“Somebody like you.”
“When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn’t make sense. Nigerians don’t buy houses because they’re old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn’t work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.”
“Is it me or are you now given to delivering little lectures?” she asked.
“It’s just refreshing to have an intelligent person to talk to.”
She looked away, wondering if this was a reference to his wife, and disliking him for it.
“Your blog already has such a following,” he said.
“I have big plans for it. I’d like to travel through Nigeria and post dispatches from each state, with pictures and human stories, but I have to do things slowly first, establish it, make some money from advertising.”
“You need investors.”
“I don’t want your money,” she said, a little sharply, keeping her eyes levelly on the sunken roof of the abandoned house. She was irritated by his comment about an intelligent person because it was, it had to be, about his wife, and she wanted to ask why he was telling her that. Why had he married a woman who was not intelligent only to turn around and tell her that his wife was not intelligent?
“Look at the peacock, Ifem,” he said, gently, as though he sensed her irritation.
They watched the peacock walk out of the shadow of a tree, then its lugubrious flight up to its favorite perch on the roof, where it stood and surveyed the decayed kingdom below.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“One male and two females. I’ve been hoping to see the male do its mating dance but I never have. They wake me up in the morning with their cries. Have you heard them? Almost like a child that doesn’t want to do something.”
The peacock’s slender neck moved this way and that, and then, as though it had heard her, it cawed, its beak parted wide, the sounds pouring out of its throat.
“You were right about the sound,” he said, moving closer to her. “Something of a child about it. The compound reminds me of a property I have in Enugu. An old house. It was built before the war, and I bought it to tear it down, but then I decided to keep it. It’s very gracious and restful, big verandahs and old frangipani trees in the back. I’m redoing the interior completely, so it will be very modern inside, but the outside has its old look. Don’t laugh, but when I saw it, it reminded me of poetry.”
There was a boyishness in the way he said “Don’t laugh” that made her smile at him, half making fun of him, half letting him know she liked the idea of a house that had reminded him of poetry.
“I imagine one day when I run away from it all, I’ll go and live there,” he said.
“People really do become eccentric when they become rich.”
“Or maybe we all have eccentricity in us, we just don’t have the money to show it? I’d love to take you to see the house.”
She murmured something, a vague acquiescence.
His phone had been ringing for a while, an endless, dull buzzing in his pocket. Finally he brought it out, glanced at it, and said, “Sorry, I have to take this.” She nodded and went inside, wondering if it was his wife.
From the living room, she heard snatches of his voice, raised, lowered, and then raised again, speaking Igbo, and when he came inside, there was a tightening in his jaw.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“It’s a boy from my hometown. I pay his school fees but he now has a mad sense of entitlement and this morning he sent me a text telling me he needs a cell phone and could I send it to him by Friday. A fifteen-year-old boy. The gall of it. And then he starts calling me. So I’ve just told him off and I’ve told him his scholarship is off, too, just to scare some sense into his head.”
“Is he related to you?”
“No.”
She waited, expecting more.
“Ifem, I do what rich people are supposed to do. I pay school fees for a hundred students in my village and my mum’s village.” He spoke with an awkward indifference; this was not a subject that he cared to talk about. He was standing by her bookshelf. “What a beautiful living room.”
“Thank you.”
“You shipped all your books back?”