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.