The Woman Next Door (7 page)

‘Set it there. Thank you, Bassey. Never mind, we’ll pour ourselves.’

She began again after the click of the door.

‘I don’t want us to waste time. Apart from being old, I have some meetings to attend. I think you realise that my husband did not inform me of his change to his will. I think you understand what things must have been like between husband and wife for such an action not to be shared.’ She pushed her reading glasses down her nose, so she could look at the boy through her mud-brown eyes. She knew people found her eyes quite frightening. He didn’t disappoint her. ‘Now, what do we need to do? You have the paperwork in that briefcase of yours?’

She sat back, happy with the effect of her speech. She waited as Marx spread the papers on the desk.

‘Can I pour?’ Hortensia asked.

‘Thank you.’

‘Let’s get on with it.’

‘I know you weren’t expecting me.’ He was recovering.

‘When did he make the change?’

‘Three or four months back. I can trace the exact date if it matters.’

Hortensia shook her head. Peter had had one last surge of good health, lucidity, before falling into his final hole. He must have done it then.

‘I don’t need his money by the way. The house is in my name. This isn’t about that.’

‘Yes, Mrs James. I am aware that you are worth a large sum of money.’

‘I don’t like to put it that way.’

‘Mr James spoke a lot about you.’

Despite herself, Hortensia was interested. What might Peter have said? She had no notion. But she didn’t ask for Marx to expand and he didn’t seem to think there was any more to say on the matter. He placed a file on the table.

‘Well, as you now know, he made me the executor of his will.’

‘Did he take me off as a beneficiary?’

‘Oh no, you’re still a beneficiary.’ He was fidgeting; raised his cup but put it back down.

‘Is something wrong? With your coffee?’

‘It’s hot.’

‘I see.’

He cleared his throat. ‘I really don’t—’

‘Mr Marx, please proceed. I don’t have all day.’

‘You are still a beneficiary. Just not the primary one.’

Marx kept his head down. He managed a sip of his coffee, it brought colour back to his face.

‘So who’s the primary one, then? Did he go and leave his money to the hunting club? Idiot, I told him not to be foolish.’

‘Well, actually, Mrs James, there’s another beneficiary – a person.’

Hortensia waited.

‘I’m really sorry for the difficulty of the situation.’

‘Mr Marx, I don’t know you that well and you obviously don’t know me. This, I assure you, is not difficult.’

‘Yes, Mrs James. The other beneficiary, you see, is daughter to Mr James, so he informed me, and she goes by the name of Esme.’

He made himself busy, rifled unnecessarily through the papers in front of him.

Hortensia sat back in her chair. She needed a few moments; she held her face. Always hold your face – she usually knew how to. But this time something rippled, she felt the twitch in her right cheek, put her hand there to steady it. There was confusion first, then anger. Betrayal a close third.

‘I see.’ She smiled at Marx. ‘I understand. Well, okay,’ she said, more to herself than to the lawyer. ‘Well, we didn’t really have to meet for this. You could have sent me an email.’

Marx seemed unsure whether to return the smile. He chose not to, went on to explain the details. Hortensia had to get in touch with Esme, in fact meet with her. The will ‘expressly’ stated that no one was to notify Esme of her inheritance except Hortensia. Peter’s trickery.

‘Where’s the girl?’

‘She’s an adult, Mrs James. Forty-nine years old, by Mr James’s calculations. She lives in England. The minute you contact her, arrangements have been made for a ticket, accommodation, and so on.’

Like a play-date, Hortensia thought.

The rest of the meeting was dotted lines to sign upon and corners of pages to initial. Perhaps because of the intimacy of leaning over paperwork, or the sense of familiarity brought by the sharing of bad or, as he put it, difficult news, Mr Marx, at one point, loosened up enough to comment, ‘She’ll be one rich woman, that’s for sure.’

Hortensia thought this was crude of him. She’d so far been nice to him, which is to say she hadn’t been unpleasant. She wished she could take back her courtesies; in fact if she had had a weapon, she would have struck him. Except that the person, in that moment, she really wanted to hurt – to kill – was Peter and it pained her greatly that he was already dead.

Peter hadn’t been religious, but he’d had religious affectations Hortensia had never been able to fully decipher. He’d whistle ‘Morning Has Broken’ and then sing it, but get the words wrong, the song disappearing down his throat. He played golf on Sundays but wanted carols at Christmas. And now he dies and asks for a church.

Hortensia stood at the entrance of the church. A Land Rover crunched over the gravel and parked, irreverently Hortensia thought, beside the empty hearse.

The priest touched her on the shoulder. ‘Let me go and prepare,’ she said and Hortensia listened to her shuffle up the aisle. The priest, despite having a youthful cherubic face, had a laboured gait and Hortensia found it painful to watch her; she somehow felt guilty, as if it were her fault.

A stooped man and plump woman got out of the parked car and walked towards the entrance. The woman had the kind of fat on her body that had become familiar and would never leave. She looked comfortable. Hortensia studied them from behind her dark glasses and extended a hand when they came within reach.

‘Our deepest condolences.’

She nodded because there was nothing to say. Hortensia had never met them before. They stood there for a few awkward seconds and then walked on past her into the empty nave. She imagined they would find somewhere to sit.

Five more people arrived. A woman who said Peter had been her biggest client, a hedge-fund-looking woman, but Hortensia was too pissed off to ask.

‘I love Simon’s Town,’ the spike-heeled woman said, looking back towards the avenue of trees along the road that led to the church.

In place of condolences the woman spoke of her beautiful drive from Hout Bay, and Hortensia felt her mood swing, felt herself become a widow who required pity for the loss of her beloved and resented this woman who offered none.

There came an elderly couple who claimed Peter was the best golfer in their club. The man had also hunted with Peter, when Peter was still hunting, and he told anecdotes of little bokkies being dondered, which made the priest, who had returned to Hortensia’s side, give him a pleading look.

A man arrived late, after everyone including Hortensia had already sat down. At the end of the short saccharine service, while everyone else rose, he stayed sitting on the hard wood pew at the back for a few extra moments. Hortensia had been sitting too and when, at the end, she stood and walked past him, something in the way the man was holding his face with his eyes closed made her realise that he was praying.

She walked to the back of the church, where a stretch of snacks looked about to go to waste, and startled to find her neighbour’s face staring at her.

‘Marion, what are you doing here?’

‘I’m sorry about Peter. I wanted to pay my respects.’

She wanted to gloat. Hortensia was calculating how to walk past this nasty woman, perhaps walk to the tea table and bite into a banana muffin. She squeezed her shoulders in, as Marion took a step closer to her.

‘I really am sorry.’

Hortensia, from the corner of her eye, noticed the praying-man rise and walk out of the church. She felt bolstered; he’d prayed a prayer, perhaps she could float on the wings of whatever blessings he’d bargained for.

‘Marion—’

‘I know, I know. We’re not friends.’ Marion looked around as if expecting a chorus of agreement, but no one was paying them any attention. The cherub was inspecting a long koeksister and the husband-and-wife golfers appeared to be arguing. ‘I just thought to come. I just … I just thought to come.’ She raised her hands, then collapsed them to her sides, an exaggerated shrug.

‘Please, Marion. Let me get past.’

Marion, her face glum, shifted aside and Hortensia went in search of a muffin.

After the church, all the mourners (except Marion, Hortensia noted with relief) went to Peter’s patch of ground where the tombstone stood waiting. The ashes, collected in a simple wooden box, were placed into a hole. And, even though she could feel the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, when a wiry man began shovelling the sand, there was also a part of Hortensia that wanted to tell him to stand back so she could spit.

AT A CERTAIN
point, after it had started, Hortensia knew. She didn’t agonise over whether she was wrong, whether she was misjudging her husband, shouldn’t she give him the benefit of the doubt, or anything like that. She simply knew, from a smell, from a frown or a smile that hung out of place.

By that time they’d been in Nigeria for five years. Hortensia had become well studied in Peter’s movements around the house on his return from work. She had practically memorised the number of steps it took him to get from the front door to the guest bathroom. The seconds it took to relieve himself. The running tap. And then to his study; the faint smell of a cigarette. Only after that would he seek her out in the living room.

‘Have a good day?’ he’d ask, pecking her on the cheek.

How long had he been coming home that way? When had she become the sort of wife you needed to have a pee and smoke before you could face her?

The lies followed, the way one thing necessitates another. Important office meetings that ran on till night-time, weekend-long conferences. Hortensia sometimes despaired that her husband was not more creative.

Sometimes he came home and she had already turned off the bedroom lights, lain down, awake. She counted his steps, tracked how he wound through the house. On the nights when he figured she was asleep, his movements were different; he wasn’t pressed to use the toilet, didn’t really need to calm his nerves with a cigarette. Instead it was a quick visit to the lounge, a few moments of silence as he reached the carpet. He often, she surmised, stood by the silver tray placed on the teak sideboard, where the housekeeper left the mail. If she strained, if she raised her head off the pillow, Hortensia would hear the tear of paper as he ran the letter-opener through. If it wasn’t a letter from his mother, it was otherwise just some rubbish mail from England. Hortensia wondered what her mother-in-law wrote in that slanted cursive with its flourish, indicative of anyone literate born in the early twentieth century. Did she ever tell her son that she missed him? Did she ask after Hortensia, maybe suggest – but never outright – the magic of new life, the glisten it can give a marriage? Would she know, would she guess that things were bad, that her son was bored, or maybe even in love with someone else?

After a few more minutes Hortensia would sense her husband’s presence before he actually entered their room. Then the weight of him on the bed. No part of their bodies touched. Once she was certain that Peter was asleep, Hortensia would get up to clean the bathtub.

The bathtub had proved useful. When they’d first moved in she’d thrown doubt at the cast-iron tub, quaint but perpetually stained. The first night after she’d guessed a third person was now present in her marriage, Hortensia had been unable to lie still, next to Peter in their bed. Her heart pounded as if she was running a marathon. But instead of scrolling through in her mind who it could possibly be, her thoughts alighted on the stains – cumulus and menacing – unchanged all these years after much effort from the housekeeper. Hortensia got up, certain the woman simply hadn’t tried hard enough. On her knees in the bathroom she found the action of scrubbing tight and mechanical, she liked the music of her breathing and the scrape of bristles against weathered enamel. Despite no real change in the appearance of the blemishes, Hortensia convinced herself that her scrubbing was working, that the stains were slowly disappearing. It became her project. If he heard her, Peter didn’t mention it. The exercise was precisely what she needed to be able to hit the pillow and die into sleep; lying awake beside him had become intolerable.

Some nights if, after the tub, Hortensia was not tired enough, she swabbed at the sink, polished the mirror, mopped the tiles. Their bathroom became the cleanest in the house. And if the physical exhaustion of housework still wasn’t good enough, Hortensia would attempt to expend her mind. She’d go into her study and sit at her desk. Some of her most successful designs happened after 1 a.m., as if the condition for good design was darkness, fatigue and morose solitude. If that were so, though, it would have been a new insight for Hortensia. A student at Bailer’s Design College, she had always needed to work in daylight – sunlight in fact. A thing she’d realised, on arriving in Brighton fresh from Bridgetown, young and determined, would be in short supply, despite the misleading name of her new town.

The name would explain itself over time, but the weather would remain unimpressive.

The only other non-British student in Hortensia’s class was a girl named Kehinde. She was younger than average, sixteen, but full of talent and chutzpah. It was known by the students that Kehinde was from Nigeria but, for the four years of study, she denied it, referred to herself as a Startian, from an unknown unnameable planet. She answered only to the name K, rather than the mispronounced (deliberate or not) versions of her name that her classmates called her. Although Hortensia had not been friends with K, they’d had one honest conversation. Hortensia found herself alone with K one evening in the workshop. A young fashion designer was teaching at Bailer’s for a term. He had caused some excitement in Florence, at one of the infamous Giorgini soirées, with what he called ‘capes and clutches’. At Bailer’s he encouraged the students to see textile design and fashion as one-and-the-same thing. He instructed them in pattern-making. Hortensia enjoyed the sewing machine, she liked the force of the pedal (the power of that) and steadying the needle, with her right hand on the balance wheel. She paused in her concentration.