Homing by Henrietta Rose-Innes Page A

her possessions into the void. In a way she was still standing there, waiting for the sound of them hitting the bottom.
    It was this incident that had brought her back to her aunts, to the peace of this old house, as consternation had often done in the past. Although never before had she done something so startling, so alarmingly futile.
    None of this could she tell the aunts. To tell them would be to confirm all their fears; it would force them to make some terrible gesture of recognition. But although she’d said nothing, still they seemed to sense that danger had touched her, that she’d fled to them from some pursuing shadow. This visit, the aunts had been particularly solicitous, watchful, kind.
    But in her heart, Marion knew it had not been real. Yes, her wrist had flicked and the plates had spun from her hand, hair whipping across her cheeks and colour flushing the skin. But even as she’d acted out her mother’s mad ballet – performed so many times, long ago in another small apartment, when Celia was not much older than Marion was now – she hadn’t truly believed. She had never felt the weight of true madness under her arousal.
    And afterwards, standing there with her bare feet, nicked and a little bloody, in the heap of shattered porcelain, she’d known that it had been an experiment. Drawing blood from the perfect skin inherited from her mother, cutting it to find what was inside. She had not entered the fury, had not been lifted away. And with the small wash of relief she’d felt at the ordinariness of her emotions – embarrassment, fright – there’d been a tickle of something else: maybe shame.
    And so she must continue. She must allow Auntie B to brush out her hair as she had once brushed Celia’s; she must go down to the sea and collect for Auntie A the pieces of broken plates and bowls. She must be serene, and persuade them that Celia’s heart had found in her own generous breast a peaceful resting place.
    In the morning, when she was packing the car, Amelia and Belle came out to say goodbye. Amelia was carrying a large cardboard box.
    “If you have to go, take a little something with you,” said Belle.
    It would be a clay pot from the village. Belle often gave her presents from the workshop; Marion’s flat was full of them.
    Driving back along the dirt road, she passed through the village and saw the women walking in twos and threes between the rondavels and the pink-plastered hexagonal houses, carrying paraffin tins and plastic drums on their heads. Not porcelain or clay, but functional. They made pottery for tourists, but for fetching their water, they used what worked best.
    Back home in the city, Marion opened the cardboard box and found not a clay pot but Amelia’s partially reassembled vase. It was carefully bound up in thin sheets of foam rubber and sticky-tape. She took it gently out of its wrappings and placed it on the dresser.
    “Auntie A, it’s beautiful,” she said on the telephone.
    “It’s just an old broken thing,” said Amelia, sounding pleased. “Of course half of it’s still down at the bottom of the ocean.”
    “But what if you find more pieces to fit?”
    “Then you’ll have to come and get them, won’t you?”
    After the phone call, Marion stood before the vase on the dresser for a long time. She had positioned it not centrally, but to one side. Next to it, invisible, was another, vanished vessel: the clear glass vase that used to stand on this same dresser when she was a little girl.
    She touched the sides of the vase, the smooth patches of porcelain, the rough absences where the chicken wire showed through. And she was calmed by the feel of it. These broken pieces would not hurt her: spoils of empire, casualties of storm and wreckage, softened and blunted by time. Lovers on a bridge, a willow tree. And broken as it already was, she in turn could do the vase no further harm. Running her finger over the smoothed-off edges, she poked her fingertips into the