The Woman Next Door (24 page)

‘Do you know where the child is? Does he expect you to go out and find her?’

Hortensia shook her head. ‘It’s all there. Marx gave an email, a phone number.’

‘I don’t mean to … Tell me if it’s none of my business, but why do you think he put all this together like this, Peter?’

‘I can think of two reasons. One, because he hates me and wants to punish me. For what, I cannot imagine. Control the scene, boss me around?’

‘And two?’

‘Because he wants us to meet. He loves me and he loves her, and he’s sorry.’

‘Are you worried you’re doing the wrong thing?’

‘I want her – the child – to not exist. Why would I want to send her an email?’

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I’d do, either.’

‘But then I think: what if she’s destitute? I can’t imagine it – never knowing my own father, his love. What if this is her chance to know that he thought of her?’

Marion couldn’t help it when her jaw slackened. Hortensia, for just some seconds, resembled a soft-hearted woman; she could bake cookies and smile at Girl Scouts. It felt naked and made Marion uncomfortable. ‘I feel like I’m forcing you to talk.’

‘Oh, come off it.’

Someone blasted a horn and Marion suddenly missed her binoculars, felt blown off her perch as Queen of Katterijn.

‘One thing,’ Hortensia started again. ‘One thing I’ll always hate him for was this time in Brighton. My father had died and I couldn’t leave Brighton. I don’t know – I just couldn’t go home. As if going home would make his absence permanent. Normally I’d work in Croydon over the summer, but that year I stayed on in Brighton and Peter came to see me. His effort was so … tender. I was already in love with him but, somehow, this gesture did something. Anyhow, one day he suggested we go to the beach. You realise I grew up on the best beach there is; Brighton was a joke to me. I’d been several times alone but never with him, so we went. A picnic. It was his idea to watch the sunset. We had a blanket, Peter draped his leg over me. I remember that I struggled to breathe but didn’t say anything. Having the weight of his leg on me seemed more important. It grew cold and we spread another cloth over us, night came. He proposed to me. “I want to take care of you,” he said. Can you believe that? “I want you to know that you can depend on me.” Depend, he said.’

Marion grunted her understanding.

‘And there is where I shall never forgive him. Because, you see, I really heard him that day. With something deeper than ears. Maybe you can listen with your spleen, or your pancreas. Because it felt like that, Marion. I heard him deep in some part of my body.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Of course he couldn’t have meant it. Not with the way things turned out. And then I made a joke about the whole thing to myself. Decided marriage was like ordering in a foreign-language restaurant. Thinking it’s fish, too embarrassed and proud to confirm in English. And then your heart drops when the waiter puts a plate of something bleeding and unrecognisable in front of you. Something you are absolutely certain you are not going to be able to eat, no matter how hard you try.’

Hortensia sat in a chair, she leaned forward to pull on her skirt, lifting one buttock and then the other, feeling tired even though it was morning. The strain of getting dressed – who would have thought. She also felt annoyance at having unburdened to Marion. She had no interest in it, no inclination. She rejected in herself the urge Marion displayed. The need to talk, the need to have someone listen. Her nose scrunched up. Those who talked and those, like her, who calcified. All those years in Ibadan, stalking lovers, all that time spent grieving, this was the direction her broken-hearted logic had led her in. It was not wise, but it was, like a fossil, self-preserving. She’d survived. The machinery of her body had kept going, hatred’s venom for oil; her skin was taut, no one ever guessed her age. Surely if she’d lived that other life, a life of unburdening and revelations, if she’d stayed delicate, run after him, begged and pleaded, she’d have let life use her, not the other way around. And used things grow old. She had Peter to thank, then, for her flawless complexion, her beauty.

Hortensia stood. She eyed a jumble of shoes in the bottom of the closet. Of course beauty had not been what she was after, nor agelessness. She had wanted love. She fitted her feet into a pair of loafers, brown suede, not striking, but not repulsive either. Unqualified love. She reached for the walker. She’d had such a time; a time when she’d loved him, his tongue in her mouth, along the grooves of her teeth or his hand cradling her neck. Soft times. When she’d allowed softness. Remembering such a time made her feel foolish. She’d felt foolish back then too. Hoodwinked. She remembered deciding to be tough, hardening, making the trade between fulfilment and not being duped. She would use all her powers to have him endure her suffering, and by proximity he would suffer too. They went on to have an okay marriage, an okay life. Like an okay house, with just that one room you don’t go into. Not because it’s unfurnished or ugly, but because it’s haunted. And there are no haunted rooms, really, only haunted houses.

Still, snivelling Marion was upsetting a really good system that, up till now, had been working.

Hortensia entered the kitchen. She left the door ajar so she would see when Marion came down the stairs; she intended to call out to her.

Marion had woken up with a crick in her neck, and she knew that the pain was not there because she had slept in a bad position. It was there because it was the nature of pain to show up whenever it liked.

She felt shy about seeing Hortensia, felt she ought to hide from her. She had nothing to compare this feeling to, except her wedding night, pulling the covers to hide her thighs from her husband; needing the bathroom, being scared to mention it.

When Marion got out of bed and looked around for her slippers she felt light-headed, she’d bent down too fast. She showered and wore a camel turtle-neck, feeling chilled despite the good weather.

‘About yesterday,’ both women said, paused. ‘You first,’ they both said, paused. Sighed in unison. Marion moved from the doorway and sat opposite Hortensia at the kitchen table. Ever-discreet Bassey, stacking the dishwasher, left the task incomplete and excused himself.

‘You were saying?’

‘I was just going to say that – I don’t know how to put it – I was thinking of what it must feel like, to have read Peter’s will … Thinking how I would have been.’ That wasn’t what she’d wanted to say.

‘Hmm.’

Marion laced her fingers. ‘What were you going to say?’

‘How are you feeling?’ Which hadn’t been what Hortensia had wanted to say, either. The question seemed to surprise Marion as well.

‘I’m fine. My neck hurts. You?’

‘Everything hurts after a certain age. Dr Mama told me that, but he said it in such a way that it sounded funny.’

Marion smiled. She had something to say.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot. Oh God!’ she covered her face with her hand.

‘What now?’

‘I’m going to cry and you’ll be upset with me.’

‘Why are you going to cry?’ Hortensia felt her body move between impatience and compassion; she settled somewhere in the middle.

‘Because I am ashamed.’

‘Okay.’ She moved towards practicality. ‘You cry, Marion. I’ll make us some coffee. Did you notice this beautiful piece of machinery in my kitchen – ordered it, flown in specially, delivered yesterday. It’s a Blumenthal. Just you wait.’

‘How do you do it?’ Marion emptied her nostrils into a handkerchief.

‘Do what?’ She assembled two espresso cups on the counter.

‘Keep it all together.’

Hortensia liked to press the buttons; such a simple transaction: push some buttons and make delicious coffee. ‘I don’t keep anything together. I lost everything long ago, I don’t have anything left to keep together.’ She put one steaming cup in front of Marion, took a sip from the other. ‘That’s how I do it.’

‘Good coffee.’

‘Excellent, you mean.’

They sat like that. Somewhere in the house a vacuum cleaner started up.

‘Did you know, I was born in District 6. Did you know that?’

Hortensia shook her head.

‘I don’t remember it really, my parents moved the next year. To Wynberg. Then we moved to Plumstead – we kept creeping southwards.’ She took in the coffee aroma. ‘I wish old age would make me senile. I wish to really forget. I was just now thinking, remembering. Before he died, my father used to do this thing. They were divorced by then, my parents. And old. I’d arranged for them to stay at the home, full of Jews, the people they’d spent their lives avoiding, but they bore it. A decent enough place. So I’d visit every Sunday and we’d all three have breakfast. And my father would do this thing with the newspapers. It never really hit me before. I thought he was just losing it a bit. We’d all be sitting, and Father would start reading out a few headlines from articles in the
Cape Times
… or was it the
Argus
? I can’t remember. He’d say – my father had a really deep voice – you know he’d be reading to himself and then suddenly he’d shout out something, like
So-and-so backs colour bar in factories
or
Challenge to Nats to keep South Africa white
. He’d say
Police out as rebellious miners protest, such-and-such street disturbed by gunfire
, and on and on. Thing is, this was the early Nineties – these weren’t the actual headlines. He was making them up, remembering, perhaps, from days gone. He spoke in a certain tone. As if trying to make a point maybe. Trying to say, look at what we called a country … Just look.’

Hortensia stretched her legs, leaned forward on the chair to massage the length of them. She had to keep her blood moving, otherwise she feared she would not be able to stand up. Ever.

‘Just blurting that stuff out. Like he was calling up the ghost of something, of apartheid. Saying … or rather feeling sorry. I think so, anyway. I remember now that my mother would get upset and ask him to stop. Maybe one or two would be violent-sounding. Please, my mother would say, and my father would stop but do the same thing the following Sunday. Such a feeble thing, you know, but I started thinking: maybe he was trying … I really like to hope that he was trying.’ Her eyes glistened.

Hortensia said nothing. Her fingers massaged her leg.

‘We were able to move southwards because my father did well with the shop. Trading in jewellery. A cousin would have the right contacts, a shipment would come in. I don’t know – I didn’t pay attention much. In 1951 we moved to Constantia; the house wasn’t large, but the address was right – we’d made it. Alberta came to work for us. Her name was really Bathandwa, but my mother asked if we could call her Alberta; she liked the name, although she never explained why. Bathandwa seemed to agree.’

It happened so long ago that Marion had taught herself to think of it as something she’d once read in a book. Bathandwa had been older than Marion, mid-twenties or so. The regular cleaner of the Baumann household, Hettie, had died the year before, sick with tuberculosis in a hospital for blacks with not enough medicines, no beds. Marion was at first surprised at how young Bathandwa was. And then she was surprised by Bathandwa’s ragged ear, an ear that looked as if a dog had tried to turn it into lunch. She never found the courage to ask Bathandwa what had happened to her ear.

There was a period when the Smiths next door had no one and asked Mrs Baumann if they could borrow her girl, Alberta. For two weeks she shared her time between the Baumanns and the Smiths, and then Marion never saw her again.

One day Alberta was taking out the washing, she passed Marion in the hallway and asked if she knew that Mrs Smith next door had only nine toes, and did Marion know what had happened to the pinkie on her left foot? And that the nail on Mr Smith’s ring-finger was rotten – soon he’ll have no nail. Whitlow. Alberta said Marion’s mother had rings on her neck, red welts: did Marion know how they got there, did she notice how they came and went? So-and-so had a wooden leg from an accident at the border. So-and-so drank, her liver was finished. On it went, an inventory of scars. It made Marion, who never said anything in response, uncomfortable, but the passing remarks became a ritual of Alberta’s. Once, Marion went into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich. Did you know, Alberta started, glancing over her shoulder as she stood at the sink, that Mr and Mrs Smith couldn’t fuck? He had no cock, she no pussy. ‘The children are borrowed, gifts from the gods who take pity on the weak.’

Marion had been friendly with the Smith girls, and frequently went round for tea. One day she was over at the Smiths’, eating crackers and Marmite with her friends. A commotion deeper within the house, the sound of a loud banging and Mr Smith shouting, made the girls get up and run to where his voice was coming from.

‘Dad, what’s going on?’ one of the Smith girls asked.

‘Alberta was in the bathroom.’

‘I was just cleaning up. I’ve finished work, Sir. I’m going home now.’

Bathandwa was dressed in dark-blue jeans and a red fitted top. Marion noticed the more familiar powder-blue uniform poking from the tote bag Bathandwa carried.

‘Why are you wearing my wife’s earrings? Give them.’

‘These are my own earrings, Sir.’

Slender things speckled with diamantés, dangling and almost touching her bare shoulders.

‘Nonsense. You think I’m stupid? Give.’

They all stood frozen in the passageway. Marion and the Smith girls tried to get a good look at Bathandwa, but the mass of Mr Smith was blocking most of their view.

‘But they are mine, Sir.’

His hands shot through the space and slapped her cheek.

‘And the shoes as well,’ he said.

They were new shoes, heels Bathandwa had bragged about to Marion earlier in the week.

‘Take them off.’

Mr Smith stripped the girl who cleaned his house. Near the end, when she was almost naked, he said, ‘And what’s that smell? Who told you you could use my wife’s perfume?’

Afterwards, no one spoke about it. Mrs Smith came home and raised only an eyebrow when Mr Smith told her he’d caught the girl stealing. He handed his wife the things that wouldn’t fit, shoes that were not to her liking. The Smiths finally got their own maid and the Baumanns found someone new as well. Before the woman could tell them her name, they asked if they could call her Alberta.