‘Marion, what are you doing here?’
‘I’m sorry about Peter. I wanted to pay my respects.’
She wanted to gloat. Hortensia was calculating how to walk past this nasty woman, perhaps walk to the tea table and bite into a banana muffin. She squeezed her shoulders in, as Marion took a step closer to her.
‘I really am sorry.’
Hortensia, from the corner of her eye, noticed the praying-man rise and walk out of the church. She felt bolstered; he’d prayed a prayer, perhaps she could float on the wings of whatever blessings he’d bargained for.
‘Marion—’
‘I know, I know. We’re not friends.’ Marion looked around as if expecting a chorus of agreement, but no one was paying them any attention. The cherub was inspecting a long koeksister and the husband-and-wife golfers appeared to be arguing. ‘I just thought to come. I just … I just thought to come.’ She raised her hands, then collapsed them to her sides, an exaggerated shrug.
‘Please, Marion. Let me get past.’
Marion, her face glum, shifted aside and Hortensia went in search of a muffin.
After the church, all the mourners (except Marion, Hortensia noted with relief) went to Peter’s patch of ground where the tombstone stood waiting. The ashes, collected in a simple wooden box, were placed into a hole. And, even though she could feel the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, when a wiry man began shovelling the sand, there was also a part of Hortensia that wanted to tell him to stand back so she could spit.
FIVE
AT A CERTAIN point, after it had started, Hortensia knew. She didn’t agonise over whether she was wrong, whether she was misjudging her husband, shouldn’t she give him the benefit of the doubt, or anything like that. She simply knew, from a smell, from a frown or a smile that hung out of place.
By that time they’d been in Nigeria for five years. Hortensia had become well studied in Peter’s movements around the house on his return from work. She had practically memorised the number of steps it took him to get from the front door to the guest bathroom. The seconds it took to relieve himself. The running tap. And then to his study; the faint smell of a cigarette. Only after that would he seek her out in the living room.
‘Have a good day?’ he’d ask, pecking her on the cheek.
How long had he been coming home that way? When had she become the sort of wife you needed to have a pee and smoke before you could face her?
The lies followed, the way one thing necessitates another. Important office meetings that ran on till night-time, weekend-long conferences. Hortensia sometimes despaired that her husband was not more creative.
Sometimes he came home and she had already turned off the bedroom lights, lain down, awake. She counted his steps, tracked how he wound through the house. On the nights when he figured she was asleep, his movements were different; he wasn’t pressed to use the toilet, didn’t really need to calm his nerves with a cigarette. Instead it was a quick visit to the lounge, a few moments of silence as he reached the carpet. He often, she surmised, stood by the silver tray placed on the teak sideboard, where the housekeeper left the mail. If she strained, if she raised her head off the pillow, Hortensia would hear the tear of paper as he ran the letter-opener through. If it wasn’t a letter from his mother, it was otherwise just some rubbish mail from England. Hortensia wondered what her mother-in-law wrote in that slanted cursive with its flourish, indicative of anyone literate born in the early twentieth century. Did she ever tell her son that she missed him? Did she ask after Hortensia, maybe suggest – but never outright – the magic of new life, the glisten it can give a marriage? Would she know, would she guess that things were bad, that her son was bored, or maybe even in love with someone else?
After a few more minutes Hortensia would sense her husband’s presence before he actually entered their room. Then the weight of him on the bed. No part of their bodies touched. Once she was certain that Peter was asleep, Hortensia would get up to clean the bathtub.
The bathtub had proved useful. When they’d first moved in she’d thrown doubt at the cast-iron tub, quaint but perpetually stained. The first night after she’d guessed a third person was now present in her marriage, Hortensia had been unable to lie still, next to Peter in their bed. Her heart pounded as if she was running a marathon. But instead of scrolling through in her mind who it could possibly be, her thoughts alighted on the stains – cumulus and menacing – unchanged all these years after much effort from the housekeeper. Hortensia got up, certain the woman simply hadn’t tried hard enough. On her knees in the bathroom she found the action of scrubbing tight and mechanical, she liked the music of her breathing and the scrape of bristles against weathered enamel. Despite no real change in the appearance of the blemishes, Hortensia convinced herself that her scrubbing was working, that the stains were slowly disappearing. It became her project. If he heard her, Peter didn’t mention it. The exercise was precisely what she needed to be able to hit the pillow and die into sleep; lying awake beside him had become intolerable.
Some nights if, after the tub, Hortensia was not tired enough, she swabbed at the sink, polished the mirror, mopped the tiles. Their bathroom became the cleanest in the house. And if the physical exhaustion of housework still wasn’t good enough, Hortensia would attempt to expend her mind. She’d go into her study and sit at her desk. Some of her most successful designs happened after 1 a.m., as if the condition for good design was darkness, fatigue and morose solitude. If that were so, though, it would have been a new insight for Hortensia. A student at Bailer’s Design College, she had always needed to work in daylight – sunlight in fact. A thing she’d realised, on arriving in Brighton fresh from Bridgetown, young and determined, would be in short supply, despite the misleading name of her new town.
The name would explain itself over time, but the weather would remain unimpressive.
The only other non-British student in Hortensia’s class was a girl named Kehinde. She was younger than average, sixteen, but full of talent and chutzpah. It was known by the students that Kehinde was from Nigeria but, for the four years of study, she denied it, referred to herself as a Startian, from an unknown unnameable planet. She answered only to the name K, rather than the mispronounced (deliberate or not) versions of her name that her classmates called her. Although Hortensia had not been friends with K, they’d had one honest conversation. Hortensia found herself alone with K one evening in the workshop. A young fashion designer was teaching at Bailer’s for a term. He had caused some excitement in Florence, at one of the infamous Giorgini soirées, with what he called ‘capes and clutches’. At Bailer’s he encouraged the students to see textile design and fashion as one-and-the-same thing. He instructed them in pattern-making. Hortensia enjoyed the sewing machine, she liked the force of the pedal (the power of that) and steadying the needle, with her right hand on the balance wheel. She paused in her concentration.
‘Why do you lie?’ Hortensia asked.
‘About?’ Kehinde didn’t look up from cutting; she’d marked out the borders of the garment in white chalk.
‘Where you’re from. Are you ashamed?’ It had been boiling in Hortensia for a while now. They were both teased endlessly, Hortensia for being Barbadian, for singing when she spoke, for rounding words in a way that amused her classmates, for being dark; but mostly they spurned her for being a good designer, for the audacity of that.
‘I’m not ashamed. I just thought that would be the easiest way.’
‘To what?’
‘To give them something to muck about with.’
K’s strategy had puzzled Hortensia, who’d never even considered bringing a strategy with her to Brighton – perhaps a failure of her otherwise-robust imagination. On confirmation that she’d received the coveted British Council Art Scholarship (her teacher had practically browbeaten her into making an application), she’d celebrated with Zippy, enjoyed the proud gaze of her father, Kwittel, and endured a litany of cautions from her mother, Eda. It
was really one cautionary remark repeated in various forms – Be careful. Eda, ever tightly wound to the possibility of coming troubles, predicting Armageddon, emboldened by the Bible, King James Version, whose first testament she had put to memory, with its smiting and endless tribulations. Hortensia had ignored her mother’s warnings, but soon, arriving unprepared for battle, regretted this. Regardless, she wrote simple letters home and received simple ones back. Eda’s shaky writing dominated the square pages. Hortensia wrote back in black, all-capital letters (she’d discovered a great capacity for penmanship), and told of a beach that wasn’t a beach, not the sea baths to which she was accustomed. Despite Eda’s repeated ‘Are you alrights?’, Hortensia left out stories of what she called ‘the freeze’. Hard stares from fellow students and lecturers alike; stares from people who looked through you, not at you; stares intent on disappearing you; and stares you fought by making yourself solid. People found it civilised to imitate the sound of a chimpanzee whenever they passed Hortensia or K in the corridors. They were not the first black students to ever attend Bailer’s and yet it seemed a riddle had to be solved each time a black person presented at the college. A boy once asked Hortensia how her brother was. I don’t have a brother, Hortensia replied. Oh, but you do, here – the golliwog on the Robertson strawberry-jam jar.
In 1950, a year after Hortensia arrived at Bailer’s, the rest of the Braithwaites boarded a ship, the Spig-Noose docked at Dover and they caught a coach to Waterloo Station. An older cousin of Kwittel’s, Leroy, had completed his service with the Carib Regiment; he’d been stationed in Italy, saw no action, but had a heart attack all the same (apparently hereditary); he’d chosen to stay on in England and, with Hortensia already in university, had encouraged Kwittel to bring himself and the rest of his family out. Leroy had offered London as a promise of better, and Kwittel had sold this to his sceptical wife. A few weeks after arriving in London, Kwittel found work as a postman. Hortensia’s classmates managed to divine this piece of information about her life. People who thought themselves funny asked her: if the black postman delivers the mail at night, wouldn’t it be blackmail? It was one of the few stings that actually hurt. Hortensia’s father was not only the closest thing she had to a best friend, but he was also the best person she knew in the entire world.
Kwittel Braithwaite had two furrows that ran on either side of the bridge of his nose. When his daughters, Hortensia and Zephyr, were young they liked to feel those furrows with their small spongy fingers. The grooves had formed over many years of studying, his wife liked to say, a tinge of awe in her voice. The wire spectacles that had been instrumental in creating this feature were the same ones Hortensia tried to describe decades later, to an assistant in the front room of her optician’s in Cape Town.
If her relationship with her father was filled with admiration, Hortensia’s relationship with her mother was ruled by restraint. The tension came from Eda’s need to dominate, and Hortensia’s to resist. Hortensia thought of her relationship with her mother as being governed by a repulsive force that sat between them and kept them, at any given time, at least a hundred centimetres apart. If, by some accident, they came any closer or even touched, it was only for seconds and then they glanced apart like two similarly charged black magnets.
They hadn’t always been that way. Before the age of twelve, things had been different. But then they had one of their many arguments. It started as something quite regular. Eda was plaiting her daughter’s hair and Hortensia was sitting between Eda’s thighs, wincing and complaining about the style her mother was fixing. Hortensia, who felt she had a better understanding of what suited her and what didn’t, wanted something different and she was telling her mother so. Occasionally she got a knock on her head for twisting and complaining too much. Perhaps that day she had received one too many knocks, because something settled in her, some kind of resolve. When Eda was done and released the child from between her bony tight-lock thighs, Hortensia excused herself to the room she shared with Zippy. When it was time to prepare food and Hortensia was called, there was suddenly a lot of screaming. That evening there was no dinner.
Hortensia had not only undone the plaits her mother had prepared, she’d found a pair of scissors to cut the hair as short as possible. Then, still unsatisfied, she’d sought out her father’s blade and managed not to draw even a spot of blood, but achieve a soft, smooth and very close shave. She looked, Eda shouted, like some bug-eyed alien and she threatened to swat the thing back into outer space. Hortensia was saved by her father who, she suspected, would forever lose some of his wife’s affection for having shielded her from Eda, for siding with her. That evening war was declared. Hortensia noticed that Eda had become injured with a wound that would never heal. A wound that even after many years, despite Hortensia’s own disappointment in her marriage (a sadness she never managed to hide from her mother), would prevent Eda from offering her eldest daughter – her precious person – comfort.
Soon after graduating from the Bailer’s Design College, Hortensia travelled from Brighton up to London. It was 1953. She moved in with her mother and Zippy in Holloway.
Defeated by cancer, Hortensia’s father had passed away one year before and it felt strange to be living without him. To not see him beneath a lamp, a book in hand. He’d never completed high school, but treasured history and taught himself much of what there was to know about the world. Many evenings were spent instilling the same curiosity in his daughters. Paramount to him was teaching them from where they came; in this way he taught them pride.
Before he died, Kwittel admitted to his wife that he had been sick before they boarded ship. In fact he knew he was dying but thought this rush northwards, via the Atlantic Ocean, would be good for his family. And when he was dying and Eda mentioned going home, he made it clear to her that he wanted to be buried in England. He was being devious; he knew his remains in London would ensure Eda stayed put, ensure Zippy could finish school and make something of herself. He knew superstitious Eda, itching to go home as she was, would never dare leave his grave to be tended to by strangers.
He died quickly and Eda bore his death as if she’d read of its coming in the clouds. She infected her daughters with her subdued grieving, and none of the three ever fully recovered from the sombre shadow Kwittel’s death cast.
The home at Holloway was two rooms. Eda and the other residents of the house all cooked on the landing and shared the bathroom facilities. At night Hortensia sat, missed her father and suffered her mother, who was proud of her daughter but concerned about her marriageability. Zippy was fourteen years old, the sisters were not quite friends, but there was conviviality and genuine warmth between them; a fierce sense of protection from Hortensia and a persistent curiosity from Zippy. She never tired of rifling through Hortensia’s drawings.
‘I like this one.’ Zippy pointed to a sketch of a series of chairs.
‘You call the number I give you?’ Eda asked, looking up from her ironing. She ran a small laundry and ironing business from home. Her face was worn, her lips always downturned since her husband’s death. She also drove trains for London Transport.
‘You look tired, Mama.’
‘You call?’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Well … call. The boy waiting.’
Hortensia sighed.
‘And this one.’ Zippy had a special ability to zone out their mother’s nagging, perhaps, Hortensia thought, because the nagging was seldom directed at her. She watched her sister flick through her sketchbook.
‘I’m going to start selling my own designs,’ Hortensia said, looking at Zippy although the statement was intended for Eda. She’d started getting her documents together for the registration of House of Braithwaite.
‘Your own designs?’ Eda asked, lifting the iron and taking a moment to glance at her firstborn.
‘Yes.’
What Hortensia didn’t tell Eda was that she had no need to call ‘the boy’ Eda was trying to fix her up with.
Instead, she and Peter were in the last stages of their courtship. He had asked for her hand in marriage and she’d said yes.
They had been courting in secret for three years. Later, when Peter would tease Hortensia for her love of beautiful things, what he couldn’t have known was that he’d been that for her once too – a beautiful thing, perfect and in need of nothing. The year they met, Hortensia’s first summer in England, Peter was tutoring in Pure Mathematics and Statistics at Croydon College. Hortensia was on vacation from design school. Mr List, the same enthusiastic teacher that had introduced fashion to Bailer’s, had noticed Hortensia’s talent and invited her to join him as his assistant. He ran a summer pattern-making class at Croydon College. Accustomed to being received coolly at Bailer’s, the young teacher’s interest in her work had surprised Hortensia. She accepted the offer, keen for the extra money. She moved in with her Uncle Leroy. Her mother sent a letter with the details of the family’s imminent arrival.
Within days of starting her job at Croydon, Hortensia had observed Peter from afar; he was distinctly tall and difficult to miss. Up close one day in the cafeteria, Hortensia saw that he had freckles on his face, they were dark brown and she found them pleasant. She smiled at him and he stammered a greeting.
Almost on arrival Eda found something to worry about. She didn’t like the hours Hortensia was keeping, the journey into Croydon. She said as much to Hortensia who, as usual, didn’t pay her any mind. And as if danger follows worry, one night, after staying late in Croydon to enjoy a drink with some of the students, Hortensia began her journey home. She was dressed in high heels, which was unusual despite her short stature. She wobbled in the heels, walked slowly, shivered from the cold (how could this be summer?). One came up on her left and another on her right. A hand pressed against her back meant someone was behind her too. Teddy boys were always spoken of but, up till then, she’d never encountered any. In the early days of their marriage, when there was still laughter, Hortensia would claim she had had all three boys on their backs by the time Peter showed up. He’d respond by saying, ‘If on their backs means standing with their fists jabbing the air, then yes.’
The Woman Next Door Page 6
