The Woman Next Door (12 page)

Her mother had been pregnant on the ship. She and her husband sailed for South Africa from London, leaving behind the dormitory house they had lived in, with so many others, for a few months. It had all been a jumble of nightmares and rain. On the
Blue Mary
, her mother had been sick often. Sick with the sea, but also sick with the baby. Sick too with fear and a close sense of what is ugly about the world, what it is like to be hunted. She stood on the deck, Marion’s mother explained to her, when the seas calmed and she saw the shining waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

No one could ever know but, standing on the deck of the ship one evening, she’d considered jumping. Her bits of sick were bobbing down below on the waves. She felt a madness, like a fever, and the only thing to end it would be to jump, fling herself and the unborn child over the edge, give them both a simple kind of peace. She held onto the rails and, as if it was a fast wind, the feeling passed. She reasoned that if she could get away from the dark place they’d come from – not just physically – then she could be alright. She decided to make herself forget and she vowed that, henceforth, for every remembrance anyone, even her husband, attempted to inflict on her, she would slap it away. Because this would be a new life, away from a land that had turned on itself. And in the new life there would be no need for remembering. She wanted to forget and she wanted to be forgotten. After all the horrific attention, she longed to simply slip through life unnoticed.

Marion was surprised to hear her mother say so much, but it was a carefully made story with nothing fraying along its edges. Marion never asked again.

In the guest house in Katterijn, as the sun began to drop, Marion put the portrait of her parents back into the brown cardboard box full of worthless trinkets and forgettable memories. Stupid portrait. How ridiculous, the painting – worth something – and this photograph survives. This stupid picture that was irrepressible. She shoved the box with her leg and her heel complained.

From the window she could see the highway. Apparently if you looked carefully into the thicket you could pick out the Von Struiker Gardens, so said the receptionist. Marion narrowed her eyes as she glared at the view. Too little light, really. But the room was too quiet, and it felt less quiet if she stood at the window and looked out of it. She missed Alvar. Of course, apart from the painting, that had been the first thing Marion had wondered. She feared the worst but, like an exclamation mark to Marion’s failure as a parent, Marelena had taken Alvar in. Imagine. She’d taken the dog in and she’d put her own mother into a guest house. Marion bristled, but she found it difficult to despise Alvar for being favoured.

At last Marelena’s number shone on the screen of her cellphone.

‘Darling, have you found it? … The painting! Marelena, I don’t think you fully understand just how important this is … I’m not shouting! … Well, can you check? Please … I’m asking as sweetly as I can – I won’t sleep otherwise … Thank you. I spoke with the lawyer earlier. It’s all a mess, but what can I do? The lawyer thinks the whole incident might buy me some time with the debt collectors; meanwhile I’m waiting to see what the insurance pays out for the damages – it better cover the repairs … What do you mean? … I don’t know what I’ll do afterwards, Marelena, I don’t know – sell the house … What? … Yes, I realise I can’t move in with you, I gathered that, darling …’ She made a laugh devoid of humour. Sighed. ‘Yes, darling, I’m sure it will all work out. Please don’t forget about the painting … Yes, well, goodbye.’

Marion took out her teeth. She slept curled with a hand on her face, turned upwards. Parrying what, she couldn’t say.

In the morning Agnes brought a note.

The letter had been hard to compose. A few days on and Hortensia was still juggling the words in her head. She’d already received notice of the insurance claim for the damages. In fact it was a whole chain of insurance claims, like dominoes. She called off the building works, thinking Marion would be happy to hear that. From Bassey’s account – he’d heard from Agnes – Marion was staying at that disease of a guest house down the road and was not in the least bit happy about that.

‘Why not with her family? She has a soccer team of children,’ Hortensia asked Bassey, who’d brought tea and then stood in the doorway of her study for a while, indulging her with gossip.

He shrugged. ‘Agnes says the two kids live overseas. The other two are in the country, but may as well not be.’

Hortensia snorted, ignored Bassey’s look of recrimination. There were fewer and fewer pleasures – why not enjoy the Vulture’s misfortune?

‘Anyway,’ Bassey said, the word he used as a means of taking leave.

‘What happened? With her and the kids?’ Hortensia was keen to have him stay and talk. What else was there to do – she was bed-bound.

‘Agnes says the only thing that kept her a Christian was working for that family – that it is tribulation that builds faith.’

‘Dreadful!’

‘She said you need Jesus in your life if you’re going to work for the Agostinos.’ Bassey turned and Hortensia, indulging an old habit, counted his steps back down the hallway and into the kitchen.

The hospital had insisted on their blasted nurses. Hortensia did her best to make their work unpleasant, and she happily noticed that the same nurse never returned the next day. She imagined there were a finite number of Constantinople Hospital nurses and that soon enough they’d run out and leave her be. Let her get gangrene and die, for God’s sake, what of it?

Amidst the fog of the pain-medicines they plied her with, Hortensia tried to design her apology. With the recent example of the crane-driver vivid in her mind, she could not ignore adding the ingredient he had omitted. Somewhere in the crowd of things she meant to tell Marion, there had to be an admission of guilt. She, Hortensia, was complicit. She was sorry. Sorry. The word alone was an assault to her sense of herself. Waves of nausea visited her during the day and the miserable nurse on duty thought it had something to do with the pain. Each time Bassey came into the room she worried he had news that Marion was back next door or, worse, right outside her own door. But of course Marion couldn’t come home; her house was in disrepair, no works could begin until the insurance chain was worked out – who did what to whom, what was damaged and who was utmostly responsible, who owed whom and how much.

Maybe she should phone Marion but, as much as she would have liked this she knew it would be a cop-out, the coward’s way.

On a particularly miserable morning, when the previous night had been a succession of bad dreams (Marion sitting on Hortensia’s head, Marion asking Hortensia to pick her teeth with a plastic toothpick, Marion making Hortensia floss her own teeth with strands of Marion’s grey and greasy hair), Hortensia decided: enough. She shouted for Bassey, thinking as she did that they must call the electrician and have a buzzer installed by the bed.

‘Yes, please.’

‘I need to speak with Mrs Agostino. Don’t look at me like that. What do you know?’

Bassey, of course, knew that the women hated one another. Everyone did.

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, I need to speak with her. I mean I would like to … I can’t really go to her, you see?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you can talk to Agnes, yes?’

Bassey nodded.

‘Think I can send her a letter? Marion, I mean. Through Agnes. I don’t even know if she’ll come. She’ll probably see my name and reach for a blowtorch.’

Bassey smiled. Hortensia had always liked the fact that he enjoyed her scathing humour.

‘Pass me my writing paper, it’s in the second drawer. It’s not locked. My pen is over there.’

Dear Mrs Agostino

Hortensia crumpled the paper and started again:

Marion, I know I’ve caused you some difficulty. I would prefer to speak in person. I would come to you if I could, but I think you know I am confined to my bed. It is unreasonable, but still I thought to ask – will you please come, so that I may apologise to you in person?

HJ

Hortensia wondered if Marion would see this as Hortensia’s comeuppance – come and see a weakened Hortensia, come and see her grovel. Or would she be incensed that she was being summoned? Or some strange combination of both? Would she come? The nightmares continued. For many days no reply arrived.

IT WAS GOOD
to be at a committee meeting without Hortensia the Horrible around to snap and carry on. Marion waited while the minutes from the last meeting were passed around to be signed. It was also good to be out of the dreary guest house and to forget her financial hassles for a couple of hours.

‘Sorry I’m late, Marion, everyone.’ Ludmilla took a seat.

When they’d bought in ’64, the Von Struikers had already been living in Katterijn for a couple of years. Marion remembered envying them at dinner parties. Jan (Jannie), tanned, with a flick of blond hair falling forward into his left eye; Ludmilla certainly stout (and she’d got stouter) but contained, apparently in no need of making a good impression. Because she didn’t like them, Marion had made them her friends, attended all their soirées, noticed that behind the money their marriage was a sham and took comfort from this.

‘Jan not joining us?’

‘We decided I’ll handle this.’

‘Okay, well, we should focus on the claims, but first, Agatha, you said another letter from the Gierdien woman arrived?’ Agatha was in charge of checking the post-office box.

‘Yes, this time she’s requesting a meeting.’

‘Really we should just put her in direct contact with Hortensia, Marion,’ Sarah Clarke said. ‘Let them have it out. It’s got no legal ramifications, unlike the Samsodiens, which we really ought to be focusing on.’

‘Could you pass the letter, please?’

Agatha leaned across the table and handed Marion the envelope.

She scanned it. Marion still harboured hope that she could torment Hortensia with this Beulah Gierdien business. She didn’t feel like simply handing it over just yet. ‘I’ll hold onto this.’ She put the letter in her purse. ‘Agatha, do you still have that section in the library with the history of Katterijn? Maybe I’ll come round, check on the validity of Ms Gierdien’s story.’

‘Can we move onto the Samsodiens’ claim? After the first mediation our lawyer has advised us on how to proceed,’ Ludmilla said, impatient. That she thought the committee a nonentity was no secret. In fact she only ever referred to it as ‘the club’, giving Marion the impression that she thought it was a place old women gathered to gossip.

‘Lawyer?’ someone asked.

‘But it’s still at the Commission stage, Ludmilla,’ Marion said.

‘I know. But just in case it gets to the Land Claims Court, we want to have all our ducks in a row.’

‘What does your lawyer say? Do they have a claim?’

‘They do have a claim, but we can refute it.’

‘They have a claim?’ Marion couldn’t hide her shock and then blushed when she saw the pity in Ludmilla’s eyes. As if Ludmilla had looked at her, seen a child who understood so little of the world and felt sorry.

‘But we can refute it,’ Ludmilla repeated. ‘The Samsodiens have a lawyer too. The Commission is proposing monetary compensation, but it looks like they’ll refuse. Very likely we’ll end up in court.’

Ludmilla spoke about the strategy going forwards. Marion only half-listened. She was disturbed by the possibility that the Samsodiens had a claim.

‘How did you acquire the land?’ Marion asked.

‘Auction. They were desperate and needed the money. We bought it fair and square.’

Marion only nodded.

The nurse was heffing; it wasn’t really a word but it was a term Hortensia used. Maybe her mother had used it? It certainly described the kind of thing people did around Hortensia a lot. She’d say something – something simple, more true than offensive – and the person would heff. For some, heffing involved physical traits like a downturning of the mouth to show displeasure or a shaking body to show general unhappiness.

‘I expect an apology, Mrs James. No one talks to me that way.’

For others, their heffing meant they said things like that. Demanding apologies with no regard for how difficult they were for Hortensia to manufacture.

‘And I intend to report you to the head-nurse.’

They threatened. And all for what? What had she said? He, the nurse, had made the mistake of trying to make small talk, to unburden himself of his whiteness by suggesting how non-racial he was and how many black friends he had and how wonderful Nelson Mandela was. He seemed, on entering the house, to have been struck by a kind of PC-diarrhoea and, almost immediately, he’d begun to produce a litany of anecdotes to absolve himself of any sense of responsibility for the wrongdoing that white people have been known to inflict almost everywhere they have been.

‘I see nothing to report, but do as you think best.’

She’d caught him unawares; he’d been telling her about his ‘buddy’, the guard at his bank, who had taught him the ‘African handshake’. Which is it that makes him your ‘buddy’, she’d asked, punishing him with his own choice of word. The fact that he’s black or the fact that he’s poor – or is it both?

Hortensia wasn’t being mean for its own sake, she was genuinely curious to know. She’d witnessed the scene the nurse described many times already. A fraught eagerness that played itself out in close, uncomfortable spaces. The security guard and the blasted cumbersome handshake white people had decided was the password to being down. A shortcut is what it was.

‘You must know he’s not your buddy?’ Hortensia asked. She’d done her own study of the nation, post-’94. Cheap tricks like handshakes and cute localised expressions to hide what was really needed. Slogans in place of the real dirty slog required if unity was truly the goal. ‘You can’t be stupid, surely?’ she asked the nurse. ‘Which leaves the conclusion that you must be a liar.’

He was now packing up his little nurse-bag, which could only mean he was leaving. Hopefully this was the last nurse they would send her.

‘How dare you speak to me like that? I have never been spoken to in this way.’ Spit flew as he enunciated the words.