‘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.
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,