CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Half of a Yellow Sun

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2006

Copyright © Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2006

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Source ISBN: 9780007200283

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Contents

Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Part One: The Early Sixties Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Part Two: The Late Sixties Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Part Three: The Early Sixties Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Part Four: The Late Sixties Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Keep Reading Author's Note P.S. Ideas, interviews & features… About the Author Reviews About the Publisher

Dedication

My grandfathers, whom I never knew,

Nwoye David Adichie and Aro-Nweke Felix Odigwe,

did not survive the war.

My grandmothers, Nwabuodu Regina Odigwe and Nwamgbafor Agnes Adichie, remarkable women both, did.

This book is dedicated to their memories: ka fa nodu na ndokwa.

And to Mellitus, wherever he may be.

Epigraph

Today I see it still –

Dry, wire-thin in sun and dust of the dry months –

Headstone on tiny debris of passionate courage.

– Chinua Achebe,

From ‘Mango Seedling’ in Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems

PART ONE

The Early Sixties

1

Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair. Ugwu’s aunty said this in a low voice as they walked on the path. ‘But he is a good man,’ she added. ‘And as long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day.’ She stopped to spit; the saliva left her mouth with a sucking sound and landed on the grass.

Ugwu did not believe that anybody, not even this master he was going to live with, ate meat every day. He did not disagree with his aunty, though, because he was too choked with expectation, too busy imagining his new life away from the village. They had been walking for a while now, since they got off the lorry at the motor park, and the afternoon sun burned the back of his neck. But he did not mind. He was prepared to walk hours more in even hotter sun. He had never seen anything like the streets that appeared after they went past the university gates, streets so smooth and tarred that he itched to lay his cheek down on them. He would never be able to describe to his sister Anulika how the bungalows here were painted the colour of the sky and sat side by side like polite, well-dressed men, how the hedges separating them were trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped with leaves.

His aunty walked faster, her slippers making slap-slap sounds that echoed in the silent street. Ugwu wondered if she, too, could feel the coal tar getting hotter underneath, through her thin soles. They went past a sign, ODIM STREET, and Ugwu mouthed street, as he did whenever he saw an English word that was not too long. He smelt something sweet, heady, as they walked into a compound, and was sure it came from the white flowers clustered on the bushes at the entrance. The bushes were shaped like slender hills. The lawn glistened. Butterflies hovered above.

‘I told Master you will learn everything fast, osiso-osiso,’ his aunty said. Ugwu nodded attentively although she had already told him this many times, as often as she told him the story of how his good fortune came about: While she was sweeping the corridor in the Mathematics Department a week ago, she heard Master say that he needed a houseboy to do his cleaning, and she immediately said she could help, speaking before his typist or office messenger could offer to bring someone.

‘I will learn fast, Aunty,’ Ugwu said. He was staring at the car in the garage; a strip of metal ran around its blue body like a necklace.

‘Remember, what you will answer whenever he calls you is Yes, sah!’

‘Yes, sah!’ Ugwu repeated.

They were standing before the glass door. Ugwu held back from reaching out to touch the cement wall, to see how different it would feel from the mud walls of his mother’s hut that still bore the faint patterns of moulding fingers. For a brief moment, he wished he were back there now, in his mother’s hut, under the dim coolness of the thatch roof; or in his aunty’s hut, the only one in the village with a corrugated-iron roof.

His aunty tapped on the glass. Ugwu could see the white curtains behind the door. A voice said, in English, ‘Yes? Come in.’

They took off their slippers before walking in. Ugwu had never seen a room so wide. Despite the brown sofas arranged in a semicircle, the side tables between them, the shelves crammed with books, and the centre table with a vase of red and white plastic flowers, the room still seemed to have too much space. Master sat in an armchair, wearing a singlet and a pair of shorts. He was not sitting upright but slanted, a book covering his face, as though oblivious that he had just asked people in.

‘Good afternoon, sah! This is the child,’ Ugwu’s aunty said.

Master looked up. His complexion was very dark, like old bark, and the hair that covered his chest and legs was a lustrous, darker shade. He pulled off his glasses. ‘The child?’

‘The houseboy, sah.’

‘Oh, yes, you have brought the houseboy. I kpotago ya.’ Master’s Igbo felt feathery in Ugwu’s ears. It was Igbo coloured by the sliding sounds of English, the Igbo of one who spoke English often.

‘He will work hard,’ his aunty said. ‘He is a very good boy. Just tell him what he should do. Thank, sah!’

Master grunted in response, watching Ugwu and his aunty with a faintly distracted expression, as if their presence made it difficult for him to remember something important. Ugwu’s aunty patted Ugwu’s shoulder, whispered that he should do well, and turned to the door. After she left, Master put his glasses back on and faced his book, relaxing further into a slanting position, legs stretched out. Even when he turned the pages he did so with his eyes on the book.

Ugwu stood by the door, waiting. Sunlight streamed in through the windows, and from time to time, a gentle breeze lifted the curtains. The room was silent except for the rustle of Master’s page turning. Ugwu stood for a while before he began to edge closer and closer to the bookshelf, as though to hide in it, and then, after a while, he sank down to the floor, cradling his raffia bag between his knees. He looked up at the ceiling, so high up, so piercingly white. He closed his eyes and tried to reimagine this spacious room with the alien furniture, but he couldn’t. He opened his eyes, overcome by a new wonder, and looked around to make sure it was all real. To think that he would sit on these sofas, polish this slippery-smooth floor, wash these gauzy curtains.

‘Kedu afa gi? What’s your name?’ Master asked, startling him.

Ugwu stood up.

‘What’s your name?’ Master asked again and sat up straight. He filled the armchair, his thick hair that stood high on his head, his muscled arms, his broad shoulders; Ugwu had imagined an older man, somebody frail, and now he felt a sudden fear that he might not please this master who looked so youthfully capable, who looked as if he needed nothing.

‘Ugwu, sah.’

‘Ugwu. And you’ve come from Obukpa?’

‘From Opi, sah.’

‘You could be anything from twelve to thirty.’ Master narrowed his eyes. ‘Probably thirteen.’ He said thirteen in English.

‘Yes, sah.’

Master turned back to his book. Ugwu stood there. Master flipped past some pages and looked up. ‘Ngwa, go to the kitchen; there should be something you can eat in the fridge.’

‘Yes, sah.’

Ugwu entered the kitchen cautiously, placing one foot slowly after the other. When he saw the white thing, almost as tall as he was, he knew it was the fridge. His aunty had told him about it. A cold barn, she had said, that kept food from going off. He opened it and gasped as the cool air rushed into his face. Oranges, bread, beer, soft drinks: many things in packets and cans were arranged on different levels and, at the top, a roasted, shimmering chicken, whole but for a leg. Ugwu reached out and touched the chicken. The fridge breathed heavily in his ears. He touched the chicken again and licked his finger before he yanked the other leg off, eating it until he had only the cracked, sucked pieces of bones left in his hand. Next, he broke off some bread, a chunk that he would have been excited to share with his siblings if a relative had visited and brought it as a gift. He ate quickly, before Master could come in and change his mind. He had finished eating and was standing by the sink, trying to remember what his aunty had told him about opening it to have water gush out like a spring, when Master walked in. He had put on a print shirt and a pair of trousers. His toes, which peeked through leather slippers, seemed feminine, perhaps because they were so clean; they belonged to feet that always wore shoes.

‘What is it?’ Master asked.

‘Sah?’ Ugwu gestured to the sink.

Master came over and turned the metal tap. ‘You should look around the house and put your bag in the first room on the corridor. I’m going for a walk, to clear my head, i nugo?’

‘Yes, sah.’ Ugwu watched him leave through the back door. He was not tall. His walk was brisk, energetic, and he looked like Ezeagu, the man who held the wrestling record in Ugwu’s village.

Ugwu turned off the tap, turned it on again, then off. On and off and on and off until he was laughing at the magic of the running water and the chicken and bread that lay balmy in his stomach. He went past the living room and into the corridor. There were books piled on the shelves and tables in the three bedrooms, on the sink and cabinets in the bathroom, stacked from floor to ceiling in the study, and in the storeroom, old journals were stacked next to crates of Coke and cartons of Premier beer. Some of the books were placed face down, open, as though Master had not yet finished reading them but had hastily gone on to another. Ugwu tried to read the titles, but most were too long, too difficult. Non-Parametric Methods. An African Survey. The Great Chain of Being. The Norman Impact Upon England. He walked on tiptoe from room to room, because his feet felt dirty, and as he did so he grew increasingly determined to please Master, to stay in this house of meat and cool floors. He was examining the toilet, running his hand over the black plastic seat, when he heard Master’s voice.

‘Where are you, my good man?’ He said my good man in English.

Ugwu dashed out to the living room. ‘Yes, sah!’

‘What’s your name again?’

‘Ugwu, sah.’

‘Yes, Ugwu. Look here, nee anya, do you know what that is?’ Master pointed, and Ugwu looked at the metal box studded with dangerous-looking knobs.

‘No, sah,’ Ugwu said.

‘It’s a radiogram. It’s new and very good. It’s not like those old gramophones that you have to wind and wind. You have to be very careful around it, very careful. You must never let water touch it.’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘I’m off to play tennis, and then I’ll go on to the staff club.’ Master picked up a few books from the table. ‘I may be back late. So get settled and have a rest.’

‘Yes, sah.’

After Ugwu watched Master drive out of the compound, he went and stood beside the radiogram and looked at it carefully, without touching it. Then he walked around the house, up and down, touching books and curtains and furniture and plates, and when it got dark, he turned the light on and marvelled at how bright the bulb that dangled from the ceiling was, how it did not cast long shadows on the wall like the palm oil lamps back home. His mother would be preparing the evening meal now, pounding akpu in the mortar, the pestle grasped tightly with both hands. Chioke, the junior wife, would be tending the pot of watery soup balanced on three stones over the fire. The children would have come back from the stream and would be taunting and chasing one another under the breadfruit tree. Perhaps Anulika would be watching them. She was the oldest child in the household now, and as they all sat around the fire to eat, she would break up the fights when the younger ones struggled over the strips of dried fish in the soup. She would wait until all the akpu was eaten and then divide the fish so that each child had a piece, and she would keep the biggest for herself, as he had always done.

Ugwu opened the fridge and ate some more bread and chicken, quickly stuffing the food in his mouth while his heart beat as if he were running; then he dug out extra chunks of meat and pulled out the wings. He slipped the pieces into his shorts’ pockets before going to the bedroom. He would keep them until his aunty visited and he would ask her to give them to Anulika. Perhaps he could ask her to give some to Nnesinachi too. That might make Nnesinachi finally notice him. He had never been sure exactly how he and Nnesinachi were related, but he knew they were from the same umunna and therefore could never marry. Yet he wished that his mother would not keep referring to Nnesinachi as his sister, saying things like, ‘Please take this palm oil down to Mama Nnesinachi, and if she is not in, leave it with your sister.’

Nnesinachi always spoke to him in a vague voice, her eyes unfocused, as if his presence made no difference to her either way. Sometimes she called him Chiejina, the name of his cousin who looked nothing at all like him, and when he said, ‘It’s me’, she would say, ‘Forgive me, Ugwu my brother,’ with a distant formality that meant she had no wish to make further conversation. But he liked going on errands to her house. They were opportunities to find her bent over, fanning the firewood or chopping ugu leaves for her mother’s soup pot, or just sitting outside looking after her younger siblings, her wrapper hanging low enough for him to see the tops of her breasts. Ever since they started to push out, those pointy breasts, he had wondered if they would feel mushy-soft or hard like the unripe fruit from the ube tree. He often wished that Anulika wasn’t so flat-chested – he wondered what was taking her so long anyway, since she and Nnesinachi were about the same age – so that he could feel her breasts. Anulika would slap his hand away, of course, and perhaps even slap his face as well, but he would do it quickly – squeeze and run – and that way he would at least have an idea and know what to expect when he finally touched Nnesinachi’s.

But he was worried that he might never get to touch them, now that her uncle had asked her to come and learn a trade in Kano. She would be leaving for the North by the end of the year, when her mother’s last child, whom she was carrying, began to walk. Ugwu wanted to be as pleased and grateful as the rest of the family. There was, after all, a fortune to be made in the North; he knew of people who had gone up there to trade and came home to tear down huts and build houses with corrugated-iron roofs. He feared, though, that one of those pot-bellied traders in the North would take one look at her, and the next thing he knew somebody would bring palm wine to her father and he would never get to touch those breasts. They – her breasts – were the images saved for last on the many nights when he touched himself, slowly at first and then vigorously, until a muffled moan escaped him. He always started with her face, the fullness of her cheeks and the ivory tone of her teeth, and then he imagined her arms around him, her body moulded to his. Finally, he let her breasts form; sometimes they felt hard, tempting him to bite into them, and other times they were so soft he was afraid his imaginary squeezing caused her pain.

For a moment, he considered thinking of her tonight. He decided not to. Not on his first night in Master’s house, on this bed that was nothing like his hand-woven raffia mat. First, he pressed his hands into the springy softness of the mattress. Then, he examined the layers of cloth on top of it, unsure whether to sleep on them or to remove them and put them away before sleeping. Finally, he climbed up and lay on top of the layers of cloth, his body curled in a tight knot.

He dreamed that Master was calling him – Ugwu, my good man! – and when he woke up Master was standing at the door, watching him. Perhaps it had not been a dream. He scrambled out of bed and glanced at the windows with the drawn curtains, in confusion. Was it late? Had that soft bed deceived him and made him oversleep? He usually woke with the first cockcrows.

‘Good morning, sah!’

‘There is a strong roasted-chicken smell here.’

‘Sorry, sah.’

‘Where is the chicken?’

Ugwu fumbled in his shorts’ pockets and brought out the chicken pieces.

‘Do your people eat while they sleep?’ Master asked. He was wearing something that looked like a woman’s coat and was absently twirling the rope tied round his waist.

‘Sah?’

‘Did you want to eat the chicken while in bed?’

‘No, sah.’

‘Food will stay in the dining room and the kitchen.’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘The kitchen and bathroom will have to be cleaned today.’

‘Yes, sah.’

Master turned and left. Ugwu stood trembling in the middle of the room, still holding the chicken pieces with his hand outstretched. He wished he did not have to walk past the dining room to get to the kitchen. Finally, he put the chicken back in his pockets, took a deep breath, and left the room. Master was at the dining table, the teacup in front of him placed on a pile of books.

‘You know who really killed Lumumba?’ Master said, looking up from a magazine. ‘It was the Americans and the Belgians. It had nothing to do with Katanga.’

‘Yes, sah,’ Ugwu said. He wanted Master to keep talking, so he could listen to the sonorous voice, the musical blend of English words in his Igbo sentences.

‘You are my houseboy,’ Master said. ‘If I order you to go outside and beat a woman walking on the street with a stick, and you then give her a bloody wound on her leg, who is responsible for the wound, you or me?’

Ugwu stared at Master, shaking his head, wondering if Master was referring to the chicken pieces in some roundabout way.

‘Lumumba was prime minister of Congo. Do you know where Congo is?’ Master asked.

‘No, sah.’

Master got up quickly and went into the study. Ugwu’s confused fear made his eyelids quiver. Would Master send him home because he did not speak English well, kept chicken in his pocket overnight, did not know the strange places Master named? Master came back with a wide piece of paper that he unfolded and laid out on the dining table, pushing aside books and magazines. He pointed with his pen. ‘This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.’ Master picked up the paper and folded it, so that one edge touched the other, leaving a hollow between. ‘Our world is round, it never ends. Nee anya, this is all water, the seas and oceans, and here’s Europe and here’s our own continent, Africa, and the Congo is in the middle. Farther up here is Nigeria, and Nsukka is here, in the southeast; this is where we are.’ He tapped with his pen.

‘Yes, sah.’

‘Did you go to school?’

‘Standard two, sah. But I learn everything fast.’

‘Standard two? How long ago?’

‘Many years now, sah. But I learn everything very fast!’

‘Why did you stop school?’

‘My father’s crops failed, sah.’

Master nodded slowly. ‘Why didn’t your father find somebody to lend him your school fees?’

‘Sah?’

‘Your father should have borrowed!’ Master snapped, and then, in English, ‘Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?’

‘Yes, sah!’ Ugwu nodded vigorously. He was determined to appear as alert as he could, because of the wild shine that had appeared in Master’s eyes.

‘I will enrol you in the staff primary school,’ Master said, still tapping on the piece of paper with his pen.

Ugwu’s aunty had told him that if he served well for a few years, Master would send him to commercial school where he would learn typing and shorthand. She had mentioned the staff primary school, but only to tell him that it was for the children of the lecturers, who wore blue uniforms and white socks so intricately trimmed with wisps of lace that you wondered why anybody had wasted so much time on mere socks.

‘Yes, sah,’ he said. ‘Thank, sah.’

‘I suppose you will be the oldest in class, starting in standard three at your age,’ Master said. ‘And the only way you can get their respect is to be the best. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sah!’

‘Sit down, my good man.’

Ugwu chose the chair farthest from Master, awkwardly placing his feet close together. He preferred to stand.

‘There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers. I will give you books, excellent books.’ Master stopped to sip his tea. ‘They will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger. That is rubbish. Our people fished in the Niger long before Mungo Park’s grandfather was born. But in your exam, write that it was Mungo Park.’

‘Yes, sah.’ Ugwu wished that this person called Mungo Park had not offended Master so much.

‘Can’t you say anything else?’

‘Sah?’

‘Sing me a song.’

‘Sah?’

‘Sing me a song. What songs do you know? Sing!’ Master pulled his glasses off. His eyebrows were furrowed, serious. Ugwu began to sing an old song he had learned on his father’s farm. His heart hit his chest painfully. ‘Nzogbo nzogbu enyimba, enyi …’

He sang in a low voice at first, but Master tapped his pen on the table and said ‘Louder!’ so he raised his voice, and Master kept saying ‘Louder!’ until he was screaming. After singing over and over a few times, Master asked him to stop. ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Can you make tea?’

‘No, sah. But I learn fast,’ Ugwu said. The singing had loosened something inside him, he was breathing easily and his heart no longer pounded. And he was convinced that Master was mad.

‘I eat mostly at the staff club. I suppose I shall have to bring more food home now that you are here.’

‘Sah, I can cook.’

‘You cook?’

Ugwu nodded. He had spent many evenings watching his mother cook. He had started the fire for her, or fanned the embers when it started to die out. He had peeled and pounded yams and cassava, blown out the husks in rice, picked out the weevils from beans, peeled onions, and ground peppers. Often, when his mother was sick with the coughing, he wished that he, and not Anulika, would cook. He had never told anyone this, not even Anulika; she had already told him he spent too much time around women cooking, and he might never grow a beard if he kept doing that.

‘Well, you can cook your own food then,’ Master said. ‘Write a list of what you’ll need.’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘You wouldn’t know how to get to the market, would you? I’ll ask Jomo to show you.’

‘Jomo, sah?’

‘Jomo takes care of the compound. He comes in three times a week. Funny man, I’ve seen him talking to the croton plant.’ Master paused. ‘Anyway, he’ll be here tomorrow.’

Later, Ugwu wrote a list of food items and gave it to Master.

Master stared at the list for a while. ‘Remarkable blend,’ he said in English. ‘I suppose they’ll teach you to use more vowels in school.’

Ugwu disliked the amusement in Master’s face. ‘We need wood, sah,’ he said.

‘Wood?’

‘For your books, sah. So that I can arrange them.’

‘Oh, yes, shelves. I suppose we could fit more shelves somewhere, perhaps in the corridor. I will speak to somebody at the Works Department.’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘Odenigbo. Call me Odenigbo.’

Ugwu stared at him doubtfully. ‘Sah?’

‘My name is not Sah. Call me Odenigbo.’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘Odenigbo will always be my name. Sir is arbitrary. You could be the sir tomorrow.’

‘Yes, sah – Odenigbo.’

Ugwu really preferred sah, the crisp power behind the word, and when two men from the Works Department came a few days later to install shelves in the corridor, he told them that they would have to wait for Sah to come home; he himself could not sign the white paper with typewritten words. He said Sah proudly.

‘He’s one of these village houseboys,’ one of the men said dismissively, and Ugwu looked at the man’s face and murmured a curse about acute diarrhoea following him and all of his offspring for life. As he arranged Master’s books, he promised himself, stopping short of speaking aloud, that he would learn how to sign forms.

In the following weeks, the weeks when he examined every corner of the bungalow, when he discovered that a beehive was lodged in the cashew tree and that the butterflies converged in the front yard when the sun was brightest, he was just as careful in learning the rhythms of Master’s life. Every morning, he picked up the Daily Times and Renaissance that the vendor dropped off at the door and folded them on the table next to Master’s tea and bread. He had the Opel washed before Master finished breakfast, and when Master came back from work and was taking a siesta, he dusted the car over again, before Master left for the tennis courts. He moved around silently on the days that Master retired to the study for hours. When Master paced the corridor talking in a loud voice, he made sure that there was hot water ready for tea. He scrubbed the floors daily. He wiped the louvres until they sparkled in the afternoon sunlight, paid attention to the tiny cracks in the bathtub, polished the saucers that he used to serve kola nut to Master’s friends. There were at least two visitors in the living room each day, the radiogram turned on low to strange flutelike music, low enough for the talking and laughing and glass clinking to come clearly to Ugwu in the kitchen or in the corridor as he ironed Master’s clothes.

He wanted to do more, wanted to give Master every reason to keep him, and so one morning, he ironed Master’s socks. They didn’t look rumpled, the black ribbed socks, but he thought they would look even better straightened. The hot iron hissed and when he raised it, he saw that half of the sock was glued to it. He froze. Master was at the dining table, finishing up breakfast, and would come in any minute now to pull on his socks and shoes and take the files on the shelf and leave for work. Ugwu wanted to hide the sock under the chair and dash to the drawer for a new pair but his legs would not move. He stood there with the burnt sock, knowing Master would find him that way.

‘You’ve ironed my socks, haven’t you?’ Master asked. ‘You stupid ignoramus.’ Stupid ignoramus slid out of his mouth like music.

‘Sorry, sah! Sorry, sah!’

‘I told you not to call me sir.’ Master picked up a file from the shelf. ‘I’m late.’

‘Sah? Should I bring another pair?’ Ugwu asked. But Master had already slipped on his shoes, without socks, and hurried out. Ugwu heard him bang the car door and drive away. His chest felt weighty; he did not know why he had ironed the socks, why he had not simply done the safari suit. Evil spirits, that was it. The evil spirits had made him do it. They lurked everywhere, after all. Whenever he was ill with the fever, or once when he fell from a tree, his mother would rub his body with okwuma, all the while muttering, ‘We shall defeat them, they will not win.’

He went out to the front yard, past stones placed side by side around the manicured lawn. The evil spirits would not win. He would not let them defeat him. There was a round, grassless patch in the middle of the lawn, like an island in a green sea, where a thin palm tree stood. Ugwu had never seen any palm tree that short, or one with leaves that flared out so perfectly. It did not look strong enough to bear fruit, did not look useful at all, like most of the plants here. He picked up a stone and threw it into the distance. So much wasted space. In his village, people farmed the tiniest plots outside their homes and planted useful vegetables and herbs. His grandmother had not needed to grow her favourite herb, arigbe, because it grew wild everywhere. She used to say that arigbe softened a man’s heart. She was the second of three wives and did not have the special position that came with being the first or the last, so before she asked her husband for anything, she told Ugwu, she cooked him spicy yam porridge with arigbe. It had worked, always. Perhaps it would work with Master.

Ugwu walked around in search of arigbe. He looked among the pink flowers, under the cashew tree with the spongy beehive lodged on a branch, the lemon tree that had black soldier ants crawling up and down the trunk, and the pawpaw trees whose ripening fruits were dotted with fat, bird-burrowed holes. But the ground was clean, no herbs; Jomo’s weeding was thorough and careful, and nothing that was not wanted was allowed to be.

The first time they met, Ugwu had greeted Jomo and Jomo nodded and continued to work, saying nothing. He was a small man with a tough, shrivelled body that Ugwu felt needed a watering more than the plants that he targeted with his metal can. Finally, Jomo looked up at Ugwu. ‘Afa m bu Jomo,’ he announced, as if Ugwu did not know his name. ‘Some people call me Kenyatta, after the great man in Kenya. I am a hunter.’

Ugwu did not know what to say in return because Jomo was staring right into his eyes, as though expecting to hear something remarkable that Ugwu did.

‘What kind of animals do you kill?’ Ugwu asked. Jomo beamed, as if this was exactly the question he had wanted, and began to talk about his hunting. Ugwu sat on the steps that led to the backyard and listened. From the first day, he did not believe Jomo’s stories – of fighting off a leopard barehanded, of killing two baboons with a single shot – but he liked listening to them and he put off washing Master’s clothes to the days Jomo came so he could sit outside while Jomo worked. Jomo moved with a slow deliberateness. His raking, watering, and planting all somehow seemed filled with solemn wisdom. He would look up in the middle of trimming a hedge and say, ‘That is good meat,’ and then walk to the goatskin bag tied behind his bicycle to rummage for his catapult. Once, he shot a bush pigeon down from the cashew tree with a small stone, wrapped it in leaves, and put it into his bag.

‘Don’t go to that bag unless I am around,’ he told Ugwu. ‘You might find a human head there.’

Ugwu laughed but had not entirely doubted Jomo. He wished so much that Jomo had come to work today. Jomo would have been the best person to ask about arigbe – indeed, to ask for advice on how best to placate Master.

He walked out of the compound, to the street, and looked through the plants on the roadside until he saw the rumpled leaves close to the root of a whistling pine. He had never smelt anything like the spicy sharpness of arigbe in the bland food Master brought back from the staff club; he would cook a stew with it, and offer Master some with rice, and afterwards plead with him. Please don’t send me back home, sah. I will work extra for the burnt sock. I will earn the money to replace it. He did not know exactly what he could do to earn money for the sock, but he planned to tell Master that anyway.

If the arigbe softened Master’s heart, perhaps he could grow it and some other herbs in the backyard. He would tell Master that the garden was something to do until he started school, since the headmistress at the staff school had told Master that he could not start midterm. He might be hoping for too much, though. What was the point of thinking about a herb garden if Master asked him to leave, if Master would not forgive the burnt sock? He walked quickly into the kitchen, laid the arigbe down on the counter, and measured out some rice.

Hours later, he felt a tautness in his stomach when he heard Master’s car: the crunch of gravel and the hum of the engine before it stopped in the garage. He stood by the pot of stew, stirring, holding the ladle as tightly as the cramps in his stomach felt. Would Master ask him to leave before he had a chance to offer him the food? What would he tell his people?

‘Good afternoon, sah – Odenigbo,’ he said, even before Master had come into the kitchen.

‘Yes, yes,’ Master said. He was holding books to his chest with one hand and his briefcase with the other. Ugwu rushed over to help with the books. ‘Sah? You will eat?’ he asked in English.

‘Eat what?’

Ugwu’s stomach got tighter. He feared it might snap as he bent to place the books on the dining table. ‘Stew, sah.’

‘Stew?’

‘Yes, sah. Very good stew, sah.’

‘I’ll try some, then.’

‘Yes, sah!’

‘Call me Odenigbo!’ Master snapped before going in to take an afternoon bath.

After Ugwu served the food, he stood by the kitchen door, watching as Master took a first forkful of rice and stew, took another, and then called out, ‘Excellent, my good man.’

Ugwu appeared from behind the door. ‘Sah? I can plant the herbs in a small garden. To cook more stews like this.’

‘A garden?’ Master stopped to sip some water and turn a journal page. ‘No, no, no. Outside is Jomo’s territory, and inside is yours. Division of labour, my good man. If we need herbs, we’ll ask Jomo to take care of it.’ Ugwu loved the sound of Division of labour, my good man, spoken in English.

‘Yes, sah,’ he said, although he was already thinking of what spot would be best for the herb garden: near the Boys’ Quarters where Master never went. He could not trust Jomo with the herb garden and would tend it himself when Master was out, and this way, his arigbe, his herb of forgiveness, would never run out. It was only later in the evening that he realized Master must have forgotten about the burnt sock long before coming home.

Ugwu came to realize other things. He was not a normal houseboy; Dr Okeke’s houseboy next door did not sleep on a bed in a room, he slept on the kitchen floor. The houseboy at the end of the street with whom Ugwu went to the market did not decide what would be cooked, he cooked whatever he was ordered to. And they did not have masters or madams who gave them books, saying, ‘This one is excellent, just excellent.’

Ugwu did not understand most of the sentences in the books, but he made a show of reading them. Nor did he entirely understand the conversations of Master and his friends but listened anyway and heard that the world had to do more about the black people killed in Sharpeville, that the spy plane shot down in Russia served the Americans right, that De Gaulle was being clumsy in Algeria, that the United Nations would never get rid of Tshombe in Katanga. Once in a while, Master would stand up and raise his glass and his voice – ‘To that brave black American led into the University of Mississippi!’ ‘To Ceylon and to the world’s first woman prime minister!’ ‘To Cuba for beating the Americans at their own game!’ – and Ugwu would enjoy the clink of beer bottles against glasses, glasses against glasses, bottles against bottles.

More friends visited on weekends, and when Ugwu came out to serve their drinks, Master would sometimes introduce him – in English, of course. ‘Ugwu helps me around the house. Very clever boy.’ Ugwu would continue to uncork bottles of beer and Coke silently, while feeling the warm glow of pride spread up from the tips of his toes. He especially liked it when Master introduced him to foreigners, like Mr Johnson, who was from the Caribbean and stammered when he spoke, or Professor Lehman, the nasal white man from America who had eyes that were the piercing green of a fresh leaf. Ugwu was vaguely frightened the first time he saw him because he had always imagined that only evil spirits had grass-coloured eyes.

He soon knew the regular guests and brought out their drinks before Master asked him to. There was Dr Patel, the Indian man who drank Golden Guinea beer mixed with Coke. Master called him Doc. Whenever Ugwu brought out the kola nut, Master would say, ‘Doc, you know the kola nut does not understand English,’ before going on to bless the kola nut in Igbo. Dr Patel laughed each time, with great pleasure, leaning back on the sofa and throwing his short legs up as if it were a joke he had never heard before. After Master broke the kola nut and passed the saucer around, Dr Patel always took a lobe and put it into his shirt pocket; Ugwu had never seen him eat one.

There was tall, skinny Professor Ezeka, with a voice so hoarse he sounded as if he spoke in whispers. He always picked up his glass and held it up against the light, to make sure Ugwu had washed it well. Sometimes, he brought his own bottle of gin. Other times, he asked for tea and then went on to examine the sugar bowl and the tin of milk, muttering, ‘The capabilities of bacteria are quite extraordinary.’

There was Okeoma, who came most often and stayed the longest. He looked younger than the other guests, always wore a pair of shorts, and had bushy hair with a parting at the side that stood higher than Master’s. It looked rough and tangled, unlike Master’s, as if Okeoma did not like to comb it. Okeoma drank Fanta. He read his poetry aloud on some evenings, holding a sheaf of papers, and Ugwu would look through the kitchen door to see all the guests watching him, their faces half frozen, as if they did not dare breathe. Afterwards, Master would clap and say, in his loud voice, ‘The voice of our generation!’ and the clapping would go on until Okeoma said sharply, ‘That’s enough!’

And there was Miss Adebayo, who drank brandy like Master and was nothing like Ugwu had expected a university woman to be. His aunty had told him a little about university women. She would know, because she worked as a cleaner at the Faculty of Sciences during the day and as a waitress at the staff club in the evenings; sometimes, too, the lecturers paid her to come in and clean their homes. She said university women kept framed photos of their student days in Ibadan and Britain and America on their shelves. For breakfast, they had eggs that were not cooked well, so that the yolk danced around, and they wore bouncy, straight-hair wigs and maxi-dresses that grazed their ankles. She told a story once about a couple at a cocktail party in the staff club who climbed out of a nice Peugeot 404, the man in an elegant cream suit, the woman in a green dress. Everybody turned to watch them, walking hand in hand, and then the wind blew the woman’s wig off her head. She was bald. They used hot combs to straighten their hair, his aunty had said, because they wanted to look like white people, although the combs ended up burning their hair off.

Ugwu had imagined the bald woman: beautiful, with a nose that stood up, not the sitting-down, flattened noses that he was used to. He imagined quietness, delicacy, the kind of woman whose sneeze, whose laugh and talk, would be soft as the under feathers closest to a chicken’s skin. But the women who visited Master, the ones he saw at the supermarket and on the streets, were different. Most of them did wear wigs (a few had their hair plaited or braided with thread), but they were not delicate stalks of grass. They were loud. The loudest was Miss Adebayo. She was not an Igbo woman; Ugwu could tell from her name, even if he had not once run into her and her housegirl at the market and heard them both speaking rapid, incomprehensible Yoruba. She had asked him to wait so that she could give him a ride back to the campus, but he thanked her and said he still had many things left to buy and would take a taxi, although he had finished shopping. He did not want to ride in her car, did not like how her voice rose above Master’s in the living room, challenging and arguing. He often fought the urge to raise his own voice from behind the kitchen door and tell her to shut up, especially when she called Master a sophist. He did not know what sophist meant, but he did not like that she called Master that. Nor did he like the way she looked at Master. Even when somebody else was speaking and she was supposed to be focused on that person, her eyes would be on Master. One Saturday night, Okeoma dropped a glass and Ugwu came in to clean up the shards that lay on the floor. He took his time cleaning. The conversation was clearer from here and it was easier to make out what Professor Ezeka said. It was almost impossible to hear the man from the kitchen.

‘We should have a bigger pan-African response to what is happening in the American South really –’ Professor Ezeka said.

Master cut him short. ‘You know, pan-Africanism is fundamentally a European notion.’

‘You are digressing,’ Professor Ezeka said, and shook his head in his usual superior manner.

‘Maybe it is a European notion,’ Miss Adebayo said, ‘but in the bigger picture, we are all one race.’

‘What bigger picture?’ Master asked. ‘The bigger picture of the white man! Can’t you see that we are not all alike except to white eyes?’ Master’s voice rose easily, Ugwu had noticed, and by his third glass of brandy, he would start to gesture with his glass, leaning forwards until he was seated on the very edge of his armchair. Late at night, after Master was in bed, Ugwu would sit on the same chair and imagine himself speaking swift English, talking to rapt imaginary guests, using words like decolonize and pan-African, moulding his voice after Master’s, and he would shift and shift until he too was on the edge of the chair.

‘Of course we are all alike, we all have white oppression in common,’ Miss Adebayo said dryly. ‘Pan-Africanism is simply the most sensible response.’

‘Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,’ Master said. ‘I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.’

Professor Ezeka snorted and shook his head, thin legs crossed. ‘But you became aware that you were Igbo because of the white man. The pan-Igbo idea itself came only in the face of white domination. You must see that tribe as it is today is as colonial a product as nation and race.’ Professor Ezeka recrossed his legs.

‘The pan-Igbo idea existed long before the white man!’ Master shouted. ‘Go and ask the elders in your village about your history.’

‘The problem is that Odenigbo is a hopeless tribalist, we need to keep him quiet,’ Miss Adebayo said.

Then she did what startled Ugwu: she got up laughing and went over to Master and pressed his lips close together. She stood there for what seemed a long time, her hand to his mouth. Ugwu imagined Master’s brandy-diluted saliva touching her fingers. He stiffened as he picked up the shattered glass. He wished that Master would not sit there shaking his head as if the whole thing were very funny.

Miss Adebayo became a threat after that. She began to look more and more like a fruit bat, with her pinched face and cloudy complexion and print dresses that billowed around her body like wings. Ugwu served her drink last and wasted long minutes drying his hands on a dishcloth before he opened the door to let her in. He worried that she would marry Master and bring her Yoruba-speaking housegirl into the house and destroy his herb garden and tell him what he could and could not cook. Until he heard Master and Okeoma talking.

‘She did not look as if she wanted to go home today,’ Okeoma said. ‘Nwoke m, are you sure you are not planning to do something with her?’

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

‘If you did, nobody in London would know.’

‘Look, look – ’

‘I know you’re not interested in her like that, but what still puzzles me is what these women see in you.’

Okeoma laughed and Ugwu was relieved. He did not want Miss Adebayo – or any woman – coming in to intrude and disrupt their lives. Some evenings, when the visitors left early, he would sit on the floor of the living room and listen to Master talk. Master mostly talked about things Ugwu did not understand, as if the brandy made him forget that Ugwu was not one of his visitors. But it didn’t matter. All Ugwu needed was the deep voice, the melody of the English-inflected Igbo, the glint of the thick eyeglasses.

He had been with Master for four months when Master told him, ‘A special woman is coming for the weekend. Very special. You make sure the house is clean. I’ll order the food from the staff club.’

‘But, sah, I can cook,’ Ugwu said, with a sad premonition.

‘She’s just come back from London, my good man, and she likes her rice a certain way. Fried rice, I think. I’m not sure you could make something suitable.’ Master turned to walk away.

‘I can make that, sah,’ Ugwu said quickly, although he had no idea what fried rice was. ‘Let me make the rice, and you get the chicken from the staff club.’

‘Artful negotiation,’ Master said in English. ‘All right, then. You make the rice.’

‘Yes, sah,’ Ugwu said. Later, he cleaned the rooms and scrubbed the toilet carefully, as he always did, but Master looked at them and said they were not clean enough and went out and bought another jar of Vim powder and asked, sharply, why Ugwu didn’t clean the spaces between the tiles. Ugwu cleaned them again. He scrubbed until sweat crawled down the sides of his face, until his arm ached. And on Saturday, he bristled as he cooked. Master had never complained about his work before. It was this woman’s fault, this woman that Master considered too special even for him to cook for. Just come back from London, indeed.

When the doorbell rang, he muttered a curse under his breath about her stomach swelling from eating faeces. He heard Master’s raised voice, excited and childlike, followed by a long silence and he imagined their hug, and her ugly body pressed to Master’s. Then he heard her voice. He stood still. He had always thought that Master’s English could not be compared to anybody’s, not Professor Ezeka, whose English one could hardly hear, or Okeoma, who spoke English as if he were speaking Igbo, with the same cadences and pauses, or Patel, whose English was a faded lilt. Not even the white man Professor Lehman, with his words forced out through his nose, sounded as dignified as Master. Master’s English was music, but what Ugwu was hearing now, from this woman, was magic. Here was a superior tongue, a luminous language, the kind of English he heard on Master’s radio, rolling out with clipped precision. It reminded him of slicing a yam with a newly sharpened knife, the easy perfection in every slice.

‘Ugwu!’ Master called. ‘Bring Coke!’

Ugwu walked out to the living room. She smelt of coconuts. He greeted her, his ‘Good afternoon’ a mumble, his eyes on the floor.

‘Kedu?’ she asked.

‘I’m well, mah.’ He still did not look at her. As he uncorked the bottle, she laughed at something Master said. Ugwu was about to pour the cold Coke into her glass when she touched his hand and said, ‘Rapuba, don’t worry about that.’

Her hand was lightly moist. ‘Yes, mah.’

‘Your master has told me how well you take care of him, Ugwu,’ she said. Her Igbo words were softer than her English, and he was disappointed at how easily they came out. He wished she would stumble in her Igbo; he had not expected English that perfect to sit beside equally perfect Igbo.

‘Yes, mah,’ he mumbled. His eyes were still focused on the floor.

‘What have you cooked us, my good man?’ Master asked, as if he did not know. He sounded annoyingly jaunty.

‘I serve now, sah,’ Ugwu said, in English, and then wished he had said I am serving now, because it sounded better, because it would impress her more. As he set the table, he kept from glancing at the living room, although he could hear her laughter and Master’s voice, with its irritating new timbre.

He finally looked at her as she and Master sat down at the table.

Her oval face was smooth like an egg, the lush colour of rain-drenched earth, and her eyes were large and slanted and she looked like she was not supposed to be walking and talking like everyone else; she should be in a glass case like the one in Master’s study, where people could admire her curvy, fleshy body, where she would be preserved untainted. Her hair was long; each of the plaits that hung down to her neck ended in a soft fuzz. She smiled easily; her teeth were the same bright white of her eyes. He did not know how long he stood staring at her until Master said, ‘Ugwu usually does a lot better than this. He makes a fantastic stew.’

‘It’s quite tasteless, which is better than bad-tasting, of course,’ she said, and smiled at Master before turning to Ugwu. ‘I’ll show you how to cook rice properly, Ugwu, without using so much oil.’

‘Yes, mah,’ Ugwu said. He had invented what he imagined was fried rice, frying the rice in groundnut oil, and had half-hoped it would send them both to the toilet in a hurry. Now, though, he wanted to cook a perfect meal, a savoury jollof rice or his special stew with arigbe, to show her how well he could cook. He delayed washing up so that the running water would not drown out her voice. When he served them tea, he took his time rearranging the biscuits on the saucer so that he could linger and listen to her, until Master said, ‘That’s quite all right, my good man.’ Her name was Olanna. But Master said it only once; he mostly called her nkem, my own. They talked about the quarrel between the Sardauna and the premier of the Western Region, and then Master said something about waiting until she moved to Nsukka and how it was only a few weeks away after all. Ugwu held his breath to make sure he had heard clearly. Master was laughing now, saying, ‘But we will live here together, nkem, and you can keep the Elias Avenue flat as well.’

She would move to Nsukka. She would live in this house. Ugwu walked away from the door and stared at the pot on the stove. His life would change. He would learn to cook fried rice and he would have to use less oil and he would take orders from her. He felt sad, and yet his sadness was incomplete; he felt expectant, too, an excitement he did not entirely understand.

That evening, he was washing Master’s linen in the backyard, near the lemon tree, when he looked up from the basin of soapy water and saw her standing by the back door, watching him. At first, he was sure it was his imagination, because the people he thought the most about often appeared to him in visions. He had imaginary conversations with Anulika all the time, and, right after he touched himself at night, Nnesinachi would appear briefly with a mysterious smile on her face. But Olanna was really at the door. She was walking across the yard towards him. She had only a wrapper tied around her chest, and as she walked, he imagined that she was a yellow cashew, shapely and ripe.

‘Mah? You want anything?’ he asked. He knew that if he reached out and touched her face, it would feel like butter, the kind Master unwrapped from a paper packet and spread on his bread.

‘Let me help you with that.’ She pointed at the bedsheet he was rinsing, and slowly he took the dripping sheet out. She held one end and moved back. ‘Turn yours that way,’ she said.

He twisted his end of the sheet to his right while she twisted to her right, and they watched as the water was squeezed out. The sheet was slippery.

‘Thank, mah,’ he said.

She smiled. Her smile made him feel taller. ‘Oh, look, those pawpaws are almost ripe. Lotekwa, don’t forget to pluck them.’

There was something polished about her voice, about her; she was like the stone that lay right below a gushing spring, rubbed smooth by years and years of sparkling water, and looking at her was similar to finding that stone, knowing that there were so few like it. He watched her walk back indoors.

He did not want to share the job of caring for Master with anyone, did not want to disrupt the balance of his life with Master, and yet it was suddenly unbearable to think of not seeing her again. Later, after dinner, he tiptoed to Master’s bedroom and rested his ear on the door. She was moaning loudly, sounds that seemed so unlike her, so uncontrolled and stirring and throaty. He stood there for a long time, until the moans stopped, and then he went back to his room.

2

Olanna nodded to the High Life music from the car radio. Her hand was on Odenigbo’s thigh; she raised it whenever he wanted to change gears, placed it back, and laughed when he teased her about being a distracting Aphrodite. It was exhilarating to sit beside him, with the car windows down and the air filled with dust and Rex Lawson’s dreamy rhythms. He had a lecture in two hours but had insisted on taking her to Enugu airport, and although she had pretended to protest, she wanted him to. When they drove across the narrow roads that ran through Milliken Hill, with a deep gully on one side and a steep hill on the other, she didn’t tell him that he was driving a little fast. She didn’t look, either, at the handwritten sign by the road that said, in rough letters, BETTER BE LATE THAN THE LATE.

She was disappointed to see the sleek, white forms of aeroplanes gliding up as they approached the airport. He parked beneath the colonnaded entrance. Porters surrounded the car and called out, ‘Sah? Madam? You get luggage?’ but Olanna hardly heard them because he had pulled her to him.

‘I can’t wait, nkem,’ he said, his lips pressed to hers. He tasted of marmalade. She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t wait to move to Nsukka either, but he knew anyway, and his tongue was in her mouth, and she felt a new warmth between her legs.

A car horn blew. A porter called out, ‘Ha, this place is for loading, oh! Loading only!’

Finally, Odenigbo let her go and jumped out of the car to get her bag from the boot. He carried it to the ticket counter. ‘Safe journey, ije oma,’ he said.

‘Drive carefully,’ she said.

She watched him walk away, a thickly built man in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt that looked crisp from ironing. He threw his legs out with an aggressive confidence: the gait of a person who would not ask for directions but remained sure that he would somehow get there. After he drove off, she lowered her head and sniffed herself. She had dabbed on his Old Spice that morning, impulsively, and didn’t tell him because he would laugh. He would not understand the superstition of taking a whiff of him with her. It was as if the scent could, at least for a while, stifle her questions and make her a little more like him, a little more certain, a little less questioning.

She turned to the ticket seller and wrote her name on a slip of paper. ‘Good afternoon. One way to Lagos, please.’

‘Ozobia?’ The ticket seller’s pockmarked face brightened in a wide smile. ‘Chief Ozobia’s daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh! Well done, madam. I will ask the porter to take you to the VIP lounge.’ The ticket seller turned around. ‘Ikenna! Where is that foolish boy? Ikenna!’

Olanna shook her head and smiled. ‘No, no need for that.’ She smiled again, reassuringly, to make it clear it was not his fault that she did not want to be in the VIP lounge.

The general lounge was crowded. Olanna sat opposite three little children in threadbare clothes and slippers who giggled intermittently while their father gave them severe looks. An old woman with a sour, wrinkled face, their grandmother, sat closest to Olanna, clutching a handbag and murmuring to herself. Olanna could smell the mustiness on her wrapper; it must have been dug out from an ancient trunk for this occasion. When a clear voice announced the arrival of a Nigeria Airways flight, the father sprang up and then sat down again.

‘You must be waiting for somebody,’ Olanna said to him in Igbo.

‘Yes, nwanne m, my brother is coming back from overseas after four years reading there.’ His Owerri dialect had a strong rural accent.

‘Eh!’ Olanna said. She wanted to ask him where exactly his brother was coming back from and what he had studied, but she didn’t. He might not know.

The grandmother turned to Olanna. ‘He is the first in our village to go overseas, and our people have prepared a dance for him. The dance troupe will meet us in Ikeduru.’ She smiled proudly to show brown teeth. Her accent was even thicker; it was difficult to make out everything she said. ‘My fellow women are jealous, but is it my fault that their sons have empty brains and my own son won the white people’s scholarship?’

Another flight arrival was announced and the father said, ‘Chere! It’s him? It’s him!’

The children stood up and the father asked them to sit down and then stood up himself. The grandmother clutched her handbag to her belly. Olanna watched the plane descend. It touched down, and just as it began to taxi on the tarmac, the grandmother screamed and dropped her handbag.

Olanna was startled. ‘What is it? What is it?’

‘Mama!’ the father said.

‘Why does it not stop?’ The grandmother asked, both hands placed on her head in despair. ‘Chi m! My God! I am in trouble! Where is it taking my son now? Have you people deceived me?’

‘Mama, it will stop,’ Olanna said. ‘This is what it does when it lands.’ She picked up the handbag and then took the older, callused hand in hers. ‘It will stop,’ she said again.

She didn’t let go until the plane stopped and the grandmother slipped her hand away and muttered something about foolish people who could not build planes well. Olanna watched the family hurry to the arrivals gate. As she walked towards her own gate minutes later, she looked back often, hoping to catch a glimpse of the son from overseas. But she didn’t.

Her flight was bumpy. The man seated next to her was eating bitter kola, crunching loudly, and when he turned to make conversation, she slowly shifted away until she was pressed against the aeroplane wall.

‘I just have to tell you, you are so beautiful,’ he said.

She smiled and said thank you and kept her eyes on her newspaper. Odenigbo would be amused when she told him about this man, the way he always laughed at her admirers, with his unquestioning confidence. It was what had first attracted her to him that June day two years ago in Ibadan, the kind of rainy day that wore the indigo colour of dusk although it was only noon. She was home on holiday from England. She was in a serious relationship with Mohammed. She did not notice Odenigbo at first, standing ahead of her in a queue to buy a ticket outside the university theatre. She might never have noticed him if a white man with silver hair had not stood behind her and if the ticket seller had not signalled to the white man to come forwards. ‘Let me help you here, sir,’ the ticket seller said, in that comically contrived ‘white’ accent that uneducated people liked to put on.

Olanna was annoyed, but only mildly, because she knew the queue moved fast anyway. So she was surprised at the outburst that followed, from a man wearing a brown safari suit and clutching a book: Odenigbo. He walked up to the front, escorted the white man back into the queue and then shouted at the ticket seller. ‘You miserable ignoramus! You see a white person and he looks better than your own people? You must apologize to everybody in this queue! Right now!’

Olanna had stared at him, at the arch of his eyebrows behind the glasses, the thickness of his body, already thinking of the least hurtful way to untangle herself from Mohammed. Perhaps she would have known that Odenigbo was different, even if he had not spoken; his haircut alone said it, standing up in a high halo. But there was an unmistakable grooming about him, too; he was not one of those who used untidiness to substantiate their radicalism. She smiled and said ‘Well done!’ as he walked past her, and it was the boldest thing she had ever done, the first time she had demanded attention from a man. He stopped and introduced himself, ‘My name is Odenigbo.’

‘I’m Olanna,’ she said and later, she would tell him that there had been a crackling magic in the air and he would tell her that his desire at that moment was so intense that his groin ached.

When she finally felt that desire, she was surprised above everything else. She did not know that a man’s thrusts could suspend memory, that it was possible to be poised in a place where she could not think or remember, but only feel. The intensity had not abated after two years, nor had her awe at his self-assured eccentricities and his fierce moralities. But she feared that this was because theirs was a relationship consumed in sips: She saw him when she came home on holiday; they wrote to one another; they talked on the phone. Now that she was back in Nigeria they would live together, and she did not understand how he could not show some uncertainty. He was too sure.

She looked out at the clouds outside her window, smoky thickets drifting by, and thought how fragile they were.

* * *

Olanna had not wanted to have dinner with her parents, especially since they had invited Chief Okonji. But her mother came into her room to ask her to please join them; it was not every day that they hosted the finance minister, and this dinner was even more important because of the building contract her father wanted. ‘Biko, wear something nice. Kainene will be dressing up, too,’ her mother had added, as if mentioning her twin sister somehow legitimized everything.

Now, Olanna smoothed the napkin on her lap and smiled at the steward placing a plate of halved avocado next to her. His white uniform was starched so stiff his trousers looked as if they had been made out of cardboard.

‘Thank you, Maxwell,’ she said.

‘Yes, aunty,’ Maxwell mumbled, and moved on with his tray.

Olanna looked around the table. Her parents were focused on Chief Okonji, nodding eagerly as he told a story about a recent meeting with Prime Minister Balewa. Kainene was inspecting her plate with that arch expression of hers, as if she were mocking the avocado. None of them thanked Maxwell. Olanna wished they would; it was such a simple thing to do, to acknowledge the humanity of the people who served them. She had suggested it once; her father said he paid them good salaries, and her mother said thanking them would give them room to be insulting, while Kainene, as usual, said nothing, a bored expression on her face.

‘This is the best avocado I have tasted in a long time,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘It is from one of our farms,’ her mother said. ‘The one near Asaba.’

‘I’ll have the steward put some in a bag for you,’ her father said.

‘Excellent,’ Chief Okonji said. ‘Olanna, I hope you are enjoying yours, eh? You’ve been staring at it as if it is something that bites.’ He laughed, an overly hearty guffaw, and her parents promptly laughed as well.

‘It’s very good.’ Olanna looked up. There was something wet about Chief Okonji’s smile. Last week, when he thrust his card into her hand at the Ikoyi Club, she had worried about that smile because it looked as if the movement of his lips made saliva fill his mouth and threaten to trickle down his chin.

‘I hope you’ve thought about coming to join us at the ministry, Olanna. We need first-class brains like yours,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘How many people get offered jobs personally from the finance minister,’ her mother said, to nobody in particular, and her smile lit up the oval, dark-skinned face that was so nearly perfect, so symmetrical, that friends called her Art.

Olanna placed her spoon down. ‘I’ve decided to go to Nsukka. I’ll be leaving in two weeks.’

She saw the way her father tightened his lips. Her mother left her hand suspended in the air for a moment, as if the news were too tragic to continue sprinkling salt. ‘I thought you had not made up your mind,’ her mother said.

‘I can’t waste too much time or they will offer it to somebody else,’ Olanna said.

‘Nsukka? Is that right? You’ve decided to move to Nsukka?’ Chief Okonji asked.

‘Yes. I applied for a job as instructor in the Department of Sociology and I just got it,’ Olanna said. She usually liked her avocado without salt, but it was bland now, almost nauseating.

‘Oh. So you’re leaving us in Lagos,’ Chief Okonji said. His face seemed to melt, folding in on itself. Then he turned and asked, too brightly, ‘And what about you, Kainene?’

Kainene looked Chief Okonji right in the eyes, with that stare that was so expressionless, so blank, that it was almost hostile. ‘What about me, indeed?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I, too, will be putting my newly acquired degree to good use. I’m moving to Port Harcourt to manage Daddy’s businesses there.’

Olanna wished she still had those flashes, moments when she could tell what Kainene was thinking. When they were in primary school, they sometimes looked at each other and laughed, without speaking, because they were thinking the same joke. She doubted that Kainene ever had those flashes now, since they never talked about such things any more. They never talked about anything any more.

‘So Kainene will manage the cement factory?’ Chief Okonji asked, turning to her father.

‘She’ll oversee everything in the east, the factories and our new oil interests. She has always had an excellent eye for business.’

‘Whoever said you lost out by having twin daughters is a liar,’ Chief Okonji said.

‘Kainene is not just like a son, she is like two,’ her father said. He glanced at Kainene and Kainene looked away, as if the pride on his face did not matter, and Olanna quickly focused on her plate so that neither would know she had been watching them. The plate was elegant, light green, the same colour as the avocado.

‘Why don’t you all come to my house this weekend, eh?’ Chief Okonji asked. ‘If only to sample my cook’s fish pepper soup. The chap is from Nembe; he knows what to do with fresh fish.’

Her parents cackled loudly. Olanna was not sure how that was funny, but then it was the minister’s joke.

‘That sounds wonderful,’ Olanna’s father said.

‘It will be nice for all of us to go before Olanna leaves for Nsukka,’ her mother said.

Olanna felt a slight irritation, a prickly feeling on her skin. ‘I would love to come, but I won’t be here this weekend.’

‘You won’t be here?’ her father asked. She wondered if the expression in his eyes was a desperate plea. She wondered, too, how her parents had promised Chief Okonji an affair with her in exchange for the contract. Had they stated it verbally, plainly, or had it been implied?

‘I have made plans to go to Kano, to see Uncle Mbaezi and the family, and Mohammed as well,’ she said.

Her father stabbed at his avocado. ‘I see.’

Olanna sipped her water and said nothing.

After dinner, they moved to the balcony for liqueurs. Olanna liked this after-dinner ritual and often would move away from her parents and the guests to stand by the railing, looking at the tall lamps that lit up the paths below, so bright that the swimming pool looked silver and the hibiscus and bougainvillea took on an incandescent patina over their reds and pinks. The first and only time Odenigbo visited her in Lagos, they had stood looking down at the swimming pool and Odenigbo threw a bottle cork down and watched it plunk into the water. He drank a lot of brandy, and when her father said that the idea of Nsukka University was silly, that Nigeria was not ready for an indigenous university, and that receiving support from an American university – rather than a proper university in Britain – was plain daft, he raised his voice in response. Olanna had thought he would realize that her father only wanted to gall him and show how unimpressed he was by a senior lecturer from Nsukka. She thought he would let her father’s words go. But his voice rose higher and higher as he argued about Nsukka being free of colonial influence, and she had blinked often to signal him to stop, although he may not have noticed since the veranda was dim. Finally the phone rang and the conversation had to end. The look in her parents’ eyes was grudging respect, Olanna could tell, but it did not stop them from telling her that Odenigbo was crazy and wrong for her, one of those hot-headed university people who talked and talked until everybody had a headache and nobody understood what had been said.

‘Such a cool night,’ Chief Okonji said behind her. Olanna turned around. She did not know when her parents and Kainene had gone inside.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Chief Okonji stood in front of her. His agbada was embroidered with gold thread around the collar. She looked at his neck, settled into rolls of fat, and imagined him prying the folds apart as he bathed.

‘What about tomorrow? There’s a cocktail party at Ikoyi Hotel,’ he said. ‘I want all of you to meet some expatriates. They are looking for land and I can arrange for them to buy from your father at five or six times the price.’

‘I will be doing a St Vincent de Paul charity drive tomorrow.’

Chief Okonji moved closer. ‘I can’t keep you out of my mind,’ he said, and a mist of alcohol settled on her face.

‘I am not interested, Chief.’

‘I just can’t keep you out of my mind,’ Chief Okonji said again.

‘Look, you don’t have to work at the ministry. I can appoint you to a board, any board you want, and I will furnish a flat for you wherever you want.’ He pulled her to him, and for a while Olanna did nothing, her body limp against his. She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together. She pushed him back, finally, and felt vaguely sickened at how her hands sank into his soft chest. ‘Stop it, Chief.’

His eyes were closed. ‘I love you, believe me. I really love you.’

She slipped out of his embrace and went indoors. Her parents’ voices were faint from the living room. She stopped to sniff the wilting flowers in a vase on the side table near the staircase, even though she knew their scent would be gone, before walking upstairs. Her room felt alien, the warm wood tones, the tan furniture, the wall-to-wall burgundy carpeting that cushioned her feet, the reams of space that made Kainene call their rooms flats. The copy of Lagos Life was still on her bed; she picked it up, and looked at the photo of her and her mother, on page five, their faces contented and complacent, at a cocktail party hosted by the British high commissioner. Her mother had pulled her close as a photographer approached; later, after the flashbulb went off, Olanna had called the photographer over and asked him please not to publish the photo. He had looked at her oddly. Now, she realized how silly it had been to ask him; of course he would never understand the discomfort that came with being a part of the gloss that was her parents’ life.

She was in bed reading when her mother knocked and came in.

‘Oh, you’re reading,’ her mother said. She was holding rolls of fabric in her hand. ‘Chief just left. He said I should greet you.’

Olanna wanted to ask if they had promised him an affair with her, and yet she knew she never would. ‘What are those materials?’

‘Chief just sent his driver to the car for them before he left. It’s the latest lace from Europe. See? Very nice, i fukwa? ’

Olanna felt the fabric between her fingers. ‘Yes, very nice.’

‘Did you see the one he wore today? Original! Ezigbo!’ Her mother sat down beside her. ‘And do you know, they say he never wears any outfit twice? He gives them to his houseboys once he has worn them.’

Olanna visualized his poor houseboys’ wood boxes incongruously full of lace, houseboys she was sure did not get paid much every month, owning cast-off kaftans and agbadas they could never wear. She was tired. Having conversations with her mother tired her.

‘Which one do you want, nne? I will make a long skirt and blouse for you and Kainene.’

‘No, don’t worry, Mum. Make something for yourself. I won’t wear rich lace in Nsukka too often.’

Her mother ran a finger over the bedside cabinet. ‘This silly housegirl does not clean furniture properly. Does she think I pay her to play around?’

Olanna placed her book down. Her mother wanted to say something, she could tell, and the set smile, the punctilious gestures, were a beginning.

‘So how is Odenigbo?’ her mother asked finally.

‘He’s fine.’

Her mother sighed, in the overdone way that meant she wished Olanna would see reason. ‘Have you thought about this Nsukka move well? Very well?’

‘I have never been surer of anything.’

‘But will you be comfortable there?’ Her mother said comfortable with a faint shudder, and Olanna almost smiled because her mother had Odenigbo’s basic university house in mind, with its sturdy rooms and plain furniture and uncarpeted floors.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.

‘You can find work here in Lagos and travel down to see him during weekends.’

‘I don’t want to work in Lagos. I want to work in the university, and I want to live with him.’

Her mother looked at her for a little while longer before she stood up and said, ‘Good night, my daughter,’ in a voice that was small and wounded.

Olanna stared at the door. She was used to her mother’s disapproval; it had coloured most of her major decisions, after all: when she chose two weeks’ suspension rather than apologize to her Heathgrove form mistress for insisting that the lessons on Pax Britannica were contradictory; when she joined the Students’ Movement for Independence at Ibadan; when she refused to marry Igwe Okagbue’s son, and later, Chief Okaro’s son. Still, each time, the disapproval made her want to apologize, to make up for it in some way.

She was almost asleep when Kainene knocked. ‘So will you be spreading your legs for that elephant in exchange for Daddy’s contract?’ Kainene asked.

Olanna sat up, surprised. She did not remember the last time that Kainene had come into her room.

‘Daddy literally pulled me away from the veranda, so we could leave you alone with the good cabinet minister,’ Kainene said. ‘Will he give Daddy the contract then?’

‘He didn’t say. But it’s not as if he will get nothing. Daddy will still give him ten per cent, after all.’

‘The ten per cent is standard, so extras always help. The other bidders probably don’t have a beautiful daughter.’ Kainene dragged the word out until it sounded cloying, sticky: beau-ti-ful. She was flipping through the copy of Lagos Life, her silk robe tied tightly around her skinny waist. ‘The benefit of being the ugly daughter is that nobody uses you as sex bait.’

‘They’re not using me as sex bait.’

Kainene did not respond for a while; she seemed focused on an article in the paper. Then she looked up. ‘Richard is going to Nsukka too. He’s received the grant, and he’s going to write his book there.’

‘Oh, good. So that means you will be spending time in Nsukka?’

Kainene ignored the question. ‘Richard doesn’t know anybody in Nsukka, so maybe you could introduce him to your revolutionary lover.’

Olanna smiled. Revolutionary lover. The things Kainene could say with a straight face! ‘I’ll introduce them,’ she said. She had never liked any of Kainene’s boyfriends and never liked that Kainene dated so many white men in England. Their thinly veiled condescension, their false validations irritated her. Yet she had not reacted in the same way to Richard Churchill when Kainene brought him to dinner. Perhaps it was because he did not have that familiar superiority of English people who thought they understood Africans better than Africans understood themselves and, instead, had an endearing uncertainty about him – almost a shyness. Or perhaps because her parents had ignored him, unimpressed because he didn’t know anyone who was worth knowing.

‘I think Richard will like Odenigbo’s house,’ Olanna said. ‘It’s like a political club in the evenings. He only invited Africans at first because the university is so full of foreigners, and he wanted Africans to have a chance to socialize with one another. At first it was BYOB, but now he asks them all to contribute some money, and every week he buys drinks and they meet in his house –’ Olanna stopped. Kainene was looking at her woodenly, as if she had broken their unspoken rule and tried to start idle chatter.

Kainene turned towards the door. ‘When do you leave for Kano?’

‘Tomorrow.’ Olanna wanted Kainene to stay, to sit on the bed and hold a pillow on her lap and gossip and laugh into the night.

‘Go well, jee ofuma. Greet Aunty and Uncle and Arize.’

‘I will,’ Olanna said, although Kainene had already left and shut the door. She listened for Kainene’s footsteps on the carpeted hallway. It was now that they were back from England, living in the same house again, that Olanna realized just how distant they had become. Kainene had always been the withdrawn child, the sullen and often acerbic teenager, the one who, because she did not try to please their parents, left Olanna with that duty. But they had been close, despite that. They used to be friends. She wondered when it all changed. Before they went to England, for sure, since they didn’t even have the same friends in London. Perhaps it was during their secondary- school years at Heathgrove. Perhaps even before. Nothing had happened – no momentous quarrel, no significant incident – rather, they had simply drifted apart, but it was Kainene who now anchored herself firmly in a distant place so that they could not drift back together.

Olanna chose not to fly up to Kano. She liked to sit by the train window and watch the thick woods sliding past, the grassy plains unfurling, the cattle swinging their tails as they were herded by barechested nomads. When she got to Kano, it struck her once again how different it was from Lagos, from Nsukka, from her hometown Umunnachi, how different the North as a whole was from the South. Here, the sand was fine, grey, and sun-seared, nothing like the clumpy, red earth back home; the trees were tame, unlike the bursting greenness that sprang up and cast shadows on the road to Umunnachi. Here, miles of flatland went on and on, tempting the eyes to stretch just a little farther, until they seemed to meet with the silver-and-white sky.

She took a taxi from the train station and asked the driver to stop first at the market, so that she could greet Uncle Mbaezi.

On the narrow market paths, she manoeuvred between small boys carrying large loads on their heads, women haggling, traders shouting. A record shop was playing loud High Life music, and she slowed a little to hum along to Bobby Benson’s ‘Taxi Driver’ before hurrying on to her uncle’s stall. His shelves were lined with pails and other housewares.

‘Omalicha!’ he said, when he saw her. It was what he called her mother, too – Beautiful. ‘You have been on my mind. I knew you would come to see us soon.’

‘Uncle, good afternoon.’

They hugged. Olanna rested her head on his shoulder; he smelt of sweat, of the open-air market, of wares arranged on dusty wood shelves.

It was hard to imagine Uncle Mbaezi and her mother growing up together, brother and sister. Not only because her uncle’s light- complexioned face had none of her mother’s beauty, but also because there was an earthiness about him. Sometimes Olanna wondered if she would admire him as she did if he were not so different from her mother.

Whenever she visited, Uncle Mbaezi would sit with her in the yard after supper and tell her the latest family news – a cousin’s unmarried daughter was pregnant, and he wanted her to come and stay with them to avoid the malice of the village; a nephew had died here in Kano and he was looking into the cheapest way to take the body back home. Or he would tell her about politics: What the Igbo Union was organizing, protesting, discussing. They held meetings in his yard. She had sat in a few times, and she still remembered the meeting where irritated men and women talked about the northern schools not admitting Igbo children. Uncle Mbaezi had stood up and stamped his foot. ‘Ndi be anyi! My people! We will build our own school! We will raise money and build our own school!’ After he spoke, Olanna had joined in clapping her approval, in chanting, ‘Well spoken! That is how it shall be!’ But she had worried that it would be difficult to build a school. Perhaps it was more practical to try and persuade the Northerners to admit Igbo children.

Yet, now, only a few years later, her taxi was on Airport Road, driving past the Igbo Union Grammar School. It was break time and the schoolyard was full of children. Boys were playing football in different teams on the same field, so that multiple balls flew in the air; Olanna wondered how they could tell which ball was which. Clusters of girls were closer to the road, playing oga and swell, clapping rhythmically as they hopped first on one leg and then the other. Before the taxi parked outside the communal compound in Sabon Gari, Olanna saw Aunty Ifeka sitting by her kiosk on the roadside. Aunty Ifeka wiped her hands on her faded wrapper and hugged Olanna, pulled back to look at her, and hugged her again. ‘Our Olanna!’

‘My aunty! Kedu? ’

‘I am even better now that I see you.’

‘Arize is not back from her sewing class?’

‘She will be back anytime now.’

‘How is she doing? O na-agakwa? Is her sewing going well?’

‘The house is full of patterns that she has cut.’

‘What of Odinchezo and Ekene?’

‘They are there. They visited last week and asked after you.’

‘How is Maiduguri treating them? Is their trading picking up?’

‘They have not said they are dying of hunger,’ Aunty Ifeka said, with a slight shrug. Olanna examined the plain face and wished, for a brief guilty moment, that Aunty Ifeka were her mother. Aunty Ifeka was as good as her mother, anyway, since it was Aunty Ifeka’s breasts that she and Kainene had sucked when their mother’s dried up soon after they were born. Kainene used to say their mother’s breasts did not dry up at all, that their mother had given them to a nursing aunt only to save her own breasts from drooping.

‘Come, ada anyi,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘Let’s go inside.’ She pulled down the wooden shutters of the kiosk, covering the neatly arranged cases of matches, chewing gum, sweets, cigarettes, and detergent, and then picked up Olanna’s bag and led the way into the yard. The narrow bungalow was unpainted. The clothes hung out to dry were still, stiff, as if desiccated by the hot afternoon sun. Old car tyres, the ones the children played with, were piled under the kuka tree. Olanna knew the tranquil flatness of the yard would change soon, when the children came back from school. The families would leave doors open and the veranda and kitchen would fill with chatter. Uncle Mbaezi’s family lived in two rooms. In the first, where worn sofas were pushed aside at night to make room for mats, Olanna unpacked the things she had brought – bread, shoes, bottles of cream – while Aunty Ifeka stood back watching, her hands behind her back. ‘May another person do for you. May another person do for you,’ Aunty Ifeka said.

Arize came home moments later and Olanna braced herself to stand firmly, so Arize’s excited hug would not knock her down.

‘Sister! You should have warned us that you were coming! At least we would have swept the yard better! Ah! Sister! Aru amaka gi! You look well! There are stories to tell, oh!’

Arize was laughing. Her plump body, her rounded arms, shook as she laughed. Olanna held her close. She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again. This was why she came to Kano: this lucid peace. When Aunty Ifeka’s eyes began to dart around the yard, she knew it was in search of a suitable chicken. Aunty Ifeka always killed one when she visited, even if it was the last she owned, sauntering around the yard, its feathers marked with a splash or two of red paint to distinguish it from the neighbours’ chickens, which had bits of cloth tied to their wings or paint of a different colour. Olanna no longer protested about the chicken, just as she no longer protested when Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka slept on mats, next to the many relatives who always seemed to be staying with them, so that she could have their bed.

Aunty Ifeka walked casually towards a brown hen, grasped it quickly, and handed it to Arize to kill in the backyard. They sat outside the kitchen while Arize plucked it and Aunty Ifeka blew the chaff from the rice. A neighbour was boiling corn, and once in a while, when the water frothed over, the stove fire hissed. Children were playing in the yard now, raising white dust, shouting. A fight broke out under the kuka tree, and Olanna heard a child scream at another in Igbo, ‘Your mother’s pussy!’

The sun had turned red in the sky before it began its descent, when Uncle Mbaezi came home. He called out to Olanna to come and greet his friend Abdulmalik. Olanna had met the Hausa man once before; he sold leather slippers close to Uncle Mbaezi’s stall in the market, and she had bought a few pairs that she took back to England but never wore because it was then the middle of winter.

‘Our Olanna has just finished her master’s degree. Master’s degree at London University! It is not easy!’ Uncle Mbaezi said proudly.

‘Well done,’ Abdulmalik said. He opened his bag and brought out a pair of slippers and held them out to her, his narrow face creased in a smile, his teeth stained with kola nut and tobacco and whatever else Olanna did not know, stains of varying shades of yellow and brown. He looked as if it were he who was receiving a gift; he had that expression of people who marvelled at education with the calm certainty that it would never be theirs.

She took the slippers with both hands. ‘Thank you, Abdulmalik. Thank you.’

Abdulmalik pointed at the ripe gourdlike pods on the kuka tree and said, ‘You come my house. My wife cook very sweet kuka soup.’

‘Oh, I will come, next time,’ Olanna said.

He muttered more congratulations before he sat with Uncle Mbaezi on the veranda, with a bucket of sugar cane in front of them. They gnawed off the hard, green peels and chewed the juicy, white pulp, speaking Hausa and laughing. They spit the chewed cane out on the dust. Olanna sat with them for a while, but their Hausa was too swift, too difficult to follow. She wished she were fluent in Hausa and Yoruba, like her uncle and aunt and cousin were, something she would gladly exchange her French and Latin for.

In the kitchen, Arize was cutting open the chicken and Aunty Ifeka was washing the rice. She showed them the slippers from Abdulmalik and put them on; the pleated red straps made her feet look slender, more feminine.

‘Very nice,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘I shall thank him.’

Olanna sat on a stool and carefully avoided looking at the cockroach eggs, smooth black capsules, lodged in all corners of the table. A neighbour was building a wood fire in one corner and despite the slanting openings in the roof, the smoke choked the kitchen.

‘I makwa, all her family eats every day is stockfish,’ Arize said, gesturing towards the neighbour with pursed lips. ‘I don’t know if her poor children even know what meat tastes like.’ Arize threw her head back and laughed.

Olanna glanced at the woman. She was an Ijaw and could not understand Arize’s Igbo. ‘Maybe they like stockfish,’ she said.

‘O di egwu! Like it indeed! Do you know how cheap the thing is?’ Arize was still laughing as she turned to the woman. ‘Ibiba, I am telling my big sister that your soup always smells so delicious.’

The woman stopped blowing at the firewood and smiled, a knowing smile, and Olanna wondered if perhaps the woman understood Igbo but chose to humour Arize’s fun poking. There was something about Arize’s effervescent mischief that made people forgiving.

‘So you are moving to Nsukka to marry Odenigbo, Sister?’ Arize asked.

‘I don’t know about marriage yet. I just want to be closer to him, and I want to teach.’

Arize’s round eyes were admiring and bewildered. ‘It is only women that know too much Book like you who can say that, Sister. If people like me who don’t know Book wait too long, we will expire.’ Arize paused as she removed a translucently pale egg from inside the chicken. ‘I want a husband today and tomorrow, oh! My mates have all left me and gone to husbands’ houses.’

‘You are young,’ Olanna said. ‘You should focus on your sewing for now.’

‘Is it sewing that will give me a child? Even if I had managed to pass to go to school, I would still want a child now.’

‘There is no rush, Ari.’ Olanna wished she could shift her stool closer to the door, to fresh air. But she didn’t want Aunty Ifeka, or Arize, or even the neighbour to know that the smoke irritated her eyes and throat or that the sight of the cockroach eggs nauseated her. She wanted to seem used to it all, to this life.

‘I know you will marry Odenigbo, Sister, but honestly I am not sure I want you to marry a man from Abba. Men from Abba are so ugly, kai! If only Mohammed was an Igbo man, I would eat my hair if you did not marry him. I have never seen a more handsome man.’

‘Odenigbo is not ugly. Good looks come in different ways,’ Olanna said.

‘That is what the relatives of the ugly monkey, enwe, told him to make him feel better, that good looks come in different ways.’

‘Men from Abba are not ugly,’ Aunty Ifeka said. ‘My people came from there, after all.’

‘And do your people not resemble the monkey?’ Arize said.

‘Your full name is Arizendikwunnem, isn’t it? You come from your mother’s people. So perhaps you look like a monkey as well,’ Aunty Ifeka murmured.

Olanna laughed. ‘So why are you talking marriage-marriage like this, Ari? Have you seen anybody you like? Or should I find you one of Mohammed’s brothers?’

‘No, no!’ Arize waved her hands in the air in mock horror. ‘Papa would kill me first of all if he knew I was even looking at a Hausa man like that.’

‘Unless your father will kill a corpse, because I will start with you first,’ Aunty Ifeka said, and rose with the bowl of clean rice.

‘There is someone, Sister.’ Arize moved closer to Olanna. ‘But I am not sure he is looking at me, oh.’

‘Why are you whispering?’ Aunty Ifeka asked.

‘Am I talking to you? Is it not my big sister I am talking to?’ Arize asked her mother. But she raised her voice as she continued. ‘His name is Nnakwanze and he is from close to us, from Ogidi. He works at the railway. But he has not told me anything. I don’t know if he is looking at me hard enough.’

‘If he is not looking at you hard enough, there is something wrong with his eyes,’ Aunty Ifeka said.

‘Have you people seen this woman? Why can’t I talk to my big sister in peace?’ Arize rolled her eyes, but it was clear she was pleased and perhaps had used this opportunity to tell her mother about Nnakwanze.

That night, as Olanna lay on her uncle and aunt’s bed, she watched Arize through the thin curtain that hung on a rope attached to nails on the wall. The rope was not taut, and the curtain sagged in the middle. She followed the up-down movement of Arize’s breathing and imagined what growing up had been like for Arize and her brothers, Odinchezo and Ekene, seeing their parents through the curtain, hearing the sounds that might suggest an eerie pain to a child as their father’s hips moved and their mother’s arms clutched him. She had never heard her own parents making love, never even seen any indication that they did. But she had always been separated from them by hallways that got longer and more thickly carpeted as they moved from house to house. When they moved to their present home, with its ten rooms, her parents chose different bedrooms for the first time. ‘I need the whole wardrobe, and it will be nice to have your father visit!’ her mother had said. But the girlish laugh had not rung true for Olanna. The artificiality of her parents’ relationship always seemed harder, more shaming, when she was here in Kano.

The window above her was open, the still night air thick with the odours from the gutters behind the house, where people emptied their toilet buckets. Soon, she heard the muted chatter of the night- soil men as they collected the sewage; she fell asleep listening to the scraping sounds of their shovels as they worked, shielded by the dark.

The beggars outside the gates of Mohammed’s family home did not move when they saw Olanna. They remained seated on the ground, leaning against the mud compound walls. Flies perched on them in dense clusters, so that for a moment it seemed as if their frayed, white kaftans had been splashed with dark-coloured paint. Olanna wanted to put some money in their bowls but decided not to. If she were a man, they would have called out to her and extended their begging bowls, and the flies would rise in buzzing clouds.

One of the gatemen recognized her and opened the gates. ‘Welcome, madam.’

‘Thank you, Sule. How are you?’

‘You remember my name, madam!’ He beamed. ‘Thank you, madam. I am well, madam.’

‘And your family?’

‘Well, madam, by the will of Allah.’

‘Is your master back from America?’

‘Yes, madam. Please come in. I will send to call Master.’

Mohammed’s red sports car was parked in front of the sprawling sandy yard but what held Olanna’s attention was the house: the graceful simplicity of its flat roof. She sat down on the veranda.

‘The best surprise!’

She looked up and Mohammed was there, in a white kaftan, smiling down at her. His lips were a sensual curve, lips she had once kissed often during those days when she spent most of her weekends in Kano, eating rice with her fingers in his house, watching him play polo at the Flying Club, reading the bad poetry he wrote her.

‘You’re looking so well,’ she told him, as they hugged. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be back from America.’

‘I was planning to come up to Lagos to see you.’ Mohammed moved back to look at her. There was a tilt to his head, a narrowing of his eyes, that meant he still harboured hope.

‘I’m moving to Nsukka,’ she said.

‘So you are finally going to become an intellectual and marry your lecturer.’

‘Nobody said anything about marriage. And how is Janet? Or is it Jane? I mix up your American women.’

Mohammed raised one eyebrow. She could not help admiring his caramel complexion. She used to tease him about being prettier than she was.

‘What did you do to your hair?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t suit you at all. Is this how your lecturer wants you to look, like a bush woman?’

Olanna touched her hair, newly plaited with black thread. ‘My aunty did it. I quite like it.’

‘I don’t. I prefer your wigs.’ Mohammed moved closer and hugged her again. When she felt his arms tighten around her, she pushed him away.

‘You won’t let me kiss you.’

‘No,’ she said, although it had not been a question. ‘You’re not telling me about Janet-Jane.’

‘Jane. So this means I won’t see you any more when you go to Nsukka.’

‘Of course I’ll see you.’

‘I know that lecturer of yours is crazy, so I won’t come to Nsukka.’ Mohammed laughed. His tall, slim body and tapering fingers spoke of fragility, gentleness. ‘Would you like a soft drink? Or some wine?’

‘You have alcohol in this house? Someone must inform your uncle,’ Olanna teased.

Mohammed rang a bell and asked a steward to bring some drinks. Afterwards, he sat thoughtfully rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Sometimes, I feel my life is going nowhere. I travel and drive imported cars, and women follow me. But something isn’t there, something isn’t right. You know?’ She watched him; she knew where he was going with this. Yet when he said, ‘I wish things didn’t change,’ she was touched and flattered.

‘You’ll find a good woman,’ she said limply.

‘Rubbish,’ he said, and as they sat side by side drinking Coke, she recalled the disbelieving pain on his face that had only deepened when she told him she had to end it right away because she did not want to be unfaithful to him. She expected that he would resist, she knew very well how much he loved her, but she had been shocked when he told her to go ahead and sleep with Odenigbo as long as she did not leave him: Mohammed, who often half-joked about coming from a lineage of holy warriors, the very avatars of pious masculinity. Perhaps it was why her affection for him would always be mingled with gratitude, a selfish gratitude. He could have made their breakup more difficult for her; he could have left her with much more guilt.

She placed her glass down. ‘Let’s go for a drive. I hate it when I visit Kano and only get to see the ugly cement and zinc of Sabon Gari. I want to see that ancient mud statue and go around the lovely city walls again.’

‘Sometimes you are just like the white people, the way they gawk at everyday things.’

‘Do I?’

‘It’s a joke. How are you going to learn not to take everything so seriously if you live with that crazy lecturer?’ Mohammed stood up. ‘Come, we should stop by first so you can greet my mother.’

As they walked past a small gate at the back and into the courtyard that led to his mother’s chambers, Olanna remembered the trepidation she used to feel coming here. The reception area was the same, with gold-dyed walls and thick Persian rugs and grooved patterns on the exposed ceilings. Mohammed’s mother looked unchanged, too, with the ring in her nose and the silk scarves around her head. She was fine-spun in the way that used to make Olanna wonder if she wasn’t uncomfortable, dressing up every day and simply sitting at home. But the older woman did not have that old standoffish expression, did not speak stiffly with her eyes focused somewhere between Olanna’s face and the hand-carved panelling. Instead she got up and hugged Olanna.

‘You look so lovely, my dear. Don’t let the sun spoil that skin of yours.’

‘Na gode. Thank you, Hajia,’ Olanna said, wondering how it was possible for people to switch affection off and on, to tie and untie emotions.

‘I am no longer the Igbo woman you wanted to marry who would taint the lineage with infidel blood,’ Olanna said, as they climbed into Mohammed’s red Porsche. ‘So I am a friend now.’

‘I would have married you anyhow, and she knew it. Her preference did not matter.’

‘Maybe not at first, but what about later? What about when we had been married for ten years?’

‘Your parents felt the same way as she did.’ Mohammed turned to look at her. ‘Why are we talking about this now?’ There was something inexpressibly sad in his eyes. Or maybe she was imagining it. Maybe she wanted him to seem sad at the thought that they would never marry. She did not wish to marry him, and yet she enjoyed dwelling on the things they did not do and would never do.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘There’s nothing to apologize for.’ Mohammed reached out and took her hand. The car made rasping sounds as they drove past the gates. ‘There’s too much dust in the exhaust. These cars weren’t made for our parts.’

‘You should buy a hardy Peugeot.’

‘Yes, I should.’

Olanna stared at the beggars clumped around the walls of the palace, their bodies and begging bowls covered in flies. The air smelt of the spicy-sour leaves from the neem tree.

‘I am not like white people,’ she said quietly.

Mohammed glanced at her. ‘Of course you’re not. You’re a nationalist and a patriot, and soon you will marry your lecturer the freedom fighter.’

Olanna wondered if Mohammed’s lightness hid a more serious mockery. Her hand was still in his and she wondered, too, if he was having difficulty manoeuvring the car with one hand.

* * *

Olanna moved to Nsukka on a windy Saturday, and the next day Odenigbo left for a mathematics conference at the University of Ibadan. He would not have gone if the conference was not focused on the work of his mentor, the black American mathematician David Blackwell.

‘He is the greatest living mathematician, the greatest,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come with me, nkem? It’s only for a week.’

Olanna said no; she wanted the chance to settle down when he was not there, to make peace with her fears in his absence. The first thing she did after he left was to throw away the red and white plastic flowers on the centre table.

Ugwu looked horrified. ‘But mah, it is still good.’

She led the way outside to the African lilies and pink roses, freshly watered by Jomo, and asked Ugwu to cut some. She showed him how much water to put in the vase. Ugwu looked at the flowers and shook his head, as if he could not believe her foolishness. ‘But it die, mah. The other one don’t die.’

‘Yes, but these are better, fa makali,’ Olanna said.

‘How better, mah?’ He always responded in English to her Igbo, as if he saw her speaking Igbo to him as an insult that he had to defend himself against by insistently speaking English.

‘They are just nicer,’ she said, and realized that she did not know how to explain why fresh flowers were better than plastic ones. Later, when she saw the plastic flowers in a kitchen cupboard, she was not surprised. Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful. She asked him to clean out the store and line the shelves with old newspapers, and as he worked she stood by and asked him about his family. It was difficult to picture them because, with his limited vocabulary, he described everyone as ‘very good’. She went to the market with him, and after they bought the household items, she bought him a comb and a shirt. She taught him to cook fried rice with green peppers and diced carrots, asked him not to cook beans until they became pudding, not to douse things in oil, not to be too sparing with salt. Although she had noticed his body odour the first time she saw him, she let a few days pass before she gave him some scented powder for his armpits and asked him to use two capfuls of Dettol in his bath water. He looked pleased when he sniffed the powder, and she wondered if he could tell that it was a feminine scent. She wondered, too, what he really thought of her. There was clearly affection, but there was also a quiet speculation in his eyes, as if he was holding her up to something. And she worried that she came out lacking.

He finally started to speak Igbo to her on the day she rearranged the photos on the wall. A wall gecko had scuttled out from behind the wood-framed photo of Odenigbo in a graduating gown, and Ugwu shouted, ‘Egbukwala! Don’t kill it!’

‘What?’ She turned to glance down at him from the chair she was standing on.

‘If you kill it you will get a stomachache,’ he said. She found his Opi dialect funny, the way he seemed to spit the words out.

‘Of course we won’t kill it. Let’s hang the photo on that wall.’

‘Yes, mah,’ he said, and then began to tell her, in Igbo, how his sister Anulika had suffered a terrible stomachache after killing a gecko.

Olanna felt less of a visitor in the house when Odenigbo came back; he pulled her forcefully, kissed her, pressed her to him.

‘You should eat first,’ she said.

‘I know what I want to eat.’

She laughed. She felt ridiculously happy.

‘What’s happened here?’ Odenigbo asked, looking around the room. ‘All the books on that shelf?’

‘Your older books are in the second bedroom. I need the space for my books.’

‘Ezi okwu? You’ve really moved in, haven’t you?’ Odenigbo was laughing.

‘Go and have a bath,’ she said.

‘And what was that flowery scent on my good man?’

‘I gave him a scented talcum powder. Didn’t you notice his body odour?’

‘That’s the smell of villagers. I used to smell like that until I left Abba to go to secondary school. But you wouldn’t know about things like that.’ His tone was gently teasing. But his hands were not gentle. They were unbuttoning her blouse, freeing her breast from a bra cup. She was not sure how much time had passed, but she was tangled in bed with Odenigbo, warm and naked, when Ugwu knocked to say they had visitors.

‘Can’t they leave?’ she murmured.

‘Come, nkem,’ Odenigbo said. ‘I can’t wait for them to meet you.’

‘Let’s stay here just a little longer.’ She ran her hand over the curly hair on his chest, but he kissed her and got up to look for his underwear.

Olanna dressed reluctantly and went out to the living room.

‘My friends, my friends,’ Odenigbo announced, with an exaggerated flourish, ‘this, finally, is Olanna.’

The woman, who was tuning the radiogram, turned and took Olanna’s hand. ‘How are you?’ she asked. Her head was wrapped in a bright-orange turban.

‘I’m well,’ Olanna said. ‘You must be Lara Adebayo.’

‘Yes,’ Miss Adebayo said. ‘He did not tell us that you were illogically pretty.’

Olanna stepped back, flustered for a moment. ‘I will take that as a compliment.’

‘And what a proper English accent,’ Miss Adebayo murmured, with a pitying smile, before turning back to the radiogram. She had a compact body, a straight back that looked straighter in her stiff orange-print dress, the body of a questioner whom one dared not question back.

‘I’m Okeoma,’ the man with the tangled mop of uncombed hair said. ‘I thought Odenigbo’s girlfriend was a human being; he didn’t say you were a water mermaid.’

Olanna laughed, grateful for the warmth in Okeoma’s expression and the way he held her hand a little too long. Dr Patel looked shy as he said, ‘Very nice to see you finally,’ and Professor Ezeka shook her hand and then nodded disdainfully when she said her degree was in sociology and not one of the proper sciences.

After Ugwu served drinks, Olanna watched Odenigbo raise his glass to his lips and all she could think of was how those lips had fastened around her nipple only minutes ago. She surreptitiously moved so that her inner arm brushed against her breast and closed her eyes at the needles of delicious pain. Sometimes Odenigbo bit too hard. She wanted the guests to leave.

‘Did not that great thinker Hegel call Africa a land of childhood?’ Professor Ezeka asked, in an affected tone.

‘Maybe the people who put up those NO CHILDREN AND AFRICANS signs in the cinemas in Mombasa had read Hegel, then,’ Dr Patel said, and chuckled.

‘Nobody can take Hegel seriously. Have you read him closely? He’s funny, very funny. But Hume and Voltaire and Locke felt the same way about Africa,’ Odenigbo said. ‘Greatness depends on where you are coming from. It’s just like the Israelis who were asked what they thought of Eichmann’s trial the other day, and one of them said he did not understand how the Nazis could have been thought great by anyone at any time. But they were, weren’t they? They still are!’ Odenigbo gestured with his hand, palm upward, and Olanna remembered that hand grasping her waist.

‘What people fail to see is this: If Europe had cared more about Africa, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened,’ Odenigbo said. ‘In short, the World War would not have happened!’

‘What do you mean?’ Miss Adebayo asked. She held her glass to her lips.

‘How can you ask what I mean? It’s self-evident, starting with the Herero people.’ Odenigbo was shifting on his seat, his voice raised, and Olanna wondered if he remembered how loud they had been, how afterwards he had said, laughing, ‘If we go on like this at night, we’ll probably wake Ugwu up, poor chap.’

‘You’ve come again, Odenigbo,’ Miss Adebayo said. ‘You’re saying that if white people had not murdered the Herero, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened? I don’t see a connection at all!’

‘Don’t you see?’ Odenigbo asked. ‘They started their race studies with the Herero and concluded with the Jews. Of course there’s a connection!’

‘Your argument doesn’t hold water at all, you sophist,’ Miss Adebayo said, and dismissively downed what was in her glass.

‘But the World War was a bad thing that was also good, as our people say,’ Okeoma said. ‘My father’s brother fought in Burma and came back filled with one burning question: How come nobody told him before that the white man was not immortal?’

They all laughed. There was something habitual about it, as if they had had different variations of this conversation so many times that they knew just when to laugh. Olanna laughed too and felt for a moment that her laughter sounded different, more shrill, than theirs.

***

The following weeks, when she started teaching a course in introductory sociology, when she joined the staff club and played tennis with other lecturers, when she drove Ugwu to the market and took walks with Odenigbo and joined the St Vincent de Paul Society at St Peter’s Church, she slowly began to get used to Odenigbo’s friends. Odenigbo teased her that more people came to visit now that she was here, that both Okeoma and Patel were falling in love with her, because Okeoma was so eager to read poems in which descriptions of goddesses sounded suspiciously like her and Dr Patel told too many stories of his days at Makerere, where he cast himself as the perfectly chivalrous intellectual.

Olanna liked Dr Patel, but it was Okeoma whose visits she most looked forward to. His untidy hair and rumpled clothes and dramatic poetry put her at ease. And she noticed, early on, that it was Okeoma’s opinions that Odenigbo most respected, saying ‘The voice of our generation!’ as though he truly believed it. She was still not sure what to make of Professor Ezeka’s hoarse superciliousness, his certainty that he knew better than everyone else but chose to say little. Neither was she sure of Miss Adebayo. It would have been easier if Miss Adebayo showed jealousy, but it was as if Miss Adebayo thought her to be unworthy of competition, with her unintellectual ways and her too-pretty face and her mimicking-the-oppressor English accent. She found herself talking more when Miss Adebayo was there, desperately giving opinions with a need to impress – Nkrumah really wanted to lord it over all of Africa, it was arrogant of America to insist that the Soviets take their missiles out of Cuba while theirs remained in Turkey, Sharpeville was only a dramatic example of the hundreds of blacks killed by the South African state every day – but she suspected that there was a glaze of unoriginality to all her ideas. And she suspected that Miss Adebayo knew this; it was always when she spoke that Miss Adebayo would pick up a journal or pour another drink or get up to go to the toilet. Finally, she gave up. She would never like Miss Adebayo and Miss Adebayo would never even think about liking her. Perhaps Miss Adebayo could tell, from her face, that she was afraid of things, that she was unsure, that she was not one of those people with no patience for self-doubt. People like Odenigbo. People like Miss Adebayo herself, who could look a person in the eye and calmly tell her that she was illogically pretty, who could even use that phrase, illogically pretty.

Still, when Olanna lay in bed with Odenigbo, legs intertwined, it would strike her how her life in Nsukka felt like being immersed in a mesh of soft feathers, even on the days when Odenigbo locked himself in the study for hours. Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it to a prosaic partnership.

3

Richard said little at the parties Susan took him to. When she introduced him, she always added that he was a writer, and he hoped the other guests assumed he was distant in the way writers were, although he feared they saw through him and knew he simply felt out of place. But they were pleasant to him; they would be to anyone who was Susan’s companion, as long as Susan continued to engage them with her wit, her laughter, her green eyes that sparkled in a face flushed from glasses of wine.

Richard didn’t mind standing by and waiting until she was ready to leave, didn’t mind that none of her friends made an effort to draw him in, didn’t even mind when a pasty-faced drunk woman referred to him as Susan’s pretty boy. But he minded the all-expatriate parties where Susan would nudge him to ‘join the men’ while she went over to the circle of women to compare notes on living in Nigeria. He felt awkward with the men. They were mostly English, ex-colonial administrators and business people from John Holt and Kingsway and GB Ollivant and Shell-BP and United Africa Company. They were reddened from sun and alcohol. They chuckled about how tribal Nigerian politics was, and perhaps these chaps were not quite so ready to rule themselves after all. They discussed cricket, plantations they owned or planned to own, the perfect weather in Jos, business opportunities in Kaduna. When Richard mentioned his interest in Igbo-Ukwu art, they said it didn’t have much of a market yet, so he did not bother to explain that he wasn’t at all interested in the money, it was the aesthetics that drew him. And when he said he had just arrived in Lagos and wanted to write a book about Nigeria, they gave him brief smiles and advice: The people were bloody beggars, be prepared for their body odours and the way they will stand and stare at you on the roads, never believe a hard-luck story, never show weakness to domestic staff. There were jokes to illustrate each African trait. The uppity African stood out in Richard’s mind: An African was walking a dog and an Englishman asked, ‘What are you doing with that monkey?’ and the African answered, ‘It’s a dog, not a monkey’ – as if the Englishman had been talking to him!

Richard laughed at the jokes. He tried, too, not to drift throughout the conversations, not to show how awkward he felt. He preferred talking to the women, although he had learned not to spend too long with a particular woman, or Susan would throw a glass at the wall when they got home. He was baffled the first time it happened. He had spent a short time talking to Clovis Bancroft about her brother’s life as a district commissioner in Enugu years ago, and afterwards Susan was silent during the drive back in her chauffeur-driven car. He thought perhaps she was dozing off; it had to be why she was not talking about somebody’s ghastly dress or the unimaginative hors d’oeuvres that had been served. But when they got back to her house, she picked up a glass from the cabinet and threw it against the wall. ‘That horrible little woman, Richard, and right in my face, too. It’s so awful!’ She sat on the sofa and buried her face in her hands until he said he was very sorry, although he was not quite sure what he was apologizing for.

Another glass crashed some weeks later. He had talked to Julia March, mostly about her research on the Asantehene in Ghana, and stood absorbed, listening, until Susan came over and pulled him by the arm. Later, after the brittle splinter of shattering glass, Susan said she knew he didn’t mean to flirt but he must understand that people were horribly presumptuous and the gossip here was vicious, just vicious. He had apologized again and wondered what the stewards who cleaned up the glass thought.

Then there was the dinner at which he talked about Nok art with a university lecturer, a timid Yoruba woman who seemed to feel just as out of place as he did. He had expected Susan’s reaction and prepared to apologize before she got to the living room, so that he could save a glass. But Susan was chatty as they were driven home; she asked if his conversation with the woman had been interesting and hoped he had learned something that would be useful for his book. He stared at her in the dim interior of the car. She would not have said that if he had been talking to one of the British women, even though some of them had helped write the Nigerian constitution. It was, he realized, simply that black women were not threatening to her, were not equal rivals.

Aunt Elizabeth had said that Susan was vivacious and charming, never mind that she was a little older than he was, and had been in Nigeria for a while and could show him round. Richard did not want to be shown round; he had managed well on his past trips abroad. But Aunt Elizabeth insisted. Africa was nothing like Argentina or India. She said Africa in the tone of one repressing a shudder, or perhaps it was because she did not want him to leave at all, she wanted him to stay in London and keep writing for the News Chronicle. He still did not think that anybody read his tiny column, although Aunt Elizabeth said all her friends did. But she would: The job was a bit of a sinecure after all; he would not have been offered it in the first place if the editor were not an old friend of hers.

Richard did not try to explain his desire to see Nigeria to Aunt Elizabeth, but he did accept Susan’s offer to show him around. The first thing he noticed when he arrived in Lagos was Susan’s sparkle, her posh prettiness, the way she focused entirely on him, touched his arm as she laughed. She spoke with authority about Nigeria and Nigerians. When they drove past the noisy markets with music blaring from shops, the haphazard stalls of the streetside hawkers, the gutters thick with mouldy water, she said, ‘They have a marvellous energy, really, but very little sense of hygiene, I’m afraid.’ She told him the Hausa in the North were a dignified lot, the Igbo were surly and money-loving, and the Yoruba were rather jolly, even if they were first-rate lickspittles. On Saturday evenings, when she pointed at the crowds of brightly dressed people dancing in front of lit-up canopies on the streets, she said, ‘There you go. The Yoruba get into huge debt just to throw these parties.’

She helped him find a small flat, buy a small car, get a driving licence, go to the Lagos and Ibadan museums. ‘You must meet all my friends,’ she said. At first, when she introduced him as a writer, he wanted to correct her: journalist, not writer. But he was a writer, at least he was certain he was meant to be a writer, an artist, a creator. His journalism was temporary, something he would do until he wrote that brilliant novel.

So he let Susan introduce him as a writer. It seemed to make her friends tolerate him, anyway. It made Professor Nicholas Green suggest he apply for the foreign research grant at Nsukka, where he could write in a university environment. Richard did, not only because of the prospect of writing in a university, but also because he would be in the southeast, in the land of Igbo-Ukwu art, the land of the magnificent roped pot. That, after all, was why he had come to Nigeria.

He had been in Nigeria for a few months when Susan asked if he would like to move in with her, since her house in Ikoyi was large, the gardens were lovely, and she thought he would work much better there than in his rented flat with the uneven cement floors where his landlord moaned about his leaving his lights on for too long. Richard didn’t want to say yes. He didn’t want to stay much longer in Lagos. He wanted to do more travelling through the country while waiting to hear back from Nsukka. But Susan had already redecorated her airy study for him, so he moved in. Day after day, he sat on her leather chair and pored over books and bits of research material, looked out the window at the gardeners watering the lawn, and pounded at the typewriter, although he was aware that he was typing and not writing. Susan was careful to give him the silences he needed, except for when she would look in and whisper, ‘Would you like some tea?’ or ‘Some water?’ or ‘An early lunch?’ He answered in a whisper, too, as if his writing had become something hallowed and had made the room itself sacrosanct. He did not tell her that he had written nothing good so far, that the ideas in his head had not yet coalesced into character and setting and theme. He imagined that she would be hurt; his writing had become the best of her hobbies, and she came home every day with books and journals from the British Council Library. She saw his book as an entity that already existed and could therefore be finished. He, however, was not even sure what his subject was. But he was grateful for her faith. It was as if her believing in his writing made it real, and he showed his gratitude by attending the parties he disliked. After a few parties, he decided that attending was not enough; he would try to be funny. If he could say one witty thing when he was introduced, it might make up for his silence and, more importantly, it would please Susan. He practised a droll, self-deprecating expression and a halting delivery in front of the bathroom mirror for a while. ‘This is Richard Churchill,’ Susan would say and he would shake hands and quip, ‘No relation of Sir Winston’s, I’m afraid, or I might have turned out a little cleverer.’

Susan’s friends laughed at this, although he wondered if it was from pity at his fumbling attempt at humour more than from amusement. But nobody had ever said, ‘How funny,’ in a mocking tone, as Kainene did that first day in the cocktail room of the Federal Palace Hotel. She was smoking. She could blow perfect smoke rings. She stood in the same circle as he and Susan, and he glanced at her and thought she was the mistress of one of the politicians. He did that with the people he met, tried to guess a reason for their being there, to determine who had been brought by someone. Perhaps it was because he would not have been at any of the parties if it wasn’t for Susan. He didn’t think Kainene was some wealthy Nigerian’s daughter because she had none of the cultivated demureness. She seemed more like a mistress: her brazenly red lipstick, her tight dress, her smoking. But then she didn’t smile in that plastic way the mistresses did. She didn’t even have the generic prettiness that made him inclined to believe the rumour that Nigerian politicians swapped mistresses. In fact, she was not pretty at all. He did not really notice this until he looked at her again as a friend of Susan’s did the introductions. ‘This is Kainene Ozobia, Chief Ozobia’s daughter. Kainene’s just got her master’s from London. Kainene, this is Susan Grenville- Pitts, from the British Council, and this is Richard Churchill.’

‘How do you do,’ Susan said to Kainene, and then turned around to speak to another guest.

‘Hello,’ Richard said. Kainene was silent for too long, with her cigarette between her lips as she looked at him levelly, and so he ran his hand through his hair and mumbled, ‘I’m no relation of Sir Winston’s, I’m afraid, or I might have turned out a little cleverer.’

She exhaled before she said, ‘How funny.’ She was very thin and very tall, almost as tall as he was, and she was staring right into his eyes, with a steely blank expression. Her skin was the colour of Belgian chocolate. He spread his legs a little wider and pressed his feet down firmly, because he feared that if he didn’t he might find himself reeling, colliding with her.

Susan came back and tugged at him but he didn’t want to leave and when he opened his mouth, he wasn’t sure what he was going to say. ‘It turns out Kainene and I have a mutual friend in London. Did I tell you about Wilfred at the Spectator?’

‘Oh,’ Susan said, smiling. ‘How lovely. I’ll let you two catch up then. Be back in a bit.’

She exchanged kisses with an elderly couple before moving to a group at the other end of the room.

‘You just lied to your wife,’ Kainene said.

‘She’s not my wife.’ He was surprised at how giddy he felt to be left standing with her. She raised her glass to her lips and sipped. She inhaled and exhaled. Silver ashes swirled down to the floor. Everything seemed to be in slow motion: The hotel ballroom enlarged and deflated and the air was sucked in and out of a space that seemed to be, for a moment, occupied only by himself and Kainene.

‘Would you move away, please?’ she asked.

He was startled. ‘What?’

‘There is a photographer behind you who is keen to take a photo of me, and particularly of my necklace.’

He moved aside and watched as she stared at the camera. She did not pose but she looked comfortable; she was used to having her photograph taken at parties.

‘The necklace will be featured in tomorrow’s Lagos Life. I suppose that would be my way of contributing to our newly independent country. I am giving fellow Nigerians something to covet, an incentive to work hard,’ she said, coming back to stand beside him.

‘It’s a lovely necklace,’ he said, although it looked gaudy. He wanted to reach out and touch it, though, to lift it off her neck and then let it settle back against the hollow of her throat. Her collarbones jutted out sharply.

‘Of course it’s not lovely. My father has obscene taste in jewellery,’ she said. ‘But it’s his money. I see my sister and my parents looking for me, by the way. I should go.’

‘Your sister is here?’ Richard asked, quickly, before she could turn and leave.

‘Yes. We’re twins,’ she said and paused, as if that were a momentous disclosure. ‘Kainene and Olanna. Her name is the lyrical God’s Gold, and mine is the more practical Let’s watch and see what next God will bring.’

Richard watched the smile that pulled her mouth up at one end, a sardonic smile that he imagined hid something else, perhaps dissatisfaction. He didn’t know what to say. He felt as if time was slipping away from him.

‘Who is older?’ he asked.

‘Who is older? What a question.’ She arched her eyebrows. ‘I’m told I came out first.’

Richard cradled his wine glass and wondered if tightening his grasp any further would crush it.

‘There she is, my sister,’ Kainene said. ‘Shall I introduce you? Everybody wants to meet her.’

Richard didn’t turn to look. ‘I’d rather talk to you,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind, that is.’ He ran his hand through his hair. She was watching him; he felt adolescent with her gaze on him.

‘You’re shy,’ she said.

‘I’ve been called worse.’

She smiled, in the way that meant she had found that funny, and he felt accomplished to have made her smile.

‘Have you ever been to the market in Balogun?’ she asked. ‘They display slabs of meat on tables, and you are supposed to grope and feel and then decide which you want. My sister and I are meat. We are here so that suitable bachelors will make the kill.’

‘Oh,’ he said. It seemed a strangely intimate thing to tell him, although it was said in the same dry, sarcastic tone that seemed natural to her. He wanted to tell her something about himself, too, wanted to exchange small kernels of intimacies with her.

‘Here comes the wife you denied,’ Kainene murmured.

Susan came back and pushed a glass into his hand. ‘Here, darling,’ she said, and then turned to Kainene. ‘How lovely to meet you.’

‘How lovely to meet you,’ Kainene said and half-raised her glass towards Susan.

Susan steered him away. ‘She’s Chief Ozobia’s daughter, is she? Whatever happened to her? Quite extraordinary; her mother is stunning, absolutely stunning. Chief Ozobia owns half of Lagos but there is something terribly nouveau riche about him. He doesn’t have much of a formal education, you see, and neither has his wife. I suppose that’s what makes him so obvious.’

Richard was usually amused by Susan’s mini-biographies, but now the whispering irritated him. He did not want the champagne; her nails were digging into his arm. She led him to a group of expatriates and stopped to chat, laughing loudly, a little drunk. He searched the room for Kainene. At first, he could not find the red dress and then he saw her standing near her father; Chief Ozobia looked expansive, with the arching hand gestures he made as he spoke, the intricately embroidered agbada, whose folds and folds of blue cloth made him even wider than he was. Mrs Ozobia was half his size and wore a wrapper and headgear made out of the same blue fabric. Richard was momentarily startled by how perfectly almond-shaped her eyes were, wide-set in a dark face that was intimidating to look at. He would never have guessed that she was Kainene’s mother, nor would he have guessed that Kainene and Olanna were twins. Olanna took after their mother, although hers was a more approachable beauty with the softer face and the smiling graciousness and the fleshy, curvy body that filled out her black dress. A body Susan would call African. Kainene looked even thinner next to Olanna, almost androgynous, her tight maxi outlining the boyishness of her hips. Richard stared at her for a long time, willing her to search for him. She seemed aloof, watching the people in their group with a now indifferent, now mocking expression. Finally, she looked up and her eyes met his and she tilted her head and raised her eyebrows, as if she knew very well that he had been watching her. He averted his eyes. Then he looked back quickly, determined to smile this time, to make some useful gesture, but she had turned her back to him. He watched her until she left with her parents and Olanna.

Richard read the next issue of Lagos Life, and when he saw her photo, he searched her expression, looking for what he did not know. He wrote a few pages in a burst of manic productivity, fictional portraits of a tall, ebony-coloured woman with a near-flat chest. He went to the British Council Library and looked up her father in the business journals. He copied down all four of the numbers next to ozobia in the phone book. He picked up the phone many times and put it back when he heard the operator’s voice. He practised what he would say in front of the mirror, the gestures he would make, although he was aware that she would not see him if they spoke over the phone. He considered sending her a card or perhaps a basket of fruit. Finally, he called. She didn’t sound surprised to hear from him. Or perhaps it was just that she sounded too calm, while his heart hammered in his chest.

‘Would you like to meet for a drink?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Shall we say Zobis Hotel at noon? It’s my father’s, and I can get us a private suite.’

‘Yes, yes, that would be lovely.’

He hung up, shaken. He was not sure if he should be excited, if private suite was suggestive. When they met in the hotel lounge, she moved close so that he could kiss her cheek and then led the way upstairs, to the terrace, where they sat looking down at the palm trees by the swimming pool. It was a sunny, luminous day. Once in a while, a breeze swayed the palms, and he hoped it would not tousle his hair too much and that the umbrella above would keep away those unflattering ripe-tomato spots that appeared on his cheeks whenever he was out in the sun.

‘You can see Heathgrove from here,’ she said, pointing. ‘The iniquitously expensive and secretive British secondary school my sister and I attended. My father thought we were too young to be sent abroad, but he was determined that we be as European as possible.’

‘Is it the building with the tower?’

‘Yes. The entire school is just two buildings, really. There were very few of us there. It is so exclusive, many Nigerians don’t even know it exists.’ She looked into her glass for a while. ‘Do you have siblings?’

‘No. I was an only child. My parents died when I was nine.’

‘Nine. You were young.’

He was pleased that she didn’t look too sympathetic, in the false way some people did, as if they had known his parents even though they hadn’t.

‘They were very often away. It was Molly, my nanny, who really raised me. After they died, it was decided I would live with my aunt in London.’ Richard paused, pleased to feel the strangely inchoate intimacy that came with talking about himself, something he rarely did. ‘My cousins Martin and Virginia were about my age but terribly sophisticated; Aunt Elizabeth was quite grand, you see, and I was the cousin from the tiny village in Shropshire. I started thinking about running away the first day I arrived there.’

‘Did you?’

‘Many times. They always found me. Sometimes just down the street.’

‘What were you running to?’

‘What?’

‘What were you running to?’

Richard thought about it for a while. He knew he was running away from a house that had pictures of long-dead people on the walls breathing down on him. But he didn’t know what he was running towards. Did children ever think about that?

‘Maybe I was running to Molly. I don’t know.’

‘I knew what I wanted to run to. But it didn’t exist, so I didn’t leave,’ Kainene said, leaning back on her seat.

‘How so?’

She lit a cigarette, as if she had not heard his question. Her silences left him feeling helpless and eager to win back her attention. He wanted to tell her about the roped pot. He was not sure where he first read about Igbo-Ukwu art, about the native man who was digging a well and discovered the bronze castings that may well be the first in Africa, dating back to the ninth century. But it was in Colonies Magazine that he saw the photos. The roped pot stood out immediately; he ran a finger over the picture and ached to touch the delicately cast metal itself. He wanted to try explaining how deeply stirred he had been by the pot but decided not to. He would give it time. He felt strangely comforted by this thought because he realized that what he wanted most of all, with her, was time.

‘Did you come to Nigeria to run away from something?’ she asked finally.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been a loner and I’ve always wanted to see Africa, so I took leave from my humble newspaper job and a generous loan from my aunt and here I am.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you to be a loner.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re handsome. Beautiful people are not usually loners.’ She said it flatly, as if it were not a compliment, and so he hoped she did not notice that he blushed.

‘Well, I am,’ he said; he could think of nothing else to say. ‘I’ve always been.’

‘A loner and a modern-day explorer of the Dark Continent,’ she said dryly.

He laughed. The sound spilt out of him, uncontrolled, and he looked down at the clear, blue pool and thought, blithely, that perhaps that shade of blue was also the colour of hope.

They met the next day for lunch, and the day after. Each time, she led the way to the suite and they sat on the terrace and ate rice and drank cold beer. She touched her glass rim with the tip of her tongue before she sipped. It aroused him, that brief glimpse of pink tongue, more so because she didn’t seem conscious of it. Her silences were brooding, insular, and yet he felt a connection to her. Perhaps it was because she was distant and withdrawn. He found himself talking in a way he usually didn’t, and when their time ended and she got up, often to join her father at a meeting, he felt his feet thicken with curdled blood. He did not want to leave, could not bear the thought of going back to sit in Susan’s study and type and wait for Susan’s subdued knocks. He did not understand why Susan suspected nothing, why she could not simply look at him and tell how different he felt, why she did not even notice that he splashed on more aftershave now. He had not been unfaithful to her, of course, but fidelity could not just be about sex. His laughing with Kainene, telling Kainene about Aunt Elizabeth, watching Kainene smoke, surely had to be infidelities; they felt so. His quickened heartbeat when Kainene kissed him goodbye was an infidelity. Her hand clasped in his on the table was an infidelity. And so the day Kainene did not give him the usual goodbye kiss and instead pressed her mouth to his, lips parted, he was surprised. He had not permitted himself to hope for too much. Perhaps it was why an erection eluded him: the gelding mix of surprise and desire. They undressed quickly. His naked body was pressed to hers and yet he was limp. He explored the angles of her collarbones and her hips, all the time willing his body and his mind to work better together, willing his desire to bypass his anxiety. But he did not become hard. He could feel the flaccid weight between his legs.

She sat up in bed and lit a cigarette.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and when she shrugged and said nothing, he wished he had not apologized. There was something dismal in the luxurious overfurnished suite, as he pulled on trousers that might just as well have stayed on and she hooked her bra. He wished she would say something.

‘Shall we meet tomorrow?’ he asked.

She blew the smoke through her nose and, watching it disappear in the air, asked, ‘This is crude, isn’t it?’

‘Shall we meet tomorrow?’ he asked again.

‘I’m going to Port Harcourt with my father to meet some oil people,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be back after noon on Wednesday. We could have a late lunch.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ Richard said, and until she met him in the hotel lobby, days later, he worried that she would not come. They had lunch and watched the swimmers below.

She was a little more animated, smoked more, spoke more. She told him about the people she had met since she began to work with her father, how they were all the same. ‘The new Nigerian upper class is a collection of illiterates who read nothing and eat food they dislike at overpriced Lebanese restaurants and have social conversations around one subject: ‘How’s the new car behaving?” Once, she laughed. Once, she held his hand. But she did not ask him into the suite and he wondered if she wanted to give it time or if she had decided that it was not the sort of relationship she wanted with him after all.

He could not bring himself to act. Days passed before she finally asked if he wanted to go inside, and he felt like an understudy who hoped the actor would not show up and then, when the actor finally did fail to come, became crippled by awkwardness, not quite as ready as he had thought he was for the stage lights. She led the way inside. When he began to pull her dress up above her thighs, she pushed him away calmly, as if she knew his frenzy was simply armour for his fear. She hung her dress over the chair. He was so terrified of failing her again that seeing himself erect made him deliriously grateful, so grateful that he was only just inside her before he felt that involuntary tremble that he could not stop. They lay there, he on top of her, for a while, and then he rolled off. He wanted to tell her that this had never happened to him before. His sex life with Susan was satisfactory, though perfunctory.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

She lit a cigarette, watching him. ‘Would you like to come to dinner tonight? My parents have invited a few people.’

For a moment, he was taken aback. Then he said, ‘Yes, I’d love to.’ He hoped the invitation meant something, reflected a change in her perception of the relationship. But when he arrived at her parents’ house in Ikoyi, she introduced him by saying, ‘This is Richard Churchill,’ and then stopped with a pause that felt like a deliberate dare to her parents and the other guests to think what they would. Her father looked him over and asked what he did.

‘I’m a writer,’ he said.

‘A writer? I see,’ Chief Ozobia said.

Richard wished he hadn’t said he was a writer and so he added, as if to make up for saying he was a writer, ‘I’m fascinated by the discoveries at Igbo-Ukwu. The bronze castings.’

‘Hmm,’ Chief Ozobia murmured. ‘Do you have any family doing business in Nigeria?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

Chief Ozobia smiled and looked away. He didn’t say very much else to Richard for the rest of the evening. Neither did Mrs Ozobia, who followed her husband around, her manner regal, her beauty more intimidating close up. Olanna was different. Her smile was guarded when Kainene introduced them, but as they talked, she became warmer and he wondered if the flicker in her eyes was pity, if she could tell how keen he was to say the right things and yet didn’t know what those right things were. Her warmth flattered him.

He felt strangely bereft when she sat far from him at the table. The salad had just been served when she began to discuss politics with a guest. Richard knew it was about the need for Nigeria to become a republic and stop claiming Queen Elizabeth as head of state, but he did not pay close attention until she turned to him and asked, ‘Don’t you agree, Richard?’ as if his opinion mattered.

He cleared his throat. ‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said, even though he was¬n’t sure what it was he was agreeing with. He felt grateful that she had pulled him into the conversation, included him, and he was charmed by that quality of hers that seemed both sophisticated and naive, an idealism that refused to be suffocated by gritty reality. Her skin glowed. Her cheekbones rose as she smiled. But she lacked Kainene’s melancholy mystique, which exhilarated and confused him. Kainene sat next to him and said little throughout dinner, once sharply asking a steward to change a glass that looked cloudy, once leaning over to ask, ‘The sauce is nauseating, isn’t it?’ She was mostly inscrutable, watching, drinking, smoking. He ached to know what she was thinking. He felt a similar physical pain when he desired her, and he would dream about being inside her, thrusting as deep as he could, to try and discover something that he knew he never would. It was like drinking glass after glass of water and still emerging thirsty, and with the stirring fear that he would never quench the thirst.

Richard worried about Susan. He would watch her, the firm chin and green eyes, and tell himself that it was unfair to deceive her, to skulk in the study until she fell asleep, to lie to her about being at the library or museum or polo club. She deserved better. But there was a reassuring stability to being with her, a certain safety in her whispering and her study room with the pencil sketches of Shakespeare on the walls. Kainene was different. He left Kainene full of a giddy happiness and an equally dizzying sense of insecurity. He wanted to ask her what she thought of the things they never discussed – their relationship, a future, Susan – but his uncertainties muted him each time; he was afraid of what her answers would be.

He pushed any decisions away until the morning he woke up and thought about that day in Wentnor, when he was out playing and heard Molly calling him. ‘Richard! Supper!’ Instead of answering ‘Coming!’ and running to her, he dodged under a hedge, scraping his knees. ‘Richard! Richard!’ Molly sounded frantic this time, but he remained silent, crouched. ‘Richard! Where are you, Dicky?’ A rabbit stopped and watched him, and he locked eyes with the rabbit and, for those short moments, only he and the rabbit knew where he was. Then the rabbit leapt out and Molly peered under the bushes and saw him. She smacked him. She told him to stay in his room for the rest of the day. She said she was very upset and would tell Mr and Mrs Churchill. But those short moments had made it all worthwhile, those moments of pure plenary abandon, when he felt as if he, and he alone, were in control of the universe of his childhood. Recalling them, he decided he would end it with Susan. His relationship with Kainene might well not last long, but the moments of being with her, knowing he was not weighed down by lies and pretense, would make the brevity worthwhile.

His resolve buoyed him. Still, he put off telling Susan for another week, until the evening they returned from a party where she had drunk too many glasses of wine.

‘Would you like a nightcap, darling?’ she asked.

‘Susan, I care very much about you,’ he said in a rush. ‘But I’m not quite sure that things are going very well – that is, things between us.’

‘What are you saying?’ Susan asked, although her hushed tone and blenched face told him that she knew very well what he was saying.

He ran his hand through his hair.

‘Who is it?’ Susan asked.

‘It’s not another woman. I just think our needs are different.’ He hoped he did not sound insincere, but it was true; they had always wanted different things, always valued different things. He should never have moved in with her.

‘It’s not Clovis Bancroft, is it?’ Her ears were red. They always turned red after she drank, but he was only noticing the strangeness of it now, the angry-red ears jutting out by her pale face.

‘No, of course not.’

Susan poured herself a drink and sat on the arm of the sofa. They were silent for a while. ‘I fancied you the minute I saw you and I didn’t think I would, really. I thought how handsome and gentle he is, and I must have resolved there that I would never let you go.’ She laughed quietly, and he noticed the tiny lines around her eyes.

‘Susan –’ he said, and stopped, because there was nothing else to say. He hadn’t known she thought these things of him. He realized how little they had talked, how their relationship had been like an artless flow with little input from them, or at least from him. The relationship had happened to him.

‘It was all too rushed for you, wasn’t it?’ Susan said. She came and stood by him. She had regained her composure; her chin no longer quivered. ‘You didn’t get a chance to explore, really, to see more of the country like you wanted to; you moved in here and I’ve made you go to these ghastly parties with people who don’t much care about writing and African art and that sort of thing. It must have been so awful for you. I’m terribly sorry, Richard, and I do understand. Of course, you must see a bit of the country. Can I help? I have friends in Enugu and Kaduna.’

Richard took the glass from her, put it down, and took her in his arms. He felt a faint nostalgia at the familiar apple scent of her shampoo. ‘No, I’ll be all right,’ he said.

She didn’t think it was really over, it was clear; she thought he would come back and he said nothing to make her think differently. When the steward in the white apron opened the front door to let him out, Richard was light with relief.

‘Bye, sah,’ the steward said.

‘Goodbye, Okon.’ Richard wondered if the inscrutable Okon ever pressed his ear to the door when he and Susan had their glass-breaking rows. He once asked Okon to teach him some simple sentences in Efik, but Susan had stopped it after she found them both in the study, Okon fidgeting as Richard pronounced the words. Okon had looked at Susan with gratitude, as if she had just saved him from a mad white man, and later, Susan’s tone was mild when she said she understood that Richard didn’t know how things were done. One couldn’t cross certain lines. It was a tone that reminded him of Aunt Elizabeth, of views endorsed with an unapologetic, self-indulgent English decency. Perhaps if he had told Susan about Kainene, she would have used that tone to tell him that she quite understood his need to experiment with a black woman.

Richard saw Okon waving as he drove away. He had the overwhelming urge to sing, except that he was not a singing man. All the other houses on Glover Street were like Susan’s, expansive, hugged by palm trees and beds of languid grass.

The next afternoon, Richard sat up in bed naked, looking down at Kainene. He had just failed her again. ‘I’m sorry. I think I get overexcited,’ he said.

‘May I have a cigarette?’ she asked. The silky sheet outlined the angular thinness of her naked body.

He lit it for her. She sat up from under the cover, her dark-brown nipples tightening in the cold, air-conditioned room, and looked away as she exhaled. ‘We’ll give it time,’ she said. ‘And there are other ways.’

Richard felt a swift surge of irritation, towards himself for being uselessly limp, towards her for that half-mocking smile and for saying there were other ways, as if he was permanently incapable of doing things the traditional way. He knew what he could do. He knew he could satisfy her. He just needed time. He had begun, though, to think about some herbs, potent manhood herbs he remembered reading about somewhere, which African men took.

‘Nsukka is a little patch of dust in the middle of the bush, the cheapest land they could get to build the university on,’ Kainene said. It was startling, how easily she slipped into mundane conversation. ‘But it should be perfect for your writing, shouldn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You might like it and want to stay on.’

‘I might.’ Richard slid under the covers. ‘But I’m so pleased you’ll be in Port Harcourt and I won’t have to come all the way to Lagos to see you.’

Kainene said nothing, smoking with steady intakes, and for one terrified moment, he wondered if she was going to tell him that it was over when they both left Lagos and that, in Port Harcourt, she would find herself a man capable of performing.

‘My house will be perfect for our weekends,’ she said finally. ‘It’s monstrous. My father gave it to me last year as a bit of dowry, I think, an enticement for the right sort of man to marry his unattractive daughter. Terribly European when you think of it, since we don’t have dowries, we have bride prices.’ She put the cigarette out. She had not finished it. ‘Olanna said she didn’t want a house. Not that she needs one. Save the houses for the ugly daughter.’

‘Don’t say that, Kainene.’

‘Don’t say that, Kainene,’ Kainene mimicked him. She got up and he wanted to pull her back. But he didn’t; he could not trust his body and could not bear to disappoint her yet again. Sometimes he felt as if he knew nothing about her, as if he would never quite reach her. And yet, other times, lying next to her, he would feel a wholeness, a certainty that he would never need anything else.

‘By the way, I’ve asked Olanna to introduce you to her revolutionary lecturer lover,’ Kainene said. She pulled her wig off and, with her short hair worn in cornrows, her face looked younger, smaller. ‘She used to date a Hausa prince, a pleasant, bland sort of fellow, but he did not have any of the crazed delusions she has. This Odenigbo imagines himself to be quite the freedom fighter. He’s a mathematician but he spends all his time writing newspaper articles about his own brand of mishmash African socialism. Olanna adores that. They don’t seem to realize how much of a joke socialism really is.’ She put the wig back on and began to brush it; the wavy hair, parted in the middle, fell to her chin. Richard liked the clean lines of her thin body, the sleekness of her raised arm.

‘Socialism could very well work in Nigeria if done right, I think,’ he said. ‘It’s really about economic justice, isn’t it?’

Kainene snorted. ‘Socialism would never work for the Igbo.’ She held the brush suspended in mid-air. ‘Ogbenyealu is a common name for girls and you know what it means? “Not to Be Married by a Poor Man.” To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at its best.’

Richard laughed, and he was even more amused because she did not laugh; she simply went back to brushing her hair. He thought about the next time he would laugh with her and then the next. He found himself often thinking about the future, even before the present was over.

He got up and felt shy when she glanced at his naked body. Perhaps she was expressionless only to hide her disgust. He pulled on his underwear and buttoned his shirt hurriedly.

‘I’ve left Susan,’ he blurted out. ‘I’m staying at the Princewill Guesthouse in Ikeja. I’ll pick up the rest of my things from her house before I leave for Nsukka.’

Kainene stared at him, and he saw surprise on her face and then something else he was not sure of. Was it puzzlement?

‘It’s never been a proper relationship, really,’ he said. He did not want her to think he had done it because of her, did not want her asking herself questions about their relationship. Not yet.

‘You’ll need a houseboy,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘A houseboy in Nsukka. You’ll need somebody to wash your clothes and clean your house.’

He was momentarily confused by the non sequitur. ‘A houseboy? I can manage quite well. I’ve lived alone for too long.’

‘I’ll ask Olanna to find somebody,’ Kainene said. She pulled a cigarette from the case, but she didn’t light it. She put it down on the bedside table and came over and hugged him, a tremulous tightening of her arms around him. He was so surprised he did not hug her back. She had never embraced him that closely unless they were in bed. She did not seem to know what to make of the hug either, because she backed away from him quickly and lit the cigarette. He thought about that hug often, and each time he did he had the sensation of a wall crumbling.

Richard left for Nsukka a week later. He drove at moderate speed, pulling off the road once in a while to look at the hand-drawn map Kainene had given him. After he crossed the River Niger, he decided to stop at Igbo-Ukwu. Now that he was finally in Igbo land, he wanted to see the home of the roped pot before anything else. A few cement houses dotted the village; they marred the picturesque quality of the mud huts that were crowded on either side of dirt paths, paths so narrow he parked his car a long way away and followed a young man in khaki shorts who seemed used to showing visitors around. His name was Emeka Anozie. He had been one of the labourers who worked at the dig. He showed Richard the wide, rectangular ditches where the excavations had taken place, the shovels and pans that had been used to brush the dust off the bronzes.

‘You want to talk to our big father? I will interpret for you,’ Emeka offered.

‘Thank you.’ Richard felt slightly overwhelmed by the warm reception, by the neighbours who trailed in and said, ‘Good afternoon, nno, welcome,’ as if they did not even think about minding that he had come uninvited.

Pa Anozie had a dirty-looking cloth wound round his body and tied behind his neck. He led the way into his dim obi, which smelt of mushrooms. Although Richard had read about how the bronzes were found, he asked the question anyway. Pa Anozie nudged a pinch of snuff up his nostrils before he began telling the story. About twenty years ago, his brother was digging a well when he hit something metallic that turned out to be a gourd. He soon found a few others and brought them out, washed them, and called the neighbours to come in and see them. They looked well crafted and vaguely familiar, but nobody knew of anyone making anything like them. Soon, word got to the district commissioner in Enugu, who sent somebody to take them to the Department of Antiquities in Lagos. After that, nobody came or asked anything else about the bronzes for a while, and his brother built his well and life went on. Then, a few years ago, the white man from Ibadan came to excavate. There were long talks before the work began, because of a goat house and compound wall that would have to be removed, but the work went well. It was harmattan, but because they feared the thunderstorms, they covered the ditches with tarpaulins spread across bamboo sticks. They found such lovely things: calabashes, shells, many ornaments that women used to decorate themselves, snake images, pots.

‘They also found a burial chamber, didn’t they?’ Richard asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think it was used by the king?’

Pa Anozie gave Richard a long, pained look and mumbled something for a while, looking grieved. Emeka laughed before he translated. ‘Papa said he thought you were among the white people who know something. He said the people of Igboland do not know what a king is. We have priests and elders. The burial place was maybe for a priest. But the priest does not suffer people like king. It is because the white man gave us warrant chiefs that foolish men are calling themselves kings today.’

Richard apologized. He did know that the Igbo were said to have been a republican tribe for thousands of years, but one of the articles about the Igbo-Ukwu findings had suggested that perhaps they once had kings and later deposed them. The Igbo were, after all, a people who deposed gods that had outlived their usefulness. Richard sat there for a while, imagining the lives of people who were capable of such beauty, such complexity, in the time of Alfred the Great. He wanted to write about this, to create something from this, but he did not know what. Perhaps a speculative novel where the main character is an archaeologist digging for bronzes who is then transported to an idyllic past?

He thanked Pa Anozie and got up to leave. Pa Anozie said something and Emeka asked, ‘Papa is asking will you not take photo of him? All the white people that have come take photo.’

Richard shook his head. ‘No, sorry. I haven’t brought a camera.’

Emeka laughed. ‘Papa is asking what kind of white man is this? Why did he come here and what is he doing?’

As he drove towards Nsukka, Richard, too, wondered just what he was doing and, more worrying, what he was going to write.

The university house on Imoke Street was reserved for visiting researchers and artists; it was sparse, near ascetic, and Richard looked over the two armchairs in the living room, the single bed, the bare kitchen cupboards, and felt instantly at home. The house was filled with a suitable silence. When he visited Olanna and Odenigbo, though, she said, ‘I’m sure you must want to make the place a little more habitable,’ so he said, ‘Yes,’ although he liked the soulless furnishing. He agreed only because Olanna’s smile was like a prize, because her attention flattered him. She insisted that he hire their gardener, Jomo, to come in twice a week and plant some flowers in the yard. She introduced him to their friends; she showed him the market; she said she had found him the perfect houseboy.

Richard envisaged somebody young and alert like their houseboy, Ugwu, but Harrison turned out to be a small, stooped stick of a man, middle-aged, wearing an oversized white shirt that stopped below his knees. He bowed extravagantly at the beginning of each conversation. He told Richard with unconcealed pride that he had formerly worked for the Irish priest Father Bernard and the American professor Land. ‘I am making very good beet salad,’ he said that first day, and later Richard realized that he was proud not only of his salad but also of cooking with beets, which he had to buy in the ‘specialty vegetable’ stall because most Nigerians did not eat them. The first dinner Harrison cooked was a savoury fish, with the beet salad as a starter. A crimson beet stew appeared next to his rice the following evening. ‘It is from an American recipe for potato stew that I am making this one,’ Harrison said, as he watched Richard eat. The next day, there was a beet salad, and the next another beet stew, now frighteningly red, next to the chicken.

‘No more, please, Harrison,’ Richard said, raising his hand. ‘No more beets.’

Harrison looked disappointed, and then his face brightened. ‘But, sah, I am cooking the food of your country; all the food you are eating as children I cook. In fact, I’m not cooking Nigerian foods, only foreign recipe.’

‘Nigerian food is quite all right, Harrison,’ Richard said. If only Harrison knew how much he had disliked the food of his childhood, the sharp-tasting kippers full of bones, the porridge with the appalling thick skin on top like a waterproof lining, the overcooked roast beef with fat around the edges drenched in gravy.

‘Okay, sah.’ Harrison looked morose.

‘By the way, Harrison, do you happen to know of any herbs for men?’ Richard asked, hoping he sounded casual.

‘Sah?’

‘Herbs.’ Richard gestured vaguely.

‘Vegetables, sah? Oh, I make any of the salad of your country very good, sah. For Professor Land, I am making many different-different salad.’

‘Yes, but I mean vegetables for sickness.’

‘Sickness? You see doctor in Medical Centre.’

‘I am interested in African herbs, Harrison.’

‘But sah, they are bad, from the witch doctor. They are devilish.’

‘Of course.’ Richard gave up. He should have known that Harrison, with his excessive love for all things non-Nigerian, was not the right person to ask. He would ask Jomo instead.

Richard waited until Jomo arrived and then stood at the window watching him water the newly planted lilies. Jomo placed the watering can aside and began to pick the umbrella tree fruit; they had fallen during the previous night and lay, oval and pale yellow, on the lawn. Richard often smelt the over-sweetness of their rotting, a scent he knew he would always associate with living in Nsukka. Jomo held a raffia bag full of fruit when Richard came up to him.

‘Oh. Good morning, Mr Richard, sah,’ he said, in his solemn manner. ‘I want take the fruit to Harrison in case you want, sah. I no take them for myself.’ Jomo placed the bag down and picked up his watering can.

‘It’s all right, Jomo. I don’t want any of the fruit,’ Richard said. ‘By the way, would you know of any herbs for men? For men who have problems with … with being with a woman?’

‘Yes, sah.’ Jomo kept watering as if this was a question he heard every day.

‘You know of some herbs for men?’

‘Yes, sah.’

Richard felt a triumphant leap in his stomach. ‘I should like to see them, Jomo.’

‘My brother get problem before because the first wife is not pregnant and the second wife is not pregnant. There is one leaf that the dibia give him and he begin to chew. Now he has pregnant the wives.’

‘Oh. Very good. Could you get me this herb, Jomo?’

Jomo stopped and looked at him, his wise, wizened face full of fond pity. ‘It no work for white man, sah.’

‘Oh, no. I want to write about it.’

Jomo shook his head. ‘You go to dibia and you chew it there in front of him. Not for writing, sah.’ Jomo turned back to his watering, humming tunelessly.

‘I see,’ Richard said, and as he went back indoors he made sure not to let his dejection show; he walked straight and reminded himself that he was, after all, the master.

Harrison was standing outside the front door, pretending to polish the glass. ‘Is there something that Jomo is not doing well, sah?’ he asked hopefully.

‘I was just asking Jomo some questions.’

Harrison looked disappointed. It was clear from the beginning that he and Jomo would not get along, the cook and the gardener, each thinking himself better than the other. Once, Richard heard Harrison tell Jomo not to water the plants outside the study window because ‘the sound of water is disturbing Sah writing.’ Harrison wanted Richard to hear it, too, the way he spoke loudly, standing just outside the study window. Harrison’s obsequiousness amused Richard, as did Harrison’s reverence for his writing; Harrison had taken to dusting the typewriter every day, even though it was never dusty, and was reluctant to throw away manuscript pages he saw in the dustbin. ‘You are not using this again, sah? You are sure?’ Harrison would ask, holding the crumpled pages, and Richard would say that, yes, he was sure. Sometimes he wondered what Harrison would say if he told him that he wasn’t even sure what he was writing about, that he had written a sketch about an archaeologist and then discarded it, written a love story between an Englishman and an African woman and discarded it, and had started writing about life in a small Nigerian town. Most of his material for his latest effort came from the evenings he spent with Odenigbo and Olanna and their friends. They were casually accepting of him, did not pay him any particular attention, and perhaps because of that, he felt comfortable sitting on a sofa in the living room and listening.

When Olanna first introduced him to Odenigbo, saying, ‘This is Kainene’s friend that I told you about, Richard Churchill,’ Odenigbo shook his hand warmly and said, “‘I have not become the king’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”’

It took Richard a moment to understand before he laughed at the poor imitation of Sir Winston Churchill. Later, he watched Odenigbo wave around a copy of the Daily Times, shouting, ‘It is now that we have to begin to decolonize our education! Not tomorrow, now! Teach them our history!’ and thought to himself that here was a man who trusted the eccentricity that was his personality, a man who was not particularly attractive but who would draw the most attention in a room full of attractive men. Richard watched Olanna as well, and each time he glanced at her he felt renewed, as if she had become more beautiful in the preceding minutes. He felt an unpleasant emotion, though, seeing Odenigbo’s hand placed on her shoulder and, later, imagining them together in bed. He and Olanna said little to each other, outside of the general conversation, but a day before he left to visit Kainene in Port Harcourt, Olanna said, ‘Richard, please greet Kainene.’

‘I will,’ he said; it was the first time she had mentioned Kainene.

Kainene picked him up at the train station in her Peugeot 404 and drove away from the centre of Port Harcourt towards the ocean, to an isolated three-storey house with verandas wreathed in creeping bougainvillea of the palest shade of violet. Richard smelt the saltiness of the air as Kainene led him through wide rooms with tastefully mismatched furniture, wood carvings, muted paintings of landscapes, rounded sculptures. The polished floors had a woody scent.

‘I did wish it was closer to the sea, so we could have a better view. But I changed Daddy’s décor and it’s not too nouveau riche, I pray?’ Kainene asked.

Richard laughed. Not just because she was mocking Susan – he had told her what Susan had said about Chief Ozobia – but because she had said we. We meant both of them; she had included him. When she introduced him to her stewards, three men in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, she told them, with that wry smile of hers, ‘You will be seeing Mr Richard often.’

‘Welcome, sah,’ they said in unison, and they stood almost at attention as Kainene pointed to each and said his name: Ikejide, Nnanna, and Sebastian.

‘Ikejide is the only one with half a brain in his head,’ Kainene said.

The three men smiled, as though they each thought differently but would of course say nothing.

‘Now, Richard, I’ll give you a tour of the grounds.’ Kainene gave a mocking bow and led the way out through the back door to the orange orchard.

‘Olanna asked me to say hello to you,’ Richard said, taking her hand.

‘So her revolutionary lover has admitted you into the fold. We should be grateful. It used to be that he allowed only black lecturers in his house.’

‘Yes, he told me. He said that Nsukka was full of people from USAID and the Peace Corps and Michigan State University, and he wanted a forum for the few Nigerian lecturers.’

‘And their nationalist passion.’

‘I suppose so. He is refreshingly different.’

‘Refreshingly different,’ Kainene repeated. She stopped to flatten something on the ground with the sole of her sandals. ‘You like them, don’t you? Olanna and Odenigbo.’

He wanted to look into her eyes, to try and discern what she wanted him to say. He wanted to say what she wanted to hear. ‘Yes, I like them,’ he said. Her hand was lax in his and he worried that she would slip it away. ‘They’ve made it much easier for me to get used to Nsukka,’ he added, as if to justify his liking them. ‘I’ve settled in quite quickly. And of course there’s Harrison.’

‘Of course, Harrison. And how is the Beet Man doing?’

Richard pulled her to him, relieved that she was not annoyed. ‘He’s well. He is a good man, really, very amusing.’

They were in the orchard now, in the dense interweaving of orange trees, and Richard felt a strangeness overcome him. Kainene was speaking, something about one of her employees, but he felt himself receding, his mind unfurling, rolling back on its own. The orange trees, the presence of so many trees around him, the hum of flies overhead, the abundance of green, brought back memories of his parents’ house in Wentnor. It was incongruous that this tropical, humid place, with the sun turning the skin of his arms a mild scarlet and the bees sunning themselves, should remind him of the crumbling house in England, which was draughty even in summer. He saw the tall poplars and willows behind the house, in the fields where he stalked badgers, the rumpled hills covered in heather and bracken that spread for miles and miles, dotted with grazing sheep. Blue remembered hills. He saw his father and his mother sitting with him up in his bedroom, which smelt of damp, while his father read them poetry.

Into my heart on air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

His father’s voice would always deepen at the phrase Blue remembered hills, and when they left his room, and for the weeks afterwards when they would be away, he would look out of his window and watch the far-off hills take on a blue tinge.

Richard was bewildered by Kainene’s busy life. Seeing her in Lagos, in brief meetings at the hotel, he had not realized that hers was a life that ran fully and would run fully even if he was not in it. It was strangely disturbing to think that he was not the only occupant of her world, but stranger still was how her routines were already in place, after only a few weeks in Port Harcourt. Her work came first; she was determined to make her father’s factories grow, to do better than he had done. In the evenings, visitors – company people negotiating deals, government people negotiating bribes, factory people negotiating jobs – dropped by, parking their cars near the entrance to the orchard. Kainene always made sure they didn’t stay long, and she didn’t ask him to meet them because she said they would bore him, so he stayed upstairs reading or scribbling until they left. Often, he would try to keep his mind from worrying about failing Kainene that night; his body was still so unreliable and he had discovered that thinking about failure made it more likely to happen.

It was during his third visit to Port Harcourt that the steward knocked on the bedroom door to announce, ‘Major Madu came, madam,’ and Kainene asked if Richard would please come down with her.

‘Madu is an old friend and I’d like you to meet him. He’s just come back from an army training course in Pakistan,’ she said.

Richard smelt the guest’s cologne from the hallway, a cloying, brawny scent. The man wearing it was striking in a way that Richard immediately thought was primordial: a wide, mahogany-coloured face, wide lips, a wide nose. When he stood to shake hands, Richard nearly stepped back. The man was huge. Richard was used to being the tallest man in a room, the one who was looked up to, but here was a man who was at least three inches taller than he was, and with a width to his shoulders and a firm bulk to his body that made him seem taller, hulking.

‘Richard, this is Major Madu Madu,’ Kainene said.

‘Hello,’ Major Madu said. ‘Kainene has told me about you.’

‘Hello,’ Richard said. It was too intimate, to hear this mammoth man with the slightly condescending smile on his face say Kainene’s name like that, as if he knew Kainene very well, as if he knew something that Richard did not know, as if whatever Kainene had told him about Richard had been whispered in his ear, amid the silly giggles born of physical intimacy. And what sort of name was Madu Madu anyway? Richard sat on a sofa and refused Kainene’s offer of a drink. He felt pale. He wished Kainene had said, This is my lover, Richard.

‘So you and Kainene met in Lagos?’ Major Madu asked.

‘Yes,’ Richard said.

‘She first told me about you when I called her from Pakistan about a month ago.’

Richard could not think of what to say. He did not know Kainene had talked to him from Pakistan and did not remember her ever mentioning a friendship with an army officer whose first name and surname were the same. ‘And how long have you known each other?’ Richard asked, and immediately wondered if he sounded suspicious.

‘My family’s compound in Umunnachi is right next to the Ozobias’.’ Major Madu turned to Kainene. ‘Aren’t our forefathers said to be related? Only that your people stole our land and we cast you out?’

‘It was your people who stole the land,’ Kainene said, and laughed. Richard was surprised to hear the husky tone of her laughter. He was even more surprised at how familiarly Major Madu behaved, the way he sank into the sofa, got up to flip the album in the stereo, joked with the stewards serving dinner. Richard felt left out of things. He wished Kainene had told him that Major Madu would be staying for dinner. He wished she would drink gin and tonic like him rather than whisky with water like Major Madu. He wished the man would not keep asking him questions, as if to engage him, as if the man were the host and Richard the visitor. How are you enjoying Nigeria? Isn’t the rice delicious? How is your book going? Do you like Nsukka?

Richard resented the questions and the man’s perfect table manners.

‘I trained at Sandhurst’, Major Madu said, ‘and what I hated most was the cold. Not least because they made us run every morning in the bloody cold with only a thin shirt and shorts on.’

‘I can see why you’d find it cold,’ Richard said.

‘Oh, yes. To each his own. I’m sure you’ll soon get very homesick here,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so at all,’ Richard said.

‘Well, the British have just decided to control immigration from the Commonwealth, haven’t they? They want people to stay in their own countries. The irony, of course, is that we in the Commonwealth can’t control the British moving to our countries.’

He chewed his rice slowly and examined the bottle of water for a moment, as if it were wine whose vintage he wanted to know.

‘Right after I came back from England, I was part of the Fourth Battalion that went to the Congo, under the United Nations. Our battalion wasn’t well run at all, but despite that, I preferred Congo to the relative safety of England. Just because of the weather.’ Major Madu paused. ‘We weren’t run well at all in the Congo. We were under the command of a British colonel.’ He glanced at Richard and continued to chew.

Richard bristled; his fingers felt stiff and he feared his fork would slip from his grasp and this insufferable man would know how he felt.

The doorbell rang just after dinner while they sat on the moonlit veranda, drinking, listening to High Life music.

‘That must be Udodi, I told him to meet me here,’ Major Madu said.

Richard slapped at an irritating mosquito near his ear. Kainene’s house seemed to have become a meeting place for the man and his friends.

Udodi was a smallish, ordinary-looking man with nothing of the knowing charm or subtle arrogance of Major Madu. He seemed drunk, almost manic, in the way he shook Richard’s hand, pumping up and down. ‘Are you Kainene’s business associate? Are you in oil?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t do the introductions, did I?’ Kainene said. ‘Richard, Major Udodi Ekechi is a friend of Madu’s. Udodi, this is Richard Churchill.’

‘Oh,’ Major Udodi said, his eyes narrowing. He poured some whisky into a glass, drank it in one gulp, and said something in Igbo to which Kainene replied, in cold, clear English, ‘My choice of lovers is none of your business, Udodi.’

Richard wished he could open his mouth and fluidly tell the man off, but he said nothing. He felt helplessly weak, the kind of weakness that came with illness, with grief. The music had stopped and he could hear the far-off whooshing of the sea’s waves.

‘Sorry, oh! I did not say it was my business!’ Major Udodi laughed and reached again for the bottle of whisky.

‘Easy now,’ Major Madu said. ‘You must have started early at the mess.’

‘Life is short, my brother!’ Major Udodi said, pouring another drink. He turned to Kainene. ‘I magonu, you know, what I am saying is that our women who follow white men are a certain type, a poor family and the kind of bodies that white men like.’ He stopped and continued, in a mocking mimicry of an English accent, ‘Fantastically desirable bottoms.’ He laughed. ‘The white men will poke and poke and poke the women in the dark but they will never marry them. How can! They will never even take them out to a good place in public. But the women will continue to disgrace themselves and struggle for the men so they will get chicken-feed money and nonsense tea in a fancy tin. It’s a new slavery, I’m telling you, a new slavery. But you are a Big Man’s daughter, so what you are doing with him?’

Major Madu stood up. ‘Sorry about this, Kainene. The man isn’t himself.’ He pulled Major Udodi up and said something in swift Igbo.

Major Udodi was laughing again. ‘Okay, okay, but let me take the whisky. The bottle is almost empty. Let me take the whisky.’

Kainene said nothing as Major Udodi took the bottle from the table. After they left, Richard sat next to her and took her hand. He felt as if he had disappeared, as if that was the reason Major Madu did not include him in the apology. ‘He was dreadful. I’m sorry he did that.’

‘He was hopelessly drunk. Madu must feel terrible right now,’ Kainene said. She gestured to the file on the table and added, ‘I’ve just got the contract to supply army boots for the battalion in Kaduna.’

‘That’s nice.’ Richard drank the last drop from his glass and watched as Kainene looked through the file.

‘The man in charge was Igbo, and Madu said he was keen to give the contract to a fellow Igbo. So I was lucky. And he’s asking only for a five per cent cut.’

‘A bribe?’

‘Oh, aren’t we innocent.’

Her mockery irritated him, as did the speed with which she had absolved Major Madu of any responsibility for Major Udodi’s boorish behaviour. He stood up and began to pace the veranda. Insects were humming around the fluorescent bulb.

‘You’ve known Madu for very long then,’ he said finally. He hated calling the man by his first name; it assumed a cordiality he did not feel. But then he had no choice. He would certainly not call him Major; using a title would be too elevating.

Kainene looked up. ‘Forever. His family and ours are very close. I remember once, years ago, when we went to Umunnachi to spend Christmas, he gave me a tortoise. The strangest and best present I ever got from anybody. Olanna thought it was wrong of Madu to take the poor thing out of its natural habitat and whatnot, but she didn’t much get along with Madu anyway. I put it in a bowl, and of course it died soon afterwards.’ She went back to looking through the file.

‘He’s married, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Adaobi is doing her bachelor’s in London.’

‘Is that why you’re seeing him so often?’ His question came out in a near-croak, as though he needed to clear his throat.

She did not respond. Perhaps she had not heard him. It was clear that the file, the new contract, occupied her mind. She got up. ‘I’ll just make some notes for a minute in the study and join you.’

He wondered why he could simply not ask if she found Madu attractive and if she had ever been involved with him or, worse yet, was still involved with him. He was afraid. He moved towards her and put his arms around her and held her tightly, wanting to feel the beat of her heart. It was the first time in his life he felt as if he could belong somewhere.

1. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

For the prologue, he recounts the story of the woman with the calabash. She sat on the floor of a train squashed between crying people, shouting people, praying people. She was silent, caressing the covered calabash on her lap in a gentle rhythm until they crossed the Niger, and then she lifted the lid and asked Olanna and others close by to look inside.

Olanna tells him this story and he notes the details. She tells him how the bloodstains on the woman’s wrapper blended into the fabric to form a rusty mauve. She describes the carved designs on the woman’s calabash, slanting lines crisscrossing each other, and she describes the child’s head inside: scruffy plaits falling across the dark-brown face, eyes completely white, eerily open, a mouth in a small surprised O.

After he writes this, he mentions the German women who fled Hamburg with the charred bodies of their children stuffed in suitcases, the Rwandan women who pocketed tiny parts of their mauled babies. But he is careful not to draw parallels. For the book cover, though, he draws a map of Nigeria and traces in the Y shape of the rivers Niger and Benue in bright red. He uses the same shade of red to circle the boundaries of where, in the Southeast, Biafra existed for three years.

4

Ugwu cleared the dining table slowly. He removed the glasses first, then the stew-smeared bowls and the cutlery, and finally he stacked plate on top of plate. Even if he hadn’t peeked through the kitchen door as they ate, he would still know who had sat where. Master’s plate was always the most rice-strewn, as if he ate distractedly so that the grains eluded his fork. Olanna’s glass had crescent-shaped lipstick marks. Okeoma ate everything with a spoon, his fork and knife pushed aside. Professor Ezeka had brought his own beer, and the foreign-looking brown bottle was beside his plate. Miss Adebayo left onion slices in her bowl. And Mr Richard never chewed his chicken bones.

In the kitchen, Ugwu kept Olanna’s plate aside on the Formica counter and emptied the rest, watching rice, stew, greens, and bones slide into the dustbin. Some of the bones were so well cracked they looked like wood shavings. Olanna’s did not, though, because she had only lightly chewed the ends and all three still had their shape. Ugwu sat down and selected one and closed his eyes as he sucked it, imagining Olanna’s mouth enclosing the same bone.

He sucked languidly, one bone after another, and did not bother to tone down the slurpy sounds his mouth made. He was alone. Master had just left for the staff club with Olanna and their friends. The house was always quietest now, when he could linger over nothing, with the lunch dishes in the sink and dinner far off and the kitchen bathed in incandescent sunlight. Olanna called this his Schoolwork Time, and when she was home, she would ask him to take his home work into the bedroom. She didn’t know that his homework never took long, that he would sit by the window afterwards and struggle through difficult sentences in one of Master’s books, looking up often to watch the butterflies dipping and rising above the white flowers in the front yard.

He picked up his exercise book while sucking the second bone. The cold marrow was tart on his tongue. He read the verse, which he had copied so carefully from the blackboard that it looked like Mrs Oguike’s handwriting, and then closed his eyes and recited it.

I can’t forget that I’m bereft

Of all the pleasant sights they see,

Which the Piper also promised me.

For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,

Joining the town and just at hand,

Where waters gushed and fruit trees grew,

And flowers put forth a fairer hue,

And everything was strange and new.

He opened his eyes and scanned the verse to make sure he had missed nothing. He hoped Master would not remember to ask him to recite it because, although he had memorized the verse correctly, he would have no answer when Master asked, What does it mean? Or, What do you think it is really saying? The pictures in the book Mrs Oguike gave out, of the long-haired man with happy rats following him, were incomprehensible, and the more Ugwu looked at them, the more certain he became that it was all some sort of senseless joke. Even Mrs Oguike did not seem to know what it meant. Ugwu had come to like her – Mrs Oguike – because she did not treat him with special concern, did not seem to notice that he sat alone in the classroom at break time. But she had noticed how fast he learnt the very first day when she gave him oral and written tests while Master waited outside the airless room. ‘The boy will surely skip a class at some point, he has such an innate intelligence,’ she had told Master afterwards, as if Ugwu were not standing right beside them, and innate intelligence instantly became Ugwu’s favourite expression.

He closed the exercise book. He had sucked all the bones, and he imagined that the taste of Olanna’s mouth was in his as he started to wash the dishes. The first time he sucked her bones, weeks ago, it was after he saw her and Master kissing in the living room on a Saturday morning, their open mouths pressed together. The thought of her saliva in Master’s mouth had both repelled and excited him. It still did. It was the same way he felt about her moaning at night; he did not like to hear her and yet he often went to their door to press his ear against the cold wood and listen. Just as he examined the underwear she hung in the bathroom – black slips, slippery bras, white pants.

She had blended so easily into the house. In the evenings, when guests filled the living room, her voice stood out in its clear perfection, and he fantasized about sticking out his tongue at Miss Adebayo and saying, ‘You cannot speak English like my madam, so shut your dirty mouth.’ It seemed as if her clothes had always been in the wardrobe, her High Life music always come from the radiogram, her coconut scent always wafted over every room, and her Impala always parked in the driveway. Still, he missed the old days with Master. He missed the evenings when he would sit on the floor of the living room while Master talked in his deep voice and the mornings when he served Master’s breakfast, knowing that the only voices that could be heard were theirs.

Master had changed; he looked at Olanna too often, touched her too much, and when Ugwu opened the front door for him, his eyes expectantly darted past into the living room to see if Olanna was there. Only yesterday, Master told Ugwu, ‘My mother will be visiting this weekend, so clean the guest room.’ Before Ugwu could say Yes, sah, Olanna said, ‘I think Ugwu should move to the Boys’ Quarters. That way we’ll have a free guest room. Mama may stay a while.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Master said, so promptly that it annoyed Ugwu; it was as if Master would stick his head in a raging fire if Olanna asked him to. It was as if she had become the master. But Ugwu didn’t mind moving to the room in the Boys’ Quarters, which was empty except for some cobwebs and cartons. He could hide things he had saved there; he could make it fully his. He had never heard Master speak about his mother, and, as he cleaned the guest room later, he imagined what she would be like, this woman who had bathed Master as a baby, fed him, wiped his running nose. Ugwu was in awe of her already, for having produced Master.

He finished the lunch dishes quickly. If he was as quick in preparing the greens for the dinner pottage, he could go down to Mr Richard’s house and talk to Harrison for a little while before Master and Olanna came back. These days, he shredded the greens with his hands instead of slicing them. Olanna liked them that way; she said they retained more of their vitamins. He, too, had started to like them, just as he liked the way she taught him to fry eggs with a little milk, to cut fried plantains in dainty circles rather than ungainly ovals, to steam moi-moi in aluminium cups rather than banana leaves. Now that she left most of the cooking to him, he liked to look through the kitchen door from time to time, to see who murmured the most compliments, who liked what, who took second helpings. Dr Patel liked the chicken boiled with uziza. So did Mr Richard, although he never ate the chicken skin. Perhaps the pale chicken skin reminded Mr Richard of his own skin. There was no other reason Ugwu could think of; the skin was, after all, the tastiest part. Mr Richard always said, ‘Fantastic chicken, Ugwu, thank you,’ when Ugwu came out to bring more water or to clear something away. Sometimes, while the other guests retired to the living room, Mr Richard would come into the kitchen to ask Ugwu questions. They were laughable questions. Did his people have carvings or sculptures of gods? Had he ever been inside the shrine by the river? Ugwu was even more amused that Mr Richard wrote his answers down in a small book with a leather cover. Some days ago, when Ugwu offhandedly mentioned the ori-okpa festival, Mr Richard’s eyes turned a brighter blue and he said he wanted to see the festival; he would ask Master if he and Ugwu could drive to his hometown.

Ugwu laughed as he brought the greens out of the refrigerator. He could not imagine Mr Richard during the ori-okpa festival, where the mmuo (Mr Richard said they were masquerades, weren’t they, and Ugwu agreed, as long as masquerades meant spirits) paraded the village, flogged young men, and chased after young women. The mmuo themselves might even laugh at the sight of a pale stranger scribbling in a notebook. But he was pleased that he had mentioned the festival to Mr Richard, because it meant an opportunity to see Nnesinachi before she left for the North. To think how impressed she would be when he arrived in a white man’s car, driven by the white man himself! She would certainly notice him this time, he was sure, and he could not wait to impress Anulika and his cousins and relatives with his English, his new shirt, his knowledge of sandwiches and running tap water, his scented powder.

Ugwu had just washed the shredded greens when he heard the doorbell. It was too early for Master’s friends. He went to the door, wiping his hands on his apron. For a moment, he wondered if his aunty was really standing there or if he was seeing an image of her only because he had been thinking about home.

‘Aunty?’

‘Ugwuanyi’, she said, ‘you have to come home. Oga gi kwanu? Where is your master?’

‘Come home?’

‘Your mother is very sick.’

Ugwu examined the scarf tied round his aunty’s head. He could see where it was threadbare, the fabric stretched thin. He remembered that when his cousin’s father died, the family had sent word to her in Lagos, telling her to come home because her father was very sick. If you were far from home, they told you the dead person was very sick.

‘Your mother is sick,’ his aunty repeated. ‘She is asking for you. I will tell Master that you will be back tomorrow, so he will not think we are asking for too much. Many houseboys do not even get to go home in years, you know that.’

Ugwu did not move, rolling the edge of the apron around his finger. He wanted to ask his aunt to tell him the truth, to say so if his mother was dead. But his mouth would not form the words. Remembering his mother’s last illness, when she had coughed and coughed until his father left before dawn to get the dibia while the junior wife, Chioke, rubbed her back, frightened him.

‘Master is not in,’ he said finally. ‘But he will be back soon.’

‘I will wait and plead with him to let you come home.’

He led the way to the kitchen, where his aunty sat down and watched him slice a yam and then cut the slices into cubes. He worked fast, feverishly. The sunlight that came in through the window seemed too bright for late afternoon, too full of an ominous radiance.

‘Is my father well?’ Ugwu asked.

‘He is well.’ His aunty’s face was opaque, her tone flat: the demeanour of a person who carried more bad news than she had delivered. She must be hiding something. Perhaps his mother really was dead; perhaps both his parents had fallen down dead that morning. Ugwu continued to slice, in a turgid silence, until Master came home, tennis whites plastered to his back with sweat. He was alone. Ugwu wished that Olanna had come home as well so that he could look at her face as he spoke.

‘Welcome, sah.’

‘Yes, my good man.’ Master placed his racket down on the kitchen table. ‘Some water, please. I lost all my games today.’

Ugwu had the water ready, ice cold in a glass placed on a saucer.

‘Good evening, sah,’ his aunty greeted.

‘Good evening,’ Master said, looking slightly perplexed, as if he was not certain who she was. ‘Oh, yes. How are you?’

Before she could say more, Ugwu said, ‘My mother is sick, sah. Please, sah, if I go to see her I will return tomorrow.’

‘What?’

Ugwu repeated himself. Master stared at him and then at the pot on the stove. ‘Have you finished cooking?’

‘No, sah. I will finish fast-fast, before I go. I will set the table and arrange everything.’

Master turned to Ugwu’s aunty. ‘Gini me? What is wrong with his mother?’

‘Sah?’

‘Are you deaf?’ Master jabbed at his ear as if Ugwu’s aunty did not know what it meant to be deaf. ‘What is wrong with his mother?’

‘Sah, her chest is on fire.’

‘Chest on fire?’ Master snorted. He drank all his water and then turned to Ugwu and spoke English. ‘Put on a shirt and get in the car. Your village isn’t far away, really. We should be back in good time.’

‘Sah?’

‘Put on a shirt and get in the car!’ Master scribbled a note on the back of a flyer and left it on the table. ‘We’ll bring your mother here and have Patel take a look at her.’

‘Yes, sah.’ Ugwu felt breakable as he walked to the car, beside his aunty and Master. He felt as though his bones were broomsticks, the kind that snapped easily during the harmattan. The ride to his village was mostly silent. As they drove past some farms with rows and rows of corn and cassava like a neatly plaited hairstyle, Master said, ‘See? This is what our government should focus on. If we learn irrigation technology, we can feed this country easily. We can overcome this colonial dependence on imports.’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘But instead, all the ignoramuses in government do is lie and steal. A number of my students joined the group that went to Lagos this morning to demonstrate, you know.’

‘Yes, sah,’ Ugwu said. ‘Why are they demonstrating, sah?’

‘The census,’ Master said. ‘The census was a mess, everybody forged figures. Not that Balewa will do anything about it, because he is as complicit as they all are. But we must speak out!’

‘Yes, sah,’ Ugwu replied, and in the midst of his worry about his mother, he felt a twinge of pride because he knew his aunty would have her eyes wide in wonder at the deep conversations he had with Master. And in English, too. They stopped a little way before the family hut.

‘Get your mother’s things, quickly,’ Master said. ‘I have friends visiting from Ibadan tonight.’

‘Yes, sah!’ Ugwu and his aunty spoke at the same time.

Ugwu climbed out of the car and stood there. His aunty dashed into the hut, and soon his father came out, eyes red-rimmed, looking more stooped than Ugwu remembered. He knelt in the dirt and clutched Master’s legs. ‘Thank, sah. Thank, sah. May another person do for you.’

Master stepped back and Ugwu watched his father sway, almost falling over backwards. ‘Get up, kunie,’ Master said.

Chioke came out of the hut. ‘This is my other wife, sah,’ his father said, standing up.

Chioke shook Master’s hands with both of hers. ‘Thank you, master. Deje!’ She ran back inside and emerged with a small pineapple that she pressed into Master’s hand.

‘No, no,’ Master said, pushing the pineapple back. ‘Local pineapples are too acidic, they burn my mouth.’

The village children were gathering around the car to peer inside and run awed fingers over the blue body. Ugwu shooed them away. He wished Anulika were home, so she would go with him into their mother’s hut. He wished Nnesinachi would drop by now and take his hand in hers and tell him soothingly that his mother’s illness was not serious at all, and then lead him to the grove by the stream and untie her wrapper and offer him her breasts, lifting them up and forward towards him. The children were chattering loudly. Some women stood by and spoke in lower tones, their arms folded. His father kept asking Master to have some kola nut, palm wine, a stool to sit down, some water, and Master kept saying no, no, no. Ugwu wanted his father to shut up. He moved closer to the hut and looked in. His eyes met his mother’s in the dim light. She looked shrivelled.

‘Ugwu,’ she said. ‘Nno, welcome.’

‘Deje,’ he greeted, and then remained silent, watching, while his aunty helped her tie her wrapper around her waist and led her out.

Ugwu was about to help his mother into the car when Master said, ‘Step aside, my good man.’ Master helped her into the car, asked her to lie down on the backseat, to stretch out as much as she could.

Ugwu suddenly wished that Master would not touch his mother because her clothes smelled of age and must, and because Master did not know that her back ached and her cocoyam patch always yielded a poor harvest and her chest was indeed on fire when she coughed. What did Master know about anything anyway, since all he did was shout with his friends and drink brandy at night?

‘Stay well, we will send you word after a doctor has looked at her,’ Master said to Ugwu’s father and aunty before they drove off.

Ugwu kept himself from glancing back at his mother; he rolled his window down so the air would rush loudly past his ears and distract him. When he finally turned to look at her, just before they got to the campus, his heart stopped at the sight of her shut eyes, her lax lips. But her chest was rising and falling. She was breathing. He exhaled slowly and thought about those cold evenings when she would cough and cough, and he would stand pressed to the flinty walls of her hut, listening to his father and Chioke ask her to drink the mixture.

Olanna opened the door, wearing the apron that had an oil stain in front. His apron. She kissed Master. ‘I’ve asked Patel to come,’ she said and then turned to Ugwu’s mother. ‘Mama. Kedu? ’

‘I am well,’ his mother whispered. She glanced around the room and seemed to shrink even more at the sight of the sofas, the radiogram, the curtains.

‘I’ll take her inside,’ Olanna said. ‘Ugwu, please finish in the kitchen and set the table.’

‘Yes, mah.’

In the kitchen, Ugwu stirred the pot of pepper soup. The oily broth swirled, the hot spices wafted up and tickled his nose, and the pieces of meat and tripe floated from side to side. But he did not really notice. He was straining to hear something. It was long, too long, since Olanna had taken his mother in and Dr Patel went in to join them. The peppers made his eyes water. He remembered that last time when she was sick from the coughing, how she cried out that she could no longer feel her legs and the dibia asked her to tell the evil spirits to leave her alone. ‘Tell them it is not yet your time! Gwa ha kita! Tell them now!’ the dibia had urged her.

‘Ugwu!’ Master called. The guests had arrived. Ugwu went into the living room and his hands worked mechanically, serving kola nuts and alligator pepper, uncorking bottles, shovelling ice, laying out steaming bowls of pepper soup. Afterwards, he sat down in the kitchen and pulled at his toenails and imagined what was going on in the bedroom. He could hear Master’s raised voice from the living room. ‘Nobody is saying that burning government property is a good thing, but to send the army in to kill in the name of order? There are Tiv people lying dead for nothing. For nothing! Balewa has lost his mind!’

Ugwu did not know who the Tiv people were, but hearing the word dead made him shiver. ‘It is not yet your time,’ he whispered. ‘Not yet your time.’

‘Ugwu?’ Olanna was at the kitchen door.

He flew off the stool. ‘Mah? Mah?’

‘You mustn’t worry about her. Dr Patel says it’s an infection and she will be fine.’

‘Oh!’ Ugwu was so relieved he feared he would float away if he raised one leg. ‘Thank, mah!’

‘Put the rest of the pottage in the fridge.’

‘Yes, mah.’ Ugwu watched her go back to the living room. The embroidery on her close-fitting dress gleamed and she looked, for a moment, like a shapely spirit who had emerged from the sea.

The guests were laughing now. Ugwu peeked into the living room. Many of them were no longer sitting upright but sloped on their seats, mellowed by alcohol, languorous with ideas. The evening was ending. The conversation would soften into tennis and music; then they would get up and giggle loudly at things that were not funny, such as the front door being difficult to open and the night bats flying too low. He waited for Olanna to go to the bathroom and Master to his study before he went in to see his mother, asleep, curled childlike on the bed.

She was bright-eyed the next morning. ‘I am well,’ she said. ‘The medicine that doctor gave me is very powerful. But what will kill me is that smell.’

‘What smell?’

‘In their mouth. I smelt it when your madam and master came in to see me this morning and also when I went to ease myself.’

‘Oh. That is toothpaste. We use it to clean our teeth.’ Ugwu felt proud saying we, so that his mother would know that he too used it.

But she did not look impressed. She snapped her fingers and picked up her chewing stick. ‘What is wrong with using a good atu? That smell has made me want to vomit. If I stay here much longer I will not be able to keep food in my stomach because of that smell.’

She looked impressed, though, when Ugwu told her that he would be living in the Boys’ Quarters. It was like being given his own house, separate, all to himself. She asked him to show her the Boys’ Quarters, marvelled that it was bigger than her hut, and, later, insisted that she was well enough to help in the kitchen. He watched her, bent over to sweep the floor, and remembered how she used to smack Anulika’s bottom for not bending properly to sweep. ‘Did you eat mushrooms? Sweep like a woman!’ she would say, and Anulika would grumble that the broom was too short and it was not her fault that people were too stingy to buy longer brooms. Ugwu suddenly wished that Anulika were here, as well as the little children and the gossiping wives of his umunna. He wished his whole village were here, so he could join in the moonlight conversations and quarrels and yet live in Master’s house with its running taps and refrigerator and stove.

‘I will go home tomorrow,’ his mother said.

‘You should stay a few more days and rest.’

‘I will go tomorrow. I shall thank your master and mistress when they return and tell them I am well enough to go home. May another person do for them what they have done for me.’

Ugwu walked with her to the end of Odim Street in the morning. He had never seen her walk so fast, even with the twined bundle balanced on her head, never seen her face so free of lines.

‘Stay well, my son,’ she said, and thrust a chewing stick into his hand.

On the day Master’s mother arrived from the village, Ugwu cooked a peppery jollof rice. He mixed white rice into tomato sauce, tasted it, and then covered it and reduced the heat. He went back outside. Jomo had leaned his rake against the wall and was sitting on the steps eating a mango.

‘That thing you are cooking smells very good,’ Jomo said.

‘It is for my master’s mother, jollof rice with fried chicken.’

‘I should have given you some of my meat. It will be better than the chicken.’ Jomo gestured to the bag tied behind his bicycle. He had shown Ugwu the small furry animal wrapped in fresh leaves.

‘I cannot cook bush meat here!’ Ugwu said in English, laughing.

Jomo turned to look at him. ‘Dianyi, you now speak English just like the children of the lecturers.’

Ugwu nodded, happy to hear the compliment, happier because Jomo would never guess that those children with their cream-pampered skin and their effortless English sniggered whenever Mrs Oguike asked him a question because of how he pronounced his words, how thick his bush accent was.

‘Harrison should come and hear good English from somebody who does not brag about it,’ Jomo said. ‘He thinks he knows everything just because he lives with a white man. Onye nzuzu! Stupid man!’

‘Very stupid man!’ Ugwu said. He had been just as vigorous last weekend when he agreed with Harrison that Jomo was foolish.

‘Yesterday the he-goat locked the tank and refused to give me the key,’ Jomo said. ‘He said I am wasting water. Is it his water? Now if the plants die, what do I tell Mr Richard?’

‘That is bad.’ Ugwu snapped his fingers to show just how bad. The last quarrel between the two men was when Harrison hid the lawn mower and refused to tell Jomo where it was until Jomo rewashed Mr Richard’s shirt, which had been splattered with bird droppings. It was Jomo’s useless flowers, after all, that attracted the birds. Ugwu had supported both men. He told Jomo that Harrison was wrong to have hidden the lawn mower, and later he told Harrison that Jomo was wrong to have planted the flowers there in the first place, knowing they attracted birds. Ugwu preferred Jomo’s solemn ways and false stories, but Harrison, with his insistent bad English, was mysteriously full of knowledge of things that were foreign and different. Ugwu wanted to learn these things, so he nurtured his friendship with both men; he had become their sponge, absorbing much and giving little away.

‘One day I will wound Harrison seriously, maka Chukwu,’ Jomo said. He threw away the mango seed, sucked so clean of the orange pulp that it was white. ‘Somebody is knocking on the front door.’

‘Oh. She has come! It must be my master’s mother.’ Ugwu dashed inside; he barely heard Jomo say goodbye.

Master’s mother had the same stocky build, dark skin, and vibrant energy as her son; it was as if she would never need help with carrying her water pot or lowering a stack of firewood from her head. Ugwu was surprised to see the young woman with downcast eyes standing beside her, holding bags. He had expected that she would come alone. He had hoped she would come a little later, too, when the rice was done.

‘Welcome, Mama, nno,’ he said. He took the bags from the young woman. ‘Welcome, Aunty, nno.’

‘You are the one that is Ugwu? How are you?’ Master’s mother said, patting his shoulder.

‘Fine, Mama. Did your journey go well?’

‘Yes. Chukwu du anyi. God led us.’ She was looking at the radiogram. Her green george wrapper hung stiff on her waist and made her hips look square-shaped. She did not wear it with the air of the women on campus, the women who were used to owning coral beads and gold earrings. She wore it in the way that Ugwu imagined his mother would if she had the same wrapper: uncertainly, as if she did not believe that she was no longer poor.

‘How are you, Ugwu?’ she asked again.

‘I am well, Mama.’

‘My son has told me how well you are doing.’ She reached out to adjust her green headgear, worn low on her head, almost covering her eyebrows.

‘Yes, Mama.’ Ugwu looked down modestly.

‘God bless you, your chi will break away the rocks on your path. Do you hear me?’ She sounded like Master, that sonorous and authoritative tone.

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘When will my son be back?’

‘They will return in the evening. They said you should rest, Mama, when you come. I am cooking rice and chicken.’

‘Rest?’ She smiled and walked into the kitchen. Ugwu watched her unpack foodstuffs from a bag: dried fish and cocoyams and spices and bitter leaf. ‘Have I not come from the farm?’ she asked. ‘This is my rest. I have brought ingredients to make a proper soup for my son. I know you try, but you are only a boy. What does a boy know about real cooking?’ She smirked and turned to the younger woman, who was standing by the door, arms folded and eyes still downcast, as if waiting for orders. ‘Is that not so, Amala? Does a boy belong in the kitchen?’

‘Kpa, Mama, no,’ Amala said. She had a high-pitched voice.

‘You see, Ugwu? A boy does not belong in the kitchen.’ Master’s mother sounded triumphant. She was standing by the counter, already breaking up some dried fish, extracting the needlelike bones.

‘Yes, Mama.’ Ugwu was surprised that she had not asked for a glass of water or gone inside to change first. He sat on the stool and waited for her to tell him what to do. It was what she wanted; he could sense that. She was looking over the kitchen now. She peered suspiciously at the stove, knocked on the pressure cooker, tapped the pots with her fingers.

‘Eh! My son wastes money on these expensive things,’ she said. ‘Do you not see, Amala?’

‘Yes, Mama,’ Amala said.

‘Those belong to my madam, Mama. She brought many things from Lagos,’ Ugwu said. It irritated him: her assuming that everything belonged to Master, her taking command of his kitchen, her ignoring his perfect jollof rice and chicken.

Master’s mother did not respond. ‘Amala, come and prepare the cocoyams,’ she said.

‘Yes, Mama.’ Amala put the cocoyams in a pot and then looked helplessly at the stove.

‘Ugwu, light the fire for her. We are village people who only know firewood!’ Master’s mother said, with a short laugh.

Neither Ugwu nor Amala laughed. Ugwu turned the stove on. Master’s mother threw a piece of dried fish into her mouth. ‘Put some water to boil for me, Ugwu, and then cut these ugu leaves for the soup.’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘Is there a sharp knife in this house?’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘Use it and slice the ugu well.’

‘Yes, Mama.’

Ugwu settled down with a cutting board. He knew she was watching him. When he started to slice the fibrous pumpkin leaves, she yelped, ‘Oh! Oh! Is this how you cut ugu? Alu melu! Make them smaller! The way you are doing it, we might as well cook the soup with the whole leaves.’

‘Yes, Mama.’ Ugwu began slicing the leaves in strips so thin they would break up in the soup.

‘That’s better,’ Master’s mother said. ‘You see why boys have no business in the kitchen? You cannot even slice ugu well.’

Ugwu wanted to say, Of course I slice ugu well. I do many things in the kitchen better than you do, but instead he said, ‘My madam and I don’t slice vegetables, we shred them with our hands because the nutrients come out better that way.’

‘Your madam?’ Master’s mother paused. It was as if she wanted to say something but held herself back. The steam from boiling hung in the air. ‘Show Amala the mortar so she can pound the cocoyams,’ she said finally.

‘Yes, Mama.’ Ugwu rolled out the wood mortar from under the table and was rinsing it when Olanna came home. She appeared at the kitchen door; her dress was smart-fitting, her smiling face was full of light.

‘Mama!’ she said. ‘Welcome, nno. I am Olanna. Did you go well?’ She reached out to hug Master’s mother. Her arms went round to enclose the older woman but Master’s mother kept her hands to her sides and did not hug Olanna back.

‘Yes, our journey went well,’ she said.

‘Good afternoon,’ Amala said.

‘Welcome.’ Olanna hugged Amala briefly before turning to Master’s mother. ‘Is this Odenigbo’s relative from home, Mama?’

‘Amala helps me in the house,’ Master’s mother said. She had turned her back to Olanna and was stirring the soup.

‘Mama, come, let’s sit down. Bia nodu ana. You should not bother in the kitchen. You should rest. Let Ugwu do it.’

‘I want to cook a proper soup for my son.’

There was a light pause before Olanna said, ‘Of course, Mama.’ Her Igbo had slipped into the dialect that Ugwu heard in Master’s speech when his cousins visited. She walked around the kitchen, as if eager to do something to please Master’s mother but uncertain what to do. She opened the pot of rice and closed it. ‘At least let me help you, Mama. I’ll go and change.’

‘I hear you did not suck your mother’s breasts,’ Master’s mother said.

Olanna stopped. ‘What?’

‘They say you did not suck your mother’s breasts.’ Master’s mother turned to look at Olanna. ‘Please go back and tell those who sent you that you did not find my son. Tell your fellow witches that you did not see him.’

Olanna stared at her. Master’s mother’s voice rose, as if Olanna’s continued silence had driven her to shouting. ‘Did you hear me? Tell them that nobody’s medicine will work on my son. He will not marry an abnormal woman, unless you kill me first. Only over my dead body!’ Master’s mother clapped her hands, then hooted and slapped her palm across her mouth so that the sound echoed.

‘Mama –’ Olanna said.

‘Don’t mama me,’ Master’s mother said. ‘I said, Do not mama me. Just leave my son alone. Tell your fellow witches that you did not find him!’ She opened the back door and went outside and shouted. ‘Neighbours! There is a witch in my son’s house! Neighbours!’ Her voice was shrill. Ugwu wanted to gag her, to stuff sliced vegetables into her mouth. The soup was burning.

‘Mah? Will you stay in the room?’ he asked, moving towards Olanna.

Olanna seemed to get hold of herself. She tucked a plait behind her ear, picked up her bag from the table, and headed for the front door. ‘Tell your master I have gone to my flat,’ she said.

Ugwu followed her and watched as she got into her car and drove out. She did not wave. The yard was still; there were no butterflies flitting among the white flowers. Back in the kitchen, Ugwu was surprised to hear Master’s mother singing a gently melodious church song: Nya nya oya mu ga-ana. Na m metu onu uwe ya aka ….

She stopped singing and cleared her throat. ‘Where has that woman gone?’

‘I don’t know, Mama,’ Ugwu said. He walked over to the sink and began to put away the clean plates in the cupboard. He hated the too-strong aroma of her soup that filled the kitchen; the first thing he would do after she left was wash all the curtains because that smell would soak into them.

‘This is why I came. They said she is controlling my son,’ Master’s mother said, stirring the soup. ‘No wonder my son has not married while his mates are counting how many children they have. She has used her witchcraft to hold him. I heard her father came from a family of lazy beggars in Umunnachi until he got a job as a tax collector and stole from hard-working people. Now he has opened many businesses and is walking around in Lagos and answering a Big Man. Her mother is no better. What woman brings another person to breastfeed her own children when she herself is alive and well? Is that normal, gbo, Amala?’

‘No, Mama.’ Amala’s eyes focused on the floor as if she were tracing patterns on it.

‘I heard that all the time she was growing up, it was servants who wiped her ike when she finished shitting. And on top of it, her parents sent her to university. Why? Too much schooling ruins a woman; everyone knows that. It gives a woman a big head and she will start to insult her husband. What kind of wife will that be?’ Master’s mother raised one edge of her wrapper to wipe the sweat from her brow. ‘These girls that go to university follow men around until their bodies are useless. Nobody knows if she can have children. Do you know? Does anyone know?’

‘No, Mama,’ Amala said.

‘Does anyone know, Ugwu?’

Ugwu placed a plate down noisily and pretended as if he had not heard her. She came over and patted his shoulder.

‘Don’t worry, my son will find a good woman and he will not send you away after he marries.’

Perhaps agreeing with the woman would make her exhaust herself quicker and shut her mouth. ‘Yes, Mama,’ he said.

‘I know how hard my son worked to get where he is. All that is not to be wasted on a loose woman.’

‘No, Mama.’

‘I do not mind where the woman my son will marry comes from. I am not like those mothers who want to find wives for their sons only from their own hamlet. But I do not want a Wawa woman, and none of those Imo or Aro women, of course; their dialects are so strange I wonder who told them that we are all the same Igbo people.’

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