Gradually, as the business took off, Hortensia stopped following the lovers. She spent her days in the shop or the adjoining workshop. She sent pictures of the fabrics to Mr List along with her sketches and he used the material to launch a new range of bejewelled handbags. Adebayo raised a shaggy eyebrow but nothing more. The bulk of their customers were expats who delighted in the combination of Adebayo’s ageless designs and Hortensia’s modern spin. She suggested he take lace and dye it like he would the cotton, she cut up the fabrics into bedspreads and tablecloths, curtains and cushion covers.
And then overnight Hortensia went from considering smocking to sitting by the radio, reading the newspapers of a country splitting, warring. On the thirtieth of May 1967, Lieutenant-Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the Eastern Region of Nigeria, the Republic of Biafra. Like a soundtrack through the almost three years of war, Eda begged Hortensia to come home, her voice filled with pre-emptive horror at the thought of having to bury her own child. But despite talk at Peter’s office (a few resigned, some took unpaid leave) they stayed on.
It would later embarrass Hortensia that when the war ended all she could notice was that her husband looked less happy, less rosy in the cheeks, no whistling. Yes, the war was over, millions were dead and her husband’s lover had apparently disappeared from their lives, as surreptitiously as she had come into it. Shameless, having allowed herself, as a cheated-on wife, to become oblivious to the true horrors of war, Hortensia fantasised that the woman had been caught up in the conflict somehow, been shot in the chest or, better yet, beheaded.
By the middle of 1970 the Zonta women’s society opened a branch in Ibadan and Hortensia joined up. With the boutique thriving and an end to Peter’s extramarital activity, Hortensia had expected happiness. She would later feel stupid for this. For thinking they would simply pick up from where they left off, wind back some years, cuddle in bed and laugh again. Peter’s mood darkened, reminiscent of their first morning after marriage. His mood darkened sufficiently that it stopped being a mood and started being simply who he was. Occasionally when she arrived home from work and he offered her an orange or asked if he could rub her feet, she shivered; these slivers of good nature would last some hours and then slip away – their fleeting nature made them less bearable than his regular unpleasant tempers.
There were moments when Hortensia daydreamed about running away. Adebayo, she’d decided, had no interest in any sexual relations, whether with her or anyone else for that matter. On sad days, to make herself laugh, she plotted her seduction of him, imagined backpacking through the south-west up into the north. There were days her scheme brought tears of laughter, aching stomach muscles.
Every few months she would awaken and find herself enveloped in Peter’s long arms. They would make love, fierce, intense, as if despite their unhappiness they understood that the infrequency of their sexual relations demanded explosiveness, fire.
They were not happy, they were not unhappy.
In 1990 at the ripe age of sixty-six, Peter retired. Soon after, he started to complain that he couldn’t see so well. He visited the optician for a pair of glasses. Hortensia made fun of him, she’d always been the near-sighted one. They were out walking one day, in a market not dissimilar to the one she’d tracked him and his lover in almost thirty years before. Hortensia was musing on this, walking leisurely several paces behind her husband, when he fell to the ground. Her immediate thought was that he was dead, and tears came in the few steps it took to reach him. His eyes were open.