William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

He staggered towards Fanshawe’s drinks cabinet and poured himself half a tumbler of gin. He walked out on to the back verandah and took a mouthful. His eyes streamed with tears and he shuddered as it went down. His view of the southern precincts of Nkongsamba bathed in a peachy matinal light shivered and went soft at the edges. He set down his glass with a rattle on the concrete balustrade at the edge of the stoop. He shook his head fiercely; a manic, berserk anger seemed to be rampaging there, like a lunatic in a padded cell. The bastard, he breathed out acid rancorous bile at the dawn, the dirty rotten filthy bastard! He went on, giving his imagination free rein. It seemed to help, at least minimally. He sensed overloaded systems responding to gentle tender hands at control. He felt like a skilled pilot nursing a grievously stricken airliner into a crash-landing. But as his anger began to subside and ratiocination asserted its dominance over the passions once more the consequences of his fury slowly brought themselves to his shocked attention. Oh no, he said haltingly to himself, oh no, the golf. That was away now. Gone, irretrievable. And Adekunle, he thought too, what would Adekunle say? He contemplated Adekunle’s wrath and shivered. How could he bribe Murray now? he asked himself. And Fanshawe? The body was still there. What was Fanshawe going to do when he found Innocence baking in the morning sun?

He threw the rest of the gin into a flowerbed. He felt sick, exhausted and grimy; it seemed as though some malicious person had prised apart his eyelids, lifted them up and emptied small phials of fine sand there. He’d handled everything so badly, misjudged and miscalculated all round. Par for the course, he thought cynically, no point in breaking the pattern. He knew in his heart that shit creek had claimed him this time. Full fathom five. He looked up through the brown water hoping for a flicker of sun. But it was all murk.

The new day burst cool over Nkongsamba with its usual display of crisp breathtaking beauty. Motionless smoke-threads rose from a thousand charcoal fires into pale blue skies. The green of the trees tested the gold of the kind morning sun like a bride discovering her trousseau. Ectoplasmic wisps of mist clung possessively to the meandering paths of creeks and streams and shrouded the taller hills. Africa at her most gloriously seductive.

But Morgan knew that Innocence lay not two hundred yards away. The jelly of her eyeballs dry and opaque. Her pink tongue contracting in her gaping mouth, mites and insects patrolling her body for moisture, her blood stagnant and pooling, her muscles and limbs stiff and unpliant.

He gazed blankly at the progress of the new day, indifferent to its splendour. Murray could have helped him if he had wanted to, he realized; if he had an iota of concern, a jot of feeling for him. But he didn’t give a fuck, that much was plain, he was more worried about his rule book, observing the letter of the law. Morgan squinted at the landscape watching its contours blur and elide. He was on his own as usual. He knew then that he wanted to bribe Murray, tarnish his gleaming image, foul his perfect reputation more than anything else in the world. More than he wanted rid of Innocence; more than he wanted to marry Priscilla; more than he wanted to sleep with any number of beautiful women. He felt quite weak with the power of his desire. Something drastic had to happen to that man’s conception of himself: it was long overdue, and he, Morgan Leafy, would make it his business to see that it occurred, especially now that Murray had deliberately struck him down in this way. So brutally — almost as Shango had felled Innocence.

It was all Murray’s fault, he said to himself quietly and calmly. Everything was Murray’s fault.

Morgan well remembered the first occasion he had met Dr Murray. At the time he hardly knew him. Murray never came to the Commission cocktail parties, even though his name was often mentioned as most of the British in the university had fallen sick — or their children had at one time or another — and had therefore called on Murray’s services. Morgan had heard nothing but good: the three university clinics functioned more efficiently than ever, rabid dogs had been cleared from the campus thanks to the registration and inoculation schemes he had introduced, everyone was satisfied. Murray was held to be — despite a certain formality of manner — a fine doctor whose diagnoses were invariably correct and whose cures were effective. Morgan had taken scant notice of this sort of cocktail party chit-chat. He was not interested in the doctor or his clinics, he had enjoyed robust good health since his arrival in Kinjanja, apart from the odd upset tummy or septic mosquito bite and had never needed to utilize the University Health Service, to which the white members of the Commission staff were officially attached.

One morning, shortly after Morgan’s relationship with Hazel had begun, he was discussing the thorny problems of efficient contraception in Africa with Lee Wan at the bar of the university club. Lee Wan was sitting on a bar stool, a considerable portion of his brown leathery pot-belly visible through the straining gaps in his olive green shirt.

‘Listen, my boy,’ he said, swirling the ice cubes in his pink gin with a brown finger. ‘You want to get that popsy on to these contraceptive pills, p.d.q. Forget your rubber johnnies, your PL’s — unless you can get a pal to bring you some out from the UK.’ Lee Wan was a naturalized British citizen, and spiced his speech with a curious mixture of archaic slang and what he considered were bona fide English expressions. He had studiously lost all trace of a Malay accent. ‘Don’t use the local rubbish for Christ’s sake,’ he-went on, dropping his voice for the sake of the two ladies sitting near the bar. ‘It’s like poking through a glove.’ He wheezed with laughter at his simile and slapped Morgan on the arm. ‘A bloody sheepskin glove,’ he choked. He wiped his eyes. ‘My God,’ he gasped with hilarity, ‘My dear God…Simeon,’ he called to the barman. ‘Let’s have another two gins here.’

Morgan had smiled at Lee Wan’s joke but not too widely. Sometimes he thought the tubby Malay as vile and disgusting a creature as he had ever met and felt guilty for enjoying his company. He was mildly repulsed by the turn the conversation had taken and he looked out onto the bright pool terrace from the cool shade of the ground floor bar. Outside, water splashed over a modern cuboid fountain and two tiny children shrieked and played on the concrete surround. Nearby their mother took advantage of the burst of sunshine to augment her tan.

It was mid-September. Most of Nkongsamba’s expatriates had been away in Europe on leave and were gradually returning to take up their work again after the summer’s break, which coincided with Kinjanja’s rainy season. Morgan had taken his last leave back in March and with Fanshawe and Jones back in Britain he had been alone in the Commission for the last two months. He had found time heavy on his hands, what with the slack volume of work, the daily steaming downpour and the clubs quiet and torpid. He had been fairly happy to renew his friendship with Lee Wan and had soon been roped in to bar-crawls round Nkongsamba, perilous boozing sessions in Lee Wan’s campus bungalow and gut-expanding curry lunches on Sundays. It had been, on reflection, an unpleasant period of debauch that left him buried for short periods under heaps of recriminations. Still, he thought, it had seen him through the rainy season, the worst part of the Kinjanjan year, and he had met Hazel.

Morgan looked at his watch. The Fanshawes were arriving after lunch at Nkongsamba’s small airport, flying up from the capital, and he was due to meet them there with the official Commission car. An advance letter from Fanshawe had informed him that their daughter was coming out with them to stay for a while. Morgan wondered vaguely what the daughter of Arthur and Chloe Fanshawe would look like. Jones had returned a week ago from his holiday in Swansea or Aberystwyth or somewhere Welsh; the rains had finished too. Life, he thought, would perhaps crank itself to its feet and try to be a little more tolerable.