In spring when everybody was dressed up to the nines like butterflies, their business was going so well that they were able to buy a plot of land and plant marrows and strawberries. But just when things were looking so good, the mother-in-law suddenly went down with flu and died shortly afterwards of complications leading to heart failure. Our heroine finished off the collar of the man's silk shirt that her mother-in-law had been making, so that every tiny stitch was as even and neat as possible. But she could not lose the sense of naked loss. It was as if she had been robbed of all her possessions at the railway station before setting off on a long journey.
When some people die the sense of loss dominates all other feelings, even long, deep feminine grief, and lingers on achingly, as a solitary street lamp destroys the peace of night with its dull glow.
At the funeral our heroine caught sight of her husband. He was peeping out from behind an enormous woman, a new one, without a beard this time, but still out of the ordinary. He had his arm respectfully round her waist and winked at her, pleased with himself as usual. The shoemakers crowded the cemetery with their usual air of self-importance. No one was going to keep them out — they knew the rules. They all stood silently around the grave with nobody to make a speech. Then out of the trees a man came forward, wiping his tears and told them the old woman had once been a care-worker at an orphanage and had helped him get up in the world. But it was obvious from his tattered coat and scruffy haircut that she had done nothing of the sort and he was as forlorn and destitute as ever. After this the rain in the cemetery seemed like the beginning of a universal deluge, and beneath its steady downpour it was irrelevant who had made or not made what of whom.
At the table when they had all warmed up, the orphan turned out to be a man in an expensive sweater with the limpid wandering eyes of a womaniser, which shifted gently from our heroine to her fifteen-year-old daughter, not looking them straight in the eye, but somewhat lower, as if approving the finish of their skin. The shoemakers behaved quite peacefully at the funeral dinner, knocking back their drinks unobtrusively, and even downing the fruit punch, little fingers crooked daintily. One of them was indignantly assuring his neighbour that he never pissed inside the house entrance. He would rather get it frost-bitten than piss in the entrance. Nobody had thought of accusing him of this so the impassioned fervour with which he kept defending himself was hard to understand.
A week after the funeral our heroine sat her daughter down at the sewing machine, and the girl pressed the pedal, singing happily like a bird, as if she had been born to it. She had no friends and seldom went out except to school and her dancing class, as if her needle eye was very narrow with no need of broader impressions, anything new or unknown, and her girlish trust in life encompassed everything she did, never demanding, always satisfied, as if it fed on air.
In lieu of payment for a satin-collared blouse, a woman they knew who worked in a marriage bureau selected some photographs of the girl from an album, added the words «Blue-eyed blonde would like to meet…» and sent it round the world. Letters began to arrive in different languages with photographs of men, shops, swimming pools and big cars. The daughter was fascinated by them and asked for some money one day to buy a dictionary. The cat also showed an interest in the box containing the gaudy sweet wrappers of this brightly coloured alien world.
To avoid paying for a lined leather jacket the marriage bureau woman offered our heroine long term credit to buy a licence for a dressmaking business and promised her two assistants and some clients. She also invited some local officials who «might be useful» to their little contract-signing celebration. Two of them left, but the third went to sleep on the sofa. They decided not to wake him up. Next morning the guest apologised and took his leave, but returned that evening and asked if he could spend the night there. Our heroine phoned the woman to find out the name of the man in the dark-blue sweater. She laughed, but told her.
Every day the mother sat sewing. The daughter came home from school, dealt with the letters and wrote some herself, glancing occasionally into the dictionary. The man in the dark-blue sweater went off and came back in the evening, amazed at himself because no one had invited him or tried to keep him. He just felt like coming back here instead of some callous place infested with the pain of unrealised hopes. He bought fish and vegetables for supper. The days passed uneventfully, without sorrow or joy, changing only the colour of the sky and the attire of the trees, but not the essence of life, which changes, if at all, slowly, imperceptibly, each change demanding a heroic effort.
One day the daughter read a letter out to her mother. «When David and I were fixing the motor bike our instruments were spread out on a newspaper. As I glanced at it and read your advertisement, I wondered if this was my fate,» the girl translated.
«He's an architect from London who lives in Cape Town. He likes it there. It's warm and sunny. Look at this!» She waved a photograph of a bronzed foreigner squinting against the background of a dazzling turquoise swimming pool. He had a kind face like a pedigree dog and was wearing linen trousers. «And that picture is by his son David.» The picture showed a horse with red wings rearing up over blue waters with a black-haired boy-rider in swimming trunks. «It's a self-portrait. He's taught the children to make model aeroplanes and to draw. Shall I write to him?»
Six months later the girl finished school, got a passport, a leaving certificate and flew off to Cape Town. Then she sent a form asking for her parents' consent to her marriage and an invitation to the wedding. She was marrying the architect.
Our heroine tracked down her husband, now living alone for some reason.
«Will you take me back?» he asked.
«Sure I will,» she agreed easily, without implying any sense of injury. «As night-watchman for the warehouse.»
He spat morosely, but all the same went to the notary's office to record his consent, peering sadly and thoughtfully through the tram window at the women outside.
A year later the daughter came back. «I can't stand it any longer. The boys drive me mad, pestering me for food and trying to scare me all the time. With a mouse or a snake. There are snakes all over the place, slithering around under the windows. If you throw a banana into the bushes it starts a real battle. Neil won't teach me to draw. He just wants to lie in bed with the shutters drawn. And it's so hot! Never any hope of winter» She opened the window, broke off an icicle and put it in her mouth laughing joyfully. «I'm pregnant! They say it's a girl, and I've promised to go back as soon as I've had the baby, otherwise he wouldn't let me go!»
Neil sent his wife some money and asked her to come home as soon as possible. He also sent several unanswered letters to his mother-in-law, which the daughter did not think to translate, so our heroine had no idea they existed.
Then a parcel arrived with a picture by David. Another self portrait on a red-winged horse, only this time the rider had no swimming trunks and his little willy was sticking up.
«He does that on purpose» the daughter confided. «They're all idiots, those kids. With them around you could never grow up.»
The girl answered the letters affectionately, thanking them, but she didn't want to go back to Cape Town and sat down at the sewing machine instead to make little caps and nappies. In the autumn she gave birth to a daughter, called Anna after her dead grandmother, and all four of them began to live together, neither happy, nor unhappy, and died as is only right and proper each in her own time without experiencing any particularly beautiful or unusual feelings, apart from a sense of gratitude that God looks after the shorn lambs and protects them from the wind, whenever he can.