“Yes.”
“You should write about it then.” She drank her second glass slowly, raising her head to enjoy the cold liquid flowing down her throat. “Do you have a title for the book?”
“‘The Basket of Hands.’”
“‘The Basket of Hands.’” Olanna tilted her glass and finished her drink. “It sounds macabre.”
“It’s about labor. The good things that were achieved—the railways, for example—but also how labor was exploited and the lengths the colonial enterprise went to.”
“Oh.” Olanna got up and uncorked the second bottle. She bent down to fill her glass first. She felt light, as if it were much easier to carry her own weight, but she was clearheaded; she knew what she wanted to do and what she was doing. Richard’s almost-damp smell filled her nose when she stood before him with the bottle.
“My glass isn’t quite empty,” he said.
“No, it’s not.” She placed the wine bottle on the floor and sat next to him and touched the hair that lay on his skin and thought how fair and soft it was, not assertively brittle like Odenigbo’s, nothing like Odenigbo at all. He looked at her and she wondered if his eyes had really turned gray or if she was imagining it. She touched his face, left her hand resting on his cheek.
“Come, sit on the floor with me,” she said finally.
They sat side by side, their backs resting on the sofa seat. Richard said, in a mumble, “I should leave,” or something that sounded like it. But she knew he would not leave and that when she stretched out on the bristly carpet he would lie next to her. She kissed his lips. He pulled her forcefully close, and then, just as quickly, he let go and moved his face away. She could hear his rapid breathing. She unbuckled his trousers and moved back to pull them down and laughed because they got stuck at his shoes. She took her dress off. He was on top of her and the carpet pricked her naked back and she felt his mouth limply enclose her nipple. It was nothing like Odenigbo’s bites and sucks, nothing like those shocks of pleasure. Richard did not run his tongue over her in that flicking way that made her forget everything; rather, when he kissed her belly, she was aware that he was kissing her belly.
Everything changed when he was inside her. She raised her hips, moving with him, matching his thrusts, and it was as if she was throwing shackles off her wrists, extracting pins from her skin, freeing herself with the loud, loud cries that burst out of her mouth. Afterward, she felt filled with a sense of well-being, with something close to grace.
21
Richard was almost relieved to learn of Sir Winston Churchill’s death. It gave him an opportunity to avoid going to Port Harcourt for the weekend. He could not face Kainene yet.
“You’ll have to lay your awful Churchill joke to rest now, won’t you?” Kainene said on the phone, when he told her that he would be going to Lagos for the memorial at the British High Commission. He laughed and then thought of what it would be like if she found out and left him and he never heard that sardonic voice over the phone.
It was only days ago, but even the memory of Olanna’s flat
was hazy: he had fallen asleep afterward, on her living room floor, and woken up with a dry headache and a keenly uncomfortable sense of his own nudity. She was sitting on the sofa, dressed and silent. He felt awkward, not sure whether they were supposed to talk about what had happened. Finally he turned to leave without saying a word because he did not want what he imagined to be regret on her face to turn into dislike. He had not been chosen; it could have been any man. He had sensed this even while holding her naked, but it had not marred the pleasure he found in her curvy body, her moving with him, her taking as much as she gave. He had never been so firm, never lasted so long as he had with her.
Now, though, he was bereft. His admiration had thrived on her being unattainable, a worship from afar, but now that he had tasted the wine on her tongue, pressed himself so close against her that he too smelled of coconuts, he felt a strange loss. He had lost his fantasy. But what he worried most about losing was Kainene. He was determined that Kainene would never know.
Susan sat next to him at the memorial service, and when parts of a speech delivered by Sir Winston Churchill were played, she clasped her gloved hands together, tightly, and leaned against him. Richard felt tears in his eyes. This was perhaps the only thing they had in common, their admiration for Churchill. Afterward, she asked him to have a drink with her at the Polo Club. She had taken him once before and had said, while they sat by the expanse of green lawn, “Africans have been allowed in for only a few years, but you wouldn’t believe how many come now, and they show such little appreciation, really.”
They were seated at the same spot again, near the whitewashed railing, by a Nigerian waiter in a tight black suit. The club was almost empty, although a polo game was on at the other side. The sounds of eight shouting, swearing men galloping at full speed after a ball filled the air. Susan spoke quietly, full of the dulled grief of mourning a person she had never known. She said how interesting it was that the last commoner to get a state funeral was the Duke of Wellington, as if it was news to him, and how sad it was that some people still didn’t know how much Churchill had done for Britain, and how horrible it was that somebody at the memorial had suggested that his mother had some Red Indian blood. She looked a little more tan than he remembered; he had not seen her since he moved to Nsukka. She became animated after a few glasses of gin and talked about a marvelous film on the royal family that had been screened at the British Council.
“You’re not paying much attention, are you?” she asked after a while. Her ears were red.
“Of course I am.”
“I heard about your lady love, Chief Ozobia’s daughter,” Susan said, lady love in the comic caricature that she assumed was an uneducated accent.
“Her name is Kainene.”
“Will you make sure always to use a rubber? One must be careful, even with the most educated of these people.”
Richard looked out at the calm unending greenness. He would never have been happy with her—life would be gossamer, all his days merging into one long sheer sheet of nothingness.
“I had an affair with John Blake,” she said.
“Did you?”
Susan laughed. She was playing with her glass, running it along the table, smearing the water that had collected on it. “You seem surprised.”
“I’m not,” he said, although he was. Not because she had an affair but because it was with John, who was married to her good friend Caroline. But this was expatriate life. All they did, as far as he was concerned, was have sex with one another’s wives and husbands, illicit couplings that were more a way of passing heat-blanched time in the tropics than they were genuine expressions of passion.
“It means nothing, absolutely nothing,” Susan said. “But I did want you to know that I shall keep busy while I wait for you to finish with your dusky affair.”