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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.

FIVE
    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