‘Yes, you’re Innes and I’m hungry.’
The entire afternoon seemed intent on baffling Marion. First Agnes, buxom and maladroit, on a bike chaperoning her granddaughter. Then Hortensia being … charming? Marion realised she’d never seen her with anyone under fifty and the effect appeared to transform the woman into … someone nice.
‘Come,’ Hortensia was ushering Innes. ‘Bassey makes a mean hot chocolate.’
It became crowded in the kitchen, in a warm sort of way. Bassey and Agnes chatted. Hortensia leaned against the central island, teased Bassey about his hot chocolate and ordered that he make some. Marion remembered dimensioning her kitchen drawings, the plans. Reasoning out how the spaces would be used, where the cook would stand, how far from the fridge. Innes wanted to know whether Hortensia had cried when she broke her leg, and could she see the wound, please, please – she promised not to scream.
The visit went surprisingly well. Marion vacillated between being jealous that Innes and Hortensia got acquainted so quickly, and being relieved that Hortensia was being so kind; no jabs, no goading, not even a suggestion that this was a woman accustomed to striking people with her tongue. When Innes left, Marion spent some seconds wondering how, after such civility, she and Hortensia might slip with dignity back into the antagonism that was known and comfortable between them. Her concern was unnecessary.
‘Lovely little girl,’ Hortensia said, standing beside Marion on the stoep as the two bikes pumped away, up Katterijn Avenue. ‘If not that she calls you “grandmother” I would never have imagined a familial connection.’ She turned and went inside.
TWELVE
WHEN THEY MET, Peter, twenty-six, had just completed his studies at the Imperial College of Science and Technology where he read chemical engineering. Hortensia wanted to know what he was doing tutoring at Croydon. Peter mentioned his father, a man Hortensia would eventually meet, large like his son, but unsmiling – the only man she would ever confess to being afraid of. He had organised a job for his son at a prestigious firm of engineers and Peter was stalling.
‘You don’t want to work?’
In the early days they didn’t so much date as walk beside each other and talk. It was an unspoken caution of theirs not to visit pubs together or restaurants. An attraction was growing, but sitting across from one another at a table, arranging a specific meeting, was too solid a gesture. After the incident with the Teddy boys, Peter’s daily presence at the entrance of the college when she exited the building at the end of a day’s work left a tickle in the area where her belly button was. But there was the fact that she wasn’t imagining the glares they received, walking side by side down the streets. A woman (many women with many faces that eventually became one), her hair beneath a scarf (or in a hat, or pinned up), tutted (or scrunched her nose or spat) as she walked past them – Peter didn’t always seem to notice, but Hortensia could never forget.
‘I wish to work. I intend to work very hard, but … we don’t get along so well. I want to find my own job, on my own steam.’
Hortensia nodded. There was something stiff and deliberate about Peter, the son of a war-man, he referred to himself as; but that was the only detail he offered about his father. Later, when they finally understood that they were in love with each other and ought to (Peter’s words) marry, and when they finally worked up the courage to tell their parents, Hortensia met the war-man. He shook her hand, looked her in the eye and asked if they intended to have children.
Father, what a question, Peter said. But later on in the visit the question came up again. What would they be, though? What would you have? As if, Hortensia thought, Peter’s parents were breeders wondering about the outcome of mating their prize stallion with a questionable mare. What kind of pedigree could they possibly get from such a coupling? She would regret not speaking up, not silencing them. She was accustomed, from her days at Bailer’s, to being called names, being openly mocked. This was a thinner, sharper knife. The parents had a way of looking at her that told her who she was, where she truly belonged. They were accomplished at this, had learned it from their parents who’d been experts themselves, and had learned it from theirs and so on.
But so much came before that. The slowest of courtships. A wooing measured out in footsteps.
‘And you?’
She wasn’t shy, had never been.
‘I like the lines of things. Forms.’
He wanted her to explain more. She’d decided, long before being awarded the scholarship to study in England, that the world was divided into three different parts. There was the space. Peter smiled while he listened to her and it played with her heart that he was amused, but not in an unkind way. He interrupted to tell her she had strange ideas and he liked it. She continued.
‘In addition to the space there are the people, yes – the animals and so on?’