“Mary, it’s just so cool that you are here.”
“Justin, I am going to have to make changes. Soon we will be pooing every day.”
Vanessa, who happens to be walking down the landing, hears gales of laughter from Justin’s bedroom, and is once more racked with curiosity. But she goes downstairs telling herself to be happy. If he’s laughing, Mary is a good investment. And very soon, surely, she’ll take over the housework.
It is true she has ignored the cleaning things, left hopefully out by the tall cupboard. But Justin is definitely livelier. One morning he smiles at his mother on the landing, and it is only half-past ten, and he has pyjama trousers on, which is certainly an advance on nothing. The plates Mary brings down after meals are empty. So Vanessa grits her teeth and goes on cooking. She has deferred the question of hiring a new cleaner.
Yet the house is getting dirtier: balls of hair and dandruff on the fitted carpets, a mottled skin of grey on the basins, tidemarks of brownish scale in the bath, a faint smell of urine around the lavatory. The kitchen floor bears ghosts of spilled sauces: when the oven goes on, it smells of old burnt food. Vanessa decides not to notice it. That is what Tigger always recommends. Trevor has a gift for not noticing things. It is maddening, but it keeps him contented. Vanessa feels she is learning wisdom. Perhaps she will never lose her temper again. She does a deal with an unnamed god in her brain: make Justin better, and I’ll be a new person.
Life goes on like that until the night Mary notices her innards are chock-full of white rice and precooked chicken.
The next day, Mary gets up at seven. Vanessa hears the front door closing and runs along the landing, heart in her mouth, to check that Justin is still in his room. He is still in his room, but Mary is gone. She reappears at ten with three bulging shopping bags. She leaves a sheaf of scrawled receipts on the table, torn scraps of paper from some crude market. Within half an hour, the kitchen is changing.
The earth has spilled roots out on to its lap, great brown and red tubers, white in cross-section where Mary has sawed some off for the pot. Great bullet-hard cabbages like dark green oilskins, with bulging white veins as strong as bone. Fat misshapen carrots like giant’s fingers, ringed with knuckles of dirt, trailing six inches of hair; tomatoes puffed and quilted like marrows; pinky-gold mangoes smelling faintly of rot; cocoa-brown cassava as thick as a wrist; two enormous hands of black oversized bananas. And other things packed in rough paper or sacking: shiny beans like pebbles: coarse brown rice. Mary unpacks, and straight away starts cooking, dragging out an old black iron cauldron that has not been used since Tigger was here.
Vanessa hovers on the threshold, watching, uneasy at this vegetable flood, this weird invasion of living things into her kitchen, and there is Mary, in vigorous action, her strong back bending and straightening, her taut arms whirling like a Hindu goddess.
At two o’clock there is a giant lunch, after which Vanessa goes in to college feeling as if she has swallowed a farm. Her stomach makes noises throughout her workshop, and one of the MA students gets the giggles. When she comes home at six, Mary is cooking again. The kitchen has been cleaned and tidied, though the rest of the house is still in disorder, and the lunchtime washing-up is stacked dirty on the draining-board.
When Mary goes upstairs with plates for her and Justin, they are piled so high they hardly fit on the tray.
“Are you sure that Justin is going to eat that?”
“Do not worry, Miss Vanessa. It is good for him. By the way, Miss Henman, excuse me,” she says, sweetly. “I am leaving the dishes for you to wash.”
“I beg your pardon?” gobbles Vanessa, her mouth choked with fibre, but Mary is gone.
Vanessa, of course, has no intention of doing it. She goes to bed, and lies there for hours, listening to the sound of her borborygmus. Then she sleeps heavily, only to wake at three am to the sound of voices. People laughing, or quarrelling. It must be in the street. She sleeps again.
In the morning, someone is in the bathroom, Vanessa has an urgent need. She doesn’t want to trek to the downstairs loo while she is still in her short ‘Pachamama’ t-shirt. She stands outside fretfully for several minutes, listening to someone, who must be Mary, talking to herself and farting like a tuba. Then there is the sound of the loo roll rattling furiously upon its holder. Vanessa goes tactfully back to her bedroom so Mary does not find her there. After a few more minutes, tact is impossible. She emerges, crab-wise, but the door’s shut again. Justin is inside, grunting like a baby. Vanessa limps furiously back to her room. By the time she gets in, the bathroom smells like a midden. This will become her morning routine.
And in the kitchen, the washing-up is still there. The work-tops are clean, but the washing-up, two lots of it, covers the draining-board, and overflows on to the dark oak table. Vanessa is incapable of leaving it. She puts on the radio, and stacks the machine.
After all, at least she has a dish-washer. Whereas Mary had probably never even seen one.
More and more exotic foodstuffs arrive. The kitchen starts to feel like a harvest festival. Many of the newcomers are unfamiliar. The bananas are not over-ripe, Mary says, indeed they aren’t bananas, they are matooke. Whatever that may be, thinks Vanessa. And there are big dry nuts with pink papery skin. Once Vanessa finds an insect she has never seen before, a weevilish thing with a fat hairy body, and she squashes it savagely, with a phone-book, because she is afraid of it. The compost bin is always full.
“And where do you buy all this?” asks Vanessa. “Surely most of this food is African?” And so is my kitchen now, she thinks, a little sourly; it always seems hot, and swirling with steam.
“But London is full of African things,” Mary answers. “London is full of Africans.”
The house is much louder than it was before. Mary Tendo is not a light woman. She does not run upstairs, as Vanessa does, fleet as a bird on small stiff legs, or pad like Justin, who never puts his shoes on, and likes to be silent, so his mother does not notice him. Mary has a stately, womanly walk that Vanessa starts to find irritating. How does she have time to walk so slowly? Why is she always walking about, or clashing spoons in the kitchen, or closing doors loudly? Why does Mary have to sing hymns as she cooks?
“Where is the serving dish?” Mary asks. “I am cooking pork ribs with cassava and cabbage and I can only find one serving dish.”
“Is it in the cupboard?” Vanessa asks, guiltily. She knows she has not emptied the dish-washer.
“I do not think so, Miss Vanessa. Can you please find me the serving dish?”
Grumpy, Vanessa opens the dish-washer, to find she has forgotten to switch it on. She extracts the dish and does it by hand. Gives it to Mary without a word, and Mary accepts it with a curt nod.
“Dinner will be ready in half an hour.” Mary’s words seem innocent enough, but Vanessa knows she has been dismissed.
Fifi rings, at nine, some time after they have eaten. Vanessa is lying on the floor of her study, trying to do her usual curls and crunches, but her stomach is still busy digesting the food, and complains as she doggedly lifts and straightens. She is glad to be interrupted by the phone, but a little disappointed that it is Fifi. Part of her expects her cousin to ring, her cousin in the village, her long-lost family.
Fifi wants to know how things are going with Mary. “You said she had barely showed her face.”
“Well that’s changed completely. She’s always in the kitchen.”
“That’s brilliant. You see, I told you not to worry.”
“Almost too much, as a matter of fact. In some ways, the house doesn’t feel my own. In fact—”