William Boyd: A Good Man in Africa

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 lot of 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 heart-rending 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 checker-board, 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 storeys and most were crumbling mud-walled houses randomly clustered and packed alongside narrow potholed 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 pot-bellied 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.