THANK YOU TO my family, always there, providing what is needed when, from food and shelter to love and encouragement. Jacqui L’Ange, Zukiswa Wanner, Paige Nick and Anya Mendel, thank you for reading this in its various stages of undress and for your partnership, insight and generosity. Elise Dillsworth, super-agent, you were with this story from very early on, helping, with expert searchlights, move it onwards. Thank you for your belief, patience and tenacity. Becky Hardie, thank you for your close reading and careful editing. I have learnt an immense amount as a result. I acknowledge Michele Rowe and her article ‘My Place: Silvermine’s true gold’ published in Times Live, 6 November 2013, portions of which have been used, with permission from the author, here. Several people provided me with information and anecdotes that were crucial to the writing – Lyle Cupido, Moegsien Hendricks, Lanice Holloway, Eve Mendel, Nomzamo Mji, Mrs Helen Richfield, Rosalie and Julian Richfield, Mrs Dvora Schweitzer, Marcel Tamlin, and Issy Wolman, thank you for giving your time and engaging with me. To the organisers and staff of the Ebedi International Writers Residency and Norman Mailer Fellowship, thank you for providing timely solace and invaluable opportunities for connecting with writers, readers and teachers.
Thank you to my friends, I feel lucky to love and be loved, writing wouldn’t be writing without that.
THE HABIT OF walking was something Hortensia took up after Peter fell ill. Not at the beginning of his sickness, but later, when he turned seriously ill, bedridden. It had been a Wednesday. She remembered because Bassey the cook was off on Wednesdays and there were medallions of lamb in Tupperware in the fridge, meant to be warmed in the convection oven, meant to be eaten with roasted root vegetables slathered in olive oil. But she hadn’t been hungry. The house felt small, which seemed an impossible thing for a six-bedroomed home. Still, there it was.
‘I’m going out,’ Hortensia had shouted at the banister. According to the nurses, she wasn’t supposed to leave him unattended but Hortensia held the nurses and their opinions in contempt. She didn’t see the need to knock on the door and tell him she was leaving, either. She had convinced herself that Peter’s hearing, unlike his deteriorating body, was intact. That he was capable of hearing even while buried beneath blankets, hearing through the closed door of what she called the sickbay, hearing down the stairs, hearing as she closed the front door behind her. She’d gone out through the pedestrian gate, looked up and down Katterijn Avenue and turned right towards the Koppie.
The Koppie, a small rise in an otherwise flat landscape, was the obvious place to walk to that first time, and every time since. Being neither fit nor young, it was important to her (especially with her bad leg) that the slope was gradual enough not to be a bother; but still high enough to afford Hortensia a sense of accomplishment each time she climbed it. She was petite and her strides were small. Her walk had grown laboured over the years but in her youth, with her small stature and vigorous movements, she had been regularly confused, from afar, for a child. Her curly black hair cut close to the skull didn’t help her appear any more adult. Up close, though, there was nothing childlike about the sharpness of her cheekbones, her dark serious face, her brown eyes.
Once on top of the Koppie, Hortensia liked to trail through the grasses and low bush. She wore her hiking boots and enjoyed the crunch of their soles on the rough ground. All this had been a surprise that first time; enjoyment of nature wasn’t generally something Hortensia engaged in. But at the advanced age she was, with over sixty years of a wrecked marriage behind her, this enjoyment was precarious. The slightest thing could upset it.
The top of the Koppie was planted with wild-growing vines and scattered pine trees. A path cut through the long grasses and although it looked maintained, Hortensia couldn’t help but think of the Koppie as a forgotten land. Once it became of interest to her she quickly noticed that the kids of the neighbourhood didn’t play there, and the adults of Katterijn seemed to flatten the hill with their gaze, discount its presence.
Soon after she started climbing it – to get away from a dying man, to give him room to die faster, to catch fresh air, she couldn’t work out which – some old bat from the committee mentioned it; put it on the agenda in fact. Katterijn committee meetings never failed to make much ado of the quotidian, to wrestle the juices from the driest of details, to spend at least an hour apiece on the varied irrelevances experienced by the committee members since the last meeting.
The Koppie was also a surprise because Hortensia had reached the age of eighty-five without having understood the meditative power of walking. How had she missed that? she scolded herself. But now, with Peter almost gone, it seemed right that she discover walking, that she do a lot of it and that she not resist the contemplation it provoked in her, the harking back to the past, the searching. These were all things Hortensia had grown skilled in avoiding. All her life she’d occupied her time with work. In return her company, House of Braithwaite, had enriched her and, in exclusive circles particularly in Denmark, amongst interior designers and fashionably nerdy textile-design students, made her famous.
Before the Koppie, memories were balls of fire sitting in the centre of each earlobe. A headache, her doctor in Nigeria had called it when it first started, but this was no headache. It was resentment, and Hortensia found that if she looked away from the things that were rousing – the memories – she was not happy but nor was she in agony. And then, so many years later, to discover walking. To discover that if she remembered while walking, the memories were bearable. Was it the fact of simultaneously thinking back while moving forward in a wide-open space, unconstricted? Not that the walking made the memories come sweetly. They came with anger and it helped that the Koppie was deserted, so Hortensia could shout and not be disturbed by any other living thing except some squirrels and, judging by the small mounds of sand, a colony of ants.
Katterijn was an enclave of some forty houses within Cape Town’s suburb of Constantia. Not all owners lived on the premises; many were European, leased their properties out and boasted of their African summer homes at dinner gatherings. The Estate had its origins as a wine farm. When Hortensia and Peter had moved to South Africa the agency had made a fuss about the great history of Katterijn, which went as far back as the late 1600s. A Dutch man, Van der Biljt (Hortensia found the name unpronounceable), had visited the Cape, a guest of the Dutch East India Company. Corruption was rife in the company, and Van der Biljt was a reluctant part of a team posted by the directors to bring order to the venality. The parcel of land was gifted to him to sweeten the deal, encourage him to settle after the mission was completed, should he so wish. He so did and eventually used the land to produce wine as well as fruits and vegetables. Some said Katterijn was the name of his lover, a slave concubine, but others – more invested in a de-scandalised history for the neighbourhood – insisted Katterijn was his daughter. What about the history of the slaves? Hortensia had asked, because it was in her nature, by then, to make people uncomfortable. The agent did not know anything about the slaves of Katterijn; she directed their attention, instead, to the marvellous view of Table Mountain.
It had been 1994. South Africa shed blood and had elections. The USA hosted the World Cup. Nigeria beat Bulgaria 3–0. Already sick, nothing excited Peter, but soccer still could. And as the players put the ball through the goalposts fair and square, a democratically elected president in Nigeria was arrested; the previous year a perfectly decent election had been annulled. Hortensia and Peter agreed to leave Nigeria. After the perpetual warmth, they were reluctant to return to England’s cold climate. South Africa with its new democracy, its long summers and famed medical facilities would ensure the best conditions as Peter got sicker. They’d arrived to their new home and Hortensia had realised that she would be the only black person living in Katterijn as an owner. She’d felt disgust for her surroundings, for the protected white gentry around her and, in her private dark moments, she felt disgust for herself as well.
Despite its beauty, Katterijn turned out to be ugly and, to begin with, Hortensia was unable to fathom why. Not one for uncertainty, she preferred simply not to notice the prettiness at all, then the puzzle of how something apparently good-looking could generate disgust would be avoided altogether. The houses were white and green and the lawns were wide and planted with flowers, bushes and grass that presented a manicured wildness. Gardens made to look like they’d sprung up that way, except they hadn’t, they’d been as good as painted into place; branches trained and bent into position. The Katterijners had simply mastered a popular pastime, making a thing appear to be what it is not. But by the time Hortensia had worked all this out she was too tired to move again. And besides, she wondered if such a place wasn’t just right for her.
Once a month a Katterijn committee meeting was held. As far as Hortensia understood it, the committee had been started by a woman named Marion Agostino who also happened to be her neighbour, a nasty woman who Hortensia did not like. But then again Hortensia did not like most people. She had stumbled upon the meetings by accident, soon after she arrived in Katterijn. No one had thought to mention that by rights, as an owner, she was entitled to while away time with the other committee members. The information was let slip. At the time Hortensia had felt that the initial omission was not forgetfulness but deliberate, and it was easy enough to assume that the slight was based on skin colour. Armed with the knowledge, Hortensia had taken the short trip to Marion’s and pressed the buzzer on her intercom.
‘It’s Hortensia James from next door.’
She had not been offended by the absence of any show of welcome from her neighbour or the other residents. They had not come to Katterijn to make friends, something both she and Peter had managed without for the bulk of their lives.
‘Wait, I’ll call my madam,’ a disembodied voice said.
Hortensia leaned her shoulder against the wall.
‘Hello?’ That must be Marion.
‘It’s Hortensia. From next door.’
‘Yes?’
This was the moment when Hortensia understood she would not be invited in. The slight annoyed her briefly, but she waved it away as unimportant.
‘I’ll be attending the meetings.’ It mustn’t sound like she was asking permission. ‘The committee meetings.’
‘Hmm, I hadn’t realised you were owners.’
Hortensia still listening at the buzzer like a beggar. ‘Yes, well, we are.’
‘Oh, well, I was confused. And …’ Hortensia could almost hear Marion searching for another gear, ‘… is that gentleman your husband?’ She wasn’t asking so much as scolding.
‘Who, Peter? Yes.’ Again this hadn’t surprised Hortensia. She’d fallen in love with a white man in 1950s London. They had been asked on many occasions to verify their courtship, to affirm that they were attached, to validate their love. Within a year of being together they were practised at it. ‘Yes, Peter is my husband.’
‘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.
In the mid-nineteenth century Annamarie’s grandfather, Jude, had worked on the original wine farm. He’d also formed the group of slave men used to construct most of the buildings from that era, some of which still stood: the post office, Beulah wrote; the library, which was actually stables. They built the roundabout and planted most of the trees that formed the generous groves within the suburb. Jude was a dark man with paper-white eyes and small feet that his wife, apparently, had teased him about. Hortensia grimaced as she read, just the sort of memory-lane nonsense she found difficult to swallow – people fawning over their individual and collective histories.
Jude and his wife had children as slaves, but grew old in freedom. Their daughter, Cessie, gave birth to Annamarie. Jude and his wife, on being granted their freedom, had been permitted to remain on the land as workers and earn wages. Annamarie’s parents had inherited the same agreement and stayed on in Katterijn – raising their family. Annamarie learned how to read. But by 1939 the Land Act of 1913 caught up with the small family and they were forcibly moved off the land. By then Annamarie was twenty years old, a mother herself and a wife. Except her first child had died at birth and, after another child died too, her husband walked off somewhere one night and was found floating in the lake. Father and babies were buried under No. 10’s Silver Tree.
Hortensia looked up. Marion was standing by the refreshments table chewing something; their eyes met. Marion offered a smile, which Hortensia ignored and returned to Beulah Gierdien’s notes.
After the tragedies Annamarie settled in Lavender Hill and married again. They had a boy, Beulah’s father.
Hortensia laid the papers down.
A few of the members were milling around the tarts, the meeting having gone on for longer than seemed bearable. Someone had prepared flapjacks, scorned at first (for fat content, for too-largeness) but eaten by all. People piled their plates, filled their cups and settled back in their seats.
‘So you see, Hortensia, this is not about your favourite topic, the race card. For once we’re on the same side.’ Marion’s smile looked set to burst and set the world alight.
‘Not so.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Not so, Marion. We are not on the same side. You should know this by now. Whatever you say, I disagree with. However you feel, I feel the opposite. At no point in anything are you and I on the same side. I don’t side with hypocrites.’
Marion was red. And quiet.
‘I am not in agreement with you to push back on the Samsodien claim. Let those who are justly claiming their rights to the land – land owned by hoodlums, I might add – let them claim it.’
‘And the Gierdien woman?’ Marion managed to let out in a squeak.
‘This,’ Hortensia indicated the pile of papers in front of her, ‘is sentimental claptrap and I won’t be taking any notice of it at all. That you thought to waste precious committee-meeting time on something so trivial is, indeed, a puzzle to me.’
Marion’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Sarah Clarke slurped her tea. The meeting was adjourned.
ON THE DRIVE back home after the meeting, Marion played Hortensia’s derision over in her head.
‘Well, she can’t just brush the whole thing aside,’ Marion told the steering wheel. ‘Just watch me. See if I let her just brush it.’
It was a cool evening, not too chilly and only just darkening.
‘Race this, race that. Everything race – “when you say ‘these people’” … Cow!’ Marion braked in time to spare a cat scuttling across the road in the half-light of dusk.
Over the years the two women had argued about many things, each new encounter tense with enmity. In truth, they couldn’t have been more opposite. Hortensia, black and small-boned, Marion, white, large. Marion’s husband dead, Hortensia’s not yet. Marion and her brood of four, Hortensia with no children.
In the early days, when Hortensia still attempted to socialise, the Clarkes, who lived across from the Jameses, had had a dinner party. Peter pleaded fatigue, Hortensia went out of boredom. It was uneventful, until Sarah mentioned an article she’d seen in the latest Digest of South African Architecture. Hortensia hadn’t seen it. It was a Who’s Who of local architects. Sarah looked innocent enough when she said that she’d expected to see Marion listed.
‘Well,’ Marion was caught off guard. She’d read as far as K (Karol) and then put the magazine away.
‘Marion?’ Hortensia pressed, the party suddenly looking up.
‘I don’t remember any women from my generation being included,’ Marion said. ‘There might not have been many of us but from reading that thing you’d think we didn’t exist at all.’
‘We hardly do,’ someone Hortensia didn’t know piped up and the conversation was steered safely away. Then, like a gift, Marion casually commented on Sarah’s Mackintoshes and Hortensia ventured to point out, in a loud enough voice to be heard by most in the parlour, that the chairs were fakes; and, without being asked, she took the trouble to explain why. Dinner parties became a place to posture. Marion once held court on the wisdom of pedestrianising Long Street. She showed her sketches (her handbag was never without a notebook and a pencil). In return, Hortensia spoke for several minutes on the error of formalising the informal.
‘If you take the cars off Long Street, you’ll take away the people. There will be too much space and too little chaos.’
Marion made snide remarks about commercialised plastic-making; fiddling with crayons and thread was her approximation of textile design – any three-year-old can do it. Hortensia mentioned the presence of one of her fabrics – a brocade – used to panel a wall in the new Cape Grace wine bar. A modest article (Hortensia kept the clippings, as she did of all her works that made the news) in the Sunday paper, decor section, on the consolation of beauty in otherwise unsettling times. Trivial, Marion said, but struggled for words when Hortensia took pains to impart her disdain for a six-year degree that teaches you to knock walls together.
‘You do realise Architecture can exist without Architects?’
Hortensia referred to the profession as one of the biggest cons and had absolutely no time for the navel-gazing self-importance and total inconsequentiality of architectural academia and their ponderous supposings. She knew a little about it as she had once been the guest of the architecture department at the University of Cape Town. She’d been invited to join a panel of external examiners on a project involving textile fabrication. She’d consented out of hubris but remained unimpressed.
‘I visited your alma mater,’ she’d told Marion the first chance she got.
‘And?’
Apparently Hortensia’s dislike was too much for words. She simply grimaced and walked on, leaving Marion in no doubt that her architecture school had just suffered the worst form of insult.
Other times they argued about maids and madams. It started at the grocer’s. Hortensia behind Marion in the queue. She observed as her neighbour started to empty her basket.
‘How are you, Precious?’ Marion asked the woman at the checkout counter.
‘Fine,’ she responded.
‘Truly? Promise?’ Marion asked again. ‘You usually look happier.’
The woman offered an uncomfortable smile. As Marion unloaded her items onto the counter she seemed to think it necessary to explain to Precious why she had bought them.
‘That’s for Mr Agostino. Tummy trouble. Oh, this is for my granddaughter. Fussy baby, that one. She likes this type, won’t eat any other. This is for Agnes – you know Agnes, my girl at the house. Oh, and I saw that and thought: wouldn’t Niknaks like that? Niknaks, that’s Agnes’s child. We thought of adopting her, but … you know … How much does all that come to, Precious?’
Hortensia had stared aghast through it all, in the rare position of being tongue-tied. She had a chance to set her tongue free at a gathering. Marion said that Agnes, her housekeeper, was part of the family: that the sixty-five-year-old woman had been pivotal in raising her kids, one boy and three girls, and that Marion in turn had attempted to make her life easier, sent Agnes’s kid to a good school, built her a house.
‘You want credit for that? That’s blood-money. Mixed in with missionary work. You think you did well by her, don’t you? Perhaps you’d like a medal?’
Marion was speechless.
‘St Marion. Charity-giver. My foot! You can’t buy it, Marion. You want to give something, you know what you should have given? You should have given Agnes your own house. And taken hers. Swopped suburbs. That’s what you should have done, my friend … Or, better, here’s a thought: Hero Marion, you should have ended apartheid … if you later wanted something to be able to brag about. Oh, and she is not like part of your family, she is employed by you. If she were part of your family, she wouldn’t have to clean up every time she visits.’
Hortensia made a hook with her index and middle fingers, to go with the word ‘visits’. Marion left the party.
Everything seemed to be about race for Hortensia, but Marion thought life was more complex than that, more wily.
She parked her car. As she climbed her stoep, her cellphone began to ring.
‘Darling … why do you sound so upset? … I’m sorry I missed Innes’s birthday … No, I didn’t forg—… No, I didn’t just not come … Marelena, I’ve had some issues to deal with here … The accountant called me, about Dad and his … well … What do you mean, am I surprised? How was I to know? … Your brother isn’t even taking my calls, Gaia refuses to give me her number in Perth … I sent her an email the other day; don’t suppose I’ll hear back … As for Selena, you’d think Jo’burg was the North Pole, the amount I hear from her … I need some help, is what I’m saying … Help-help. Money! … Zero, is what the accountant said … Marelena, would you please listen? … Marelena? … Yes, gone – all of it, gone … All … I see … Okay, Okay … Yes, of course you need to speak to your husband first … Well, will you call me? … Okay. Bye.’
‘Agnes.’ Marion put the phone down and arranged a chair the way she liked it, concealed from view by her row of Silvers. ‘Agnes!’ She banged against the front door. ‘I’m calling you!’
‘Ma’am.’ The woman appeared.
‘Take.’ Marion handed over her keys and committee file. ‘Put on my desk.’
Of course there were other things to be concerned about, besides Hortensia.
‘Oh, Agnes! Tea. Bring tea.’
Max had finished their money. They, Marion and Max, had had lots and lots of money. And just before he’d died he’d gone and finished it. The fool.
‘Agnes!’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Tea. Use the china – the proper stuff. And bring the binoculars. And a biscuit for Alvar.’
Marion tapped her temple, listened to the padded steps retreating across the stoep, back into the house, up the hallway towards the kitchen.
‘Don’t break anything!’ The woman must have Parkinson’s or something. Whatever that disease was where your hands shake. Dropped the handmade ceramic antique soup bowl – blue and white. Dropped it. Broken. Irreparable.
All the same, if the accountant was right, she’d eventually have to let Agnes go. Stupid Max. Stupid stupid stupid.
‘Come here, Alvar! Come here, boy.’
Alvar was approaching two years old. The dachshund had been a gift to Marion from Marelena and her children. They’d been tactful enough to wait several months after Max had died before presenting Marion with a white wire cage, a yellow ribbon round it. But even so, the notion of a replacement could not be avoided. Her children had been raised never to talk about the obvious, never to mention the thing in the room that gave off a stench. Marion had taught them either to move or bear it, but never to let on. Pointing things out was too unpleasant.
The reality was that within days it became clear that Alvar was going to be a much better companion than Max ever was. Apart from in the arenas of passing on human sperm and earning money to keep a family, Alvar won over Max in all spheres. He had a much better sense of humour, he didn’t snore or fart in his sleep, he was always happy to see her and he came when she called. Marion named the dog after Alvar Aalto, her favourite architect. She saw in Alvar the same restraint of design (the mark of genius, surely), tasteful simplicity, an appreciation for natural materials and textures. No one else could quite see how a dog bore the same characteristics as a Master Builder, but they let it go.
Agnes brought the tea. The weight of Alvar was a comfort in Marion’s lap. ‘Wrong set. The proper one, I said.’ Marion took the biscuit. ‘And bring another biscuit, Agnes.’ Who brings a dog a single biscuit?