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‘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.
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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’sGold, and mine is the more practical Let’s watch and see what next Godwill 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.
