Free The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso

rounding words in a way that amused her classmates, for being dark; but mostly they spurned her for being a good designer, for the audacity of that.
    ‘I’m not ashamed. I just thought that would be the easiest way.’
    ‘To what?’
    ‘To give them something to muck about with.’
    K’s strategy had puzzled Hortensia, who’d never even considered bringing a strategy with her to Brighton – perhaps a failure of her otherwise-robust imagination. On confirmation that she’d received the coveted British Council Art Scholarship (her teacher had practically browbeaten her into making an application), she’d celebrated with Zippy, enjoyed the proud gaze of her father, Kwittel, and endured a litany of cautions from her mother, Eda. It was really one cautionary remark repeated in various forms – Be careful. Eda, ever tightly wound to the possibility of coming troubles, predicting Armageddon, emboldened by the Bible, King James Version, whose first testament she had put to memory, with its smiting and endless tribulations. Hortensia had ignored her mother’s warnings, but soon, arriving unprepared for battle, regretted this. Regardless, she wrote simple letters home and received simple ones back. Eda’s shaky writing dominated the square pages. Hortensia wrote back in black, all-capital letters (she’d discovered a great capacity for penmanship), and told of a beach that wasn’t a beach, not the sea baths to which she was accustomed. Despite Eda’s repeated ‘Are you alrights?’, Hortensia left out stories of what she called ‘the freeze’. Hard stares from fellow students and lecturers alike; stares from people who looked through you, not at you; stares intent on disappearing you; and stares you fought by making yourself solid. People found it civilised to imitate the sound of a chimpanzee whenever they passed Hortensia or K in the corridors. They were not the first black students to ever attend Bailer’s and yet it seemed a riddle had to be solved each time a black person presented at the college. A boy once asked Hortensia how her brother was. I don’t have a brother, Hortensia replied. Oh, but you do, here – the golliwog on the Robertson strawberry-jam jar.
    In 1950, a year after Hortensia arrived at Bailer’s, the rest of the Braithwaites boarded a ship, the
Spig-Noose
docked at Dover and they caught a coach to Waterloo Station. An older cousin of Kwittel’s, Leroy, had completed his service with the Carib Regiment; he’d been stationed in Italy, saw no action, but had a heart attack all the same (apparently hereditary); he’d chosen to stay on in England and, with Hortensia already in university, had encouraged Kwittel to bring himself and the rest of his family out. Leroy had offered London as a promise of better, and Kwittel had sold this to his sceptical wife. A few weeks after arriving in London, Kwittel found work as a postman. Hortensia’s classmates managed to divine this piece of information about her life. People who thought themselves funny asked her: if the black postman delivers the mail at night, wouldn’t it be blackmail? It was one of the few stings that actually hurt. Hortensia’s father was not only the closest thing she had to a best friend, but he was also the best person she knew in the entire world.
    Kwittel Braithwaite had two furrows that ran on either side of the bridge of his nose. When his daughters, Hortensia and Zephyr, were young they liked to feel those furrows with their small spongy fingers. The grooves had formed over many years of studying, his wife liked to say, a tinge of awe in her voice. The wire spectacles that had been instrumental in creating this feature were the same ones Hortensia tried to describe decades later, to an assistant in the front room of her optician’s in Cape Town.
    If her relationship with her father was filled with admiration, Hortensia’s relationship with her mother was ruled by restraint. The tension came from Eda’s need to dominate,