Chapter summary
Mr. Briggs confronts his prejudiced misconduct, rehearses an unfamiliar apology, and telephones Tobe that afternoon.
MR. BRIGGS
Friday morning Mr. Briggs read the statement on the sixth floor at ten past nine, standing up, with his reading glasses in one hand and a cup of cold tea in the other. By the second paragraph he had sat down.
It was four paragraphs long. It was written in the dry, careful English of a person who did not intend to be argued with. It said that a lady, whose name he did not know and had been asked not to look up, had gained access to the account of Ms. Tobechukwu Anyanwu, on a Sunday night, without permission, and sent a message to him in her name. It said that Ms. Anyanwu had not known. It enclosed a log. It apologised, not to him, but to Ms. Anyanwu, in a single clean sentence, and did not apologise twice.
He read the log. He did not understand most of it. There was a sign-in at 11:49. There was a machine named after a library.
On the far side of the glass wall the sales floor was going about its Friday morning, with the rustle and the coffee and the low voices. He could see her empty desk. It had a small potted plant on it, a succulent that someone had been watering.
He had a nephew. That was what he thought of, to his own astonishment, with the tea going cold. Gbolahan, in the Abuja office, had missed his target for four months. And when Mr. Briggs looked at the quarterly figures in his drawer, he could not honestly say that the nephew’s name was anywhere near hers.
He had printed the email. He had put it on the carpet. He had shouted her full name, the one she was baptised with, because he had been told that on a certain Monday a man with a loud tie had to be firm.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
The joke, he found, had not been quite as bad as he had remembered it. It was a coarse joke, and she should not have written it, but it was a private one, written on a Saturday on a toilet, and it was, if he was honest, not entirely wrong. Madame Angelina was a beautiful woman. He did vibrate. He had been vibrating for six years.
Mr. Briggs, who in thirty-one years of working life had never apologised to a woman younger than himself, went into the men’s room, locked the door, looked at his face in the mirror and said aloud, in the voice of a man trying on a coat that does not fit, “Tobechukwu, I should have asked you before I shouted.”
It sounded false. He tried it again. He tried it eleven times.
At a quarter to three, with the Handbook open on the desk before him and his hands flat on either side of it, like a man about to take an oath, he picked up the telephone.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 46
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All five images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no image depicts a real event or named person. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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