The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  When they arrived at the manor, the chauffeur released Ronald into the custody of a maid, who was far more polite. She curtsied and gestured him through the large wooden doors into a tall, dark vestibule, a single skylight piercing down from above. They mounted the marble stairs and walked along a corridor, the walls of which were covered with oil paintings of aristocratic ancestors. His suite was enormous, with floor-to-ceiling windows through which you could see the flat green lawns and in the distance, a glowing haze of bluebells at the edge of the woods. Everything in here seemed drowned in heavy cloth: blankets, curtains, pillows, thick rugs. Even the washroom was carpeted. Amongst the jumble of decor, he noticed two ebony busts of African slaves, a man and a woman carved in European style, their profiles thin caricatures of negritude.

  The maid left him and he unpacked, hanging his two thin suits in the armoire, and stacking his four thick books by the bed. Then he took himself on a tour. As usual, he fell immediately into a fever of class anxiety as he wandered around, peeking into the countless rooms. Torn between envy and gratitude, he compared this estate with the last, then compared both to the incomparable original, Shiwa Ng’andu. Sir George was apparently an MP – was that different from a baron? How was he to be addressed? Ronald always worried he would neglect some custom or another: English etiquette was as rigid and inconsistent as English grammar.

  At least this estate had a well-stocked library, he thought as he strolled around a gloomy room with a tomb’s worth of tomes. The books were in variable states of wear, their pages either leathery with use or so brittle they crumbled at the touch. It looked like mostly legal theory with the occasional glance at ancient history: Pliny, Thucydides, Herodotus. There was no modern science, which was a relief. Ronald often felt obliged to read those books first, less out of interest and more because his hosts, knowing that he studied engineering, would inevitably quiz him on the only science they knew. He finally found a trove of novels and a few translated works of mythology – Greek, Roman, Norse – in a corner. These proved to be Lady Carolyn’s – was that her title? – which was rather less useful to him.

  At dinner that evening, his hostess demurred his efforts at conversation, offering him endless dishes instead, accompanied by apologies – ‘must be…taste so different…wish we could…well…suppose…best we can.’ Ronald knew by now to thank her profusely and pretend that the rich sauces did not cloy his taste buds, that the overboiled vegetables did not caulk every cranny of his mouth. Sir George seemed to have a cold. He kept clearing his throat, hmming and hrghing. He spoke just once and then only to say: ‘Our daughter. She’s…ill, or rather, hrmm, indisposed at the moment. She sends her regards.’ Ronald expressed his best wishes for her health, then wondered if he had been too forward in alluding to her body at all. He gave up on conversation altogether and for the rest of the meal took recourse to smiling and nodding at Sir George, a great nodder himself, their bobbing heads as if on either end of a scale.

  * * *

  When Ronald finally set eyes on this indisposed daughter, he was reading on a bench by the side of the tennis lawn – the best place, he had discovered, to avoid the strenuous labour of being a guest in a British manor. He had just turned to a chapter on aerodynamics in his textbook when he heard an insecty hum followed by a hollow pock, like a drop of water falling down a drain. He looked up and saw a ball bounce off the low wall beside him. He stopped it with his foot and smiled and waved at the tall girl in white holding a racket on the other side of the lawn. He was a little offended when she didn’t wave back.

  Instead, she tilted her face up to the sky and took a long sniff. The sunlight hit her eyes, turning the lids translucent, and that’s when he saw that they were closed – she hadn’t seen him. Was she winking now? No, just a flash of light from the edge of her racket as she raised it and pressed a ball against the strings with her other hand. Eyes still shut, she tossed and leaned and swung with a grunt. The yellow ball flew like a comet through the air, hit the short wall again, bounce-bounce-bounced and stammered to a stop.

  Ronald closed his book and watched for a while. He considered the uses of blind play as a training technique. It would attune the player to her body, and hone her instincts so that sight was not the sole arbiter of when to strike. He grew puzzled again when the girl walked to the other side to gather the balls. The way she moved around on her knees, the way she patted the blank spaces between balls – oh, she couldn’t see at all! This was not the blindness he knew from home, eyelids bulging or welded shut with pus, begging hands outstretched. Nor was it the kind he knew from the London Underground, people walking into him as if he were a pole that had popped up in the middle of the moving stairs.

  The blind girl started to serve again, from his side of the net now. It was a relief to watch someone, himself unwatched. Her legs were exquisite, long and thick and white like the trunks of the silver birches on the eastern edge of the garden. Her face, collecting droplets of sweat like a cold glass of water, was not beautiful, but solid and cool. Her mouth never curved or opened. Her brow never clenched. As she grew warmer, flush dusted her cheeks with pink and yellow like the magnolia blossoms he’d seen in Kew Gardens.

  Ronald sometimes had the impression that he saw eyes in her skin – or rather, felt them there like a watchful presence. She seemed both weak and imperious, helpless yet haughty. In a word: British. Right before she swung the racket, when she arched, raised up on her toes and leaned back, he would feel an urge to run to her, to encircle her waist and catch her before – but, of course, she never fell. He still wanted to hold her there, though, to lower her slowly, letting her bend like a bow until her long ponytail grazed the grass…

  * * *

  Every morning, after a strained and greasy breakfast with Carolyn and George, Ronald would take a stroll in the gardens, sniffing the flowers most foreign to him – honeysuckles and poppies still drooling with dew – then walk through the bluebell-infested forest to the stable to visit the horses, shiny as polished wood, their long heads as elegant as those of the lechwe at Shiwa. In the fields beyond, sullen cows sometimes approached, not to attack him, he learned from Carolyn, but expecting to be milked.

  He visited the dairy only once. Encouraged by the grinning farmhand there, who mimed instructions as if not quite believing that a guest so exotic spoke English, Ronald stuck his pinkie into a newborn calf’s mouth. He enjoyed the sucking caress until he remembered that his new tic of chewing his cuticles essentially made them open wounds. For days, Ronald obsessed about infection and henceforth avoided all farm life at the estate. He had not travelled so far in distance, years and education only to subject himself to diseases of the hand, mouth and foot.

  After he first caught sight of the blind girl playing tennis, Ronald figured out which bedroom window belonged to her and began to pause outside it after his morning walks. Hiding behind a manicured hedge, he’d furtively pluck its leaves to make an aperture to see her through. This soon became the goal towards which his day was pitched: spying on the sleeping beauty until, weather permitting, she sat up and searched with nimble toes for the shoes beneath her bed. Then he would hurry to the tennis lawn, avoiding the maid blinkingly shaking a rug or casting out slops behind the kitchen, and sit on his bench with his textbook on his lap.

  He felt smitten with pity and a kind of fear as he watched this pale, mad girl serve to no one, then rummage on her knees for the balls she had scattershotted, collecting them in her skirt and tumbling them into a canvas bag that, like the sky, slowly greyed as autumn approached. One day, it simply became unbearable to see her crawling around with those bright fuzzy spheres eluding her, drifting off at the touch of a finger. So Ronald stood up and went to her and gave her what she was grasping for.

  * * *

  It took a week of Agnes serving tennis balls and Ronald collecting them before they managed a proper interaction. They couldn’t play – he didn’t know how and she could no lon
ger teach – so they exchanged words squatting on the lawn, tennis balls bumping between their ankles. At first there wasn’t too much to say: he was a student, she was Agnes; he was Ronald, she used to play tennis really, really well. After a few days of empty chat, she gave in to a desire she had never confessed, not even to herself. She wanted someone to describe the world she could no longer see. She would never think of asking anyone in the house. They were all dreadfully inarticulate in one way or another, which had become clearer to her now that she relied so much on voices.

  But Ronald spoke a straightforward, mellifluous English, lapsing only occasionally into malapropisms and odd idioms. Agnes could ascribe these to neither class nor region. Her parents had offered only the vaguest words about their guest’s background: ‘his sort’, her father said; ‘such innocent people’, her mother said; ‘substandard culture’, her father said; ‘in his nature’, her mother said. Too bemused to enquire further, Agnes took any strangeness in Ronald’s manner of speaking as a sign of personality or fashion – what did she know of hip lingo, isolated as she was from swinging London? She relished the lack of clutter in his sentences. None of those bloody ers and ums.

  ‘Would you describe…the sky for me?’ she asked one day, a little hesitantly.

  ‘I would say partly cloudy with a chance of rain, Madam.’

  ‘There’s always a chance of rain here,’ she snorted. ‘And don’t call me Madam! Unless you want me to call you Mister!’ She paused. ‘I suppose you could call me Mad – short for Madam. And I’ll call you Miss – short for Mister!’ Her laughter died alone. Had she just insulted them both in a single drollery? She willed her voice to be softer, coyed it.

  ‘And these clouds you mention. Are they white? Or grey?’ she asked in a way that presaged a witty remark about variously coloured clouds.

  ‘Oh? I am sorry, it was a lie. There are no clouds today.’

  Agnes thought he was being facetious and felt a little daunted.

  ‘Fine then,’ she said, smiling bravely. ‘Is the sky blue? Or is it blueblue?’

  ‘It’s blueblue. Like your eyes.’

  ‘Oh dear, are they open? I try to keep them closed, but…’

  After an awkward pause, she asked him if he liked it here.

  ‘Ah, it is very fine. Merrie England.’

  She’d meant Surrey but now he was asking her if she liked it, and they were off again, talking about what they liked and what they hated: at school, at dinner, in cities and outside of them. She explained to him the rules of tennis, which he found baffling.

  ‘Why do you call it love when you have zero points?’ he asked.

  Surely this was just an excuse to talk about romance. He sounded earnest, though.

  ‘It comes from the French word for egg, l’oeuf. Because a zero is the shape of an egg.’

  ‘Oh-oh?’ he chuckled. ‘But I thought the English hated the French.’

  ‘Oh, we do, but we steal from them mercilessly. It’s sort of our thing.’

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Agnes was feasting on honeytoast and tea in the kitchen. Mrs Wainscroft was with her, offering backhanded admiration:

  ‘A blessing, Miss Agnes, to have such lovely pale skin…pallid skin, I’ve heard ’em call it, must be nice!’ Mrs Wainscroft often pretended to greater illiteracy in order to make her point. It was her version of irony. ‘So fascinating to see it against that Mr Ronald, you know, with his.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Agnes murmured through a mouthful of tea-soggy toast. She was feeling her knees under the table, wondering if they looked as rough as they felt.

  ‘Never saw nothing like it. A chessboard or somethink.’

  The week after that, they were discussing how Agnes would fare in London, whether she was ready for a shopping trip. Could she cross the streets on her own at the lights and at the—

  ‘Why is it, d’you think, they call it a zebra crossing?’ asked Mrs Wainscroft.

  ‘The stripes, obviously,’ said Agnes, her head in the closet as she felt along the seams of her old clothes, trying to discern by hand what textures she preferred.

  ‘But where does zebra come from? Are they black with white lines, or white with black?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, dear Crofty,’ said Agnes. ‘I can’t make out lines anyway.’

  Her voice was strained with patience. One of the great burdens of blindness was having to help other people remember it. But Agnes was growing reconciled to it. Time was passing, softening the rocks against which she once thought her life had foundered. And flirtation – the sheer possibility of romance – had stirred up a glorious hormonal buzz in her. It drowned out just about everything else.

  When Ronald had first touched her arm on the tennis lawn, Agnes had felt a shock of warmth in her stomach: embarrassment combined with the recognition that he had been there all along. He was that metallic smell in the air singing like a high note over the cut grass and the rubber balls. He was the reason that, after serving, she had so often found herself waiting, as if the ball were on its way back. Now that they were spending more time together, his smell had become a comfort, even coated with his cheap men’s spray.

  There were other, more practical advantages to Ronald. He was monstrously witty, though she couldn’t always judge his tone. He had a ludicrous name, and he was short, but neither of these flaws was his fault, after all. And he was a university student, which promised upward mobility. Besides, they didn’t need money – she had her trust and her prize earnings. They would get a house, a small one with a tennis lawn, and maybe a corgi, like the Queen.

  * * *

  When the epiphany came, it was like the jerk that wakes you from a dream of falling. Agnes had put on her nicest dress and invited Ronald to tea. They sat on the patio with the bird fountain. The birds were babbling. The fountain was chattering but not quite like rain – the pattern slightly more predictable. They were discussing family and Ronald mentioned something about his mother. The name was so exotic, especially compared to his, that Agnes simply had to ask.

  ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘she is from the east. They mostly speak Chichewa there.’

  ‘East…Anglia?’

  Ronald slurped his cup of tea and swallowed. ‘No,’ he said warily. ‘The eastern part of Northern Rhodesia.’

  ‘Oh…’ Agnes murmured, paging through her limited knowledge of geography.

  ‘Oh?’ she said, hitting upon a map of Africa, then on Grandpa Percy’s finger pointing at a jigsaw piece inside it.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispered.

  The fountain splattered, the birds sang, the sun sunned down.

  Agnes burst into laughter – thick, riotous, frothy laughter.

  It wasn’t that Mrs Wainscroft’s hints hadn’t conveyed the message about Ronald’s race; it was that Agnes had chosen to hear them vaguely, to let them leave the impression of a certain swarthiness, a Byronic charm. It had never occurred to her that the object of her passion was of the darker persuasion, was Negroid, was African – a nigger, a Kaffir, Grandpa Percy’s words bounced around her head unwittingly.

  The revelation set Agnes vibrating with the force of a waterfall uncovered by the shifting of a great stone. In this flood was a current of amazement that this was possible: the not-knowing of it, the bloody blindness of it. There was flotsam of intrigue, jetsam of revulsion. Elation, a flurry of bubbles. Fear, rocks glinting under the water. Mrs Wainscroft’s pointed comments resurfaced. A chessboard! What was the other one? Something about day and night, shadow and light? ‘Those stripy horses’ had been invoked at one point. Agnes laughed even harder. And now, floating above the momentous epiphany, like mist over the falls, relief: despite the cook’s clumsy euphemisms and petty misgivings, the old biddy hadn’t told Agnes’s parents. Yet.

  ‘That was a jolly laugh,’ said Ronald, sounding slig
htly disconcerted.

  ‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’ Agnes sighed and they each took a slurp of their tea.

  * * *

  Their first time naked together was a kind of miracle. Ronald seemed cautious at first, but when he realised she was letting him undress her, he responded eagerly. They tussled with their clothing, with their legs – so many legs, his in between hers or on either side or alternating – and finally he took her hand and guided it to his centre. Agnes knew what she would find there, and that it would be soft or hard, depending. But she had somehow never considered the transition from one state of being to the other. At her touch, it rose, and this independent action, a clock’s hand moving towards noon or midnight, that rise to fullest tallest splendour, made her marvel.

  ‘Oh dear!’ she said. ‘How lovely!’

  Then came the blunder and blur, the pain and the pleasure, and the crying out, their voices like bells striking a rough harmony to announce and seal their union.

  They were in the old shed behind the tennis lawn, surrounded by the smell of rusted tools. The wind shook the thin walls and whistled through the cracks in them. As they lay in that gusty, musty aftermath, Agnes asked Ronald to describe the room. He said the window was glowing green from the light coming through the trees outside, which made watery shadows on the walls. She asked him to describe her body. He spoke about density, which, because of his distinctive pronunciation, she mistook at first for destiny. But no, Ronald was speaking like the engineering student he was, about mass: how it felt when he lifted her thighs, how heavy her hair was despite its fineness. He analysed the bridge of her nose. He didn’t mention skin colour.