Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection

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.

‘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 armour 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, though 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.’