‘I cannot forgive him,’ she’d mimicked me. ‘He did not ask about our son, he did not ask about his son. Does he care? Has he cared all these years?’ she’d asked rhetorically. ‘Please, in the name of the Virgin Mary, I ask you not to let Ifechi see you like this, eh? Do not let that good husband of yours see you like this. Not for Urenna.’ She sneered at the name like a rag picked up from the dustbin.
Chidinma’s harshness had poured cold water on my agitation, and I’d gone home that night, my head righted. When I’d told Ifechi the next day, I had reached a measure of peace, and I’d thought he had been relieved to see that the chance meeting had not turned my world the wrong side up.
‘Uloma and Ozioma kwanu?’ I asked Chidinma about her girls, two beautiful if not terribly book-smart young women – genes were strong things. They were now in their twenties, and their mother could not wait for them to marry.
‘Still no husband o, my sister,’ she said, sounding so serious.
I laughed. ‘You know that marriage is not everything.’
‘I know it is not everything,’ she responded dourly. ‘When are you leaving your own?’
I laughed. Chidinma could be so dramatic.
‘How is the shop doing?’ Chidinma asked, changing the subject, fumbling in her purse for something. I waited until her hand came out with some groundnuts.
‘It is doing well.’
‘Thank God,’ she said.
I was not sure what God had to do with any of it, but I exercised wisdom by ignoring that. God was the one thing we could not agree on. Chidinma was a Roman Catholic and would be until she died.
‘Did I tell you that I have a new customer? Mrs Obiechina. Her son is getting married in a few months, and I am making clothes for her for the traditional wedding and the church wedding. And she is rich – she did not haggle for a second when I told her the prices. Now, she is even bringing her friends to make aso-ebi for the wedding.’
‘That is very good. Is she inviting you to the wedding? Maybe you can take me, eh? And I know a baker o, in case they do not yet have a baker for the cake?’
I laughed at her. That was Chidinma, always looking for an opportunity to make money. She often said that she had no choice; having five children had not been the greatest decision she made in life.
It was a destination wedding, I told her. In Kenya. All the events were happening there. So, no, I would not be going, or taking her with me.
…
What I did not tell Chidinma that day – mostly because I did not know it myself – was that Mrs Obiechina and I were on our way to establishing some kind of friendship, if you could call a seventy-year-old and an almost fifty-year-old woman friends.
I had long stopped wondering what excuse Mrs Obiechina would provide for bringing her big, perfumed self to my shop in the middle of a busy day. Twice, sometimes three times a day, she dropped in – for ten, twenty minutes, sometimes an hour.
‘Good afternoon, my dear,’ she would say, entering the shop. She would smile at me as if I brought her joy by just being there. ‘Kedu? How is the work going?’
‘Good afternoon, Ma,’ I would reply. ‘Work is going well.’
There was a time when I wondered whether she dropped in to check on her expensive fabrics and, exasperated, I would ask Ifechi why a woman would leave her clothes with a tailor if she was not confident in that tailor. He would smile at me in that infuriatingly calm way, and ask if she was taking up more than two seats. She is heavy, I would say, so maybe one and a half seats. And my husband would guffaw in laughter.
But Mrs Obiechina didn’t worry about her fabrics. Indeed, she brought more, her perfume wafting in to announce her.
‘I just went to Obiageli’s and thought I would come in to see how you were doing,’ she would say with a smile. I would keep myself from saying what was on the tip of my tongue, which was that Mrs Nwajei lived all the way in Abakpa and there was a straight route from her house to Mrs Obiechina’s Independence Layout address.
But more than surviving her visits, I began to look forward to them. I was not quite sure when I made this transition, or how Mrs Obiechina wore my resistance down. Perhaps it was when she began to bring fruits to tempt my willing-to-be-tempted workers. Or when I said I liked a perfume and she brought me a bottle the next time, saying she had lots of them and gave them out for birthdays and at Christmas. Or her deep, quiet interest in my work as a tailor, or fashion designer, as she called me. Or perhaps it was when she began to show interest in my children, insisting that I call them more often and listening with concentration when I spoke about them. She wished, she said, there had been mobile phones when her son, Afam, went away to boarding school.
All I know is that we became friendly. And that I began to look forward to her smile, which started with a crinkling by the side of her eyes before it came down to her mouth, and to her stories about her son’s music production business. It made me realise that I had not known the friendship of an older woman, a woman who was old enough to be my mother.
Mrs Obiechina and Ifechi also took to each other and had lots to talk about when he came to the shop. Ifechi would sit and listen to her like she had the wisdom of God in a pouch somewhere. Her eyes lit up when she saw him, and she said that I had made a really good choice, that I was a truly lucky woman. Would she still call me lucky if she knew my past? I wondered. Lucky people did not lose their parents early, were not sent off to work in homes where they did not receive the love that every child should; they did not get pregnant outside of marriage with the child of a boy who did not care. And, I felt a squeeze where they said the heart should be, they did not then proceed to lose the child. But I kept these thoughts to myself, in part because what she said was true. I was very lucky to have found my husband.
It was a strange world, I would find myself thinking occasionally. Who would have thought I would be friends with this woman from a different world? In the past, I could have been her housemaid, but in this time, we were friends, in a manner of speaking.
One afternoon, she told me she had just stopped in to see her doctor.
‘I hope all is well,’ I said, surprised by the genuine concern that welled up from my heart.
‘Yes. He likes to monitor my blood pressure, which goes up sometimes. And my blood sugar. And my cholesterol. And my heart rate. An unending list of things, I tell you. He tells me to stop eating fried eggs and beef. As if I have more than one life to live. As if any of us are leaving here alive.’ She laughed, a hearty laugh, her big arms jiggling to the sound of her mirth.
She must exasperate her doctor, I thought, but I found myself laughing right along with her as she lowered herself into her favourite spot in my reception – the two-seater couch that welcomed you with the right combination of softness and firmness. I did not wonder how long she would stay this time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JULIE
I sat in the dining room, a dark ornate room, furnished with the beautiful brown chairs and long dinner table that should have seated many more people than the single person sitting there this night. Dinner was served at six-thirty, the same time that Eugene had insisted it be served when he was alive. I had no energy to say to the cook sometimes, ‘I do not want to eat. I have no appetite.’ Today he presented a bowl of watery, bland nsala soup. My cook could cook many things, but nsala soup was not one of them.
I ate by myself. And then I watched CNN. It was a habit I’d formed with Eugene, this news-watching, and I continued even after he died. I often wondered if the people at CNN started their day by praying for evil things to happen in the world. Today, it was something about the Middle East. Wars would never end. I could not remember if that was what it said in the Bible. Or it could be that wars would increase in the end. Was this the end? When a leader and his wife sat down on golden stools, stuck in power, and let children die? Though my eyes stayed on the screen – what else was there to look at when one had lived in a house for thirty years? – my thoughts rove
d through the day.
Obiageli found my budding friendship with the seamstress very amusing. ‘He who climbs the oji tree should attempt not only to get its fruits but firewood too,’ she quoted one of my favourite proverbs back at me. ‘You will get well-made clothes out of her as well as friendship?’
I ignored her.
‘Please, I still need my best friend,’ Obiageli went on, ‘Tell her that she should go back to her own secondary school and find her own best friend. Ah ah, what is this?’ She laughed till tears came out of her eyes. And I joined her, so infectious was her amusement.
‘Is it because she is from Nwokenta?’ she asked me more seriously.
My son was curious, too. On several occasions when he called, I would say I was at my tailor’s shop. ‘You are there again! Is everything all right, Mummy?’ he asked one day.
I have long finished the last of the nsala soup when he called, talking about work. ‘I promise to come visit,’ he said eventually, ‘It is just that lots of projects are taking off right now and it is such a bad time to take time away from work.’
‘I know,’ I reassured him, as I knew he wanted me to. ‘I am fine, really. If I need anything, I will let you know,’ I said, knowing it would get him off my back.
‘Okay then. If you promise.’
‘I promise.’
We said our goodbyes. A sigh escaped me. Why did everybody think that becoming old meant becoming foolish, senile? Everyone, including old people like Obiageli nwannem nwanyi, thought that becoming old was synonymous with gullibility. I thought about my son as a young boy of three, wanting me to pick him up when he came out from his class at the nursery school and wrapping both of his arms, long even then, around my neck. I thought about the joy of being loved, being needed. And then I thought of this young man who was off living his life somewhere, loving but not needing the old woman I had become.
Who was this seamstress who was taking all his mother’s time, I imagined my son asking himself in Lagos, London, or Frankfurt – wherever it was that his business took him. Did he wonder, I grumbled, what I, a retiree, a widow, lay reader in church, former chairwoman of many organisations – Inner Wheel Club, town meeting, church women’s organisation, Union of Teachers, Enugu branch – did he wonder what I did all day? No. But the minute I developed a new friendship, sleep vanished from his eyes.
I sighed. It is important for a woman to have a life, I heard my mother say in my head. It is most important for a woman to have children, but she must have a life outside of her children because one day they will grow up or refuse to grow up. Either way, they will still leave you. I smiled. My mother had never really said that, never really said anything beyond the fact that a woman must have children to be called a woman. But whenever anything like a nugget of wisdom popped into my head, I attributed it by force of habit to that quiet force of nature I had called Mother.
I did wish Afam could show a little more concern than he had, but I chided myself: everyone must live their lives. His business was taking off; he had a new love in his life, soon to be his wife. He called often. Of his love, I could not be in doubt. Perhaps if I had married a little earlier, I would have had grandchildren already, like Obiageli. But even she could stay only so long in her children’s homes. Her stories of being careful what you said about and to your in-laws were enough to inspire any old person to stay put in their own home. True, there was the joy of grandchildren, but you soon had the sense that you were overstaying your welcome.
Thinking of grandchildren, I wondered when my son and his fiancée would start a family. Many new-fangled ideas were now becoming the norm. First, it was having fewer children. One time that meant having four, but at church I heard new couples saying they would have two, even one, no more. I had had one because I had no choice. Given a choice, I happily would have had six. Some, like my son, say they did not even mind the sex of the children. The world was full of wonders; the one constant thing, as they said, was change.
Where had the time gone? How did it happen that everyone now called me Mama, and treated me with deference but also with care, like I would break if they looked away for a second. My bad knees did not help. Afam mentioned knee-replacement surgery. I did not want surgery. My doctor said it would help to lose some weight, to stop eating everything that could be called remotely tasty. Was that living? I asked him. He told me to take walks with Eugene. The walks had not prevented the stroke that came to kill him, so I stopped walking. I could not bring myself to do it alone.
I was lonely. There was no getting around it. I ached with loneliness, it was a physical pain. The nights were the hardest after the cook and the help had gone to their houses. I sometimes called Obiageli right after I’d aeten, but I could not stay too long on the phone. It cost money and made Emma jealous. Once, I had asked the cook to watch CNN with me – Amanpour, World News. He was a man in his fifties and had been with us, with me, for more than ten years. His discomfort as he’d sat on the edge of the seat, responding in monosyllables to my questions about his sons in Lagos, had been hard to watch. His feet had kept up a ratatata sound on the edge of the beautiful, fading centre rug Eugene had bought in Kano the first time he’d gone back after the war. I never asked again. Afam usually sounded so tired when he called after work, I did not have the heart to keep him on the phone.
It surprised me to see that Eugene had left such a big hole, that he had mattered this much. I got what I needed. Did Eugene get what he needed? the truth monster asked. He had been selfish, the other part of me said, the one that took my side when I had tough choices and had to make a decision. But so were you, said the truth monster. It was necessary, was the reply. I got a child; he got a son. And we had become friends in the end.
For a long time, we were anything but friends – not enemies, but not passionate lovers either. Instead we were, like many of our friends, co-parents, roommates, providing the necessary picture of partnership that each needed at social events, playing the part that society had decided for each gender within the marriage. But even that fragile partnership threatened to break down when he began an affair with a newly hired employee.
Affairs had never been a problem before. They had long been part of our marriage. On his part. I lacked energy for the passion and the idea of getting into one, perhaps out of one. It was enough to get into one marriage. But Eugene, it seemed to me, would never grow out of his need for the chase and the new adulation that came with each affair. My nonchalance was hard won; I had only one son, after all, with the latent fear that Eugene would seek another elsewhere. But when I did come to this detachment, it was genuine. Until Mmaku.
When Mmaku came along, I was already principal of my school. Afam had just entered boarding school, at Eugene’s insistence, and life was rolling along on even, if unexciting roads. Eugene had greyed, grown a proper pot belly and flesh everywhere else, and looked every inch the middle-aged, successful Igbo man who knew his place in the world and made sure everyone else knew it. The symptoms of the disease – adultery or jealousy, depending on whose side you were on – were the late-night, furtive phone calls taken in other rooms. I knew that adultery was Eugene’s middle name, but he had been careful not to bring it home. What was different about this one, I wondered.
When I mentioned it to Obiageli, she waved it off. She knew about his philandering ways. ‘He always comes back,’ she said by way of reassurance. ‘Why are you worried?’
‘I am not sure. This seems more serious. Phone calls in the middle of the night. And he has slept outside many more times in the past six months than he has done throughout our marriage. He does not sleep well, as if his own bed has suddenly become itchy.’
Maybe you need to get to know who this woman is,’ Obiageli had suggested, her tone careful.
It did not take long for me to find out. She was an intern, doing her compulsory work year in one of Eugene’s companies.
‘Twenty-one, maybe twenty-two,’ I told Obiageli. ‘What do they talk about?’ I rage
d. ‘Oh, you must think I am mad. Why should they talk when they have more important things to do?’
Obiageli did not laugh. She only said, ‘Take it easy. This will blow over like the others.’
My gut instinct told me otherwise. This one, this affair, was different. I could feel Eugene’s desire to run out of the house, to be anywhere but close to me. Even his socialising – Rotary meetings, village meetings, meetings of knights in the church, old boys’ meetings – faded in the face of this fervour for something else.
One day, when I knew that Eugene was having a meeting with the governor, I drove to the office just to get a glimpse of the girl. Like a character in a spy novel, I walked in and asked for Eugene. She was visibly shaken when the manager introduced me to her.
She was tall, fair-skinned. I would not call her beautiful; she wore too much make-up for a girl her age.
I stared at her. My mind, perhaps my expression too, registered the horror: she was pregnant. Anywhere from three to six months, there was no way of knowing.
Her voice was soft when she said, ‘Good afternoon, Ma,’ before making a quick excuse and escaping with files in her hands.
She was pregnant, I told Obiageli. And she was keeping the baby. And he was letting her work in the office where everyone knew that the two of them were sleeping together.
Why? I wanted to know. But I already did. And my friend did too. The last time a pregnant woman had told Eugene she was having his child, he had married her. He had married me. Will he do to me what he had done to Onyemaechi? I wanted to scream.
It was Obiageli who condensed it for me: ‘You cannot let that happen. You cannot let Eugene marry another wife.’
‘No,’ I said. That was all too clear. In Obiageli’s bedroom we sat and hatched a plan, and then I went home.
We first found the young woman’s mother and paid her a visit. She was a cleaner at the university. Did Eugene, that most superficial of men, know this – that his prospective mother-in-law was a cleaner?
The Son of the House Page 21