I am unprepared for renting in London. I have lost my carapace.
It is like reading a play. The arrival of one character spells doom for another.
I have spoken to Caryl of my situation. I do not like to ask assistance from a woman I have walked out with but I am desperate.
Where was my mother? It was like her to be missing from her own story, blocked out by Aunt Caryl.
Caryl has found a place for me. If I take it, my new landlord will be her father. He has done up her old bedroom and is looking for his first lodger. It seems an improper suggestion. “Don’t be silly, Francis,” she said to me. We were hardly a serious item. How quickly these obroni women dispatch a man’s ego.
Well, I am in Mr. Bain’s house now. It is a narrow Victorian dwelling on a modest street. Lower middle class, but tidily so. It is two floors high. Kitchen and parlor on the ground floor, two bedrooms on the first and my small room in what is almost an attic. I have a sink but I must share the bathroom with Mr. Bain and his second daughter.
I recognized this house from my childhood. We lived there until I was eight, when Grandpa Owen died.
Mr. Bain goes to work at a factory at 6 a.m. and his younger daughter leaves not long after for a job at a clothes store. I carefully time my ablutions so we do not meet. Yet I have caught a few glimpses of Caryl’s sister. She is petite and pale with long black hair and eyes the shade of the Atlantic at noon. She is more conventional-looking than Caryl. That is my own proud way of saying I find her beautiful.
At last, my mother appears, and I am glad Francis Aggrey found her beautiful. She was beautiful, although she carried her beauty with downward looks and a hesitant manner that somewhat effaced her features.
Yet Francis had noticed her and picked the shy sister. Perhaps my mother hid this diary to protect me. It was better to know nothing of my father than to discover him on the first page and lose him again by the end.
I set my alarm and wake up early. I am going to the British Museum. I went for the first time as a teenager to sketch the Elgin Marbles. Ms. Rendell, my art teacher, took a small group of us on a Saturday. I remember the stone rippling like cloth, the lithe torsos of centaurs, the naked display of muscle.
The morning rush has passed and the street is deserted. My tube carriage is empty apart from an elderly couple in tweed. The man holds a large, folded umbrella the height of a small child. I have forgotten mine. I sit on a newly upholstered seat, holding a fresh copy of a free newspaper. It is mostly adverts interlaced with gossip for the commuters before they plunge into the grey haze of office work. The carriage sways as it moves through the tunnels, tons of earth above us, Londoners walking on our grave. I feel ill. I stare out the window, counting the stops to Russell Square.
There are arrows in the station pointing to the museum. Even in November, the tourists are here: the orderly pack of Japanese, the elastic sprawl of Americans. The museum’s fa?ade is Grecian, built in rational lines. Inside, the glass ceiling is curved and modern, crisscrossed with steel, held up by a thousand minute calculations.
The Africa collection is in the basement. The noise from outside melts into a hush of spotlights and glass. A cloth of gold is mounted on a wall, draped in glittering folds, ceremonial robes of a great chief. It is an illusion, I see, when I draw closer—not cloth but tiny strips of metal, joined close until they look like fabric. El Anatsui, the placard says. Ghanaian. 2001. Francis Aggrey did not see this.
I move towards a display of sculptures. There is a small wooden man who has come from Bamana, an idol in a boat with a tiny pipe in his mouth. He is to bring fishermen luck. Francis Aggrey’s mother dealt in fish. She might have prayed to this Bimba.
I stand in front of a wall of masks. There are masks for death here, jumbled with masks for love and weddings and fertility. The placards do not explain much. Birth mask. Twin mask. How were they used? For sacrifice? For blood?
I bring out my notebook to sketch a pair of nineteenth-century ivory leopardesses. A ring of coral encircles each waist, the haunches caught in motion, padding to their prey. I am shading in the hindmost spots when an American couple walks in.
“Well, aren’t these creepy?” the wife says. She is sheathed in a grey puffer coat. Her blond hair straggles around her face like tassels of corn.
“Wouldn’t want to wake up to that, would you, honey?”
They are standing in front of the wall of masks.
“They are not meant to be stared at,” I call out from my bench.
They turn. There are only three of us in the room. The wife steps towards me.
“Are you a guide?”