The Woman Next Door (17 page)

‘It’s cold,’ Hortensia had said and her sister and mother agreed.

But then when her father came home – not yet diagnosed, but slow in his movements, weakened – her mother turned on him, she’d stored up all her frustration for him. With her daughters looking on, Eda let Kwittel know that a rich white woman in an animal’s skin had bumped into her on the pavement and raised her nose at her and told her to get back on the banana boat. Hortensia had never seen her mother so furious. And yet it wasn’t just anger, it was shame.

When Hortensia found herself embraced in money, from Peter’s considerable salary but also from her own successes, she understood that this was something she would need to manage. She would never allow money to turn her into someone who could make a woman come home shaking and shout upsets at her husband.

Bassey had answered a simple advert. Several others had too but, during the interviews, they had fawned over Hortensia, the way honest people had to in order to get work from those with more fortune. Bassey arrived on a motorbike. This surprised Hortensia and, when she asked, he said he needed to be able to get around and that he could not afford a car. He looked much the same as he did now. She’d noticed his pronounced Adam’s apple, his darkened nails, perhaps telltale of a past as a smoker, although he declared that he was not one. Peter had begged off the tedium of finding a housekeeper, so Hortensia conducted the interviews alone. It was summer; she sat with potential employees on the stoep and ignored the occasional stares from neighbours passing by. What struck her about Bassey was that, on greeting him and settling in front of him on a crochet-covered cushion set upon a wicker chair, she immediately wanted something from him. Not sex. Not housework. Not even loyalty. It was something imperceptible, something she would never pin down in all his years of service. But one thing was clear: she would never get it. And this was the reason she hired him.

He’d answered no to all the questions: children, wife, live-in. Over the years, Hortensia calculated that he could well be homosexual. She also had times she thought he was simply celibate, but not for religious reasons, rather something philosophical. Or perhaps a disregard for shared nudity, the exchanging of bodily fluids. She could not imagine him having any capacity for the carnal. If it happened at all, Hortensia thought, sex with him would be in straight lines. There was something eternally tidy about Bassey, held together. It played out in a mild disdain for herself and Peter, she had always sensed it. Not a dislike though, something else – not pity, either. She’d noticed it that very first day when he’d sat across from her. A discreet weariness in his eyes like a tired king. And while Hortensia had been confused by Bassey’s regalness, his haughtiness, she’d also liked him for it. He spoke as if his words were precious and he knew the person he was talking to couldn’t really afford them. His facial expressions bore signs of forbearance – the quiet, long suffering of those who tend to others.

Marion could not keep herself from fussing. At night while Hortensia slept she walked around No. 10. Checking. Like a mother, after a long separation from her offspring, looking for birthmarks. It had been her idea to expose the concrete lintels, adding grey to the palette, adding weight. And there: the wall, running from the entrance down the passageway. She’d come to site and it was up … and straight. It’s wrong, she’d told the builder. It’s supposed to be skew. He, a burly guy, old, had said he thought she’d made a mistake. And did she know what she was doing? He’d called her ‘girlie’. It’s supposed to be skew, she repeated, calling for the site drawings. Why? he’d demanded, his eyebrows twitching. The workmen were looking on. Because that’s how I designed it. It caught the view, it caught the light, it fanned out the hallway, making a perspective that she found delicate. He gritted his teeth. You need to redo it, she said. Do it again, do it skew. And they did. Marion grinned, remembering. There was a swell in her heart, a mound of pride.

Coming to No. 10 was what she’d always imagined. A feeling of rightness restored to life. All the reasons to fret forgotten. Marion slept as if returned to the womb. She was home.

This sense of ownership also stirred up an interest in the decor of No. 10. Hortensia was, thankfully, mostly out of the way, so Marion consulted Bassey, who was puzzled by her behaviour but polite. For instance, she asked him about the choice of curtains in the lounge.

‘A rather dirty yellow, don’t you think?’

He turned his head to the side and dropped it just an inch. He seemed to be waiting, then he carried on with his vacuuming.

Once she cornered him in the kitchen.

‘I’d played with the idea of a fireplace here, but I think this was the right decision, you know? The stove is a kind of fireplace really – that was my concept at the time. In the centre like this, the hearth.’

There were small details she’d not really forgotten, but filed away, and it brought her joy to notice them again. The views of the mountain from the guest bedroom upstairs. The wooden lattice of uneven squares separating the entertainment space from the lounge. A series of holes in the wall, filled in with coloured glass and little concrete shelves jutting out.

‘You could put something nice out. A vase or something, Bassey. If she has one. The idea was to catch the coloured light, refract it. The sun comes up that side – can you just imagine it?’

There was a knock on the door. Hortensia knew it could only be Marion because it wasn’t Bassey’s knock. His was urgent business. Quick successive knocks. Hers, three generously spaced-out raps.

‘Yes?’

Marion closed the door behind her and stepped towards the bed. ‘Sorry to trouble you, Hortensia.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’d just wanted to ask if someone could visit.’

Finally a contrite Marion. A grateful Marion. A seeking-permission Marion.

‘Visit you?’

‘Innes, my youngest granddaughter. We’re quite fond of each other.’

Hortensia doubted very much that anyone (perhaps apart from that ridiculous dog) could be fond of Marion, but she let it go. On account of how timid the woman appeared. She even seemed smaller, somehow. Cut-down. Hortensia smiled.

‘Why not? I mean, please, Marion, be at home here. Do as your needs dictate.’

At the door Marion lingered next to a portrait photograph, heavily framed, that Hortensia had been wanting to take down.

‘May I?’ Marion asked, which was silly. Asking for permission to look at something plainly visible.

She studied the picture. Hortensia didn’t mind so much. After all, they were young there, and still beautiful.

‘I’ve been meaning to take it down,’ she said.

Marion turned to look at her and they held eyes.

‘Thing is,’ Hortensia continued, but looked away, losing the stare-off, ‘it hides a stain.’

Before she left the room Marion reached and lifted the photograph to check. She noted the stain on the wall and nodded.

When Innes visited, Agnes was with her.

‘How surprising to see you,’ Marion said.

‘My sister hasn’t been well, so she asked if I’d take her place for a few days.’

Marion regularly forgot that Agnes had a sister, whom Marelena had hired soon after she got married and started having children of her own.

‘Oh.’

Innes hugged her grandmother at the waist. ‘Mum was busy, so Agnes came with me. I rode my bike and she rode Lara’s.’

Marion hadn’t noticed the bikes propped on the stoep. ‘You cycle?’ she asked Agnes.

Innes moved through into the hallway. ‘So this is the house. Grandma, show me around.’

‘No rush,’ Agnes said to Marion and went into the kitchen, calling for Bassey.

Dazed, Marion went after Innes, cautioning her to be quiet because an old, sick lady was sleeping.

‘I heard that,’ shouted Hortensia. ‘What do we have here?’ She emerged from her sickroom.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘Yes, you’re Innes and I’m hungry.’

The entire afternoon seemed intent on baffling Marion. First Agnes, buxom and maladroit, on a bike chaperoning her granddaughter. Then Hortensia being … charming? Marion realised she’d never seen her with anyone under fifty and the effect appeared to transform the woman into … someone nice.

‘Come,’ Hortensia was ushering Innes. ‘Bassey makes a mean hot chocolate.’

It became crowded in the kitchen, in a warm sort of way. Bassey and Agnes chatted. Hortensia leaned against the central island, teased Bassey about his hot chocolate and ordered that he make some. Marion remembered dimensioning her kitchen drawings, the plans. Reasoning out how the spaces would be used, where the cook would stand, how far from the fridge. Innes wanted to know whether Hortensia had cried when she broke her leg, and could she see the wound, please, please – she promised not to scream.

The visit went surprisingly well. Marion vacillated between being jealous that Innes and Hortensia got acquainted so quickly, and being relieved that Hortensia was being so kind; no jabs, no goading, not even a suggestion that this was a woman accustomed to striking people with her tongue. When Innes left, Marion spent some seconds wondering how, after such civility, she and Hortensia might slip with dignity back into the antagonism that was known and comfortable between them. Her concern was unnecessary.

‘Lovely little girl,’ Hortensia said, standing beside Marion on the stoep as the two bikes pumped away, up Katterijn Avenue. ‘If not that she
calls
you “grandmother” I would never have imagined a familial connection.’ She turned and went inside.

WHEN THEY MET,
Peter, twenty-six, had just completed his studies at the Imperial College of Science and Technology where he read chemical engineering. Hortensia wanted to know what he was doing tutoring at Croydon. Peter mentioned his father, a man Hortensia would eventually meet, large like his son, but unsmiling – the only man she would ever confess to being afraid of. He had organised a job for his son at a prestigious firm of engineers and Peter was stalling.

‘You don’t want to work?’

In the early days they didn’t so much date as walk beside each other and talk. It was an unspoken caution of theirs not to visit pubs together or restaurants. An attraction was growing, but sitting across from one another at a table, arranging a specific meeting, was too solid a gesture. After the incident with the Teddy boys, Peter’s daily presence at the entrance of the college when she exited the building at the end of a day’s work left a tickle in the area where her belly button was. But there was the fact that she wasn’t imagining the glares they received, walking side by side down the streets. A woman (many women with many faces that eventually became one), her hair beneath a scarf (or in a hat, or pinned up), tutted (or scrunched her nose or spat) as she walked past them – Peter didn’t always seem to notice, but Hortensia could never forget.

‘I wish to work. I intend to work very hard, but … we don’t get along so well. I want to find my own job, on my own steam.’

Hortensia nodded. There was something stiff and deliberate about Peter, the son of a war-man, he referred to himself as; but that was the only detail he offered about his father. Later, when they finally understood that they were in love with each other and ought to (Peter’s words) marry, and when they finally worked up the courage to tell their parents, Hortensia met the war-man. He shook her hand, looked her in the eye and asked if they intended to have children.

Father, what a question, Peter said. But later on in the visit the question came up again. What would they be, though? What would you have? As if, Hortensia thought, Peter’s parents were breeders wondering about the outcome of mating their prize stallion with a questionable mare. What kind of pedigree could they possibly get from such a coupling? She would regret not speaking up, not silencing them. She was accustomed, from her days at Bailer’s, to being called names, being openly mocked. This was a thinner, sharper knife. The parents had a way of looking at her that told her who she was, where she truly belonged. They were accomplished at this, had learned it from their parents who’d been experts themselves, and had learned it from theirs and so on.

But so much came before that. The slowest of courtships. A wooing measured out in footsteps.

‘And you?’

She wasn’t shy, had never been.

‘I like the lines of things. Forms.’

He wanted her to explain more. She’d decided, long before being awarded the scholarship to study in England, that the world was divided into three different parts. There was the space. Peter smiled while he listened to her and it played with her heart that he was amused, but not in an unkind way. He interrupted to tell her she had strange ideas and he liked it. She continued.

‘In addition to the space there are the people, yes – the animals and so on?’

He nodded.

‘And then there are things. I’m really, really interested in things. The lines of things, you see? The forms.’

All that talk, but done side by side, never front-to-front. The first time they sat down at a table, a year had passed. Hortensia had gone back to Brighton, completed her second year and then returned again to London for the summer and to work at Croydon. Peter had turned down his father’s contact and had interviewed for a job at Unilever; he’d been working for almost six months. While apart, they had spoken on the telephone a few times and a letter each had passed between them. The idea to sit down for a tea was his. He’d given her directions to his office. When she arrived, she found that she was out of breath.

‘Hortensia,’ he said, entering the reception area.

He looked composed.

‘Hello, Peter.’

They shook hands and she detected in his face some small pleasure at seeing her. He watched her for a few seconds and she liked this.

The desk-lady went back to her seat, but Hortensia could tell her presence was a kind of disturbance, a wobble in the balance of things.

‘It’s so good to see you.’

She smiled, dropped her head to the side. This was a youthful habit that in only a few years she would lose.