Someone blasted a horn and Marion suddenly missed her binoculars, felt blown off her perch as Queen of Katterijn.
‘One thing,’ Hortensia started again. ‘One thing I’ll always hate him for was this time in Brighton. My father had died and I couldn’t leave Brighton. I don’t know – I just couldn’t go home. As if going home would make his absence permanent. Normally I’d work in Croydon over the summer, but that year I stayed on in Brighton and Peter came to see me. His effort was so … tender. I was already in love with him but, somehow, this gesture did something. Anyhow, one day he suggested we go to the beach. You realise I grew up on the best beach there is; Brighton was a joke to me. I’d been several times alone but never with him, so we went. A picnic. It was his idea to watch the sunset. We had a blanket, Peter draped his leg over me. I remember that I struggled to breathe but didn’t say anything. Having the weight of his leg on me seemed more important. It grew cold and we spread another cloth over us, night came. He proposed to me. “I want to take care of you,” he said. Can you believe that? “I want you to know that you can depend on me.” Depend, he said.’
Marion grunted her understanding.
‘And there is where I shall never forgive him. Because, you see, I really heard him that day. With something deeper than ears. Maybe you can listen with your spleen, or your pancreas. Because it felt like that, Marion. I heard him deep in some part of my body.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Of course he couldn’t have meant it. Not with the way things turned out. And then I made a joke about the whole thing to myself. Decided marriage was like ordering in a foreign-language restaurant. Thinking it’s fish, too embarrassed and proud to confirm in English. And then your heart drops when the waiter puts a plate of something bleeding and unrecognisable in front of you. Something you are absolutely certain you are not going to be able to eat, no matter how hard you try.’
Hortensia sat in a chair, she leaned forward to pull on her skirt, lifting one buttock and then the other, feeling tired even though it was morning. The strain of getting dressed – who would have thought. She also felt annoyance at having unburdened to Marion. She had no interest in it, no inclination. She rejected in herself the urge Marion displayed. The need to talk, the need to have someone listen. Her nose scrunched up. Those who talked and those, like her, who calcified. All those years in Ibadan, stalking lovers, all that time spent grieving, this was the direction her broken-hearted logic had led her in. It was not wise, but it was, like a fossil, self-preserving. She’d survived. The machinery of her body had kept going, hatred’s venom for oil; her skin was taut, no one ever guessed her age. Surely if she’d lived that other life, a life of unburdening and revelations, if she’d stayed delicate, run after him, begged and pleaded, she’d have let life use her, not the other way around. And used things grow old. She had Peter to thank, then, for her flawless complexion, her beauty.
Hortensia stood. She eyed a jumble of shoes in the bottom of the closet. Of course beauty had not been what she was after, nor agelessness. She had wanted love. She fitted her feet into a pair of loafers, brown suede, not striking, but not repulsive either. Unqualified love. She reached for the walker. She’d had such a time; a time when she’d loved him, his tongue in her mouth, along the grooves of her teeth or his hand cradling her neck. Soft times. When she’d allowed softness. Remembering such a time made her feel foolish. She’d felt foolish back then too. Hoodwinked. She remembered deciding to be tough, hardening, making the trade between fulfilment and not being duped. She would use all her powers to have him endure her suffering, and by proximity he would suffer too. They went on to have an okay marriage, an okay life. Like an okay house, with just that one room you don’t go into. Not because it’s unfurnished or ugly, but because it’s haunted. And there are no haunted rooms, really, only haunted houses.
Still, snivelling Marion was upsetting a really good system that, up till now, had been working.
Hortensia entered the kitchen. She left the door ajar so she would see when Marion came down the stairs; she intended to call out to her.
Marion had woken up with a crick in her neck, and she knew that the pain was not there because she had slept in a bad position. It was there because it was the nature of pain to show up whenever it liked.
She felt shy about seeing Hortensia, felt she ought to hide from her. She had nothing to compare this feeling to, except her wedding night, pulling the covers to hide her thighs from her husband; needing the bathroom, being scared to mention it.