William Boyd: A Good Man in Africa

‘Dis man,’ she said in pidgin-English. ‘Dis man ‘e nevah done satisfy, ah-ah!’ She clapped her hands in delighted mirth. For some reason Morgan found himself smiling bashfully, a schoolboy blush spreading slowly across his face.

Morgan parked his Peugeot in the club car park. He got out and gazed across the warm roofs of the other cars at the club building. It was a dark night and the gathering rainclouds had obscured the stars. A coolish breeze blew from the west and Morgan smelt the damp-earth odour of impending rain.

The club was situated to the north of the city in one of the more seemly purlieus. Nearby stood a dusty racecourse and polo ground and the only Nkongsamban cinema regularly frequented by Europeans. The club itself was a large sprawling building which had been added to many times in the last half century and its haphazard design illustrated a variety of solid colonial architectural styles. It boasted also half a dozen red clay tennis courts, a sizeable swimming pool and a piebald eighteen-hole golf course. Inside were a couple of bars, a billiard room, a function suite of sorts that doubled as a discotheque and a large lounge-area filled with rickety under-stuffed armchairs which on festive occasions was cleared to provide space for dances, tombola and amateur dramatics or, should any crisis arise, acted as an assembly point for anxious expatriates.

It was a seedy-looking building, over-used, always seeming in need of a fresh coat of paint, but it was, by virtue of the poverty of alternatives, a popular place and Morgan, when he didn’t detest it as a repository for all the worst values of smug colonial British middle — classdom, often found himself savouring its atmosphere: the wide eaves providing ample shade for the long verandahs, the whirling roof fans rustling the tissue-thin airmail editions of The Times , the barefoot waiters in their white gold-buttoned uniforms clicking across the loose parquet flooring as they brought another tall green frosted bottle of beer to your chair.

But it wasn’t always shrouded in this nostalgic fog for him: there were bar-flies and bores, lounge-lizards and lechers. Adulterers and cuckolds brushed shoulders in the billiard room, idle wives played bridge or tennis or sunbathed round the pool, their children in the care of nannies, their housework undertaken by stewards, their husbands earning comfortable salaries all day. They gossiped and bitched, thought about having affairs and sometimes did, and the dangerous languor that infected their hot cloudless days set many a time-bomb ticking beneath their cosy, united nuclear families.

So Morgan changed his mind about the club from time to time. It had provided him with a few sexual partners — the hard, thin-faced wife of a civil engineer with five children, the large, moustachioed energetic spouse of the Italian Fiat representative in Nkongsamba — and for this he was duly grateful. He like the pool too, when it was free of the wives and their screaming brats, and he happily took advantage of the tennis courts and golf course when he felt so inclined. What he didn’t like so much was the deadening familiarity of the place after three years: the same tiresome old bachelors, the sun-wrinkled, gin-sodden couples with their endless dinner invitations and impoverished conversations. Being First Secretary at the Commission made him something of a social catch, and anyone who thought they might have a remote chance of landing an OBE or MBE shamelessly sought his company, plied him with drinks and meals and with remarkable lack of subtlety would tell him of their years of unstinting service in Kinjanja, what they had achieved and sacrificed for Britain. After three years of this Morgan was beginning to think he deserved some sort of reward himself for the hours of his young life he had sacrified listening to sententious political analyses and dreary racist diatribes.

There was another club up at the university where he was an honorary member and which he sometimes patronized. It had a swimming pool and tennis courts but no golf course, was newer and smaller and the intellectual levels of its members marginally higher. These two places, the cinema and private dinner parties represented all the social outlets available to the expatriate population of Nkongsamba. It’s no wonder, Morgan thought as he made his way through the parked cars towards the fairy-lit club façade and the jangling sound of pop-music, that we’re such a desperate lot.

He walked into the colonnaded entrance porch of the club house. A large noticeboard was covered with club rules, minutes of meetings and announcements of forthcoming events. His jaundiced eye swiftly surveyed what was on offer: XMAS GALA PARTY, HE READ, TO BE ATTENDED,BY HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF RIPON. He shuddered, wondering what had possessed him to agree to be Father Christmas. Next to that was the golf club’s GRAND BOXING DAY COMPETITION, all welcome, prizes for everyone, sign below . He turned away in despair. Outside the main door was a newsagent’s kiosk that sold European newspapers and magazines. Tucked away amongst the display ofheat-blanched copies of Newsweek, Marie-Claire and Bunte Morgan knew there were a few issues of American sex-magazines. He was surreptitiously leafing through one entitled Over-40 —it was not a publication for gerontophiles, the number referred not to the models’ age but to their mammary development — when he heard footsteps on the concrete path behind him. Snatching up a copy of Reader’s Digest he looked round guiltily and saw Dr Murray approaching, accompanied by a young boy.

Morgan felt contrasting emotions stampede through his body: hatred, reluctant admiration, fear and embarrassment. He did his utmost to affect nonchalance.

‘Evening, Doctor,’he said with wide-eyedjocularity, indicating with one twirling hand the vague source of the pop-music. ‘Dancing tonight?’

Murray looked at him as if he were slightly mad, but said politely enough, ‘Not for me, I’m just dropping my son off here.’ He introduced Morgan: ‘This is Mr Leafy, from the Commission.’ The boy seemed about fourteen, tall and slim with a look of brown hair falling across his forehead. He had a distinct look of his father about him. He said hello as politely too, but Morgan thought he detected a look of suspicious recognition in his eyes, as if somewhere, in unsavoury circumstances, they had met before.

Murray was about fifty and also was tall and slim. He was wearing baggy dark flannels and a crisp white short-sleeved shirt; indeed, Morgan had never seen him in anything else. Murray had a strong sun-battered face with deep deltas of laugh lines around his eyes and short, wavy, pepper-and-salt hair. His nose seemed a little too small for his face, and his blue eyes sometimes had a humorous glint to them, but more often than not they were probing and unforgiving. Morgan knew the look well.

‘You go on in,’ Murray told his son. ‘Phone when you’re ready to come home.’

‘OK, Dad,’ said the boy looking a bit nervous, and he went into the club. Murray turned to go.

‘Holidays?’ Morgan asked, desperately keen to keep the conversation going, remembering with real anguish what Adekunle had ordered him to do.

Murray stopped. ‘Yes. All the family together now, my son arrived about a week ago.’

‘Uh-uh,’ Morgan said, his head a sudden echoing void. ‘Yes, I see, must be nice having him out here,’ he said fatuously.

The penetrating look had returned to Murray’s eyes. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked. ‘No recurrence, everything functioning normally?’

Morgan felt his face going hot. ‘Oh yes,’ he said hastily, ‘fine there. Absolutely.’ He paused. ‘Listen,’ he said in horribly inept bonhomie, ‘what about a game of golf? Must have a game sometime.’ Why did Murray bring out the arsehole in him? he wondered, appalled at his lack of finesse.