AT A CERTAIN point, after it had started, Hortensia knew. She didn’t agonise over whether she was wrong, whether she was misjudging her husband, shouldn’t she give him the benefit of the doubt, or anything like that. She simply knew, from a smell, from a frown or a smile that hung out of place.
By that time they’d been in Nigeria for five years. Hortensia had become well studied in Peter’s movements around the house on his return from work. She had practically memorised the number of steps it took him to get from the front door to the guest bathroom. The seconds it took to relieve himself. The running tap. And then to his study; the faint smell of a cigarette. Only after that would he seek her out in the living room.
‘Have a good day?’ he’d ask, pecking her on the cheek.
How long had he been coming home that way? When had she become the sort of wife you needed to have a pee and smoke before you could face her?
The lies followed, the way one thing necessitates another. Important office meetings that ran on till night-time, weekend-long conferences. Hortensia sometimes despaired that her husband was not more creative.
Sometimes he came home and she had already turned off the bedroom lights, lain down, awake. She counted his steps, tracked how he wound through the house. On the nights when he figured she was asleep, his movements were different; he wasn’t pressed to use the toilet, didn’t really need to calm his nerves with a cigarette. Instead it was a quick visit to the lounge, a few moments of silence as he reached the carpet. He often, she surmised, stood by the silver tray placed on the teak sideboard, where the housekeeper left the mail. If she strained, if she raised her head off the pillow, Hortensia would hear the tear of paper as he ran the letter-opener through. If it wasn’t a letter from his mother, it was otherwise just some rubbish mail from England. Hortensia wondered what her mother-in-law wrote in that slanted cursive with its flourish, indicative of anyone literate born in the early twentieth century. Did she ever tell her son that she missed him? Did she ask after Hortensia, maybe suggest – but never outright – the magic of new life, the glisten it can give a marriage? Would she know, would she guess that things were bad, that her son was bored, or maybe even in love with someone else?
After a few more minutes Hortensia would sense her husband’s presence before he actually entered their room. Then the weight of him on the bed. No part of their bodies touched. Once she was certain that Peter was asleep, Hortensia would get up to clean the bathtub.
The bathtub had proved useful. When they’d first moved in she’d thrown doubt at the cast-iron tub, quaint but perpetually stained. The first night after she’d guessed a third person was now present in her marriage, Hortensia had been unable to lie still, next to Peter in their bed. Her heart pounded as if she was running a marathon. But instead of scrolling through in her mind who it could possibly be, her thoughts alighted on the stains – cumulus and menacing – unchanged all these years after much effort from the housekeeper. Hortensia got up, certain the woman simply hadn’t tried hard enough. On her knees in the bathroom she found the action of scrubbing tight and mechanical, she liked the music of her breathing and the scrape of bristles against weathered enamel. Despite no real change in the appearance of the blemishes, Hortensia convinced herself that her scrubbing was working, that the stains were slowly disappearing. It became her project. If he heard her, Peter didn’t mention it. The exercise was precisely what she needed to be able to hit the pillow and die into sleep; lying awake beside him had become intolerable.
Some nights if, after the tub, Hortensia was not tired enough, she swabbed at the sink, polished the mirror, mopped the tiles. Their bathroom became the cleanest in the house. And if the physical exhaustion of housework still wasn’t good enough, Hortensia would attempt to expend her mind. She’d go into her study and sit at her desk. Some of her most successful designs happened after 1 a.m., as if the condition for good design was darkness, fatigue and morose solitude. If that were so, though, it would have been a new insight for Hortensia. A student at Bailer’s Design College, she had always needed to work in daylight – sunlight in fact. A thing she’d realised, on arriving in Brighton fresh from Bridgetown, young and determined, would be in short supply, despite the misleading name of her new town.