Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [101]
That’s as much as I remember about Lyme Regis. The greasy feel of the rain, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean, the metallic taste of stewed tea and the guest house owner hurrying along our love-making. I didn’t know it at the time, but by then I was already pregnant.
I spent far too much money on the wedding cake. Three tiers, with a little model bride and groom on the top. The bride had ridged, yellow hair and blue dots for eyes, the groom’s face was a pink splodge under a slick of black. Ambrose laughed, joking they didn’t look much like us. Still I had set my heart on such a cake.
I changed my name to his. It had become the fashionable thing to do among African women, to take our husbands’ names. Now, of course, your generation are all busy holding on to their fathers’ names, to show how emancipated you all are. Well, then, it was the other way around. To the African way of thinking, we took our husbands’ names to show how sophisticated, how Westernised we were. And most of all how different from our own mothers who kept the names they were born with all their lives.
Ya Memso wasn’t happy about the marriage. She didn’t think Ambrose’s uncles were serious people, the way they behaved over the bride gift, you know. By all accounts my father was most exacting, because by then I was an educated woman. Ambrose’s family didn’t like that, not at all. They were city people, they thought they were doing us a favour. They were already vexed at having to travel all the way up to the provinces. In their view my father was a bumpkin with too many wives and far too many children.
So Ya Memso walked all the way to town and hired a letter-writer. Then she carried the letter to the post office. But she had no address for me in England. What to do? The clerk standing behind the plywood counter smiled and took her money. It was a small matter, he assured her, he would look it up. And she believed him. Went away comforted in the knowledge that the addresses of everybody in the whole world were contained within one giant ledger.
It happened that once a month the overseas students gathered at the registrar’s office in the university to collect their Government grants. One such day everybody received a brown envelope with their name in the window as usual, with the exception of Ambrose and the other students from our country. At first nobody worried. Some kind of a mistake. But the next day Ambrose returned home empty-handed, and the next.
Four days later one of the students appeared in the common room with a newspaper. On an inside page was a short article, just a paragraph, and a photograph above. The picture was of a crowd gathered outside the closed doors of our own national bank building. Even given the bad quality of the picture, you could just make out the angry expressions on the faces of the waiting people, the blank looks of the security guards and, at a window of one of the upper floors, the managers looking out.
I had given up my postgraduate course once Junior was born. Now I went to work at the Lyons Coffee Shop, in order that Ambrose could finish his own studies. It was mindless work. But once I had worked out how to fill the teapots with hot water from the spout of the machine that hissed and spat without scalding myself, it suited me. I liked the drift of people, the banter among the other girls, the paper bags of teacakes we were given at the end of the day and ate for breakfast in the morning.
There was a game they played among themselves, surreptitiously, mindful of the manager who would have sacked them if he had overheard. A man would come in and they would award him points out of ten. Whoever had the highest score won a date with him. Not really, of course. But they would go on to describe the evening, where they might go, what they would wear, imagine what this man they didn’t even know was like. These were their dreams. To ride with a man in a car. To be taken up town to the theatre. I thought their dreams very