A Good Man in Africa (18 page)

“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 covered 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.

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.

“I like the suit, Morgan,” he said. He had a hoarse Teutonic drawl, as if he were just recovering from laryngitis. “A business suit, yes?”

“No,” Morgan said feeling embarrassingly spruced-up beside Muller’s rumpled ease. “I’m going on somewhere. I just popped in.”

“I didn’t know you were a friend of Sam’s,” Muller said.

“I’ve met him once or twice … Celia invited me.”

“Aah. The lovely Celia.” Muller waved his glass at the courtyard. “Quite a party. Have you seen the tarts? They say Adekunle flew some of them in from Lagos and Abidjan. He’ll be impressing a lot of people tonight. Still, I wish him luck.”

“Is that official BRD policy?” Morgan asked.

Muller laughed. “It won’t make much difference to us whoever wins. No, I’m speaking as a businessman. Sam buys a lot of wood from me and if he wins—well, you know how these things work—business will boom.”

Morgan was curious. “What does a Professor of Economics want with wood?”

“Hell, man,” Muller said. “He owns the biggest construction company in the Mid-West: Ussman Danda Ltd. Where have you been living these last years, Morgan?”

Morgan blushed. There was nothing in the Kingpin file on this. He knew the name, there were even commercials on the TV for it. “Is that common knowledge?” he asked.