‘All good, thank you.’
Bassey had been twenty years younger when she’d interviewed him for the job as their housekeeper; his right leg had since found a limp and, a few years back, he’d started wearing spectacles. Hortensia had carefully curated her relationship with him. This compulsion had come with having money, with being called ‘Madam’ in Nigeria by the housekeepers; it had come with the weight of money. Her parents had had almost none, even when they made it to London from Barbados, where they’d had even less. They’d just worked and put everything towards their daughters’ education. Hortensia remembered her mother coming in one day, that first year after the move. She must have been twenty-one, home from Bailer’s for Christmas. And her mother came in late from work. It was hailing and Hortensia recalled the cold air that entered with her mother and how it stayed in the room. Funny how cold air could preserve itself in a room where it was not welcome. Her mother made tea, as she normally did when she came in from work. It was about 4.30 p.m. but dark outside. Her mother wouldn’t stop shaking, and Hortensia kept waiting for the cold air to die out. She and Zippy sat at the table and were served their tea: salt biscuits and an apple to share.
‘It’s cold,’ Hortensia had said and her sister and mother agreed.
But then when her father came home – not yet diagnosed, but slow in his movements, weakened – her mother turned on him, she’d stored up all her frustration for him. With her daughters looking on, Eda let Kwittel know that a rich white woman in an animal’s skin had bumped into her on the pavement and raised her nose at her and told her to get back on the banana boat. Hortensia had never seen her mother so furious. And yet it wasn’t just anger, it was shame.
When Hortensia found herself embraced in money, from Peter’s considerable salary but also from her own successes, she understood that this was something she would need to manage. She would never allow money to turn her into someone who could make a woman come home shaking and shout upsets at her husband.
Bassey had answered a simple advert. Several others had too but, during the interviews, they had fawned over Hortensia, the way honest people had to in order to get work from those with more fortune. Bassey arrived on a motorbike. This surprised Hortensia and, when she asked, he said he needed to be able to get around and that he could not afford a car. He looked much the same as he did now. She’d noticed his pronounced Adam’s apple, his darkened nails, perhaps telltale of a past as a smoker, although he declared that he was not one. Peter had begged off the tedium of finding a housekeeper, so Hortensia conducted the interviews alone. It was summer; she sat with potential employees on the stoep and ignored the occasional stares from neighbours passing by. What struck her about Bassey was that, on greeting him and settling in front of him on a crochet-covered cushion set upon a wicker chair, she immediately wanted something from him. Not sex. Not housework. Not even loyalty. It was something imperceptible, something she would never pin down in all his years of service. But one thing was clear: she would never get it. And this was the reason she hired him.