One of the great burdens of blindness was having to help other people remember it. But Agnes was growing reconciled to it. Time was passing, softening the rocks against which she once thought her life had foundered. And flirtation – the sheer possibility of romance – had stirred up a glorious hormonal buzz in her. It drowned out just about everything else.
When Ronald had first touched her arm on the tennis lawn, Agnes had felt a shock of warmth in her stomach: embarrassment combined with the recognition that he had been there all along. He was that metallic smell in the air singing like a high note over the cut grass and the rubber balls. He was the reason that, after serving, she had so often found herself waiting, as if the ball were on its way back. Now that they were spending more time together, his smell had become a comfort, even coated with his cheap men’s spray.
There were other, more practical advantages to Ronald. He was monstrously witty, though she couldn’t always judge his tone. He had a ludicrous name, and he was short, but neither of these flaws was his fault, after all. And he was a university student, which promised upward mobility. Besides, they didn’t need money – she had her trust and her prize earnings. They would get a house, a small one with a tennis lawn, and maybe a corgi, like the Queen.
* * *
When the epiphany came, it was like the jerk that wakes you from a dream of falling. Agnes had put on her nicest dress and invited Ronald to tea. They sat on the patio with the bird fountain. The birds were babbling. The fountain was chattering but not quite like rain – the pattern slightly more predictable. They were discussing family and Ronald mentioned something about his mother. The name was so exotic, especially compared to his, that Agnes simply had to ask.
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘she is from the east. They mostly speak Chichewa there.’
‘East…Anglia?’
Ronald slurped his cup of tea and swallowed. ‘No,’ he said warily. ‘The eastern part of Northern Rhodesia.’
‘Oh…’ Agnes murmured, paging through her limited knowledge of geography.
‘Oh?’ she said, hitting upon a map of Africa, then on Grandpa Percy’s finger pointing at a jigsaw piece inside it.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.
‘Oh God,’ she whispered.
The fountain splattered, the birds sang, the sun sunned down.
Agnes burst into laughter – thick, riotous, frothy laughter.
It wasn’t that Mrs Wainscroft’s hints hadn’t conveyed the message about Ronald’s race; it was that Agnes had chosen to hear them vaguely, to let them leave the impression of a certain swarthiness, a Byronic charm. It had never occurred to her that the object of her passion was of the darker persuasion, was Negroid, was African – a nigger, a Kaffir, Grandpa Percy’s words bounced around her head unwittingly.
The revelation set Agnes vibrating with the force of a waterfall uncovered by the shifting of a great stone. In this flood was a current of amazement that this was possible: the not-knowing of it, the bloody blindness of it. There was flotsam of intrigue, jetsam of revulsion. Elation, a flurry of bubbles. Fear, rocks glinting under the water. Mrs Wainscroft’s pointed comments resurfaced. A chessboard! What was the other one? Something about day and night, shadow and light? ‘Those stripy horses’ had been invoked at one point. Agnes laughed even harder. And now, floating above the momentous epiphany, like mist over the falls, relief: despite the cook’s clumsy euphemisms and petty misgivings, the old biddy hadn’t told Agnes’s parents. Yet.
‘That was a jolly laugh,’ said Ronald, sounding slightly disconcerted.
‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’ Agnes sighed and they each took a slurp of their tea.
* * *
Their first time naked together was a kind of miracle. Ronald seemed cautious at first, but when he realised she was letting him undress her, he responded eagerly. They tussled with their clothing, with their legs – so many legs, his in between hers or on either side or alternating – and finally he took her hand and guided it to his centre. Agnes knew what she would find there, and that it would be soft or hard, depending. But she had somehow never considered the transition from one state of being to the other. At her touch, it rose, and this independent action, a clock’s hand moving towards noon or midnight, that rise to fullest tallest splendour, made her marvel.
‘Oh dear!’ she said. ‘How lovely!’
Then came the blunder and blur, the