of cassettes, most of which were badly dubbed from soul LPs and labelled ‘Mixed Grill’. Occasionally, Radio One played a song with a dance beat, like ‘Funkin’ For Jamaica’; otherwise, she had to tune into Radio Luxembourg. Tessa was into bands like Led Zep and Pink Floyd. Deola had never heard of them before and Tessa did not know who Teddy Pendergrass or George Benson were. In the end, they didn’t agree to take turns to play their music; they just enjoyed whatever was on and that was how Deola learned that those obscure choruses from her childhood, like ‘Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, were from songs by the Stones and the Beatles. She’d grown up believing they were Nigerian folk songs.
She calls Tessa and they arrange to meet for tea on Sunday in a café off Haymarket. They sit by the window, which is thick enough to reduce the noise of the traffic to a hum. The café is cozy. There are mirrors on the walls and Deola can see her profile as well as the back of her head. The tea is overpriced and the sugar is caramelized, as if to compensate. She eats a cheese danish as Tessa butters a scone and slaps on strawberry jam. Tessa’s red hair is pulled back with a black band. She has a slightly crooked nose that makes her look striking. Her dark denim jacket contrasts with her pale freckly skin. She wears a ruby cabochon ring on her middle finger; it is too loose for her ring finger. She has been engaged to Peter for several months now and they are yet to set a wedding date.
‘The trouble is,’ Tessa says, ‘we can’t decide where to live. It’s either Pete moves here or I move to Australia, right? So Pete doesn’t like the climate here and you know I can’t stand the heat. But I really don’t have to live here to work and Pete can basically live anywhere.’
‘So?’
‘So it’s unsettling. It’s such a long way away, Australia. Such a long way from home. He will build me a studio, though, if we move there, so I can work.’
Tessa and Peter live in a mews in Notting Hill Gate. Peter buys houses in London with a business partner, fixes them up and sells them. He left school at seventeen, wanting to be a wildlife photographer, and travelled throughout Asia taking carpentry and building jobs to sustain himself.
‘They have that huge theatre, don’t they?’ Deola asks.
‘Which one?’
‘The one at Sydney Harbour.’
‘Yes, the opera house.’
‘Australia,’ Deola says. ‘My neighbours downstairs are from Australia.’
Tessa puts her teacup down. ‘Are they?’
‘I think so. Stay here, Tess. What if you get another big role?’
Tessa bites her scone. ‘Mm, mm. The … roles … aren’t … there any more.’
‘You got Annie.’
‘Yes … but that was ages ago.’
‘So?’
‘So in a couple of years I’ll be old enough to play Miss Hannigan.’
‘Remember when you were Adelaide?’
‘Adelaide,’ Tessa says, unenergetically.
She misses being on stage. She has had more luck in festivals than in the West End. She eventually turned to BBC radio and the voiceover work came out of that. A review said her singing voice was ‘soulful’, and Deola secretly took credit for that. Who exposed her to soul music? Who took her to see the High Priestess, Nina Simone, at Ronnie Scott’s?
‘You know who I’d really love to play?’ Tessa says.
‘Who?’
‘Piaf. But I’m too tall to play her. She was tiny, Piaf.’
Tessa as Édith Piaf doesn’t surprise Deola as much as Tessa as a housewife. Tessa gave Peter an ultimatum before he agreed to get married. He is six years younger than Tessa and his father is not pleased about that. Peter’s mother died of melanoma when he was a boy and he and his father are more like brothers. They get drunk together, which Tessa at first thought was sweet. Now she says it’s unsavoury.
‘What made you change your mind?’ Deola asks.
Tessa wipes her fingers on a napkin. ‘About?’
‘You know.’
‘I’m ready,’ Tessa says. ‘I want the husband, the kids, the whole lot.’
Deola thinks of the clapping and skipping games she learned as a girl and chants like ‘When will you marry? This year, next year’ and ‘First comes love, then comes marriage.’
‘I know we’ve been brainwashed,’ Tessa says, reading her skeptical expression. ‘It’s biological. I don’t want to wait until I have fossils for eggs.’
‘Please don’t mention eggs around here.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s no hope for mine.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling.’
‘Seriously. There’s no one in London.’
‘What do you mean? There’s someone. There’s someone else.’
A group of Japanese tourists are walking past. One stops to take a photograph with his Canon camera.
How to begin? Deola thinks. The closest she got to talking to Tessa about race was telling Tessa she danced well, considering. Tessa, of course, thought Deola was a fantastic dancer. Deola didn’t dance that well, just better than other girls in school, who danced out of rhythm. Tessa got curious about the word ‘oyinbo’, having overheard other Nigerians using it and it was awkward for Deola to confess it meant white, Westerner, Westernized, foreign. Tessa blushed. The British won’t have any of that, stirring up stuff.
‘You must have had an image of what your prince looked like when you were a girl,’ Deola says.
‘I’m sure I did,’ Tessa says.
‘Well, mine was no Englishman.’
Tessa laughs. ‘What?’
‘I want to be with a Nigerian.’
‘Oh, don’t be daft.’
‘It’s a preference.’
‘Don’t be daft, darling. Who ends up with her prince anyway?’
Deola gesticulates. ‘It’s about … having a shared history.’
In her college days, who wanted to be the odd one with the oyinbo boyfriend at a party, explaining to him, ‘Yes, yes, we like our music this loud. No, no, we don’t make conversation, we just dance’?
You were either pathetic or lost if you were with an oyinbo boy. She never went out with any in school. She had crushes. There was the golden-haired American tennis player and the Welsh rugby player with bowlegs. Tessa went out with a pimply pseudo-intellectual who walked around with a paisley scarf
