In Lyme Regis a family dressed in oilskins, slick as seals, watched as I waded into the sea. Underfoot the pebbles were slippery, the water so cold it made my ankles ache; I waved to Ambrose standing in his polished brogues and sheepskin jacket on the shore. Back at the guest house, where the hall smelled of smoked fish and the sweet-sherry odour of elderly English people, I warmed my hands and feet against the clanking radiator in our room and later my feet were swollen, shiny and itching. In the mornings we lay together in bed until we heard the woman who ran the place banging on the door, insisting we let the maid in to clean the room.
That’s as much as I remember about Lyme Regis. The greasy feel of the rain, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean, the metallic taste of stewed tea and the guest house owner hurrying along our love-making. I didn’t know it at the time, but by then I was already pregnant.
I spent far too much money on the wedding cake. Three tiers, with a little model bride and groom on the top. The bride had ridged, yellow hair and blue dots for eyes, the groom’s face was a pink splodge under a slick of black. Ambrose laughed, joking they didn’t look much like us. Still I had set my heart on such a cake.
I changed my name to his. It had become the fashionable thing to do among African women, to take our husbands’ names. Now, of course, your generation are all busy holding on to their fathers’ names, to show how emancipated you all are. Well, then, it was the other way around. To the African way of thinking, we took our husbands’ names to show how sophisticated, how Westernised we were. And most of all how different from our own mothers who kept the names they were born with all their lives.
Ya Memso wasn’t happy about the marriage. She didn’t think Ambrose’s uncles were serious people, the way they behaved over the bride gift, you know. By all accounts my father was most exacting, because by then I was an educated woman. Ambrose’s family didn’t like that, not at all. They were city people, they thought they were doing us a favour. They were already vexed at having to travel all the way up to the provinces. In their view my father was a bumpkin with too many wives and far too many children.
So Ya Memso walked all the way to town and hired a letter-writer. Then she carried the letter to the post office. But she had no address for me in England. What to do? The clerk standing behind the plywood counter smiled and took her money. It was a small matter, he assured her, he would look it up. And she believed him. Went away comforted in the knowledge that the addresses of everybody in the whole world were contained within one giant ledger.
It happened that once a month the overseas students gathered at the registrar’s office in the university to collect their Government grants. One such day everybody received a brown envelope with their name in the window as usual, with the exception of Ambrose and the other students from our country. At first nobody worried. Some kind of a mistake. But the next day Ambrose returned home empty-handed, and the next.
Four days later one of the students appeared in the common room with a newspaper. On an inside page was a short article, just a paragraph, and a photograph above. The picture was of a crowd gathered outside the closed doors of our own national bank building. Even given the bad quality of the picture, you could just make out the angry expressions on the faces of the waiting people, the blank looks of the security guards and, at a window of one of the upper floors, the managers looking out.
I had given up my postgraduate course once Junior was born. Now I went to work at the Lyons Coffee Shop, in order that Ambrose could finish his own studies. It was mindless work. But once I had worked out how to fill the teapots with hot water from the spout of the machine that hissed and spat without scalding myself, it suited me. I liked the drift of people, the banter among the other girls, the paper bags of teacakes we were given at the end of the day and ate for breakfast in the morning.
There was a game they played among themselves, surreptitiously, mindful of the manager who would have sacked them if he had overheard. A man would come in and they would award him points out of ten. Whoever had the highest score won a date with him. Not really, of course. But they would go on to describe the evening, where they might go, what they would wear, imagine what this man they didn’t even know was like. These were their dreams. To ride with a man in a car. To be taken up town to the theatre. I thought their dreams very small indeed. To the customers I might seem the same as these girls but I told myself my destiny was far greater. I thought I was better than them.
As a rule I was not included in this game.
‘What about him, then?’ Jeanette said to me once, picking at a lipstick-stained strip of skin on her lower lip. But before I could reply Shona gave her a nudge:
‘She can’t …’ she hissed.
‘Why ever not?’ Jeanette frowned.
‘Well …’ Shona pulled a face and stretched her eyes wide, looking at Jeanette all the time. Jeanette gazed back blankly. Shona wavered, only for a moment. ‘She’s married!’ She sounded relieved when she said that. But of course I knew this wasn’t the reason. Grace played, she was married.
Shona was a stupid girl, too stupid to worry about. Another day she tried to make amends, pointing to a man on the far side of the room: ‘Look, love. There’s one for you.’ The man, a black man, was sitting at a table in a windowless corner of the room. He was alone. On the table in front of him lay a pair of gloves and a folded newspaper. He was writing, scribbling furiously, in a notepad. I was silent, not speaking for a long time. Beside me Shona shuffled, a tickle of discomfort. ‘I don’t mean just because …’
Still I didn’t answer her. I was staring at that man, feeling everything around me, the lights, the noise, grow faint. Even the sound of Shona’s voice. I stepped out from behind the counter and walked across the room, without bothering to pick up a pad or collect a menu. I stood in front of the table where he was sitting, my hands by my sides, until he looked up at me.
‘Hello,’ I said softly. At that he stood up suddenly, pushing back his chair so that it fell over. I didn’t try to catch it and neither did he. Instead we took a step towards each other.
‘Hello,’ said Janneh.
So that was how we found one another again. Seventeen years had passed. Janneh walked me home at the end of the shift. Night-time was coming, bringing with it the cold. I pushed my hands into the pockets of my thin coat. In England my hands and feet were always, always cold. Even in what passed for summer. Without a word Janneh removed his gloves and handed them to me, and I slipped my fingers into the warm place inside.
Janneh was working as a journalist. He was in England for a short time only, looking for a second-hand Linotype printing press. He planned to set up an independent newspaper: ‘A free press, you know. One the Government can’t control.’ I smiled, even though what he was saying was serious. I remembered that about him, the way he punctuated his conversation with certain phrases. ‘You know,’ was one of them.
At home I invited Janneh to stay and eat with us. Ambrose would be back soon. So Janneh accepted and squeezed in next to me in the tiny kitchen, peeling onions while I squeezed lemons for chicken yassa. When he asked me my news, I told it to him, including how I came to be working at the Lyons Coffee Shop. Ambrose joined us, we fitted the extra leaf in the table in the sitting room and sat down, and for the first time I heard about the things that were happening back home.
Government ministers who built houses high on the hill. Houses with east and west wings, pillared porches and glass chandeliers. On the outside homeless people built their little panbodies against the high walls. The wives of these big men drove around in shining Mercedes, frequently flew out of the country with their husbands on official business, shopped and slept between Egyptian cotton sheets in smart hotels. Meanwhile the price of rice climbed higher every day. People went to withdraw their savings from the bank and found they were refused their own money. The poorest souls walked around with swollen stomachs and feverish eyes.