“You look stunning, Mary. Is that tribal dress? I mean…is it…indigenous?” She is not sure they still talk about tribes. Her voice is muffled by the vest.
“Of course it is not dangerous. It is a gomesi, Miss Vanessa.” It has a wide sash and peaked, puffed sleeves, which stick up from her shoulders like butterfly wings. It is golden bronze. Mary’s skin glows against it.
Vanessa decides not to explain. She slips on her jacket and her pearls. “It’s very nice. You look, well, delightful.”
And Mary smiles back at her appreciatively. “And you, Vanessa, look like a Jamaican—” Vanessa does not know quite how to take this, but Mary continues, “—because, I have noticed, the English do not like to look smart in church. It is not the fashion, for white Christians. Best of all, they like jeans and sandals. They think it makes them look more humble. But Jamaicans and Africans look very smart. We do not like this scruffiness. We do not believe the white Christians are humble. They sit at the front, in the very best seats. Thank you for looking smart, Vanessa.”
Sometimes Mary sounds surprisingly sharp. Vanessa is glad she has cut the mustard.
“Now we must find some food to take,” Mary says, briskly, and sets off towards the kitchen.
“Oh no, Mary, really, we don’t do that,” says Vanessa, laughing once more at Mary’s innocence.
“Because, Vanessa, it is Harvest Festival. The Reverend Andy asked everyone to bring some.”
“Oh, Harvest Festival, wonderful.” Vanessa brightens considerably, remembering long-lost feasts of colour, being sent to school with marrows and apples. And thanks to Mary’s new regime in the kitchen, they soon assemble an impressive display: black and orange plantains, a Savoy cabbage so yellowy green it is almost golden, frilled and tightly-layered like the bodice of a dress, three baking potatoes as big as Easter eggs; a feathery-topped, fluted column of celery.
They pause in the hall, just before they go out, and see themselves framed in the circular mirror. It is a picture of harmony: silver-blonde Vanessa in her pink and pearl, smiling broadly with her new shiny teeth, her white hands clutching the speckled plantains, the pale rod of celery under her armpit, and next to her, the intense dark figure of Mary, dressed in the golden bronze butterfly dress, her hair caught up in a swathe of gold fabric, taller than Vanessa, even in her pink heels, broader than her, but with her arm around her, and it sits on Vanessa’s pink woollen shoulder, surprising her with its heft and weight, and Mary’s other arm holds the green and yellow basket she brought from Uganda as a present for Vanessa, with the cabbage and potatoes brightly peeping out.
“We’re fertility goddesses,” Vanessa says, very taken with this image of the two of them, but Mary looks stern, it is the wrong kind of godliness, so ‘Sisters’, Vanessa tries again, and smiles at the glass, and Mary laughs to herself, and repeats it, so softly that Vanessa hardly hears it.
Sometimes, she thinks, Mary is almost timid.
A moment later, Mary shouts, “Justin!” at a volume that does not seem credible. Vanessa looks at her amazed, but in seconds there appears at the top of the stairs a combed and tidied, pink-faced, Justin, wearing a white shirt and linen blazer his mother hasn’t seen him in since the breakdown.
“Present and correct,” he smiles at Mary.
Mary hands her loaded basket to Justin, and Vanessa stops herself from protesting, for after all, he must be stronger now. The three of them head towards the door. “Mary, we’re going to need umbrellas,” says Vanessa, as the hissing sound of rain comes closer. She looks out of the window: deep metallic-grey, with weeping fringes of navy blue cloud. The wind is rattling the rose against the glass. She opens the door to get a closer look, but as soon as she does she sees Tigger is waiting at the end of the path with his big white van.
He comes down to meet them with a golf umbrella. “Minicab, Madam,” he says to Mary, and the two of them laugh in such an intimate way that Vanessa has to tell herself not to be jealous.
So now we are all here, even the men, Vanessa thinks, bringing up the rear. Justin seems cheerful, though he squints at the rain. She hates the idea of going in the van, but she does not want to make a fuss. She hopes it is not covered in paint and brick dust. Knowing Tigger, it probably is. Though even Tigger looks smart for him, in a sports jacket over a black polo-neck jumper, with Mary Tendo smiling and clutching his arm.
But how does Mary manage it? Vanessa asks herself, puzzled. Do we actually all do whatever she wants?
And they follow her meekly into the church and down into a pew at the back, where everyone but them is black. Indeed this whole segment of the church is black. Vanessa wonders if she will be unwelcome, but a glance at Mary’s face shows she isn’t bothered.
“Why do all the black people sit over here?” she asks Mary. “Is it because English people are racist?”
Vanessa feels proud to have used the ‘R’—word. It is the beginning of their new frankness. After all, if they are friends, there must be no secrets.
But Mary, who was praying for Zakira and the baby, the granddaughter of whom Vanessa knows nothing, just laughs, and points at the radiators. “It is because the heaters are here at the back. English churches can be very cold places.”
Mary has many things to pray for today. First of all for Jamil. Always Jamil. For Zakira and Justin and the baby. And for herself. For her own secret. The autobiography that she is writing. And about the agent. As she promised Vanessa, she is going to pray hard about the agent. Though Vanessa does not have any idea why.
It is Vanessa’s first time in a church since she sat by her father for her mother’s funeral. “It’s what she would have wanted,” she remembers him saying. According to her father, they used to go often, when she was just a tiny girl, before her mother’s world was warped by illness, and perhaps that accounts for the shock of love Vanessa feels this morning when the second hymn turns out to be a rousing ‘We plough the fields and scatter’; and though she is wary of sentiment, she finds there are tears pricking in her eyes. She is part of the singing, and part of the people, and part of all people everywhere who have ploughed the fields and loved the earth, who have scattered the good seed on the land, who are watered by the Almighty hand; and somewhere in that surge of feeling is an almost forgotten love for her father. The congregation belt the hymn out, and she is surprised to hear Justin singing, a fine tenor voice, and she squeezes his hand.
But Mary is looking at the harvest display, which is on a table in front of the altar. Can the Reverend Andy be pleased with it? There are small ziggurats of tins, rows of packets, a pineapple with a label still on it, some faded, supermarket-style apples, and somebody has brought a pumpkin, but for some reason, it’s been tucked behind the tins (in fact, Andy’s female curate hid the pumpkin, at the last moment, as they all came in, because of the association with witchcraft). Mary and Vanessa’s offerings stand out well against this patchy, unsatisfactory landscape.
I was the child who came with the harvest, Mary Tendo thinks, half the world away. But it seems that in UK, they have forgotten how to grow things. One day they will starve, like Ethiopians. Although they have rain, and this is not a desert.
As usual, Mary tries to listen to the sermon, but Andy speaks as if to small children, making jokes about TV that are not very funny (though maybe she is wrong, because Justin, who watches TV all day long, laughs happily, pleased to be included, and so do some of the scruffy white people). Soon her attention wanders again.