Page 21 - In a different register - Sample

Quite contrarily, after her first year at university and much begging and pleading, her parents allowed her to take up the offer of a distant relative to become the English Governess at a Swiss Finishing School. It took a virtual vow to return to South Africa and complete her degree for them to agree. Her spirit took wings during that year and she wrote to her father about London being ‘the best place in the whole world’. ‘The best in the whole world’ was a family in-joke, but of course it was a toss-up with Paris where she risked descending to the fires of hell going to the Folies Bergère by choice. She was more overcome by the spectacle than the free display of flesh. Her innocence was such that in Brussels she thought it odd that all along one street women sat on display in strange attire in the bay windows signing to each other now and then. For some reason they resented her loitering about and motioned to her vigorously to leave. In Scotland she sat next to a man on a bus trip back to London. Surreptitiously, under the blankets passengers had been given against the cold, he fondled her hand for a while then attempted to get her to masturbate him. Mary laughed self-congratulatory ‘I shook him off vigorously’. On another occasion in Lausanne a man sat down on the park bench she was sitting on. He struck up a conversation. After a while he said “Donc, comment vous me trouve?’ OK, I replied nonchalantly. Sérieusement, he said, do I please you? I burst out laughing. Hardly the way to entice a man: That is, if you wanted him. But infinitely more worth exploring than God.By the age of twenty-one, Mary was the confirmed black sheep of the family and her parents prayed every day for the salvation of her soul, while her sister, her sister Martha met all their expectations through being a committed Christian and achieving professional and social status as a doctor. In order to satisfy her father’s command that there be ‘no alcohol ‘under my roof’, Mary celebrated her twenty-first birthday at a restaurant sans famille. She told J that she thought she must have been about twenty-two when she was in residence at Rhodes University that she had her first kiss: It was on a walk up the river that Peter took me in his arms: As our lips met I let out a shriek. Heaven only knows what transgression I thought was being committed. To his credit Peter got over it rapidly and we subsequently explored all the permutations of kissing strictly above the neck only! She was teaching at the University of Cape Town when she met Tim who was a Master’s student. He always claimed it was she who had rekindled his love of opera and introduced him to Wagner in the many hours of lying on the mohair carpet in her sister Martha’s flat where she warded off his advances. After a career move to Johannesburg at the age of twenty four she decided that if she was going to commit suicide she might as well find out what sex was like before she died. She executed her plan when she flew down to be with Tim over a long weekend. Afterwards there was blood on the sheet. In surprise and unfeigned innocence she claimed not to be menstruating. Tim was shocked to discover she was a virgin as he had always seen her as sooooooooooooo sophisticated. She wondered if that was part of the reason Tim stayed in touch with her thereafter: That he seemed to feel some responsibility for her wellbeing, for having ‘deflowered’ her. It is consoling that a man should have such sensibility. Not only that but a brilliant philosophic mind and a quirky sense of humour. He won a bursary to study in England. They carried on a correspondence for five years before they met up again in London. Taking an instant dislike to each other, nothing either did could improve matters. After they parted he wrote: ‘Since we have corresponded for five years I can see no reason to allow a mere two weeks of dissatisfaction on sight to hinder us from continuing our most amicable correspondence. I therefore propose that we press on regardless.’ Which he did. We continued to write for another several years, said Mary, before meeting up again when our mutual pleasure in each other’s company and the plenitude of London’s galleries, the Proms, last minute seats at the theatre, each with our nose in a book at Picolos or watching the ducks sail by in Regent’s Park on summer afternoons, spilled over into an everlasting bond. Out of sheer curiosity, whimsical Tim once hid himself at the National Gallery in London where they were to meet, to watch how men responded to her as she wondered around waiting for him. He said men lingered around where she was standing although she seemed oblivious of their interest and more taken by the paintings than their attention. We once met in winter Paris, in a café next to Notre Dame and ordered Brandy to dull the misery of life – where else but in Paris. We drowned our sorrows little realising that neither had we specified the Brandy nor had we checked its price which by the end of the grey afternoon added considerably to our sorrow. When she met Matt shortly after the abandoned leap into the underworld of sex with Tim – or so she thought at the time - she half wished that Matt had been the first one. Her sister, her sister Martha, on the other