The Woman Next Door (2 page)

‘I see.’

In the silence Hortensia supposed Marion was thinking, inching towards her next move, preparing another strike, but instead she heard a sigh and almost missed the details of the upcoming meeting. Marion even threw in a dress code as a parting gift.

‘We dress for our meetings, Mrs James. We follow rigorous decorum.’ As if she thought dignity was something Hortensia required schooling in.

The meetings seemed to have been created for the purpose of policing the neighbourhood; keeping an eye out ‘for elements’, the community librarian had explained to Hortensia. Foolishness, she’d thought, and soon been vindicated after attending a few sessions. The meetings were a show of a significance that did not exist. Old women, with their wigs, their painted nails, their lipsticks seeping down whistle lines; scared and old rich white women pretending, in the larger scheme of life, that they were important. Hortensia attended because the women were amusing, nattering on in earnest about matters that didn’t matter. She enjoyed to think she was laughing at them. But really it passed the time, took her mind off whatever else there was.

There were times, however, when the meetings moved from amusing to offensive. Once, a black couple moved into Katterijn, renting a duplex not on the Avenue but off one of the minor roads. They had two children. A neighbour, an old man, green at the gills and one-toothed, complained that the children ought not to bother his postbox. The matter was raised in committee. He claimed that the children were assaulting his postbox, messing with it. How did he know this, had he seen it? No, he had smelt it when he climbed down his stoep to collect the mail. He knew the smell of brown children. Could this botheration come to an end? he pleaded. Hortensia had cursed him, walked out of that meeting. And as if the Heavens had heard the man’s plea, the botheration came to an end – he died.

Regardless, Hortensia always went back. To mock them, to point out to them that they were hypocrites, to keep herself occupied.

Hortensia checked her watch. Give or take, there were usually ten people present, ten of a possible thirty or so owners. Tonight twelve had shown up. It was all women, all over sixty, all white. This was Katterijn. The meetings were usually tedious but this time apparently something important was to happen. ‘Crucial’ had been the word used by her neighbour Marion.

‘Evening,’ Hortensia greeted the batty librarian whose name, just then, she couldn’t remember.

‘Hortensia, good you’re here. Today is crucial.’

As if the word had been circulated, sent out in memo by Marion. True, there was an extra breeze of excitement. Hortensia, as always, chose a chair near the door. She did it deliberately to remind whoever might bother to notice that she could leave. Well, they could all leave, but it was particularly important to her for them to know that she could leave first.

‘Evening, ladies.’ Marion Agostino seemed to press these words out of her nose. Her smile was painted in a red too red for white skin, Hortensia thought, showing her distaste, hoping people would notice. ‘Today’s meeting is particularly crucial.’

A shiver went round, scented in a bouquet of Yardley, Anaïs Anaïs and talcum powder. Sometimes Hortensia hoped the women were pretending, like she was. She hoped they were there for the same reason, even if secretly. Not for the discussion of fencing left unfixed, bricks from previous works uncollected; nor for hedges to be trimmed or three quotes to be inspected; but for the promise of something non-threatening and happily boring with which to pass the time, get nearer to death, get closer to being done with it all. After so many years of living – too many – Hortensia wanted to die. She had no intention of taking her life but at least there were the Katterijn committee meetings, slowly ticking the hours off her sheet.

‘So.’

Hortensia watched Marion lengthen her stubby neck and lace her fingers together atop a manila folder obsequiously named (in elaborate stencil) Katterijn Committee Meeting File. That the same tattered folder had been in use for the twenty years Hortensia had been whittling time away at these meetings proved the kind of nonsense they’d been up to.

‘Yes, there is this pressing matter, but I first wish to deal with issues pending from our last meeting …’

True to form, Marion was circling the issue, circling. Marion the Vulture. Hortensia looked around the table. They were bickering about a swing in a park, just by the highway that headed back towards the city centre. A group of vagrants had taken possession of it. Clothes were seen drying there, strung along the bars. Offensive smells had been noticed. Someone resolved to take the message to City Council. Then there was the clutch of trees that was blocking someone’s view of Table Mountain, but someone else’s grandmother had planted them, and so on.

‘Okay, so now,’ Marion was readying for her big strike of the evening. Her hair was dyed a wan colour to conceal the fact that she’d been living for over eighty years. At one meeting Hortensia had overheard her refer to herself as a woman in her late sixties and almost choked on the tepid rooibos tea she’d been drinking.

‘… finally, ladies, to the matter at hand. I’m not sure if any of you realise – in fact the only reason I found out is because of my first granddaughter, I’m sure you all recall that she’s a law student – well, the point is, a notice has been made of a land claim in Katterijn. The notice was published in the
Government Gazette
by the … Land Claims Commission.’

‘What’s that?’ Sarah Clarke asked.

Sarah was the only other person on the committee who got so much as a word in edgeways. She was the resident gossip, now in the unfamiliar position of asking a question, since there was little that Sarah Clarke did not already know.

‘It’s the … Commission … it deals with land claims, things like that.’

Hortensia rolled her eyes. Not that she cared but, naturally, she knew all about it and said so, explained that the Commission was set up in the Nineties to restore land to the disenfranchised. While reaching into the hallowed folder, Marion spat a look at her.

Marion pulled out a map of Katterijn, which she unfolded in the centre of the table with a reverence Hortensia had seldom seen shown for paper.

‘The Land Claims Commission, Sarah, is one of those things with a self-explanatory name. And now,’ she rose to point out the parcels of land, ‘a group of some …’ she rifled papers, more a show of importance than a real search for information, ‘some three families … well, one big extended family, the Samsodiens.’

Marion rifled some more, until Hortensia had to concede that perhaps she was actually looking for information and, more than that, the woman looked nervous.

‘What’s the claim, Marion?’

‘Just a moment, Hortensia. Just a moment.’

She found what she was looking for. ‘The claims process has just this month been reopened, so … what I mean is they’d been closed since 1998 and then, for various reasons, on the first of July—’

‘Why were they closed?’ asked a woman whose name Hortensia could never recall.

‘Well, Dolores, they were closed because …’ She rifled. ‘Doesn’t say here, but—’

‘The Commission was only open to claims from ’94 to ’98. That was the window-period.’ Hortensia was enjoying herself. It wasn’t like Marion to give away such easy points but, while she was being generous, it was Hortensia’s aim to collect. Their rivalry was infamous enough for the other committee women to hang back and watch the show. It was known that the two women shared hedge and hatred and they pruned both with a vim that belied their ages.

Marion looked crestfallen. She was of course accustomed to doing battle with Hortensia, anywhere from the queue at Woolworths to outside the post office, but these committee meetings were like sacred ground to her, sacrosanct – she never got over the shock each time Hortensia questioned her authority.

‘The Commission,’ Hortensia continued, ignoring the glare in Marion’s eyes, ‘came about as a result of the Restitution of Land Rights Act that was passed by the then-new government.’ Hortensia relished the use of those words ‘new’ and ‘government’, aware of how much they affected the women.

‘Alright, alright, Hortensia. If we can just get back to the actual issue that we – gathered here – must deal with. The history lesson can continue
after
the meeting is over. Thank you. The Samsodiens are claiming land. The Vineyard basically. I’m surprised the Von Struikers aren’t here, I’ll make a call and request they attend the next meeting. It might be their land, but something like this will affect us all. Don’t even get me started on what it’ll do for property prices.’

Hortensia hated the Von Struikers. Bigots of the highest order, they owned the Katterijn Vineyard, bottled a limited-edition white wine and sometimes a red, neither of which Hortensia found drinkable. Not because of its taste; even if the wines were the best thing ever, she would have found them unacceptable. The thought of drinking anything made by Ludmilla and Jan Von Struiker made her sick.

‘They make me sick,’ Hortensia had once railed to Peter after a dinner at Sarah Clarke’s, where Ludmilla had let slip the year that she and Jannie had arrived in Cape Town to start their ‘small venture’. ‘It took her a whole minute to realise what was wrong with coming to South Africa in the Sixties.’

Ludmilla pronounced ‘v’ with an ‘f’ sound and resembled the largest of the babushka dolls. Once, when Hortensia still deigned to entertain them, she’d offered her cheeks to be kissed in greeting and caught a whiff of foul breath. All these details she piled together as incriminating.

‘The claim dates back to the Sixties when the Von Struikers acquired the land. I’ve made copies here for all present – you can study the details so we can discuss at the next meeting. It’s going to be a long haul.’

‘How do you mean?’ Hortensia felt like a fight.

‘Well, we’re going to challenge it of course. I certainly won’t be allowing this and I doubt Ludmilla and Jan will be, either. I’m sure, if pushed, these people would be hard pressed to substantiate the claims. People looking for easy money, if you ask me.’

‘When you say “these people” what you really mean is black people, am I right?’

‘You most certainly are not, and I would—’

‘Marion, I’m not in the mood for your bigotry today. I distinctly remember asking you to keep your racist conversations for your dinner table.’

‘I beg your—’

‘Ladies. Please. Let’s try and finish the meeting. Marion, I assume that’s all for now?’ Sarah had her uses. Thick as she was, she made a good buffer. ‘Shall we continue at the next meeting? Do we need to type up a formal response to the Commission? Perhaps you want to speak to Ludmilla first then feed back to us.’

‘Well, yes, but actually.’ Marion was smiling; so soon recovered, Hortensia thought woefully. ‘There is one more thing. Specifically with regards to the Jameses’ property.’

Hortensia’s ears pricked up.

‘This is a special case. Well, not
case
as such. It’s not a claim but rather a request.’ Marion relished the moment and, despite her absent-mindedness just moments before, she appeared to have memorised all the details of this ‘special case’; she knew it word-for-word, and the spaces in between – as if she’d written it herself.

‘I received a letter from a woman, Beulah Gierdien. She had a grandmother named Annamarie, who was born in 1919, right here,’ Marion said and a few of the women looked around the meeting room, half-expecting to still find the afterbirth dangling on the back of a chair or laid out on the plush azure carpet. ‘Annamarie’s mother was a slave woman on the farm for which No. 10 was the main house.’ Marion looked pointedly at Hortensia. ‘It states here that No. 12 – that would be my property – is where the adjoining slave quarters were, but that … well, that bit is … I think they got their facts wrong there. I do intend to challenge that but, anyway, where was I …? I must say it’s a rather protracted and odd request.’ She was enjoying herself. ‘There’s no money involved, Hortensia, so you can relax.’

‘Get on with it, Marion. I need to be getting home soon.’

‘Well, it’s precisely that home that Beulah Gierdien seems interested in, Hortensia. Or at least one of the trees on the property. She refers to it as a “Silver”.’

‘The Silver Tree. Yes, I have one of those. What, she wants the tree?’

‘It’s not quite that simple.’

The librarian, Agatha, coughed. A woman, lips newly Botoxed, poured herself some water but struggled to drink. People stretched in their chairs; someone’s yawn cracked and silence settled again.

‘Apparently our Silvers – your single Silver Tree and my several – marked the edge of the properties in that day. There were no fences. Anyhow apparently the trunk of your Silver has some carvings on it.’ Marion arched an eyebrow. ‘You’d need to confirm that, Hortensia, but that’s what she’s saying were the markers.’

‘Markers for what?’

‘For where Annamarie’s children are buried. For where Annamarie requested, in her last will and testament, that she be buried.’ Marion was beaming.

‘She wants to bury her grandmother on my property?’

‘Correction, she wants to bury her grandmother’s ashes on the property. The woman’s been dead a while already.’

Through the excited chatter Hortensia snapped her fingers for Marion to hand over the documents. There were several sheets of paper, handwritten in a neat cursive. Hortensia started to scan the pages.

‘Perhaps, while you familiarise yourself with that, Hortensia, we can call a break. Ladies.’ Marion, her face beatific, rose and the other women followed suit.

‘And the reason she wrote to you?’

Marion shrugged. ‘She got the contact for the committee via the
Constantiaberg Bulletin
. My guess is she assumed the owners lived overseas and her best bet was to write to the committee.’ It was always gratifying when outsiders acknowledged the significance of having a local committee.

Hortensia stayed sitting; she continued reading. The Katterijn Estate had originally been 65 hectares of land that, as the years collected, got parcelled and sold and parcelled and sold. By the 1960s only a small portion was being farmed, and this was the land the Von Struikers now owned.