Gratuitously instructing Luxmore to remain where he was, Osnard sidled across the dining room to the hall, closing doors along his way, and squinted through the fish-eye of his front door. The lens was coated with condensation. With a handkerchief from his pocket he wiped it clear on his own side, and made out one misty eye, its sex ambivalent, squinting back at him while the blast of the doorbell continued like a fire alarm. Then the eye pulled away and he recognised instead Louisa Pendel, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and precious little else, standing on one leg while she took her shoe off as a prelude to beating down the door with it.
Louisa did not remember which particular straw had broken her camel’s back. Neither did she care. She had returned from squash to an empty house. The children were visiting with the Rudds and staying over. She rated Ramón one of the Great Unspeakables of Panama and detested letting them anywhere near him. It wasn’t that Ramón hated women, it was the way he hinted that he knew more about Harry than she did, and all of it bad. And the way that, just like Harry, he clammed up when she talked about the rice farm, although it was her money that had bought it.
But none of this accounted for how she felt when she came home from squash, or why she found herself weeping without a reason, when so often in the last ten years she had had a reason but refused to weep. So she supposed that what had happened to her was some kind of accumulation of despair, assisted by a large vodka on the rocks before her shower because she felt like it. Having showered, she examined herself naked, all six feet of her in the bedroom mirror.
Objectively. Forgetting my height for a moment. Forgetting my beautiful sister Emily with her golden tresses and Playboy centrefold ass and tits to kill for and list of conquests longer than the Panama City telephone directory. Would I or would I not, if I was a man, wish to sleep with this woman? She reckoned she might, but on what evidence? She only had Harry to go by.
She phrased her question differently. If I was Harry, would I still want to sleep with me after a dozen years of marriage? And the answer to that was: on recent evidence, not. Too tired. Too late. Too placatory. Too guilty about something. All right, he was always guilty. Guilt was his best thing. But these days he wore it like a placard: I am forfeit, I am untouchable, I am guilty, I don’t deserve you, goodnight.
Brushing away her tears with one hand and clutching her glass in the other, she continued to parade back and forth across the bedroom, studying herself, pushing herself out and in, and thinking how for Emily everything came too easily, whether she was playing tennis or riding a horse or swimming or washing up, she couldn’t make an ugly movement if she tried. Even as a woman, you practically had an orgasm watching her. Louisa tried writhing obscenely, the worst whore ever. A frost. Too knobbly. No flow. No hip movement. Too old. Always have been. Too tall. Fed up, she marched back to the kitchen and, still naked, determinedly poured herself another vodka, no ice this time.
And it was a real drink, not ‘maybe I could do with a drink,’ because she had to open a new bottle and find a knife to cut round the seal before she could pour, which is not the sort of thing you do when, just casually, almost by accident, you pour yourself a little something to keep your spirits up while your husband’s out screwing his mistress.
‘Fuck him,’ she said aloud.
The bottle came from Harry’s new hospitality store. Chargeable, he said.
‘Chargeable, who to?’ she had demanded.
‘Tax,’ he said.
‘Harry, I do not wish my house to be used as a tax-free bar.’
Guilty smirk. Sorry, Lou. Way of the world. Didn’t mean to upset you. Won’t do it again. Creep, cringe.
‘Fuck him,’ she repeated, and felt the better for it.