William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

‘Joining us for a drink, Morgan?’ she asked unpersuasively.

‘No, I’m afraid I’m…’

‘Shame. Never mind.’ She turned to the others. ‘Come on everybody, let’s go Geraldine? Are the children all right?…’ The party moved off leaving Morgan alone with Priscilla. She had established the beginnings of a tan which was offset by a straight white and green sleeveless dress and white shoes. Morgan began by apologizing as he could sense she was a little upset by his neglect of her.

‘I am sorry, Priscilla,’ he said. ‘But it was semi-official buttering up of a local dignitary.’

‘Well, it wasn’t much fun for me.’

He stole a look at the backs of the retreating group, almost invisible in the darkness now, and gave Priscilla a fraternal kiss on the cheek.

‘It wasn’t exactly fun for me either,’ he said reproachfully. ‘I’d much rather have been with you.’ She was looking very fanciable tonight, he thought. If only she’d get rid of that sulky, hard-done-by expression.

‘But why can’t you come along now? Honestly, Morgie, I haven’t talked to you all day.’

Every tendon and sinew in his body seemed to go into spasm, triggered by the revolting diminutive she’d recently adopted. Did he look remotely like a ‘Morgie’ he wondered, nauseated? Where the hell had she dug that up from? No one had ever called him that, ever. With an effort he controlled himself and tried to think of a reasonable excuse. He thought for a moment. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Do you fancy going fishing next week? Make a day of it? Picnic and all that,’ he improvised hastily, silently thanking the Royal Family for inspiring him.

‘Fishing?’

‘Yes. It’s great fun. I’ve done it once or twice. A place about seventy miles away. Called Olokomeji.’

‘Well…Yes.’ She thought about it. ‘Sounds lovely.’

‘Great,’ Morgan exclaimed, hugely relieved. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make all the arrangements.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘See you tomorrow maybe. I’m really bushed. Sorry,’ he abased himself again. He kissed her on the lips, allowing his own to linger there a moment or so, but he sensed that nothing more passionate was likely to ensue. He understood implicitly that in the rules of the game they were playing his behaviour had been less than satisfactory tonight — even though the prospect of the fishing trip had mollified her slightly — and he would have to take his punishment like a man.

The road to Olokomeji was quiet and through thick rainforest. They had made an early start, at around seven, as the river was a two and a half hour ride away from Nkongsamba. Every now and then they would pass a small cluster of mud huts and roadside trading stalls that marked a village. The fascinated stares Morgan and Priscilla attracted spoke of the curiosity value that still attended white people as soon as the main roads and towns were left behind. Morgan had got Moses to make up a picnic of a cold roast chicken and sandwiches and he had also filled a cooler-bag with fridge-chilled bottles of beer. They stopped at one of the larger villages to buy fruit: a pineapple, oranges and bananas. Priscilla said she was entranced by the primitive nature of it all but her subdued demeanour seemed to tell another story as she unexcitedly took in the naked children, women pounding cassava in wooden tubs and slack-breasted old mammies expertly chopping sugar cane. Priscilla wore a red polka-dot dress with large white buttons down the front. When she removed her sunglasses she had dark rings under her eyes.

As they approached the large bridge across the river that marked the fishing pool Morgan kept his eyes peeled for the secluded turning that would lead them down to the bottom of the gorge. He saw it at the last moment and had to reverse back. It was a rutted laterite track that wound gingerly down the thickly forested slope to a small clearing. There he stopped the car and got out. The great pale-barked trees towered above them screening the sun, birds and insects chattered and buzzed setting up a surprising volume of noise. A well-trodden path led down to the fishing pool.

Morgan pounded his chest, ‘Aaah-ooah-ooah, ooah-ooah!’ he bellowed, adding in a throaty basso profundo: ‘me Jane.’

It wasn’t very funny, any wood or copse prompted the same display, but as expected, it made Priscilla giggle. ‘You are a silly,’ she said. That was better, he thought, she needed to cheer up a bit — she had probably never been forced to get up this early for ages. They unloaded the picnic gear and the fishing rods and walked down to the river. To their right, about two hundred yards upstream and almost obscured by a bend in the river, were the high arches of the road bridge. The river was about fifty yards across and the colour of milky coffee. Ten or fifteen yards out into the stream from where they were standing were some rock outcrops beyond which were the deep pools where the Niger perch lurked. The far bank rose in a steepish rocky cliff amongst whose boulders and crannies lived a colony of baboons. It was very quiet. The sky was a washed-out blue and the water was so sluggish it seemed hardly to be moving.

‘Pretty spectacular eh?’ Morgan commented proudly, as if he owned it. ‘Real Heart of Darkness stuff don’t you think?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Real Heart of… nothing. Not important.’

‘Are you sure it’s all right to swim in that?’ Priscilla asked. ‘It looks filthy.’

‘Of course it is,’ Morgan said, putting his arm round her shoulders and pecking her on the cheek. ‘All right to swim in I mean. Here, give us a hand to spread this groundsheet.’ They laid the groundsheet on the narrow bar of greyish sand at the bank. Morgan opened a bottle of beer, put it to his lips and took a long swig.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Into the swimming togs.’ He had marked this particular activity as being a significant pointer as to how the rest of the day would go and also to indicate the extent to which his intimacy with Priscilla had spread. In the case of his previous companion at this very spot, the Rubenesque moustachioed wife of the Fiat dealer, the untamed prim-itiveness of the scene had inspired her to abandon all clothing for the duration of their stay, and she and Morgan had splashed about, fished and fucked like a couple of beefy naked survivors of some nuclear holocaust. But for all their spontaneous noble savagery he had felt that their soft pampered bodies, their tender skins and sunburnt buttocks, their chilled Gancia and paper cups made them a shouting crude anachronism in the wild and uncultivated landscape. He expected no such transformation from Priscilla but he hoped that they would not, at least, need to observe the traditional modest conventions when changing into their swimming suits. However he was considerably disappointed when Priscilla unbuttoned her dress and stepped out of it to reveal her swimsuit already on underneath. It was navy blue, high necked, and its stretched nylon outlined a complicated armature of plastic boning around the bust: it was the sort of costume worn by the captains of girls’ school swimming teams.

A little put out, and suddenly lacking the naturist fervour of a moment ago, he wrapped a towel around his waist and with difficulty lowered his underpants and eased up his swimming shorts, a pair of psychedelically patterned surfin’ baggies imported from the USA and purchased at the local Kingsway stores. They fully covered his ham-like thighs and, he reasoned, the dazzling swirl of colours should distract attention from his overflowing gut.

‘Goodness,’ was all Priscilla could say when he whipped away the towel with a flourish. She seemed to be in an unresponsive mood so he set about making up and then baiting the rods with finger-thick worms dug from the garden compost heap that morning by Friday. Purple gunge and clotted pus-like oozings soon covered his fingers as he looped and skewered the worms on the large hooks. Priscilla turned away as he did this; it made her sick, she said. She was definitely moody today, he decided. They waded out to the largest of the rock outcrops. The water was bath-warm almost, the river bed yielding mud. Priscilla spread her towel on a large flat-topped boulder while Morgan sloshed back for the beer. That secured, he cast Priscilla’s line out into the pool and wedged it in the rocks by her head.