“Except the biscuits,” I say.
“So, you’ll come next week, then?”
“Maybe.”
“And you’ll let me know if you find out more about your father. Imagine meeting him after all these years. It would be a wonderful experience.”
“I hope so.”
I unlocked my front door and stepped on a folded sheet of paper. It was a note pushed through my letterbox while I was in church. My name was on the flap. The handwriting was Robert’s, large letters all the same size, perfectly formed as though with a stencil.
My breath was uneven from Katherine’s brisk pace or from the latent excitement my husband could still arouse. I flicked his note open.
Just wanted to make sure everything was all right. I returned your call and left a message. You’ve changed the locks or else I’d have waited for you to come home. Let me know you’re okay.
All my love, Robert
I found out about his affair by chance. He went on holiday with his mistress but told me he was traveling for work, to Brussels or some other bland decoy. They’d taken pictures together. Afterwards, she sent a photo while I was texting Rose from his phone.
At first, I’d admired the woman in the bikini, the muscle definition in her stomach, the large sunglasses perched on her head. And then I wondered why a bare-chested Robert was next to her, arm around her hip, lips pressed to her blond weave.
You think it can never happen to you. It is the hubris that makes daily life possible. The bomb explodes for someone else; the sky always crashes on their head, until the ticking parcel stops with you.
Self-pity threatened to sweep away the pleasant residue of the church service. All Robert’s love. How trite. I tore the note into pieces.
7
A bronze Isaac Newton sat naked and bent over a compass in the British Library courtyard. The building was overwhelmingly brick. A child might have put it together with pieces of toy blocks. Inside were pale marble and white columns, airy and light, a surprise after the dense exterior. Registration was on the second floor.
“Good morning. How may I help?” asked a man with a row of black pens in his breast pocket. His shirt was white, his suit navy blue. A pair of glasses hung from his neck by a rainbow cord, a sharp burst of personality.
“I’m researching Kofi Adjei, the first president of Bamana.”
“And are you a PhD research student or an academic?”
“Do I have to be? The website didn’t mention that.”
“No, but we’d like to know for our records.”
“No.”
“Do you know what books you’d like to view?”
I read out the titles: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter and Bamana: The First Hundred Days.
“May I see your ID and proof of address?”
He lowered his eyes to my passport and then raised them to me. The Anna Brangwen Graham in the photograph was plumper and, to her knowledge, adequately married.
“If you’d just look into the camera.”
My startled face was printed on a plastic card, along with a bar code and my full name.
“There you are, Ms. Graham. All set.”
“Bain.”
“Pardon?”
“Bain. I’m thinking of changing my surname back to my maiden name.”
“Right. Well, if you do, let us know so we can update your details. Next, please.”
The Asia and Africa Reading Room brought to mind neither Asia nor Africa. Rows of heads bent in quiet study, feet resting on hushed grey carpet, eyes flicking to muted cream walls. There were no windows. All the light in the room was artificial, giving no sense of passing time.
Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter by Kofi Adjei was a slight volume, thinner than I had expected. Bamana: The First Hundred Days by Adrian Bennett, the LSE lecturer in Menelik’s circle, was three times its size. I sat down at desk number 129 and began with my father.
I was born in Segu, the son of a humble fish trader and the lowest grade of civil servant the British imperial machine could create. My father, Peter Aggrey, had his first contact with the British as a young man. He was pressed into the labor gang that built the railway from the diamond mines of Mion to the port city of Segu. The British called this kind of work “forced labor” but it was really slavery because it was a job one could not quit. Living conditions were very poor for forced laborers. They often died of malaria, snakebites, and a combination of overwork and malnutrition. One night, my father escaped, taking with him the damaged lungs that would plague him for the rest of his life.
He could not go back to his village of Yabo because the chief, a collaborator, would have him whipped and sent back. So he set off from his family and kinsmen for the city of Segu, a young man on his own. Nowadays, this is a journey many rural youth take with little trepidation, but for my father it would have been like setting off to the moon on foot. He arrived in Segu with little English and fell into the hands of some Irish missionaries.