1981 - A Good Man in Africa

by William Boyd; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Adekunle’s house was grand and looked twice the size of any other on the campus, probably built by Ussman Danda Ltd, Morgan thought. It was an imposing, square, two-storeyed building with a column-supported balcony running round the entire length of the first floor. Attached to the house was, on one side, a jumble of servants’ quarters and, on the other, a three-car garage. It was set in a large well-tended garden which was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. It looked like the residence of a state governor rather than the home of a professor of economics and Morgan wondered what Adekunle’s university colleagues thought of such conspicuous consumption. Two khaki-clad watchmen opened the iron gates and Morgan pulled into the drive and parked by the front door. Fanshawe had been beside himself with glee when Morgan informed him about the phone call and, not for the first time, wondered if his superior had told him about everything that was riding on the success of Project Kingpin. The plane tickets, apparently, were ready—just waiting for a date—and according to Fanshawe the beds in Claridges were turned down in expectation.

  Morgan rang the front-door bell and was shown by a white-uniformed steward into an airy sitting room which like most houses in Kinjanja was open to the garden and the breeze on two sides. The floors were wooden, the furniture light and Swedish-looking. Fine examples of Africana—masks, beaten bronze panels, carved calabashes—hung on the walls. He wondered if this was Celia Adekunle’s doing and suspected it was.

  She came into the room. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sam told me you were coming. I’m afraid he’s going to be a bit late.’ She was wearing a straight, pale, lime-green summery dress with a V-neck and no sleeves. Morgan realized it was the first time he’d seen her in European clothes. In the shade of the room and set offby the colour of her dress her tan looked very dark.

  ‘Oh I see,’ Morgan said. ‘Is it all right if I wait?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Please do. Would you like some tea?’ They had some tea and chatted aimlessly.

  ‘Lovely house,’ Morgan said. ’

  ‘Do you think so?’ she said without much enthusiasm. ‘We were hoping to move. I can’t stand the fence. Sam was going to build a house nearer town but,’ she gave a slight laugh, ‘he can’t afford it—these election expenses are terrible. The only trouble is that if he wins we’ll probably need a bigger fence,’ she didn’t look at all pleased at the prospect, ‘and guards.’

  ‘Don’t you want him to win?’ he asked.

  She looked at him critically. ‘It doesn’t really matter what I want,’ she said in a flat voice. She got to her feet and took a cigarette from a box on a coffee table in front of him. As she bent down to pick one out he saw the pale whiteness of her bra down the front of her V-neck. She raised her eyes and caught him looking.

  ‘Cigarette?’ she offered, then said, ‘No, I forgot. You’ve given up haven’t you.’ She looked at her watch, Morgan checked his: it was past four. ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked. ‘It’s a bit late for more tea.’ She called for the steward. ‘What’ll you have?’ she asked him.

  ‘Ooh…’ he tried to look as if he was thinking about it. ‘I’ll have…tell you what, I’ll just have a Coke.’

  ‘One Coke and one vodka and tonic,’ she directed the steward. She looked back at Morgan, a smile on her face.

  ‘Don’t smoke, don’t drink. Are you completely vice-free, Mr Leafy?’

  ‘Please, Morgan,’ he invited, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have my share,’ he said. She was a strange woman, he thought, there’s something curiously aggressive about her. He watched her resume her seat. Her hair was dry-looking, pulled back carelessly in a pony-tail; her eyes had that bruised, half-shut, heavy-lidded look he’d noticed before. Her crossed legs were very brown—even her toes were brown, he saw, where they peeped from her sandals. Her skin had that overtanned look where it loses its gloss and sheen and becomes dull and matt. He wondered if she were brown all over.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she said suddenly.

  Morgan was a bit taken aback. ‘I…I was admiring your tan,’ he said, flustered.

  ‘Well, I don’t have much else to do,’ she confessed. ‘I can lie out on the balcony there all day. Follow the sun round. It’s…quite private. The kids are away at boarding-school, there’s nothing here for me to do,’ she indicated the house. ‘Sometimes I go to the club in town in the mornings just to get away from the university, and the university wives. Yap yap gossip all day.’ She stabbed out her cigarette. ‘I’m often down there between nine and eleven week-days,’ she looked at him pointedly. ‘Do you go swimming, Morgan?’ she asked.

  Good Lord, he thought, this isn’t very subtle. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like swimming.’ There was a pause. He thought he should depressurize the atmosphere a little. ‘I shall have more time for it now,’ he said breezily. ‘Since the new man’s arrived. Taken over all my routine work.’

  She came over for another cigarette. ‘Is that all your immigration, visa application stuff?’ she asked nonchalantly.

  ‘That’s right. Shunted it over to Dalmire. Leave me free for other things.’ He didn’t mean that to be an innuendo and he hoped she wouldn’t interpret it that way. His libido was in very poor shape these days and he still had a week and a half to run on his quarantine.

  ‘But,’ she casually blew smoke into the air. ‘You, ah, no doubt still have overall control of that side of things.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Morgan said patronizingly. ‘Young Dalmire only does the routine stuff—doesn’t really know the ropes yet. Anything problematic still has to come through me.’

  ‘I see,’ she nodded, then looked up suddenly. ‘I think that sounds like Sam.’ She got to her feet. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Morgan, I know Sam won’t want to be disturbed.’ She walked towards the stairs. Morgan stood up. ‘I enjoyed our chat,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you at the club some morning this week.’ She skipped quickly up the stairs as Morgan heard Adekunle come through the front door. He turned to meet him.

  ‘My good friend Mr Leafy,’ Adekunle greeted him jovially, looking trussed-up and sweaty in a three-piece suit. He dumped a slim briefcase on an armchair and strode across the room, a pale brown palm extended. ‘How is everything going?’ he asked. ‘Has Celia been looking after you well?’

  ‘He what? Fanshawe squeaked in outrage, plucking at the tiny hairs of his moustache. ‘My God, the bloody nerve!’

  ‘Yes, definitely,’ Morgan said. ‘He wants two weeks at Claridges and a car with a driver.’

  Fanshawe looked shocked. ‘Good grief,’ he said. ‘Just who do these chappies think they are?’

  ‘And,’ Morgan went on. ‘He wants an open ticket, two in fact, and he wants to be met officially at the airport.’

  ‘Officially?’ Fanshawe shook his head in disbelief. ‘What did you say to all this?’

  Morgan paused. ‘I said it was OK…’ Fanshawe looked up in alarm. ‘Of course I said I’d have to clear it first—made no firm promises.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Fanshawe ran his hand over his head, smoothing down the smooth hair. ‘Just as well, as I’m not at all sure we can swallow all that, not sure at all.’

  ‘It should do the trick though,’ Morgan suggested. ‘Adekunle said that if we could arrange all this he’d forget about the other invitations.’

  ‘What other invitations?’ Morgan had never told him.

  ‘To Paris, Washington, Rome.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Fanshawe went pale. Morgan wondered just what he’d been telling the High Commissioner, what he’d guaranteed the mandarins in the Foreign Office. He saw suddenly that the man was as desperate to escape as he was: Project Kingpin was his passport out of Nkongsamba too. He watched Fanshawe drumming his fingers nervously on his desk top. ‘He’ll forget about them, you say?’ he asked.

  ‘So he assures me,’ Morgan said. ‘He says that he’s not prepared to sell Kinjanja round the globe at this stage.’ Morgan went on, trying to reassure him, ‘I mean, Adekunle apart, it make
s sense. Kinjanja was a British colony: it’s natural for him to come to us. And I think he’s bluffing to a certain extent. He doesn’t want the French influence to spread any more in West Africa, and the Americans are tied up in Vietnam.’

  Fanshawe looked at him. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But it wouldn’t do at all for him to go swanning off to these other countries. Especially if we give him what he asks for—I mean, that has to be a condition we lay down. Wouldn’t do at all,’ he repeated, ‘he hasn’t even been elected yet.’

  ‘I don’t think he could even if he wanted to. If he’s going to be in the UK for two weeks it doesn’t leave him much time for electioneering. He’s got to be on the scene here: polling day’s getting closer all the time and he’s a big man in the party.’

  Fanshawe brightened at this. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’ Morgan felt pleased with himself: he liked talking about the French and Americans in this way, enjoyed his confident analyses of the political situation. Fanshawe was putting a lot of faith in him, it was obvious.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do about his various requests,’ Fanshawe said, frowning with concentration. ‘They’re getting awfully important these elections,’ he said. ‘There are more oil finds in the river delta. Lots of British money in there now. New refinery being built.’ He spread his palms on the blotter and smiled weakly at Morgan. ‘Your reports have confirmed Adekunle as our man. The High Commissioner’s most impressed with your work, but there’s a lot riding on it, you know. More than a couple of weeks in Claridges. Oh yes, much more now.’ He paused, his frown still buckling his forehead. Morgan began to sense worry in the atmosphere, it seeped in through his pores. He wondered for a moment if Fanshawe was trying to put the wind up him—but then he realized he wasn’t that good an actor.

  ‘I’m sure we’ve made the right choice, Arthur,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Fanshawe said, waving his hand-as if to disperse a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘I’m sure you have.’

  Morgan walked out of the men’s changing room into the glare of the morning sun, suddenly conscious of the coruscating dazzle of his surfing shorts. Around his neck he had casually slung a towel, the ends of which hung down over his broad chest. He wasn’t too enamoured of public swimming, it made him hyper-aware of the inadequacy of his tan, the considerable size of his body and the countless millions of freckles that were sprinkled over it. Standing in front of the waist-high mirror in the changing room, inspecting himself before venturing outside, he had been alarmed, on presenting a profile of his torso, to see how far his breasts projected and vowed again to resume dieting and exercise.

  He strode with false confidence out onto the terrace, acutely aware of his breasts juddering beneath the slung towel. At the tables and loungers around the poolside sat the usual quota of bored wives, some with children too young for nursery school. There were no men apart from an old white-haired fellow who was relaxing in the water at the deep end, his elbows hooked over the guttering, his feet idly kicking beneath the surface. Morgan looked closely at him: he always and immediately suspected such immobile contentment to be a sign of a covert subaquatic piss, but on reflection decided that the old chap just seemed to be enjoying the sun. Morgan found two unoccupied loungers and removed his towel and watch. Celia Adekunle had said she would be at the pool by half past ten. She was usually prompt.

  He walked over to the shallow end and dived into the cool blue water. He glided beneath the surface enjoying the sensation of the water flowing over his skin, then broke through into the sunlight and set off down the length of the pool in a powerful and splashy crawl, driving the old man away from his comfortable perch. One of Morgan’s flailing arms thwacked him across a retreating leg.

  ‘So sorry,’ Morgan called, enjoying himself, ‘can’t seem to change course once I’ve started.’

  ‘Aaagh! Christ!’ Morgan shouted as a spatter of cold water landed on his hot back. He turned round and squinted into the sun and saw Celia Adekunle leaning above him wringing out her wet hair over his body.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, flopping onto the lounger and flinging her arms wide as she faced the sun. ‘Whew,’ she gasped, ‘Water’s lovely.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Morgan said, drying his back. ‘You could give someone a heart attack like that.’ He smiled. This was their third meeting by the pool in as many days. One morning he had been driving across Nkongsamba en route for the Commission and had spontaneously decided to call into the club. As she had told him he would, he found Celia there. They met again the following day, Morgan equipped with his swimming trunks this time, and they had swum, sunbathed and talked. She had left just after midday, but not before setting up this third meeting. Morgan found he enjoyed being with her. As he had noticed at their first encounter there was an implied intimacy in their exchanges, an unspoken familiarity, as if they possessed some private knowledge about each other, sensed instinctively the shared motives beneath the banter, but enjoyed the subterfuge nonetheless. He couldn’t define it any more coherently than that, or even explain why it should have arisen in the first place.

  He watched her settle on the lounger. Her eyes were closed against the sun, so he could observe her openly. She was wearing a yellow bikini, her body was thin and very brown. Her breasts were small and her legs thin with prominent boney knees. One puckered inch of appendectomy scar showed above the top of her bikini pants. The skin on her stomach was loose, leathery, almost, from the sun and creased as the result of her two children, he suspected. Looking at her this dispassionately he had to admit that there was nothing that physically really attracted him to her, and this perplexed him somewhat.

  He lay back on his towel, shielding his eyes with a forearm. This being the case, he wondered, why was he spending so much time with her? Well, he told himself, she was potentially a prime source for information on Adekunle and the KNP—which was the explanation he would offer if Fanshawe ever saw fit to question him about his mornings at the pool. He had, certainly, learned that a considerable portion of Adekunle’s private fortune had gone to buy certain influential figures very expensive gifts, and had ascertained that Ussman Danda Ltd was becoming dangerously overdrawn at the bank. But otherwise he had discovered little that he didn’t know already: Adekunle, it appeared, didn’t talk much about his political business; in- fact, so Celia said, he hardly spoke to her at all. It was, she stressed, virtually a token marriage now. This information had been supplied the day before. Morgan had accompanied her to her car after their swim. After she told him this there had been a pause. Morgan had said, ‘Oh I see.’

  ‘You know,’ she had said abruptly, looking at him with disturbing directness, ‘we needn’t meet here. We could go somewhere else.’

  ‘Somewhere else?’ he had said artlessly. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.’

  She had made a small grimace, as though it was a response she had expected. She hunched her shoulders. ‘One afternoon,’ she said frankly, ‘we could go for a drive.’

  He had felt touched and flattered by the candour of her approach, sensing vaguely the emotional effort required to make it. He was flattered because it was the first time this had happened to him—at least in daylight and under conditions of sobriety. He thought of his quarantine period, still with several days to run, and said with as much respect and gentlemanly understanding as he could marshal, laying his hand on her arm, ‘No, Celia, I don’t really think we should go for a drive, not now anyway.’

  She had laughed with a hollow gaiety, and shook her hair. ‘No, you’re right,’ she said. ‘Silly of me. I must be getting all confused.’ She paused. ‘Thanks though,’ she said earnestly and climbed into the car. She wound down the window. ‘We can still meet tomorrow, can’t we? Same time?’

  As he lay back now he asked himself if he would have been so thoughtful and reticent if he hadn’t been working the dreaded gonococci out of his system. He didn’t press himself too strongly on that point, didn’t insist on an answer: it was su
fficient, surely, that he’d behaved commendably, taken care that there was no reason for Celia to think she’d done anything cheap. Out of the corner of his eye he watched her turn over and unclip her bikini top to present a bare back to the sun. As she awkwardly attempted to slip her arms out of the straps one breast suddenly hung free like a bell before it was resnugged in its bra cup. He knew, then, that he was kidding himself: his mornings with Celia Adekunle had nothing to do with information-gathering.