At last Marelena’s number shone on the screen of her cellphone.
‘Darling, have you found it? … The painting! Marelena, I don’t think you fully understand just how important this is … I’m not shouting! … Well, can you check? Please … I’m asking as sweetly as I can – I won’t sleep otherwise … Thank you. I spoke with the lawyer earlier. It’s all a mess, but what can I do? The lawyer thinks the whole incident might buy me some time with the debt collectors; meanwhile I’m waiting to see what the insurance pays out for the damages – it better cover the repairs … What do you mean? … I don’t know what I’ll do afterwards, Marelena, I don’t know – sell the house … What? … Yes, I realise I can’t move in with you, I gathered that, darling …’ She made a laugh devoid of humour. Sighed. ‘Yes, darling, I’m sure it will all work out. Please don’t forget about the painting … Yes, well, goodbye.’
Marion took out her teeth. She slept curled with a hand on her face, turned upwards. Parrying what, she couldn’t say.
In the morning Agnes brought a note.
The letter had been hard to compose. A few days on and Hortensia was still juggling the words in her head. She’d already received notice of the insurance claim for the damages. In fact it was a whole chain of insurance claims, like dominoes. She called off the building works, thinking Marion would be happy to hear that. From Bassey’s account – he’d heard from Agnes – Marion was staying at that disease of a guest house down the road and was not in the least bit happy about that.
‘Why not with her family? She has a soccer team of children,’ Hortensia asked Bassey, who’d brought tea and then stood in the doorway of her study for a while, indulging her with gossip.
He shrugged. ‘Agnes says the two kids live overseas. The other two are in the country, but may as well not be.’
Hortensia snorted, ignored Bassey’s look of recrimination. There were fewer and fewer pleasures – why not enjoy the Vulture’s misfortune?
‘Anyway,’ Bassey said, the word he used as a means of taking leave.
‘What happened? With her and the kids?’ Hortensia was keen to have him stay and talk. What else was there to do – she was bed-bound.
‘Agnes says the only thing that kept her a Christian was working for that family – that it is tribulation that builds faith.’
‘Dreadful!’
‘She said you need Jesus in your life if you’re going to work for the Agostinos.’ Bassey turned and Hortensia, indulging an old habit, counted his steps back down the hallway and into the kitchen.
The hospital had insisted on their blasted nurses. Hortensia did her best to make their work unpleasant, and she happily noticed that the same nurse never returned the next day. She imagined there were a finite number of Constantinople Hospital nurses and that soon enough they’d run out and leave her be. Let her get gangrene and die, for God’s sake, what of it?
Amidst the fog of the pain-medicines they plied her with, Hortensia tried to design her apology. With the recent example of the crane-driver vivid in her mind, she could not ignore adding the ingredient he had omitted. Somewhere in the crowd of things she meant to tell Marion, there had to be an admission of guilt. She, Hortensia, was complicit. She was sorry. Sorry. The word alone was an assault to her sense of herself. Waves of nausea visited her during the day and the miserable nurse on duty thought it had something to do with the pain. Each time Bassey came into the room she worried he had news that Marion was back next door or, worse, right outside her own door. But of course Marion couldn’t come home; her house was in disrepair, no works could begin until the insurance chain was worked out – who did what to whom, what was damaged and who was utmostly responsible, who owed whom and how much.
Maybe she should phone Marion but, as much as she would have liked this she knew it would be a cop-out, the coward’s way.
On a particularly miserable morning, when the previous night had been a succession of bad dreams (Marion sitting on Hortensia’s head, Marion asking Hortensia to pick her teeth with a plastic toothpick, Marion making Hortensia floss her own teeth with strands of Marion’s grey and greasy hair), Hortensia decided: enough. She shouted for Bassey, thinking as she did that they must call the electrician and have a buzzer installed by the bed.
‘Yes, please.’
‘I need to speak with Mrs Agostino. Don’t look at me like that. What do you know?’
Bassey, of course, knew that the women hated one another. Everyone did.
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, I need to speak with her. I mean I would like to … I can’t really go to her, you see?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you can talk to Agnes, yes?’
Bassey nodded.
‘Think I can send her a letter? Marion, I mean. Through Agnes. I don’t even know if she’ll come. She’ll probably see my name and reach for a blowtorch.’
Bassey smiled. Hortensia had always liked the fact that he enjoyed her scathing humour.