The Black Sisters
Griet’s sister Tienie had inherited her mother’s hair and her father’s temper. Everyone in the family said so. Short Shirley Temple curls and a shorter than short temper. But right now she was sitting at a restaurant table, radiantly happy, with no trace of the seven devils she sometimes carried around with her.
‘Let me guess,’ said Griet opposite her. ‘You’re in love.’
‘A holiday romance.’ Tienie nodded. ‘It probably won’t last. But it doesn’t matter. I’m old enough not to think this is for keeps every time I meet someone. Not any more.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Griet as it behoves an older sister to do. ‘Who’s the lucky lover?’
‘Someone local.’ Tienie smiled mysteriously. ‘With a gorgeous beach house up the West Coast.’
‘So that’s where you’re going to hide these holidays.’
Griet took in her sister’s curly hair and unmade-up face: she still looked like the teenager that she’d been years ago. ‘I suffer from a small man complex,’ Tienie had said herself. ‘I can’t impress my students with my stature. I have to vanquish them with my brilliant brain and fearless tongue.’ And when she frowned, her abundant eyebrows met over her nose, making her look fear-somely bedevilled.
She’d always been more independent than her sisters. She was the only one who’d ventured out to an English-medium university. Now she worked as a sociology lecturer – at an English university in Johannesburg.
‘Have you seen Ma and Pa?’
‘I’m having supper with them tonight.’
‘Alone?’
‘Me, myself, I,’ she hummed over the rim of her tea cup. ‘Without the lover?’
‘Anything to keep the peace.’ Tienie shrugged, pushing the sugar bowl around on the table. ‘I’ve already given them enough shocks.’
‘I don’t think anything that you or Nella pitch up with at home could still shock them. Do you remember the time Nella invited a boyfriend with a wooden leg and an eye-patch over for supper?’
‘The one Pa called “Shiver Me Timbers”?’
‘Ma thought the eye-patch was a new fashion and asked him if he wouldn’t be more comfortable if he pushed it up while he ate. So he obliged and it turned out he didn’t have an eye under it. Ma tried so hard not to look shocked!’
A young waitress was hovering near them, her blue-shadowed eyes fixed on the moving sugar bowl. It was a smart restaurant and an expensive sugar bowl and they both looked out of place here, Griet realised. Tienie was dressed in her holiday clothes – floral shorts and a striped T-shirt and trainers without laces – and Griet wore one of her familiar crumpled dresses, the uniform she chose for hiding in her office.
‘Petra also brought a few weirdos home before she became the world’s leading yuppy.’
‘Do I hear she’s coming out for a visit?’ asked Tienie.
‘Just after Christmas. For more than a month. Ma is on cloud nine.’
‘Without hubby?’ Tienie raised her heavy eyebrows expressively.
‘Hubby has to stay behind in the Big Apple to keep the home fires burning.’
‘And to keep his wife in designer clothes.’
Tienie and Petra didn’t burn with enthusiasm for each other, Gretha always said, and they certainly weren’t warmed by the same fire. Of course not, said Tienie, the nearest Petra ever came to any fire was the flame on her elegant silver cigarette lighter. Tienie regarded Petra as a capitalistic femme fatale with an irrelevant, superficial job in the advertising industry. Petra regarded her sister Tienie as a socialist feminist who talked a lot of crap.
‘That’s one black sheep that turned snow white.’ Griet smiled with her chin in her hand. ‘These days Pa regards her as the most exemplary of all his children.’
‘Well, she’s the only one who’s making any money. Maybe that’s all that counts for him.’
It was because they were such opposites, Gretha always said, that Tienie and her father could never get on. No, said Tienie, it was because she’d dared to be a third daughter rather than the son he’d wanted so badly. She’d always shone in the classroom and on the sports field, but he’d just shaken his head and said she was too competitive for a girl. She’d have a hard time finding a husband.
‘And the only one who’s decently married,’ said Griet. ‘Since my fiasco.’
‘How are you coping?’ Tienie leant closer in concern. Now she played the older sister. ‘I mean, I know how one feels when a relationship breaks up … but how do you cope when a baby dies?’
‘You don’t cope.’ Griet stared at the cup in her hands as though she could read the future in it. The porcelain was so thin it was almost transparent. The restaurant had better crockery than she’d ever had at home. ‘If I smash this cup against the wall, I could maybe stick it together again, but there’ll be bits that I can’t find. That’s probably what happens every time someone you love dies … your mother or your husband or your brother … If it’s your child, there are so many bits missing there’s not much left to stick together.’
But on a certain level a failed relationship is worse, thought Griet. Death makes you feel powerless, but a divorce makes you feel guilty. You have no control over death, but you have to accept responsibility for a divorce.
It was the guilt that was torturing her; the guilt and the responsibility. Sometimes she wondered whether her inability to bear a child was also her fault. Whether she was being punished because she preferred writing to cooking. Preferred sex to ironing.
What if she had to choose? Between bringing up children and writing stories?
Her throat closed and she couldn’t get a word out.
‘As far as the relationship goes …’ she said gruffly at last, ‘I’ll probably always wonder if I didn’t give up hope too easily; whether I couldn’t have done more to save it.’
‘Such as?’
‘Not locking the keys in the car.’
When she was discharged from hospital shortly after the birth and death of her baby, she and George had got to the car before she realised she’d left her flowers beside her bed. They were the only flowers she’d received – a bunch of creamy-white roses her husband had brought her, white-knuckled. She asked him to go back and fetch them. He sighed, put her case into the car and went back into the hospital building.
She got into the car, feeling more alone than she’d ever felt in her life. It was so unbearable that she got out again to run after him. When they returned to the car, the keys were locked inside. George didn’t say anything, just bit his lip, picked up a brick and took out all his frustration on the window. It was the only time she ever saw him lose control.
‘I can’t decide whether I did too many things wrong,’ she tried to explain to her frowning sister, ‘or just didn’t do enough things right.’
‘What do you think you did wrong?’
‘You sound just like my shrink. One always does something wrong. Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.’
‘And you sound just like Grandpa Big Petrus, always quoting from the Bible. Except that he knew the proper words.’
‘You cope from day to day.’ Griet poured herself a third cup of tea. It was quite cold by this time. The waitress was still watching them with anxious eyes. She seemed to be scared they’d make off with the china. ‘But not always from night to night.’
‘I know. When I lie awake in the dark, I think: This is what hell must be like. Very dark and very alone.’
‘I’m not brave enough to lie in the dark.’ Griet took a sip of tea and grimaced – it tasted worse than she’d expected. ‘I’m worse than Grandma Lina was. I turn on every light in the flat before I go to bed. Last week was a bit better, with Adam in the living room. Just to hear someone else breathing …’
‘Tell me more about him.’ Tienie leant forward again.
Griet wondered what the two women at the table next to them were talking about. They were much more smartly dressed than the two Swart sisters, in suits with high-heeled shoes, but their heads were just as close together.
‘I don’t know very much. He knocked on my door – in the middle of the night. He’s tall with brawny shoulders and a golden body. I was probably mad to let him in, but I felt sorry for him.’
‘“Be kind to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realising it.”’
‘Where did you get that from?’ Griet asked, delighted.
‘Guess! It begins with a B.’
‘Impossible!’
‘“Don’t forget about those in jail. Suffer with them as though you were there yourself.”’
‘One of Jans’s friends has a bumper sticker that says that.’
‘It’s well known in the Struggle. Hebrews 13, verse 3. But verse 2 is much more beautiful: “Don’t forget to be kind to strangers …”’
‘Entertaining angels without realising it …’ Griet repeated slowly. ‘Well, so far I haven’t seen an awful lot of this angel. I’m in the office and he’s on the loose. But he says he wants to make a meal for me this weekend. To thank me for letting him stay. I’m only too pleased that someone wants to use the oven for something other than suicide.’
‘Do you mean …’
‘No, I don’t mean anything.’
Tienie shook her head incredulously.
‘You mean he can cook?’
‘Seems like it,’ Griet smiled and dropped her chin into her hand again. ‘He apparently worked in a restaurant sometime or another.’
‘You’ve finally met a man who can look after himself!’
‘Now I must just find one who can look after me as well.’
‘You can look after yourself.’
‘I know, I know, I know, I’m not talking about physical care,’ she protested to her indignant sister. ‘But it would be nice to find someone who doesn’t run away when the “for worse” in the “for better or for worse” happens, you know, Tienie.’
‘I never know what he wants!’ said the woman at the next table, suddenly animated. ‘I just never know what he wants!’
Griet started to laugh, nearly choking on the dregs of cold tea in her cup.
‘You have to keep on guessing, my dear,’ comforted her elegant friend, painting her lips a bloody red while she peered into a little hand-mirror.
‘Now you sound like Ma again,’ giggled Tienie. ‘Look for a partner who’ll eat seven bags of salt with you. Wasn’t that what she always said?’
‘That’s what she still says.’ Griet gestured to the waitress with the starched lashes to bring their bill. ‘Strength has nothing to do with muscles. Just look at your father.’
‘That’s why I’m gay.’ Tienie looked at the young waitress and then at the two old friends at the next table and shook her head as though there were something she couldn’t understand. ‘Because Ma taught me that strength doesn’t lie in muscles. I just don’t know if Ma is ever going to accept that she had anything to do with it.’
‘Cover yourself, my darling sister,’ said Griet, her voice faltering unexpectedly, ‘so the rain doesn’t fall too hard on you, so the wind does not blow too cold on you … Do you remember?’
‘So the king may see how beautiful you are …’ Tienie said absently.