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.