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.