The Woman Next Door (6 page)

Of course she would now need to swallow her pride to ask Hortensia for help, but that wound would eventually heal. It would be a small price to pay for a chance not to die a pauper. Marion rehearsed the words she would use and looked through her binoculars across at her neighbour’s house – No. 10 Katterijn Avenue. The words were hard to form. Since the first lines she’d scratched on tracing paper over fifty years back, No. 10 was hers.

Corbusier claimed a house was a machine for living in. Marion, to her studio master’s amusement, explained her position. Didn’t we have enough machines? Did everything have to be likened to cogs and wires in order to make it worthwhile? A house is a person, she’d argued, to the sound of guffaws from the rest of the class. But she’d pressed on and turned in her essay. What was house design if it wasn’t the study of armour, of disguises, of appearances? The most intimate form of space-making, the closest architects might ever come to portraiture. Interesting, interesting, the teacher had said, but not substantiated enough. Marion thought him an idiot with a mind as narrow as a pin and did not allow his tepid response to dampen her own enthusiasm. She’d wanted to design houses the way other girls her age wanted babies.

How do you go to someone who has taken your baby and ask them to help you with something delicate? The pleases and thank-yous. Marion tried them in her head; they wouldn’t come. Not even slowly. Unless there was some other way to do it … She could go to the funeral, for instance, play up a bit. Marion’s mind moved through the steps. The phone rang.

‘Yes, darling … Yes, I wondered … I see … I wasn’t asking for that much money, Marelena. I didn’t even mention an amount. I just needed to know that in the event … Well, tell your hubby I don’t need his money, then. I have an idea anyway, so maybe I won’t need your help after all … I’ll tell you when I’ve worked it all out … What do you mean, why am I being so … I realise that, Marelena … Yes, you too … okay. Bye.’

Marion eyed the painting. Send flowers, go to the funeral, then wait some days; at the right moment, strike. Worth a try.

Back on the porch, Marion drank her tea but it was cold and she could only taste bile. After No. 10 was complete and the Norwegians living in it, nothing had alleviated that sunken feeling in the bottom of Marion’s belly. Not a marriage to Max, not one child after another. Not starting her practice. Nothing.

‘
WOULD YOU LIKE
to see him?’ the mortician asked Hortensia.

I’ve seen him already, Hortensia thought, but she nodded. You were supposed to nod, you were supposed to want to say goodbye one last time in private. The world was funny, encouraging you to speak to dead bodies. Hortensia tried to get comfortable on the low couch with missing studs while the woman – had she called herself Meredith? – made a phone call. ‘Are you ready for her?’ the woman said into the receiver.

Hortensia tuned her out. The nice thing about being old is that you can literally moderate your hearing, and these days there was little worth listening to. The mortician’s office was two chairs, the couch and a wide desk with nothing on it except a pair of hands belonging to … Meredith (maybe) and a lamp that made Hortensia wonder if the woman worked nights. All the furniture was low; it looked as if someone had tried to go for minimal and chic, but ended up with cheap instead. Meredith, a large woman, bulged out of the chair, a Raggedy Ann doll sitting for tea with Barbie furniture. Hortensia studied her, unashamed when the woman caught her eye occasionally. The thing about turning off your hearing is you lose all inhibition. Hortensia examined the mottled skin of the woman’s arms that poked out from black puffy sleeves. Her chubby wrists. She had a strange birthmark on the tip of her index finger, a dark splodge of ink-black that had the effect of making her look grimy.

‘Pardon?’ Hortensia said, turning the dial.

‘Sorry for the wait. We’re almost finished preparing him.’ She pushed her chair out and rose. ‘Be right back.’

Hortensia shrugged but not enough to be seen. This was another skill of her age: the infinitesimal shrug that let you pour heaps of blame, hopelessness and a sense of being victimised onto the world without having to contend with any resistance. Meredith – or was it Judith? – closed the door behind her, only to open it again a few minutes later.

‘Ready?’

The woman’s back was wide, and Hortensia felt like a child as she traipsed behind her down the passageway. It was safe, like being in a human slipstream. The mortician’s shoulders, and the shock of red curls that fell onto them, reminded Hortensia that she had to ask Malachi the gardener to trim back the ivy by the gate. Probably he hadn’t noticed, he was the kind of gardener that didn’t notice things. Then there was the continual problem of her concrete pots by the entrance steps. Hortensia had had the pots made, specially cast; she’d had the paint factory use an acid-based dye. Four pots, square-shaped because the entrance porch required corners, strong lines versus baroque curves. On each square pot was a white image, the silhouette of a bird with a delicate elongated beak that might suggest a hummingbird, but only if you looked closely. The birds, when the pots were arranged as they should be, ascended as if heading skywards. Malachi moved the pots around often. For instance, if he was turning their soil or if she’d asked him to plant something bright and pretty. Then he’d return the pots along the right-hand side of the porch, one for each step, but the birds would be jumbled, some facing east, some west, no skywards-effect. The suffering she experienced at the hands of a gardener without an eye for these things.

‘I’ll leave you for a few minutes. Take your time, Ma’am.’

Hortensia moved closer to the bed. She put her mouth in a line, surprised at herself, at the agreement she was making with her face that this was not the time for tears. She edged forward, took a look. Of course it wasn’t him. It never is. And, unable to stop it, the thought came that she too would lie down one day, not ever to get up, and maybe someone (the cleaner or the nurse in charge) would edge forward. Of course it would be the cleaner or the nurse. It wouldn’t (couldn’t) be anyone who actually knew her. It wouldn’t be anyone who would be able to tell that this wasn’t her; that, in death, she wasn’t herself. And wasn’t that somehow a failing – having no known-one there to witness? What could be more fitting than dying and having people who knew you from when you were alive; have them present to look into your casket and confirm that ‘It isn’t you’; that no, you were quite different in life; that yes, death had taken something, there had been something to take. Hortensia’s eyes wandered with her mind, she looked to the corners of the small wooden-panelled room, she looked to the ceiling. Imagine having people witness that, in death, you looked the same. And then her eyes fell to the dead body that was not Peter.

His face was grey-green and small. It had sunken in, as if he’d taken a very big breath, sucked all the air in and hollowed his cheeks, but not got the chance to breathe out again. She felt sorry for him. She reached out and touched his cheekbone. The skin was like wet, but it wasn’t. Damp somehow.

His hands were knobbled, in particular his ring-finger. The knuckle swollen, his golden band trapped in place. Hortensia moved her hand to the ring, to the cold of the soft metal. It was now too late. She sucked her tongue to distract herself – what was the point of crying now, whatever was the point? She turned to call the mortician back, tell the plank of a woman that she’d seen him enough. And just then Hortensia remembered that the paint-seller had called that colour, for the pots, ‘Magic Teal’. And after the pots had been delivered Hortensia had thought how unlike its name the colour looked. And, without any way of explaining it, she’d felt cheated.

After the viewing at the morgue, the tangle of arrangements started. Hortensia baulked both at the sympathy that spilled out from people and at the assumption that, at her advanced age, she had buried many already, that she understood how things worked. This produced a rather obscene casualness in the mortician, whom Hortensia now reliably recalled was a Ms Judith Mulligan. At their second meeting Judith had asked Hortensia whether she’d notified ‘the regulars’. And then later Judith had asked her if Peter had a Facebook page. It was a miserable time, not because her husband had died but because most of the living – people Hortensia had to associate with – appeared to be numbskulls.

Some man telephoned about a tombstone for Peter. Yes, apparently Peter had commissioned his own tombstone. She tried to get rid of the guy but he was resolute. The man had gruff in his voice, the kind of voice you’d think a sculptor, someone who worked with stone, should have. I don’t understand why you’re calling me, Hortensia said, her already short temper at its shortest that week. But Peter must have prepared Gary – that was his name – for this encounter with his wife. After Gary’s protracted explanation, Hortensia relented and agreed to receive him and inspect the work of art before its installation. The stone was to be placed, adjacent to the buried ashes, on a snatch of ground Peter had purchased a year back. Hortensia had joked at the time that it wasn’t big enough to fit a car.

Gary arrived in a white truck. He hooted at the gate, which was unnecessary – there was a perfectly working intercom. He had a beard and eyes so squinting you could hardly see them. Hortensia wondered, with a small sneer, if he could see anything, if his work could be any good, but when he unveiled the stone she stopped – Gary, sun-beaten, leather-skinned Gary, had made something beautiful. The base was thick, and a thin slab projected out from it at an angle, all in white marble. Hortensia was surprised at the thinness of the slab. ‘Won’t it break?’ She was careful to sound disinterested. They were standing in the driveway, looking into the back of the truck. He shook his head. ‘Reinforced,’ he said. The slab was covered, meticulously, in a fine pattern of black dots, like tar bubbles. Hortensia wanted to run her hands over them (she could almost feel them already, the bumps) but she restrained herself. She found that she liked Gary’s design and she was worried that he’d notice. ‘Alright,’ she said and offered directions but he said he didn’t need them – he knew already where the plot of land was.

So much else was happening. It didn’t help that Hortensia kept forgetting things. The mortician wanted to know the name of the hospital, the doctor who’d signed the death certificate. It was all written down – why was she asking her? ‘I don’t know, Cathy-something,’ Hortensia had said. ‘Dr Cathy Marcus or something like that. Oh, there were many doctors, though. Oh, you mean the one who signed? Marcus … or something.’

Hortensia also forgot simple things. She forgot to ask Malachi to make a cutting of the bougainvillea for the vase on the bureau in the hallway. She forgot to tell Bassey, who was the only man large enough to fit anything Peter owned, to go through her husband’s things, take whatever he wanted. She forgot that Peter would want her to contact Unilever in Ibadan – who would still be there of the old crowd? Let them know about the death. The so-called regulars. She’d even forgotten to tell Zippy, who had phoned from London, all concerned to find out how Peter was doing. Hortensia felt like an idiot telling her sister, three days after it had happened, that her brother-in-law was dead.

‘Oh, my darling, poor thing,’ Zippy said, but who was Zippy’s pity directed at: her or Peter?

‘It’ll be okay,’ Hortensia said.

‘Should I come? I should come. Shouldn’t I? You sound so normal, why didn’t you call me the minute it happened? I’ll come.’

Hortensia let her baby sister carry on for a while, then she used all her powers to persuade Zippy that the funeral was nothing, rather come out for a longer time afterwards, when Hortensia would need the support. It sounded right, even though none of it was true. She listened a bit more to admonitions that were simply a younger version of the ones she’d received from their mother, before telling Zippy there were things she had to attend to, and ringing off.

There’d also been a surprise. No death is complete without one. Hortensia placed her teacup down, taking small joy – a sense of the rightness of things – in the crisp clink-sound the bone china made as she set it on the saucer. A breeze blew up onto the patio and she looked out and noticed that the clouds were threatening rain. Hortensia could hear Bassey preparing dinner. Everything was normal, except that her husband was dead and apparently she was no longer the executor of his will. Someone else was, a someone she now had an appointment with the following day. Hortensia curled her lip; it was involuntary. If she were with company she would fight the urge, fight the way the corners of her mouth just naturally wanted to sink to the ground, but since she was alone she let them go. She picked up her cup again and took a sip of Earl Grey, prepared with Chinese Black Congou tea and not the usual Ceylonese. This small detail made the moment bearable.

Within seconds of meeting the young lawyer, Hortensia knew she didn’t much like him.

‘Come this way,’ Hortensia said to him, noticing by the fluster in his eyes that he’d have preferred niceties before business.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he followed into her study.

‘Come, sit down. Sit over there.’

While he took a seat and arranged his briefcase, Hortensia pressed the intercom. ‘Bassey. Tea, Mr Marx?’

‘I’d prefer coffee, Mrs James, if it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Black?’

‘Thank you.’

She finished her instructions to Bassey and sat on her throne. She wouldn’t call it that for anyone else to hear, but it’s what she always thought when she lowered her posterior onto the leather. Hortensia smiled and Marx, carelessly, thought she wanted to be friends.

‘I am sorry for your loss, Mrs James.’

She tightened her lips, fixed her spectacles to her face and gave her let’s-get-to-business look.

‘Your husband,’ he said, ‘was … well, I wanted to … What I’m trying to—’

Hortensia raised a hand. Bassey knocked.

‘Come.’

He was a large man with breasts of his own.