Half of a Yellow Sun (11 page)

“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 toward. 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 spilled 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 color 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 over-furnished 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 armor 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, through 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 wasn’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 naïve, 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 leaped 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.