— Mr. Floode really wanted to be here himself, but because of security. .
She said nothing, and kept staring at the same spot.
— I know you’re tired; if you’d rather rest. .
Now she turned to me and I saw how my unexpected comment had taken her by surprise. She shook her head.
— No. I can talk. What do you want to know?
— Well, how did you do it? How did you manage to escape?
— It wasn’t that hard. Salomon was able to overpower the guard. He bashed him on the head with a stone, and we slipped away. I guess they weren’t expecting us to try something so crazy.
— Yes, Salomon, why did he help you escape? He kidnapped you in the first place, didn’t he?
— It’s complicated.
— What do you mean?
— He didn’t actually kidnap me.
— He didn’t? Well, the police are looking for him. He’s their primary suspect.
— Look, you’ll have to ask Salomon for some of the details of what happened that day. He’s out there somewhere. What I can tell you is what I know.
— Okay. That’s all right. Please go ahead, Mrs. Floode.
— Sorry. . I didn’t mean to snap at you, but everything is so. . I expected to die back there, you know. I still find it hard to believe I’m here, almost safe, on my way to Port Harcourt. When I decided to come to this country, the last thing on my mind was getting kidnapped. Of course, I had been advised about the risks of coming to Nigeria, to Port Harcourt. The embassy had shown me all the newspaper clippings about abducted foreigners, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was coming on a special mission. I was coming to save my marriage.
She paused and looked at me, her eyes still expressionless. I had read somewhere that she was a schoolteacher — perhaps her husband had told me — and her eyes made me feel like an erring student, waiting for judgment.
— Rufus, I’m telling you all this just to put everything into perspective. I know you must have risked a lot to be here, so you deserve to know everything. Perhaps my husband has told you some of it already, but it doesn’t matter. Though I expect you to use your judgment to know what to print and what to leave out.
I nodded. She turned away and continued her story.
She had met Floode at university. He was in his final year, and she was a year behind. They got married a year after she graduated. The first years were happy ones. He worked for a chemical company in London, but then he got his present job, and that was when things began to change. He was a gifted petroleum engineer, and his skills were in great demand. He began to travel a lot, and over the past three years he had lived in five different countries: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Canada, Netherlands and now Nigeria. At first she happily went with him to each new place, but after Canada she suddenly lost interest. Why go all that distance only to stay at home watching TV or shopping at the mall, never seeing him till late in the evenings? So when he got posted to the Netherlands, they decided it was best if she stayed with his mother in Newcastle. But six months later he was out of the Netherlands and on his way to Nigeria. When she asked him if he was happy with the way things were, if he would perhaps think of another line of work for the sake of their marriage, he told her Nigeria would be for only two years, and then he would retire. He was being paid a lot of money to go there because of the dangerous conditions. But then she met someone else. It was nothing serious, nothing actually happened, but it got her thinking.
— I realized how lonely I had been all this while. What we had, me and James, couldn’t really be called a marriage. At first we used to phone every day, but then many days would pass without a word from him. He always claimed that the infrastructure in Nigeria was just awful. Well, I had a brilliant idea. I was going to have a baby. I was going to go to Nigeria on a surprise visit, get pregnant, and everything would be fine.
At first he appeared happy to see her, and every day he came home early from work; there were invitations from other families for cocktails and garden parties, and trips to Lagos and Abuja — in the evenings they’d sit out on the veranda, with its view of the distant sea, and eat, refreshed by the sea breeze. But then, abruptly, things changed. A bomb exploded at his office, and the next day an Italian worker was kidnapped. He started coming home late, saying things were crazy at the office, and he had to be there all the time. After a month of waiting for things to change, of going to the club to play tennis with some of the wives, of sipping sherry under umbrellas by the pool, alone, she realized that was it, and things were not going to change.
— When, in desperation, I told him about my intention to get pregnant, he said it was out of the question. And that was when he told me he was seeing someone else. He didn’t tell me whom, and I assumed it was one of the many expatriate women I always saw at the club. He told me he wanted a divorce.
I kept nodding, keeping my expression pleasant and interested, comparing what she was telling me with what her husband had told me. I tried to calm my excitement: I was being handed a major scoop, and, though I had no pen or recorder, I was storing every word, every inflection of her voice.
— Well, he said the affair had been going on for a while, and. . and that she was pregnant. You can imagine how I felt, the shock. It was as if a cloud had risen in the room, roaring and blocking out every other thing. I couldn’t see. I needed to be alone, to think. It was late at night and I didn’t know the roads very well. The driver, Salomon, always took me out, but I didn’t care. I took the car and went to the club. My plan was to leave for London the next morning.
But she was surprised to find that Salomon had come to look for her there. At first she thought he was waiting to drive her home, but then she noticed he wasn’t wearing his blue-and-black uniform.
— Hello, Solomon. .
— Salomon.
She realized she had always referred to him as Solomon, and he had never corrected her, till now.
— Oh, sorry.
— It’s okay. No problem.
— Did James send you?
— No, madam. I came to talk to you about something serious.
He looked and sounded different. He was wearing a jacket — a bit tight around the shoulders — and it gave him a more formal air than the uniform ever did; and he wasn’t speaking the usual pidgin English that she found so irksome and that always had to be explained to her. Today he spoke a grammatically faultless English, and even the accent was modified, easy to understand. Later she discovered that he was actually a university graduate who, like a lot of young men in the Delta, had been forced to take a job far below his qualifications while he waited for that elusive office job with an oil company. She gave him the car keys and they drove — she had no idea where they were going, but she didn’t care. Something told her what she was about to hear wasn’t going to be pleasant. He said nothing as he drove but she could feel him watching her in the car mirror. Finally they stopped at what looked like a roadside motel.
— Can I get a drink here?
— Yes. My uncle owns this place.
— Good. I’ll have a whiskey.
He led her into a deserted bar, and they sat in a dark corner. The bartender glanced briefly at them and returned to reading his magazine. Salomon went to the bar and returned with her drink.
— Thanks. Aren’t you having anything?
— No, madam. I’m fine.
— Okay, what is it?
— It’s about Koko.
— Koko? What about Koko?
Koko was the maid. She cooked and cleaned three days a week.
— Koko is my fiancée. Yesterday she told me she was pregnant.
He looked mournful, uncomfortable. He sat stiffly on the edge of his seat, and he avoided her eyes as he spoke.