‘Ready?’
The woman’s back was wide, and Hortensia felt like a child as she traipsed behind her down the passageway. It was safe, like being in a human slipstream. The mortician’s shoulders, and the shock of red curls that fell onto them, reminded Hortensia that she had to ask Malachi the gardener to trim back the ivy by the gate. Probably he hadn’t noticed, he was the kind of gardener that didn’t notice things. Then there was the continual problem of her concrete pots by the entrance steps. Hortensia had had the pots made, specially cast; she’d had the paint factory use an acid-based dye. Four pots, square-shaped because the entrance porch required corners, strong lines versus baroque curves. On each square pot was a white image, the silhouette of a bird with a delicate elongated beak that might suggest a hummingbird, but only if you looked closely. The birds, when the pots were arranged as they should be, ascended as if heading skywards. Malachi moved the pots around often. For instance, if he was turning their soil or if she’d asked him to plant something bright and pretty. Then he’d return the pots along the right-hand side of the porch, one for each step, but the birds would be jumbled, some facing east, some west, no skywards-effect. The suffering she experienced at the hands of a gardener without an eye for these things.
‘I’ll leave you for a few minutes. Take your time, Ma’am.’
Hortensia moved closer to the bed. She put her mouth in a line, surprised at herself, at the agreement she was making with her face that this was not the time for tears. She edged forward, took a look. Of course it wasn’t him. It never is. And, unable to stop it, the thought came that she too would lie down one day, not ever to get up, and maybe someone (the cleaner or the nurse in charge) would edge forward. Of course it would be the cleaner or the nurse. It wouldn’t (couldn’t) be anyone who actually knew her. It wouldn’t be anyone who would be able to tell that this wasn’t her; that, in death, she wasn’t herself. And wasn’t that somehow a failing – having no known-one there to witness? What could be more fitting than dying and having people who knew you from when you were alive; have them present to look into your casket and confirm that ‘It isn’t you’; that no, you were quite different in life; that yes, death had taken something, there had been something to take. Hortensia’s eyes wandered with her mind, she looked to the corners of the small wooden-panelled room, she looked to the ceiling. Imagine having people witness that, in death, you looked the same. And then her eyes fell to the dead body that was not Peter.
His face was grey-green and small. It had sunken in, as if he’d taken a very big breath, sucked all the air in and hollowed his cheeks, but not got the chance to breathe out again. She felt sorry for him. She reached out and touched his cheekbone. The skin was like wet, but it wasn’t. Damp somehow.
His hands were knobbled, in particular his ring-finger. The knuckle swollen, his golden band trapped in place. Hortensia moved her hand to the ring, to the cold of the soft metal. It was now too late. She sucked her tongue to distract herself – what was the point of crying now, whatever was the point? She turned to call the mortician back, tell the plank of a woman that she’d seen him enough. And just then Hortensia remembered that the paint-seller had called that colour, for the pots, ‘Magic Teal’. And after the pots had been delivered Hortensia had thought how unlike its name the colour looked. And, without any way of explaining it, she’d felt cheated.