‘Yes, dear,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing. It’s nothing,’ she sighed. Like the ambulance, she was drawing away.
But I was curious now. ‘This chicken is delicious. Much better than the one we had at lunch. That was all grease,’ I tried. ‘But you didn’t eat very much of yours. Were you not feeling well?’ She had not touched the roast at all.
‘No, I wasn’t so hungry,’ she replied. ‘I shouldn’t have taken the food in the first place.’ And then she fell silent again.
I did not want to ask outright what the matter was, but I did not want that to be the end of it. After another few minutes of quiet I said, ‘I may be mistaken, but I’m sure Mrs Minter is getting fatter. I thought so today, for a while now. Such a young girl – she should be careful not to let herself go. She’s only asking for trouble.’
Mrs Minter’s first name is Deborah. We hardly ever call her that.
‘Oh, she’s just fine,’ Shree rallied to Mrs Minter’s defence. ‘She’s not getting bigger. In fact, I think she’s losing weight. Just a little. But certainly she’s not putting any on.’
‘Oh, yes?’ I said.
‘Mmm,’ Shree continued. ‘I’ve even wanted to tell her so myself, but I don’t, of course. It might cause offence.’
When we were younger, throughout our thirties and forties, Shree had a spirit coupled with a temper that could take on the most arrogant bully. I learned to argue with her in quiet ways, without recourse to shouting or bellicosity. If I lost my temper and began to yell, I would always lose the argument, regardless of whether I was right or wrong. But after Nicholas died, Shree could never rise to her old heights again and I began to miss that part of her. Something had been peeled away from her, from both of us, and it had left her exposed and vulnerable.
‘Remember when you were talking about retiring and we couldn’t decide what to do?’ she began quietly.
‘Oh, yes?’ I said again.
‘It doesn’t seem so long ago, does it? But it’s been years and years.’
‘Um … yes, it has,’ I replied. I did not know why she had to bring up that business again. I lifted a forkful of chicken and sweet potato curry to my lips, let it hover, then lowered it again.
‘That’s what we were talking about this morning, Mrs Minter and I.’
I sighed, which could have meant anything – fatigue, contentment, annoyance, gluttony – but I did not say a word. When Shree retired she had been teaching for over thirty years. She was one of those people who love their work; if it had been financially viable, she would have done it without the salary. She was always good with children – with our own as well as her school kids. I would watch her sometimes, sitting at the back of a class in which our daughter Ronke was a pupil. She had a way of making even the slowest student feel cared for and appreciated; she gave them all the encouragement they needed to thrive and in return she was loved more like a mother than a teacher.
She wanted to return to St Lucia after she retired. She was fed up with the winters, and except for our children who were grown anyway, there was no reason for her to stay. There was me, of course. I hadn’t retired, but that would happen soon enough. She wanted to be close to her sisters again. She felt it like an ache within her. She grew excited, drew up plans for the future. Everything was clear in her mind then.
Meanwhile, I continued to work, past my retirement date. Every day I would think about Shree’s spoken plans and would consider my own desires which I had not verbalised. I too wanted to escape the cold, but to my own country, not to St Lucia – that wasn’t my home, the place where I had lived as a boy. Its smells and foods and geography were unfamiliar to me. Even though I had travelled many times to visit Shree’s family, settling there seemed like starting out all over again.
When I eventually vocalised my thoughts, so much time had elapsed that Shree’s plans were almost concrete in her mind. She could not take what I had to say seriously. She kept expecting me to yield, to see things from her point of view. But the opposite occurred – with each passing day, I dug in my heels until I was adamant that we would return to Zaria. Of course Shree would not come back with me and I would not live in Soufrière. It was too far away. We were both strangers to the other’s country. So we remained in London; our children and grandchildren were here.
‘Look, you’ve only eaten half your chicken,’ Shree pointed out as we cleared the dining table. She was becoming more animated now.
‘It’s probably best that we’re still here,’ she said, rinsing a side plate under a lukewarm tap. ‘I mean, we get to see the children whenever we want, right? I would have missed them too much if we’d moved away.’
‘Everything we need is right here,’ I said. ‘Besides, it’s too late to change now.’ I hoped that would be the end of it.
There was a time when I was younger, when I wanted to return home to see the people I had grown up with – cousins, neighbours, even primary school friends. My parents were no longer alive then, but there was this pull that made it uncomfortable for me to be in England, an awkwardness in my geography. I travelled back a few times over a period of years, searching for opportunities. I almost invested all our savings in a soft-drinks company, and although Shree wasn’t keen on the idea, she did not hold me back. At the last minute I shrank away from the venture – the pitfalls seemed too great to gamble everything we owned. In the end the company struggled for years and then flourished. It is doing well to this day, but I can’t agonise over that. I am glad, in a way, that I withdrew. There were times in Zaria when I did not know who to turn to, who to trust. All the sure foundations of my life in London did not apply there. Nothing seemed without an element of risk: the contractors we considered, the other investors, even the night drive from the airport in Lagos to the hotel seemed hazardous. I was a stranger again as I had been in London all those years ago. This did not come so much as a shock to me, but as an observation – this gradual loss of something as I invested my life in Shree and the children, our house, my work, the friends we gained. I could only gaze at both extremes in my life and accept that the changes were beyond my control.
There were a few years before I settled down with Shree when I felt adrift in the world. Everything was strange. I did not wish to return home, but I did not feel comfortable in this new place – and I was hungry for something else. Often I wanted to jump aboard a ship and set sail. But there was nowhere I could go, nowhere I needed to be. I changed jobs frequently, moved from flat to flat. There were many affairs in my life, and parties, but nothing could assuage my restlessness. Only years later did I understand that there had been a great need then to make the choice to settle. No one tells you you need a firm sense of place in the world until it’s too late and you’re floundering – a poor skater on black ice.
Several months ago we stopped using the upstairs rooms; we live on the ground floor now. It was a problem for Shree to manage the stairs with her difficult hip, and I had no need to journey between both floors. Late one night I wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water; the distance from our bedroom to the kitchen is now very short. I drank looking out of the sliding doors. In the moonlight, roaming about in the garden, were two foxes and their cubs. At first I was startled – they looked like apparitions. I woke Shree and told her what I had seen. She crept into the kitchen, and I feared the foxes might have gone; they may have been a figment of my imagination. But there they were – Shree grinned like a girl when she saw them. She sucked in her breath and held a hand to her mouth.
After five minutes the foxes disappeared. We couldn’t sleep. Shree switched on the kitchen light and began to prepare a pot of lemon tea. Her hair was still bound in its netting and she kept tugging at the sleeves of her nightdress to prevent them getting wet. We sipped the tea in silence, occasionally looking out of the sliding doors.
‘It’s nice like this,’ Shree said at one point. ‘So quiet outside. Peaceful.’
In a while the dawn would materiali
se and another day would begin. I thought of Mrs Minter then, sleeping soundly, her large frame rising and falling, the breath whistling out of her.
ANOTHER WOMAN
‘YOU ALL RIGHT there?’ the barman asks. ‘Want another?’ He glances at her, quickly shifts his gaze to a table near the centre of the room where a group sits, watching. He reddens. She makes him nervous, the old woman sitting by herself. Not talking.
‘No, I’m just fine with this,’ she smiles. ‘Thank you.’ She cups the half pint of stout with her small dry hands as if it is something warm. Life giving. She glances at her watch and sighs, looks at the weathered old men, the young people, the girl near the door, her watch again. Barely a minute has passed.
Someone laughs, too loud, and she feels it in her spine. A table of youngsters in the corner, all of them with too much to drink, and still only early evening.
She waits until eight and drains her glass. With relief she swings away from the bar and gingerly steps off the stool. She takes time to fix the buttons of her cardigan. She wants to draw feeling back into her legs which are stiff and sore from so much sitting.
‘Goodnight.’ She smiles at the barman.
‘Night,’ he says.
She walks past the glances, noticing how the conversation dips, past the girl by the entrance who does not look at her, who has her eyes fixed firmly on the door, into the parched mouth of the summer evening.
She hails the first bus that arrives, taking her south of the river, over the bridge with the glinting water below. She knows it is another kind of journey in the winter. Colder. Wetter. Miserable. But she does not want to remember that now. The conductor walks past – he does not stop – all the way to the front of the bus. He peers at the road ahead, turns and walks towards her. She rummages for her pass in the pockets of her cardigan. As the conductor draws close she looks up. Again he does not stop. She squints then sits back. She holds her breath, not knowing where she is, what is happening, seeing her own brother who has twice walked past, not acknowledging her, not checking tickets, not smiling, moving on.
She turns to gaze at him as he stands on the platform. His hair is not as neat as she would like; bushy at the back and sides, with the smooth lake of brown skin at the crown, the whole effect peppered with grey. She realises her mistake. She sees the resemblance, but nothing else. This man is taller and too lean and he does not smile. But she cannot take her eyes off him. It leaves her troubled for the remainder of the journey.
‘Taiwo? Is that you? Tai? How was it?’ her husband calls from the bathroom when he hears the clunk of the front door.
‘Fine, dear,’ she calls back. ‘I’ll tell you later. You have your bath.’ She can see him in her mind, standing, dripping there, wondering whether to come down immediately or finish his bath, unable to reach a decision. She hears the bathroom door shut.
She stands in the hallway of their home listening to the gentle tinkling of bath water, the faint revving of traffic outside. She cannot shake off the shock of the bus conductor. The terrier barks once and she looks down.
‘Delphi, look at you!’ she says. ‘You nearly gave me a fright.’ She opens the patio door to allow the dog outside. She draws the curtains on the ground floor and prepares the tea and sandwiches they always have upstairs before bed.
‘I hope you opened the window, Raymond,’ she calls as she approaches the landing. ‘I don’t want it all misty in there.’
Her husband opens the door and stands in his dressing gown, his grey hair damp and dishevelled, his skin pink, almost steaming. She likes it that at his age he has retained most of his hair.
‘Oh, Raymond, cover yourself. I’m too old for shocks.’
He turns and fastens the cord of his dressing gown.
‘I hope the bath wasn’t too hot,’ she says. ‘I keep telling you not to use too much hot water, Raymond. It’s not good for your heart.’
‘I didn’t use too much hot,’ he protests. ‘Stop worrying so much. You’ve got enough worry for ten people.’
She glances into the bathroom, at the open window, and makes a barely audible click with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Neither approval nor disapproval. ‘Let’s have the sandwiches before the tea goes cold,’ she says. ‘Nothing worse than lukewarm tea.’
They sit in chairs at one end of the bedroom styled after the many hotel rooms in which they have stayed. Two easy chairs frame a small circular glass table where they sometimes have breakfast. They both loved to travel when they were younger, and this replica of a hotel room is a way to perpetuate their visits abroad.
‘How did it go?’ Raymond asks after he has eaten a first triangle of sandwich.
‘Oh, I don’t know. It was boring,’ she says. ‘I didn’t talk to anyone except the barman … Sometimes it was interesting, seeing the different people – tourists and what have you. But once is enough. I won’t do it again.’
‘I told you not to go, didn’t I?’ he says. ‘Did I force you?’ He bites off another piece of triangle and stares at the teapot on the table between them.
‘No, you’re right, Raymond. I didn’t have to go. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone. Maybe I shouldn’t have opened the front door today. Maybe I shouldn’t have got out of bed.’ She looks out the window, and sits forward a little, squinting. ‘The neighbour’s tree will have to come down soon. Look how it’s leaning. I don’t like it at all. It’s dangerous.’
Raymond looks away from the teapot and scrutinizes the neighbour’s garden. ‘Who even lives there now, I don’t know. They come and go in those flats, I’m surprised the garden gets a look-in.’
‘Well, someone needs to be told before there’s an accident.’
‘I’ll phone the council,’ he says. ‘First thing in the morning, before we go to Tom and Kiki’s.’
Taiwo makes the clicking noise again and they finish their tea in silence.
After her bath they watch the news in bed, then the weather report, then Raymond turns off his lamp. ‘Goodnight, dear.’ He brushes his wife’s lips with his own, then rolls onto his side, away from the glow of her lamp.
She picks up the memoir she is reading, about a woman whose children are kidnapped and taken overseas by her husband. For many years the woman fights to have the children returned to her. They are older and strangers to each other when they are reunited and they are forced to learn to know one another again. Taiwo reads the first few sentences of a new chapter then looks at them once more, realising she cannot remember what she has read. She puts the book down on the duvet and fans out her fingers to examine her nails, her tiny hands. She should have used more moisturiser, she thinks. Already cracks are appearing where the skin is loose above the veins. She cannot remember the last time her skin was taut and soft and smooth.
‘Raymond?’ she whispers. She coughs. ‘Raymond, you’re not sleeping are you?’
Her husband stirs.
‘Raymond?’
‘Yes … dear. What is it?’
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘No. No, not now … Anything the matter?’
‘No, no. I was just thinking. I couldn’t concentrate.’
‘Oh … Oh well. Goodnight then.’
‘Raymond, you … you won’t brush your teeth?’ she asks. ‘Oh Raymond, that’s not nice. I’ll be smelling sardine all night now.’
Raymond sighs and raises himself into a sitting position. He rubs his thighs, on account of the sciatica, before limping to the bathroom. Delphine follows from the foot of the bed and waits for him, lying on the carpet outside the bathroom door. When he returns his wife is quiet.
‘Tai?’ He goes to her side of the bed seeing the slow rise and fall of her body, hearing the shallow, measured breathing that will soon deepen and break into subtle snores. He removes the book from the duvet and turns off the lamp and feels his way back to his side of the bed, careful not to tread on Delphine.
The next day, in the afternoon, Raymond attaches the leash to the terrier while Taiwo
pulls on her raincoat.
‘There’s no sign of rain,’ he says. ‘Not for the next few days. Didn’t you listen to the weather report?’
‘It’s for just in case,’ she replies. ‘One never knows. No one can predict the weather, Raymond. They’re always getting it wrong, you know that.’
They leave the house and plunge into the warm still air. A single vapour trail splits the cloudless sky. Delphine skitters to one side of the pavement, cutting across the old couple, forcing Raymond to change places with his wife.
‘It’s like an oven today,’ Raymond says. ‘I hope they managed to put up the umbrella.’
‘Kiki says they went out and bought a new one. The other one kept collapsing. Something wrong with the catch.’ She unbuttons her raincoat as they walk. By the time they have reached the end of their road she has taken it off and folded it. ‘Raymond, let me help you with Delphi. She’s going this way and that. You hold this for me for a minute.’
Raymond accepts the raincoat and remains silent until he cannot help himself. ‘I told you not to bring it,’ he says.
‘What did the council say,’ Taiwo interjects, ‘when you phoned them?’
Raymond looks ahead and says nothing.
In seven minutes they are at the house. Raymond often jokes that they do not have to use the telephone; the two couples can always shout across the houses to one another. Taiwo lags behind, encouraging Delphine away from the pavement, away from a handsome Doberman pinscher. Raymond waits. The door opens and there is Taiwo again, an exact replica of her, apart from the buba and iro, the head-tie. His own Taiwo is wearing mock denim trousers and an oversized yellow blouse with a faint blue-green smudge near the armpit where the colour of something has run. Her hair is combed back in a bun.
‘Raymond! Come in. Come out of that hot sun,’ Kehinde exclaims. ‘Taiwo, oya now. Thomas is waiting outside.’
A Life Elsewhere Page 17