William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

He had only begun to wash his hands when he heard the voices in the hall. He heard Chloe Fanshawe’s loudly yodelled goodnights and the sound of two people coming up the stairs. He felt panic clench his heart into a tiny pounding ball. He switched off the light in the bathroom and stood nailed to the middle of the floor wondering what to do until some faint instinct of self-preservation steered him towards the bath. He stepped in and drew the shower curtain around him, seeking some form of safety however flimsy.

He heard modulated English voices. Someone said, ‘Did you unpack everything, Sylvia?’ and Sylvia replied, ‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Ma’am would be the Duchess, he reasoned, wondering who Sylvia might be: probably a lady-in-waiting, chaperone or first companion of the bedchamber or whatever it was, he decided. He thought hopelessly that perhaps no one would need to use the bathroom…

The light went on. Morgan froze behind his shower curtain.

‘…Ghastly little man I thought,’ he heard the Duchess say. ‘And his wife! Good Lord, what an extraordinary…oh I don’t know, the people they send out here.’ Morgan’s instinctive dislike was strengthened by this general slur. The door was shut and he smelt cigarette smoke. He tried not to breathe. Through the semi-transparent plastic of the curtain he could make out a dim grey shape. He heard a zip being run down, the rustle of a dress being lowered. He saw the shape sit down on the WC, heard the straining grunts, the farts, the splashes. Ah, he thought to himself, a manic giggle chattering in his head, so they do go to the toilet like everyone else. There was the noise of paper crumpling, the flush, clothes being readjusted, the running of water from the taps. He heard the Duchess mutter ‘bloody filthy’, at the state he’d left the basin in, then the water stopped. The door was opened.

‘Sylvia?’ came the voice more distantly from the passageway. ‘When exactly are we leaving tomorrow?’

Morgan breathed again, perhaps he might make it after all. He wondered ifhe had the time to clamber out of the bathroom window and make his escape across the back lawn. Maybe Sylvia would only have a pee as well and that would be it. He felt so tense he thought his spine might snap. But he had no time to dwell on the state of his body as there were more steps on the landing outside. Christ, Sylvia arriving, he thought. Some obscure need for disguise made him reach into his pocket for his cotton-wool beard which he quickly put on. He heard the door click shut, smelt cigarette smoke and he knew the Duchess had returned. Please God, he prayed with all the intensity he could muster, please just let her clean her teeth. I’ll do anything God, he promised, anything. He held his breath in agonized anticipation. He heard a rustle, a snap of elastic, the sound of something soft hit the floor.

He saw a shadow-hand reach for the shower curtain. With a rusty click of metal castors the curtain was twitched back. Morgan and the Duchess stared at each other eye to eye. He had never seen dumbfounded surprise and shock registered on anyone’s face quite so distinctly before. After all, the thought flashed through his brain, it’s not every day you find Father Christmas in your bath. The Duchess stood there slack and squat, quite naked apart from a pale-blue shower cap and a half smoked cigarette in one hand. Morgan saw breasts like empty socks, floppy-jersey fat folds, a grey Brillo pad, turkey thighs. Her mouth hung open in paralysed disbelief.

‘Evening, Duchess,’ Morgan squeaked from behind his beard, stepping from the bath with the falsetto audacity of a Raffles. He flung open the bathroom window, lowered the lid of the WC, stepped up and slung his legs over the window-sill. He glanced back over his shoulder. He didn’t care anymore. Her mouth was still open but an arm was across her breasts and a hand pressed into her lap.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I promise I won’t tell if you won’t.’ He dropped down six feet onto the tar-paper roof of the rear verandah, crawled to the edge and hung down, falling onto the back lawn. As he tore across the dark grass towards the gate he felt curiously exultant and carefree as he waited for the Duchess’s screams to rend the night air. But nothing disturbed the impartial gaze of the stars and the convivial silence of the scene.

♦

Bilbow stuck his head out of the spare bedroom when Morgan let himself into the house twenty minutes later.

‘Bloody hell,’ Bilbow said, looking at Morgan’s face. ‘What happened to you, Santa? Reindeers crash? Sledge get shot down in flames?’

Morgan didn’t bother to reply — he was too busy pouring himself a huge drink.

‘By the way,’ Bilbow said, wandering into the sitting room. ‘Some chap called Adekunle’s been ringing all day. Says you must phone him as soon as you get in, doesn’t matter what time it is. Make any sense?’

It didn’t. So he went to bed.

Morgan stood next to the caddie cage — a kind of miniature POW camp where the caddies lounged — waiting for the caddie master to select him a boy. A Boxing Day sun shone in the clear pale-blue sky and it was already hot for ten o’clock. He was due on the first tee by 10.30 but had come down early as he wasn’t keen to remain in the house. He had not phoned Adekunle as requested, neither had he made contact with Fanshawe to see what the reaction had been to the miraculous reappearance of Innocence. The phone had gone twice while he was eating his breakfast but he had ignored it. On his way to the club he had been held up by a big election march on behalf of the UPKP weaving its way through Nkongsamba’s twisted streets en route for a rally at the football stadium. So eventful had his life become of late that he had forgotten that voting commenced tomorrow.

A young boy in a grubby Hawaiian shirt hefted Morgan’s clubs onto his shoulder. He had transferred some of Adekunle’s gleaming beauties into his own well-worn plastic and canvas golf-bag as he had been unwilling to attract amused comment on speculation over Adekunle’s monstrosity, which was of such generous proportions that it could have functioned happily as a great-dane’s kennel or motorbike garage when it wasn’t being transported round a golf-course. Besides, he was sure it would have taken at least two caddies to lift it anyway, and he wanted as little company as possible today. He moved slowly over towards the first tee. Many golfers had made an early start as the tournament was intended to wind up around lunchtime. In fact, he and Murray were driving off third from the end. Morgan nodded and smiled at those he knew, and he received many curious glances in return. He was aware that he looked a little peculiar, what with his frizzy teddyboy quiff (flattened for two minutes with a water-loaded comb, springing perkily back up as it dried), one eyebrow replaced by an oblong of elastoplast, red eyes and a shiny pink nose. He slipped on a transparent green sun-visor to protect his tingling sensitive face from the increasingly hot glare. Halfheartedly he rehearsed his bribe speech like a nervous best man at a wedding, but the words refused to form themselves into any convincing order, and when they did he thought he sounded like some oily dockside pimp: ‘hey meester, you want feelthy peectures.’ That sort of approach would never work with Murray. Generally speaking he was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on what he had to do later in the course of the morning. The trauma of Innocence’s death, the body snatch, the…whatever the opposite of body snatch was — the body drop, the mind-blowing confrontation with the Duchess, had robbed him of any satisfaction he had planned to derive from this symbolic act of corruption. It had now become a simple exercise in self-defence, in skin saving, because he knew — more than ever now — that in order not to lose control irretrievably of his life he had to hold on to his job.