The Woman Next Door (19 page)

Their wedding was a small affair at Hortensia’s mother’s church. Mrs James, Peter’s mother, would have preferred her church, but did not insist. Uncle Leroy, retired serviceman of the Carib Regiment, ambled down a short aisle with his grandniece’s bony hand in his. They walked staring ahead at the priest, at a surprised-looking Peter and, beyond, at the yellow blue-and-red stained-glass window depicting Jesus, haloed and chaste.

In the morning, getting ready, Hortensia had looked long at herself in the mirror, having never felt this pretty. She was drunk on the romantic booze of a wedding day – Zippy with a garland in her hair, the flurry of little girls with dusty rose-coloured bouquets, the shiny smiles everyone reserved for Hortensia, smiles at their highest volume; no one could have been more smiled at than Hortensia on that day and she went deaf with it.

The morning after the wedding her ears were still ringing. She was even more senseless after having made love to Peter; her first experience that pain and pleasure could coexist.

When they awoke the morning after, Hortensia had felt shy, but she had taken his cheeks and gazed into a face she adored. His ardour of the previous night had drained and instead he looked blank.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked. And this surprised her. What could be wrong? ‘You seem a bit … I don’t know.’

The words didn’t suggest it, neither did his facial expression, but all Hortensia could think was: he is scared. There was no answer to his question; he wasn’t really asking her anything. It sobered her up, though, and in the few years it took the company to give Peter a raise and suggest he move to their branch in Nigeria, Hortensia stayed sober. In fact love would never again induce anything more than an ache in the centre of her belly. Peter’s coolness of that morning, though, was quickly replaced with the characteristics she was more familiar with – intense, studious, quirky and warm. They honeymooned for three days.

Hortensia moved into Peter’s flat in Highbury, they made love every night. Peter, seemingly recovered from the shock of being a husband, ardent and happier than she’d ever seen him.

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.

Years passed. 1958, she was twenty-eight years old and her mother wanted to know why she wasn’t yet pregnant. Peter said nothing. The sexual clamour of their arrival in a new place died down, though, and Hortensia discovered the loneliness of marriage.

They began to argue about silly things and she discovered that he had a temper, rare but awful enough that, each time it erupted, the gap between them widened. Gradually it became a fact that Peter touched Hortensia very little.

In bed at night they slept turned away from one another and in the daylight, on the rare occasions they walked together, they did not reach for each other’s hands. Marriage was a disappointment. Colder than Hortensia had imagined, it was the sad end to her Sunday-school belief in the lore of Noah – that life was best lived in pairs. Instead, marriage had turned out to not be much after all. It was the tedium of little domestic details. It was negotiating the tiresome habits of another. Marriage also made Hortensia suspicious when she met new people. Where was the nastiness in this one? she would think to herself as she handed change to a trader or stood to be measured by a polite seamstress. She’d seen Peter cradle an injured bird so gently that the animal had managed to come to a state of calm. And, in the heat of one of his moods, she’d seen him smash a plate to the floor. Not just any plate, but the gold-leaf-painted Chinese porcelain plate that she’d spent months negotiating for and finally wangled out of a dealer in London. It had been her favourite, with four pheasants and four orchids arranged along the face, flecks of gold dancing between them like magic dust.

What happened? This was a common question she asked herself. And then Hortensia would work backwards through their time together, through the string of little and big arguments, offences taken, insults applied. Often the house settled into weeks of corrosive silence. The silence was easier than the booby-trapped mission of attempting conversation. But sometimes the silence wasn’t a relief, it was a form of punishment. The spells of silence could continue for days, but they always ended unceremoniously.

‘Did the paper come?’ Peter would ask at breakfast and Hortensia would answer in a clear sweet voice.

Or they would be in the bedroom, Peter dressing for work, the sounds of the driver singing as he completed the morning car wash, the tinkling of the housekeeper as she laid the breakfast table. Hortensia would already be dressed. She’d stand by the window and look out into the garden, the tennis courts beyond, the pool that the gardener fought with every day to maintain the chlorinated blue of cleanliness.

‘Harmattan is late this year,’ she’d say.

And Peter would nod and then, understanding that she couldn’t see him, with her back turned, and might take his silence to mean he intended to stretch the fight out, he’d say, ‘Yes, it just might be.’

Sometimes they did make love, but it was duty. Hortensia remembered her father telling her about hurricane scares when he was a boy. When the electricity was cut off, how to keep the eggs fresh: every few days turn them over. That was how they made love. It was a domestic task to keep something from rotting.

THE FEELING MARION
was experiencing was not one she was familiar with.

She knocked on the door.

‘Marion,’ came Hortensia’s response – the woman could see through wood.

‘May I come in?’

She heard what sounded like a sigh, which was as close to a ‘yes’ as Hortensia was likely to come.

‘Sorry to trouble.’

Bassey was off and the house was empty.

‘I felt like some company.’

Hortensia pursed her lips, watched as Marion pulled a chair up to the bed.

‘Marion, with all due respect, I didn’t invite you into my home in order to offer you company.’

Always terse. Always so cutting.

‘I went to the library,’ Marion said in a bid to ignore Hortensia’s discouraging look. When she didn’t say anything, Marion bravely carried on. ‘I … I just felt like … Don’t you sometimes feel a bit …’

‘Marion—’

‘Just let me try and explain. I remembered something.’

‘Is this really necessary?’

‘Yes.’

Marion had remembered being in class.

‘At school, St Winifred’s, in Wynberg. Maybe you’ve heard of it.’

Hortensia nodded, her face was set, Marion faltered.

‘I … I—’

‘Marion, really.’

Marion smoothed her skirt and rose from the chair. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

Once Marion’s history teacher, Miss Siebert, wrote an address on the green board. Miss Siebert – they called her Queen Victoria behind her back, because her hair went down to her bum and her skirts to her ankles – told the girls that this was a place that sold books. And she said the girls should go and visit it sometime, that this was a good idea. And she taught the lesson and every now and then throughout the class as she gave information – something about the Hottentots, something about the British – she would mention the books in the bookstore. And then at the very end, and the class was memorable because it would be the last Miss Siebert would ever teach at St Winifred’s, at the end Miss Siebert said in a higher voice than normal: ‘I don’t know if I’ve really made myself clear, girls. You should go. You should buy this book.’ And she hurriedly scribbled the name of a book on the board. ‘Because you see, this,’ she indicated the orange textbook she’d been teaching from, the one Marion would later cram to score an A, ‘this is not really history.’

Miss Siebert didn’t come back. One of the girls told that Miss Siebert was a communist who had sex with her garden boytjie. The girl boasted that the book Queen Victoria had written up on the board was a banned book, and that her father worked with the council and she’d done a good thing and told him. The school board shivered that such insubordination could take place at St Winifred’s. A more suitable history teacher was found for the girls.

Marion took her confusion home to her parents. She told them about what Miss Siebert had said, about the bookstore, about real history. Her questions were swatted away, dampened. She felt the incident ripple but there was no one to ask about what was real history and what was not. Her parents weren’t in the business of telling these two kinds of histories apart; they weren’t in the history business at all.

Marion’s knock again. God, that woman!

‘Come in!’ Hortensia shouted. ‘What now?’

‘Actually I forgot to mention just now: the thing is, I’ve been considering that stain.’

Hortensia arched an eyebrow. There was definitely something wrong with the woman. One minute blabbering, the next going on about a damned stain. Hortensia rolled her eyes. ‘What is it, Marion? What is it that you want?’

‘The stain, you see. I wondered if you’d allow me to … try something.’

‘What makes you think I haven’t already
tried
something? I just need to get someone in, that’s all. If I wasn’t flat on my back, many a thing would be handled.’