A Good Man in Africa

by William Boyd

  “Right,” he said. “Into the swimming togs.” He had marked this particular activity as being a significant pointer as to how the rest of the day would go and also to indicate the extent to which his intimacy with Priscilla had spread. In the case of his previous companion at this very spot, the Rubenesque moustachioed wife of the Fiat dealer, the untamed primitiveness of the scene had inspired her to abandon all clothing for the duration of their stay, and she and Morgan had splashed about, fished and fucked like a couple of beefy, naked survivors of some nuclear holocaust. But for all their spontaneous noble savagery he had felt that their soft pampered bodies, their tender skins and sunburnt buttocks, their chilled Gancia and paper cups made them a shouting crude anachronism in the wild and uncultivated landscape. He expected no such transformation from Priscilla but he hoped that they would not, at least, need to observe the traditional modest conventions when changing into their swimming suits. However, he was considerably disappointed when Priscilla unbuttoned her dress and stepped out of it to reveal her swimsuit already on underneath. It was navy blue, high necked, and its stretched nylon outlined a complicated armature of plastic boning around the bust: it was the sort of costume worn by the captains of girls-school swimming teams.

  A little put out, and suddenly lacking the naturist fervour of a moment ago, he wrapped a towel around his waist and with difficulty lowered his underpants and eased up his swimming shorts, a pair of psychedelically patterned surfin’ baggies imported from the USA and purchased at the local Kingsway stores. They fully covered his ham-like thighs and, he reasoned, the dazzling swirl of colours should distract attention from his overflowing gut.

  “Goodness,” was all Priscilla could say when he whipped away the towel with a flourish. She seemed to be in an unresponsive mood so he set about making up and then baiting the rods with finger-thick worms dug from the garden compost heap that morning by Friday. Purple gunge and clotted puslike oozings soon covered his fingers as he looped and skewered the worms on the large hooks. Priscilla turned away as he did this; it made her sick, she said. She was definitely moody today, he decided. They waded out to the largest of the rock outcrops. The water was bath-warm almost, the river bed yielding mud. Priscilla spread her towel on a large flat-topped boulder while Morgan sloshed back for the beer. That secured, he cast Priscilla’s line out into the pool and wedged it in the rocks by her head.

  “You’re here to fish, you know,” he mock-rebuked her, “not sunbathe. You can sunbathe any day at the club.”

  “Oh don’t be such a bore,” she said, lying flat on her back, her eyes closed, her hands by her side, palms down. “This is lovely.”

  Morgan did a little dance of rage on his own adjacent rock, silently mouthing imprecations and waving v-signs at her. This was not how she was meant to behave. Still, there was plenty of time, he considered; it was only mid-morning. Olokomeji always had a calming effect on him. The sun beat down, a car buzzed by on the road bridge, the float on his line hung steady in the pool. He took a great throat-pulsing swig from his beer bottle, the chill bitter fluid sluicing down his throat, contentment spreading through his veins with the alcohol.

  Two hours later the river and its banks swam in a pleasant alcoholic haze. Morgan had donned an old bush hat and draped a shirt across his shoulders to protect him from the sun’s heat, which was becoming intense as it reached its zenith. He had recast his line several times, but the original worm still remained on its hook. He was about to suggest lunch and a siesta when Priscilla exclaimed without looking up.

  “What’s that rattling noise? Is it you, Morgan?” He looked over and saw her rod leaping and quivering in spastic rage, the fibre-glass whipping and bending as though suddenly animate. He scrambled over.

  “Christ. Bloody hell! You’ve caught a fish,” he shouted, grabbing the rod which bucked and tugged in his hand as he vigorously wound in her catch. Priscilla watched in fascination by his side.

  “God … it’s, it’s quite a … big one, too,” he grunted in amazement. He had never caught a fish at Olokomeji.

  The fish was shortly hauled thrashing into the shallows around the rock outcrop. Morgan thrust the rod into Priscilla’s hand and clambered down. Taking some loops of line around his hand he hauled the jerking fish out of the water. It was a Niger perch, looked to be about six pounds, a thick solid grey thing with a blunt face. He heaved it up onto the flat top of the rock where it flipped and quivered on the hot surface.

  The fish’s one visible eye seemed to stare hostilely as they looked down on it.

  “Shouldn’t you kill it?” Priscilla suggested. “You can’t just let it bake and, well, die like that.” Morgan agreed. The only problem was he had never caught a fish that large—two feet long and heavy—and had never considered how one should go about putting them out of their misery. Did successful fishermen carry guns for this purpose, he wondered vaguely, or electric stunning devices?

  He pressed his palm down on the slippery object and with his other hand wrenched and levered the hook free from its mouth. This new agony prompted the fish to renew its efforts and it bounced and floundered wildly about the rock.

  “Don’t let it fall back in!” Priscilla squealed.

  Morgan grabbed the perch with both hands, its bulk preventing his fingers from meeting on either side. It was like holding a disembodied thigh muscle, cut from a leg, yet still pulsing with life. The tiddlers he’d caught in his past had been easily dealt with: the tail between finger and thumb and the head flipped on a nearby stone. He thought he would try a variation on this method and still clutching the exhausted fish he kneeled towards some uneven projections at one end of the rock.

  “Quickly,” yelped Priscilla. “Put the poor thing out of its misery.”

  Easier said than done, you stupid bitch, Morgan swore under his breath, and tentatively slapped its head against the rock. The fish, inspired to one final effort by this blow, twisted and jackknifed out of his hands and fell off the edge of the rock and down onto a sand bar that ran between this and the next outcrop.

  Swearing vilely, Morgan jumped down after it and seized the twitching fish for the last time.

  “Right, you little bastard,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “Now get this,” and he smashed its upper half against the rock side. Once, twice, three times. Bits of flesh and blood splattered onto his forearms and very soon the fish felt inert and limp.

  “You haven’t spoilt it, have you?” Priscilla asked in a trembling voice.

  Morgan looked up. Priscilla stood on the rock edge above him. He turned the fish over; a doll’s eye dangled from the pulp he’d made of its head. Silver scales glinted from the rock.

  “No,” he said. “It’ll be fine.” He stood up, damp sand sticking to his legs; fish blood covered fingers and knuckles and trickled in thin rivulets to drip from his forearms. He leapt, with as much agility as he could muster, back up the rocks onto the flat surface.

  “There you are,” he said huskily, his chest heaving from the effort. “Your fish.”

  Morgan and Priscilla ate their lunch in an uneasy silence. She had become quite subdued while he tore at a chicken leg with pagan gusto. His mind raced exultantly. Christ, he thought to himself, D. H. Lawrence couldn’t have arranged or directed that episode any more skilfully—the violence, the blood, the male aggression, the admiring female—the very air throbbed with felt life. Furthermore, Morgan suddenly thought, if DHL was anywhere near right she should be a pushover now.

  Priscilla lay back on her towel. “Ouch!” she yipped almost immediately and sat up again craning her hand round behind her back. Morgan saw a stunned large black ant wobble uncertainly across the towelling surface.

  “There’s your culprit,” he pointed and watched Priscilla flatten it with the heel of her sandal. Great, he thought, now we’ve both killed.

  “God, that was sore,” she complained, turning her back to him. He saw the bite, a sixpence-sized weal just to the left of the top bump of her vertebrae. He covere
d it with his lips and licked the swelling gently.

  “There,” he said and took her in his arms. They kissed and he lowered her back down onto the towel. He leant on his elbow looking down on her face. Lovingly he brushed her fringe aside with his fingers, then kissed her again with a conscious display of passionate abandon.

  This continued for a couple of minutes before Morgan stopped and re-adopted his elbow-leaning posture. He casually slipped the right hand strap of her bathing suit off her shoulder. “You know,” he said in what he thought was the correct tone of childlike rebuke, “I’m getting dangerously fond of you.” Priscilla lay back, her lips slightly parted. Perhaps she had had too much beer, Morgan wondered, hence her passivity. She ran her hand through his hair. He wished she wouldn’t do that.

  “Why dangerous?” she asked teasingly.

  Morgan slid the other strap down as far as it would go and bent to kiss her collar bone. “Because,” he looked at her seriously, and summoned up all his courage, “I think I may be falling in love with you.…”

  “Oh, Morgie,” she sighed and put her arms round his neck, pulling herself up so she could kiss him, and as she did so he hooked his fingers onto the back of her bathing suit and tugged it down. He felt the coolness of a freed breast against his own. He rolled her back onto the towel. A pale pink nipple showed above the dark blue nylon of the swimsuit. Carefully he uncovered the other and slipped Priscilla’s arms out of the shoulder straps as if he were undressing a child. Her conical breasts were unbelievably firm, girlish and gravity-defying, standing straight up from her chest. Morgan kissed them reverently—they were cold and flecked with tiny sand grains. Priscilla lay still with an uncertain look on her face and her shoulders hunched as if she weren’t entirely sure how she had come to find herself in this position.

  Morgan knelt beside her. “You’re very beautiful,” he said in proper tones of awe. He undid the waist strings of his swimming shorts, stood up and jammed his thumbs into his waist band. “Very beautiful,” he repeated, and pushed down his swimming shorts, noticing as he did so that Priscilla hadn’t moved. He had eased them round his buttocks when Priscilla suddenly said, “Morgan. For goodness sake, what are you doing?”

  He hauled his shorts back up and dropped down beside her again. He kissed her face and neck. Stupid of him, he thought, to get the sequence wrong. “I’m sorry, my love,” he said, sliding his hand beneath her swimsuit which was now bunched around her waist. She drew up her knees protectively.

  “No, don’t, Morgan, please.”

  “But why, my darling? I am in love with you, I told you.” He tried to keep the whine out of his voice. Priscilla sat up and fitted the front of her swimsuit to her breasts. Morgan looked on in empty disbelief. She smiled sadly at him and rested her forehead on his. She kissed his nose.

  “I know you are, Morgie,” she said with a note of assurance he found irritating. “But I can’t. Not today. Couldn’t you tell, you silly? It’s my time of the month.”

  They were back in Nkongsamba by early evening, several hours earlier than planned. Priscilla asked him to pull into the side of the road before they reached the Commission. She took his right hand in her two.

  “It was a lovely day,” she said. “You were so sweet. I’m only sorry …”

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it too. “Stupid of me, incredibly.” They left it at that and sat in silence for a while. Morgan felt faintly sick, as though he’d eaten a huge cream tea or five bars of chocolate.

  “Mor?” she said tentatively.

  More what? he asked himself, until he realised with a renewed attack of nausea that his name had been reduced even further.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you … did you mean what you said?”

  “About what?”

  “About me … about how you feel.”

  He leant over and kissed her. “Of course,” he said quickly. She hung on to him tightly for a second.

  “Oh, I shall miss you,” she said fervently.

  “Miss me?” he demanded. “Where the … where are you going?”

  “Didn’t I say? I meant to tell you. Mummy and I are going to stay with the Wagners for a few days.” She squeezed his arm. “But I’ll hurry back.” She kissed his cheek and opened the door. “Don’t bother to come in.” She got out and shut the door blowing him a kiss through the open window. “See you in a few days.”

  Morgan reached behind him for a soggy newspaper-wrapped bundle. “Here,” he said, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Don’t forget your fish.”

  He turned the car round and drove directly back to town to the hotel where Hazel was currently living. He impatiently tooted his horn for five minutes until the proprietor emerged to see what all the fuss was about.

  “Hazel?” Morgan asked. “I’m waiting for Hazel.”

  The proprietor spread his empty hands. “Sorry, sah,” he said compassionately. “She no dey. Nevah come home last night.”

  That was when Morgan decided he had to find a flat for her.

  Chapter 7

  Celia Adekunle’s invitation arrived as promised and Morgan and Fanshawe discussed the impending party in some detail. Morgan had earlier pressed for some additional bait other than Britain’s good will in an attempt to lure Adekunle away from a position that looked to be securely on the fence.

  “It’s just not enough,” Morgan was saying on the Friday morning before the party, “to let him know that we’re rooting for his victory. We need something else to make a more binding alliance.”

  “True,” Fanshawe admitted, “but we don’t want the man to feel that he gets our support as a matter of course.”

  “No,” Morgan agreed cautiously.

  “If anything, we want him to feel grateful to us for this early recognition. Indebted.”

  “Yes. Well, I’m not so sure.” Not for the first time Morgan wondered if he and Fanshawe were thinking along the same lines.

  “I was on the phone to the capital this morning,” Fanshawe told him. “They’re pleased with the way things are going, very pleased. It looks more and more like the KNP are favourites for the election and they want us to press ahead. They want to get Adekunle to London.”

  “London!”

  “Yes, some time before the elections. But only once we’re sure of his attitude.”

  “I’m not sure if we …” Morgan began dubiously.

  “Nonsense,” Fanshawe waved away his reservations. “Tell you what though. Offer it to him as a kind of reward—you know, first class tickets, couple of nights at Claridge’s. That should bring him into line,” Fanshawe said confidently. Morgan wondered if they were talking about the same Adekunle. Fanshawe’s approach seemed to belong to another age, as if plane tickets and hotel reservations were an updated version of beads and blankets.

  Morgan sat there, his face heavy with scepticism. “Cheer up,” Fanshawe said. “We’re practically granting the KNP official recognition before a vote’s been cast. He can’t turn up his nose at that. Why man, he should be eating out of your hand.”

  So it had been agreed. As a gesture of goodwill—once Adekunle’s pro-British stance had been confirmed—he was to fly to London courtesy of the British taxpayer. Morgan was unhappy about this move. It seemed to take too much for granted, and that night as he drove into town he was in a considerable state of nervousness. Fanshawe was expecting great things of him but for all he knew Adekunle might chuck him out as a gatecrasher.

  The Hotel de Executive was a four-storey all-concrete L-shaped block set some way back from the road in a high-walled compound. The kerb outside was thronged with parked cars and he had to drive several hundred yards up the road before he could find a gap for himself. He was surprised to find the hotel compound almost deserted. A few young men sat aimlessly around tin tables but he heard a thump of music and the din of conversation which seemed to be coming from around the back of the hotel. In the foyer he presented his invitation to a girl sitting at a table and
was directed down a dark corridor. Emerging from this he found himself in a large courtyard formed by two sides of the L and squared off by a kind of raised, covered gallery. He stood at the angle of the L; on his left was a band and in front of them a concrete dance floor. All round this, tables and chairs had been set and opposite the band on the raised gallery was a long bamboo-fronted bar. Lights shone down from the side of the hotel, and coloured bulbs were strung around the courtyard.

  The place was packed with guests. Morgan could see a few white faces but most of the guests were black and wearing vibrant Kinjanjan costume. He edged his way self-consciously towards the bar. Above the band stretched a huge banner with “HAPPY B’DAY SAM!” written on it, and below that another saying “ACTION TODAY! VOTE KNP! VOTE SAM ADEKUNLE!” As far as Morgan could see there was no sign of the man in question, nor of his wife. The heat was intense, what with the lights and the press of people, and the noise was almost intolerable. The band was blaring out brassy highlife music at conversation-stopping level yet the conversation went on, excited and shrill. He ordered a beer but his money was waved away. Free drink for this mob, he thought, impressed; Adekunle was certainly being generous. He sipped at his beer and surveyed the crowd. He saw a few familiar faces: the mayor of Nkongsamba for one, Ola Dunyodi—Kinjanja’s most famous playwright—for another, and various of Adekunle’s university colleagues. The whole scene was reminiscent of an American electoral campaign, Morgan thought, right down to the hookers. For, hovering round the bar, were a number of gaudily dressed girls in the latest Western fashions, with huge lacquered wigs and expensive jewellery. Probably imported from the capital, Morgan thought; they looked too fast for Nkongsamba.

  There was a touch at his elbow. It was Georg Muller, the saw-mill owner and West German chargé d’affaires. He was in his early fifties with a creased, tired-looking face. Sometimes he looked ill too, but tonight it was only fatigue. He had yellowy stained teeth and a straggly, wiry goatee that reminded Morgan of leek roots. He was wearing an unironed white shirt and mustard-coloured trousers that almost matched his smile.