Soon after she graduated, Mr List, whose faith in Hortensia never wavered, had invited her to submit designs for a collection he was putting together. His drawings showed lean, pointy women, fabric held at the neck with a bejewelled clasp and trailing down, scraping the floor; others cut clean at the small of the back. The clutch-purses and capes were a piece and had become a hit with a crop of rich, bored people. In an article in Harper’s Bazaar List was honest in his praise of Hortensia’s House of Braithwaite and the contribution the designs had made to the success of the collection – it was Hortensia’s first sensation of spotlight.
The main feature of her designs was a series of dashes, deliberately misarranged. Once repeat-printed onto yards of fabric (her colours were variations of mud and flecks of white, egg-yolk-yellow and cobalt), it looked like someone with too much time had sat and scratched out an alien cipher. This motif became a signifier of her designs. Sometimes sharp precise lines, sometimes frenzied scratches of different thicknesses. Always dense. In later versions she varied the lengths of the dashes. In one collection she hid black stencilled birds (wings spread) amongst what now resembled foliage. In another she interrupted the pattern with bands of blank. For a special commission (carpets and curtains) she arranged the cipher into wiry-like shapes that looked like an ancient alphabet. Decades later, when her reputation in the design world was established, Hortensia’s rich ciphers would be spoken of with wonder.
Peter had initially thought it trivial to refer to lines on a piece of fabric as a cipher. His rebuff had hurt Hortensia, though, and they argued about it – about the possibility that he, with his mathematics and chemistry, did not consider her work serious or worthwhile. He apologised and they slept entangled, but the feeling never left Hortensia, that although Peter was intrigued by her work and seemed genuinely pleased at her success, he didn’t really comprehend its significance. Making marks was pure to Hortensia. It saddened her that what she considered the best thing about herself was a puzzle to her husband.
Soon after the article was published, House of Braithwaite won a large contract with Deutsche Lufthansa offices in Cologne, to produce wallpaper for the executive suites. She was able to join a collective of designers in north-west London. She hired a part-time assistant. Hortensia favoured block-printing and stencilling, but these were time consuming. Eventually, after receiving a commission to design all the fabrics for a yacht owned by one of List’s most devoted customers, Hortensia bought a new mechanised screen-printer, Swedish-engineered. She moved into her own studio and hired another pair of hands.
The more celebrated House of Braithwaite became, the less Hortensia felt the need to justify her work to Peter. For her it was easy; she had always longed to make beautiful things and now she was doing so. She liked the shining light validation throws on those who do well. She came home and loved her husband but also went out and loved the attention. Peter observed one day that she was perhaps gone too much. Between her trips to fairs in Milan and Stockholm he missed seeing her. She shushed him, but later she would wonder about the glare of success, feel the pull of the notion that a woman’s true success was in the home and not out there in the world. She would feel punished and reach to blame something – her mother, Peter, the unjust God – and find nothing but herself.
In 1956, both her marriage and her business over three years old, Peter mentioned that his superiors were keen to second him to Nigeria, Ibadan, and that he was keen to accept.
Eda didn’t like the idea of her daughter going so far away. Despite Hortensia’s efforts, she’d continued to drive trains. She’d been puzzled at Hortensia’s suggestion that she could stop working. She ignored that offer, but accepted the one to move out of Holloway to a more comfortable flat. Zippy was doing her A-levels, she wanted to go to university and then become an accountant. She considered Hortensia going off to Nigeria an adventure and softened Eda’s fears with stories of fellow classmates from West Africa.
Hortensia settled into Ibadan as if it were a neighbourhood in London. The new environment and the chunky accents around her were not strange, nor were the house staff, although she’d grown up making her own tea and mopping the floors.
They still had sex in those days. Next to the kitchen sink on the charcoal-blue Italian factory tiles that the supplier had given Hortensia a discount on; or Peter standing, pressing in, Hortensia’s hands spread against her favourite surface with the canna-lily wallpaper (last batch by the, now dead, textile designer). Peter went off to work, chauffeur-driven, and Hortensia worked in the shed she’d had converted, almost on arrival, into a studio. Her work was still being sold from the London studio, which she’d reluctantly surrendered to the assistant, with Zippy keeping an eye. Hortensia had seen yards of adire on a visit to Abeokuta and was in search of a local designer to join her in opening a boutique. At the end of the day Peter would come home and they would touch eyes over dinner. The heat was sticky and the love slippery, but Hortensia’s uterus didn’t take any notice.