‘I’m sorry,’ she snivelled, pulled a tissue from a nearby box. ‘I wanted you to say “yes”.’
Hortensia ground her teeth, shook her head. ‘Why does it matter so much?’
‘I needed you to be … better.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘See, I’d have said “no” too. If it was my land they wanted. I’d have told them no, go away.’
Hortensia looked ashen. And annoyed.
SEVENTEEN
IT WAS A small ceremony, although Marion imagined that Annamarie’s funeral would have brought half of Lavender Hill running, and the surrounds. Wasn’t that what the funeral of an old woman was supposed to be like? An old man even.
Beulah carried a brown earthenware bowl. She came with an old stooped man who didn’t say anything. Marion guessed he was Annamarie’s second husband. Beulah’s mother was there and Beulah’s younger brother. Hortensia and Marion met them at the gate, they thanked Hortensia in unison and then they and the small group of friends who joined them, all together, walked in a jagged line of procession towards the Silver Tree.
The brother dug the hole, Beulah said a few words.
Hortensia stayed for the ceremony, then said she had a headache and went back inside.
Others mingled around long wooden trellises laid out in the garden. There were cupcakes and koeksisters and hot tea, normal and rooibos, and small pies and samoosas and little squares of fudge. Some chairs were spread around, but people mostly stood. Marion got to talking with Beulah.
‘Your brother mentioned that you are a lawyer.’
Beulah nodded. She’d taken a gulp of milky rooibos tea.
‘Do you follow all the claims? On the land by the … people?’
‘Some of it. There’s a lot.’
‘We have one going on here. The Von Struiker farm.’
Beulah took another koeksister. Finished it and took a samoosa. She smiled.
‘I’m expecting.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘My grandmother used to talk about when they moved people off the land. She said about how a lot of the old people died. Broken-hearted. Some lived on, heartbroken but alive. Which is worse?’
Marion didn’t know.
‘Sorry to say this, Marion, but it was a wicked thing – scattering people like that. It undid a whole culture of people. Made pride difficult.’
Beulah rubbed her tummy and Marion noted that there was a small bulge to it.
‘Your people … white people say to forget it and move on. But … we must also get better. Sometimes you move on and you remain sick, and then what is the point of going forward? We must get better too. My grandmother didn’t want to forget. I always thought it’s because forgetting would be the same as getting lost, not knowing where you are. She told us about this place.’
Marion’s face grew dark.
‘There was a wheel, this big,’ Beulah raised her hand over her head. ‘Runaways. Or a slave man caught with a white woman. Or any slave that maybe hit a white person. Stole something, perhaps. Food. A spoon from the big house. And they’ll tie the slave, the person, to the wheel … It was basically designed to break bones.’
Marion excused herself.
Week after endless week, it was good to have a site to visit. The works were progressing, in fact almost complete. Marion picked her way across the yard to the front door. Frikkie walked from sitting with his workers and joined her.
‘Afternoon, Mrs Agostino.’
‘Frikkie.’
Marion was struggling, hitting up against something.
‘Can I walk with you?’ he asked. ‘Then if you have any notes.’
Marion nodded. Frikkie opened the front door, let her pass. She walked, placing each footstep, afraid she’d fall, but actually the real struggle was metaphysical.
‘Should we start in the kitchen?’
She’d once been watching a TV recording of her favourite opera – La Traviata – when, in trying to adjust the picture, she pressed the wrong button and landed on a channel she didn’t know existed. There was a young black girl on the screen – dressed wonderfully in fuchsia – and she was complaining. It was some kind of youth programme, the kind that began choking television after ’94. Black youth, this and that. Anyhow the girl was deciding to move from Cape Town to Johannesburg and her sole reason was the absence of a black middle class. It was all quite strange, the way such things were always strange to Marion. The girl referred to Cape Town as ‘closed’.
‘I’m sick of being an oddity in my own country,’ she’d whined.
She cited the fact that on visits to restaurants the only other black people were there to take her order and wash the dishes. ‘Cape Town, the last outpost’, she’d said in a mocking tone.
The whole thing had stayed with Marion. The girl’s earnest account of a problem Marion had been unaware of. What struck her the most was that the complaint seemed inaccurate. For Marion there were black people everywhere – too many even.
‘Do you like it here, Frikkie?’
He looked startled. ‘You mean?’
‘In Cape Town.’
He frowned. ‘I’m from here.’
‘Oh.’
‘Well, the Eastern Cape originally but, yes, I grew up in Langa.’