‘HAVE I told you Jonty Rhodes is my cousin?’
Cordelia asked this 10 minutes after we met for the first time.
Yes, you did tell me, I thought, two minutes after we met and you are about to tell me again and there’s nothing I can do about it.
While blabbering away I was silently wondering if Jonty also knows her, and if she’s aware that he cheated on his first wife and now has a daughter who he named India because she was born in Mumbai?
Rich people try so hard to stand out.
Halfway through our second Jonty story she calls out to Maria to make us coffee, but when Maria shuffles past, towards the ‘lifestyle area’, she stops her with a ‘sorry Maria, I meant to call Agnes’.
To me she says that she often makes that mistake because the nanny and the housekeeper look almost exactly the same.
When Agnes appears I see that they do look quite alike – both black – and if you don’t pay attention to the fact that the one is about 25 and the other 55, it will definitely confuse you.
New boobs
Cordelia then asks if I had trouble getting into the golf estate, but apologises before I can reply, telling me how difficult it was for her and Edward to make the decision to move there.
Apparently they had to do it for the children…
‘We had no choice because it’s so dangerous out there.
‘If only Madiba was still alive, this country would have been such a paradise.’
For the next five minutes it’s Madiba this and Madiba that.
Not Nelson Mandela, but ‘Madiba’, as if she knew him on a personal level – like she claims to know Jonty.
She also tells me that instead of just throwing old clothes away, they donate them to charity on Madiba Day, and once even parted with an Errol Arendz gown, which cost a fortune but, after her new boobs, was never going to fit again.
At this point I forced myself to think what these people consider as ‘old clothes’, and not to try and see what her ‘new boobs’ look like.
I was wishing Edward would grace us with his presence, because the interview was scheduled for 3pm and it was already almost four.
I couldn’t stomach another Jonty story, or Madiba praise.
She assured me that Edward will be home any minute because with the house being on the golf course, he’s never too far away.
Rich and lost
For the next 30 minutes I heard how naughty Jonty was at age five, and how the estate’s gardener, ‘old Alpheus’ is just as kind a soul as Madiba, and how out of kindness Edward made Alpheus’ son his full-time caddy.
‘Edward is such a humanitarian.’
I just listened because I had nothing to say in reply.
I looked at her – at how new boobs’ wrinkled 43-year-old hands and cheeks as tight as party balloons look like they came off three different people.
In the photo on the Design Benedict coffee table she looks 25, but it couldn’t have been taken so long ago because she’s standing in front of the Aston Martin Museum in South Oxfordshire, England.
They just returned from visiting there and that’s why I need to talk to Edward.
I hoped she never goes missing, because with pictures like that, she will stay lost forever.
