A pause for study and reflection while Louisa Pendel in her red three-buttoned housecoat and nothing underneath patrols her husband’s bookshelves, pushing out her breasts and buttocks. She is feeling extremely naked. Better than naked. Hot-naked. She would like another baby. She would like to have all of Hannah’s Seven Sisters as long as none of them turns out to be an Emily. Her father’s books on the Canal march past her, starting with the days when the Scots tried to form a colony in the Darién and lost half their country’s wealth. She opens them one by one, shakes them so vigorously that the bindings creak, flings them carelessly aside. No love letters.
Books about Captain Morgan and his pirates who sacked Panama City and burned it to the ground except for the ruins where we take the kids picnicking. But no love letters from Sabina or anybody else. None from Alpha, Beta, Marcos or the Bear. Nor from some cute-arsed little rad stud with funny money from the States. Books about the time when Panama belonged to Colombia. But no love letters, however hard she flings them at the wall.
Louisa Pendel, mother-to-be of Hannah’s Seven Sisters, squats naked inside the housecoat he never fucked me in, calves to thighs and all the way back again, browsing through the construction of the Canal and wishing she hadn’t screamed at that poor woman whose love letters she can’t find and probably wasn’t Sabina anyway and wasn’t calling from the rice farm. Accounts of real men like George Goethals and William Crawford Gorgas, men who were solid and methodical as well as mad, men who were loyal to their wives instead of writing letters about seeing fit or blackening the reputation of her employer or hiding wads of banknotes in their locked desks, and wads of letters I can’t find. Books that her father made her read, in the hope that she would one day build her own fucking canal.
‘Harry?’ Screaming at the top of her voice to scare him. ‘Harry? Where did you put that sad bitch’s letters? Harry, I wish to know.’
Books on the Canal Treaties. Books on drugs and ‘Whither Latin America?’ Whither my fucking husband is more like it. And whither poor Ernesto, if Harry has anything to do with it. Louisa sits down and addresses Harry quietly and reasonably in a tone calculated not to dominate him. Shouting doesn’t do it any more. She is speaking to him as one mature human being to another from a teak-framed armchair her father used when he was trying to get her to sit on his knee.
‘Harry, I do not understand what you are doing in your den night after night irrespective of what time you come home from whatever you have been doing before. If you are writing a novel about corruption or an autobiography or a history of tailoring, I think you should come out with it and tell me, since after all we are married.’
Harry druckens himself, which is how he describes it when he’s joking about a tailor’s false humility.
‘It’s the accounts, you see, Lou. You don’t get the fluence, not during the daytime, not with the doorbell going all the time.’
‘The farm accounts?’
She is being a bitch again. The rice farm has become a non-subject in the household and she is supposed to respect this: Ramón is restructuring the finances, Lou. Angel has got a bit of a question mark over him, Lou.
‘The shop,’ Harry mumbles, like a penitent.
‘Harry, I am not ungifted. I took excellent grades in math. I can help you any time you wish.’
He is already shaking his head. ‘They’re not that sort of numbers, you see, Lou. It’s more the creative side. Numbers out of the air.’
‘Is this why you have notes scribbled all over the margins of McCullough’s Path Between the Seas, so that no one will ever be able to read it except you?’
Harry brightens – artificially. ‘Oh well, yes, you’re right there, Lou, clever of you to notice it. I’m seriously thinking of having some of the old prints blown up, you see, giving more of a Canal tone to the Clubroom, maybe get hold of a few artefacts for the atmosphere.’