Afterwards I remember standing in the blaze of heat by the wayside, waiting for my parents’ taxi to come. It took half an hour longer than expected. They looked small and old in the ferocious light. Once they would not have needed a taxi. But Nick was in high good humour, and for some reason he began to impersonate a Teddy Boy going out on a Friday night, walking down the road with chest absurdly inflated, ape arms swinging, knees doing a springy dance of self-importance. Instead of worrying about the taxi, my parents laughed and laughed, especially my father, who shook and wept, yielding to the moment, free of all anxiety, shoulders soundlessly heaving, pale eyes streaming in the sunlight. Nick marched up and down: we couldn’t stop laughing. ‘He’s very funny, duck,’ Dad said as we parted. ‘He’s a real comedian, is Nick.’ It was high praise, the gift of a tribute.
I think perhaps that lunch was important. It was all leading somewhere, but I didn’t know where. I did know we couldn’t stay a moment longer in the ice-white Viking monstrosity I’d chosen. Despite the glassy-eyed despair of the staff, who sat there paralysed, with nothing to do, servicing international emptiness, we checked out, and walked towards the sea, and found ourselves something more ordinary, cheaper. It had coaches outside, but at least there were people. The breakfast was economy class, with orange squash and white rolls and jam, but what mattered was the room. And what happened inside it.
At first they showed us to a room with single beds. ‘No,’ I said, and they swiftly moved us. The next room, at first, seemed equally bad, though at least it had a double bed. But it looked over a blank field of rubble. ‘What’s this?’ I asked the man who had brought us here. ‘Ees a factory,’ he said. ‘But they knock heem down.’ He made it sound as if this was a bonus.
‘I don’t want a view of a demolished factory!’ I said to Nick, who was staring out of the window. He didn’t want to move again.
‘OK,’ I sighed, and the man left us.
‘Look,’ said Nick. ‘Look again.’
Some obelisk or pole had been left standing out there, alone in the middle of a muddle of rubbish.
No, it wasn’t a pole, it was a chimney.
With something large and black on top.
As I watched, I saw something was moving in that dark disk, small flickering changes to the sharp silhouette. And then a huge bird swooped down from the blue, with wide white wings, elaborate, angelic, catching the sunlight, transforming the view.
‘It’s a stork,’ I said. ‘Of course, it’s a stork’s nest.’
‘Yes,’ said Nick, ‘and there are young.’
We watched them whenever we were in the room. We made jokes, of course, about the storks bringing babies. The rest of the time, we discovered how much of the Lagos peninsula was still unspoiled, if you got away from the mangled centre. We walked for hours along tiny goat-tracks; goats fled ahead of us, a flash of light coats, bells clanging erratic, melancholy notes; the herbs on the slopes down to the sea were aromatic; there were lemon-trees and mimosa trees and tiny spring flowers—rock roses, tiny golden pea-flowers, miniature indigo irises, dark tongues in mouths of speckled flame. The light made everything unnaturally clear, as if we were being shown something, as if God had pulled a grey curtain away, and here it was, dazzling and complex, his handiwork. There was something almost brutal about so much beauty that we in our studies did not usually see. At night we walked along deserted beaches. They were not romantic; they made me shiver. The waves crashed hard upon great black rocks that blazed red by daylight. The moon was full, unbelievably large, and stared at us, hard, effortlessly burning our eyes with silver. I thought about Beverly, whose life was over. Nick, who had just given up smoking, was in an uncharacteristic mood, his system disrupted by the lack of nicotine, and feeling wild and rootless now his book was finished and he had nothing definite lined up.
I was ready with good advice, as usual. ‘You need a niche somewhere,’ I said. ‘Something that isn’t me, or writing. I think that men need somewhere to go.’ I must have based that idea on my father, who set off every morning at half-past eight. I wasn’t entirely wrong, as it happened, but in another sense I was completely blind, for there was something else that we both needed, which stared us in the face, and only I couldn’t see it, something that was happening all around us in the dazzling display of plants and animals.
Ever since we had been a couple, we had used contraception, but Nick had long ago suggested I come off the pill, and he was right, for I had been on it for a decade. We had never taken risks; I’m a cautious person, who likes to make logical decisions. I had told him when we married that I didn’t want children, because I thought they would stop me writing, and he seemed surprised, but he didn’t argue. (Of course I didn’t know what I was saying. He was probably right to take no notice. I was just reluctant to grow up.)