Harrison served fried eggs and toast for breakfast.
‘Sah? There are papers I am seeing on the ground in the study?’ He looked alarmed.
‘Leave them there.’
‘Yes, sah.’ Harrison folded and refolded his arms. ‘You are taking your manscrit? I pack other papers for you?’
‘No, I won’t be working this weekend,’ Richard said. The disappointment on Harrison’s face did not amuse him as it usually did. He wondered, as he boarded the train, what it was Harrison did during the weekends. Perhaps he cooked himself tiny exquisite meals. He shouldn’t have been so ill-tempered with the poor man; it wasn’t Harrison’s fault that Okeoma felt he was condescending. It was the look in Okeoma’s eyes that worried him the most: a disdainful distrust that made him think of reading somewhere that the African and the European would always be irreconcilable. It was wrong of Okeoma to assume that he was one of those Englishmen who did not give the African the benefit of an equal intelligence. Perhaps he had sounded surprised, now that he thought of it, but it was the same surprise he would express if a similar discovery were made in England or anywhere else in the world.
Hawkers were milling about. ‘Buy groundnuts!’ ‘Buy oranges!’ ‘Buy plantains!’
Richard beckoned to a young woman carrying a tray of boiled groundnuts that he didn’t really want. She lowered her tray and he took one, cracked it between his fingers, and chewed the nuts inside before he asked for two cups. She looked surprised that he knew about tasting first, and he thought sourly that Okeoma, too, would have been surprised. Before he ate each nut, he examined it – soft-boiled, light purple, shrivelled – and tried not to think of the crumpled pages in his study, until the train arrived in Port Harcourt.
‘Madu’s invited us to dinner tomorrow,’ Kainene said, as she drove him from the train station in her long American car. ‘His wife has just come back from overseas.’
‘Has she?’ Richard said little else, and instead looked at the hawkers on the road, shouting, gesturing, running after cars to collect their money.
The sound of the rain slapping against the window woke him up the next morning. Kainene lay beside him, her eyes half open in that eerie way that meant she was deeply asleep. He looked at her dark chocolate skin, which shone with oil, and lowered his head to her face. He didn’t kiss her, didn’t let his face touch hers, but placed it close enough so that he could feel the moistness of her breath and smell its faint curdled scent. He stretched and went to the window. It rained in slants here in Port Harcourt so that the water hit the windows and walls rather than the roof. Perhaps it was because the ocean was so close, because the air was so heavy with water that it let it fall too soon. For a moment, the rain became intense and the sound against the window grew loud, like pebbles being flung against the glass. He stretched again. The rain had stopped and the windowpanes were cloudy. Behind him, Kainene stirred and mumbled something.
‘Kainene?’ he said.
Her eyes were still half open, her breathing still regular.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said, although he was sure she didn’t hear him.
Outside, Ikejide was plucking oranges; his uniform bunched up at the back as he nudged fruit down with a stick.
‘Good morning, sah,’ he said.
‘Kedu?’ Richard asked. He felt comfortable practising his Igbo with Kainene’s stewards, because they were always so expressionless that it did not matter whether or not he got the tones right.
‘I am well, sah.’
‘Jisie ike.’
‘Yes, sah.’
Richard went to the bottom of the orchard, where he could see, through the thicket of trees, the white foam of the sea’s waves. He sat on the ground. He wished that Major Madu had not invited them to dinner; he was not at all interested in meeting the man’s wife. He got up and stretched and went around to the front yard and looked at the violet bougainvillea that crept up the walls. He walked for a while down the muddy stretch of deserted road that led to the house before he turned back. Kainene was in bed reading a newspaper. He climbed in beside her and she reached out and touched his hair, her fingers gently caressing his scalp. ‘Are you all right? You’ve been tense since yesterday.’
Richard told her about Okeoma, and because she did not respond right away, he added, ‘I remember the first time I read about Igbo-Ukwu art, in an article where an Oxford don described it as having a strange rococo, almost Fabergé-like virtuosity. I never forgot that – rococo, almost Fabergé-like virtuosity. I fell in love even with that expression.’
She folded the newspaper and placed it on the bedside cabinet. ‘Why does it matter so much what Okeoma thinks?’
‘I do love the art. It was horrible of him to accuse me of disrespect.’
‘And it’s wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It’s possible to love something and still condescend to it.’
Richard rolled away from her. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know if I’m a writer.’
‘You won’t know until you write, will you?’ Kainene climbed out of bed, and he noticed a metallic sheen on her thin shoulders. ‘I see you don’t feel up to an evening out. I’ll call Madu and cancel dinner.’
She came back after making the phone call and sat on the bed, and in the silence that separated them he suddenly felt grateful that her crispness gave him no space for self-pity, gave him nothing to hide behind.
‘I once spat in my father’s glass of water,’ she said. ‘He hadn’t upset me or anything. I just did it. I was fourteen. I would have been incredibly satisfied if he drank it, but of course Olanna ran and changed the water.’ She stretched out beside him. ‘Now you tell me something horrible you did.’
He was aroused by her silky skin rubbing against his, by how readily she had changed the evening plans with Major Madu. ‘I didn’t have the confidence to do horrible things,’ he said.
‘Well, tell me something, then.’
He thought of telling her about that day in Wentnor when he hid from Molly and felt, for the first time, the possibility of shaping his own destiny. But he didn’t. Instead, he told her about his parents, how they stared at each other when they talked, forgot his birthdays, and then had Molly make a cake that said happy belated birthday weeks after. They never knew what and when he ate; Molly fed him when she remembered. They had not planned to have him and, because of that, they had raised him as an afterthought. But he understood even as a young boy that it was not that they did not love him, rather it was that they often forgot that they did because they loved each other too much. Kainene raised her eyebrows, sardonic, as if his reasoning did not make sense to her, and because of that he was afraid to tell her that he sometimes thought he loved her too much.
2. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
He discusses the British soldier-merchant Taubman Goldie, how he coerced, cajoled, and killed to gain control of the palm-oil trade and how, at the Berlin Conference of 1884 where Europeans divided Africa, he ensured that Britain beat France to two protectorates around the River Niger: the North and the South.
The British preferred the North. The heat there was pleasantly dry; the Hausa-Fulani were narrow-featured and therefore superior to the negroid Southerners, Muslim and therefore as civilized as one could get for natives, feudal and therefore perfect for indirect rule. Equable emirs collected taxes for the British, and the British, in return, kept the Christian missionaries away.
The humid South, on the other hand, was full of mosquitoes and animists and disparate tribes. The Yoruba were the largest in the Southwest. In the Southeast, the Igbo lived in small republican communities. They were non-docile and worryingly ambitious. Since they did not have the good sense to have kings, the British