I knew exactly how she felt: it was the way I had felt in Nyasaland, my first year.
She loved being in Africa. Very well, so did I. And so I chattered and boasted, trying to impress her, because I wanted to see her again. I was the acting director of the Institute, I said. I ran the place, I had eighty students and five part-time lecturers. I didn’t tell her that everyone else had quit and gone home, that I was the only person left to do the job and as soon as a qualified African applied I would be replaced. I told her that we had regional centers all over Uganda and that I would shortly be setting off to visit them.
“I’d love that kind of job,” she said. “One that involved traveling up-country.”
“You’re welcome to come along.”
“You don’t need my help,” she said.
She was very firm — I admired her for it. But I was also wondering how it was possible to tempt her.
I could see that she had a definite objective — being in Africa, teaching in the bush, being independent. She was a free spirit, and she knew what she wanted. I could not be part of her plans. My job was here, in Kampala. And I had no other plans.
I was careful in my questions. I did not want to be disappointed by any of her replies. She said she was a Londoner; she had gone to Oxford; she liked Wordsworth and D. H. Lawrence; she was a socialist, her father worked for the Water Board, she had acted in various plays — Rosalind in As You Like It in a student production. This was just chat; I did not want to go any deeper and discover that she had a lover.
“Please let me pay my share,” she said, when the waiter brought us the bill.
She meant it — it was another example of her insistence on being independent. I was impressed but a little uneasy — I wasn’t used to women paying their way.
I said, “Do you want to see the best view in Kampala?”
She seemed puzzled but said yes, and I drove her to Wireless Hill. We parked on the edge of the summit and looked out at all the lights. This hill was a place for furtive lovers who had cars — there were two other cars parked nearby, and people embracing on the front seats of them. The lights were scattered in the bowl of the town, and behind the mosque and the cathedral and the illuminated mansions and monuments was the impenetrable blackness of the Ugandan forest on one side, and Lake Victoria in the distance, under a warm and pockmarked moon.
I kissed her, and we embraced innocently for a while, just holding on, as though consoling each other. I wanted more but I didn’t know what to say.
Finally I said, “I really like you.”
“You hardly know me.”
“I know enough.”
Then she relented. “I’m glad you like me,” she said. “I like you too.”
As she said it I saw that the car parked next to mine was Graham Godby’s old Austin. Inside, Alma Godby’s head was jammed against the rear window. An African with her, smiling with effort, his eyes popping, I saw very clearly was Festus Okello. They looked as though they were beating time to music with their wagging heads. But I knew better, and just as Alma’s head seemed to flatten against the glass and slip down, I turned away.
It was embarrassing because it was predictable, the Kampala custom of getting laid on Wireless Hill. It was always adulterous expatriates, and I saw there was something selfish and routine about it. I had parked there many times in just that way — because this was where you took the person you couldn’t take home; it was more secret than a borrowed apartment or the little hotel in Bombo that we called the knocking-shop. This was where an adulterer took someone to be safe from his mistress. It was one of the darker and more desperate places. I had once found that thrilling, but when I saw Alma and Festus in that trembling car I became flustered. It seemed to me a bad beginning for us.
I said, “I like you so much that”—thinking fast—“I don’t want to sleep with you.”
She was silent. Then she snorted. “What a strange thing to say. God, you’re funny!”
“I mean, I’m happy being with you,” I said, hurriedly. “I mean, for now. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m very interested in sex.”
She was looking out of the front window and smiling at the lights.
“That’s very reassuring.”
She had an English person’s devastating knack for balancing a statement between irony and sincerity.
“Sometime we must try it,” she said. “But it might help if you knew my name.”
Her name was Jennifer — Jenny; though she didn’t tell me until the next day. It was her way of teasing me and also of making me wait. This time I waited for her, at the swimming pool. She said she swam most days.
“Don’t you?”
“I can’t do it here,” I said. “It gives me the creeps to stand around in my bathing suit while Africans hang on the fence watching. Look at them.”
There were five ragged Africans clinging to the chainlink fence that surrounded the pool, and others lay on the grass, looking in. They were there all day, watching the expatriates in the swimming pool, wearing small tight bathing suits, splashing or sunning themselves. The nakedness fascinated the Africans, and the idea of people lying in the sun was such a novelty that the Africans simply gaped, wondering why they didn’t move. Whites in the sun had the torsion and muscularity of snakes, and like snakes the most they did was blink.
I avoided the place usually, though this voyeurism seemed an appropriate African response to whites in Uganda who stared at bare-breasted tribeswomen or Karamojong warriors who never bothered to conceal their thick floppy cocks.
“I give African kids swimming lessons,” Jenny said. “I’ve taught some of the students to swim.”
“I wouldn’t swim here. I’d hate Africans staring at me.”
“That’s just silly. That’s snobbery.”
It was our first disagreement. She was intelligent, logical, and articulate; but I also felt she was wrong.
“You probably dislike swimming.”
“I used to be a lifeguard.”
That night I took her to the Hindoo Lodge. Jenny liked the place — vegetarian food served at communal tables. The waiters were Brahmins, though they wore grubby pajamas. I saw my friends Neogy and Desai and I introduced Jenny. They smiled from a nearby table and watched her eat. It was the only orthodox restaurant in town — water in brass jars, a washroom in back, no knives or forks. Jenny made no fuss, though she had a little difficulty managing the rice with her fingers.
“Those men are staring at me,” she said.
“Because you’re eating with your left hand.”
“So what?”
“You’re suppose to eat with your right hand, and make love with your left.”
“Tell them I’m ambidextrous,” she said.
After that we often ate out — at the Sikh’s, at the Grand Hotel and the Greek’s, at Fatty’s and the Chez Joseph. I introduced her to spending Sunday afternoons strolling at the Botanical Gardens among milling Indians, and usually we had tea afterwards at the Lake Victoria Hotel. I was very happy, except when Jenny said how much she was looking forward to finishing her diploma course and her posting up-country. She spoke enthusiastically of the isolation of teaching school in the bush, in places like Gulu or Arua, or even more distant towns like Pakwach and Kitgum and Moroto, haunts of naked cattle rustlers with flopping dongs.
I did not want her to go, but I never said so. I said that I might visit her. In the meantime we could spend our time together, if she happened to be free.
“I happen to be free,” she said.
“I have to visit some listening groups,” I said. “Would you like to come along?”