William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

His house was a long squat bungalow, set in a generous garden dotted with small groves of frangjpani and avocado trees and presided over by several towering casuerina pines. Only half the house — the two bedrooms and his study — was mosquito proofed. The other half, consisting of an airy dining⁄sitting room, kitchen and pantry, was fronted by the usual wide verandah upon which he now damply paced. The inundating rainstorm thundered on the roof and poured off the eaves in an extended sheet of water, turning the gravel gutters that surrounded the house into rushing streams that flowed across the wasted grass of the lawn to collect in an ever-widening pool at the bottom of the garden near the perimeter hedge of poinsettia. In the frequent flashes of sheet lightning Morgan could clearly see the silently expanding mini-lake, its surface tin-tacked by the heavy raindrops.

He slowly regained his breath, mildly alarmed that a thirty yard dash should leave him panting this way, kicked off his sodden shoes and went through to the kitchen in search of his servants. There, he found Friday asleep, sitting with his head pillowed on his arms at the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the room. Leaving the light off he walked past him silently and looked out of the open kitchen door at the back garden. Beside the steps that led down from the kitchen stood an old table and, as he had expected, he saw his aged cook Moses sitting upon it — quite protected from the downpour by the eaves that projected a good six feet. Moses was sitting with his long shanks drawn up beneath him staring out at the curtain of rain. He was puffing away on his foul-smelling pipe and by his side there was a grimy calabash and a glass full of cloudy, pale green palm wine. Thunder barrages bracketed the sky overhead and the scene again flickered into ghostly life from the lightning. The weight of water falling on the earth seemed to have transformed the surface of the garden into a slow-moving, treacle-like tide. Water flowed, stopped, inched forward again; pools formed and broke, leaves and grass were transported short distances and dumped, and still the rain came down. It was a hell of a storm, Morgan thought.

Moses belched softly, turned to top up his glass and saw Morgan standing there with his hands on his hips. He threw down his pipe and leapt to his feet.

‘Ah-ah. De rain sah. I nevah go hear you one time, masta,’ he said and ducked up the steps past Morgan, switching on the kitchen light and shaking Friday awake who immediately began a long explanation of his extreme tiredness.

‘Shut up, Friday,’ Morgan ordered. ‘One cheese omelette please, Moses. And Friday, switch on my air-conditioner and bring me one bottle of beer.’ He went into the sitting room and switched on the lights and the roof fan, happy to have caught his servants napping.

He was halfway through his bottle of beer when Friday brought him his omelette and placed it on a side-table in front of him.

‘ Ça va , masta?’ he asked cheerfully.

‘No it doesn’t,’ Morgan said. ‘I need a bloody fourchette and bloody couteau , don’t I?’ He shouted after Friday who’d dashed back to the kitchen, ‘Salt and pepper too!’

Friday was a very small, powerfully-built man in his early twenties who had come over from his French colony in search of work. Morgan had felt smart and cosmopolitan when he’d employed him — the nearest thing to a French maid in Kinjanja he’d wittily bragged — but the little man was hopelessly inept, had never got to grips with the English language, and was cordially detested by Moses, Morgan’s cook. Moses, in contrast, was thin and lanky and really quite old. No one knew his exact age — including Moses — but he had a wrinkled grizzled face and there were many grey spirals in his hair which probably meant he was well over sixty. He was a sly old man who filched professionally from Morgan and refused to let the demands of his job interfere unduly with his easy-going life. He could cook omelettes, fish cakes, a kind of stew, chicken curry, make rhubarb crumble and sherry trifle and that was it. Everyday the palm wine seller called at the kitchen door and Moses would buy a pint or two of the powerful drink. He cut up his own strong tobacco which he bought in moist strips like blackened bacon rinds and which he smoked in a tiny-bowled pipe that he always produced whenever he sat down to a tumbler of cloudy palm wine. What he could cook he cooked well however, and Morgan found that he tired of the diet less frequently than he might have supposed. It was enlivened from time to time by dinner invitations and, whenever the mood took him or whenever the prospect of fish cakes palled, he would eat at one of the clubs, in town or at the university, or at some of the Lebanese or Syrian restaurants whose kitchens were generally held to conform to minimal standards of hygiene.

When he had finished his omelette Morgan walked out to the verandah and peered into the night. The rain seemed to be abating, the thunder and lightning heading eastwards. He could hear the croaking of frogs and toads coming from trie blackness.

He decided to go to bed. He knew what it was like after rain: every insect sprouted wings and took to the air in mad untrained flight. He told Friday and Moses to lock up and go home. He snibbed the corridor door behind him, hearing as he did so the rumble of the glass doors of the living room being slid shut, and walked up the passageway to his bedroom.

He had a quick shower and dried himself off. He sat on the edge of the bath and thought about Murray. How would he approach the man? How would he introduce the idea of the bribe? How would Murray react? He suddenly felt appalled that he, an official of Her Majesty’s Government’s Diplomatic Service, should be casually plotting in such a corrupt and criminal way, that his filthy luck had placed him in such vile and unhappy circumstances. In search of some solace he switched his mind to the sex he had enjoyed with Hazel earlier that evening. It distracted him for a minute or two, but slowly and inevitably a not wholly unpleasant sense of melancholy began to descend on him as it often did at such times. The house was quiet apart from the comforting hum of his air-conditioner, the rain appeared to have stopped, only the eaves still dripped into the gravel gutter-beds. He fancied he could hear the crickets starting up outside, brr-brr, brrr-brrr, telling the world how cold they felt.

His thoughts turned, appropriately for a moody exile, to home. He thought about his mother in Feltham, a kindly fun-loving widow who, so she had hinted in her last letter, might really, finally, be marrying Reg, her boyfriend of many years. Reg was a newsagent, a nice man; Morgan had known him all his life. He was quite bald but was one of that deluded crew who think that a damp lock of hair bisecting the gleaming pate from ear to ear will effectively persuade people otherwise. Reg was all right, Morgan thought warmly: he was friendly, liked a drink, got on well with his mother. So were Jill and Tony, he added, his sister and brother-in-law. Yes, they were all nice; they rubbed along very happily whenever he went back home on leave.

But then a sudden anger flared up. They were all so bloody ordinary, he told himself ruthlessly, so depressingly unremarkable, so inoffensive. He thought of his father — an indistinct enigmatic figure to him now — who had died when Morgan was fifteen. Keeled over from a coronary while helping a workman install a new dishwashing unit in a Heathrow cafeteria. Morgan occasionally gazed at his parents’ smiling posed faces in the family snapshot album and wondered how on earth he had developed the way he had: selfish, fat and misanthropic.

He gloomily heaved himself to his feet, his backside sore from the unyielding bath-edge. He went disconsolately through to the bedroom and flung himself on the bed. Everything was going wrong. He shut his eyes and thought about his day: averagely disastrous. First Priscilla’s engagement, next the Father Christmas fiasco underway, then Adekunle’s ‘bad news’. Now all he had to do was bribe Murray: he was doing well. He turned round abruptly and pulled a pillow over his head. Good God, he thought, what a can of worms, what a fucking snake pit. Murray too. Somehow everything came back to Murray. The man had marched into his life with all the tact of an invading army. Three months ago he hardly knew him, was only barely aware of what he looked hke, and now he had to bribe him to help a devious politician pay for a crooked campaign. For an awful moment he thought he was going to cry mawkish, vinegary tears of self-pity, so he rudely sat himself upright, pounding pillows into shape with angry fists and snatched up a paperback. He glanced at the title. Hell comes Tomorrow! it screamed at him in vulgar red capitals. In a wave of premonitory disgust he flung it at the wall.