Homemaking for the Down-At-Heart. Finuala Dowling

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 flat tyre and they’d conned her into replacing all four. An unctuous man had offered her cheap coffee with instant creamer as a palliative. Was it true that instant creamer was made out of whale fat? She wished she wouldn’t retain every canard fed to her by her listeners.

      Whenever Margot was tempted to give up radio work, she’d imagine what life would be like in a cheap rented flat above Central Jewellers, with the wind blowing plastic bags and takeaway cartons against the steel steps of the fire escape. It kept her motivated.

      She turned left at the traffic circle and they rose up out of the valley and instantly everything was pretty once more. The narrow road through Sunny Cove seemed to carry the imprint of her childhood on it. She might see an untroubled housewife in a headscarf carrying a wicker hand basket, or her own family setting off for a picnic at Miller’s Point on the last day of the school holidays. Their old Anglia had been so much more innocent-looking than the cars around her today. She could speak to Curtis about that: he would love to talk to her about evolving car shapes.

      It was disconcerting to feel the pull of the past so distinctly at that particular curve of the road, just where the mountain stream flowed beneath the road and out to the sea from a pipe below Jager’s Walk. Mr Morland said water was the photographic paper of the psychic world. Ancient battles still raged on the world’s river banks, he said.

      Margot steered the car along the rocky coast, following the single-gauge railway line to Simon’s Town. They passed the disused stone quarry before Glencairn beach. A rock kestrel rode the thermal. It was a pity about the houses built too high on the mountainside, clinging there with their absurd sheets of glass. The road curved again, and there was Dixie’s Restaurant, where Margot had first tasted Indonesian food.

      “Do you remember when we ate here and you thought the chef had accidentally stirred peanut butter into your plate?”

      But Zoe didn’t remember. “Why don’t you just drive us off the edge here?” she suggested. “We could die together. You’re not happy either.”

      “I am happy.”

      Margot wasn’t happy. You, she wanted to say, it’s you who make me unhappy.

      If it weren’t for Zoe, Margot could spend Sunday any way she liked. She could invite friends around for lunch . . . assuming she could change into the kind of person who tossed lunches together with ease after being awake all night. Assuming she wanted to see anyone at all. All she really wanted was to lie in a locked, curtained room reading a book in which nothing happened. She wanted to drop off to sleep with a book still in her hands, then wake and eat Salticrax straight out of the box for supper and speak to no one; never again, in fact, to have to dredge up another topic of conversation.

      “You’re the saddest person I know,” said Zoe. “Living or dead.”

      The phrase “idiot savant” came to Margot’s mind.

      They were passing the site of the defunct marine refinery now. A historic reflex caused Margot to wind up the car window. It used to stink so much, adding to her childhood carsickness. Who would eat margarine, knowing that smell? On the left, behind barbed wire, the Lower North Battery pointed its fixed gun at enemies unknown. Like me, she thought. I do that.

      In Simon’s Town they parked at Jubilee Square. The two women progressed slowly to the quayside, Zoe leaning heavily on her daughter. Margot should have had breakfast – she could feel the nausea rising. Think you’re going to throw up, but then you faint instead: life had taught her that much. The light was far too bright, bouncing off the water and the white hulls. The halyards hitting against the masts in the light breeze mocked her queasiness.

      “I have to sit down,” said Margot. They were descending the stone steps