William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

Morgan looked at her in dismal misgiving, as if she were a bloodied corpse planted in his sitting room. Her dress girdled her thighs, the brassiere lay strung over a cushion, her small pink-tipped breasts heaved from the recent exertions. He watched her pass the back of her hand slowly across her eyes like someone awakening from a sleep. Awkwardly, almost meekly, she pulled her dress down over her legs and covered her exposed breasts with her arms.

‘You bastard,’ she said softly and then, suddenly, she snatched up the bra and her shoes and crouch-ran past him through the screen door and up the passage to the bathroom. Morgan hung his head in shame and abject despondency. He experienced Priscilla’s humiliation as if it had been his own: the defenceless prurience of her position on the floor, the retroactive embarrassment, the baleful unsympathetic light, him standing over her, shock written across his face. But he knew too, instinctively, and with an assurance gained from his own experience that, publicly at least, it wouldn’t stay that way for long. The self-defence mechanisms of the human psyche would swing efficiently into action, shrouding the truth, reallocating the shame, imposing new guilts and transferring the disgrace to him, where, he confessed, it properly belonged.

Numbly he replaced the scattered cushions on the sofa. He wanted to bawl like a baby, cry his frustration to the world, but instead he drank some more whisky, sat down and waited for Priscilla to reappear.

Presently the sharp clicks of her heels on the concrete floor of the corridor told him that, as expected, more than fresh make-up; had been applied in her absence. In glum trepidation he noted the frozen little smile on her face.

‘Will you take me home, please,’ she spoke as to a waiting taxi-driver. They walked out to the car in silence, Morgan wondering what he could possibly say to prevent this damage from becoming irreparable. Priscilla got into the car and sat stiffly erect.

‘Priscilla,’ he began. ‘I can explain. You see I thought it would be best if…’

‘Would. You. Just. Take. Me. Home.’ There was no trace of dejection in her voice, just cold, emphatic hatred. He started the car and backed it out into the driveway. The return journey to the Commission passed without another word being exchanged.

As he drove along the road Morgan saw his future disappearing in front of him with the remorseless inevitability of a torpedoed liner slipping beneath the waves. Already, only the creases in Priscilla’s dress, like the bubbling ripples of water, bore witness to their former intimacy. But then they too would be ironed out tomorrow. It would be like nothing had ever happened. Morgan found it hard to believe that such glowing possibilities — an actual breathing state of affairs — could be blotted out with such ease; that all the hints and talk of love, the moments of passion, his eminently realizable dreams, could be erased, as he surely knew they would be, so abruptly. But the bitter chill that existed in the car confirmed this fact unsparingly.

Hepulledup outside the Fanshawes’ house. He saidimmedi-ately, pleadingly ‘Priscilla, believe me, darling, there is an explanation for all this. I can explain. Please don’t feel that because I didn’t…’

She turned to face him. ‘I feel sorry for men like you,’ she said sofdy and venomously. ‘What I can’t understand is how I failed to see it in the beginning. It’s so obvious. You’re pathetic creatures, all of you, with your big talk, your sexy swaggering behaviour. Pathetic, feeble weak creatures. I don’t hate you, Morgan, I pity you.’

As Morgan listened to this his faltering hopes turned on one wing and went into a howling death-dive. He was horror-struck at her version of his behaviour: she thought he’d chickened out, couldn’t take the heat, hadn’t the lead in his pencil, which was absolutely the last thing he wanted. He had been assuming that she would think he was too ‘nice’, too ‘decent’ to compromise their love with a bit of fornication, but he saw the utter vanity of his wishes. His assault on her at Olokomeji on the river bank made any connection between him and ideas of gentlemanly restraint singularly inappropriate. With a sudden sickening feeling he saw just how apt Priscilla’s interpretation of his behaviour was. It was also clear to him that for all this talk of pity on her part what she really felt for him was seething contempt. Then he was shocked to see Fanshawe walk on to the verandah and beckon them inside.

‘Goodbye,’ Priscilla said quickly, and got out of the car. She ran up the steps towards her father. Morgan gave a casual wave and drove off promptly so as not to see them talking. He tried not to think what Priscilla might say, what explanation she would provide for her early return and his refusal to join the family inside. He tilted his head towards the window and let the breeze play across his face. He couldn’t actually recall from his anthology of personal disasters a more traumatic and ruinous evening; and yet it had hovered so tantalizingly close to being perfect, to cementing firmly the first bricks in the new future he had planned to build for himself.

With a surge of faint hope he thought that it might, just, be possible to salvage something from the wreckage: perhaps by dint of tears or lovelorn propositions convince her that he was truly sincere and hadn’t wanted to affect or alter their relationship by making it sexual at this early stage. He tried out an impromptu draft apologia on himself, but it sounded irredeemably bogus and unlikely. And he saw too, with a soured midnight clarity, that it had all gone too far, that after what Priscilla had in fact done — ripping off her clothes, practically begging him — there was no chance of rewriting her version of the night’s events. He saw himself cast permanently in the role of rugby club braggart, victim of his own preposterous life-guard conceit: the trumpeted exploits of the local stud exposed as sham, the empty, well-hung innuendoes of a redundant gigolo. He felt his face go red with anger as he saw the details of the portrait emerge. If only she knew what he was really capable of…but then his choler turned to shame as he saw the stereotype close in around him. He didn’t care what people said. Women always held the last card — he couldn’t win this one.

When he arrived back home he went straight to bed. Like a Napoleon at his Waterloo, he had briefly cast his eyes over the scene of his defeat — and had spotted Priscilla’s pants lying in the corner of the room where she had hurled them in pert abandon. The thought that he had driven a pantless Priscilla home was just the final ironic straw. He picked them up, successfully resisting the impulse to sniff them. They were white with blue lace trim round the leg-holes. They rested now in the drawer of his bedside table, a sad trophy of what might have been. As he masochistically re-ran the evening in his mind he reflected that if he hadn’t met Murray at the club, if he’d even decided to have a trial pee when he reached home instead, none of this would have happened: in fact he’d be lying in bed with Priscilla at this very moment. But no, the random events and occurrences of his and Murray’s day had to, like the Titanic and the iceberg, converge outside the gentlemen’s lavatory at that precise moment with finely adjusted timing. And equally, he thought malevolently, it had to be Murray too. The man was assuming a daemonic, fatal role in his life, it seemed to him. Murray’s untimely collision had jolted his conscience out of that closet in his mind where only seconds before it had been securely enclosed for the night and Morgan strongly doubted if he could ever forgive him for that. One side of him grudgingly admitted that Murray couldn’t ever have known the effect of his on-the-spot diagnosis but this was more than countered by the hateful aptness of him being the reminder, the catalyst that had set his rusty creaking sense of values juddering into action. For he knew that it had been his inclination to do the ‘decent’ thing by Priscilla that had landed him in this mess — but it was with no sense of comfort or self-congratulation that he acknowledged this was so. His moral niceties — he blankly calculated — had cost him Priscilla and all the bright tomorrows that queued entrancingly behind her. With a sudden flash of prophetic inspiration he felt he knew why there was so much evil in the world: the price you paid for being good was simply quite out of proportion, preposterously over-valued. And as prime consumers of the commodity of goodness the human race had decided that as far as they were concerned they were just not prepared to pay the going rate any more. He turned over in his bed and furiously punched his pillows, tears of frustration at his own weakness pricking his eyes. That is, he thought, except for a few silly mugs: except for a few soft, stupid bastards like himself.