A Good Man in Africa (9 page)

The light was on above his front door but there was no other sign of life in the house. Where the hell were Friday and Moses? he wondered angrily. It was only a matter of thirty yards from the garage to the front door but in this rain he’d be soaked in seconds.

“UMBRELLA!” he bellowed in the direction of the house, hoping his voice would carry above the noise of the downpour. There was a brilliant flash of lightning, as if in sarcastic response to his faint cry, illuminating his garden in harsh monochrome for a brief instant, followed some moments later by a hill-cracking peal of thunder. Morgan restrained himself from shaking his fist at the dark sky as he sprinted splashily towards his house, leaping over the burbling stream that already gushed around
the doorstep, and flinging himself panting onto the verandah.

His house was a long squat bungalow, set in a generous garden dotted with small groves of frangipani and avocado trees and presided over by several towering casuarina pines. Only half the house—the two bedrooms and his study—was mosquito-proofed. The other half, consisting of an airy dining/sitting room, kitchen and pantry, was fronted by the usual wide verandah upon which he now damply paced. The inundating rain storm thundered on the roof and poured off the eaves in an extended sheet of water, turning the gravel gutters that surrounded the house into rushing streams that flowed across the wasted grass of the lawn to collect in an ever-widening pool at the bottom of the garden near the perimeter hedge of poinsettia. In the frequent flashes of sheet lightning Morgan could clearly see the silently expanding mini-lake, its surface tin-tacked by the heavy raindrops.

He slowly regained his breath, mildly alarmed that a thirty-yard dash should leave him panting this way, kicked off his sodden shoes and went through to the kitchen in search of his servants. There, he found Friday asleep, sitting with his head pillowed on his arms at the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the room. Leaving the light off he walked past him silently and looked out of the open kitchen door at the back garden. Beside the steps that led down from the kitchen stood an old table and, as he had expected, he saw his aged cook Moses sitting upon it—quite protected from the downpour by the eaves that projected a good six feet. Moses was sitting with his long shanks drawn up beneath him, staring out at the curtain of rain. He was puffing away on his foul-smelling pipe and by his side there was a grimy calabash and a glass full of cloudy, pale-green palm wine. Thunder barrages bracketed the sky overhead and the scene again flickered into ghostly life from the lightning. The weight of water falling on the earth seemed to have transformed the surface of the garden into a slow-moving, treacle-like tide. Water flowed, stopped, inched forward again; pools formed and broke, leaves and grass were transported short distances and dumped, and still the rain came down. It was a hell of a storm, Morgan thought.

Moses belched softly, turned to top up his glass and saw Morgan standing there with his hands on his hips. He threw down his pipe and leapt to his feet.

“Ah-ah. De rain, sah. I nevah go hear you one time, masta,” he said and ducked up the steps past Morgan, switching on the kitchen light and shaking Friday awake who immediately began a long explanation of his extreme tiredness.

“Shut up, Friday,” Morgan ordered. “One cheese omelette, please, Moses. And Friday, switch on my air-conditioner and bring me one bottle of beer.” He went into the sitting room and switched on the lights and the roof fan, happy to have caught his servants napping.

He was half way through his bottle of beer when Friday brought him his omelette and placed it on a side-table in front of him.

“
Ça va
, Masta?” he asked cheerfully.

“No it doesn’t,” Morgan said. “I need a bloody
fourchette
and bloody
couteau
, don’t I?” He shouted after Friday who’d dashed back to the kitchen, “Salt and pepper too!”

Friday was a very small, powerfully built man in his early twenties who had come over from his French colony in search of work. Morgan had felt smart and cosmopolitan when he’d employed him—the nearest thing to a French maid in Kinjanja he’d wittily bragged—but the little man was hopelessly inept, had never got to grips with the English language, and was cordially detested by Moses, Morgan’s cook. Moses, in contrast, was thin and lanky and really quite old. No one knew his exact age—including Moses—but he had a wrinkled grizzled face and there were many grey spirals in his hair which probably meant he was well over sixty. He was a sly old man who filched professionally from Morgan and refused to let the demands of his job interfere unduly with his easy-going life. He could cook omelettes, fish cakes, a kind of stew, chicken curry, make rhubarb crumble and sherry trifle and that was it. Every day the palm wine seller called at the kitchen door and Moses would buy a pint or two of the powerful drink. He cut up his own strong tobacco which he bought in moist strips like blackened bacon rinds and which he smoked in a tiny-bowled pipe that he always produced whenever he sat down to a tumbler of cloudy palm wine. What he could cook he cooked well, however, and Morgan found that he tired of the diet less frequently than he might have supposed. It was enlivened from time to time by dinner invitations and, whenever the mood took him or whenever the prospect of fish cakes palled, he would eat at one of the clubs,
in town or at the university, or at some of the Lebanese or Syrian restaurants whose kitchens were generally held to conform to minimal standards of hygiene.

When he had finished his omelette Morgan walked out to the verandah and peered into the night. The rain seemed to be abating, the thunder and lightning heading eastwards. He could hear the croaking of frogs and toads coming from the blackness.

He decided to go to bed. He knew what it was like after rain—every insect sprouted wings and took to the air in mad untrained flight. He told Friday and Moses to lock up and go home. He snibbed the corridor door behind him, hearing as he did so the rumble of the glass doors of the living room being slid shut, and walked up the passageway to his bedroom.

He had a quick shower and dried himself off. He sat on the edge of the bath and thought about Murray. How would he approach the man? How would he introduce the idea of the bribe? How would Murray react? He suddenly felt appalled that he, an official of Her Majesty’s Government’s diplomatic service, should be casually plotting in such a corrupt and criminal way, that his filthy luck had placed him in such vile and unhappy circumstances. In search of some solace he switched his mind to the sex he had enjoyed with Hazel earlier that evening. It distracted him for a minute or two, but slowly and inevitably a not wholly unpleasant sense of melancholy began to descend on him as it often did at such times. The house was quiet apart from the comforting hum of his air-conditioner, the rain appeared to have stopped, only the eaves still dripped into the gravel gutter-beds. He fancied he could hear the crickets starting up outside, brr-brr, brrr-brrr, telling the world how cold they felt.

His thoughts turned, appropriately for a moody exile, to home. He thought about his mother in Feltham, a kindly fun-loving widow who, so she had hinted in her last letter, might really, finally, be marrying Reg, her boyfriend of many years. Reg was a newsagent, a nice man; Morgan had known him all his life. He was quite bald but was one of that deluded crew who think that a damp lock of hair bisecting the gleaming pate from ear to ear will effectively persuade people otherwise. Reg was alright, Morgan thought warmly; he was friendly, liked a drink, got on well with his mother. So were Jill and Tony, he
added, his sister and brother-in-law. Yes, they were all nice; they rubbed along very happily whenever he went back home on leave.

But then a sudden anger flared up. They were all so bloody
ordinary
, he told himself ruthlessly, so depressingly unremarkable, so inoffensive. He thought of his father—an indistinct, enigmatic figure to him now—who had died when Morgan was fifteen. Keeled over from a coronary while helping a workman install a new dishwashing unit in a Heathrow cafeteria. Morgan occasionally gazed at his parents’ smiling posed faces in the family snapshot album and wondered how on earth he had developed the way he had: selfish, fat and misanthropic.

He gloomily heaved himself to his feet, his backside sore from the unyielding bath-edge. He went disconsolately through to the bedroom and flung himself on the bed. Everything was going wrong. He shut his eyes and thought about his day: averagely disastrous. First Priscilla’s engagement, next the Father Christmas fiasco under way, then Adekunle’s “bad news.” Now all he had to do was bribe Murray—he was doing well. He turned round abruptly and pulled a pillow over his head. Good God, he thought, what a can of worms, what a fucking snake pit. Murray too. Somehow everything came back to Murray. The man had marched into his life with all the tact of an invading army. Three months ago he hardly knew him, was only barely aware of what he looked like, and now he had to bribe him to help a devious politician pay for a crooked campaign. For an awful moment he thought he was going to cry mawkish, vinegary tears of self-pity, so he rudely sat himself upright, pounding pillows into shape with angry fists, and snatched up a paperback. He glanced at the title.
Hell Comes Tomorrow!
it screamed at him in vulgar red capitals. In a wave of premonitory disgust he flung it at the wall.

He switched out the bedside lamp and settled himself down, trying to get to sleep. He took uneasy, faltering stock of his day. Had he done anything he could be remotely proud of? Had he done anything good? Had he done anything thoughtful, unselfish or unmotivated? Had there been any event that wasn’t directed towards the sole end of furthering the material, physical and spiritual well-being of Morgan Leafy, Esquire? Well … no. He had to admit it: a definite, unqualified no. Thinking back he
ruefully acknowledged that he’d been rude, sulky, bullying, selfish, unpleasant, hypocritical, cowardly, conceited, fascist, etc., etc. A normal sort of day. But, he thought. Yes, but. Was he any different from anyone else in this stinking country, in this wide swarming world? Again, as far as he could see, as far as his experience had dictated, no. No was the only honest answer. As usual this brutal analysis did not bring with it much comfort. Unsettled and unhappy he turned over, closed his eyes and called on sleep.

The phone rang. It was beside his bed and its ring was, at this hour, loud and brain-curdling. As he picked up the receiver he glanced at the alarm clock. Twenty past twelve. He couldn’t have been asleep for more than ten minutes.

“Hullo, Leafy here,” he mumbled into the mouthpiece.

“Hello, Morgan? Sorry to bother you at this hour. It’s Arthur Fanshawe here.” Fanshawe’s voice was tense but solicitous.

“Arthur,” Morgan said. “Anything wrong?”

“Yes,” Fanshawe replied straightforwardly. “Something of a bugger actually. Can you get out here?”

“What? Now?” Morgan allowed more protest to creep into his tone than was wise.

“If you don’t mind.” Fanshawe was suddenly clipped, offended.

Morgan sat hunched on the edge of his bed. He rubbed his eyes. “Look, can you tell me what it is? I mean … are you sure I …?” Fanshawe’s tingling silence on the other end was eloquent. “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. ’Bye.” Morgan put the phone down. The stupid mad shit, he thought wrathfully, what the hell’s going on? As far as he could remember he wasn’t even on standby duty. It was Dalmire tonight. Had they disturbed Dickie’s beauty sleep?

Grumbling his doubt about this to himself, Morgan pulled on the clothes he had been wearing that day and splashed his face with water. Outside the rain had stopped and the dark moist night was dyspeptic with noises and mumblings. Toads burped, crickets trilled, bats swooped and beeped. As he walked across his verandah he saw squadrons of moths and flying ants battering around the front door light. Underfoot, his shoes crunched on the twitching drifts of myriads of exhausted insects, who had unfolded new wings at the onset of the rain and taken to the air for a brief joyous flight, lured by the glow of the hot bulb. His feet squelched on the mud of his garden path and driveway as he walked out towards his garage. Overhead the sky had cleared and the familiar wide canopy of stars shone down. You always saw more stars in Africa than you did back home, he thought.

The road to the Commission was quiet, a few taxis returning late-night revellers and one enormous articulated lorry thundering heedlessly down the road south, piled high with groundnut sacks. As he turned into the Commission’s car-park he was annoyed to find it empty. Dalmire had clearly not been disturbed. If this problem was so all-fired important, he asked himself testily, where were the other members of staff? The Commission building appeared deserted too, with no lights shining.

Morgan parked his car and headed briskly across the dark garden to the Fanshawes’ residence which, as he approached, he could see was lit up like a liner on both floors. He guessed the problem was a domestic one and rolled his eyes heavenwards. Again he noticed no other cars in the driveway. Morgan ascended the steps and rapped on the glass door of the sitting room. Through it he could see Mrs. Fanshawe and Priscilla sitting on one of the sofas. Priscilla had her arm round her mother’s broad shoulders. At Morgan’s cheery knock they both looked up in alarm, and Priscilla jumped to her feet and skipped across the room to open the door.

“Oh Morgan,” she said with relief in her voice, “I’m so glad you’ve come.”

The genuineness of her expression so astonished him that he almost failed to appreciate her trim beauty, her ruffled hair and the skimpiness of the Japanese housecoat she was wearing, the bottom of which stopped half way down her thighs.

“Hello, Morgan.” It was Mrs. Fanshawe. Morgan noticed that her eyes were red. Had she been crying? he wondered, never having seen her face register any of the softer emotions. “It’s so dreadful,” she whimpered, remaining hunched on the sofa, a handkerchief balled in her hand, her large body quite disguised by a massive pale blue candlewick dressing gown.