They sat for a long time on the bean bag holding, and smiling at, each other, as if now they were alone together they weren't quite sure what to do next. Then Nengi said he wanted to show her something back at his hotel room and they left the flat arm in arm and got into Ruth's car. Though Ruth continued to worry about her loss of control etc., being alone in her car with Nengi was very exciting. The crazy currents that had been flowing between them since the dance at Ginger, that had been fiercened by that long kiss on the bean bag in her flat, tormented her exquisitely. It was a struggle to keep her eyes on the road, to remember to move the trafficator, to reach the brakes, to move any muscle. He didn't help matters either. He leaned over and put his left arm around her; he stressed every point he made by touching her here and there, easily, naturally; he shifted this way and that, brushing against her all the time, as if the car could hardly contain him. In his high-pitched voice that made him sound so innocent, that sounded so beautiful to Ruth's ears, he kept saying things that made Ruth dizzy. Things like: "I don't know how I was able to control myself when you walked into the living room in your flat this afternoon; I was shocked; I didn't think anyone could look so beautiful. You know, because of the lighting at Ginger I didn't see you well before I fell for you. And then when you walked out and I saw how stunning you were, gosh! It was like winning a bonus." Things like: "How do you do it? How do you impose your presence so much without saying a word? You know, at Ginger we were all doing a lot of talking on that table but it seemed so pointless because you were not part of it. It was as if we needed your approval for anything we said to make sense."

"Oh, you talk so much rubbish," Ruth said and struck him gently.

"No, I mean it, I mean every word. I barely slept after I got back to my room. I couldn't believe my good fortune. I couldn't believe it. I would have come to your flat in the morning but I kept restraining myself. By three o'clock I couldn't take it any longer."

"You sweet-tongued man," Ruth said, squeezing his hand which was on her right knee, "You want to blow my mind, you want to finish me completely."

As always, the car park at the Sheraton was full and the lobby was packed. Men in suits, part of a wedding, hurried back and forth, bumping into people if they didn't get out of the way quickly enough. Other men were huddled in twos and threes on the seats in the large, poorly lit lobby, whispering in spite of the din, and yet other men, and a solitary woman here and there, watched you intently and expectantly as you walked across the lobby as if perhaps you were a messenger they'd been awaiting for a very long time. Ruth, arm in arm with Nengi, at the receiving end of all those stares and disoriented by all the bustle, by the experience of walking into that extremely busy place arm-in-arm with a man she'd known for less than twenty four hours, suffered from acute self-consciousness. They couldn't reach the lift quickly enough. Nengi was on the last floor, the executive floor, but his grey bedcover was weathered, the carpet was tired and the room had a stale smell.

"I've never paid so much money for such a crummy room anywhere in the world," Nengi said, "anyway I console myself that if one of the best hotels in Lagos is in this state then there is no shortage of projects to fund here at home."

But the state of the room didn't matter to Ruth. When Nengi kissed her, she again went for his tongue greedily. It turned into the longest kiss of her life. When it came to an end because he broke free to look at her, she was panting like someone who had run the marathon. He had a naughty smile on his smooth handsome face as he looked at her, still holding her body to him. She wanted to go on kissing him, perhaps forever. At the same time she was worrying afresh about what struck her as the unseemly speed at which she was surrendering everything she had to this man from far away. He was clearly aroused and made no effort to hide it; she too felt very unsettled, which made her even more worried. He seemed to sense the turmoil inside her, for he gave her a short, sweet kiss on her lips, led her to a seat beside his bed and began to talk about his work. That reduced the tension in Ruth's chest, allowed her to breathe a little better.

"This is my little baby," he said picking up a slim, shiny PowerPoint projector on the desk beside his bed. "Before I met you it was possibly my best friend. I want you to look at my sales pitch for the government and let me know what you think."

Even that little request caused Ruth some panic - what did she know about all the sophisticated things Nengi, Professor and Ebele had talked about at Ginger? He was going to find out that she was uninformed and uninteresting, he was going to lose interest in her very quickly.

In the meantime Nengi had set up his projector and was checking its connection to his black Toshiba laptop. Then, in bold dark blue and crimson colors against a dazzling white background, the name of the bank Nengi worked for (Masayoshi Lewis and Kleber or MLK for short) appeared on the wall across from the bed.

"I'll try and present it to you the way I plan to spin it to the minister when I see him in Abuja. Just touch this switch on the laptop whenever I nod in your direction."

He stood by the wall on which the image was being beamed holding a little torch-like object that produced a thin red light whenever he pointed it at the wall.

"MLK is a world leader in financing infrastructure projects. Most recently we completed the financing of a pipeline to transport natural gas from . . ."

And as Ruth, following nods from Nengi, pressed the button on the laptop, jet black lengths of pipe emerged from all sides of the screen and danced towards each other forming, as if by magic, a pipeline that came together gracefully across the middle of a map of South America filled with colourful representations of nations and large cities. Next came a series of cartoon characters representing the promoters of the pipeline, the national governments involved and the customers. The promoters carried their gas reserves in bulging gourd-like objects; the customers held briefcases marked with flashing US dollar signs which they were however shielding away from the promoters; the governments proffered folders marked "Enabling Environment". Then in the slides that followed, a hyperactive character, with MLK written boldly across its chest, accompanied by a group of other banks, set about connecting the enormous gas reserves of the promoters with the energy-famished customers. Once this connection was made the jet black pipeline made its way unerringly from the gas fields of the promoters to the power plants of the customers. And then the pipeline was filled with gas and the parties lived happily ever after. The next project was a power plant in Poland and once again MLK's diligence and expertise enabled a private power company to build a mammoth plant that went on to provide thousands of megawatts of electricity to industries and homes across the country. All with playful humour, all in rich, strong colours, like in a primer for toddlers.

"These projects would have been financed from scarce government resources or the governments would have queued for equally scarce funding from the World Bank and other development agencies. But with MLK's advice the governments provided a conducive environment for private sector promoters to access international funding. In this age of liberalisation, it's getting increasingly difficult for governments to finance projects which the private sector can handle. This is where MLK's international experience can be decisive."

Nengi's voice had lost its shrillness; it was now smooth and soothing. Even when it said something boastful, it said it as if it was a fact which everyone knew or ought to know. Ruth tried very hard to listen to and understand every word; she wanted desperately to be able to discuss his work with him, but he distracted her terribly: the way he moved his lips reminded her of that long kiss of a few minutes before, his now-modulated voice made her heady. She wanted to hold him and be held by him, but she persevered with the picture show. The next set of slides showed all the potential projects that could be financed in Nigeria with MLK's expertise: power plants, oil and gas pipelines, water projects, etc. It seemed from the slide show that if Nigeria would only embrace MLK, it would in a few years have more state of the art infrastructure than it would know what to do with. Ruth found it very interesting but too easy; it didn't seem to her that anything concerning Nigeria could be so simple.

"What do you think?" Nengi asked her when the show was over, his voice back to normal.

"You guys do wonderful things," Ruth said, "but things are never so straightforward here. Around here problems always seem to come from every direction."

"Of course, it's much harder than my spiel suggests," Nengi said, "for example, the pipeline in South America took seven years from conception to closing. What the presentation aims at is to get the government to make an initial commitment to do the things necessary to support investment and then we can go away and try to put the agreements together. And, believe me, there are scores of agreements to be written."

"It's like magic," Ruth said, not wanting to sound discouraging, "building fantastic things out of nothing."

Nengi had moved from his place near the wall which had served as a screen to her side. His proximity made her uncomfortable, as if he'd chased away all the air around her. As he turned off the laptop and then the projector with his right hand, the left hand encircled her waist and drew her against him.

"You're the magician," he said. "When I was coming here all I could think about was how to sell my project finance wares and suddenly you've made all those things seem secondary. Everything else is minor compared to you."

"Sweet-tongued man . . ." she began but he cut her off with a kiss.

When he began to take off her clothes, the anxieties that had shadowed her since the previous evening rose sharply. She helped him, but all the while a massive struggle took place inside her. Was she being cheap? Was she being stupid flinging herself at this man who would soon disappear? What would she do with Ishaya? The feel of his naked body against hers, the dozens of worshipful kisses that he planted on her body, the way he nozzled her enlarged right nipple broke all the padlocks inside her and pushed aside her panic. Over the years with Ishaya Ruth had learnt to get more out of sex. When pressed by her friends she'd described their lovemaking as "good" or even "very good". Those adjectives would be too tame to describe sex with Nengi that afternoon at the Sheraton. Her body felt like an amazing bomb that kept exploding but somehow still held together. Those sudden, very satisfying explosions were immediately followed by new neediness; each burst of pleasure merely making her hungrier, more desperate.

Thoughts about Ishaya tormented her all through the period Nengi was around and only got worse when Nengi returned to London at the end of his trip. She and Ishaya had been lovers for ten years, since when she, a first year student at the University of Jos, met him on a terribly cold evening in the middle of the Jos harmattan. He had picked her out of a group of about fifteen female students, shivering in the cold outside the university's female hostel, being herded to a party he was organizing for some rich and powerful men from out of town. It was a little like how Nengi had honed in on her, sitting quietly watching Mosquito and the dancers, even as her friends filled the air with their opinions and wit.

Ishaya was rich, powerful and popular. He managed contracts for millions of naira, organised parties for powerful men and watched them make a fool of themselves in the presence of university students young enough to be their daughters and in some cases their granddaughters, and paid kickbacks into their numbered accounts in Europe. He bought or built homes for them and was the person to talk to if you wanted to make the impossible possible or if all you wanted was to know where the best party in Jos was that weekend. Among certain circles in the female hostel "Uncle Ishaya" had a status close to that of God. That he had chosen her had made Ruth's head reel.

Ruth had lost her mother in a motor accident when she was very young. She had been brought up by her grandmother and then when her grandmother died, by an aunt with a bad drinking habit who had three children of her own and had, when drunk, angrily enumerated to Ruth again and again over several years all the sacrifices she was making on her behalf. Ishaya was the dramatic turn that had led her away from a life that had almost always been miserable. Ishaya had made her feel worthwhile. When they met he was married and had three children, but he had paid more attention to her than the boyfriends of most of her friends, married or unmarried, ever did to them. He had been generous to her, had helped her a great deal when she and Professor were setting up Ginger, had become a part of her life that she couldn't imagine letting go of. She had easily fended off the attentions of many suitors over the years because deep inside her she felt she had all she wanted. Ishaya always found reason to visit Lagos to see her at least once a month. She probably would have liked to se him more often but she'd adapted. Ruth was good at adapting, at fitting herself into whatever space life offered her and trying to make the best of it. That way you spared yourself a great deal of heartache.

So what had happened with Nengi? Why had all her coolness suddenly dissipated? Where was the deep contentment she was so confident she had? How had she ripped apart the easily manageable shape her life had fitted itself into for years and gone in search of pain and heartbreak? What would she do with Ishaya? What had happened to her? What was going to become of her?

The next time Ishaya was in town, she was terrified that she would unwittingly reveal to him that she had slept with someone else, that he would somehow read what she considered to be her betrayal of him on her body. Nothing of the sort happened. If her behaviour had changed in anyway, Ishaya didn't notice. In her eyes, he did look different. He was still handsome and very well groomed. He looked very elegant in the beige kaftan and light brown sandals he wore when they went out for dinner at Villa Medici. His beard was meticulously trimmed, but it was beginning to sprout a few white strands. He still did press-ups but his stomach was nevertheless starting to bulge a little. When he made love to her, he was still filled with energy, she still seemed to arouse him incredibly, but his effect on her was no match for what Nengi did to her. It was like the difference between a thunderstorm and a drizzle. He seemed to spend a lot more time at the mirror as if searching for ways to halt the onward march of age. She'd never asked his age, but supposed he must be in his mid-forties. She may have seen all those things in the past but she saw them with new, critical eyes. He was less than he used to be.

After Ishaya returned to Jos, Ruth became even more restless. Suddenly she would be seized by a powerful urge to call Ishaya and tell him it was over between them. The reasons for ending it with him would blossom in her head - he was a married man (in those moments that suddenly became a huge issue ten years late) - they'd been seeing each other for long enough - she had to think about her future, about getting married, she was after all thirty-one years old - she'd depended on him for too long - she had to make her own way - she was incapable of keeping two relationships at the same time - she hated telling lies and she'd have to lie to one or the other and so on. She would even reach for the phone in her office at Ginger and then she would take her hand away. The reasons why she shouldn't just end it, at least not just yet would come surging. Ishaya had done so much for her, he was such an essential part of her life she couldn't imagine breaking up with him. How, anyway, could she seriously think of giving up that which had been so reliable, so stable for ten long years, on account of a man she hardly knew, who would probably soon go away to his world of great transactions and forget her?

A few hours later, a feeling that she absolutely had to end it with Ishaya, that she had to make a decision just to stop all the turmoil in her head once and for all would again take hold of her. One night she dreamt that she had called Ishaya to tell him it was over between them and she couldn't find the nerve to tell him and he kept asking her what was the matter.

"Ruth, are you there?" he asked her in the dream.

"Yes."

"What's the matter?"

"I don't know."

"Are you all right?"

Silence.

"Ruth, are you there? Is everything all right?"

It was like having a length of rope tied round your waist and the more you tried to untie it, the more rope there was to untie. Ruth was sweating profusely when she woke up.

Ruth drew crooked lines and circles across Nengi's chest slowly, journeying from beside his left nipple to beside the right one and then down to his stomach and then back again. Her head lay sideways in the crook made by his right arm; her naked breasts were pressed against his side. They still throbbed, her entire body still throbbed, like a malfunctioning engine that couldn't be switched off. The six months Nengi had to perform a miracle in Nigeria had passed and though he said he'd made no headway in contacting senior Nigerian government officials, he sounded as if he was still determined to go on.