The Woman Next Door

by Yewande Omotoso

  ‘The same.’ He smiled into his cup, took a gulp, set the mug down, looked around the teashop.

  She walked him back to his office.

  ‘So, have you ever thought about travelling around. The world, I mean?’

  Hortensia frowned. ‘Not really.’

  ‘For instance, going really far, somewhere like Africa, for instance.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It would be like going home. For the first time.’

  He nodded. ‘True,’ he said, a little pink with embarrassment. He scuffed the underside of his shoe back and forth along the pavement. They stood to the side as his colleagues walked by. ‘I have to get back,’ he finally said and bent to land a kiss on her cheek.

  It took her by surprise. Later she would tease him about taking a year to make up his mind.

  ‘See you,’ he said as he went in through the door. He didn’t look back.

  They saw each other a few more times before Hortensia returned to Brighton, her address securely written in neat lines in Peter’s address book; his, put to memory in her mind. They wrote to each other and where before even their most friendly of meetings had maintained an air of formality, the letters were flirtatious, loose, even steamy. Peter had noticed a mole, black like the ink of his pen, just beneath her left collar bone. Distracting, he confessed. And two letters later he wondered about it, what it felt like to touch. Hortensia was initially more practical. She wanted to know whom he had exchanged letters with previously. Was he courting another? Her suspicions were there without having to be conjured – no doubt the result of growing up in the fog of Eda’s endless sense of present or coming injustice. As the year went along, the frequency of Peter’s letters, his jokes and his passion gave Hortensia the courage to allow love to bubble up, to scatter and pop along the surface of her life. He asked that she draw him pictures – their ready joke about forms, lines. Peter sent Hortensia scribblings of chemical compounds, which he would name and explain to her. Why the fascination? she once asked. His answer was cryptic in its brevity. He liked to study ‘combination’; he liked to dwell upon the science of it. She enjoyed this about his mind, the intensity with which it considered these scientific details that remained abstract to her. He seemed to apply the same intensity in studying her and, late at night, this thought made her skin hot.

  The following year, in May, Kwittel died. Hortensia attended the funeral but returned to Brighton and stayed through the summer, unable to face London. She felt guilty, but couldn’t find the courage to return to a home without her father sitting inside it, reading. Peter drove down to see her. He came to comfort her, to hold her.

  Marion hadn’t got around to the library. She’d told herself that Beulah Gierdien was in the unfortunate position of needing something from Hortensia James, which she would never get. The spite that had initially motivated Marion’s need to vindicate Beulah’s request had diminished. In its place Marion found herself curious about Hortensia, about her strange regard for history, her solitary life.

  At the end of the last committee meeting Marion had stressed to Ludmilla the importance of keeping her informed. It was that self-contained Scandinavian quality of Ludmilla’s that had made Marion nervous, made her worry that her committee meetings would be sidelined.

  Instead of an update, Ludmilla called and asked if Marion had been to the library already – if not, could she please look up some details for them. She was interested in the history of the Koppie and its surrounding lands, since it was looking possible that the case would settle out of court and the Samsodiens would be granted a parcel of land, within Katterijn, as compensation. I doubt we can stop them, but you never know, Ludmilla had said, and Marion had the uneasy sensation of feeling both nauseous and flattered. She agreed to go.

  When Marion told Hortensia she was going to the library, she also thought, in a rare moment of care, to ask if she could get her a book.

  ‘From that sorry excuse of a library, with countless Wilbur Smiths pouring from every crevice and not a single book by Walcott, Lamming or Aidoo?’ She sucked her teeth. ‘Ignoramuses.’

  Marion took that as a ‘no’. She gathered her book bag and walked, enjoying the sun on her neck, the fact of not needing a scarf. She missed Alvar, but when she’d raised with Hortensia the possibility of having him at No. 10 – out of the question, she’d said, shaking her head for extra emphasis.

  On account of its three gables, Marion assumed the library building had once been a wine cellar although Beulah’s note said ‘stables’. Its foundations dated back to the eighteenth century. The thatch roof had since been replaced by slate, but the entrance still had the original stone floor.

  ‘Agatha.’

  She was a woman with the requisite brown bun on the top of her head, a white-bone comb holding it there, and thick glasses that made her eyes look like large black-and-white buttons.

  ‘Afternoon, Marion. Returning?’

  Marion pushed her stash forward. The Jilly Cooper was forgettable. Her cheeks grew warm as Agatha scanned the three Wilbur Smiths. She hadn’t had the strength to challenge Hortensia on that.

  It was midday on a Tuesday, the Katterijn library was empty, but then again Marion had rarely seen it full.

  ‘Here are the magazines you requested.’ Agatha moved a pile of glossies along the counter. ‘You taking out some more? I can keep these here for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Aggie. I’m actually here for some research, but … you know, I was also wondering, where do all the books come from?’

  ‘The collection? Donations, really, Marion. And some funding from Council.’

  ‘And the ones that get bought – who buys those? I mean, who decides for the library?’

  ‘I do. And I take suggestions as well, based on what people around here would like to read.’

  ‘I see and … do you have anything … diverse.’ There was really no need to whisper.

  ‘You mean black?’

  ‘Aggie.’

  ‘We have a special section. In the corner over there.’

  Marion nodded. She was picturing Hortensia being sent to a corner for the authors she preferred.

  An old woman and a little boy came through the swing door. She had a cane and the boy dragged his school bag behind him, like a dog on a leash.

  ‘Hello,’ Agatha greeted them and they walked past the counter to the children’s section. ‘You were saying, Marion?’

  ‘Research. The historic materials. Remember I mentioned I’d come through … for the Beulah business. I thought I better get on with it.’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s nice to have some interest. I stumbled on the materials when I took over and tried my best to sort them out.’

  Agatha seemed excited. She rose off her chair to come around the counter. She had the walk of a heavier person, her steps suggesting a weight her bones didn’t carry. She put a hand to Marion’s arm by way of leading her.

  They walked through the main room of the library, with its runs of benches and a few reading alcoves with dormer windows. The back room, a large storeroom, smelt of dank and mould. It was dark despite it being a bright day outside. There were two high square windows, but apart from that no natural light got in. One desk and a narrow chair waited for Marion.

  ‘You can sit here. Some are in files and some of the stuff is back there still in boxes. Wait.’ Agatha’s tone was hushed.

  Marion pulled the chair out and balanced her weight on it. Agatha shuffled towards an arrangement of bookshelves and sealed boxes.

  ‘I hardly ever come here any more,’ Agatha said, breathless with pulling files off the shelf. She set them on the desk. ‘Careful,’ she said catching Marion’s eyes. And then she left.

  Marion shook her head. Agatha was known for being dotty, an odd sort. The files left a film of dust on the tips of Marion’s fingers and her eyes watered from it.

  Beulah’s dates – the deaths of the babies – matched the documents Agatha had produce
d. There was no mention of a Jude, but there was a pile of medical records as well as death certificates. Marion leafed through and her fingers remained light, unaffected, until she realised she was leafing through pages documenting the death of children – so many. Annamarie’s children, if Beulah was to be believed, could be amongst these. Marion felt ashamed. A woman wanted to perform a ritual ceremony, fulfil her grandmother’s last wish, and here she was fingering through history with no purpose. She wasn’t here to corroborate Beulah’s story – she didn’t care enough to – and she wasn’t here to refute it, either. Ludmilla had wanted her to sniff around, find some reason why the Samsodiens shouldn’t be granted land in Katterijn. Marion suddenly felt tired, unfit for the tesk.

  In another pile of documents there were some maps, hand-drawn and labelled in what must have been Dutch. A file of just numbers, some kind of ledger. Another with names, with the odd sheet of paper in Arabic script. At the bottom of the pile were a series of drawings. There was a sketch of Katterijn vlei. A diagrammatic map of the whole neighbourhood with some of the buildings labelled, in English this time. Marion’s eye searched for Katterijn Avenue; there was No. 10 on that stretch – the original manor house, which had burned down. There was the post office which used to be a barn, the Katterijn well that City Council wanted to reinstate as a monument; and there must be the library, except it was labelled as the slave quarters for one Van der Biljt farm. How many incarnations could one building have? There was a series of maps showing the topography and another with all the trees numbered. There was a moth-eaten map of the Koppie, but it wasn’t labelled the Koppie. Almost three hectares of farmland that ran down the hill and abutted the Vineyards. There was a page with names, the script unclear, smudged. Marion read through some sentences at the bottom. Her teeth came together in her mouth and she tasted something unpleasant at the back of her throat. There were sketches of the different contraptions, straps and turning wheels. In a neat hand someone had explained how far to turn the handle before the first bits of bone would start to break. She folded the map over, annoyed that her hands were shaking.

  Back at the front desk, Marion couldn’t find a voice to bid Agatha goodbye in.

  ‘Got all you want – information, I mean? Not taking out anything, I see.’

  Marion didn’t move. She fixed her stare at the cross that hung from Agatha’s neck – silver, too large and trendy-looking for a woman like Agatha. She turned to leave.

  ‘There’s blood here, Marion.’

  Marion walked; she heard Agatha call out about the magazines but decided not to turn back – she’d get them some other time. Outside she took five deep breaths. Everyone knew Aggie was a few keys short of a bunch, but Marion couldn’t stop trying to fix her hair even though it was already neat; she straightened her rings but the gems were facing outwards, straight already. She walked back towards No. 10, and twice she stopped to look over her shoulder.

  When Ludmilla called to find out what Marion had discovered, Marion told her the truth. That the documents were old and tattered, that if Ludmilla wanted to conduct proper research she should drive into town, visit the archives. Marion was unusually short with Ludmilla on the phone and she could sense the woman’s confusion. She herself was perplexed.

  They planned it, practically had the conversations marked out onstage with electrical tape. Hortensia would graduate, they’d tell Eda first (Peter wrote his intentions down in a letter) and then they’d, together, visit Peter’s parents. With all the nerves, the rehearsals and the overwhelming dread, the actual conversations were an anticlimax. Eda, convinced her daughter had been destined for spinsterhood, didn’t even mention that she would have preferred a black son-in-law, a Bajan at that. They’d been prepared for a bigger fight from Mr and Mrs James. Peter had not had to say anything explicit for Hortensia to realise his parents would disapprove. While affronted at that first meeting, at their appraisal of her, she’d also imagined, fantastically, that there would have been spitting and hissing, swearing at the least. The civility of their prejudice, the cunning, had left a polite wound. Beyond that they seemed resigned to their misfortune – Hortensia’s blackness and the brown grandchildren she would give them.

  Their wedding was a small affair at Hortensia’s mother’s church. Mrs James, Peter’s mother, would have preferred her church, but did not insist. Uncle Leroy, retired serviceman of the Carib Regiment, ambled down a short aisle with his grandniece’s bony hand in his. They walked staring ahead at the priest, at a surprised-looking Peter and, beyond, at the yellow blue-and-red stained-glass window depicting Jesus, haloed and chaste.

  In the morning, getting ready, Hortensia had looked long at herself in the mirror, having never felt this pretty. She was drunk on the romantic booze of a wedding day – Zippy with a garland in her hair, the flurry of little girls with dusty rose-coloured bouquets, the shiny smiles everyone reserved for Hortensia, smiles at their highest volume; no one could have been more smiled at than Hortensia on that day and she went deaf with it.

  The morning after the wedding her ears were still ringing. She was even more senseless after having made love to Peter; her first experience that pain and pleasure could coexist.

  When they awoke the morning after, Hortensia had felt shy, but she had taken his cheeks and gazed into a face she adored. His ardour of the previous night had drained and instead he looked blank.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. And this surprised her. What could be wrong? ‘You seem a bit … I don’t know.’

  The words didn’t suggest it, neither did his facial expression, but all Hortensia could think was: he is scared. There was no answer to his question; he wasn’t really asking her anything. It sobered her up, though, and in the few years it took the company to give Peter a raise and suggest he move to their branch in Nigeria, Hortensia stayed sober. In fact love would never again induce anything more than an ache in the centre of her belly. Peter’s coolness of that morning, though, was quickly replaced with the characteristics she was more familiar with – intense, studious, quirky and warm. They honeymooned for three days.

  Hortensia moved into Peter’s flat in Highbury, they made love every night. Peter, seemingly recovered from the shock of being a husband, ardent and happier than she’d ever seen him.

  Soon after she graduated, Mr List, whose faith in Hortensia never wavered, had invited her to submit designs for a collection he was putting together. His drawings showed lean, pointy women, fabric held at the neck with a bejewelled clasp and trailing down, scraping the floor; others cut clean at the small of the back. The clutch-purses and capes were a piece and had become a hit with a crop of rich, bored people. In an article in Harper’s Bazaar List was honest in his praise of Hortensia’s House of Braithwaite and the contribution the designs had made to the success of the collection – it was Hortensia’s first sensation of spotlight.

  The main feature of her designs was a series of dashes, deliberately misarranged. Once repeat-printed onto yards of fabric (her colours were variations of mud and flecks of white, egg-yolk-yellow and cobalt), it looked like someone with too much time had sat and scratched out an alien cipher. This motif became a signifier of her designs. Sometimes sharp precise lines, sometimes frenzied scratches of different thicknesses. Always dense. In later versions she varied the lengths of the dashes. In one collection she hid black stencilled birds (wings spread) amongst what now resembled foliage. In another she interrupted the pattern with bands of blank. For a special commission (carpets and curtains) she arranged the cipher into wiry-like shapes that looked like an ancient alphabet. Decades later, when her reputation in the design world was established, Hortensia’s rich ciphers would be spoken of with wonder.

  Peter had initially thought it trivial to refer to lines on a piece of fabric as a cipher. His rebuff had hurt Hortensia, though, and they argued about it – about the possibility that he, with his mathematics and chemistry, did not consider her work serious or worthwhile. He apologised and they slept entangled, but
the feeling never left Hortensia, that although Peter was intrigued by her work and seemed genuinely pleased at her success, he didn’t really comprehend its significance. Making marks was pure to Hortensia. It saddened her that what she considered the best thing about herself was a puzzle to her husband.

  Soon after the article was published, House of Braithwaite won a large contract with Deutsche Lufthansa offices in Cologne, to produce wallpaper for the executive suites. She was able to join a collective of designers in north-west London. She hired a part-time assistant. Hortensia favoured block-printing and stencilling, but these were time consuming. Eventually, after receiving a commission to design all the fabrics for a yacht owned by one of List’s most devoted customers, Hortensia bought a new mechanised screen-printer, Swedish-engineered. She moved into her own studio and hired another pair of hands.

  The more celebrated House of Braithwaite became, the less Hortensia felt the need to justify her work to Peter. For her it was easy; she had always longed to make beautiful things and now she was doing so. She liked the shining light validation throws on those who do well. She came home and loved her husband but also went out and loved the attention. Peter observed one day that she was perhaps gone too much. Between her trips to fairs in Milan and Stockholm he missed seeing her. She shushed him, but later she would wonder about the glare of success, feel the pull of the notion that a woman’s true success was in the home and not out there in the world. She would feel punished and reach to blame something – her mother, Peter, the unjust God – and find nothing but herself.

  In 1956, both her marriage and her business over three years old, Peter mentioned that his superiors were keen to second him to Nigeria, Ibadan, and that he was keen to accept.

  Eda didn’t like the idea of her daughter going so far away. Despite Hortensia’s efforts, she’d continued to drive trains. She’d been puzzled at Hortensia’s suggestion that she could stop working. She ignored that offer, but accepted the one to move out of Holloway to a more comfortable flat. Zippy was doing her A-levels, she wanted to go to university and then become an accountant. She considered Hortensia going off to Nigeria an adventure and softened Eda’s fears with stories of fellow classmates from West Africa.