When Love is not enough

It was a Saturday evening and Clifford had returned with a feeling of guilt. He knew he had been a very bad husband and father. So when he came home, he felt ashamed of himself. Not that what he did was a one-off act, in fact it was used to be his habit, but after that morning before he left for a game at the stadium with his colleagues, and drove around town with one of his mistresses with whom he ended up in a hotel room, he returned like a man who had been struck with a flash of lightening from above and a voice asking him the reason he hated his wife so much and treated her like a piece of shit.

            At forty-three, became a professor of art at thirty-seven, dark, and with the looks of a stage artist, Clifford Ekpenisi was the youngest professor at the university of Lagos, at least a few months younger than five or six others with four of them his close friends.

             Clifford lived a double life. An every-Sunday Christian, devoted to work, and often admired by many especially women, as a man any woman would be lucky to possess. Nobody, not even his friends, knew how badly he treated his wife. Though, his colleagues knew of his mistresses because they too were not innocent of this. The usual drill was to go back home and continue to love your wife after screwing with other ladies in hotels and clubs. It had been twelve years since they got married, with just a six year old daughter to compliment. Clifford had lost interest in his wife a long time ago, and hadn’t slept with her in the last six months even though he had sex at least twice every week.

            Rachael was one of those not-bad-looking ladies who in their few years of marriage became the opposite of what they had looked like because their marriage had turned bad with a man who no longer cared for them, a man who quarrelled at them every day and beat them up once in two weeks. She had forgotten any joy marriage ever had since their daughter was three.

            This morning had looked like the worst of all. Her first conversation with her husband ended badly. She was beaten up, kicked in the stomach, whipped with a belt, slapped in the face and was left sprawling on the floor. How it all started was always unknown.

            When Clifford got to the stadium that morning, he discovered one of his colleagues came along with his wife.

   ‘No one forced me to marry her.’ The colleague began to say, when they sat to discuss. ‘I felt ashamed of myself when I discovered she does not deserve the way I treat her.  I mean, she has done nothing wrong to me and has always tried to be a good wife.’ Clifford knew what his colleague was saying was the truth but he wanted to convince himself otherwise. People always look for reasons to do the wrong things. He also knew his own wife was more beautiful than this colleague’s – at least before he began to kick her around. The colleague ended, ‘Every good woman deserves the best treatment. Your wife is one of the good women I’ve known.’

            It was after having it with a lady that Clifford was struck with a thunderbolt of apprehension. He had stopped in the middle of the road and had asked the girl out of his car and out of his life. He looked at the dashboard; the time was 5:20pm. He didn’t know exactly how he felt, but he knew there was pain in his heart. He loved his wife before he married her. What the hell happened to that love? He was not particularly happy that she had given him just a daughter but he knew that was not the reason he treated her the way he did. He had no reason. He had been loving and caring to the ladies he slept with but not to the woman he married. He had beaten her up severally without any reason even while their daughter watched and cried. He had no objection when she suggested they send their little girl to her mother’s because he would be more comfortable slapping his wife without her daughter in the house. He had left her this morning crying on the floor because she accused him of coming home every night, smelling of women while he refused to sleep with her. He cursed himself and cried.

            He drove with his mind lost.  He stopped at a florist’s shop and paid for a bunch of flowers. He drove to a lady’s wear boutique and bought a dozen of dresses. Those he loved so much on women. He paid for the loveliest perform one of his girls had worn. He would take her out to dinner and try to be the husband she deserved. Through the night he would hold her in his arms while in bed and they would have non-stop blissful sex till Sunday morning.

            When he walked in, it was almost seven o’clock. His wife was lying down on the couch. He figured she must be badly asleep as she did not notice he was in the room. His first reaction was to go to the kitchen and prepare dinner but he had arranged for a dinner outside where he would apologise to her in public. He noticed she was almost frozen, and then he went to the air conditioner and raised the temperature to above 25⁰c. He set the bouquet of flowers just in front of her so it would be the first thing she saw once she woke up. Then he was able to look at her closely. Her face was pale and her hair snowy. He wondered if that was how his wife looked or had he distanced himself from her that long that he no longer knew how she looked?

            He reached for a blanket to cover her while he went for a bath. As he moved closer, something struck his attention. His wife had not moved a bit. She was not breathing. He touched her wrist. There was no pulse. Then it dawned on him.

            Rachael, his wife, was dead.