No Longer at Ease (9 page)

“You say
sir
to your superior officers, Mr. Okonkwo,” and the telephone was dropped with a deafening bang.

Obi bought a Morris Oxford a week after he received his letter of appointment. Mr. Green gave him a letter to the dealers saying that he was a senior civil servant entitled to a car advance. Nothing more was required. He walked into the shop and got a brand-new car.

Earlier on the same day Mr. Omo had sent for him to sign certain documents.

“Where is your stamp?” he asked as soon as Obi arrived.

“What stamp?” asked Obi.

“You get B.A. but you no know say you have to affix stamp to agreement?”

“What agreement?” asked Obi perplexed.

Mr. Omo laughed a laugh of derision. He had very bad teeth blackened by cigarettes and kola nuts. One was missing in front, and when he laughed the gap looked like a vacant plot in a slum. His junior clerks laughed with him out of loyalty.

“You think Government give you sixty pounds without signing agreement?”

It was only then that Obi understood what it was all about. He was to receive sixty pounds outfit allowance.

“This is a wonderful day,” he told Clara on the telephone. “I have sixty pounds in my pocket, and I’m getting my car at two o’clock.”

Clara screamed with delight. “Shall I ring Sam and tell him not to bother to send his car this evening?”

The Hon. Sam Okoli, Minister of State, had asked them to drinks and had offered to send his driver to fetch them. Clara lived in Yaba with her first cousin. She had been offered
a job as Assistant Nursing Sister, and she would start work in a week or so. Then she would find more suitable lodgings. Obi still shared Joseph’s room in Obalende but would move to a senior service flat in Ikoyi at the end of the week.

Obi was disposed to like the Hon. Sam Okoli from the moment he learnt that he had no designs on Clara. In fact he was getting married shortly to Clara’s best friend and Clara had been asked to be chief bridesmaid.

“Come in, Clara. Come in, Obi,” he said as if he had known both of them all his life. “That is a lovely car. How is it behaving? Come right in. You are looking very sweet, Clara. We haven’t met, Obi, but I know all about you. I’m happy you are getting married to Clara. Sit down. Anywhere. And tell me what you will drink. Lady first; that is what the white man has brought. I respect the white man although we want them to go. Squash? God forbid! Nobody drinks squash in my house. Samson, bring sherry for Miss.”

“Yes, sah,” said Samson in immaculate white and brass buttons.

“Beer? Why not try a little whisky?”

“I don’t touch spirits,” said Obi.

“Many young people from overseas start that way,” said Sam Okoli. “O.K., Samson, one beer, whisky and soda for me.”

Obi looked round the luxurious sitting room. He had read the controversy in the Press when the Government had
decided to build these ministers’ houses at a cost of thirty-five thousand each.

“A very good house this,” he said.

“It’s not too bad,” said the Minister.

“What an enormous radiogram!” Obi rose from his seat to go and have a closer look.

“It has a recording machine as well,” explained the owner. As if he knew what Obi was thinking, he added: “It was not part of the house. I paid two-seventy-five pounds for it.” He walked across the room and switched on the tape recorder.

“How do you like your work on the Scholarship Board? If you press this thing down, it begins to record. If you want to stop, you press this one. This is for playing records and this one is the radio. If I had a vacancy in my Ministry, I would have liked you to come and work there.” He stopped the tape recorder, wound back, and then pressed the playback knob. “You will hear all our conversation, everything.” He smiled with satisfaction as he listened to his own voice, adding an occasional commentary in pidgin.

“White man don go far. We just de shout for nothing,” he said. Then he seemed to realize his position. “All the same they must go. This no be them country.” He helped himself to another whisky, switched on the radio, and sat down.

“Do you have just one Assistant Secretary in your Ministry?” asked Obi.

“Yes, at present. I hope to get another one in April. I used to have a Nigerian as my A.S., but he was an idiot. His head was swollen like a soldier ant because he went to Ibadan
University. Now I have a white man who went to Oxford and he says ‘sir’ to me. Our people have a long way to go.”

Obi sat with Clara in the back while the driver he had engaged that morning at four pounds ten a month drove them to Ikeja, twelve miles away, to have a special dinner in honor of the new car. But neither the drive nor the dinner was a great success. It was quite clear that Clara was not happy. Obi tried in vain to make her talk or relax.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m just depressed, that’s all.”

It had been dark in the car. He put an arm round her and pulled her towards him.

“Not here, please.”

Obi was hurt, especially as he knew his driver had heard.

“I’m sorry, dear,” said Clara, putting her hand in his. “I will explain later.”

“When?” Obi was alarmed by her tone.

“Today. After you have eaten.”

“What do you mean? Aren’t you eating?”

She said she did not feel like eating. Obi said in that case he too wouldn’t eat. So they decided to eat. But when the food came they merely looked at it, even Obi, who had set out with a roaring appetite.

There was a film show which Clara suggested they should see. Obi said no, he wanted to find out what was on
her mind. They went for a walk in the direction of the swimming pool.

Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat
Sasa
he had thought of love as another grossly overrated European invention. It was not that he was indifferent to women. On the contrary, he had been quite intimate with a few in England—a Nigerian, a West Indian, English girls, and so on. But these intimacies which Obi regarded as love were neither deep nor sincere. There was always a part of him, the thinking part, which seemed to stand outside it all watching the passionate embrace with cynical disdain. The result was that one half of Obi might kiss a girl and murmur: “I love you,” but the other half would say: “Don’t be silly.” And it was always this second half that triumphed in the end when the glamor had evaporated with the heat, leaving a ridiculous anticlimax.

With Clara it was different. It had been from the very first. There was never a superior half at Obi’s elbow wearing a patronizing smile.

“I can’t marry you,” she said suddenly as Obi tried to kiss her under the tall frangipani tree at the edge of the swimming pool, and exploded into tears.

“I don’t understand you, Clara.” And he really didn’t. Was this woman’s game to bind him more firmly? But Clara was not like that; she had no coyness in her. Not much, anyway. That was one of the things Obi liked best about her. She had seemed so sure of herself that, unlike other women, she did not consider how quickly or cheaply she was captured.

“Why can’t you marry me?” He succeeded in sounding unruffled. For answer she threw herself at him and began to weep violently on his shoulder.

“What’s the matter, Clara? Tell me.” He was no longer unruffled. There was a hint of tears in his voice.

“I am an
osu
,” she wept. Silence. She stopped weeping and quietly disengaged herself from him. Still he said nothing.

“So you see we cannot get married,” she said, quite firmly, almost gaily—a terrible kind of gaiety. Only the tears showed she had wept.

“Nonsense!” said Obi. He shouted it almost, as if by shouting it now he could wipe away those seconds of silence, when everything had seemed to stop, waiting in vain for him to speak.

Joseph was asleep when he got back. It was past midnight. The door was shut but not locked, and he walked in quietly. But the slight whining of the door was enough to wake Joseph. Without waiting to undress, Obi told him the story.

“The very thing I was thinking to ask you. I was thinking how such a good and beautiful girl could remain unmarried until now.” Obi was undressing absentmindedly. “Anyhow, you are lucky to know at the beginning. No harm is done yet. The eye is not harmed by sleep,” Joseph said somewhat pointlessly. He noticed that Obi was not paying any attention.

“I am going to marry her,” Obi said.

“What!” Joseph sat up in bed.

“I am going to marry her.”

“Look at me,” said Joseph, getting up and tying his coverlet as a loincloth. He now spoke in English. “You know book, but this is no matter for book. Do you know what an osu is? But how can you know?” In that short question he said in effect that Obi’s mission-house upbringing and European education had made him a stranger in his country—the most painful thing one could say to Obi.

“I know more about it than yourself,” he said, “and I’m going to marry the girl. I wasn’t actually seeking your approval.”

Joseph thought the best thing was to drop the matter for the present. He went back to bed and was soon snoring.

Obi felt better and more confident in his decision now that there was an opponent, the first of hundreds to come, no doubt. Perhaps it was not a decision really; for him there could be only one choice. It was scandalous that in the middle of the twentieth century a man could be barred from marrying a girl simply because her great-great-great-great-grandfather had been dedicated to serve a god, thereby setting himself apart and turning his descendants into a forbidden caste to the end of Time. Quite unbelievable. And here was an educated man telling Obi he did not understand. “Not even my mother can stop me,” he said as he lay down beside Joseph.

At half-past two on the following day he called for
Clara and told her they were going to Kingsway to buy an engagement ring.

“When?” was all she could ask.

“Now, now.”

“But I haven’t said I …”

“Oh, don’t waste my time. I have other things to do. I haven’t got my steward yet, and I haven’t bought my pots and pans.”

“Yes, of course, it is tomorrow you are moving into your flat. I’m almost forgetting.”

They went in the car and made for the jeweler’s shop in Kingsway and bought a twenty-pound ring. Obi’s heavy wad of sixty pounds was now very much reduced. Thirty something pounds. Nearly forty.

“What about a Bible?” Clara asked.

“What Bible?”

“To go with the ring. Don’t you know that?”

Obi didn’t know that. They went over to the C.M.S. Bookshop and paid for a handsome little Bible with a zip.

“Everything has a zip these days,” said Obi, looking instinctively at his trouser front to make sure he had not forgotten to do the zip up, as had happened on one or two occasions.

They spent the whole afternoon shopping. At first Obi was as interested as Clara in the different utensils she was buying for him. But after an hour in which only one little saucepan had been bagged he lost any semblance of interest in the proceedings and simply trudged behind Clara like an obedient dog. She would reject an aluminum pot in one
shop, and walk the whole length of Broad Street to another to buy the very same thing at the very same price.

“What is the difference between this one and the one we saw at U.T.C.?”

“Men are blind,” she said.

When Obi got back to Joseph’s room it was nearly eleven o’clock. Joseph was still up. In fact he had been waiting all the afternoon to complete the discussion they had suspended last night.

“How is Clara?” he asked. He succeeded in making it sound casual and unrehearsed. Obi was not prepared to plunge headlong into it. He wanted to begin at the fringes as he used to do many years ago when he was confronted with a morning bath in the cold harmattan season. Of all the parts of his body, his back liked cold water the least. He would stand before the bucket of water thinking how best to tackle it. His mother would call: “Obi, haven’t you finished? You will be late for school and they will flog you.” He would then stir the water with one finger. After that he would wash his feet, then his legs up to the knees, then the arm up to the elbow, then the rest of his arms and legs, the face and head, the belly, and finally, accompanied by a leap into the air, his back. He wanted to adopt the same method now.

“She is fine,” he said. “Your Nigerian police are very cheeky, you know.”

“They are useless,” said Joseph, not wanting to discuss the police.

“I asked the driver to take us to the Victoria Beach Road. When we got there it was so cold that Clara refused to leave her seat. So we stayed at the back of the car, talking.”

“Where was the driver?” asked Joseph.

“He walked a little distance away to gaze at the light-house. Anyway, we were not there ten minutes before a police car drew up beside us and one of them flashed his torch. He said: ‘Good evening, sir.’ I said: ‘Good evening.’ Then he said: ‘Is she your wife?’ I remained very cool and said: ‘No.’ Then he said: ‘Where you pick am?’ I couldn’t stand that, so I blew up. Clara told me in Ibo to call the driver and go away. The policeman immediately changed. He was Ibo, you see. He said he didn’t know we were Ibos. He said many people these days were fond of taking other men’s wives to the beach. Just think of that. ‘
Where you pick am?
’ ”