Summary
Learning the Rules
Adah wakes in a ward filled with other young women. She is confused because she is tied up with what seem to be cords and she cannot talk or move. The nurses alter her situation but she is still uncomfortable and has a mouth tube in. The other women in the ward talk to her, though, and convey that there are many things she does not know about in life. One woman was married for seventeen years and had no children but then finally God visited her. She never stops talking or laughing. Adah cannot imagine Francis being okay with waiting that long.
There is also a sleek, young woman next to Adah. She is weeks overdue. Her husband is extremely handsome and well dressed and they seem to be very much in love.
The surgeon is a white man with very tan skin, and he is skilled with the knife. Adah respects and trusts him. She starts to believe that she is made for this world and not the next, all thanks to his confidence. Though there is still a tube in her mouth, she is feeling better.
Adah’s new son, Bubu, sleeps all day and wakes up and cries in the night. The nurses fit a special emergency nursery at the end of the corridor for Bubu at night.
The tube is taken out of her mouth and Adah is elated to be able to talk again. She talks to the sleek woman next to her, as she is curious about her and her man. She learns the woman was the man’s secretary. He had been married before and had two sons but his wife died. She was adopted and always wanted to make her own happy home. Adah is very envious and says it is like she is a princess. It does not seem fair to her that she is not loved this way.
During visiting hours, Adah wishes she received flowers or gifts like the others. Her biggest worry is her nightdress; she learns it is not appropriate to continue wearing the hospital gown during her confinement and all the other women have their own. She has to tell Francis to buy her one but she is nervous he will not want to, or will buy the wrong type. Francis has never even given her a present, she realizes, and she has to carry the C-section scars her whole life. She hopes, though, that his buying her a nightgown can be a romantic and special thing.
However, a young nurse tells Adah awkwardly that she must have her own nightgown, and she is ashamed that others can hear this. Prior to this she had hoped Francis would just buy her one as a glamorous gift, but now it is a directive and the fun of it has vanished. Adah is sure everyone is gossiping about her, and sinks into her covers. She only wants privacy.
Francis arrives and tells her he has good news. She is bemused, and guesses he did not get a job of his own because this is not something Francis would ever do. He hands her a letter from her boss at the library, and she learns she will be paid a lump sum for the holidays she has not taken. They also pooled money and bought her a cardigan as a gift.
Francis is talking about how this money will help pay for a course that can help him, and Adah is weary with how much of an idiot, a rogue, and a selfish man he is. She heatedly castigates him for not being there for the children, and tells him she hates him. She did not bring her children into the world to be “brought up by a woman who can’t even sign her own name” (121), and took them to England to keep them away from his family. She cries, but maintains that she is grateful Francis gave her the children. He is a tool from God, and more of an enemy than a friend.
Wearily she tells him she needs a nightgown. Two days later it arrives. It is a plain blue one in the same style as the hospital’s, but she no longer cares. She is not proud of it and does not want to show anyone.
The women start going home, anxious to leave before Christmas. The sleek woman kindly says goodbye, and Adah realizes they would only talk in a place like this, not the outside world. She learns the woman died a few days later.
Getting ready to go home is laborious. Most women want to pretend they have their figures back so they squish themselves into tight clothing. Adah is glad she gets to wear her lappa. She is more concerned about the baby’s clothing, as the shawl she will have to use is old and worn. If only she could feign confidence; if only she could just escape by death like the sleek lady.
The nurses love Bubu, which makes Adah suspicious; she wonders if they are teasing her or just curious about an African baby. But their affection seems genuine and she starts to feel guilty for her attitude. She wishes she could confide in someone, and misses her Pa. She decides she will not care about Francis anymore and will let him do what he wants, and all her focus will go to her children.
Applying the Rules
Winter is very cold, and Adah feels guilty that Francis has to work as a postman to support them. He complains constantly that the work is hard and humiliating. She worries about the English people’s dogs who like to attack postmen, and wonders if one will get Francis. Adah is also stressed that she has not improved enough after giving birth. She is weak but has goals, and does not want to give up being a librarian due to ill health.
That Christmas, Adah is happy that she can at least tell people the reason they are not getting the children presents is because her husband is a Jehovah’s Witness. In terms of her own faith, she knows there is a great man named Jesus but she does not know why he is called the son of God. To her, he is a great philosopher, politician, and psychologist and that is enough.
A parcel arrives for the children from Mrs. Konrad, which makes Adah happy, but she is still disconcerted with how much Mrs. Noble spends on her own children. Mrs. Noble laughs and tells her about credit. Adah is tempted to buy a few things for her babies because she wants to go to the store and walk around and be like other mothers, but she desists.
Christmas Eve is cold and damp, and snow falls. It is also surprisingly quiet. Francis watches TV downstairs and Adah stays with the children. She notices that one of Vicky’s ears is looking larger than the others—was it always like that? She puts Vaseline on it and it does not seem to hurt him, so she readies them all to go downstairs for tea. Yet the ear is getting worse, and Vicky is now oddly quiet.
Adah calls Francis and he comes up quickly, as she never calls him like that. When he suggests calling a doctor, she moans that none will come and Vicky will die. Francis learns the Indian doctor will not come on Christmas Eve so he goes to the police station to complain. The policemen accompany him to the house and one officer tells Francis the main doctor will not come but another will in his stead.
A young Chinese doctor arrives. Adah is comforted by the fact that he is also a “second-class citizen” and will not put on any airs. He determines Vicky received a bite from a bedbug and that he will be fine. Adah is surprised at how the welfare state does seem to work for even the lowest people here, and wonders what would have happened in Lagos.
Population Control
Spring arrives and the city is filled with new life. Adah ruminates on how bright and verdant Lagos always was, and how here in this dreary city it is actually more delightful when spring comes because it is in contrast to the gray gloom of other seasons.
She goes to the public baths, which she attends every Monday morning. After that she goes to the family planning clinic where she asks for birth control pills. She prays for forgiveness in going behind her husband’s back, but she simply cannot have more children. The woman tells her she needs Francis’s signature and she despairs that he will never give it.
Adah takes home the literature on the different methods of birth control and wrestles with whether or not to forge Francis’s signature, which she eventually decides to do. She scrapes together the money she needs for the first batch of pills, comforting herself that she has another library job waiting for her at Chalk Farm Library.
In the clinic office, Adah talks with a West Indian girl while she waits. The girl explains that she took the pill but it gave her a rash. Startled, Adah realizes she cannot let this happen to her. She decides to consider the cap even though it is risky since Francis might see her putting it in and conclude she is sleeping around.
At home, she inserts it but is nervous about it because it makes her walk funnily to keep it in. Francis notices this and eventually that evening she tells him the truth. He is incredulous and calls her a harlot. When he starts hitting her and yelling loudly about everything, Pa Noble and the other tenants investigate. Francis stops, but proclaims he will write to his mother and father.
This is the moment Adah decides her marriage is over—she cannot live with this man who shamed her so publicly. Adah is twenty-one now, and among her people this means she is a woman who can make her own decisions. She does not care about anyone else’s opinion except Boy’s.
A week later, Francis fails his examinations again and blames Adah. He writes to his parents about the cap, but it does not matter—Adah is pregnant again.
Analysis
Adah continues to navigate the often confusing British medical institutions, be they hospitals or clinics or getting a doctor on Christmas Eve. At nearly every step of the way, Emecheta has Adah trying to reconcile her own ignorance, her adherence to patriarchal norms, her feminism and strong sense of self, her need to support herself and her children, and her economic stability. For example, when Adah is staying in the hospital after Bubu’s birth, she is confused about why there are tubes in her nose, feels inferior to other women because she does not have fancy nightgowns, wishes her husband loved her and showed her attention, worries about money, and vows to not be a victim anymore and to devote all her love and care to her children, who are “going to be black… going to enjoy being black, be proud of being black, a black of a different breed” (141).
Adah decides that she will not leave Francis quite yet but that she will “live with him as long as it is convenient. No longer” (122). One of the ways that will be possible is by having no more children, so Adah visits a clinic to get birth control. Even though she comes to terms with what she is doing, she still has lingering worries that it is sinful, as well as worries about what would happen if Francis told his family. She knows “the psychology of her people” (145) and that they would think she was a harlot. Even though Adah has professed not to care what those backward, illiterate people think, she has a hard time actually imagining dealing with the shame of their thinking about her in that way.
Adah also learns that her husband is supposed to sign a form granting her permission, and she wonders why a woman cannot “be given the opportunity of exercising her own will” (142). Kasim Husain interprets the episode as a failure of the welfare state when combined with patriarchy: “When Adah seeks state-guaranteed contraception so as to prevent a fourth pregnancy that would cause her to lose her job, her doctor provides her with a requisition form that requires her husband’s signature… Requiring male consent for contraception indicates the heteropatriarchal privilege underwriting contraceptive policy, which both undermines Adah’s right of bodily self-determination and cannot conceive of a nuclear family such as Adah’s, where her work as a librarian supports Francis, her indolent accountancy student of a husband, as well as their three children.” As this instance shows, “In Britain as in Nigeria, claiming the ostensible benefits of the state is a Faustian bargain that further subordinates Adah to male authority.”
Critic Ashley Dawson agrees, writing of the required consent signature that “this apparently bizarre state practice is a product of the long-standing British legal principle of coverture, which specifies that women legally owe both their domestic and their reproductive labor to Men. If Adah is unable to control her body, in other words, it is not simply because Francis refuses to use birth control, but also because the state legislates that he controls his wife’s body.” Adah, however, doesn’t view her body that way. She forges the signature, takes abortion pills later in the novel, and decides she doesn’t have a problem with her nakedness— “Why should I be ashamed of my body?” (143).
The climax of the novel occurs when Francis, having learned about the cap because Adah finds it too hard to keep it from him, has a fit of rage, hits her, and shames her in front of the other tenants. For Adah, the marriage is “finished as soon as Francis called in the Nobles and the other tenants. She told herself that she could not live with such a man, Now everybody knew she was being knocked about, only a few weeks after she had come out of hospital. Everybody now knew that the man she was working for and supporting was not only a fool, but that he was too much of a fool to know he was acting foolishly” (147). Interestingly, Adah’s resolution comes because of what other people see and think, not because she herself has tired of being beaten, criticized, and taken advantage of. Adah is, for all her positive traits, still very concerned with how others view her, which complicates the feminist action of her leaving her husband.
