The Woman Next Door
Hortensia James is a prickly octogenarian. She is harsh and critical and she has no time for anyone’s nonsense. She is Barbados born, London bred and now lives in the Kattirijan neighborhood of Cape Town, where she moved with her white husband, Peter at the end of apartheid. She had a prosperous design company but was now past the age of caring what people think of her, and directness is her only mode of communication. As the first black home owner in her community she has felt the sting of racism.
Marion Agostino is her octogenarian neighbor. She is white, a widow, a mother of four children who don’t seem to like her, and was once a successful architect before being overwhelmed by motherhood. She had lived through apartheid without really thinking about it, “Marion had avoided history. Or she’d invented her own.”
Each lady’s disregard of the other was legendary. “It was known that the two women shared hedge and hatred and they pruned both with a vim that belied their ages.” Hortensia has disdain for what she sees as Marion’s continued racism, twenty years after the end of apartheid – “Marion, I’m not in the mood for your bigotry today. I distinctly remember asking you to keep your racist conversations for your dinner table.” For Marion, her assessment was that “Everything seemed to be about race for Hortensia, but Marion thought life was more complex than that, more wily.”
What could possibly narrow the divide between these two women in the twilight of their lives? An accident, literally brings them together. Recently widowed Hortensia needs somebody living in her house with her, following the accident, so that she doesn’t have to put up with nurses (to whom she is awful). Marion’s house next door is being repaired and she is sick of the guest house she is staying in. These most vinegary of neighbors become housemates.
In this finely constructed tale Yewande Omotoso examines the constraints placed on the lives of the two women and how race, gender, class, marriage and aging have conspired to shape the contours of their lives.
While race is the foundation for the stories, Omotoso also looks at the challenges these two women with professional ambitions dealt with, coming of age in the 1950s. Hortensia’s exposure to overt racism is anchored in her teens and young adulthood growing up in London and falling in love with a white man. “There was the fact that she wasn’t imagining the glares they received, walking side by side down the streets. A woman (many women with many faces that eventually became one), her hair beneath a scarf (or in a hat or pinned up), tutted (or scrunched her nose or spat) as she walked past them – Peter didn’t always seem to notice, but Hortensia could never forget.” To fall in love with a white man let alone marry him was a bold thing to do. She sets up her own design company and her eventual success, she realizes, may have been too much for her husband.
Marion became a successful architect, breaking free of her parents and gaining recognition for her work. However, following the birth of four children home is what she devoted herself. Now in widowhood her children have no time for her and her late husband has left so many debts that she will have to sell her house. And, she is getting old, older than her parents when they died. “Why did she have to live longer? What was the point anyway? You can’t die, but you haven’t got the money to live properly, the money to act as balm to your misery. What was the point of it all? You needed money – life was much too glaring without the shade of lots of cash.”
It is the unstoppable march of aging in both these women’s lives that is beautifully rendered by Omotoso. For Hortensia, a daily walker, “the loss of her walk was the first sign that time was wicked and had fingers to take things. It wasn’t just dates up on a wall, it was a war. Time took away her walk.” For Marion, life in the guest house epitomized everything that was bad and lonely about aging “This is what it feels like to be an old woman, discarded by your own family. Money. The only thing with the power to bring some respite to old age. And maybe love.”
It would have been easy to follow a sentimental route, bringing the women together under one roof would allow them to see the error of their ways, and to kiss and make up. Omotoso resists that temptation because, as you would suspect, it’s really hard to change your ways when you are in your eighties. As the reader learns more of their back stories we understand all the forces that shaped these women, that they are products of their time. Their lives are rendered compassionately, without judgement and the women’s stubbornness becomes more understandable, so much so that even the smallest truce seems like a victory.
I found myself thinking about Hortensia and Marion long after finishing the book, filled with regret that I didn’t learn enough of my own mother’s life story before she died. Women who came of age in the second half of the twentieth century, wherever they lived, have stories to share and we would do well to remember that octogenarians in our lives weren’t born that age, their lives are etched with the lines of time and experience that make for deep and enlightening stories. Yewande Omotoso has given voice to a demographic that tends to be invisible in our society and for that, I, for one, am grateful.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 278 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Themes: Friendship, race, marriage, neighbors, aging
Commitment: A warm and engaging tale that asks the question, are we ever too old to change?
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