The Woman Next Door (22 page)

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.

The doctor took various tests and the cabinet in the bathroom filled up with the tablets they prescribed. But Peter’s complaints (body ache, fuzzy head) persisted. Four years later the Jameses moved to Cape Town. The location changed very little; Peter continued to suffer from a series of complaints that doctors misunderstood, misdiagnosed or suggested he ignore. In South Africa Peter spoke less and less. It was not the kind of thing that was easy to notice. In 1995 Peter spoke about a tenth or so less than he had in 1994. No one knew, but this pattern was doomed to continue, until 2014 when he died a veritable mute.

Before that, though, Hortensia endured the descent. Everything was sore but he still limped off to golf on Sundays. He threatened to go on a hunting trip and she called the club and told them he was senile, that they shouldn’t let him near a rifle. In bed she read out passages to him. Sometimes he listened agreeably, but mostly he blocked his ears with his hands or he pointed out to her that her voice was unbeautiful. But he buttered her toast. He knew just how brown she liked it and tutted Bassey if he ever attempted this job. You’re no good at this, ol’ boy, he said. Or ‘my man’. Those were the names he used for Bassey. His shoes were never side by side, instead often rooms apart. Hortensia could not work out how this feat was achieved so consistently. Neither could the housekeeper. The snoring was unbearable. He ate meat when his doctor had said no. He refused a hearing aid, goaded her about hers, even though he needed one much more than she did. He sat practically deaf and turned the volume of the television up so high that the neighbours complained. He was sick. They’d grown old together, but all that seemed to mean was that they’d borne each other and not died yet. He had nightmares sometimes; he once woke her up and said his mother was on the phone. Your mother is dead, she said. She’s not on the phone, Peter, she’s dead.

He still liked to cut her fruit, bring a plate of quartered oranges out to the garden while she inspected the rose bushes, trail behind her.

‘You look ravishing, my tulip. I love your hair like that,’ he would say. Except her hair was the same as it had always been and so the compliment meant nothing. Plus she hated tulips.

He joined her in the television room. Picked up the remote. He chopped between channels with no regard for the programme she’d been watching.

‘Peter, really?’

The doctors had said just ignore him.

‘What is it you’re looking for, my love?’

He continued.

‘I said, what the hell is the channel you are looking for?’

‘Where’s the sex channel?’ But under his breath, like she wasn’t in the room and he was talking to himself.

‘The what? Peter, we don’t have a sex channel.’

He flung the remote control out the open window. It fell in a puddle, she had to buy a new one.

‘Stupid box.’ He walked out.

But he also came home with flowers. Bougainvillea. I know you love these, he said. And he brought his nose to her neck and said, are you wearing perfume? His breath was old man’s breath, sweet, rancid – he only brushed his teeth if she stood and watched and this was not always possible. There were nights, rare but beautiful, when he asked her if he could hold her in bed. I can feel your bones through your nightie, he said.

He got sicker. The time to bring up the past – the lover who had appeared as mysteriously as she had disappeared – the time to reconcile passed them by. Hortensia still did not know for sure what had made Peter lose his love for her, misplace it. It hurt her that, despite her anger, she’d loved him until he was a ravaged and lifeless body.

‘Do you need some water?’ Hortensia sat by the bed, the nurses having left for the day and she finding herself, strangely, walking up the stairs and into what used to be their room and was now his; she’d moved into the room next door.

The floor lamp by the door cast a shadow that hid most of the waste his muscles had become. There was a way his tongue hung out that Hortensia decided meant thirst. She moved to pour him a cup of water. His eyes followed her. She hadn’t come into the room, hadn’t said a word to him in weeks, over a month.

‘Here.’

She helped him lift up, just a bit, so the water didn’t spill down the front of his white flannel pyjamas. She held the cup for him, placed her other hand at the bottom of his back. His throat worked to get the water down, much went out the sides of his mouth. Hortensia settled him back, wiped him. The act of caring was like bicycle-riding – once learned, never forgotten.

‘Pardon?’

She thought he’d whispered something. Hortensia put the cup down and moved her ear closer to his chapped lips. It would be a bit of a miracle; he’d stopped speaking months before.

‘I can’t hear.’

She moved so close the cracked skin on his bottom lip scratched her ear, a sensation, a tingling and an excitement that seemed misplaced.

‘Peter?’ Still unable to hear, she took his hand. Then Hortensia lifted the skirt of her nightgown and eased herself onto the bed she hadn’t shared with him in almost a year.

He’d always been so massive.

‘My love,’ she said again, allowing a rare tenderness.

Hortensia let her arm fall over his body, she listened to the unrelenting labour of his breathing.

Peter kept trying to say something, but always just a dry scratch of sound came. And then he slept for several days, waking up to drink, or sometimes when the nurse was clumsy with the drip he would startle. But mostly he slept. As if, after all his days of illness and her unrelenting disinterest, as if making up for what was definitely lost, Hortensia stayed with him throughout this time, only going away to eat one meal a day. She ate because the doctor said she had to; she had no appetite. Or she would leave for the bathroom, stare at her face in the mirror, brush her hand over the tight-cropped coils on her head, wonder who she was. Who she’d become.

Once, coming back into the room, Hortensia overheard the nurses.

‘Poor bastard.’

‘What a way to die, hey? Someone should show mercy – you know, pull the plug.’

‘You!’ Hortensia shouted. She rushed in and walked up to the nurse’s face, stuck her nose into her, wanted to pump her with fists. ‘Don’t you dare.’

‘Mrs James, I was just—’

‘Don’t. You. Dare.’

On her frightful and violent insistence, the nurses left and Hortensia telephoned the medical care. Asked that the nurses not come back.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ the man on the other end of the phone wanted to know.

‘They have no respect. None. And no kindness for a man so close to death. I won’t have them here again. And no replacements. I would die before you humiliate us again.’

The confused man apologised, still unclear of the grievance, unsure what to write down on his complaint form.

The phone rang and Hortensia let it go to voice-message. It was the doctor calling, explaining about the drip; it was due in just under twelve hours and could Hortensia please at least let a nurse in to administer.

Hortensia climbed into the bed with Peter, holding him the way she’d grown accustomed to over the last few days. He tried to talk; she wiped the sweat on his forehead that his feeble exertions produced.

Later that night Hortensia called the doctor back to tell her they would not need a nurse to come through. That in fact no nurse would ever again come into her house as long as she lived. But certainly none was required for Peter James – he was dead and in no further need of drips.

WITH THE COMMITTEE
meeting coming up, Ludmilla called Marion again.

‘So the State has made an offer. Money. Let’s see. If the Samsodiens decline, it could still go to court. Stubborn, these people are.’

‘Ah.’ Instinctively, Marion got up to shut her bedroom door. She had a picture of Hortensia listening in. She dropped her voice, ‘I read an article.’ A piece had been published in the
Argus
, addressing the much talked-about reopening of the claims. A few cases were profiled. The Samsodiens had been evicted in the Sixties and forced to sell their land for a paltry few thousand rand. Marion recalled Ludmilla referring to it as a bargain. The article suggested the land was now worth over 100 million. Bargain would have to have been an understatement. ‘Seems a little … unfair, perhaps.’

Ludmilla scoffed while Marion realised she’d just referred to apartheid conditions as ‘a little unfair’.

‘The sale was clean. It was a good deal. Sometimes this happens.’

Marion didn’t have the words ready. She wanted to suggest that the conditions were governed by a law that was … unjust.

‘Marion, you still there?’

Marion had avoided history. Or she’d invented her own. After all, what was history but a record of what gets noticed? Noticing, it seemed to Marion, was what life was really about. Noticing and not noticing, remembering and forgetting.

Marion had studied architecture in an attempt to forget.

It was 1951, Marion’s final year at St Winifred’s High. She informed her parents that she would be studying architecture. It was a problem. Marion’s mother would have preferred a daughter less inclined to study and more ready to marry. But prospects were dim and so, as Marion had grown into a young woman, her mother had engaged in a different fantasy. Having never studied herself, she began to hope that Marion, with her quick mind at maths and science, would take medicine, the profession to end all professions. However, Marion’s father, with no sons to work with, had enjoyed his daughter’s grasp of how things were put together. They had spent weekends hammering in his workshop and tinkering with the engine of the white bakkie that he carted his trade items in. A civil engineer – he had ventured in his innermost quiet dreams – and had even gone the distance of imagining a bridge in his own name.

What neither parent factored in was the will of Marion herself. She bore down on their arguments, their threats, their attempts to slather on guilt, her mother’s tears, her father’s sulks, their reasoning. In between their sessions of persuasion with their daughter, there was the noise of them fighting one another. Each blamed the other. It broke something in both people, brought something ugly back, served as an opening for them to raise their voices after years of speaking only softly. By the time Marion stepped onto the University of Cape Town upper campus, dressed in moss-green loafers, a red pleated skirt and a white short-sleeved shirt with a collar; by that time her parents were busy with the business of dividing their assets, signing papers.

After finishing her studies and after her company came into being, each year Marion grew in stature for the homes she designed. The question she was most often asked was: what made you want to become an architect? There were many answers, like a series of diminishing dolls, each more intricate than the other, more hidden and more true. There was the big and loud answer. It was the I-love-great-design answer. And she did. A well-executed design with all the parts that fit together, nothing sticking out.

There was the slightly softer-toned answer that was not for journalists. It was an answer for a dinner party. An answer for the corner of a room, with a worthy acquaintance. This answer was about wanting to make things, real things that could stand up. The feeling that, at the end of the day, the result of her labours had to be material and lasting. And to this Marion could tack on the story of her parents and how they had argued about her choice of vocation.

The first year of architecture school had been a daze. There was a rash of classes, a set of tests and then the end-of-year exams. Marion’s headache of growing up, of the things no one spoke of, but that were there anyway; how to be blind but still see your way to walk; all the fuzziness was slowly replaced by the exactness of geometry, the rules of perspectives, two-point and three-point. Marion discovered that she liked her pencils sharp, she wanted to go to Finland and notice the architecture over there, she wanted to sit at Aalto’s feet.

This was why she’d studied architecture, this was the teeny-tiny doll answer whose face was barely there, whose body was often without lacquer, without frills. It was so intricate an answer that it was difficult to explain even to herself. That the reason she studied architecture was only made clear to her after she began studying it, as if her subconscious had known something her waking mind had not. That architecture was about a construction, a made-up thing made real. That she, Marion, needed this skill. And that even though the vertigo would never go away completely, architecture would be the only thing Marion had to steady herself.

‘What’s that noise?’

‘What?’ Marion cocked her head to listen. ‘Ambulance,’ she said.

Hortensia continued along the hallway, planting the walker in front of each footstep. Her timing had been off today and Marion had caught her doing her routine. Hortensia hated an audience. Each time the walker hit the wood, the clank moved up her arms like a ripple of static.

‘Ice-cream truck,’ Hortensia said.

‘No. Ambulance. Anyway it doesn’t matter. How are you feeling? Can I get you something?’

Hortensia cut her a look and ambled past. After a few seconds Marion moved up further along the hallway, overtaking Hortensia, and settled against the wall nearer the front door. Hortensia hobbled closer.