‘There are spies in these meetings!’ Phil was seething. ‘Eyes-eyes-eyes all over.’
Agnes stopped.
‘The ones who you think are not watching?’
Agnes turned.
‘Those ones are the most dangerous.’
Agnes walked out.
She knew how to find her own way to the Goma Lakes by now. She walked slowly, pensively tapping her cane. The irony of it! The idea that she was a spy, some kind of ‘foreign agent’. Was she not Zambian? Had she not been bestowed that honour on Z Day? A rain shower began as she reached the car park outside the student bar. The driver jumped out to help her into the car, fussing with an umbrella. Africans and their fear of water! In protest, Agnes rolled the window down a quarter and rested her head against it, letting the cool rain spray her hot scalp.
At home, she went straight to her bedroom, cracked the window and lay on the bed beneath it. She wanted just that much rain, enough to nourish her self-pity, not quite enough to drown it. When he got home from work, Ronald found her there, her cheek sprinkled with water.
‘What happened?’ He stroked the damp hair from her face. ‘How was your club?’
She frowned. Ronald never asked about her meetings. ‘Did you know your friend Phil is in The Reds?’
‘Philemon? Of course,’ he laughed, so knowingly she felt slapped. ‘Why?’
‘No reason,’ she mumbled. Was Ronald a member of the Zambian Caucus? Had he got his friend to force her out? ‘I’m not going back anyway. I’m exhausted.’ She rolled onto her back.
‘Mmm,’ he rumbled with pleasure as he rubbed her protuberant stomach. ‘Our son is making you bulge.’
She shooed him off. ‘You don’t know that it’s a boy this time.’
‘Yes, in fact, I do know,’ he said, tipping his head onto her thigh. ‘My mother even predicted. “Your second child must be a boy,” she said.’
This sounded to Agnes more like a command than a prediction, but of course she hadn’t been there – she had never met Ronald’s mother. Rather than open that old wound, she ventured a possible name for the baby, if it did turn out to be a boy.
‘Don’t you think it sounds rather regal?’
‘Regal?’ He rose up, sputtering with disbelief. ‘My child will have an African name!’
‘Carol doesn’t,’ she scoffed. ‘You don’t even have an African name, Ronald!’
‘I do!’ he shouted. ‘It has just been rubbed out. That will not happen to my children!’
She heard the door click shut behind him.
* * *
Sitting in his study the next day, Ronald pressed play on Agnes’s tape recorder. The voice that came from the speakers was as polished as the wood of his desk.
‘…no surprise the Labour Party sponsored Kaunda and published his calls for freedom…’
Ronald shook his head. Of course, Lionel Heath would be blind to Kaunda’s opportunism.
‘…arrested for possession of communist materials that, like Mao, drew parallels between capitalist and imperialist oppression. This is the bedrock for revolutionary thinking in Africa…’
Ronald let out a sound of disgust and pressed stop. Why did white men think they knew better than the black people they presumed to save? Ronald had once had faith in Great Britain’s dignity and even its superiority – Shiwa had cultivated it in him, with its traditions and its airs and Sir Stewart’s young delicate bride, Lorna. Even marrying Agnes had seemed like progress, as if her pale legs were pillars to climb. But during his time in the UK, Ronald had seen other pale legs, dozens of them, a forest of them stretching out before him in those years in Edinburgh.
Like any red-blooded man away from his wife, Ronald had sought out women that he could pay to touch him. He often thought of one in particular, with black hair, green eyes and thick creamy thighs. He remembered looking down and seeing her lips stretched over his penis, her head bobbing like a piston. She had gagged a little and he had almost stopped. But then he remembered that he had already paid her, so he closed his eyes and finished anyway. And that was when he had finally understood. White women were just women.
The study door opened and in strode his wife, just another woman, with her pregnant belly.
‘Have you seen my tape recorder?’ she asked querulously.
Ronald glanced at it on his desk. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘I’m about to go to my meeting. I simply cannot find it and neither can Grace.’
He peered around her, but the servant girl with that