only Grace there to wait patiently as she shrieked and pushed and wept and finally, held a nine-pound baby girl in her arms. In a fit of hormonal sentimentality, Agnes named her daughter Carolyn after her mother. She wrote to Surrey with the news but never received a reply.
‘Never mind,’ she said to Grace. ‘I suppose we are family enough.’
‘Yes, Ba Agnes. She is so brown, I can even call this one my daughter!’ said Grace.
* * *
Agnes couldn’t picture her daughter’s skin but she could feel her hair, which spiralled gloriously into itself, curls thick as thieves. Sitting by the pool at the tennis club or in front of the telly, Agnes would place Carol on her lap and work her fingers into that warm, springy halo for hours on end. Agnes loved this; Carol loved this; this was how they loved. But when the time came for the girl to start nursery school, Ronald, who had returned from the UK, said enough was enough. It was not acceptable for a child of Carol’s status to run around Lusaka with that matted mess on her head. So one day, Grace took her to get her hair done and left Agnes by herself at the club. And that was how Agnes met Lionel Heath.
She was sitting alone at the junior courts, listening intently to the thuds and pocks of an ongoing match. Too embarrassed to play by feel in public, this was the only way for Agnes to revisit her lost vocation. She had learned how to discern the speed and direction of the ball by the sound of the rebound from the rackets and the echoing steps of the players. This was far more enjoyable than the other games of observation that expats played at the Lusaka Tennis Club: who was slighting whom, who was shagging whom, who was destined for a divorce or an abortion.
Today, the tennis players she was observing had just achieved a satisfying volley, a percussive chanty of grunts and thwaps, when someone sat next to her on the bench.
‘I’ve never understood tennis,’ came a man’s low voice.
Agnes smiled blandly in his direction and turned back to the game. Why sit here then?
‘So many…moving parts.’
She frowned. ‘It can seem complicated,’ she conceded. ‘But it’s really rather elegant.’
‘Elegant? Elegant in what way?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It works in threes.’
‘Threes. Fascinating. Go on.’ His voice, the deep vibrato of a tall man, sounded sincere.
Agnes explained – three points to take a lead, six to end a set, three sets to make a match – and then, carried away by pedagogy, she said: ‘Do you know why they call a zero point love?’
‘Is it not sheer British condescension to the loser? “You poor love,” et cetera?’
‘Oh dear, no!’ she laughed. ‘It’s from the French word for egg – the shape of a zero. L’oeuf.’
‘Loaf. Like a loaf of bread?’
‘No, no. Oeuf.’
‘Oaf? As in a fool?’
‘Errrf,’ she dragged the word out.
‘Oooooof,’ he echoed and she finally heard the tease in his voice. This was no Ronald – of course he knew the French word for egg, and the origin of love. He just delighted in wordplay – when she told him her name, he tossed it around a bit and ended up with another jeu de mots.
‘Pleasure to meet you, Eggnest.’ He took her hand off her knee to shake it. ‘I’m Lionel.’
‘Well, I suppose I shall call you the Lion then!’ she said, a flush rising up her neck.
‘Touché,’ he said and she could hear the smile in his voice.
By the time Grace returned with a sore and sulky Carol in tow, Agnes felt that Lionel knew everything about her – except, apparently, that she had a child. She was mortified by the omission, but Lionel didn’t seem surprised by Carol’s existence, nor by her skin colour. He greeted the girl seriously and cheered her up with jokes and compliments about her hairdo – thin French braids with softly clicking beads on the ends. Grace repacked the bags as Agnes stood there, listening to her daughter’s shrill trill and Lionel’s bass rumble. Why was it so easy to talk to this man? Maybe because he wasn’t like the other expats at the club, with their casual contempt and vestigial racism – calling the staff ‘boys’ and snapping their fingers. But he wasn’t like Ronald’s apamwamba friends either, with their intellectual insults and inside jokes. He certainly wasn’t like Ronald. For one thing, he was tall.