it without the step-in?’
‘Oh no, Colette,’ Mammie says sternly. ‘The whole point of Dior’s New Look is that the waist must be as tiny as possible and the hips as wide as possible. Otherwise it is just the ordinary Old Look we wore throughout the war.’
‘If I had known I would have to suffer like this for the New Look, I would’ve stuck with the old one.’ Colette can tell from her mother’s face that this time she has gone too far. ‘I’m not complaining about the dress, Mammie, it is honestly the most beautiful dress in all of Cape Town, it is just the blooming step-in that is getting the better of me. It feels as if all the oxygen is cut off from my brain.’
‘When a girl looks as beautiful as this she doesn’t need a brain as well.’
And for the second time Colette senses a cruel truth hidden behind her mother’s banter. As if her mother is trying to impart something to her but doesn’t know how to go about it. ‘Deddy says with a brain like mine I don’t have to be in too much of a hurry to get married and have children.’
‘Aah, he’s just dreading the day when the apple of his eye will prefer another man to him. Like any father would.’
‘And how about you, Ma? Don’t you want me to go and study after school?’
The question remains unanswered, because right at that moment they hear Ouboet barge in through the front door, call to them excitedly from the hall, then run up the stairs to the top floor. ‘Ma? Colette? Is anybody home?’ Then he looms in the doorway of the bedroom, smiling all over his face. ‘Good afternoon, Ma! Good afternoon, Letty!’
‘Afternoon, Kleinbaas,’ Sina says and quickly makes herself scarce, shuffling down the stairs towards the kitchen. She calls Colette and Kleinboet by their names, jokes with them or tells them off for being messy, but Ouboet has always been Kleinbaas. For him she reserves an exaggerated show of respect, perhaps even something like fear. When she first came from the farm she called Deddy baas and Mammie noi, but Mammie taught her to say Master and Madam instead. It sounds less crude, Mammie maintains. Deddy shakes his head, amused, and asks what makes an English Master less crude than an Afrikaans baas.
Ouboet grabs his mother around the waist, lifts her off her feet, and swings her around.
‘Stop it, Ouboet, don’t be silly, what is the matter with you?’ Mammie protests, laughing, her eyes screwed up from sheer pleasure. It is probably years since anyone picked her up.
‘What is the matter with me? It is the happiest week of my life, that’s what is the matter with me! The government has fallen, our people are in power, everything I ever wanted came true on Wednesday!’
‘Oh, you are still not over the election.’ Mammie is still smiling, but it is no longer such a joyful smile.
‘It isn’t something that you get over just like that. It is History, Ma! History with a capital letter! In Stellenbosch we’ve been celebrating non-stop for two days and two nights.’
He flings himself onto the double bed and grins at them, his hands folded behind his head. He hasn’t even noticed her New Look, Colette realises. He probably doesn’t even see her, lying there in his happy trance, almost as if he is drunk. When he called them from Stellenbosch on Wednesday night after the results for the last five electoral divisions had been announced, and the entire country realised with astonishment that Dr Malan’s Herenigde Nasionale Party and the Afrikaner Party had won the election, he sounded a bit drunk, presumably from joy rather than from liquor. She knew that her eldest brother wasn’t a drinker, but on such a Historical night she supposed anything was possible. ‘We are dancing in the streets of Stellenbosch!’ he had exclaimed on the phone, his voice hoarse from cheering. Colette had struggled to picture her clever and sober brother dancing in the street in his striped Matie blazer and neat tie. Even on a dance floor he didn’t really go for dancing. ‘Smuts defeated in his own constituency in Standerton! Isn’t it wonderful, Pa?’
‘Who would have thought it,’ Deddy had muttered.
‘I told you we were going to win, didn’t I, and you all thought I had lost my mind!’
Deddy’s joy was just as deep as Ouboet’s, but more discreet, quieter. Quite overcome with joy, that’s how her father had seemed to Colette that night. She had shared his joy, and the next day the excitement of many of her classmates was infectious, and she joined the celebration over the victory for ‘our people’. The Afrikaans nation would now have an Afrikaans government. Wasn’t it wonderful?
And yet she is constantly aware that something is impeding her happiness. Like when there is a splinter in your foot, an object that is so small it is almost invisible, but nevertheless prevents you from walking properly. Her splinter is the knowledge that not everyone in her family is equally happy about this Historical victory.
Mammie, she suspects, voted for General Smuts’s United Party. With no intention, of course, of ever admitting it to her husband. And Kleinboet declared loudly last weekend that only an idiot would vote for Dr Malan; we cannot push all the other population groups aside, it will cause a catastrophe. Which had led to him and Ouboet almost coming to blows. We must help our own people first, Ouboet had shouted angrily, before we can help others! Mammie had had to restore the peace, as usual.
‘Where is Kleinboet?’ Mammie asks, concerned. ‘Didn’t you both come on the same train?’
‘Who would want to share a train with traitors? I’m just joking, Ma,’ Ouboet adds quickly, but Mammie doesn’t look amused. ‘We travelled together as far as the city, but he went off to go and court one of his English girlfriends. Probably looking for a shoulder to cry on.’
‘Take your feet off the bed,’ Mammie says, ‘you’re ruining the bedspread.’
Kleinboet didn’t call on Wednesday night. They didn’t hear from him until yesterday afternoon when Colette was paging through the newspapers, amazed – Die Burger broadcasting its Afrikaans readers’ joy and The Cape Argus sounding funereal. He had called knowing his father would be at the hospital, that only the women would be home in the afternoon.
‘This is a secret telephone call,’ he announced in a stage whisper when Colette answered the telephone. ‘I am calling from an underground hiding place where all Smuts supporters in Stellenbosch have to lie low so we are not stoned in the streets. I don’t know if I dare come home this weekend. Will you hang your ugly black school stockings out of your bedroom window when you think it is safe?’
What did he consider safe, she asked, giggling. It wasn’t a sermon from his father he minded, he assured her, he just couldn’t stand to have his brother carry on about the wonderful future that now lay ahead for the Afrikaner. Because it wasn’t going to be all that wonderful, he predicted. There was something petty in the soul of the Afrikaners that was rearing its head, he added, sounding suddenly serious.
‘But aren’t you an Afrikaner?’ Colette asked.
‘Of course. That is the reason this pettiness scares me so.’
That was when the image of the splinter occurred to Colette for the first time, a splinter that could turn into a festering sore if you didn’t get rid of it in time.
She looks at Ouboet who is still lying stretched out on the bed – although now with his feet on the floor – chewing an apple he has taken from the pocket of his maroon striped blazer. Because of the six years separating them, they never really became friends, but when she was small she admired him
