Read Online The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    ‘Why do you lie?’ Hortensia asked.
    ‘About?’ Kehinde didn’t look up from cutting; she’d marked out the borders of the garment in white chalk.
    ‘Where you’re from. Are you ashamed?’ It had been boiling in Hortensia for a while now. They were both teased endlessly, Hortensia for being Barbadian, for singing when she spoke, for