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

‘As usual.’ Okeoma laughed. ‘How is your book coming along, by the way?’

‘I’m ploughing on.’

‘Is it a novel about expatriates?’

‘Well, no, not quite.’

‘But it’s a novel, isn’t it?’

Richard sipped his beer and wondered what Okeoma would think if he knew the truth – that even he did not know whether it was a novel or not because the pages he had written did not make any coherent whole.

‘I’m very interested in Igbo-Ukwu art, and I want to make that a central part of the book,’ he said.

‘How so?’

‘I’ve been utterly fascinated by the bronzes since I first read about them. The details are stunning. It’s quite incredible that these people had perfected the complicated art of lost-wax casting during the time of the Viking raids. There is such marvellous complexity in the bronzes, just marvellous.’

‘You sound surprised,’ Okeoma said.

‘What?’

‘You sound surprised, as if you never imagined these people capable of such things.’

Richard stared at Okeoma; there was a new and quiet disdain in the way Okeoma stared back, a slight furrow to his eyebrows before he said, ‘Enough, Odenigbo and Prof! I have a poem calling to you all.’

Richard sucked his tongue. The peppery burning was unbearable now, and he hardly waited for Okeoma to finish reading a strange poem – about Africans getting buttocks rashes from defecating in imported metal buckets – before he got up to leave.

‘It’s still all right to drive Ugwu to his hometown next week, Odenigbo?’ he asked.

Odenigbo glanced at Olanna.

‘Yes, of course,’ Olanna said. ‘I hope you enjoy watching the ori-okpa festival.’

‘Have another beer, Richard,’ Odenigbo said.

‘I’m off to Port Harcourt early in the morning, so I must get to sleep,’ Richard said, but Odenigbo had already turned back to Professor Ezeka.

‘What about the stupid politicians in the Western House of Assembly that the police had to use tear gas on? Tear gas! And their orderlies carried their limp bodies to their cars! Imagine that!’

The thought that Odenigbo would not miss him after he was gone left Richard dispirited. When he got home, Harrison opened the door and bowed. ‘Good evening, sah. The food is going well, sah?’

‘Yes, yes, now let me get to sleep,’ Richard snapped. He was not in the mood for what he was certain would follow: Harrison would offer to teach any of his friends’ houseboys who wanted to learn the majestic recipes for sherry trifle or stuffed garden eggs. He went to his study and spread his manuscript pages out on the floor and looked at them: a few pages of a small-town novel, one chapter of the archaeologist novel, a few pages of rapturous descriptions of the bronzes. He started to crumple them, page by page, until he had a jagged pile next to his dustbin, and then he got up and went to bed with the sensation of warm blood in his ears.

He didn’t sleep well; he felt as if he had just laid his head on the pillow before the blinding sunlight streamed in through his curtains and he heard Harrison’s clatter in the kitchen and Jomo’s digging in the garden. He felt brittle. He could not wait to sleep properly, with Kainene’s thin arm pressed against his body.

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.