William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

‘Hey man,’ he said in a fruity drawl, ‘when the going gets tough the tough gets going. Right?’ He thumped his desk with his fist, his face breaking out into a piratical leer. ‘Damn right,’ he told himself. ‘It’s not the size of the man in the fight, it’s the size of fight in the man.’ His gung-ho homilies elated him for a moment but then his spirits collapsed with the suddenness of a fountain being switched off. He picked up his pen and fitted a minute spiral into a gap at the corner of his blotting pad.

Kojo’s face appeared round the door.

‘It’s all right, Kojo,’ Morgan said sadly. ‘I was talking to myself…’

‘Excuse, sah. There is a man on the phone. He will not give his name and he is abusin’ me because I will not connect him to you. He says to tell Mr Leafy it is Sam.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Morgan said gloomily. There was no respite. ‘Put him through.’

Adekunle came on the line. ‘Good afternoon, my friend. I thought, as the saying goes, discretion was better than valour, under the circumstances.’

Morgan was getting tired of Adekunle’s bloody sayings. ‘We’re all very annoyed with you here,’ he said boldly. ‘To put it mildly, as the saying goes.’

Adekunle’s hearty laugh echoed tinnily in his ear. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr Leafy, all is fair in love and politics. But,’ he said, the levity gone from his voice, ‘I’ve not called to discuss these matters. You have your ‘meeting’ with Dr Murray tomorrow. I must speak with you about it before then.’

‘Ah well,’ Morgan said, suddenly not caring. ‘There’s a bit of a problem there. I’m afraid…’

‘There is no problem,’ Adekunle said harshly. ‘For your own sake, I hope not.’ Morgan swallowed, his mouth dry. ‘Do you know the fish-pond on the university campus?’ Adekunle asked. Morgan said he did. ‘Then let us meet there at half past five this afternoon. Yes?’

♦

The fish-pond was another example of Kinjanjan literalness, but this time so extreme that it almost returned to metaphor. There were doubtless fish in it and it was, just, in the general class of ponds, but, more truthfully, it was a large and impressive artificial lake at the south-western edge of the university campus. Morgan sat in his car looking at it, waiting for Adekunle. Normally a tranquil scene of great beauty, today Morgan’s half-creating mind saw only stark primitive nature, hostile and unwelcoming, feral and unsafe.

The fish-pond formed an attenuated oval, roughly half a mile long and three hundred yards wide in the middle. A large stream poured sluggishly into it at one end but there was no obvious channel for the waters to escape. Perhaps the earth just seeped it up, Morgan thought, for the pond had the solid unnatural stillness of stagnancy and the huge pale-trunked trees that bordered it on the far bank were perfectly reflected in its mirror-like surface.

The beige-grey light of approaching dusk softened edges and blurred contours. Over to his right Morgan could see the white roof of a senior staff house, but apart from the tarmac road his car rested on, everything else was untouched and unchanged. He would not have been surprised if a pterodactyl had hunched itself into the air from the darkening trees, or if some squamous prehistoric beast had plodded out of the tall rushes onto the mud beach below the road. He felt his depression icily grip his brain as he stared moodily across the neutral uncomplaining lake.

His gloomy reverie was interrupted by the sound of Adekunle’s Mercedes. Morgan got out of his car as Adekunle drew up behind him. Adekunle was smoking a large cigar but Morgan sensed that his normal mood of cynical joviality was absent.

‘Mr Leafy,’ he said at once. ‘You have made me a worried man with your talk of problems and difficulties. What has gone wrong?’

Morgan kicked a pebble off the road. ‘I had an argument with Murray,’ he said flatly. ‘Under the circumstances there’s no way we can play a friendly round of golf tomorrow.’

‘No, this will not do,’ Adekunle said sharply. ‘You cannot slip out of this so easily, my friend. You must put our…offer to Dr Murray before the twenty-ninth of this month. I have decided that I must know my position before then.’

‘I’m telling you we had a blazing row,’ Morgan protested. ‘I shouted at him. I insulted him. Honestly, he must hate my guts.’

‘A very poor joke, my friend. I see how you are trying,’ Adekunle wiggled his hand, ‘to snake your way out of our agreement. It will not succeed, I warn you. You will only force me to take my complaints to Mr Fanshawe.’

Morgan was almost sobbing with frustration. ‘It’s true I tell you. It happened on Monday night…Oh, never mind.’ He picked up a twig and flung it savagely at the glimmering fish-pond. It was nearly dark. The crickets sawed away, the bats dipped above their heads. Something in his tone must have made Adekunle realize that he wasn’t joking.

‘All right,’ Adekunle said grudgingly. ‘OK. You have a set-back. But it must be overcome at some point before the election. I don’t care how. It is mandatory that this business with Dr Murray is secured before then. You must arrange it,’ he waved his cigar aggressively at Morgan.

‘But why me?’ Morgan complained. ‘Why don’t you just ring him up? Put it to him straight?’

‘My good friend Mr Leafy,’ Adekunle chuckled. ‘How very naive you are. Is it not better to be offered a…a financial inducement by one of your own people? By one who you would normally ‘assume to be above this sort of transaction. A representative of the British Crown furthermore.’ He took a satisfied puffat his cigar. ‘Believe me it is very hard to remain honest when the standards of the highest are in question.’

Morgan reluctantly conceded the acuteness of his logic. If, by implication, the Commission staff were on the make, why should anyone else worry about soiling their hands? Quis custodiet and all that. He wondered again how Murray would respond.

‘Would you like to see what we are going to all this trouble about?’ Adekunle asked.

Morgan said he might as well, and followed Adekunle up the road, away from the senior staff house and along the side of the fish-pond. At the end of the lake the road ascended a small hill and then curved round to rejoin the campus. Up at this slightly higher altitude Morgan could see behind him the lights of more staff houses.

‘There you are,’ Adekunle said. The ground in front of them dipped down into a shallow marshy river valley then rose suddenly on the other side to meet a small plateau. In the gathering darkness Morgan could make out a line of trees.

‘This is the land I own,’ Adekunle said. ‘Up as far as those trees. This is where they want to build the hall and cafeteria. As you can see it is ideally placed.’

‘Where’s the dump gojng to be?’ Morgan asked unfeelingly.

‘Beyond those trees. Far beyond them. I sold all that land several years ago. The refuse lorries and the night-soil transporters are already bringing the rubbish out here,’ he added sadly. He paused. ‘Here we are ten minutes away from the lecture theatres, ten minutes’ walk from the university centre.’ He looked at Morgan and then at the end of his cigar. ‘If not for Dr Murray,’ he said bitterly, ‘they would write me the cheque today! ’ He almost shouted the last word. ‘He has postponed the Building Committee three times already while he pursued his investigations. I know he intends to give a negative report. And so now I am driven to these desperate measures.’

Morgan didn’t try too hard to sympathize with him. ‘How much are you selling the land for?’ he asked.