Loose Ends — Chapter 41: The Rope Set Down

Chapter summary

Sarah accepts Oxford, confesses her sabotage, sets divorce terms, and releases the rope she carried.

SARAH

Friday The police came at one in the morning and left at three. They took the glass, the jug, the strip of tablets and a statement from Baba Sule, and they looked for a girl in a white dress who was no longer there. They asked Tobe and Dara whether they wished to make a complaint against the lady in boots, and Tobe said, quite steadily, that they would come in during daylight. Sarah noticed that. She noticed also that nobody had asked her to sit down.

The doctor at the hospital said that Sammy would sleep it off, that he had been lucky, that whoever had measured the dose had known how to measure it. He would be kept for observation. He was not to be woken before eight.

So Sarah sat in the back of the Mercedes in the car park, with Tunji asleep in front, snoring through his nose, and watched a grey line come up over the roof of the casualty block. At ten past six she took the envelope out of her jacket.

It was heavy. The paper was thick and cream-coloured. Her name was written across it in capitals in a hand she had known for fourteen years and had stopped reading.

Inside there were four things.

The first was a letter on the letterhead of the University of Oxford, Department of Computer Science. It confirmed that her doctoral candidature, suspended in the year of her departure, had been reinstated with effect from January, and that her place would be held for her until she took it up.

The second was a note on a plain card, in a spidery handwriting that she recognised at once, because she had spent three years trying to decipher it in the margins of her chapters. Sarah. Your husband wrote to me in September. I said yes before he finished the sentence. Your model still hears tone better than anybody’s. We kept the image of your server. It is waiting. Do come. A. Hartley.

The third was a receipt from a college bursar for one year’s fees, paid, and a lease on a small flat in Jericho, signed, with the second signature left blank for her.

The fourth was a card in his block capitals. I asked for one year twelve years ago. I am sorry it took me this long to give it back.

That was all. No ring. No promise. No plea. A man who had spent three weeks writing a speech had written, in the end, two lines and a lease.

She read it twice. Then she folded forward over her knees and cried as she had not cried all week, loudly, with her mouth open, while Tunji snored in the front seat and the sun came up through the windscreen.

He had known. That was the thing. He had known all along what she had given up, and he had told no one, and he had gone behind her back to the one man in the world who could undo it. It was the most loving thing anyone had ever done for her, and it had been done by a man who had slept with three other women in the same year. She sat in the car with those two facts, one in each hand, and could not make them weigh the same. Before she went in she did one more thing. She took BODLEIAN-7 out of its bag, on her knee, in the back of the Mercedes, with Tunji’s snores for company, and wrote a statement.

It was four paragraphs long. It was addressed to the Head of Human Resources at a company whose sixth floor she had never seen. In the dry, precise language she had once used to describe her research, it said that on the night of last Sunday she had gained access to the account of an employee named Tobechukwu Anyanwu without permission, that she had written and sent the email in question herself, and that the employee had known nothing of it. She gave her name, her address and her national identity number. She read it through twice. She did not soften a single sentence.

Then she attached the log, every line of it, the sign-in, the time stamps, the name of the machine, because she wanted them to be able to check.

She pressed send at 7:41. The little sound it made was small.

At eight o’clock she went up to his room.

He was sitting up, grey-faced, with a drip in his arm and a cup of tea he had not touched. When he saw her he looked as though he were going to speak and then did not.

She sat in the plastic chair beside the bed. “I read it.”

“Good.”

“I wrote to Tobe’s company at seven this morning. A full statement, signed. I am sending it to the Head of HR. I will pay for her tyres. I will pay for a therapist for the woman with the pizza, if she wants one, and I will not be offended if she does not.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do.” She turned the card over in her fingers. “I am still leaving, Sammy.”

“I know.”

“The boys come with me. In January. You will have them for the holidays, and for the summer, and for whatever else you can fly out for. They will have a house in Lagos and a house in Oxford, and neither of them will ever be a second house.”

He closed his eyes. It was the first time she had ever seen him flinch from a sentence of hers.

“Will you ever forgive me?”

She considered it. She wanted to answer honestly, and she found that honest answers have a way of being shorter than the ones you rehearse.

“I forgave you for the vasectomy at about four this morning,” she said. “I am going to need the rest of my life for the rest.”

He nodded. A tear ran sideways into his ear. He did not wipe it.

She stood. At the door she turned. “It was a very good cake,” she said. “I saw the bicycle.” In the car park Tunji opened the door for her and said, “Madam, where to?”

“Home,” she said. “I have a great deal of packing to do.”

She sat in the back with her boots on the seat beside her and found that she was still holding the rope. She had been holding it so long that she had forgotten it was in her hand. She set it down on the leather, and it was only a piece of rope, and it was not heavy at all.

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