Ijeoma and Chioke part 3

On the following night he came in late again, and she came dutifully to sit beside him at the table as he ate.
" How was work today? ", she asked feigning interest.
" You know Ijeoma, amazingly enough, it is going well.  The roads are so bad here that the tires wear so quickly.  So while the whole country is tightening their belt, we will loosen ours." he said finally managing to smile.  "However, my love," he continued mischeviously,"if one were trying to judge our success by the quantity of meat  you serve at table one would be hard pressed to not believe that we are near destitute."
At this she could not help but lsugh herself.  For all the meat he wanted at table he was not ready to raise the housekeeping allowance by a single kobo.  So the pieces of meat remained as tiny fragments floating in the soup.  On Sundays they would kill a whole chicken.
It was as if the conversations they were capable of had become superficial and impersonal.  No longer did they even attempt to probe into the unchartered seas of feelings and emotions.  They had long since given up on sailing such dangerous seas.  The question of who had stopped sailing first was a matter of conjecture.  She felt that he did not care to hear about her " oyinbo" feelings, as he called them.  For his own part, he felt that at this point in their marriage any discussion of feelings would be perceived as weakness, and there is nothing more dreaded in Igbo land than a man who is weak.
So, it was not so much that he did not love his wife of fourteen years, as it was that he did not know how to show the emotion.  In his own mind, the fact that he stayed on in his marital home was in and of itself proof of his love.  Surely the only reason he stayed on was for love; for physical atttraction between the two of them had long since been replaced by a stolid but undeniable complacenecy.  It was not that he suppressed these physical feelings, but rather he had conveniently found other outlets for his passion, and they were many.
In Miranda's company it was as if Chioke sparked to life.  For as long as she could please him physically their relationship was emotionally healthy and fulfilling.  She was barely twenty years old and his personal secretary.  The daily temptation of her lithe limbs and slim waist at the office had roused in him a desire that had to be fulfilled.  In this way, it was hard for him to say if he was in lust or in love.   For the line between lust and love is at best a blurry one.  Youth was not her only advantage over Ijeoma.  Her spirit also had this joyful joie de vivre which the much older Chioke found irresistible.  She would squeal with delight at the chinese restaurant in New Haven.  The time they had spent in London together had been an experience rivalling his honey moon.  There had been Champagne bubbles all the way there, and Ah! What passion.  He still had dreams of their Harrods shopping trip and visit to Buckingham Palace, and Madame Tussauds.
After their return to Nigeria it seemed to them that this shared experience had brought them even closer.  She had acquired a considerable wardrobe of silks, and skirts and blouses.  In addition, she now affected, to the best of her ability,an english/american accent.  This had partly been picked up from the trip, and the rest she had fabricated from the american movies she had seen at the cinema.  While he was in her company, he saw himself again as the Chioke of his youth albeit with a now watered down conscience which allowed him to freely indulge in fornication. All these passions which had been so carefully guarded in his youth were now given free reign in his middle aged body.  At times he felt bothered in his conscience but as time passed these feelings of unease became rarer until they desisted completely.
Ijeoma and Chioke had not shared a bedroom since Nkechi was conceived, a good 7 years ago.  This drastic measure had been deemed necessary by both of them in order to prevent them from having any more children.  But the reason of financial necessity limiting their ability to provide for more children had long since changed.  However,even with the reversal of their fortunes it seemed that the tides had changed.  In this callous way he never asked of his wife if she desired him, and he, with his passions well satisfied elsewhere felt no need to desire her.