Forget-me-not-Blues. Marita van der Vyver
eyes and looks down at her red sloppy joe jersey, and her suntanned legs and white bobby socks, thrilled to be sitting next to her handsome officer-uncle in the elegant drawing room.
‘Colette.’ Mammie clears her throat. ‘Won’t you go give Sina a hand with the tea tray in the kitchen?’
‘She doesn’t need any help, Mammie, not when you’ve taught her so well,’ she answers, and beams at Uncle David.
‘Imagine your youngest off to high school in a few months’ time, Liz,’ Uncle David says with a shake of his head. ‘How the years have flown.’
‘You can say that again,’ Mammie sighs, and touches her done-up blonde hair.
She spent more time than usual in front of the mirror this morning fixing the two victory rolls above her temples, because she had wanted to look her best for her ‘little brother’. She is even wearing a new dress she made the other day from rayon or viscose or some or other shiny synthetic fabric, white polka dots on a dark blue background. Unfortunately, looking her best is taking a little longer every year, she complained while putting on her red lipstick.
Colette cannot take her eyes off the deep dent the dimple in her uncle’s chin makes when he smiles. Before the war he was almost too good-looking for a man, she has heard Mammie say, but now he has become really dashing with his face tanned golden-brown by North Africa’s desert sun. There is an amazing scar on his cheek caused by glass shards in a bomb explosion, and he walks with a slight limp because his left leg was injured in the same explosion.
But it is still strange to see him without his uniform in a white open-necked shirt, striped sports jacket and loose-fitting beige trousers with pleats below the belt. Not that Colette has ever seen much of him, he has always lived far away from them in Natal. Among the rooinekke, according to Ouboet. And for the past several years he has merely been an almost unknown man in uniform in a photograph Mammie constantly carried in her handbag. That is how Colette has come to think of him. The unknown soldier.
‘Colette,’ Mammie repeats, menacingly this time. ‘Don’t think that because you’re almost in high school I am going to let you eavesdrop on grown-up conversation!’
She gets up meekly and drags her feet to the kitchen.
‘You were just as curious at her age,’ she hears her uncle say, amused.
‘But I was taught curiosity killed the cat. That’s what Mother always said.’
‘And Father said little pitchers have long ears.’ Uncle David laughs, and she cannot hear the rest because the kitchen door swings shut behind her.
She watches Sina carefully pour the boiling water onto the tea leaves in the finest white porcelain pot, exactly the way Mammie taught her, and snatches a home-made ginger biscuit from the bowl that has already been arranged on the embroidered cloth on the silver tray.
‘Shoo, away with you,’ Sina grumbles with an angry frown below her flowered headscarf. ‘There are shop biscuits in the cupboard for you. These ones your mamma baked for Master David yesterday.’
‘This whole big chocolate cake she also baked for “Master David”,’ Colette says, and plonks herself down on the kitchen table next to the tea tray. Bored, she fans out her trainseat-green dirndl skirt about her, and swings her feet back and forth under the table. ‘You would swear she thinks there is no chocolate cake in Australia.’
‘Not the way your mamma bakes it,’ Sina says firmly.
Colette watches Sina as she opens one drawer after the other to take out teaspoons and cake forks, and hunt for the silver tea strainer. She is so small and spare and sinewy it is hard to believe she is already sixteen. The starched white apron tied over her faded work dress wraps almost right around her body and hangs down to her ankles. A pair of old white tennis shoes peeps out below the hem. Colette outgrew them long ago, but they still gape wide around Sina’s tiny feet. And yet, when Colette recalls the slight and timid little girl they fetched from Somerverdriet three years ago, she realises that Sina must have grown several inches already and gained ten times more self-confidence.
Sometimes it seems to Colette as if Sina, although she will probably always be the smallest in the house, is also by far the oldest. When she peers at you with those beady black eyes in her tawny little face, you could swear she was older than Table Mountain, cleverer than Jan Smuts. Bushman blood, Deddy says, mixed with Malay. And of course somewhere along the way a bit of milk in the coffee too. Colette has only recently discovered what Deddy means when he talks about milk and coffee this way. Some things are simply not mentioned by name, that is another thing Colette has learnt at almost thirteen, not in this house. Nor, presumably, in many houses elsewhere in the country.
‘What is so great about Australia anyway?’ she mumbles half to herself.
‘It’s not what, it’s who,’ Sina answers and starts singing with a surprising little cackle, ‘“My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea …” It’s that nursie from that other country he got to know in the war.’
As if that explains anything.
‘I thought she drove an ambulance,’ Colette says, suddenly annoyed with this unknown Australian girl who has lured her uncle away.
‘Couldn’t say. Something to do with a hospital, is all I know, that was mos how they met. After he got hurt in the explosion.’
Sina steps back to take a critical look at the tea tray. Then she nods, apparently satisfied that Meddem Lizzie will be satisfied.
‘But why does he have to run off to another country after her? Why doesn’t he bring her here?’
‘Your mamma says he wants to start “a new life in a new country”.’
Colette swings her feet more vigorously. ‘I also heard her tell my dad that you’d swear Uncle David was ashamed of his family in Africa.’
Sina gives her a strange look, almost as if to say Uncle David might have a point, but then she is all business again. ‘You carry the chocolate cake, and I’ll bring the tray with the rest of the things.’
Colette picks up the silver plate with the enormous cake on it, and carefully balances it on one hand while opening the kitchen door with the other.
‘It is not a she, Liz, it’s a he,’ she hears her uncle say in the drawing room.
‘You mean …’ The alarm in her mother’s voice makes Colette freeze in the doorway.
‘I am going to Australia because of a man.’
Colette glances over her shoulder at Sina who is approaching with the heavily laden tray, shakes her head anxiously and gestures sh with a finger on her lips while at the same time trying to retreat without a sound.
‘I always suspected …’ her mother says, consternation in her voice. ‘But I had hoped …’
‘Lizzie. I could never be myself in this country. You would probably die of shame if I tried. If I go away, no one ever has to know, not your in-laws or your children or …’
‘Pardon me, David, it’s just … the shock …’ her mother says, jumping to her feet and rushing from the room.
‘Here she comes!’ Colette whispers panic-stricken, and steps backwards so quickly she almost knocks Sina off her feet. They hear the tinkling of silver and porcelain, and for several endless moments it looks as if the tray is going to end up on the floor, and Mammie’s most beautiful teapot will be shattered. Colette grabs the tray with one hand to help Sina, and feels the chocolate cake slipping from the silver plate in the other. She watches helplessly as the cake hits the black-and-white tiled floor. Then she hears her mother’s footsteps on the stairs, probably on the way to her bedroom to blow and powder her nose, and she wonders frantically if there might be a way to scrape the brown mess off the floor and repair the cake before Mammie comes back.
‘Shame.’ Sina places the tray on the table and bends down to pick up the