. ‘It's OK. It's all sorted out,' he says. ‘Can't you see she's just very shy?'

Shy! Just shy! Can't you see she's
just very shy!
Right in the moment of her first great triumph. And now he's gone and snatched it from her.

‘Well, I'm not going, as it happens,' she says. ‘I'm not going to Freshers' Dinner.'

‘Just listen to her,' the harridan says, heaving a martyred sigh. ‘Honestly! Just like Lady Muck on toast. I told you she'd be like this.'

‘Like what?' Dinah says, but now that the Continental smoothie's made his appearance, neither of the Committee Persons is paying her any attention.

‘So how about the Sixty-Seven?' says the Continental smoothie. ‘Will you come and have dinner with me in the Sixty-Seven instead?'

‘Didi!' says the harridan, because the Sixty-Seven is Durban's only seriously classy restaurant.

That's except for the restaurants within the Edward Hotel. Durban, for all its ever-increasing Indian population, has not got a single Indian restaurant. That's because the Group Areas Act will always get in the way. Dinah has never been to the Sixty-Seven
and neither have her parents. Jenny's been there – just the once – with the Rhodes Scholar architect.

‘Oh all right then,' she says.

‘
Didi –
!' says the harridan once again, but then she can't proceed, because the Continental smoothie has undone her very simply, by mouthing her a kiss.

To Dinah's absolute and infinite joy, she sees the harridan blush. The only trouble is that the harridan has seen her seeing the blush and it brings out her scorpion sting.

‘I'll be watching out for you, Freshette,' she says. ‘No question about that. I'll be watching for you.'

The head honcho, thanks to Didi's intervention, has simply relaxed and given up.

‘I'll sight you then, Didi,' he says. ‘Come on, Vee.' Then he begins to walk away.

‘Yep,' says the Continental smoothie. ‘I'll see you guys around.'

Didi von Schweiten, second-year student of business administration, can't understand why Dinah's so menaced by the people on the Freshers' Reception Committee, because, really, it's just a bit of fun and it helps get students together. He's not allergic to what the Committee stands for, because, unlike Dinah, he's not a deviant. He's a conservative, a status quo man. They're all good blokes, he says. Or sometimes he'll call them the boys. Even the harridan's a good sort. Didi isn't quite one of the good blokes. He's a little bit set apart. He thinks of them as the children. But he's happy enough, occasionally, to hang out with the children, when there's nothing better to do. And at such times they'll defer to him in matters such as wine and menus. Didi isn't exactly
cordon bleu
, but for the good blokes, he's Escoffier. He can distinguish Merlot from red anti-freeze. Plus he knows that tinned pears can be made to taste better if you boil up the sugar syrup with arrowroot, brandy and cloves. On the race thing as well he's not quite Dinah's cup of tea, though he's not exactly in the same box as the good blokes. Didi has a kind of racial arrogance that's different from the local brand. But it's racial arrogance for all that. It's about Old World European hierarchies, rather than local ethnic phobias, but, in effect, it comes to the same. So for Didi, blacks are jazz musicians, or else they clean your shoes. Or they toil invisibly in factories. Or they live in hovels on the land,
increasing the national product. That's the way the world is. That's the way it's meant to be.

Dinah's ashamed to admit to herself that his name holds glamour for her. This is because of Baron von Schweiten's aforementioned musical associations. She's shy to bring this up with Didi, but when she does he's surprisingly dismissive. He's more interested in horses than in symphonies and he considers that musical genius confers no particular social distinction.

‘Yes, I have an idea there's a Haydn connection,' he says. ‘And Carl Ditters, you say? I think they were probably both family servants at some point.'

Dinah is blinking at him in disbelief. ‘But I'm talking about famous composers,' Dinah says. ‘People who write symphonies. Composers aren't anyone's servants.'

‘If you're attached to a household,' Didi says, ‘that makes you one of the servants. Anyway, so what? I'm bored with this conversation.'

Didi is often bored with Dinah's conversation. Or that is what he says to her. Plus he doesn't like it if she laughs when she talks. He wants her to stop doing it. The idea is that he's grooming her, because he thinks she's worth the effort. Back home on the estate, before the war, he tells her, his father used to call all the male servants Hans and all the female servants Maria. It was a lot easier for Didi's father than learning the servants' real names. Didi is amused by this. He tells it to Dinah by way of an affectionate anecdote. It's an anecdote that's intended to cast his father in a good light. And that's because he's intending to take her home to meet his parents.

The family has relocated from Austria and has evidently known grander days. His father, once a career army officer, now manages an up-market furniture factory. His mother is the niece of the Archbishop of Heidelberg. Didi has come to university late, having spent time learning English and getting himself a Matric. Plus he's had a try-out working in an office. Now he's doing economics and accountancy with the intention of making his fortune, as befits the oldest son. Or, at any rate, he's intending to be a man of power and influence. He wants a nice life for himself. He wants to be a mover and shaker. That's in the world of business and commerce.

He's not interested in all the academic stuff.
Kultur und Klavier
are
things he leaves to the girls, so for this reason he's pleased that Dinah's on the arty side. He's always liked arty women. Didi will do the bare minimum to scrape through his course assignments and he'll not ever be bothered by his resulting scrape-through grades. Dinah goes on being besotted with her subject and – especially after the mind-rotting boredom of Miss Legge and her rote-learned history notes – she's now set on fire by almost everything on her English literature course. She can't get enough of the lectures and the books, so it's back to the Al ice-cream row. And, although she's always getting better grades than Didi, this doesn't give him a moment's grief. He's never bothered by her performance, never threatened by it.

‘Women are born to be diligent,' he says. ‘Good work, there, my baby.'

Didi always calls her my baby and he likes it that she can sew. He says that his mother will teach her to cook, because his mother is a marvel with food. His grades never have the effect of leaving Didi feeling diminished – not even before his tutors, because his tutors are like Josef Haydn. They are there to provide a service. So Dinah will hover and watch, incredulous, as he retrieves his slipshod essays from his tutors with whom he'll linger and chat. Man-to-man. Just a little bit
noblesse oblige
. His ego is in no way involved with academic prowess.

Didi doesn't read very much except for
The Kinsey Report
. It entertains him to know in detail exactly who's doing what to whom. Especially with regard to erogenous zones, especially in the backs of cars. Didi is ego-involved in sexual performance and – mercifully for Dinah for whom the area is panic stations – he's very relaxed and very practised. That's at feely-touchy stuff.

Even so, Dinah has bought the idea – pronounced forcefully from the rostrum in her sixth-form year by a popular and motherly biology teacher – that girls just have to be virgins until the day they get married. Break this rule and you'll find yourself the girl that nobody wants. Soiled goods. Second-hand merchandise. Left on the shelf. Oh the shame and horror of it. No decent man will ever want you.

‘I'll give you this, and it's straight from the shoulder,' the biology teacher says. ‘When a man is looking for a wife, he's always looking for a virgin.'

Dinah knows that Maud does sex, but then Maud is on another plane. Maud is Danger Girl. She has the right to make up the rules for herself. And then there's Maddie who's having sex all the time with boring Bernie – but she's going to marry him and she's got that fat engagement ring to prove it. Plus it's Maddie herself who's most anxious to protect Dinah from the Continental smoothie. She has higher standards for Dinah than she's ever had for herself.

‘You're too good for him,' Maddie says. ‘You're special. Don't, Dinah. You don't want to be like me.'

It's a stupid, time-warped maidenly stand about which Didi is remarkably good-humoured – mainly because he's so confident that she'll succumb to him in the end.

‘Of course you'll sleep with me,' he says. ‘My girlfriends have always slept with me.'

Dinah is at this stage unaware that Didi has other outlets. He's popular with the nurses in the residence at Addington Hospital and there's one pretty paediatric nurse in particular who's always been more than happy to offer him favours in return for the odd night out. But Dinah doesn't know about this until some two years later. That's when Catherine Cleary has returned to the local scene. She's got a nursing job in town and she soon sees fit to fill Dinah in from her fund of local nurses' gossip.

‘Well, I think it's
disgraceful
,' Catherine says. ‘I think you ought to know.'

But by then Dinah's first love affair is, at last, about to hit the rocks. It was never right for her from the start, but she's been too insecure to extract herself. So all through the rest of her degree course it has had the effect of separating her from friends. She no longer hangs out, after the lectures, with Jed and Simon and Ben. Nor with Father Francis Cull – or rather, she does so only rarely. That's when Didi's away on hunting trips, or he's off doing boy stuff on horseback in the company of his younger brother. Because a woman must forsake her tribe and cleave to the tribe of her man. And Didi is taking her seriously as the girl he's going to marry.

This hopelessly impractical project is the result of Didi's fatal flaw. Because he does seem to have a fatal flaw when it comes to choosing women. That's the women he's serious about, the ones he plans to marry. He always goes for off-beat girls, arty girls, highbrow girls. Girls with left-wing politics and unconventional habits.
Then he works at moulding them, but at some point the girls grow up. Dinah isn't aware of this, though she does know about his first serious flame who, once, in the Sixty-Seven restaurant, flatly refused to order anything except for beans on toast. Didi himself has told her about this. He tells it as though the girlfriend has committed a crime against humanity. And later – much later – Dinah gets the chance to hear about the episode from the first flame herself. Because later – much
much
later – Dinah gets to meet all Didi's girls.

They've all cut their teeth on him and then moved on. All of them, of course, are living abroad – in Toronto, Edinburgh and Oxford; in London, Cambridge and Adelaide – all of them part of the 1960s diaspora, part of the anti-apartheid brain drain. They discover each other at conferences and fund-raising concerts and literature festivals. And then they cackle together. Didi's highbrow harpies. That line of deviant female poets and forceful medics and vegetarian sociologists, of development economists and sculptors and Jungian psychoanalysts.

Didi's women, for some bizarre reason, have all gone on to marry Jews. Left-wing intellectual Jews, deracinated socialists who've got no time for Zion. An ageing band of Danny Cohens, Zacky Benjamins, Harry Shapiros, Sidney Steinbergs and Mannie Silber-steins. These are the men who reap the benefits of Didi's courtship routines.

And it's all because of Didi's reputation as the campus Continental smoothie that Dinah – determinedly virginal Dinah – gets expelled from the women's hall of residence. It's thanks to her, the Lady Warden says, that Florence Powell Hall is fast becoming known as Fleshpots Hall.

What's happened is that Lindsay and Dinah, revising together late at night, have decided to sleep outdoors. Because, indoors, it's quite impossibly hot. They're fanning themselves with sheafs of foolscap in Dinah's little shoebox bedroom because exam time is always high humidity time and the night isn't getting any cooler. They've both been guzzling Lindsay's caffeine pills and by now they are far too stimulated to do any more proper work. Dinah's got her first-year exams. Lindsay's got her finals.

‘God, but isn't it hot,' Lindsay says. ‘If only we could sleep outdoors.'

And then she's got a plan. First they throw two blankets and two pillows out of Dinah's window. Then they proceed downstairs in haste, because the doors are locked at midnight. Lindsay has got it all worked out. First, Dinah is to engage the senior House Committee person in conversation at the reception desk. This is when Lindsay will tiptoe out. Then Lindsay, from the nearby callbox, will telephone the hall of residence. That will require the senior House Committee person to enter the little ante-room. This is when Dinah will make her escape.

The scheme works to perfection and it's all the more pleasurable because the House Committee person that night is the very queen bee of the Afrikaans-language teacher-training college contingent, the most zealous of the republican-poster pasters. And the sleep-out is duly fabulous. The stars are dizzily bright, Dinah's never slept outdoors before and nothing that she can remember has felt more magical than that secret snuggling-down, rolled in a blanket under the whoosh-whoosh of the trees – and not twenty yards from the residence. Then to wake, with the early light dappling one's eyelids, to a chorus of Durban's amazing birds. It feels like being made new.