The Woman Next Door (3 page)

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?

Marion had been twenty-six – principal of her own firm but lonely – and there was Max at a dinner organised by business associates. Her friend took her by the elbow to a corner of the dimly lit lounge and said: this is Max Agostino, Italian and rich. And Max had ducked his head down as if embarrassed and shaken her hand. The friend (who was it?) then wandered off, as is the thing to do with such set-ups, and Max said something accommodating. Something like, ‘Now you know everything about me, let’s talk about you.’ And Marion had smiled. It hadn’t been everything about him. She, the friend – whoever it was – had left out that he was tall, that the neatly trimmed hairs along his temple, light grey, were the same colour as his eyes. He was well composed, Marion had noted, in his dark grey-suit and silver cufflinks. She teased him about it – that he wore office-wear to parties – and then noted with alarm that she was flirting. She looked at her glass, wondering how much she’d drunk, and Max, noticing it was empty, offered to refresh it.

When she asked, he explained the way he made his money, but the financial world was a puff of smoke to Marion and she enjoyed the fact that Max’s work was inaccessible, uncatchable. She made room for this bit of mystery in their relationship and it did the job of keeping him, at least some parts of him, strange to her. When they made love the strangeness was there, that he was someone she couldn’t quite get all of.

There were the little surprises. That he wasn’t circumcised, that he lowed when he came, that he didn’t mind crying in others and frequently did so himself, over simple things like a sad part of a movie or a baby being born. Otherwise Max was predictable, steady. And he loved her.