Changes (12 page)

After that first encounter in his office, Ali sat down and faced the fact that Mrs Esi Sekyi excited him a great deal. But what could he do about it? So there followed days when he would sit behind his desk at Linga Hide Aways after office hours, pretending he was working. In actual fact he was thinking about Esi. He had started sending her presents. Then he had run into her by chance at the Hotel Twentieth Century. After that, he gave up. He had to seek her out, and he did.

After the great and endless agony he had gone through deciding whether or not he should contact her, what Ali had not at all been prepared for was to find Esi separated from her husband. As if that was not enough good news, one day he had learned, quite accidentally, that in fact she was divorced. From what she had told him as being the basis of her estrangement, he had thought she was crazy. Or rather, ‘nicely mad'. Which was how he had put it to himself at the time. He had silently thanked Allah and set about wooing her.

The relationship between them soon became what could have been described as steady. If it had been in the village and within
a strictly traditional setting, this was the point where some of her fathers would have marched on Ali to ask him what his intentions were. In the city, it only meant that Ali could take her out: to dinners and such. They always patronised restaurants that were hidden deep in the belly of the city, or far from the city centre along and the arteries that led motorists to other towns and even out of the country. These places had some things in common. They were dimly lit; they provided music for those who desired to dance anytime during the week, and couples could get keys …

However, Esi and Ali reserved their love-making for the comfort of Esi's bed. This nearly always followed an outing, as well as any time he came just to be with her. He would shut up Linga Hide Aways at the end of the working day and drive straight to her. They would immediately fall into each other's arms and hold her welcoming kiss from the front door through the length of the sitting-room, through her bedroom and on to her bed. Then for the next hour or so it was just grunts and groans until, quite exhaused, they fell quiet.

Since both of them would have had an exhausting day at their work places, they sometimes dozed off. Invariably, it was Ali who slept properly and longest. Esi would get up to go to the bathroom to wash herself and walk around for a while before looking for a cloth to wrap herself in. On days that she was absolutely certain she was not feeling up to a repeat of the love-making, she practically tiptoed around, careful not to wake Ali. For she knew what would happen if he woke up and saw her naked body.

Esi had always enjoyed walking around naked after love-making. For her, this was one of life's very few real luxuries. Indeed, one miracle of her own existence was the fact that in spite of the torment she had suffered during childhood and adolescence for having an unfeminine body, as an adult she was not shy of showing that body to the men she slept with. As for walking around naked, she knew she could do that only when her fast growing child was out of the house, and the daily help had finished work and gone home. In fact, she had not gathered enough courage to sleep with Ali when either of those two or both of them were around. Already games were developing in the relationship, some of which were good, and others not so good. And one had to do with this business of Esi and nakedness …

Quite early in the relationship, Ali had sensed that Esi was struggling to feel easy about him watching her. So as if to encourage her boldness, he often pretended to be asleep so that he could lie there,
aware of all the movements she made. It excited him enormously and was a source of one of the pleasures of being with her. He had slept with a great number of women in his time, but he knew very few women from his part of the world who even tried to be at ease with their own bodies. The combination of forces against that had been too overwhelming -

               
traditional shyness and contempt for the biology of women;

               
Islamic suppressive ideas about women;

               
English Victorian prudery and French hypocrisy imported by the colonisers …

All these had variously and together wreaked havoc on the mind of the modern African woman: especially about herself. As far as Ali could tell, he told himself, most women behaved as if the world was full of awful things — beginning with their bodies. His wife Fusena, a good woman if ever there was one, was no exception. All the time they had lived practically alone in London, he never detected the faintest desire in Fusena ever to walk naked in the flat. And of course, with their present domestic set-up, there were always too many people around them for any body exhibitions anyway!

So being with Esi was altogether a change for Ali, for a number of other reasons too. For one, he was freed from the ordeal of having to find a place to be with a woman who was not his wife. This was a problem which he knew some men faced. Especially those who liked younger women who had not become independent of their parents. The thought of sex with young girls made him shudder. Because, apart from the question of where to be with them, their inexperience filled him with a genuine feeling of horror. Being with Esi was also a rescue from the normal chaos of his existence. He could forget Linga for a while. He could also forget his home where, because of so many factors, privacy was a rare commodity. Here in this house, that was almost out of the city, he could unwind.

As he drifted into sleep after they had made love, Ali was thinking that it had been a good idea to send the deputy manager to the meeting in Las Palmas. He could see Esi every day for the next two weeks.

‘Ali, Ali,' it was Esi's voice, coming to him from even further than the sitting room where she actually shouted from. His eyes flew open, and were immediately confronted by the vision of her in a wrap-around.

‘Supper is ready,' she announced.

Food. Another source of pleasure when you were with Esi, Ali was thinking. She cooked like nobody else he knew or had known. In fact, until he met her, he had not considered fish as an edible protein. Now he wondered how in his previous existences he could have done without fried fish, stewed fish, grilled fish and especially softly smoked fish for so long. Fusena his wife was not at all a bad cook. But like him, she had come out of a meat-eating culture and dealing with fresh fish was not one of her stronger points in the kitchen.

Ali drew the cloth tightly round his body, even over his head, pretending as usual that he was asleep. Esi was forced to re-enter the bedroom.

‘Ali, Ali,' Esi cried his name again, this time in a whisper. He nearly started to snore and the thought amused him so much, he himself began to laugh.

‘Oh you,' exclaimed Esi, coming to sit by him. He tried to pull her down to him. She resisted firmly but unaggressively. He released her, and sat up.

‘How do you know that food is what I want to eat right now?' he asked, taking hold of her and burying his head between her breasts.

‘Food is what I want you to eat, this minute,' she replied, struggling somewhat for air.

‘Okay, my lady's will shall be done,' he said, and he released her a second time. They both got up from the bed. ‘But two things first,' he said running to the bathroom.

Esi went back to the kitchen, and was presently joined by Ali.

‘So that was the first thing, which is the second thing?'

‘A drink.'

Esi was repentant, apologetic and soothing. He was forgiving and soothing; assuring her that, after all, it was not really her fault. He hadn't given her much chance to offer him a drink, had he? And since they both knew what he was referring to, there was a short embarrassed space, until Esi asked him what he wanted to drink.

‘What have you got?'

‘Thanks to you, I've got just about everything, everything. Beer; wine: white, red, pink; rum: white and dark; proper scotch and all; vodka; cognac -'

He stopped her. He just wanted a beer.

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes.'

She served him the beer and poured one for herself. Then they sat
down to what had already become All's favourite meal at Esi's: grilled fish, usually sole or snapper on a platter with a slice of
kenkey
and a salad of fresh hot peppers, onions, tomatoes and salt. ‘The usual', as any coastal man would have told him. Esi often protested that it was really a breakfast meal. Her protest fell on deaf ears. Of course, he appreciated anything she gave him. But this he could eat any hour, any day, every day. This evening it was sole, and, for the next hour, they ate in companionable silence from the same platter.

After the meal, Esi cleared the plates and went to dump them in the sink. As she was coming back to the table, she saw Ali emerging from the bedroom, dressed. She wondered aloud whether he was leaving, taking care not to let the mixture of her anxiety and disappointment show. But no, he said, not for some time, unless she wanted him to leave?

‘No,' she replied simply.

‘I just wanted to check on something in the car,' he offered, and went out.

The question of when Ali came to Esi's, and especially how long he stayed when he was there, had become another game which was already proving too dangerous to play. Ali was often out of Accra on business. And even when he was in town, he really could not see her every evening. Besides, he was also aware that when he came, there was what he himself considered to be a decent limit to how long he could stay. He loved Fusena his wife and tried not to hurt her deliberately. He knew she inevitably guessed when he was having a serious affair with another woman. Therefore the question was not whether he was deceiving her or not. There was an unspoken agreement between them not to talk about these affairs, that was all. But he always knew she knew. What he tried not to do was operate on the level of the kind of excesses which would leave her feelings unnecessarily bruised. In fact, he was not really capable of operating on that level. Or that was what he told himself. He was also too sensitive a father. He knew children would always have questions they would want to ask their parents. But then, neither the questions nor their answers need be too heavy for any young mind, he had told himself

Esi's grandmother could have told Ali that in the old days, there would have been no problem. ‘Why marry two, three or more women if you were going to go through such contortions?' So no man who had more than one wife lived with any of the women on a
permanent basis. Women could stay with their own people or you built each of them a small house if you were a man enough, because a woman had to have her own place. And the days were properly regulated. Wives took turns being wives. When it was one wife's turn, she cooked for the man and undertook the housekeeping for him completely. She either went to his bedroom or he slept with her. When her turn was over he just switched.

‘And if a woman refused to leave when she had to?'

‘Did you say when she had to?' She could not refuse. Everybody understood these things. There were no confusions.

‘Supposing a man had a favourite?'

‘He was not supposed to.'

‘But that is a matter of the heart.'

‘Ah, but that is why we do the serious business of living with our heads, and never our hearts.'

On her part, Esi at this stage was not really allowing herself to understand or not to understand All's comings and goings in relation to herself. She found the relationship very relaxing. She knew she had better leave well alone.

That had been a Thursday evening. When he was leaving, Ali had told Esi that he would be seeing her the next evening. She had not believed her ears. Two evenings in a row?

‘It is surely going to rain,' she had murmured in his ear.

And it had rained... a somewhat unexpected downpour at that time of the year, when the rains were good. But then the rain had left a clear half of the total plantation of telephone poles on the ground.

Ali had not come that Friday evening as promised, or for the next two weeks. On Monday, Esi had tried to call his office but had not managed to get through. And it had taken all the strength she could muster not to go there in person ... or try and phone his house.

In the course of building up whatever there now was between herself and Ali, Esi had laid down some rules for herself. One of the rules was that she would never never phone his house to ask for him. Another was not to make a habit of dropping into his office unexpectedly. These were clearly rules that were not going to be easy to obey. In fact, they often proved very difficult, and this was turning into one such time. The only solution to her restlessness was to keep busy. The days were no problem. The evenings were. Now she discovered the difference between not having people around but knowing where they are, and not having someone around and not knowing
where he or she is. She also missed her daughter. For the first time, she was completely alone; and that made a big bag of emptiness to handle.
Nyenyefo mpo wo ne nkaeda —
having to love a burdensome child because one day you will miss her. Trust our elders to come out with a proverb to describe every situation.

Suddenly, the tropical nights had become dark, hot and heavy with all manner of threats.