William Boyd: A Good Man in Africa

Morgan of course didn’t give, or hadn’t given, a fart about her nose, but in a spirit of pure aesthetic objectivity he had to admit it was a prominent landmark. Perhaps after a decade or so across the breakfast table it might have begun to get on his nerves, he said to himself sour-grapily, feeling only marginally compensated.

They stood silently together for a moment, Morgan looking at a soldier-ant gamely negotiating the interminable mountain range of the driveway gravel, Priscilla holding up her ring to catch a fleeting shaft of sunlight.

‘Looks like it’s going to be a real storm,’ she remarked.

Morgan couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Pris,’ he said feelingly, ‘About that night, about us…’

She turned on him a smile of uncomprehending candour. ‘Do let’s not talk about it please, Morgan. It’s over now.’ She paused. ‘Dickie’ll be waiting for me down at the club. Can I give you a lift?’ She opened the door of her car and got in.

Morgan crouched down and looked in the window. He put on a serious face. ‘I know things have been bad lately, Pris, but I can explain. There are,’ he smiled faintly, ‘convincing reasons for everything, believe me.’ He thought for a second before deciding to add, ‘I think we should talk.’ It sounded good: mature, seasoned, unhysterical.

Priscilla had been fiddling with the key in the ignition. She flashed the same smile at him again: the one that said you can talk all you want but I can’t hear a thing.

‘Coming to the barbecue?’ she asked blithely.

‘What?’

‘Tonight. At the club.’

It was no use. ‘Yes, I expect so.’

‘See you there then,’ she said. She switched on the engine, backed out of the garage and headed off down the drive. Morgan watched it go. How could she treat him like this?

‘You bitch,’ he uttered softly at the departing car. ‘Selfish, unfeeling bitch.’

Morgan walked morosely back to the Commission. He looked at his watch: half past five. He had told Hazel he’d be at the flat before five. He could smell smoke from the charcoal braziers in the servants’ quarters: dinner time, the Commission would be closed. He went in to the staff car park and saw his car was the only one remaining, his cream Peugeot 404, or ‘Peejott’ as they were known locally. He had bought it in the summer when everyone else was to leave. Hazel had suggested a Peugeot, they carried a lot of status in Kinjanja. By his car shall ye know him. Mercedes Benzes came at the top of the list; you hadn’t arrived until you did in a Mercedes. They were for heads of state, important government officials, high-ranking soldiers, very successful businessmen and chiefs. Next came the Peugeot, for the professional man: lawyers, senior civil servants, doctors, university heads of department. It spelt respectability. Citroens, grade three, were for young men on the make, pushy executives, lecturers, arrivistes of all kinds. Morgan publicly scoffed at such overt status symbols and justified buying a Peugeot for sound engineering reasons, but nonetheless, he enjoyed the appraising looks it received, felt vaguely flattered by the open weighing-up people subjected him to when he stepped out of the car: not important enough for a Merc, but a man of some quality just the same. It was too bad for Hazel that he only drove her about under cover of darkness; none of her friends had ever seen her in it.

He headed the car down to the main gate, saluted the night watchman and turned left down the long straight road into town. The Commission lay off the main road between the town of Nkongsamba and the state university campus. It was a two-mile drive down a gentle slope into the town. The Commission was placed atop a ridge of low hills that overlooked Nkongsamba from the north-east. One and a half miles further up the road lay the university campus where a significant portion of the expatriate British population of the Mid-West lived and worked.

Morgan considered going home for a shower but then abandoned the idea. Home was on an enclosed residential estate prosaically called New Reservation (he sometimes felt like an American Indian when he gave his address), which was about twenty minutes away from the Commission on the major highway north out of Nkongsamba. He had told his servants Moses and Friday to expect him back but he could always ring them from the club. It would keep the idle bastards on their toes, he thought savagely.

The road was lined with flamboyant trees on the point of bursting into radiant scarlet bloom. The rain, if it came tonight, would bring all the flowers out. He drove past the sawmill where Muller the saw-mill manager and West German charge d’affaires lived. There was a French agronomist at a nearby agricultural research station who looked after the interests of the few French people in the state, but between them and the Commission they made up the official diplomatic presence in Nkongsamba. All the big embassies and consulates were concentrated in the capital on the coast, a four-hour drive away on a deathtrap road.

He began to approach the outskirts of town. The verges widened, dusty and bare of grass; empty stalls and cleared rickety tables of day-time traders lined the route. He passed an AGIP filling station, a shoe factory and a vehicle park and then suddenly he was in the town, busy and bustling as people and cars made their laborious way home after work. There were some larger concrete buildings on the outskirts, covered in wrought-iron work and standing in their own low-walled gardens. Strange sweet burning smells were wafted into the car’s interior through the open window.

He slowed the car to walking pace as the streets narrowed andjoined the creeping honking procession of cars that clogged Nkongsamba eighteen hours out of twenty-four. He let his hand dangle out of the window and thought aimlessly about the day and the massed ranks of his current problems. He asked himself if he was really that bothered about Priscilla and Dalmire, if it really affected him that much. He got no clear answer: there was too much bruised masculine pride obscuring the view. He drove on past the swarming mud huts set a little below the level of the road, past the blue neon-lit barber shops, soft drink hoardings, the ubiquitous Coke signs, the open-air garages, furniture shops, tailors sewing furiously on clacking foot-powered machines. He saw the looming flood-lit façade of the Hotel de Executive and his heart sank as it had become used to these past two months, as the memories of his first confidential meeting with Adekunle — held within its walls — hurried into his mind. Tin advertisements glittered around its door, reflecting the lights that were going on now dusk was settling on the town. He heard the raucous blare of American soul-music emanating from within its courtyard-cum-dance floor. ‘Tonite!!’ proclaimed a blackboard propped outside the entrance. ‘Africa Jungle Beats. JOSE GBOYE and his top dandies band!!!! Fans! Be There!’ Morgan wondered if Josy Gboye had been playing that fateful evening.

He turned off the main road and went bumping over potholes up a steep street that led past the Sheila Cinema, which was offering Michele Morgan and Paul Hubschmid in Tell me Whom to Kill and Neela Akash , billed as a ‘sizzling and smashing Indian film’. He drove by the cinema and pulled the Peugeot into the forecourt of a chemist’s shop. He tipped the attendant a few coins and walked along the road ignoring the small boys running and chanting by his side. They were shouting ‘Oyibo, Oyibo’ which meant white man. It was something every Kinjanjan child did almost as a matter of course; it didn’t bother him, it was just a persistent reminder that he was a stranger in their country. He shook off his escort and two minutes’ brisk walking brought him to a newish row of shops. There was an optician’s, a Lebanese boutique and a shoe shop; above them were three flats. Hazel lived — courtesy of Morgan — above the boutique.