interrupt me.”
Zoe stared out of the bay window, thwarted. The water looked ashen and choppy, the clouds scrappy. “How dismal it is. In my day, clouds were big, puffy things. They floated in a proper blue sky. This is surely the end of the world. People must have phoned in to the radio to say so. Have they, darling?”
“It’s a recurring theme among my callers,” said Margot.
“I’m sure the world will end soon,” she repeated. “Mr Morland would know. Where is Mr Morland?”
“He’s got clients today.”
“And Curtis? Where is he?”
“Outside,” said Margot. Her mother had always preferred the company of men.
“Where is outside?” asked Zoe.
“I’ll show you in a minute, once I’ve loaded the washing machine.” Surely it could only last until December, this flickering bulb of her mother’s mind. Then it would be night.
As for things changing – cats, clouds – it was her mother’s eyes that were changed. Not just what they saw, but the eyes themselves. They were filmed over, wary and uncomprehending. The person who looked out from them was not the mother she knew and loved.
Zoe stood in the horribly altered world. Everything that was known and comforting had fled. Something catastrophic was about to happen.
Curtis kept Pia company in the shed, but did not pry into her thoughts. Occasionally he would show her an object and ask, “Could you use this in your little house?” For the most part, though, they were silent.
The shed where they worked was on the lowest terrace of the garden. Curtis looked up and saw Margot and her mother standing together in the bay window. Zoe looking so dear – gallant, almost – in a man’s dark blue blazer turned up at the cuffs, and Margot still a little tousled, as though roused too soon from bed. Mother and daughter: what a beautiful sight. He smiled and waved and pointed to what he was doing. He would love to tell Margot and Zoe about this project of the garden shears – the fine old pair he’d found in Margot’s shed. It was very satisfying. Whose had they been? They had good oak handles, and appeared to have been little used over the years. Curtis had sanded off all the rust and sharpened the blades. Now his attention was focused on the handles. Dryness had opened a split halfway along the length of one handle. He mixed some sawdust and wood glue into a paste and filled the split.
He should really have found something else to do while the handle dried – the to-do list was always there, pinned above his desk. But he was loath to leave his handiwork. He wanted to stay with the shears. He wanted someone, a woman ideally, to see what he had done.
Ah, now they were coming down the steps towards him! Curtis dashed up to assist Zoe. He was a tall man, but always held himself stooped, so as not to make his companions feel diminutive.
“You’re mending the old shears,” said Margot. Curtis beamed as though he’d been warmly praised.
“When this bit is dry – where I’ve improvised a bit of filler – then I’m going to sand both handles and oil them with linseed. You’ll have a good working pair of shears then. I can use them to clip the hibiscus branches that stick into the path. At the moment your fans risk being blinded as they come up the stairs. Blinded by infatuation. Poked as they come looking for a poke.” He gave a little chuckle to show that he’d made a joke. But the line that had felt so witty yesterday evening, when he’d thought of it while inspecting the garden in the salted air, now sounded heavy, insulting even.
Margot stared at him. What was he wittering on about? It was terrible when Curtis tried to be funny because he just wasn’t, or only in the most laboured way, involving puns and double entendres. Now Leroy, on the other hand, was genuinely funny. His jokes were dangerous, zany, apparently unplanned. Sometimes they failed, but dazzlingly so. Often they were seductive. She would be set in her resistance to him, battened down, when suddenly one of his jokes would break down the door of her shut mind, and having entered it, stand astride, as if deciding what to take next. She’d fallen in love with Leroy’s humour. She hadn’t planned for all the other women who would do the same, or for Leroy’s need to keep seducing. Now she despised him. Nails rusted in the wood of her bad opinion.
With Curtis, on the other hand, she felt she could hardly be tender enough. It was impossible to match his compassion and solicitousness. Right now, for example, she felt remote from his apparent triumph with regard to the shears. He could spend hours rubbing an oily cloth over a bit of old wood. It was good, though, that he was so cheerfully occupied. She hadn’t been sure that his inner cowboy could settle.
Pia saw that her mother was preparing to go out and came out of the shed to be close to her. Margot kissed her goodbye.
“Tomorrow, could we buy a Baby Born doll?” asked Pia. “I’ve got some money saved.”
“But, darling, you’re thirteen. Surely you don’t want another doll at this age?”
Pia could see that she had let her mother down. Sometimes her mother could read her thoughts, but not today. Ever since Granny had gone doolally, Mom had become broom-banging and full of sighs. But no matter how fixed her mother appeared, Pia knew that inside she was infinitely pliable. Pia would find a way of explaining why she needed the lifelike baby doll: so that she could be someone she’d seen on TV once. My baby – my baby! There’s something wrong with my baby! Then she would cry real tears.
She said nothing, but looked at her mother, willing her to understand. There was something Mom wanted, too, but she never said what it was.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Margot conceded.
Margot and Zoe joined the Sunday springtime traffic. Trippers had pulled onto the Clovelly kerb to marvel at southern rights in the bay. The flow of cars slowed as drivers strained to see what had attracted the crowds leaning over the railings. Below them lay the scrappy beach with its brown mountain stream, struggling dunes and ink-blue water. The whales sprayed a little water, but otherwise merely lolled in the shallow bay.
Where the corner turned, so did the culture. Kalk Bay’s artistic élan, its cobbled neighbourhood of poets, artists, chefs, antiquarians and dress designers gave way, in a matter of a kilometre, to the land of old-age homes, bowling greens, funeral parlours, loan sharks and traffic circles. People sat down at tables to eat in Kalk Bay, but in Fish Hoek they kept the engine running while someone rushed in to buy takeaway chicken or pizza. How could one kilometre make such a difference?
If you squinted so that some of the new glass-and-steel homes on the mountainside above Sunny Cove were blurred, you might as well have been looking at a postcard from the 1950s. Fish Hoek was always Fish Hoek, anchored by the AP Jones Department Store and Central Hardware opposite. But there had been changes: the beach had a flagpole now. The job of the shark spotter was to hoist a green flag if he could see clearly that there was no shark in the bay, a red flag to indicate recent shark activity, and a white flag with a picture of a shark on it if there was a shark in the bay at that moment. But day after day, the shark spotter hoisted the black flag, which meant: “I can’t see a fucking thing – swim at your own risk.”
The landscape here was quite distinct from the protected, rocky coves of St James and Kalk Bay. Apart from a densely vegetated estuary, the valley was flattened, windy, scrubby. A few desperate palm trees, scoured by the constant through-wind, hunkered down in pots lining the excessively billboarded main street. Ugliest of all was the frontage of the tyre workshop. Twice Margot had gone in there with one
