Page 19 - In a different register - Sample

She passionately loved him when she was three but aunt Judith, the same one that called her ‘Hedgehog’ because, she said, she was prickly, always winging about her food, shed doubt on his already over scrupulous code of conduct by suggesting that it was unseemly, perhaps even deleterious for the child, that there should be overly much sitting in his lap or curling up beside him in bed. Forthwith he terminated all physical contact. Her mother told her that she had been an affectionate child but from that day it ceased. From that day, well into her twenties, she never cried. Not once. A further sense of abandonment was the result of being hospitalised for scarlet fever. Of course they visited and spoiled her, but why had they taken her away from them, why did they leave her there? The one unalloyed expression of joy she could not contain was on the arrival of Chris her deaf cousin for weekends. His mother, her father’s sister, Emily, had died soon after child birth. Mary’s mother had taken on the additional six month old Christopher and his two brothers, Mark and Samuel, when Mary was about a year old. Overnight her mother had five children ranging from six months to six years old. No doubt her father became a surrogate mother. Come to think of it, Aunt Judith too might have been prickly if at the age of one year she had suddenly had to share everything, especially Mother’s attention, with four others. A game with Chris had been doctors and nurses. More often than not he was the patient lying on covers behind the sofa in the sun porch at the back of the house while she very professionally took charge. Eventually her beloved twin-soul Chris had to go to St Vincent’s boarding school for the deaf making the weeks long and a weekend without him, longer. The other two boys left after several years when their father remarried.As violently as she and her father clashed so, indestructibly she adored him. How could she not, when he might unexpectedly bring her a pair of little white embroidered gloves, of the most exquisite fabric and design, which belied his innocence of the high life. Or anticipating a child’s love of the spectacular, he might thrust a packet of fireworks into her hands as she sat alone on the step outside at Guy Fawkes. There was the strange habit of the two of them going on holiday together while her sister went with her mother elsewhere. Holidays were the occasion of unpredictable hikes along the Cape coast, exploring the rock pools of Baines Kloof, surfing the waves at Muizenberg. A time of communing by camp fires or imbibing the history of cities. Her father loved history. He loved Shakespeare. He loved London. She had long since tasted London before ever she set eyes on it.MuizenbergPerhaps for the same reason, at six and a half she had been sent to stay with the Church Pastor and his wife while her parents went ‘overseas’ to England for some months. Upholders of the faith, Uncle Ted was a mild, absent and to be invoked authority while Aunty Evelyn, a good-looking, God fearing large and buxom figure supporting a tight black bun in the nape of her neck, set out to convert the heathen,