Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [93]
The night before the journey had been quite extraordinary. Beatrice, at her own insistence, had been brought by Braimoh in a friend’s taxi through devious routes to say farewell to Chris. She wore for the occasion long-discarded clothes fished out of a big, red canvas bag in which she threw odds and ends awaiting the visit of the Salvation Army collector. With her came Elewa. It was to have been a brief visit after which the two young women would take another taxi to Elewa’s mother’s place a couple of kilometres away and spend the night there to avoid a late journey back to her flat at the GRA which might attract undue attention.
But the strain and the confusing events of recent days and nights which Beatrice had borne all on her own with such intrepidity seemed all of a sudden to assume an unbearable heaviness on her shoulders at this tantalizing reunion. Why should she accept this role of a star-crossed lover in a cheap, sentimental movie waving frantically from the window of an express train at her young man at his window in another train hurtling away on opposite tracks into a different dark tunnel? And so she rebelled with a desperate resolve grounded on a powerful premonition that Chris and she had tonight come to a crossroads beyond which a new day would break, unpredictable, without precedent; a day whose market wares piled into the long basket on her head as she approached the gates of dawn would remain concealed to the very last moment.
And so, timidly for once, Beatrice chose to hang by a thread to the days she had known, to spin out to infinite lengths the silken hours and minutes of this last familiar night.
“I shall stay here till morning,” she pronounced from that rocklike resolve just as Braimoh peeped through the door a second time for instructions about a taxi. Glances were exchanged all round but no one dared to demur. Rather, new arrangements were quickly taken in hand, debated and concluded around Beatrice’s now-aloof stance while she, immobile as a goddess in her shrine, her arms across her breasts, stared away fixedly into the middle distance.
She heard the debate and the conclusions remotely: Elewa would take Emmanuel to her mother’s place in the taxi; Braimoh would pack the five children off to sleep in a neighbour’s house…
“Oh no no no!” said Chris suddenly out of a reverie, stamping his foot firmly on the linoleum-covered floor. All eyes turned to him but he merely went on shaking his head for a while longer before saying quite decisively that the children must not be moved. The thinking which had produced this sharp reaction had gone somewhat as follows: I arrived here and failed to prevent Braimoh and Aina his wife from abandoning their matrimonial bed to me and going out every night to sleep God-knows-where. I’ll be damned if their five children will now be ejected from their floor because of Beatrice.
He leaned over and explained these thoughts to her in excited whispers. Her response was instantaneous. Her mind and all her thoughts had been so totally focussed on Chris’s metamorphosis from disembodied voice back into flesh and blood that she had left herself no room whatever to consider such things as beds and floors and at what and whose cost. Now she spoke as firmly as Chris in favour of the children. She went further to say, in sincere atonement, that as far as she was concerned the chair on which she sat was all she needed for the night.
Later, she had to be summoned several times by Chris before she left that chair and, stepping over the sleeping children, hung her head-tie on a nail driven into the wall and went over to the bed. She was still suffering a sense of shame for her thoughtlessness. But how was she to have known that by simply obeying an impulse to stay close to Chris this one night before a journey into the unknown she was selfishly putting out a poor family? Why did no one tell her? Or was she, as her people say, just to sniff her finger and know? Then who was to tell her? Braimoh? Look, Miss, my wife and I go out to pass the night on a neighbour’s floor while our