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“What is making you so moody?” He looked sideways at Clara, who was ostentatiously sitting as far away from him as she could, pressed against the left door. She did not answer. “Tell me, darling,” he said, holding her hand in one of his while he drove with the other. “Leave me, ojare,” she said, snatching her hand away.
Obi knew very well why she was moody. She had suggested in her tentative way that they should go to the films. At this stage in their relationship, Clara never said: “Let us go to films.” She said instead: “There is a good film at the Capitol.” Obi, who did not care for films, especially those that Clara called good, had said after a long silence: “Well, if you insist, but I’m not keen.” Clara did not insist, but she felt very much hurt. All evening she had been nursing her feelings. “It’s not too late to go to your film,” said Obi, capitulating, or appearing to do so. “You may go if you want to, I’m not coming,” she said. Only three days before they had gone to see “a very good film” which infuriated Obi so much that he stopped looking at the screen altogether, except when Clara whispered one explanation or another for his benefit. “That man is going to be killed,” she would prophesy, and sure as death, the doomed man would be shot almost immediately. From downstairs the shilling-ticket audience participated noisily in the action.
It never ceased to amaze Obi that Clara should take so much delight in these orgies of killing on the screen. Actually it rather amused him when he thought of it outside the cinema. But while he was there he could feel nothing but annoyance. Clara was well aware of this, and tried her best to ease the tedium for him by squeezing his arm or biting his ear after whispering something into it. “And after all,” she would say sometimes, “I don’t quarrel with you when you start reading your poems to me.” Which was quite true. Only that very morning he had rung her up at the hospital and asked her to come to lunch to meet one of his friends who had recently come to Lagos on transfer from Enugu. Actually Clara had seen the fellow before and didn’t like him. So she had said over the telephone that she wasn’t keen on meeting him again. But Obi was insistent, and Clara had said: “I don’t know why you should want me to meet people that I don’t want to meet.” “You know, you are a poet, Clara,” said Obi. “To meet people you don’t want to meet, that’s pure T. S. Eliot.”
Clara had no idea what he was talking about but she went to lunch and met Obi’s friend, Christopher. So the least that Obi could do in return was to sit through her “very good film,” just as she had sat through a very dull lunch while Obi and Christopher theorized about bribery in Nigeria’s public life. Whenever Obi and Christopher met they were bound to argue very heatedly about Nigeria’s future. Whichever line Obi took, Christopher had to take the opposite. Christopher was an economist from the London School of Economics and he always pointed out that Obi’s arguments were not based on factual or scientific analysis, which was not surprising since he had taken a degree in English.
“The civil service is corrupt because of these so-called experienced men at the top,” said Obi.
“You don’t believe in experience? You think that a chap straight from university should be made a permanent secretary?”
“I didn’t say straight from the university, but even that would be better than filling our top posts with old men who have no intellectual foundations to support their experience.”
“What about the Land Officer jailed last year? He is straight from the university.”
“He is an exception,” said Obi. “But take one of these old men. He probably left school thirty years ago in Standard Six. He has worked steadily to the top through bribery—an ordeal by bribery. To him the bribe is natural. He gave it and he expects it. Our people say that if you pay homage to the man on top, others will pay homage to you when it is your turn to be on top. Well, that is what the old men say.”
“What do the young men say, if I may ask?”
“To most of them bribery is no problem. They come straight to the top without bribing anyone. It’s not that they’re necessarily better than others, it’s simply that they can afford to be virtuous. But even that kind of virtue can become a habit.”
“Very well put,” conceded Christopher as he took a large piece of meat from the egusi soup. They were eating pounded yams and egusi soup with their fingers. The second generation of educated Nigerians had gone back to eating pounded yams or garri with their fingers for the good reason that it tasted better that way. Also for the even better reason that they were not as scared as the first generation of being called uncivilized.
“Zacchaeus!” called Clara.
“Yes, madam,” answered a voice from the pantry.
“Bring us more soup.”
Zacchaeus had half a mind not to reply, but he thought better of it and said grudgingly: “Yes, madam.” Zacchaeus had made up his mind to resign as soon as Master married Madam. “I like Master too much, but this Madam no good,” was his verdict.
CHAPTER THREE
The affair between Obi and Clara could not strictly be called love at first sight. They met at a dance organized by the London branch of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons at the St. Pancras Town Hall. Clara had come with a student who
was fairly well known to Obi and who introduced them. Obi was immediately struck by her beauty and followed her with his eyes round the hall. In the end he succeeded in getting a dance with her. But he was so flustered that the only thing he could find to say was: “Have you been dancing very long?” “No. Why?” was the curt reply. Obi was never a very good dancer, but that night he was simply appalling. He stepped on her toes about four times in the first half-minute. Thereafter she concentrated all her attention on moving her foot sideways just in time. As soon as the dance ended she fled. Obi pursued her to her seat to say: “Thank you very much.” She nodded without looking.
They did not meet again until almost eighteen months later at the Harrington Dock in Liverpool. For it happened that they were returning to Nigeria the same day on the same boat.
It was a small cargo boat carrying twelve passengers and a crew of fifty. When Obi arrived at the dock the other passengers had all embarked and completed their customs formalities. The short bald-headed customs officer was very friendly. He began by asking Obi whether he had had a happy stay in England. Did he go to a university in England? He must have found the weather very cold.
“I didn’t mind the weather very much in the end,” said Obi, who had learnt that an Englishman might grumble about his weather but did not expect a foreigner to join in.
When he went into the lounge Obi nearly fell over himself at the sight of Clara. She was talking to an elderly woman and a young Englishman. Obi sat with them and introduced himself. The elderly woman, whose name was Mrs. Wright, was returning to Freetown. The young man was called Macmillan, an administrative officer in Northern Nigeria. Clara introduced herself as Miss Okeke. “I think we have met before,” said Obi. Clara looked surprised and somewhat hostile. “At the N.C.N.C. dance in London.” “I see,” she said, with as much interest as if she had just been told that they were on a boat in the Liverpool Docks, and resumed her conversation with Mrs. Wright.
The boat left the docks at 11 A.M. For the rest of the day Obi kept to himself, watching the sea or reading in his cabin. It was his first sea voyage, and he had already decided that it was infinitely better than flying.
He woke up the following morning without any sign of the much talked about seasickness. He had a warm bath before any of the other passengers were up, and went to the rails to look at the sea. Last evening it had been so placid. Now it had become an endless waste of restless, jaggy hillocks topped with white. Obi stood at the rails for nearly an hour drinking in the unspoilt air. “They that go down to the sea in ships …” he remembered. He had very little religion nowadays, but he was nevertheless deeply moved.
When the gong sounded for breakfast his appetite was as keen as the morning air. The seating arrangement had been fixed on the previous day. There was a big central table which seated ten, and six little two-seaters ranged round the room. Eight of the twelve passengers sat on the middle table with the captain at the head and the chief engineer at the other end. Obi sat between Macmillan and a Nigerian civil servant called Stephen Udom. Directly in front of him was Mr. Jones, who was something or other in the United Africa Company. Mr. Jones always worked solidly through four of the five heavy courses and then announced to the steward with self-righteous continence: “Just coffee,” with the emphasis on the “just.”
In contrast to Mr. Jones, the chief engineer hardly touched his food. Watching his face, one would think they had served him portions of Epsom Salts, rhubarb, and mist. alba. He held his shoulders up, his arms pressed against his sides as though he was in constant fear of evacuating.
Clara sat on Mr. Jones’s left, but Obi studiously refused to look in her direction. She was talking with an Education Officer from Ibadan who was explaining to her the difference between language and dialect.
At first the Bay of Biscay was very calm and collected. The boat was now heading towards a horizon where the sky was light, seeming to hold out a vague promise of sunshine. The sea’s circumference was no longer merged with the sky, but stood out in deep clear contrast like a giant tarmac from which God’s aeroplane might take off. Then as evening approached, the peace and smoothness vanished quite suddenly. The sea’s face was contorted with anger. Obi felt slightly dizzy and top-heavy. When he went down for supper he merely looked at his food. One or two passengers were not there at all. The others ate almost in silence.
Obi returned to his cabin and was going straight to bed when someone tapped at his door. He opened and it was Clara.
