A Good Man in Africa

by William Boyd

  “Looks OK to me,” Morgan said, offended at this casual reference to his bulk.

  “No,” Mrs. Fanshawe said firmly. “Try it on now; let’s make sure.”

  “Now?” Morgan yelped. “Can’t I take it away? And tell you later?”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Fanshawe said professionally. “Just step into it now.”

  Morgan felt suddenly light-headed and giddy. With numb fingers he accepted the horrible red garment from Mrs. Fanshawe. He took off his shoes and was about to insert his left foot into the appropriate leg hole when Mrs. Fanshawe uttered a bright trill of laughter.

  “Don’t be so prim,” she mocked. “You won’t be wearing shirt and trousers on the day. How on earth am I meant to get a proper fit?”

  Unable to speak, Morgan hesitantly removed his tie, shirt and trousers and stood motionless in his boxer shorts and socks, slightly bent over, his shoulders unnaturally rounded as though he had a bad back.

  “Come on then,” Mrs. Fanshawe ordered, like a hearty games mistress encouraging a flagging hockey team.

  Inflating his chest, Morgan stepped into the overalls, pulled them up, slipped his arms into the sleeves. He was trying not to think what he had looked like standing there in his loose baggy underwear and brown socks, trying to ignore the acid smell of fresh sweat that seemed to billow noxiously from his armpits. Mrs. Fanshawe busied around him, tugging and pulling as he slowly did up the buttons on the front.

  “Not bad,” she said. “Not too bad at all. Might have to let it out around the tummy a little, that’s all. Want to see yourself in a mirror?”

  Morgan shook his head emphatically.

  “Super,” she enthused. “I’ll make a beard out of some cotton wool, I’ll attach a hood and that’ll be that. The kiddies’ll love it.”

  Morgan thought he was going to be sick as he struggled to get out of the tight overalls. His nervousness, discomfort and profound embarrassment had caused sweat to pour forth and he had to wriggle and squirm his shoulders and hips free of the clinging material. Mrs. Fanshawe was humming to herself as she rummaged through her sewing-basket. Morgan bent down, picked up the boiler-suit and handed it back to her. He avoided her eye but as she turned to take the suit from him her humming ceased abruptly and she said, “Oh!” in a tone of perplexed surprise.

  “What about gumboots?” Morgan said as though in a trance, his eyes fixed on a crack in the wall. “I suppose I’ll need those too.” He groped for his shirt on the divan.

  “Oh … yes. Yes,” Mrs. Fanshawe said, suddenly confused, gathering the red suit up into a bundle and hugging it to her chest. “Um. Look … I’ll, erm, see to that. Yes, yes. That’s what I’ll do.” Morgan shot a glance at her. She’d suddenly gone most peculiar, he thought, seeing her gazing intently out of the window.

  “I’ve just remembered something,” she blurted. “Something I must do at once,” she said, scrambling for the door. “Let yourself out, won’t you?” She was gone.

  A very, very strange woman, Morgan thought, his churning addled brain beginning to return to normal. What an odd family the Fanshawes were, he considered, but what had got into her? He sat down on the divan. It was covered in a coarsely woven bedspread. He felt the rough tickle of the material on the back of his thighs and, he suddenly realised, on a portion of his anatomy that should have been unexposed. He mouthed a silent horror-struck “Oh no!” and slowly looked down at his lap. From the simple slit in his boxer shorts that passed for a fly, his penis protruded, long, pale and flaccid. It must have popped out during his struggles to remove the boiler-suit. Now he knew.

  Chapter 3

  Morgan drove down to the club. There was a curious fixed smile on his face as though he was under deep hypnosis or, like some cartoon character, had been hit very hard on the head. With all the skill of a Zen master he had emptied his mind of thought. He was a bundle of reflexes driving down the road, a dazed refugee mindlessly fleeing the mushroom cloud of shame and embarrassment that towered over the Commission.

  It was lunchtime and the pool was quiet. He changed, stepped out onto the rough concrete surround and with the zeal of a born-again Baptist on the banks of the river Jordan hurled himself into the pool. He swam powerfully below the surface, thrusting himself through the cool blue water, his eyes mistily focussed on the shifting dappled light patterns on the pool-bottom. He imagined the sweat, the dirt and disgrace sliding from his body like a slick of sun-tan oil.

  He hauled himself from the pool, sat down in the shade of an umbrella and drank two icy bottles of beer in quick succession. Gently, patiently, he began to come round. After an hour of careful self-counselling and analysis, and a thorough survey and methodological setting-out of his problems, the jumbled perspectives of his life slowly reformed and sanity resumed something like its rightful place in the order of things.

  Calmer and pleased with this massive act of self-discipline he changed back into his clothes and walked through the club on the way to his car. As he was passing the noticeboard in the vestibule his eye was caught by the red lettering of the GRAND BOXING DAY GOLF TOURNAMENT and he noticed—as instinctively as if it had been his own—Murray’s name among the list of those who wished to compete. Morgan was forcibly reminded of his aborted golf-match and he felt the millstone of his worries resettle itself comfortably around his neck.

  The childish idea came to Morgan that if he just sat still for long enough, if he didn’t trouble anyone, didn’t draw any attention to himself, all the hideous traumas currently rampaging through his life would get bored and rumble on past him like a marauding army off to lay waste to the next village up the road. Accordingly, he crept into his office and sat quietly at his desk for three quarters of an hour, filling his blotting pad with tiny doodles of spirals and concentric circles. But then a wide jaw-cracking yawn made him realise that total quiescence, utter passivity, held out no hope and precious few charms. Besides, he just wasn’t that sort of person: he had to do something, even if it was only to cock things up further. He looked quizzically at his ink-darkened blotting pad, and wondered if, for the last couple of hours, he’d been having a minor nervous breakdown, if this was what it was like when you started to go mad.

  “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 fishpond. It was nearly dark. The crickets sawed away, the bats dipped above their heads. Something in his tone must have made Adekunle realise that he wasn’t joking.

  “Alright,” Adekunle said grudgingly. “OK. You have a setback. 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 puff at 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 going 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 sympathise with him. “How much are you selling the land for?” he asked.

  “Two hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds,” Adekunle said with feeling.

  “For a ten thousand pound investment,” Morgan said. “Not bad.”

  Adekunle came up to him and seized his arm. Morgan could smell his cigar smoke. “This is why, Mr. Leafy, you are going to help me, otherwise I take my complaints about your behaviour to the High Commissioner,” he threatened. “I will not need to go to Mr. Fanshawe; I will go to the top man.” He released his grip. “Your kind offer of a visit to London was most useful. I have some good friends there now. Believe me, Mr. Leafy, if I so wish I can make serious trouble for you. Find your own way to approach Murray. That is all. And before the twenty-ninth.” His voice was harsh and angry again.

  Morgan tried to coax some saliva into his dry mouth. “But how?” he wailed. “Jesus Christ, I told you I.…”

  “I don’t care!” Adekunle spat out suddenly, trembling with rage. “I certainly won’t give one bloody damn shit for the career of a junior diplomat!”

  “Alright,” Morgan said weakly. “Alright. I’ll think of something.” He felt very tired, overcome with weariness. He turned and set off back down the road to his car. Adekunle caught up with him.

  “Forgive me for losing my temper,” he said quietly, “but as I told you, the financial costs of an election campaign are high.” He added in a surprisingly meek tone, “You don’t know what this … this obstruction by Murray means. I have my own concerns.” Morgan said nothing. “There is no reason,” Adekunle went on, “why we should not both benefit from this, ah, how shall we say it? partnership.”

  “Thanks,” Morgan said hollowly. He would do it, he knew, primarily to save his own tattered skin and secure his piddling job. But there was another reason. Something in him made him feel that Murray would accept the bribe this time, and he desperately wanted to be there the day his feet turned to clay and his pedestal was kicked out from under him. And he wanted to be the one to apply the boot.

  He stopped in his tracks. He had an idea.

  “Do you know the golf professional at the club?” he asked.

  “No,” Adekunle said. “What’s his name?”

  “Bernard something. Bernard Odemu, I think.”

  “Is he a Kinjanjan?”

  “Yes.” Morgan paused. “Do you think you could ‘persuade’ him someh
ow to partner me with Murray in the Boxing Day golf tournament? I should think he’s the man responsible for the draw. Would that be possible, do you think?”

  “Is that all?” Adekunle asked, amused. “Then of course.”

  Power, Morgan thought, an amazing thing.

  Chapter 4

  There was, Morgan decided, a distinct smell now coming from Innocence’s body: a sort of sour-sweet smell. Which wasn’t surprising, he admitted, as she had been lying out in the sun for nearly four days. It was the morning of 24 December—Christmas Eve—clear, bright, the sun shining, the temperature in the high eighties. He was waiting for Fanshawe.

  Fanshawe had summoned him to the servants’ quarters to, as he put it, “sort out this Innocence-problem once and for all.” The Innocence-problem lay—as it had always done, unmovingly, stoically—beneath its garish shroud. As each day had gone by so the juju tokens had multiplied and now there were twenty or so little cairns or assemblies of leaf, twig and pebble clustered around the body.

  He saw Fanshawe stride into the compound. He could tell from the quick no-nonsense pace that his superior was not in the best of moods. He sighed quietly to himself.

  “Morning,” Fanshawe said brusquely. “How are things going?”

  Morgan felt strangely composed and lethargically in control for some reason. His meeting with Adekunle seemed to have jolted him out of his incipient crack-up, shaped the random nature of his various problems, given him a direction to follow. At least he had to act now, however unsavoury those acts might be. He also had the feeling that things couldn’t get much worse—but that, he knew, was a dangerous assumption to make.

  “Well,” he said with a shrug in response to Fanshawe’s question, indicating at the same time Innocence’s body. “Not much change as you can see.” He was quite pleased with his insouciance; he decided it was a pose he should strive to adopt more often in future.