To a child, nothing that is familiar in her world -- not earthquakes or revolutions, slavery or sodomy, poverty or riches -- seems either exotic or wicked. So to me, Ruth Frank, white girl on a black continent, it felt only slightly odd to be diverting myself and my friend on an otherwise dull Sunday afternoon by pulling on the penis of the gardenboy.

It was 1953. I was eight, robust and presumed rich. The nextdoor girl Lucy, my friend when it suited me, was seven, skinny and poor. We had been placed side by side on a hill above the Indian Ocean by my grandfather's small ways with money. Forty years earlier, as an enlightened Englishman in a savage land, he had decided to build a new compound for his servants, featuring electricity and plumbing and a yard for them to sit in. The Irishman who built the compound took as his payment the derelict old servants' quarters in the hollow behind the house and a few feet of land on either side of it. Within a month he had painted the building pink inside and out, divided it into four flats and moved into one of them. The others he rented out cheaply in return for no complaints. My grandfather's objections were too late, and my grandmother never forgave him or the Irishman or the servants, whose good fortune had been bought at such expense. Lucy was born to uncomplaining parents in the smallest of the Irishman's flats -- three rooms, still pink, still cheap, and to me, when I made their acquaintance, a heaven of intimate containment.

"Lucy! Come for lunch!" I had yelled that Sunday across the lawn and tennis court that divided my bedroom from hers. In our house the telephone was not to be used lightly, certainly never to reach a friend within shouting distance. Besides, everyone except my father bellowed simply to be heard, upstairs to downstairs, across the great halls, the noise muffled by stone walls and heavy wooden doors. We had been taught how to raise our voices by my mother, who shouted magnificently. She would stand in the middle of the house and boom directly from her diaphragm in a low sustained bass, enunciating each syllable with pride. "Ruth! You are wwanted on the tel-e-phone!"

My parents were theatre people and to theatre people sounds matter. Voices, tone, diction, intonation, enunciation, articulation -- all were considered more telling by them than handshakes. There was the assumption that a high squeak, a dead monotone, swallowed vowels, adenoidal wheezes were, if not intentional, careless. Anyone, they said, could have good delivery and decent speech. One just had to care enough. It was really a matter of consideration for others. There was the moral question of what right one had to subject one's listener to an awful noise, like radios turned up high, or dogs barking at night. "Lower that voice," my father would grumble. "And modulate your tone, please," my mother would add. As a team, they had the effect on one's speech of sheepdogs on the movement of a flock.

Audience mattered too. We needed one to witness the drama of our lives. To stylize the discord. To stand, like the theatre itself, between us and the world beyond. Even Lucy would do.

* * *

Lunch on Sunday was a huge affair. Giblet soup and marrow on brown bread, duck, and at least four overcooked vegetables, cheese and pudding. My mother served at the sideboard from large silver salvers on to pink and gold china, handing each plate to Reuben the houseboy -- "For the Master," "For Catherine." He stood at her side in his solemn Sunday face and bare feet, starched white cotton suit and white cotton gloves (to put something between his blackness and the food we ate.)

The dining-room ran along half the length of the house, shaded from the heat of summer by a verandah upstairs and down, and by the mango and avocado trees in the garden beyond. It had been furnished by my grandmother before my father was born, something that numbered high in my mother's abundance of irritations. "I really must redo this room one of these days," she would sigh, looking around at the maroons and dark greens of a former era. The other woman's choices. Her voice would pause before it shrank into another sigh -- "Ah well!" -- and then it would die slowly into a whisper for the cadence -- "C'est la vie!"

This was said to the audience of her daughters. We were meant to be moved by the unfairness of her fate. To me, however, her complaints were simply lullabies. I welcomed them as a child embraces meaningless rhymes or the repetition of old, toothless rebukes. Gramma was, for the moment, the Queen of the Night, Circe, Medusa. And I loved to pretend that my mother was her victim.

Valerie, however, would never play along. "I like this room," she said, turning to my father. "It feels like home."

Valerie understood better than any of us the burden that enforced gratitude had placed upon my mother. My parents could never have afforded to buy our house. When Catherine was born, Abba, my grandfather, had given it to them, together with a small monthly stipend for its upkeep, so that we children could grow up, as he said, "happy and normal". He and my grandmother moved into a smaller house not far away. Then, a year later, after Valerie was born, and the theatre needed repairs, a new roof, more studios for the theatre school, he loaned my parents the money they needed. At my grandmother's wish the loan was drawn up in her name and considered as a purchase of shares. She wanted to be a partner, she said, to share in her son's career.

My mother, however, knew better. From the beginning my grandmother had let it be known that she considered her son bewitched by my mother, seduced three weeks after his return from England by her performance of Hedda Gabler. This my mother never denied. In fact she loved the idea. She considered my father spared by her talents from a life of buying and selling Persian carpets. What she dreaded now was the thought of her mother-in-law treating the theatre as she treated our house. Gramma had always behaved as if our house were still hers, sending over her chauffeur to pick mangoes and lemons from our trees without even asking, feeling free to criticize an arrangement of flowers or the neglect of the trellises on the summerhouse.

But my mother needn't have worried. Gramma only appeared a the theatre as she always had -- to deliver my father's favourite biscuits in a special tin. She had what she wanted. It was the right to ask my mother at the Friday-night dinner table, her voice arched into a challenge, just how things were going at the theatre these days. To this my mother would answer by arching her eyebrows back, raising her wine glass, and smiling with particular graciousness into her mother-in-law's smile. "To Ibsen," she would say, "my favourite playwright."

© Copyright 1999-2002 Lynn Freed