A Good Man in Africa (2 page)

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door and Denzil Jones, the accountant, poked his head round it.

“Excuse me, Morgan. Ah, there you are, Dickie. See you at the club. Five-ish?”

“Fine,” Dalmire said. “Think you can cope with eighteen holes, Denzil?”

Jones laughed. “If you can, boyo, so can I. See you there, OK? Tara, Morgan.” Jones left.

Morgan reflected that of all the accents he disliked, the Welsh was the most irritating. Except possibly Australian … or perhaps Geordie come to that.…

“Good little golfer is Denzil,” Dalmire volunteered amiably.

Morgan looked astonished. “
Him?
Golf? You must be kidding. With a gut like that?” He sucked in his own. “I’m surprised he can see the ball.”

Dalmire screwed up his face in polite disagreement. “There’s more to Denzil than meets the eye. You’d be surprised. Handicap of seven. It’s all I can do to beat him.” He paused. “Talking of golf I heard you used to play a bit. What about joining us?”

“No, thanks,” Morgan said. “I’ve given up golf. It was ruining my mental equilibrium.” He suddenly remembered something. “Tell me,” he asked, “do you ever see Murray on the course?”

“Dr. Murray?”

“That’s the one. The Scottish chap. Doctor for the university.”

“Yes, I see him down there at some point during the week. He’s quite good for an oldish fellow. I think he’s teaching his son to play at the moment—he’s usually been with a young kid the last week or so. Why?”

“Just curious,” Morgan said. “I wanted a word with him. Perhaps I’ll catch him at the club.” He looked thoughtful.

“How well do you know Murray, then?” Dalmire asked.

“I only know him professionally,” Morgan said evasively. “I had to see him for a while about a couple of months ago for … I wasn’t feeling so good. Just before you arrived in fact.” Morgan’s face coloured as he remembered the most achingly embarrassing moments of his life, and he said with some venom, “Actually I can’t stand the man. Sanctimonious, Calvinistic so-and-so. Totally
unsympathetic—can’t think why he became a doctor—hectoring, bullying—sort of moral storm-trooper.”

Dalmire looked surprised. “Funny. I’ve heard he’s very well liked. Bit stern maybe—but then I don’t know him at all. They say he holds that university health service together. Been out here for ages, hasn’t he?”

“I think so.” Morgan felt a bit of a fool; he hadn’t meant his attack to be quite so vigorous, but Murray had that effect on him. “I suppose we just didn’t hit it off,” he said. “Personality clash. The nature of the illness and so on.” He left it at that.

He didn’t want to go on about Murray because he regarded the man as a wholly unwelcome and intensely annoying presence in his life. For some reason he seemed to stray across his path repeatedly; no matter what he did he seemed to run into Murray somewhere along the line. In fact, now he thought about it, in a way Murray had cost him Priscilla; indirectly, Murray was responsible for this latest disastrous piece of news that Dalmire had so smilingly brought him. He stiffened involuntarily with anger. Yes, he remembered, if Murray hadn’t told him that night.… He stopped himself; he saw the if-clauses stretching away to the crack of doom. It was pointless, he told himself in a sudden chill of rationality; Murray—like young Dalmire—was simply a handy scapegoat, a useful objective correlative for his own stupid mistakes, his fervent pursuit of the cock-up, the banal farce he was so industriously trying to turn his life into: Morgan SNAFU Leafy, R.I.P.

He looked pointedly at his watch, then interrupted Dalmire’s reverie. “Look, Richard,”—he couldn’t bring himself to call Dalmire Dickie, not even now—“I’ve got a hell of a work to do.…”

Dalmire looked at his feet and pushed both his palms forward, as if to support a toppling bookshelf. “Far be it from me, old man,” he said mock-abjectly. “No no. You plug on.” He walked to the door swishing an imaginary golf club. “Sure you don’t fancy a round this afternoon? Threesome?”

Morgan was sorely tried by the way Dalmire persistently accompanied his conversational remarks with visual analogues, as if he were a presenter on a TV show for the under-fives. So in response Morgan exaggeratedly shook his head and histrionically
indicated towering reams of bumf in his in-tray. Dalmire flashed him a thumbs-up sign and slipped out of the door.

Morgan sat back in pained relief and gazed at the motionless fan set in the ceiling. He sat and listened to the hum of his air-conditioner. How, he asked himself with a smile of sad incredulity on his face, how could a demure, refined … 
sweet
girl like Priscilla marry that crass nonentity, that ignorant scion of the English upper middle classes? He pinched the top of his nose in heartrending disbelief. She knew that I loved her, he told himself,
why
couldn’t she have seen.… He checked the progress of his thoughts for the third time. He should stop deluding himself this way; he knew why.

He stood up and walked round his desk to the window. Dalmire had been right about the storm. There was a fuming cliff-edge of dense purple-grey clouds looming to the west of Nkongsamba. It would probably rain tonight; there invariably were a few thunderstorms at Christmas time. He stared out over the provincial capital. What a dead-end place, he thought, as he always did when he contemplated this view. The only large town in a small state in a not-very-significant West African country: the diplomatic posting of a lifetime! He sneered—you couldn’t even call it a backwater. He felt miserable; the irony wasn’t working for him today. Sometimes he panicked, imagining that the records of his posting had been lost, deep in some bottomless Whitehall file, and that nobody even remembered he was here. The thought made his scalp crawl.

Like Rome, Nkongsamba was built on seven hills, but there all similarity ended. Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from the air it resembled nothing so much as a giant pool of crapulous vomit on somebody’s expansive unmown lawn. Every building was roofed with corrugated iron in various advanced stages of rusty erosion, and from the window of the Commission—established nobly on a hill above the town—Morgan could see the roofs stretch before him, an ochrous tin checkerboard, a bilious metallic sea, the paranoiac vision of a mad town planner. Apart from a single rearing skyscraper at the town’s centre, a bank, the modern studios of Kinjanjan Television and the large Kingsway general stores, few buildings reached higher than three stories and most were crumbling mud-walled houses randomly
clustered and packed alongside narrow pot-holed streets lined with deep purulent drains. Morgan liked to imagine the town as some immense yeast culture, left in a damp cupboard by an absent-minded lab technician, festering uncontrolled, running rampant in the ideal growing conditions.

Apart from the claustrophobic proximity of the buildings to one another, and the noisome cloying stench of rubbish and assorted decomposing matter, it was the heaving manifestation of organic life in all its forms that most struck Morgan about Nkongsamba. Entire generations of families sprawled outside the mud huts like auditioning extras for a “Four Ages of Man” documentary, from wizened flat-breasted grandmothers to potbellied pikkins frowning with concentration as they peed into the gutters. Hens, goats and dogs scavenged every rubbish pile and accessible drain-bed in search of edible scraps, and the flow of pedestrians, treading a cautious path between the mad honking traffic and the crumbling edges of the storm-ditches, never ceased.

Among the brightly clad swarming crowds were alarmingly deformed leprous beggars, with knobbled blunt limbs, who staggered, hopped and crawled along, occasionally, if in a particularly dire condition, propelling themselves about on little wooden trolleys. There were lissom motor-park touts escorting big-buttocked shop assistants; small boys selling trayfuls of biros, combs, orange dusters, coathangers, sunglasses and cheap Russian watches; huge-humped white cows driven by solemn, thin-faced Fulanis from the North. Sometimes dusty, dirt-mantled lunatics from the forests could be seen weaving their nervous way among the throng in crazed incomprehension. One day Morgan had come across one standing at a busy road junction. He wore a filthy loincloth and his hair was dyed mud-orange. He stood with wide unblinking eyes gazing at the Sargasso of humanity that passed before him, from time to time screaming shrill insults or curses, shuffling his feet in a token spell-casting dance. The crowd laughed or just ignored him—the mad are happily tolerated in Africa—content to let him gibber harmlessly on the pavement. For some reason Morgan had felt a sudden powerful bond of sympathy with this guileless fool in his hideously alien environment—he seemed to share and understand his point of view—and spontaneously he had thrust a pound note into his
calloused hand as he edged past. The madman turned his yellow eyes on him for a brief moment before stuffing the note into his wide moist mouth where he chewed it up with a salivating relish.

Morgan thought shamefacedly of the episode as he surveyed the town. Depending on his mood Nkongsamba either invigorated or depressed him. Of late—or at least for the last three months—it had cast him into a scathing misanthropy, so profound that had he possessed a spare nuclear bomb or Polaris missile he would gladly have retargeted it here. Blitzed the seven hills in one second. Cleared the ground. Let the jungle creep back in.

For an instant he visualised the mushroom cloud. BOOM. The dust slowly falling and along with it a timeless weighty peace. But inside him he suspected it was probably futile. There was just too much raw, brutal life in the place to allow itself to be obliterated that easily. He thought it would be rather like that cockroach he had tried to kill at home the other night. He had been lost in some lurid paperback when out of the corner of his eye he’d seen a real monster—two inches long, brown and shiny like a tin toy, with two quivering whiskers—scuttling across the concrete floor of his sitting room. He had enveloped it in a noxious cloud of fly-spray, swatted it with his paperback, stamped on it, leapt up and down on the revolting creature like some demented Rumplestiltskin, but to no avail. Although it had been trailing a transparent ooze, its whiskers were buckled, it had lost a couple of legs and was only groggily keeping on course, it had nonetheless made the shelter of the skirting board.

He turned away from the view and the faint noise of tooting cars that came through the firmly closed windows. The rain would be nice, he thought, dampen the dust, provide a bit of coolness for an hour or so. It was important to keep cool, he said to himself, especially now. He felt fine in his office, he had his air-conditioner turned up high, but outside his enemy the sun lay in wait eager for battle to recommence. He had decided that his low heat threshold was something to do with his complexion: pale and creamy and well supported by a thick layer of subcutaneous fat. He had been in Africa for nearly three years and still hadn’t developed anything you could call a real tan. Just more freckles, zillions of them. He held his forearms up for scrutiny; from a distance he looked as though he was
quite brown but as you drew closer the illusion was exposed. He was like some animated
pointilliste
painting. Still, he reflected, if his calculations were right, in another year all the freckles should merge together to form a continuous bronzed sheen, and then he wouldn’t need to sunbathe ever again.

In another year! He laughed harshly to himself; the way his life was currently going it would be a miracle if he lasted beyond Christmas and the elections. The mad implausibility of this last event made his head spin every time he thought about it. Only in Kinjanja, he thought, only in Kinjanja would they hold elections between Christmas and the New Year. Not just any old elections either; the Yuletide poll had all the signs of being the most important yet held in this benighted country’s short history. These thoughts brought him reluctantly back to his work and he moved away from the window, warily circling his desk as if it were wired to explode. Cautiously he sat down and opened the green file that lay to one side of his blotting pad. He read the familiar heading: KNP. The Kinjanjan National Party. He opened it and the still more familiar features of its Mid-West representative, Professor Chief Sam Adekunle smiled out at him from beneath the celebrated handlebar moustache and muttonchop whiskers. Numbly he riffled through the pages, his eyes dully flitting over the projections and assessments, the graphs, demographic surveys, breakdown of manifestos and confidential analyses of the party’s political leanings. It was a good, capable piece of work: thorough, painstaking and professionally put together. And all done by him. He turned to the last page and read his final memorandum to the effect that the KNP and Adekunle were the most pro-British of the assorted rag-bag of political parties contesting the future elections and the one whose victory would be most likely to ensure the safety of UK investment—heavy, and heavily profitable—and to encourage its maintenance and expansion in the coming years. He remembered with little satisfaction now how pleased Fanshawe had been with his work, how the telex had buzzed and clattered between Nkongsamba and the capital on the coast, between Nkongsamba and London. Great work, Morgan, Fanshawe had said, keep it up, keep it up.

Morgan cursed his efficiency, his acuity, his confident evaluations. Fate sticking her oar in again, he thought grimly; why
hadn’t he chosen the People’s Party of Kinjanja, or the Kinjanjan People’s Progress Party or even the United Party of Kinjanjan People? Because he was too bloody keen, he told himself, too effing smart, that’s why. Because for once in his life he’d wanted to do a good job, wanted some acclaim, wanted to get out. He slammed the file shut with a snarl of impotent anger. And now, he accused himself mercilessly, now Adekunle’s got you by the short and curlies, hasn’t he? Strung up and dangling.

Blackmail, so the detective novels he read informed him, was a nasty word, and he was surprised that he could pronounce it in such close association with his own name and suffer only minor qualms. Adekunle was blackmailing him—that much was clear—but perhaps his comparative equanimity stemmed from the bizarre nature of his blackmail task. However unpleasant it was it couldn’t be described as onerous—in fact, he hadn’t done a thing about it in the ten days since it had been delivered. Adekunle could have asked for anything—the contents of the Commission’s filing cabinets, the names up for New Year honours, an OBE himself, free access to the diplomatic bag—and Morgan would have gladly complied, so desperate was he to keep his job. But Adekunle had made one simple request—simple as far as he was concerned, nightmarish for Morgan. Get to know Dr. Murray, Adekunle had said. That’s all, become his friend.