‘There’s blood here, Marion.’
Marion walked; she heard Agatha call out about the magazines but decided not to turn back – she’d get them some other time. Outside she took five deep breaths. Everyone knew Aggie was a few keys short of a bunch, but Marion couldn’t stop trying to fix her hair even though it was already neat; she straightened her rings but the gems were facing outwards, straight already. She walked back towards No. 10, and twice she stopped to look over her shoulder.
When Ludmilla called to find out what Marion had discovered, Marion told her the truth. That the documents were old and tattered, that if Ludmilla wanted to conduct proper research she should drive into town, visit the archives. Marion was unusually short with Ludmilla on the phone and she could sense the woman’s confusion. She herself was perplexed.
They planned it, practically had the conversations marked out onstage with electrical tape. Hortensia would graduate, they’d tell Eda first (Peter wrote his intentions down in a letter) and then they’d, together, visit Peter’s parents. With all the nerves, the rehearsals and the overwhelming dread, the actual conversations were an anticlimax. Eda, convinced her daughter had been destined for spinsterhood, didn’t even mention that she would have preferred a black son-in-law, a Bajan at that. They’d been prepared for a bigger fight from Mr and Mrs James. Peter had not had to say anything explicit for Hortensia to realise his parents would disapprove. While affronted at that first meeting, at their appraisal of her, she’d also imagined, fantastically, that there would have been spitting and hissing, swearing at the least. The civility of their prejudice, the cunning, had left a polite wound. Beyond that they seemed resigned to their misfortune – Hortensia’s blackness and the brown grandchildren she would give them.
Their wedding was a small affair at Hortensia’s mother’s church. Mrs James, Peter’s mother, would have preferred her church, but did not insist. Uncle Leroy, retired serviceman of the Carib Regiment, ambled down a short aisle with his grandniece’s bony hand in his. They walked staring ahead at the priest, at a surprised-looking Peter and, beyond, at the yellow blue-and-red stained-glass window depicting Jesus, haloed and chaste.
In the morning, getting ready, Hortensia had looked long at herself in the mirror, having never felt this pretty. She was drunk on the romantic booze of a wedding day – Zippy with a garland in her hair, the flurry of little girls with dusty rose-coloured bouquets, the shiny smiles everyone reserved for Hortensia, smiles at their highest volume; no one could have been more smiled at than Hortensia on that day and she went deaf with it.
The morning after the wedding her ears were still ringing. She was even more senseless after having made love to Peter; her first experience that pain and pleasure could coexist.
When they awoke the morning after, Hortensia had felt shy, but she had taken his cheeks and gazed into a face she adored. His ardour of the previous night had drained and instead he looked blank.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked. And this surprised her. What could be wrong? ‘You seem a bit … I don’t know.’
The words didn’t suggest it, neither did his facial expression, but all Hortensia could think was: he is scared. There was no answer to his question; he wasn’t really asking her anything. It sobered her up, though, and in the few years it took the company to give Peter a raise and suggest he move to their branch in Nigeria, Hortensia stayed sober. In fact love would never again induce anything more than an ache in the centre of her belly. Peter’s coolness of that morning, though, was quickly replaced with the characteristics she was more familiar with – intense, studious, quirky and warm. They honeymooned for three days.
Hortensia moved into Peter’s flat in Highbury, they made love every night. Peter, seemingly recovered from the shock of being a husband, ardent and happier than she’d ever seen him.