The White Family (12 page)

‘Uhn,’ I grunt, not looking at him.

‘Regards to your sister. I didn’t say goodbye.’

‘She wouldn’t have noticed.’ One up to me.

And now he’s gone, he’s gone, thank God.

‘I thought you said only family was visiting?’ George’s eyes are like the eyes of a spaniel. Big, brown, bloodshot and bloody miserable.

‘Yes, but some people always push in.’

‘Your dad’s my oldest friend,’ said George suddenly. ‘My oldest … surviving friend, you know. Your mum knows that. She wouldn’t mind. We go back a long way, me and Alfred. Before you were thought about, young man.’

And the coughing swells, a great gale of it, as if he will burst, as if he’s exploding, as if what’s been hiding has to get out, as if he’s been holding it in too long, and now he will cough till there’s nothing left and the shop is covered with blood and phlegm.

Maybe it’s now. Maybe it’s time.

And I’ll sit and watch and do nothing to save him.

But no. Getting quieter. Calming down. Now I can hear the rain again, the hiss of rain as the cars go past. None of them stop. Roaring past us. Off to the shops that rake in the money. Doling their cash out at frigging Gigamart. Largeing it down the sodding West End. Putting on the dog in bloody Bond Street, flashing their cards for the wops and the Jews …

This is an English shop. What have they got against us?

Whenever it rained Shirley thought about Kojo. He said English rain was quiet, like tears.

He meant Shirley’s tears. She was his ‘quiet woman’. Quieter than his African loves.
He had many women before he met me but it was me he married, me he loved
.

Shirley dressed herself with elaborate care, though she was only going shopping. Leaving the house to escape the pain. Silks and wools of milk and honey that made her skin glisten rose and pearl …
Oh Kojo once called me his pink pearl, and his pale pearl, and his
–

Stop, stop.

Purse. Hanky. Cards. Umbrella?

It was the second time she had dressed that day. Jeans and jumper for breakfast with Elroy. He’d made her tea, then she made him breakfast. He left for the hospital at 8 a.m.

He never leaves without telling me he loves me. He isn’t a talker, but he always says he loves me –

I don’t know what to say to him.

Last Sunday I cooked him his favourite fried chicken and we sat together in the kitchen and talked. I said I could never marry again. (Once you’ve loved someone so completely …) But Elroy’s desperate to marry me. ‘We are living in sin,’ he says, quite straight. He’s twenty years behind the times – the Pentecostal church does that to you. I love Jesus as much as him, but I don’t think God minds about marriage. Love is patient, love is kind … He’s the God of Love, and He loves us all.

When it rained on Saturdays, we stayed in bed, Kojo and I, we loved to be naked, can that have been me, can life have been so good? Naked, in a nest of sheets, his beautiful warm slender body, curled round mine, stroking, playing, and then inside me, he spent hours inside me … Usually he’d worked till three in the morning, straining his eyes at that glaring screen, his big brown eyes always slightly bloodshot, then up at seven, racing, chasing – But at weekends he loved to lie in. I’d bring up our breakfast, we’d eat together, slowly, ravenously, playing around, jazz on the radio, rain on the window, the smoke from his fags curling up in the light, I liked the smell, it was part of the music, the smell of Kojo and our life together, how many cigarettes did I light for him? The curve of his lips with the tip between them, smiling at me, staring at me … His beautiful lips. So full, so firm, not tight and thin like English lips. He used to eat me with his eyes, he used to eat me till I came, I hardly knew my body before I met him. They say that black men won’t go down on you, that they just like pumping away all night, jump on top and get on with it, but it isn’t true of all of them, no more than any of these things are true, though Kojo could make love all night – (Elroy has never gone down on me, but Elroy is younger, less confident. He will, one day. When he loves me more. I go down on him, and it blows his mind.) But Kojo was an artist. Kojo loved me. Kojo found me. He found my joy, what was the word, the long French word, my
jouissance
, the word he used in his books for coming, the word he taught me, as he taught me to come.

No, I never came before I met Kojo. I never told him, but I never came. When we started, it seemed too big an admission, I didn’t want to give him so much power. But now I wish I had told him, thanked him. Thank you Kojo. Dear love, dear heart.

(Are you somewhere? Anywhere? Listening?)

My lovely love. My African love. Maybe he’s with his ancestors … He was westernized, he dismissed all that, but I think that part of him still believed it. He said he was a Marxist, but these things go deep. If he could be a Marxist and a Christian, he could be a Christian and believe in spirits, though he laughed when we went to visit his second cousin and found queer rubber balls in every room, and afterwards I asked him if Kwame had children, and he told me each ball stood for a different spirit, the spirits of the air and the wind and the forest. I thought it was a beautiful idea, but he claimed to think it ridiculous. ‘I left all that nonsense behind in Ghana.’

I hope he is with his ancestors. I can’t believe he is entirely lost.

Forgive me, Jesus, for thinking these thoughts. No one who sleeps in You can be lost.

We didn’t have children. He was sure we would. It fell slowly upon us, the heaviest sorrow. If I had his children, he would still be with me. I did conceive. Twice. Two boys. One lost at ten weeks, one at twelve. In the first years of marriage. Afterwards, nothing.

I knew nothing about Africa when I met him, I thought all black people were Africans. My dad hated black people, of course, and he called them ‘coloured’, so I did too, though whatever Dad hated I was ready to like, and I never knew ‘coloured’ was insulting till I went with Kojo and he told me not to say it. I asked him the difference between ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ and he said, ‘Right now you are blushing, Shirley. When you’re upset, you turn every kind of colour. Don’t you think white skins colour more than ours?’ It was another world, with another way of thinking.

Elroy’s family is Jamaican, though he was born in south London. That’s partly why Elroy is jealous of Kojo, because he was African, and so highly educated. West Indians don’t like Africans much and I always think it’s jealousy. Africans have their own names, after all. West Indians don’t. White people stole them. I felt so ashamed when Kojo told me West Indian names are all slave names. Slave owners stamping their names forever … and then there are the Africans who don’t like West Indians, ‘slave babies’. The worst insult.

It isn’t easy, being Caribbean. What they feel about Africans isn’t simple. They think that Africans are backward and strange, as well as saying they’re perpetual students. Which some of the Africans over here are –

But Kojo made it, he got his D Phil and became a lecturer, a Reader, in fact, which is next to Professor – A Reader in Comparative Literature. But his success makes Elroy feel small (because Elroy will never be as clever as Kojo). Though Elroy’s done very well, in fact, at least he has a steady job, unlike most black men of his generation.

I used to feel so proud when I went to see Kojo. DR KOJO ASANTE on the door of his office. I loved being married to a doctor. I did, I admit it, I was sinfully proud, and perhaps that’s why God took him away from me – No, nonsense, God isn’t vengeful.

Today I got up at half-seven with Elroy. He always leaves at eight a.m. When you’re up at half-seven, the mornings are long. I’d made the bed and washed the breakfast things and polished the table and watered the house-plants and done the dusting and a load of washing and ironed another by quarter past ten.

And looked out of the window. The garden I made. The garden I made to enjoy with Kojo. Long green tails of bulbs flicking up. The apple-tree where we used to picnic. And it’s still raining, always raining …

Elroy’s lighter than Kojo. He had one white grandmother. Kojo was black, dark, dark, beautiful black, a black with the sheen of coal or grapes, I loved his skin, I licked his skin. His blue-black shining West African skin. The skin of princes, emperors. Giving back light. Black full of light. I loved him so much I wanted to eat him.

When the cancer came, it did seem to eat him. At first he was slimmer. Then much too thin. And his skin lost its shine. It had a greyish tinge. It was me who insisted he went to the doctor, although I was as afraid as him, and he found so many reasons for delaying. Until he couldn’t delay any longer. In constant pain, always coughing.

And then there were things he had to do. Practical things, legal things, things which took time he did not have, but he sat with the lawyer, coughing, gasping, as words like ‘domicile’ and ‘future intention’ and ‘nationality’ droned through the air, and I brought them black coffee, but they hardly looked up. Kojo had been given a great deal of wealth by his mother’s brother, an international diplomat, descended, as Kojo was, from paramount chiefs and ultimately from Ashanti kings. We’d never had to worry about money … (So hard to get used to, being married, being rich, being loved by someone I loved in return. So hard to get used to, so hard to lose.) The Ashanti tribe believes all wealth must stay within the family, handed down through the female line, so Kojo knew that on his death they would expect his possessions to come back. He had given and given, all the time we were together, to his sisters and his sisters’ children, his cousins and his cousins’ children, but it wasn’t enough, they would expect his estate. They weren’t greedy, it was simply the custom. I knew that most of them had never accepted that I was his wife, though it was nothing personal, indeed they were warm and friendly to me, they were simply waiting for Kojo to come home and take his legitimate, Ashanti wife – I didn’t mind if they had his money.

But Kojo minded. He wanted it for me, since he couldn’t stay alive and protect me. In the end nearly all of it came to me, but I still send money to all his dependants. It makes me feel better, doing that. It somehow proves I was his wife, I am his widow, and part of his family, part of Kojo, Mrs Shirley Asante …

Now he is dead, I believe they accept me. His sister Abena brings her children over from Ghana to stay. To begin with, we were shy with each other. The little girls stared at me, deep into my eyes, touched my hair, tried to plait it, sat on my lap and stroked my face. At first my whiteness hypnotized them. Their mother seemed frightened or hostile on arrival, but she was grudgingly impressed when I cooked them dinner, jolof rice with chicken and corned beef and plantain on the side, great steaming platefuls, palm soup and peanut soup, so many choices. ‘Not bad for an
obroni
,’ she said. ‘But you need more ginger. Didn’t Kojo tell you?’

I said to her, firmly, ‘He loved my food.’ I had prepared a feast, enough for ten people, to show them they were welcome, to show them I could do it, I so much wanted to be part of their family.

But she still hadn’t got over the dispute about the will. She smiled at me, but her eyes didn’t smile. She said, ‘No
obroni
could cook
fufu
, or
banku
.’

I put them on the table:
fufu
,
banku
. The consistency exactly right. Stodgy, starchy, but not too heavy.

By the time we had finished the meal we were friends. When she went up to bed she came and hugged me, close to her chest. ‘Oh Shirley – I love you, Shirley.’ So African! So very un-English! Over the next few days she wept with me, wept and laughed, held my hand. We swopped our memories of Kojo –

But only memories. I am a widow.

Such a bleak poor word. Widow, widow, wailing and sad, on two dull notes. All I wanted to be was wife and mother, Kojo’s wife for the rest of my life, mother of his healthy children.

Despite the sorrows (my family, number one, and the morons who said cruel things on the street) – against all the odds, we were blissfully happy. And yet there were sorrows and differences. Ashanti men may not enter the kitchen! I told him that modern British men all did, but I happily cooked for him, cared for him, loved him, and he cared for me, he cared for me … And then there was his cousin who came and made trouble. She stayed with us; I made her welcome. On the second day, when Kojo went out, she asked me why I hadn’t given him a baby. I couldn’t speak; the hurt stole my breath. Then she laughed, and said he already had children, didn’t I know? So it didn’t matter. Soon he would leave me, and go back to Ghana. ‘We are waiting for him, we know he will come.’ When Kojo came home he could see I’d been crying. I said ‘You’re not going to leave me, Kojo?’ and he stormed next door and shouted at his cousin. It was all in Tri. There was a long argument. She left, with her cases, hardly speaking to me. He came back into the house looking almost frightened. ‘I shall never ask you, Kojo,’ I said. And whatever the truth, he stayed with me.

We left our families to be together, we had to be all in all to each other. Beneath us, the Everlasting Arms. We thought there would be so many years.

Stupid tears. They never run dry.

Stop. Wipe. I have to go out.

Purse, make-up, cheque-book, coat.

How many times have I walked to this bus stop?

Oxford Street is a vision of hell. The bus goes nosing down like a barge, crushing the struggling souls beneath. From the top deck, waves of them seem to disappear, sucked slowly under the metal prow, going under the wheels, silently under.

But I’m sitting pretty on the very front seat, which I took when two screaming kids got off, how can I like them when I’ve none of my own? (Elroy would like to have kids with me, Elroy is sure we shall be lucky. He says if we marry God will surely bless us, that it’s to God’s glory if we bear much fruit, for He is the Vine, and we are the branches. Elroy already has a child, seven or eight years old, a boy, Dwayne. He never sees the mother; he claims she hates him. He wants to start again, with me.)