William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

Morgan thought quickly. ‘We could go back to my place…For a cup of coffee,’ he added promptly. ‘It’s not far away and it’ll be easy to get you back here before it gets too late.’ Kindly disinterested tones highlighted his voice. He felt so noble, so upright. So hypocritical.

Priscilla placed her hand on his which was resting on the steering wheel. ‘That’d be lovely,’ she said.

♦

Morgan and Priscilla sat side by side on Morgan’s settee. They were watching a TV programme in which a man with a battered suitcase and a cigarette jammed in his mouth solved problems the CIA and MI5 couldn’t cope with. It ended with the hero removing his cigarette to kiss the beautiful daughter of an American diplomat. In his contented mood Morgan interpreted this as a favourable omen. Priscilla had kicked off her sling-back shoes and had tucked her feet up beneath her. She was leaning against him and had lodged her head in the angle formed by his neck and shoulder.

‘More coffee?’ he asked. ‘Another brandy?’ Moses and Friday were away for the night.

‘Gosh no,’ Priscilla giggled, ‘I’ll be peeing all night.’ As if this mildest of improprieties were a signal Morgan bent his head round to kiss her. In the last half hour she had relaxed sufficiently to allow gentle tongue probing and the infrequent squeeze of a breast. Morgan kissed her neck, it was moist and tasted vaguely salty. He noted that her short black skirt had ridden pleasingly up her thighs.

‘Morgan,’ she said in a small voice, ‘do you know why I came out here. To Nkongsamba?’

‘Haven’t the faintest,’ he lied, nuzzling her ear while he undid a button on her blouse. He slid his hand beneath the satin and inched it along her chest until he met the abrupt gradient of her breast and the lacy reinforcement of her bra. Try as he might, and short of using his other hand as a lever, he could not prise his fingers under it.

‘I just wanted to say thank you,’ she said. Morgan withdrew his hand and looked at her in some astonishment.

‘What on earth for?’ he asked.

She pecked him on the cheek. ‘For not storming off in a rage because I wasn’t…relaxed.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he admonished.

‘It’s just that I’m not very sure of myself…I’m a bit ‘uptight’ as I believe the current expression goes.’ She picked up Morgan’s right hand and examined it minutely as if it were some mysterious and rare artefact. ‘Which is why I’ve come out here.’

‘Oh,’ Morgan said, carefully non-committal.

‘You see I used to be almost engaged to this chap Charles, only we had a terrific bust-up. The whole thing was getting fairly serious, I…I had practically moved into his flat.’ Morgan stored this piece of information away. ‘When I suddenly realized he just wasn’t the right sort of person for me. Just one day, no particular reason, I saw it was completely wrong. Hopeless.’ She paused. ‘Charles was a sweetie, but not for me, if you know what I mean.’ She looked at him for support. ‘You can’t, you shouldn’t let things go on under those sort of circumstances. It’s better to make a break.’

‘Oh yes. You’re right,’ Morgan agreed. ‘Absolutely. Yah.’ He looked serious, intensely understanding.

She cuddled up to him. ‘It was pretty gruesome. Shouting and crying. He was terribly upset. But I knew I had to do it.’ Morgan smoothed the hair on her head. ‘Which is why I’m a bit, you know, stiff and cautious. Emotionally bruised, Mummy calls it. You understand.’

Morgan nodded. ‘A case of once bitten.’

‘Exactly,’ she affirmed. ‘Exactly,’ squeezing him with gratitude.

Morgan deposited a kiss on the flipped-up end of her nose. ‘We’d better get you home,’ he said.

They enjoyed the final and the most passionate embrace of the evening in the dark driveway of the Fanshawes’ house. As he drove home Morgan was glowing with self-congratulation, attributing the persistent dull ache in his groin to an unrelieved night-long erection. Later, lying back in his bed, he lazily contemplated the vivid memories of Priscilla’s strong smooth legs and tried to imagine what her breasts looked like, gently releasing his frustration into a wad of toilet paper. As the tingling pleasure seeped along his legs and out of his toes it was replaced by a slight but uncomfortable burning, scorching sensation at the tip ofhis penis. Further examination established that there was a slight rawness there which was effectively soothed by the application of some Nivea cream. He assumed that it had been caused by the rubbing ofhis buckled hard-on against the zip of his trousers or raised hem of his Y-fronts, a small price to pay, he reflected, for such a well-conceived and executed evening’s wooing.

Before he fell asleep he thought about Priscilla’s lie: He scoffed briefly at the illusions people erected around themselves in desperate pretence before he realized that he himself wasn’t exactly in a strong position to deride this form of behaviour. Priscilla’s version of her falling-out with Charles made her the agent; moreover, a mature and sensible one, demanding overall a mutually fulfilling relationship and, by the by, just letting him know she was no virgin. Morgan smiled to himself: one gift he was blessed with, he considered, was the ability to see through people, to size them up, see what they really were beneath public pose: an invaluable talent.

As he thought on, it occurred to him that maybe this gift of Priscilla — young, unattached, not ignorant of his charms — meant that his luck was on the turn. Those drab years as an executive officer in overlit, overheated civil service offices in the South of England, the disastrous interviews and repeated failings of Foreign Office exams before the eventual scrape-through. The shaming training period, the snobbishness, the cold shoulders of his colleagues, the prolonged wait in some Whitehall cul-de-sac, the fifth-grade overseas posting to Nkongsamba where he’d already languished eighteen months longer than he should have, perhaps, perhaps all this had been arranged by someone just so he could meet Priscilla. Fate, Destiny, Big G — he offered up a prayer of thanks just in case — who knows? For the only time in his life he was the right man in the right place at the right time. He could feel a warmth welling up in his heart, a languor suffusing his body; he sensed his muscles bulge and flex, he spread his arms across the bed, stretching his fingers wide. He knew what it was; he felt pleased with himself, and, better still, he was sure he was falling in love with Priscilla.

The lawn of the Commission was bathed in a yellow glow from the high-powered floodlights strategically placed at first-floor windows. A hundred or more people, blacks and whites, swarmed around the cold buffet tables and the two bars. Over to the left was a large cinema screen with rows of seats ranged in front of it. Morgan looked down on the throng from one of the back windows, invisible behind the glare of the floodlights. He had been unable to spot Adekunle on the ground and had moved up here to get a better view. He saw many faces he recognized among the cream of Nkongsamba society who had been lured here tonight by the prospect of free booze and food and who were, because of this bait, prepared to suffer the private screening of yet another film on the Royal Family. That, Morgan had to admit, had been a stroke of genius on Fanshawe’s part. This film, billed as an ‘intimate portrait’, had been despatched recently to all the British High Commissions and embassies throughout the world as part of a large-scale diplomatic publicity stunt. It had not been scheduled to reach Nkongsamba for many months yet but some judicious pressure by Fanshawe had managed to get it sent up prematurely from the capital. A private viewing was duly arranged and official invitations hastily sent out. It was to be an excuse for a jingoistic explosion of self-admiration for the expatriate Britons, and the anticipated regular shots of splendid castles, historic artefacts, beaming Royalty and endless immaculate parades would surely provide a gentle but potent reminder to all the non-British present of precisely just what it was they didn’t possess and why, therefore, they just weren’t quite such special people. Normally these sorts of occasion had the same effect on Morgan as weddings: they were awash with false sincerity, hypocrisy and a dreadful backslapping bonhomie that always made him sweat with embarrassment. Tonight, however, was different. To his surprise he had found himself looking forward to it, and now as he peered down on the assorted heads beneath him — blond, brunette and balding, woolly peppercorn and towering head-ties — he felt an unmistakable surge of excitement. This was a set-up, he reminded himself; he was working — yes, undercover —for his government. It was a small job perhaps, merely the securing of information on a foreign country’s political party, fairly low-priority stuff, but such jobs, he told himself, were the broad base of intelligence, the firm foundations of global diplomatic gestures, the unnoticed background to those headlined ministerial initiatives.