‘And the Gierdien woman?’ Marion managed to let out in a squeak.
‘This,’ Hortensia indicated the pile of papers in front of her, ‘is sentimental claptrap and I won’t be taking any notice of it at all. That you thought to waste precious committee-meeting time on something so trivial is, indeed, a puzzle to me.’
Marion’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Sarah Clarke slurped her tea. The meeting was adjourned.
TWO
ON THE DRIVE back home after the meeting, Marion played Hortensia’s derision over in her head.
‘Well, she can’t just brush the whole thing aside,’ Marion told the steering wheel. ‘Just watch me. See if I let her just brush it.’
It was a cool evening, not too chilly and only just darkening.
‘Race this, race that. Everything race – “when you say ‘these people’” … Cow!’ Marion braked in time to spare a cat scuttling across the road in the half-light of dusk.
Over the years the two women had argued about many things, each new encounter tense with enmity. In truth, they couldn’t have been more opposite. Hortensia, black and small-boned, Marion, white, large. Marion’s husband dead, Hortensia’s not yet. Marion and her brood of four, Hortensia with no children.
In the early days, when Hortensia still attempted to socialise, the Clarkes, who lived across from the Jameses, had had a dinner party. Peter pleaded fatigue, Hortensia went out of boredom. It was uneventful, until Sarah mentioned an article she’d seen in the latest Digest of South African Architecture. Hortensia hadn’t seen it. It was a Who’s Who of local architects. Sarah looked innocent enough when she said that she’d expected to see Marion listed.
‘Well,’ Marion was caught off guard. She’d read as far as K (Karol) and then put the magazine away.
‘Marion?’ Hortensia pressed, the party suddenly looking up.
‘I don’t remember any women from my generation being included,’ Marion said. ‘There might not have been many of us but from reading that thing you’d think we didn’t exist at all.’
‘We hardly do,’ someone Hortensia didn’t know piped up and the conversation was steered safely away. Then, like a gift, Marion casually commented on Sarah’s Mackintoshes and Hortensia ventured to point out, in a loud enough voice to be heard by most in the parlour, that the chairs were fakes; and, without being asked, she took the trouble to explain why. Dinner parties became a place to posture. Marion once held court on the wisdom of pedestrianising Long Street. She showed her sketches (her handbag was never without a notebook and a pencil). In return, Hortensia spoke for several minutes on the error of formalising the informal.
‘If you take the cars off Long Street, you’ll take away the people. There will be too much space and too little chaos.’
Marion made snide remarks about commercialised plastic-making; fiddling with crayons and thread was her approximation of textile design – any three-year-old can do it. Hortensia mentioned the presence of one of her fabrics – a brocade – used to panel a wall in the new Cape Grace wine bar. A modest article (Hortensia kept the clippings, as she did of all her works that made the news) in the Sunday paper, decor section, on the consolation of beauty in otherwise unsettling times. Trivial, Marion said, but struggled for words when Hortensia took pains to impart her disdain for a six-year degree that teaches you to knock walls together.
‘You do realise Architecture can exist without Architects?’
Hortensia referred to the profession as one of the biggest cons and had absolutely no time for the navel-gazing self-importance and total inconsequentiality of architectural academia and their ponderous supposings. She knew a little about it as she had once been the guest of the architecture department at the University of Cape Town. She’d been invited to join a panel of external examiners on a project involving textile fabrication. She’d consented out of hubris but remained unimpressed.
‘I visited your alma mater,’ she’d told Marion the first chance she got.
‘And?’
Apparently Hortensia’s dislike was too much for words. She simply grimaced and walked on, leaving Marion in no doubt that her architecture school had just suffered the worst form of insult.
Other times they argued about maids and madams. It started at the grocer’s. Hortensia behind Marion in the queue. She observed as her neighbour started to empty her basket.
‘How are you, Precious?’ Marion asked the woman at the checkout counter.
‘Fine,’ she responded.
‘Truly? Promise?’ Marion asked again. ‘You usually look happier.’