“Madam, shall I take this?” the waiter asks with his hand on the edge of my bowl. The restaurant has emptied. The lunch crowd is gone. The evening patrons are anticipated. A corner of my pasta remains uneaten, cold and congealed. I am bent over the diary, my nose almost touching the page.
“Yes, please.”
“Shall I bring the bill?”
“Coffee, please,” I say.
I am still in the Bain household. I go out early and return late. Menelik has returned from his speaking tour. We went on a march against neo-imperialism today. I shouted myself hoarse against predatory capitalism, but afterwards I wondered to what end? Losing my voice will not displace Western business interests in Africa. Perhaps it is time I began thinking of what I, personally, can do when I return home after my studies.
Coming in tonight, I saw Bronwen’s back in the kitchen but I hurried past her. The holiday will be over in ten days and then I will be too busy to dwell on that embarrassing episode.
How did she feel living in the same house with him? Had she tried to avoid him too?
Things have fallen apart. Menelik has been arrested and charged with treason. They say he bought arms illegally from a Russian dealer and plans to sell them to the ANC in South Africa. His flat was ransacked and sealed, his papers seized. They are looking for his contacts. “It is best to stay low,” Thomas said. Blessing is angry that Thomas has put them in danger by associating with what she calls riff-raff. Menelik is from Guyana. His real name is George Hamilton.
Riff-raff fraud.
Thomas advised me to burn you. His words. “Burn that book you’re always snitching into.”
Another thing Thomas said to me before we parted. Never marry.
With my mother, Francis was predator. With Menelik, he was prey. He had naively fallen in with a dangerous crowd. Was this why he had left England? To escape arrest?
I have found a note slipped into my room. It says:
I didn’t want you to stop.
This is what I have drafted in reply:
Dear Miss Bain, You must forgive my taking advantage of you. I am seven years your senior but alas lacking in both wisdom and common sense. It was an abuse of the hospitality your father has shown me. Please let us not speak of that evening again.
I still felt she was too young, too easily swept away by attention from this urbane, older man. He would have seemed that way to her, a teenage department-store attendant with no university education. At least the relationship appeared to be consensual.
We have kissed. I am playing with fire.
And my mother had gotten burned. A single mother before she was twenty.
The matter is done, through no working of mine. Friday evening. Mr. Bain was out. I climbed up to my room and discovered the door ajar. I turned on the light and found her inside, barefoot in her dressing gown, the belt of the robe untied. I am a man like—
Two thirds of the page has been blacked out. My mother had wielded the censor’s pen and erased the details of their first night together. She was always mildly prudish. She said intercourse instead of sex.
She was a virgin. This I discovered after the deed was done. In Segu a man does not take a woman’s maidenhead lightly. The family can force the culprit to marry her.
Francis’s writing about the affair is feverish. He is distracted from his studies. He is infatuated with my mother. He is ashamed of the secrecy and yet the affair continues. They fantasize about what their child might look like. He wanted a boy. Despite his revolutionary politics, he was still a traditional man.
I have had a telegram from Segu. It is from my uncle. It says my mother is very sick and I must come home. I fear she is dead. The Akan people do not announce death directly.
Bronwen came tonight, but it is a day she must avoid me. We spoke instead of my mother. I am her only child by my father, a man many years older, who died and left her a widow when she was still young. I do not remember much of my father. He seemed always sick to me. My sharpest memory is of him hawking up blood and sputum into a calabash cupped in my mother’s hands. She is both parents to me and I have never felt the lack. She bought her first fishing boat at twenty-five and now owns a small fleet. I cannot bring myself to talk of her in the past tense.
Francis is now an orphan, alone in the world. I am sorry for his loss, my loss also, a grandmother I never met.
I have paid for my passage and gone to bid Thomas farewell, who I found calculating the cost of a pram. Blessing is pregnant and they are happy despite the curtailment of his freedom. He is now almost absent from the circles of the British left. “I have moved to the outer radius,” he said. Bronwen has a premonition that I will not return. She dreamed that I drowned at sea. I told her it is not so easy to sink ships these days. I will leave this diary in her keeping. I do not want her to read it, but I will like her to hold it until I return.