‘Yes. Thank her.’
They sat. Marion had no money to give Agnes but felt thankful, for the first time in her life, for the government and that Unemployment Insurance Fund business. She’d been sluggish in registering when they first employed Agnes, but the woman had pestered her and, now, Marion was glad she had.
Both women sat with their hands in their laps. Marion looked at her loafers – good enough for site?
‘Well …’ Agnes made to stand.
‘What will you do, Agnes?’
‘Niknaks is about to have another little one. Her business is doing well, which is why, I suppose … why she kept asking. She wants me to be a grandmother.’ Agnes sighed in a way Marion hadn’t heard before. ‘But … my boyfriend asked me to go with him on holiday … to Mozambique. He was in exile there back when … Anyway, I think I’ll do that first.’
A boyfriend. A holiday. Marion nodded to convey an understanding she didn’t feel. Her tongue wouldn’t move.
‘Will you be alright?’ Agnes asked and Marion nodded more vigorously.
Shaken, inexplicably angry, Marion took the short walk from the guest house to her own home, still worried about her choice of shoes, unable to erase the image of Agnes’s face from her mind. She fingered the jewel in her pocket, wondered why she wasn’t happier to have had it returned to her.
A man in a once-white shirt greeted Marion at her gate and said his name was Frikkie. She blinked – someone that black called Frikkie, come on! When they’d spoken on the phone, his English had been so good. She’d been impressed that an Afrikaans person could sound so Brit, she’d never have thought she was speaking to a black man.
‘Well,’ Marion said, stopping and standing, arms akimbo, at the bottom of what used to be the porch steps.
Someone had set up a ramp. There were two workers on-site. One man with his shirt tied around his waist was separating a pile of rubble. Useless and useful, Marion supposed were the two categories. She took a breath: that site-smell, dust and metal and sweat. She’d missed it.
‘We’ll spend today and maybe part of tomorrow preparing the site. And I ordered a portable. Should be here any moment.’
Marion nodded. She’d asked that her toilets remain off-limits, which seemed a reasonable request.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. I thought we could discuss the works now, if you have a moment.’ He indicated a bench and two chairs, some papers held down with stones.
‘Yes.’ Marion joined him at the makeshift office. ‘So this is your business?’ She’d owned a business once.
Frikkie nodded. Marion attempted to sit down on the low chair. She managed it, but not without some strain. Frikkie touched her elbow by way of support; she snatched her arm back and lowered herself.
Whose idea had it been to leave the practice? Marion wanted to heap the blame onto Max, but she couldn’t forget her own pressing need to prove herself as a mother. She was already two kids in and still working, when Selena’s difficult birth had put her in hospital, drugged and horizontal. The doctor’s ‘slow down’ coupled with the increase, over the years, of Max’s insinuations about her mothering quickly translated into two-day working weeks and ever shorter conversations with her partner, Harry Cumfred. Damned fool! Long before he bought her out, he’d already started referring to the company as Cumfred Architects. Baumann and Cumfred was no more. There was a time after giving up the practice when Marion thought she could still bully Harry into allowing her back in, then another bump appeared – Gaia. The result of careless sex, Max returning home after an extended conference, feeling guilty and eager to please. After the birth of her fourth child Marion’s head got fuzzy – four children shouting different things at you, the world creeping in, getting in through the holes. It became too much. By 1972, almost twelve years after launching her practice, Marion stayed home.