The Woman Next Door (21 page)

Marion knocked, feeling ridiculous.

‘Yes, Marion,’ came Hortensia’s response.

Hortensia didn’t look happy to see her.

‘Ah, Marion,’ Mama said. ‘I was just asking for you.’

‘Good morning, Doctor. Hortensia.’

‘Progress is good. I’m really pleased with the healing,’ Mama said to Marion with such seriousness.

She tried not to laugh. And then she felt embarrassed; since she’d moved in, she hadn’t once asked Hortensia how she was.

‘Good,’ Marion said and ignored the way Hortensia’s eyes darted upwards.

Mama buckled his bag.

‘That was quick,’ Marion said, wondering why she’d come in at all, why it had seemed important to see him again.

Bassey appeared through the open door. ‘Mrs Agostino, will you be taking breakfast in here?’

There was silence as Mama played with an already-done buckle.

‘Why not join us?’ Marion asked.

Hortensia frowned.

‘For breakfast, Dr Mama. Join Hortensia and I.’

Bassey outdid himself. He covered the long wooden table in the sunroom with Hortensia’s pineapple-yellow chambray. A white squat vase in the middle with three sprigs of red hibiscus from the garden. Marion and Mama sat in the lounge, catching the aroma of pancakes, fried eggs, sausages and sautéed mushrooms.

Hortensia, once she’d warmed to the idea of a breakfast, had insisted on getting dressed. She appeared wearing an olive-green jacket with Chelsea collar, a pastel green T-shirt underneath and a faded blue-jean skirt. It must have been an effort to get dressed. She even wore shoes, pigskin, Marion guessed. The whole effect spoilt only by the walker.

‘Shall we?’ Hortensia asked.

They rose and followed her to the sunroom.

Conversation flapped about, looking for deep waters. For a few minutes Bassey worked in the background, cleaning up in the kitchen. He hovered, added a jug of water with slices of kiwi and mint leaves. Added a plate of cut strawberries and a bowl of cream onto an already full table.

‘Champagne?’ Bassey asked into a puddle of silence.

Hortensia shook her head and he retreated, closing the kitchen door and leaving them without the comfort of his background bustle.

‘Well.’ Mama arranged strawberries on top of a pancake. ‘This is lovely.’ He criss-crossed honey and sprinkled cinnamon.

‘Do you have children, Dr Mama?’ Marion asked quite suddenly. Hortensia coughed.

‘One. A daughter.’

‘How nice. How old?’

‘Thirty-six. A young woman, really. I don’t get that, though. I see her and I still see the child who wanted me to look under her bed. Check for monsters.’

They all smiled.

‘And yourself?’ He asked Marion. ‘Do you have children?’

Marion grimaced. ‘I do. I have four.’

The space was shallow for a while again. Cutlery scraped. Marion looked into her orange juice, feeling as if Bassey really had added champagne. She touched her neck, looked from Mama to Hortensia and then back into her juice. Was time here, she thought, in the room with them? Had time sat down for a short while?

‘I think it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, ever failed at.’

‘Marion, don’t start with your—’

‘No, really, Hortensia.’

Mama left his cutlery balanced on the plate and listened.

‘I … I had Stefano and then Marelena.’ She looked at Mama. ‘My husband was Italian. Then I had Selena, and Gaia is my last child. I don’t know. I thought giving birth would be the hard part. I don’t know where I got the idea, but … I thought I’d be good at actual motherhood. I had no idea how hard I would find it.’

‘Hortensia, you’re lucky you never had any.’ Mama sounded as if he was testing out a joke. Hortensia smiled on one side of her face, a practice-smile.

‘I even started praying after I had children.’ Marion put a piece of a strawberry into her mouth, worked it.

‘Why?’ Mama asked.

‘Marelena. She was toddling about at the time, a small thing. And she fell. I was away from her and I heard that girl cry like … someone had poked her eye out. The kind of scream I’d never heard before. I ran to her, wishing I couldn’t run, wanting to reach her but also not. I searched her body. Of course there was just a scratch – nothing really. I can’t explain it, I felt so upset. Cheated, but I couldn’t tell of what.’

‘And then you prayed?’ Hortensia said.

‘I prayed. Me. Well, I hadn’t prayed since I’d lived in my mother’s house. My parents were Jewish. Or, rather, my parents were Not Jewish.’

Mama frowned. ‘And you?’

‘Well … I observe nothing.’

‘But you prayed?’

‘Yes, yes. I found a reason to pray again. Marelena fell. My children fell over and suddenly I needed God.’

Mama gestured and Hortensia poured him a glass of water. A slice of kiwi escaped into his cup, splashed the cloth, darkened it.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ Mama said.

They ate and Hortensia thought about how intimate eating with someone was. How you might not ever really know a person until you took soup with them, listened to them slurp or try not to slurp, listened to them swallow.

PETER CAME HOME
and whistled. At breakfast he whistled. The ditties were unrecognisable, characterised mainly by the happiness they conveyed, a bouncing tune, something light and transcendent.

‘I can’t concentrate,’ Hortensia said.

He stopped, but then started again after only a few minutes had passed.

‘Peter,’ Hortensia lowered the newspaper, letting the page rest on her half-eaten grapefruit.

‘Sorry – habit, I guess.’

He smiled to himself and Hortensia wondered if he was remembering some detail of his lover’s body. Perhaps a mole on her upper back, maybe near her spine. When he breathed heavy, Hortensia imagined that he was smelling the woman, ingesting a memory of her through his nose, the smell of her lips or her eyelids.

‘How’s work going? The project you mentioned.’

There was no project, or there was one project and she was of middle height with paw-paw-sized breasts and milky skin.

‘Good. Fine. It’s a lot of travelling but … I manage.’

‘Yes, that you do.’

‘And the boutique? Do you have an opening date yet?’

‘No, but soon. We want to launch with a whole range of decor items. Make a real impression.’

‘Hmm. And how is … everything?’

Hortensia wasn’t sure what he was asking.

‘I’m okay. I’m—’

He checked his watch. ‘Yes?’

‘You’ll be late for work, you need to go.’

‘No, no, I’m listening.’

‘I’m fine. Just … I was thinking maybe I should see someone, you know? Someone else. Dr Momodu has said one thing, but a second opinion is usually recommended.’

‘Ah,’ he scraped his chair out from the breakfast table. ‘Did you have someone in mind?’

‘Or have you given up, Peter?’

‘Horts, that’s not what I said.’

To stop from crying she pushed her chair out and went into the bedroom. Locked it. Peter knocked on the door, but when she didn’t answer he went to work.

Hortensia didn’t mention it again, but booked herself an appointment with Dr Hussein. He revealed what she had already been told: her uterus was malformed. He said it with reproach, as if she had taken the vessel herself and squashed it. There was nothing more to be done, said the doctor.

Peter continued to whistle.

Why don’t you leave me? Hortensia asked him in her mind. Did he enjoy seeing her shame – was that part of the scintillation of the act? Would it be less exciting without her, the wife, waiting at home jilted? Was he evil? Hortensia would ask her breakfast plate while they sat in silence. Are you evil, Peter?

There was one time Hortensia decided to tell him she knew, make a quiet agreement about a settlement and leave for London. She called Peter at work.

‘Will you come home for dinner tonight? … I know you always come home, but I meant would you come home early enough so we can eat together? I just want to sit with you, that’s all.’

Hortensia and Peter sat, stiff, unaccustomed to facing one another for such a sustained period of time. They had got into a different routine. Hortensia taking meals in her studio or else in the lounge in front of a soap opera or the news. Peter coming in around 10 p.m.

‘Good day? At work?’ Hortensia could hear the emptiness in her voice but she pressed on.

Peter shrugged, which was a regular response to most of the questions Hortensia had for him.

‘Did you want to talk about something specific?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Did you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Hortensia sighed, focused on the chicken breast, which had more flesh than she knew what to do with. Each morsel she swallowed felt as if it was swelling up in her gut and pushing her belly button further and further out, mocking her.

‘Just thought we could sit together. That’s all.’ But the true words failed her.

Then there was a time he tried. Hortensia was already in bed, pretending to sleep. Peter came home drunk. Stumbling and falling through the house towards the bedroom. When he entered she could smell him.

‘Awake? Horts?’

She stayed pretending in the dark. Shocked at the touch of his hands on her arm. She remained still, breathing deeply.

‘Hortensia?’

But Hortensia was determined to mimic the sleep of the dead; the stupor of one truly given to the most vacant dreaming. Peter undressed, falling a few more times. In his underpants, he got into bed. She didn’t scrub the bath that night, she didn’t fall asleep, not even for a few merciful minutes. She went over in her head, too many times to count, what the thing was Peter had wanted to awaken her for. The thing he’d had to get sloshed to be able to mention. How would he have said it? she wondered. In what tone? Would he have tried to seduce her somehow, in the same voice he used to use for sex, then tell her that he’d taken a lover? Try and cajole her into seeing that he’d had no choice? Or would he have employed his office voice, something measured and uncomplicated? Saying: it is over. The kind of voice that prohibits begging.

Over time, over the years that the affair continued, Hortensia stopped seeing life as a good thing. In a cold church in London she had said yes to him, to be the only one person always there to be safe with, to bear the weight of her when her weight needed bearing, to respond to questions that no one else would care to. Someone to say the unsayable, to be scared with, together. And here she was, scared alone. Night was the real measure of love, Hortensia thought. Anything can sparkle in the daylight. But night – that was when humanity got tested. It was always at night that she saw things between them were decrepit and ugly.

Hortensia and Mr Adebayo opened a small boutique store near the Secretariat on Lebanon Road – a new trendy area of the city. The new business was a welcome distraction. Adebayo, a small man, teeth a shade of orange thanks to his penchant for kola-nut, and stained fingers, the tattoo, Hortensia thought, of an honest tie-and-dyer. His voice was gravelly and his life seemed to revolve around his art, no mention of children or wives. His single-mindedness and brusque manner suited Hortensia. His designs had captivated her when she’d visited his studio because they looked so old. She envied him his shades of indigo and newsprint-white, the neat squares of his ‘Ibadan-is-sweet’ design.

Gradually, as the business took off, Hortensia stopped following the lovers. She spent her days in the shop or the adjoining workshop. She sent pictures of the fabrics to Mr List along with her sketches and he used the material to launch a new range of bejewelled handbags. Adebayo raised a shaggy eyebrow but nothing more. The bulk of their customers were expats who delighted in the combination of Adebayo’s ageless designs and Hortensia’s modern spin. She suggested he take lace and dye it like he would the cotton, she cut up the fabrics into bedspreads and tablecloths, curtains and cushion covers.

And then overnight Hortensia went from considering smocking to sitting by the radio, reading the newspapers of a country splitting, warring. On the thirtieth of May 1967, Lieutenant-Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the Eastern Region of Nigeria, the Republic of Biafra. Like a soundtrack through the almost three years of war, Eda begged Hortensia to come home, her voice filled with pre-emptive horror at the thought of having to bury her own child. But despite talk at Peter’s office (a few resigned, some took unpaid leave) they stayed on.

It would later embarrass Hortensia that when the war ended all she could notice was that her husband looked less happy, less rosy in the cheeks, no whistling. Yes, the war was over, millions were dead and her husband’s lover had apparently disappeared from their lives, as surreptitiously as she had come into it. Shameless, having allowed herself, as a cheated-on wife, to become oblivious to the true horrors of war, Hortensia fantasised that the woman had been caught up in the conflict somehow, been shot in the chest or, better yet, beheaded.

By the middle of 1970 the Zonta women’s society opened a branch in Ibadan and Hortensia joined up. With the boutique thriving and an end to Peter’s extramarital activity, Hortensia had expected happiness. She would later feel stupid for this. For thinking they would simply pick up from where they left off, wind back some years, cuddle in bed and laugh again. Peter’s mood darkened, reminiscent of their first morning after marriage. His mood darkened sufficiently that it stopped being a mood and started being simply who he was. Occasionally when she arrived home from work and he offered her an orange or asked if he could rub her feet, she shivered; these slivers of good nature would last some hours and then slip away – their fleeting nature made them less bearable than his regular unpleasant tempers.

There were moments when Hortensia daydreamed about running away. Adebayo, she’d decided, had no interest in any sexual relations, whether with her or anyone else for that matter. On sad days, to make herself laugh, she plotted her seduction of him, imagined backpacking through the south-west up into the north. There were days her scheme brought tears of laughter, aching stomach muscles.