William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

Also he felt terrible. The tensions of the last two nights plus the strenuous drinking had combined to produce a hangover of mythic proportions. It seemed as if his entire body had been tenderized by one of those jagged wooden mallets used for bashing steaks. His tongue felt twice as large as normal, as though it was striving to loll out of the side of his mouth like a dog’s and he had a neuralgic headache that loosened every tooth in its socket and made his sinus passages hum like tuning forks.

He swished a golf-club around experimentally. He hadn’t played golf for three months or more and he heard his back and shoulders creaking and clicking under the unfamiliar strain. Checking up on his backswing he suddenly saw Murray walking past the caddie cage towards him and felt his heart lurch with nerves and panic. Then he saw Murray’s son and the sickness turned to irrational anger. Why had he brought his wretched kid along with him?

Murray came up. He smiled evenly.

‘Merry Xmas, Mr Leafy. I see we’ve been drawn together.’

‘Yes, quite a coincidence, don’t you think?’ There was a pause. ‘Ah…look, by the way, I wanted to apologize about the other night…the phone call. I was a bit upset. You know, the dead body and, well, everything, generally. I didn’t realize your position exactly.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Murray said. ‘I haven’t been.’

‘Good. No hard feelings then.’

‘No feelings at all, Mr Leafy.’ He looked closely at Morgan. ‘Your face all right?’

Morgan laughed. ‘Slight accident with my gas cooker. Blowback I think they call it. Ha-ha.’

‘I see.’ Murray looked closer. ‘Gives you a curious expression.’ He paused. ‘I hope you don’t mind my son coming along — playing some of the shorter holes?’

‘Not at all,’ Morgan forced a smile in the boy’s direction. ‘Have a good Christmas?’ he asked.

♦

Morgan played very badly. The fairways were burnt almost white from the sun and were as hard as a road. He developed out of nowhere a curling fading slice on almost every shot including his putts. The small greens, known as ‘browns’ because of their tar and sand surfacing — proved elusively hard to hit, the balls skittering over them again and again, refusing to slow down on the baked ground. Murray agreed to call him Morgan, chatted amiably enough and coached his son with a professional brevity and acuteness. Because of the boy playing some of the shorter holes they waved through the twosomes that were coming behind and soon they were at the tail-end of the tournament, which, Morgan thought, actually suited him quite well.

They completed the first nine holes by midday and paused at a fairway drink-shack to slake their thirst. Morgan had scored a dire 63 on the outward nine — Murray a useful 37—and it was shaping up to be his all-time worst-ever round of golf in more ways than one. He had imagined that, after everything he had been through, bribing Murray would turn out to be a piece of cake, but as ever the physical presence of the man unsetded him. He felt nervous, adolescent and drained of self-confidence.

The first nine holes had sent them up one side of a river valley and back down the other. The second nine branched out into the thick forest that surrounded Nkongsamba. There was a sharp dog-leg after the eleventh, and they wouldn’t see the clubhouse or the outskirts of the town again until the sixteenth. Morgan watched Murray drive off easily and fluently. The ball sailed a straight two hundred yards and bounced another fifty leaving him within easy range of the brown. Morgan squared up to his ball. He decided to give it everything he’d got, show this old man how to hit a golf-ball, pretend it was Fanshawe’s head he was striking. He took a prodigious swing and cracked the ball with all his force: it shot off and out in a steady curve to his right, plunging into dense and thorny rough.

‘ Shit! ’ he swore, then apologized for the boy’s sake.

‘You shouldn’t try to hit it so hard,’ Murray advised. ‘Relaxation’s the key to this game.’

‘That’s the fiendishly annoying thing about golf,’ Morgan complained, knowing relaxation was just about the last state he could achieve at the moment. ‘It’s such a, you know, controlled game. Everything’s held back, sort of restrained. You can’t thrash away at things, soak up the aggression, tire yourself out like you can in other sports. Every time I wind myself up for a massive effort I know it’s going to be disastrous.’

Murray looked at him quizzically, as if this admission held the key to his character. ‘But that’s what it’s all about though, isn’t it? Knowing when to hold back. Staying in control. Using the head and other wooden clubs.’

Morgan laughed uncomfortably: he didn’t welcome the implied criticism. ‘I suppose I’m just the wrong personality for the game,’ he said ruefully.

‘Don’t give up so easily,’ Murray said as he walked over to the rough with him. ‘Keep at it. It may come right one day.’

They poked around in the tangled thorny bushes looking for Morgan’s ball. They threw up thick clouds of dust, flies, tics, grasshoppers, uncovered a calcined coil of human faeces, but no ball.

‘Do you like it out here?’ Morgan asked Murray as he hacked at the undergrowth with his club head. ‘Dust, heat, stink…impenetrable jungle.’

‘Well enough,’ Murray said. ‘I probably like it as much as I’d like anywhere. It has its advantages as well as its disadvantages.’

‘You’re quite content then,’ Morgan established a little belligerently.

Murray released the bush he was pulling back. He smiled. ‘Is anybody quite content?’

‘Well I know for a fact I’m not,’ Morgan confessed. ‘But you seem to be — of all the people I’ve met.’

Murray pointed his club at him. ‘There you go,’ he said, ‘telling me how I feel. A piece of advice: don’t confuse seeming with being. You can never know anything for sure, ofcourse, but it’s a pretty safe maxim.’

‘Goodness. Quite a philosopher. So you’re not happy then?’

Murray laughed. ‘This has taken rather a serious turn for a harmless game of golf, hasn’t it? I think we’d better give your ball up. Play another?’

‘No thanks. I’ll just walk this one through.’ He watched Murray play his ball up to just short of the brown.

‘Are you going to stay here all your life?’ Morgan asked conversationally as they strolled after it.

‘No,’ Murray said. ‘I shall leave when I can.’

‘Aha,’ Morgan said in triumph. ‘So you don’t like it here.’

‘What exactly are you trying to prove?’ Murray asked with an amused smile. ‘It’s got nothing to do with liking the place, it’s just that there are other things I want to do with my life apart from working in Africa.’ He eyed his chip shot, played, and ran the ball onto the brown five feet from the hole.

‘Such as what?’ Morgan inquired. ‘What do you want to do next? Go back to Scotland?’

‘No,’ Murray said, sighting along his putter. ‘I’ve not planned anything really.’ He putted the ball into the hole. ‘What I’d like to do is go somewhere warm — I don’t think I could survive another British winter — Portugal maybe. Go swimming, sailing, play a bit of golf, read a bit more, watch my family grow up…that sort of thing. Fairly average and unremarkable ambitions, I’m afraid.’

‘And that’s it?’ For some reason Morgan felt a sense of disappointment.

‘What did you expect,’ Murray rebuked himjokingly, ‘that I wanted to be President of the World Health Organization? I’ll be ‘content’ enough, thank you, if I can manage the other things.’

♦

They played the next two holes. Morgan’s nerves returned and the sun shone down with uncomfortable force as they hit their way further into the forest. The fairways became enclosed on both sides by tall trees and dense undergrowth. Thin paths broke out from one green wall, meandered across the golf-course and disappeared into narrow openings in the jungle on the other side. If your shot was inaccurate there was virtually no hope of ever finding your ball. Morgan lost another three, Murray kept to par, even the boy played better than he did. Morgan knew that if he didn’t approach Murray soon it would be too late and he grew progressively more unhappy about the task ahead. The game of golf, he now saw, had been a bad idea. Perhaps if Murray had shown resentment at his rudeness the other night, if he’d been sniffy and stand-offish, made it clear that he didn’t like him that much, found the idea of a round of golf in his company distasteful, it would have been less of a problem. He had been expecting something like that, he supposed: the Calvinistic cold shoulder. But Murray had been amicable and considerate, and he realized that his dreams of destroying him held no appeal, were non-existent really because, he saw, the Murray he detested lived on only in his mind — had little or nothing to do with the man walking by his side. There would be no satisfaction in watching this Murray crumble now: he just didn’t hate the man enough; in fact, surprised as he was at the admission, he almost liked him. Murray was right, he thought: he had confused seeming with being. He’d established an idea about the man in his head on the basis of a couple of incidents and had never really bothered to check its veracity. With a depressingly acute flash of insight he realized that he did the same with almost everyone he met…But all these speculations were academic: Murray still had to be bribed and that was that — his own survival depended on it. He was only sorry that this new-found knowledge about his victim made the success of his venture almost inevitable: Murray was as human and fallible as he was.