William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

‘Good. Good.’ To his mild surprise and annoyance he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to say to her.

‘I’d have phoned you earlier but I’ve been at the club with Mummy. We had lunch.’

‘Uh-uh. Good. Good.’ Morgan remarked. He was now a little alarmed. This total inability to converse with the girl he loved was absurd.

‘Morgie, they’ve got a dance on there tonight.’

‘Yes, I know.’ He wished she wouldn’t call him that.

‘Honestly! What’s got into you today?’ she said impatiently. ‘Let’s go to it, shall we? It’ll be fun.’

‘What? Oh yes, if you like. Of course.’ He paused, what was happening to him? ‘I’m sorry Priscilla, I’ve been working all day. Not thinking straight.’

‘Pick me up about eightish?’

‘Sure. On the dot. Ah, looking forward to seeing you,’ he added with grotesque formality.

‘Me too. Miss me?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Miss me, silly.’

‘Oh…terribly.’

‘Oh good. See you tonight. ‘Bye.’

Morgan put down the phone. He felt an immense lassitude descend on him, and he realized that he still didn’t feel like going out tonight. And, what was more perturbing, he didn’t particularly want to spend the evening with Priscilla.

Priscilla was wearing a new dress, or at least one that Morgan hadn’t seen before. It had a white bodice with thin straps tied in a bow at her shoulders, a red plastic belt and a navy-blue skirt. Her tan had deepened as a result of her days on the coast and she looked healthy and efficient, like a successful sales promotion girl or an air hostess. Tonight, also, she was wearing pinky-orange lipstick and pale-blue eyeshadow. Her cheeks and forehead were still red from sunburn and her nose was peeling slightly.

‘You look great,’ Morgan said, a sherry poised in his hand. ‘Doesn’t she?’ he turned to Mrs Fanshawe for confirmation.

‘She’s always been fond of clothes, ever since she was a tiny baby,’ Mrs Fanshawe declared proudly. ‘I remember once when she was in her pram…’

‘Oh Mummy,’ Priscilla interrupted with a laugh, ‘Please don’t tell that story again. I’m sure Morgie isn’t the slightest bit interested.’ Everyone tittered politely. ‘Morgie’ took a sip of his sherry and placed the glass on the table beside his armchair as Mrs Fanshawe dutifully completed the anecdote. For the first time he sensed Priscilla’s parents eyeing him as a potential suitor for their daughter and this realization brought with it its usual cargo of conflicting emotions. He glanced at Mrs Fanshawe, smoke curling from her cigarette jammed in its black holder, her teeth clamped on its stem, her wide pale face beneath the jet-black hair, the immense prow of her chest. He tried to imagine her talking with his mother and Reg at the wedding reception and panic fluttered for a moment in his belly like a trapped bird. Chloe Fanshawe would be his mother-in-law…He abruptly stopped that train of thoughts from going any further.

‘We’d better be off,’ he said with a nervous smile.

Priscilla ran up the stairs to fetch her handbag and Morgan stood alone in the centre of the room, like a slave at auction, conscious again of the Fanshawes’ evaluating stares.

‘Priscilla enjoyed her day’s fishing,’ Fanshawe said. ‘Sounds like quite a place. Must take me up sometime, Morgan.’

Oh no, Morgan thought. ‘Gladly,’ he said. He felt the bosom of the family mushily enfolding him with slow inexorability. He should be pleased, he realized; he firmly told himself he was. Then Priscilla arrived and the Fanshawes walked them to the door and waved them down the steps.

‘Have a good time, you two,’ Mrs Fanshawe cooed at them as they got into his car.

When they arrived at the club Morgan and Priscilla kissed restrainedly for a while in the car park. Priscilla put her arms round him and squeezed.

‘I have missed you,’ she said. ‘Mummy and I talked a lot about you when we were staying with the Wagners.’

‘You did?’ Morgan said uncertainly.

‘They’re both very fond of you, you know.’

‘The Wagners? But I’ve only met them once.’

‘No, dopey!’ Priscilla poked him in the side. ‘Mummy and Daddy.’

‘Are they?’ he said in considerable surprise, but then covered this with a hasty ‘of course, I’m very fond of them too,’ amazed at his ability to form the words without choking. Everything, he remarked to himself, seemed to be advancing with exceptional smoothness. Perhaps tonight would be fine after all. He kissed Priscilla again to remind himself why he was going through with this factitious exchange of vows. He put his hand on her knee and ran it up her thigh under her dress until his fingers met the cotton of her pants. To his astonishment the expected reproachful wrist-slap was not forthcoming, in fact her own hand applied gentle pressure to the small of his back. They broke apart, her eyes bright and smiling. The familiar suffocating feeling established itself in Morgan’s chest; it was like having your lungs stuffed with cotton wool. The evening was shaping up in an incredibly good-natured, accommodating way. Tonight could well be the night.

They walked arm-in-arm into the club where the dance was underway. The club had a regular dance once a month. There was nothing special in this, it was simply a way of bringing people in, of injecting a faint sense of occasion into Nkongsamba’s unremarkable social life, and giving a boost to the restaurant and bar sales. Sometimes they hired a band but tonight Morgan saw they were relying solely on records. The lounge area had been cleared, the chairs pushed back to the wall and the central lights switched off. The armchairs had been arranged in intimate groups around small tables upon which candles burned in old Chianti bottles. A young man — manager of Nkongsamba’s Barclay’s Bank and social secretary of the club — sat behind the table that held the record player, flanked by two large speakers, leafing self-importantly through a pile of LPs. Some indeterminate jazz was playing, a clarinet dominant. Morgan found the music soothingly melancholic. A few people sat in the armchairs and three couples danced stiffly on the loose parquet flooring that rattled gently beneath their feet like distant castanets. The bar was busier, surrounded by people who looked only slightly better-dressed than usual: a tie there, a dab of make-up; here, a string of pearls; but the atmosphere was little different from the one that usually prevailed in the club. This came as no surprise to Morgan — the monthly dance, for all its aspirations, had never brought out the best in Nkongsamba’s avid socialites — but Priscilla seemed to be disappointed.

‘I thought there’d be a band,’ she wailed sadly.

‘There is sometimes,’ Morgan apologized.

‘But they’re not even trying,’ she protested. ‘It’s like a party in somebody’s flat.’ Morgan had to agree. He put the blame on the unimaginative social secretary, who, as if to confirm this adverse judgement, replaced the jazz with cha-cha and successfully cleared the dance floor.

‘It gets better as Christmas approaches,’ Morgan said in compensation. ‘Honestly. Anyway, let’s have a drink.’

♦

Morgan and Priscilla danced. They held each other close and moved slowly to and fro as somebody sang ‘Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play.’ Morgan rested his cheek on Priscilla’s head. He smelt her straight clean hair, shiny and fine. It seemed to him, a little fancifully he had to admit, to be a symbol of everything his life was shortly to become. He shifted his erection against Priscilla’s belly and dropped his head to kiss her bare shoulder. She locked her wrists around his neck and pulled him closer to her. Her prim façade was rapidly falling away he realized; she was probably missing Chinese Charlie’s attentions by now. She had drunk two large scotches and had been very flirtatious in her own way: he had quite enjoyed himself. He squinted at his watch: it was twenty to ten, they had been here just over an hour.