A Good Man in Africa

1

Morgan well remembered the first occasion he had met Dr Murray. At the time he hardly knew him. Murray never came to the Commission cocktail parties, even though his name was often mentioned as most of the British in the university had fallen sick — or their children had at one time or another — and had therefore called on Murray’s services. Morgan had heard nothing but good: the three university clinics functioned more efficiently than ever, rabid dogs had been cleared from the campus thanks to the registration and inoculation schemes he had introduced, everyone was satisfied. Murray was held to be — despite a certain formality of manner — a fine doctor whose diagnoses were invariably correct and whose cures were effective. Morgan had taken scant notice of this sort of cocktail party chit-chat. He was not interested in the doctor or his clinics, he had enjoyed robust good health since his arrival in Kinjanja, apart from the odd upset tummy or septic mosquito bite and had never needed to utilize the University Health Service, to which the white members of the Commission staff were officially attached.

One morning, shortly after Morgan’s relationship with Hazel had begun, he was discussing the thorny problems of efficient contraception in Africa with Lee Wan at the bar of the university club. Lee Wan was sitting on a bar stool, a considerable portion of his brown leathery pot-belly visible through the straining gaps in his olive green shirt.

‘Listen, my boy,’ he said, swirling the ice cubes in his pink gin with a brown finger. ‘You want to get that popsy on to these contraceptive pills, p.d.q. Forget your rubber johnnies, your PL’s — unless you can get a pal to bring you some out from the UK.’ Lee Wan was a naturalized British citizen, and spiced his speech with a curious mixture of archaic slang and what he considered were bona fide English expressions. He had studiously lost all trace of a Malay accent. ‘Don’t use the local rubbish for Christ’s sake,’ he-went on, dropping his voice for the sake of the two ladies sitting near the bar. ‘It’s like poking through a glove.’ He wheezed with laughter at his simile and slapped Morgan on the arm. ‘A bloody sheepskin glove,’ he choked. He wiped his eyes. ‘My God,’ he gasped with hilarity, ‘My dear God…Simeon,’ he called to the barman. ‘Let’s have another two gins here.’

Morgan had smiled at Lee Wan’s joke but not too widely. Sometimes he thought the tubby Malay as vile and disgusting a creature as he had ever met and felt guilty for enjoying his company. He was mildly repulsed by the turn the conversation had taken and he looked out onto the bright pool terrace from the cool shade of the ground floor bar. Outside, water splashed over a modern cuboid fountain and two tiny children shrieked and played on the concrete surround. Nearby their mother took advantage of the burst of sunshine to augment her tan.

It was mid-September. Most of Nkongsamba’s expatriates had been away in Europe on leave and were gradually returning to take up their work again after the summer’s break, which coincided with Kinjanja’s rainy season. Morgan had taken his last leave back in March and with Fanshawe and Jones back in Britain he had been alone in the Commission for the last two months. He had found time heavy on his hands, what with the slack volume of work, the daily steaming downpour and the clubs quiet and torpid. He had been fairly happy to renew his friendship with Lee Wan and had soon been roped in to bar-crawls round Nkongsamba, perilous boozing sessions in Lee Wan’s campus bungalow and gut-expanding curry lunches on Sundays. It had been, on reflection, an unpleasant period of debauch that left him buried for short periods under heaps of recriminations. Still, he thought, it had seen him through the rainy season, the worst part of the Kinjanjan year, and he had met Hazel.

Morgan looked at his watch. The Fanshawes were arriving after lunch at Nkongsamba’s small airport, flying up from the capital, and he was due to meet them there with the official Commission car. An advance letter from Fanshawe had informed him that their daughter was coming out with them to stay for a while. Morgan wondered vaguely what the daughter of Arthur and Chloe Fanshawe would look like. Jones had returned a week ago from his holiday in Swansea or Aberystwyth or somewhere Welsh; the rains had finished too. Life, he thought, would perhaps crank itself to its feet and try to be a little more tolerable.

Morgan accepted a new gin from Simeon and topped it up with tonic. He decided to make this his last: it wouldn’t do to turn up at the airport and breathe alcohol all over the Fanshawes. He leant back against the bar and idly enjoyed the sparkle of sun on the pool water, finding the splashing of the fountain pleasantly soothing. It wasn’t such a bad life, he thought, sipping the chill drink: the weather was fine, he had status in the community, a reasonable salary, big house, servants and, he smiled with self-satisfaction, he had a black girlfriend with fabulous breasts. This brought him back to the recent topic under discussion.

‘It’s all very well for you,’ he remarked to Lee Wan, ‘but I can hardly ask for a gross of Durex Fetherlite to be brought in with the diplomatic bag.’ Lee Wan spluttered into his gin and pounded his knee with mirth. Morgan smiled: he wasn’t such a bad old chap was old Lee, he thought, revising his earlier uncharitable opinion. Real colonial character, good value, good man to have around.

‘Anyway,’ Morgan said. ‘Where do you get these contraceptive pills from?’

‘Send her to a doctor,’ Lee Wan advised.

‘Mmm…’ he countered, ‘but how much is that going to set me back? Can’t you get them at a chemist?’

Lee Wan found this funny too. ‘God, you lazy crumpet-merchant,’ he said admiringly to Morgan. ‘You’re shafting yourself stupid and you don’t want to spend a penny. Christ Almighty, man.’ He thought for a moment and then suggested, ‘You could try Murray perhaps. He might let you have some. All the white wives out here are on oral contraceptives and Librium. Ha ha,’ he gave a little laugh. ‘That’s Africa for you, eh? trouble-free sex and tranquillizers. What do they call it? Post-pill paradise or something. Load of nonsense. Never seen a more neurotic, glum bunch in my life.’

‘Do you think that Murray might give me some?’ Morgan mused. ‘I mean, do you know him well? Is he that sort of chap?’

‘Oh yes,’ Lee Wan said expansively. ‘My old friend Alex Murray? Tell him you’re a chum of mine.’

‘Might just do that,’ Morgan said. ‘I’ll drop into his clinic on the way to the airport. Here,’ he said, clinking his glass against Lee Wan’s, ‘drink up. I’ve just got time for another before lunch. Simeon? Two gins here, chop-chop.’

♦

Morgan drove through the university campus following Lee Wan’s directions to Murray’s clinic. The Federal University of Nkongsamba was the largest in the country and was set in an expansive well-appointed campus on which everything was contained including houses for the senior staffand a village for the junior staff and servants. All told there were upward of 20,000 people within its boundaries. Morgan drove easily along pretty tree-lined roads towards the administrative centre of the university. On either side of him were the fecund gardens and sprawling bungalows inhabited by the senior staff. The pale asbestos roofs seemed to be flattened under the weight of the midday sun, driving the walls inch by inch into the hard ground. Morgan had eaten at the club restaurant: a rather stringy roast chicken and half a bottle of wine which, on top of the gins, had combined to give him a slight nagging headache.

He passed the new and splendid university bookshop. A workman was painting out a graffito which read O TE KNP. Ah yes, Morgan smiled to himself, the elections: they should be good for a laugh. Beyond the bookshop lay the university administrative offices, the central assembly hall, the arts theatre, the senate building and a wide piazza dominated by a high clocktower. Between this complex and the main gate a mile off, was a broad straight swathe of tree-lined dual carriageway. It was an impressive piece of landscaping and was known to the expatriate university staff as the Champs-Elysees. Morgan turned off it and drove down a narrow road to Murray’s clinic. It was composed of two senior staff bungalows linked into one. Behind it stood a square two-storey sick-bay containing two wards with a dozen beds in total. Serious cases had to be despatched to the capital where there was a large American-financed teaching hospital.

The car park was busy with cars. Squatting in the shade of the verandah were three African mothers with sick children. Morgan walked uneasily past these tiny wracked faces and went into the main waiting room. On the wall was a prominent notice detailing hours for students (7-10), junior staff (10–12), and senior staff (12-2). Morgan checked his watch — five to two — he had just made it but he couldn’t afford to hang around: the Fanshawes were due to arrive at a quarter to three. The rows of black plastic chairs were occupied by various senior staff and Morgan smiled at a couple of faces he recognized. The building was clean and functional and the familiar brain-pickling smell of hospital disinfectant pervaded the atmosphere. In the far wall was a hatchway with the sign ‘reception’ written above it. Behind a glass window sat a dapper little clerk. Morgan approached the guichet. It was like a bank or a railway station.

‘Good afternoon, sah,’ the clerk greeted him.

Morgan leant on the narrow counter. ‘I’d like to see Dr Murray please,’ he said. ‘As soon as possible.’ He glanced at his watch to indicate pressing time.

‘Dr Obayemi and Dr Rathmanatathan are on surgery today. Please take a seat, your name will be called.’

Morgan wasn’t used to this non-preferential treatment, but he’d met this bureaucratic self-importance many times before and he knew how to handle it. ‘Is Dr Murray actually here?’ he asked inoffensively.

‘Yes, sah,’ said the clerk. ‘But he is not taking surgery.’

Morgan smiled icily. ‘Will you tell him that Mr Leafy from the Commission is here. Mr Leafy. The Commission. Yes. Go on. You can tell him.’ Morgan thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. These little men, he said to himself, you just have to know how to treat them.

The clerk came back in two minutes. ‘Dr Murray will be here soon,’ he said peevishly. ‘Please take a seat.’

Morgan allowed triumph briefly to light up his face, then sat down. Various doors and a passageway led off the waiting room, the floor was terrazzo tiling, there were no paintings or posters on the walls, just a clock, and no magazines to read. The afternoon heat outside made the room warm and muggy.

Five minutes later Murray appeared down the passageway. Morgan rose to his feet expectantly but Murray didn’t beckon him forward. Instead he came on in to the room. Morgan vaguely recognized him: he appeared to be around fifty, was tall and slim wearing grey tropical-weight flannels, a white shirt and blue tie. He had short wavy grey-brown hair and a weather-beaten freckled look to his face. He held out his hand. Morgan shook it. It was cool and felt dry and clean. Morgan was conscious of his own sweaty palm and the fact that his fingernails needed cutting.

Murray introduced himself. ‘I’m Alex Murray,’ he said. His gaze was direct and evaluating. ‘I don’t think we’ve met before.’

‘Morgan Leafy,’ Morgan said. ‘I’m First Secretary at the Commission.’

‘What can I do for you, Mr Leafy?’ Murray had a noticeable Scottish accent, plain and unlocatable. Morgan took half a step closer to him.

‘Actually I’d like to see you about something,’ he said, a little discomfited at having to explain in mid-waiting room. He sensed people’s attentions turning towards him.

‘Oh,’ Murray said. ‘A health matter. I thought this was Commission business — the way you had my clerk introduce you.’

‘No,’ Morgan admitted. ‘It’s a personal matter.’ Murray eyed the clock which had ticked on past two. Morgan interpreted his glance and added, ‘I was here before two.’

‘What are your objections to my colleagues?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I take it you have some objections to seeing the two doctors who are on surgery today. I’m not,’ he concluded pointedly.

This was going a bit far, Morgan thought, he was becoming tired with this grilling. Who did Murray think he was talking to? Some lead-swinging undergraduate? It was time to throw a little weight about.

‘I’ve been at the Commission a couple of years now,’ he said with a confident smile. ‘As we haven’t had the pleasure of meeting and as this is my first visit to the clinic I thought I might mix business…with business. If you see what I mean?’ He paused to allow his genial authoritative tones to sink in. ‘I’ve absolutely no objection to Dr Obayemi or Dr Rathna…math…what’s-his-name…’

‘Dr Rathmanatathan. What’s-her-name.’

‘Yes, quite. But they aren’t British — I assume — and you are. And as I haven’t seen you up at any of our Commission do’s or get-togethers I thought it might be, you know, nice.’ That should do the trick, he thought, though he resented having to invent a reason in public. Murray made no apologies.

‘Come this way,’ was all he said and led Morgan down the passage to his consulting room. It was large, uncluttered and bare of decoration, containing a desk, two chairs, a high examining couch and a folding screen. The bottom half of the windows were painted white. Through the top half Morgan could see a bough of a tree and a corner of the sick-bay. An air-conditioner was set into the wall; the cool was delicious. They both sat down.

‘Marvellous machines,’ said Morgan amicably, ‘saved Africa for the European, mnah-ha,’ he gave a brief chuckle. After the guarded, slightly frosty nature of their exchange outside, and remembering what he was in fact there for, he was concerned to establish a more amenable atmosphere.

Murray, however, seemed not prepared to indulge in any preliminaries. He went straight to the point. ‘What exactly is the problem?’ he asked.

Morgan was surprised at this. ‘Well,’ he said, somewhat flustered. ‘It was Lee Wan who suggested I come and see you. About my little difficulty.’ He smiled in the way that lets the listener know he’s about to hear an intimacy of sorts — a trifle silly, but only too understandable between men of the world.

‘Yes,’ Murray said curdy. ‘Go on.’

‘Oh. Right. I’ve, ah, got this girlfriend, you see.’

‘Is she pregnant?’

This was all wrong, Morgan thought, it shouldn’t be going this way. Murray had screwed up his eyes slightly as if a bright beam of light were shining in them.

‘Lord no,’ Morgan tried laughter again, but to his ears it sounded uneasy, almost perverse. ‘No no. That’s what I’m interested in preventing. You see I was hoping you could prescribe the pill for her, the contraceptive…Lee Wan suggested that you…that it might be possible.’ To his dismay Morgan felt his ears beginning-to warm with the onset of a blush.

Murray leant forward. His eyes were cold. ‘Let’s get a couple of things clear before we go any further, Mr Leafy,’ he said evenly. ‘First Mr Lee Wan doesn’t run this clinic so his knowledge of the services we offer is not to be relied on.’

‘Gracious,’ Morgan protested. ‘I wasn’t trying to suggest…’

‘Second,’ Murray went on regardless, ‘if this ‘girlfriend’ of yours is a member of the university send her along at the relevant time and we’ll see what we can do. If she’s not, then I’m sorry. She’ll have to go elsewhere.’

‘Well, she isn’t actually,’ Morgan said apologetically. ‘She’s a young, ah, girl I met — from the town…I just thought…’ He felt a complete fool.

Murray sat back in his chair and pointed a biro at Morgan. ‘Mr Leafy,’ he said in a more reasonable voice. ‘You can’t honestly expect me to provide oral contraceptives for all the girlfriends of my patients.’ He smiled. ‘Every tart in Nkong-samba would be queueing up outside the door.’ He got to his feet, the meeting was over. Morgan pushed back his chair as Murray came round his desk. ‘Take her to a doctor in town. Shouldn’t cost you too much.’ He put his hand on the doorknob. ‘Can I give you a word of advice, Mr Leafy?’ Murray said. ‘I’ve been in Africa over twenty years now and I’ve seen a lot of young men in here, very like you, enjoying certain freedoms that the life out here offers.’ He paused, as though debating whether to go on. Til, be frank. If you’re having sex regularly with a girl…from town, it’s a good idea to use the sheath. It’s a barrier of sorts against infection. It can save a lot of trouble and embarrassment.’

Morgan felt outraged; it was like being lectured to by your headmaster on the perils of masturbation. He tried to make his voice as icy as possible. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary. This girl doesn’t live in a brothel you know, she’s perfectly respectable.’

‘Good,’ said Murray. He seemed quite unconcerned. ‘It’s just something I point out, as a matter of course. A piece of advice, that’s all.’

♦

Fine, Morgan thought blackly, well you can stick your advice up your tight Scottish arse. He couldn’t believe it, British people just didn’t speak to the Commission stafflike that, they were respectful, deferential. He’d never been so humiliated, so disgracefully spoken down to, so…

He crunched the gears and drove off with gravel spattering from his rear wheels. It was incredible, he told himself as he roared out of the university gates, Murray just assumed he was screwing some tart, took it for granted she was black, it went without saying she’d be diseased. The fact that he was right on two counts at least didn’t matter a damn. He smiled cynically to himself: Lee Wan was an appalling judge of character.

He was still fulminating as he pulled into Nkongsamba’s small airport. He saw Peter, the Commission’s driver, standing beside the official gleaming black Austin Princess. Morgan parked his car and walked over to join him. The heat was intense and Morgan felt the sun burn through his thin hair, roasting his scalp. The haze rising off the apron in front of the low airport building made the tarmac look as though it was on fire, about to burst into flames. His eyes were dazzled by flaring spangles of light exploding off the chrome fenders and glasswork of the parked cars. The Kinjanjan flag hung limply down the flagpole beside the squat control tower. Morgan took his sunglasses out of his breast pocket and put them on. Everything calmed down; the colours looked less bleached, the windscreens were striped and speckled like mackerel.

‘Plane on time, Peter?’ he asked the driver.

Peter saluted. ‘Ten minutes delay, sah,’ he said, grinning, exposing the prodigious gaps between his teeth.

‘Oh bloody hell,’ Morgan said angrily. He inspected the car, the polished sides reflecting his body back, crushing him like a concertina, making him look like a walking box. He ran a finger round his sweaty collar and straightened his tie.

He strolled across the car park to the airport building, a modern prefabricated structure. Inside it was only marginally cooler. An African family sat at a table in front of a small refreshment bar. A military policeman dozed by the arrivals door. Outside on the tarmac stood an ancient Dakota in the Kinjanjan Airways livery, one engine nacelle draped with a tarpaulin. In the shade cast by the fuselage two mechanics slept on straw mats.

Morgan hoped everyone was awake in the control tower. He went over to the refreshment bar. Beside it stood a revolving rack of well-thumbed magazines. He selected a two-month old Life and flicked through it. Muddy terrified GIs in Vietnam; mind-boggling shots of the Earth, seen from a space-probe; a centre-spread feature on a movie-star’s Bel Air château. Life.

The family at the table were all wearing their best clothes. The husband sported yellow and purple robes, the young wife, her face paled with powder, was in silvery lace, a massive knotted head-scarf towering on her head, the two little boys in scarlet pyjama-suits. They were probably meeting an important relative. The little boys were noisily draining soft drinks. It seemed like a good idea to Morgan, especially as above the front of the bar it enticingly advertised ‘Coca-Cola. Ice Cold.’

Morgan looked over the bar. A sulky girl in a tight faded dress sat on a beer crate. ‘I’ll have a Coke, please,’ Morgan said. She slowly rose to her feet and walked across to the bottle cooler. Lassitude certainly ruled here, he remarked to himself, wiping a bead of sweat from his eyebrow. He knew that his pale blue shirt, fresh this morning, would now have two soup-plate sized dark navy stains at either armpit, and possibly an intermittent streak down his spine. He should have worn a white one, he thought angrily, it was going to look marvellous when he greeted the Fanshawes’ daughter, as if he were the ‘before’ sequence of an underarm deodorant advert. He’d just have to keep his hands pinned to his sides.

The girl behind the bar idly searched through the bottles in the cooler. She had powerfully muscled buttocks that caused the dress to bunch in tight creases across the small of her back.

She selected a bottle and brought it over to the bar. Her eyes were blank with boredom and fatigue. She was about to lever the top from the bottle when Morgan noticed it was a Fanta Orange. ‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘Wait. I ask for Coca-Cola,’ he dropped naturally into pidgin English, unconsciously adopting its thick-tongued, nasal accents.

‘No Coke,’ the girl said, and flipped the top off the bottle with her opener. She chose a straw and dropped it in. ‘One shilling,’ she demanded.

Morgan felt the ribbed bottle. Warm. ‘Why he nevah cold?’ he asked.

‘Machine done broke,’ she said, shuffling back to her seat with the shilling.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Make you give me one Seven-Up instead.’ Warm lemonade would be more bearable than warm sweet orange, just.

The girl looked at him as if to say don’t fight it, mac. ‘Only Fanta,’ she flatly pronounced.

Bloody typical, Morgan thought as he took a reluctant sip at the cloying warm liquid, bloody typical. His headache was getting worse.

The Fanshawes’ plane — a Fokker Friendship — proved to be forty-five minutes late. Morgan watched it turn and bank over Nkongsamba, the sun flashing on its wings, and straighten up for its approach to the runway. He called Peter into the arrivals hall to help carry the luggage. The plane landed and taxi-ed onto the apron, coming to a halt beside the Dakota. The sleeping mechanics did not stir. Steps were wheeled out and a trolley trundled over to collect the cases. The Fanshawes were first to appear: Mrs in a creased pink dress and matching turban, Fanshawe himself looking hot in a brown suit. But it was the daughter that engaged Morgan’s attention. She was far more attractive than a knowledge of her parents could have ever led him to expect: mid-twenties, he calculated, wearing a short white dress with a pattern of red dice all over it, her face shadowed by a white straw hat with a very large floppy brim. Morgan informed the sleepy MP that this was the Deputy High Commissioner arriving and he snapped out a salute as Fanshawe came through the door.

‘Morgan,’ Fanshawe said. ‘Glad to see you. Been waiting long?’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ Morgan lied, anxious to please. ‘Enjoy your leave?’ he asked Mrs Fanshawe, who looked tired and sweaty. Morgan noticed she was limping, her feet, swollen from the flight, bulging out of high-heeled shoes. She managed a weak smile of assent.

‘Priscilla darling,’ she called to her daughter who was selecting a red vanity case from the pile of luggage that had been deposited in the arrivals hall. ‘Come and meet Mr Leafy.’

Priscilla came over, taking off her stupid hat. Morgan saw firm legs, a trace of hockey-player’s calves, slimmish body and unimaginably sharply pointed breasts, or sharply pointed bra, perk beneath the cotton material. He looked into the face below the fringe and saw the supercilious plucked eyebrows and privileged, lazy eyes. He saw too the unfortunate ski-jump nose. But he ignored all this, he didn’t care, he was thinking elatedly: she is for me, she is more than I could have hoped for, beyond my wildest dreams, this girl is the one I have been waiting for.

‘Phew,’ she said. ‘Terribly hot!’ The accent was gratingly posh. Morgan wondered if this was oblique comment on the widening stains beneath his armpits. For a panicky moment he debated whether — not daring to look down — the damp circles had spread across his chest to meet beneath his tie.

‘Priscilla,’ said her mother, putting an end to further speculation. ‘This is Mr Leafy, our First Secretary.’

‘How do you do, Mr Leafy,’ she said, shaking hands with him.

‘Morgan, please.’ He smiled his most winning smile.

The ladies were shortly ensconced in the oven of the waiting car. There were yelps of discomfort as thighs and buttocks made contact with the burning leather upholstery.

‘Good Lord, it’s hot,’ Fanshawe exclaimed, as he and Morgan stood supervising Peter loading luggage into the boot. ‘Nothing but heavy frost and fog our last week home.’

‘Sounds sublime,’ Morgan ventured enviously.

Fanshawe rubbed his hands together, looking speculatively around the airport car park. ‘Very interesting few months ahead, Morgan, very. Bags to discuss,’ he added keenly.

‘Have we?’ Morgan said. He couldn’t think what Fanshawe was referring to.

‘The elections,’ he enthused. ‘At Christmas. Oh yes yes. Very important.’ He paused. ‘I’ve been briefed of course. Unofficially mind you, but its clear what has to be done.’ His eyes were alight with excitement. ‘It’s a golden opportunity.’

Morgan, still baffled, raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?’ he said.

‘Oh yes. Astonishing stroke of luck. For us that is.’ He laughed to himself quietly. ‘They’re even flying us out a new expat, staff member, take over routine duties, leave our hands more free. Should be here in a couple of weeks.’

‘Our hands?’

Before Fanshawe could enlarge on his cryptic fervour his wife stuck her pink moist face out of the rear window. ‘Arthur,’ she exclaimed angrily, ‘we’re roasting in here.’

As Fanshawe climbed into the car he said conspiratorially over his shoulder, ‘see you tomorrow. We’ve got a Royal visit too, well, semi-Royal. Christmas, it’s all happening then.’

As the car drove off Morgan thought the girl gave him a little wave. Just in case she had, he waved back.

2

Fanshawe called Morgan into his office the next day and explained matters in greater detail. It seemed that some people he had seen at the Foreign Office while he was on leave were concerned about the coming elections in Kinjanja. Kinjanja’s recently discovered oil reserves showed every sign of being more substantial than was at first estimated, and as a result the question of who won the next election had assumed a far greater importance within the unstable sphere of West African politics. Some preliminary sounding-out had already been done on the major parties in the country and one had emerged as being potentially more pro-British than the others. This party also stood a reasonable chance of unseating the present unpopular government and accordingly all four Deputy High Commissioners had been enjoined by the FO cautiously to evaluate the regional power bases of this party, calculate its true motives and alliances and assess its potential as a possible friend to Britain, one who would secure, maintain or even encourage her interests. Fanshawe related this quickly as if it were official gospel. But then his agitation became noticeably more visible. ‘The party in question,’ he said, ‘as you’ve probably guessed, is the Kinjanjan National Party, the KNP.’ Morgan hadn’t guessed; he had made a big effort to learn as little as possible about the coming elections. But he nodded sagely all the same. ‘Anyway,’ Fanshawe continued, ‘its nominal leader is some old Emir from the north — an established religious and tribal figurehead, but who’s respected and has a loyal following. What’s more important as far as we are concerned are its two young Turks — so to speak.’ Morgan forced, then wedged, his slackening features into a semblance of passionate interest, which involved knitting his brow into a gnarled frown and taking his bottom lip between his teeth. ‘Yes,’ Fanshawe went on, ‘one of them is a lawyer — Gunlayo or something — based in the capital, who’s their legal brain and constitutional expert but the other one, the one with responsibility for foreign policy and international affairs is…guess who?’

Morgan hadn’t the faintest. He went ‘ah’ and ‘mmm’ a few times and scratched his head, eventually admitting that Fanshawe had got him there.

‘Well,’ Fanshawe said triumphantly. ‘Wait for it…Sam Adekunle,’ he announced. ‘Our very own Sam Adekunle, Professor of Economics and Business Management at the University of Nkongsamba.’ Morgan wondered why this was so significant, but he felt sure that Fanshawe would eventually get round to enlightening him. ‘Marvellous stroke of luck,’ Fanshawe insisted. ‘Here we are stuck miles up country, a quiet little backwater and it turns out we’ve got this political bigwig on our doorstep.’

‘Yes,’ Morgan said slowly, ‘Extraordinary luck.’ He shifted in his seat, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, nodded a few times and repeated the word extraordinary.

‘You see what this means,’ Fanshawe pressed on, leaving his desk and going to stand by the window. He clasped his hands behind his back and raised himself up and down on tiptoe. ‘Our analysis and evaluation is going to be of key importance.’ He whirled round suddenly to face Morgan, who gave a little jump of alarm at the unexpected movement. ‘We’re in the best position to find out what makes the KNP tick, what it thinks, what its ambitions are. What we tell the FO is going to carry a lot of weight. A lot of weight,’ he repeated. ‘Adekunle’s position in the party makes him, from the UK’s point of view, the most interesting man in the KNP. And,’ the glee in his voice was unmistakeable, ‘the man’s right bang on our doorstep!’

Morgan’s brain was sluggish that morning, he just couldn’t concentrate. ‘That’s marvellous news for you, Arthur,’ he said distractedly. ‘What do you propose to do exactly?’

‘Oh no,’ Fanshawe said. ‘Not me.’

Morgan smiled. ‘Sorry?’ he said pleasantly.

‘Not me,’ Fanshawe said. ‘You.’

‘Me?’ Morgan suddenly woke up.

‘Of course. I can’t possibly start investigating or encouraging Kinjanjan political parties, can I?’

Morgan wondered what he meant by encouraging. ‘I suppose not,’ he said, his voice heavy with trepidation. ‘But I don’t exactly see what I can do…I mean, I’ve got a hell of a lot on already and…’

‘Why do you think we’re getting a new member of staff?’ Fanshawe interrupted. ‘To relieve you of the daily routine, give you a free hand, let you really get to work.’ He gazed at Morgan as if entranced. ‘This is what it’s all about, Morgan, real work. Real diplomacy. Not this endless socializing, mindless official business. No, you can really do something positive here, something creative. For your country.’

Morgan had bowed his head from acute painful embarrassment as this tirade had progressed and was screwing the knuckles of each forefinger into his temples. What in hell’s name, he asked himself, was the old goat bleating on about? ‘For your country’, something creative for his country; give him a cocktail party any day. ‘Excuse me, Arthur,’ he said. ‘But what did you mean just then by ‘encouraging’?’

‘Coming to that,’ Fanshawe said. ‘The way I see it, your mission’—there was a tremor in his voice as he said this word—‘is to try to get to know Adekunle personally if possible. Mix with him socially. Try to find out everything you can. Not the usual guff they fill their manifestos with but the — what do they call it? — ‘realpolitik’. You know,’ he seemed to be growing frustrated at Morgan’s lack of enthusiasm, ‘realities, hard facts that we can pass on. I want you to write everything up in a report, anything you can get on Adekunle and the KNP. I’ll take it from there, liaise with the Commissioner in the capital, get the gist back to Whitehall.’

Oh yes? thought Morgan, I don’t like the sound of that. Fanshawe seemed to sense this and hastily countered. ‘Of course, I can tell you confidentially, Morgan, that a really top class piece of work here could, well, do us — our, ah, careers — no harm. Let’s face it, I think we both agree Nkongsamba’s not a major posting, not exactly the summit of our ambitions…I think I’m not going too far to say that both of us wouldn’t object to moving on somewhere a little more exalted. When there’s Washington, Paris, Tokyo, Caracas out there, Nkong-samba doesn’t…well, you know what I mean.’ He fiddled with the knot of his tie, touched the neat bristles of his moustache and frowned. Morgan was perplexed: he had never heard Fanshawe speak so openly and intimately before. ‘We’ve known each other for a good while now,’ he continued, ‘and I don’t think I’d be giving any family secrets away if I told you that Chloe and I had always hoped that the final years of my diplomatic service would end, well, somewhere…not Nkongsamba. The same goes for you I’m sure. You’re a young man with…with ability — you have to be looking ahead.’

The subdued flattery fell soothingly on Morgan’s ears, and for an instant he felt sorry for Fanshawe, an ageing failure with his dreams unfulfilled, but he still realized he’d be doing most of the work.

‘What exactly do you want me to do?’ he asked hesitantly, keen to move the subject away from these awkward and uncomfortable personal revelations.

‘Try to meet Adekunle for a start. He’s an urbane sort of chap, modern tastes, English wife, children at prep school in the UK, that sort of thing. Shouldn’t be a great effort for you to get into his particular social circle in the university. You know a few people there, don’t you? Shouldn’t be impossible. Then gently let him know that we’re on his side.’

‘I’m not sure,’ Morgan said. ‘I do know who Adekunle is but I don’t see him around much socially at all. Seems to keep to his own kind as it were.’ To his surprise he found his interest quickening as he considered the possibilities. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, enthusiasm creeping into his voice. ‘The next big jamboree we have here, let’s invite all the local political people. That way I might gain some sort of entree.’

‘First class idea,’ Fanshawe congratulated, obviously thrilled. ‘We’ll think up some excuse for a do. Duke of York’s birthday or something.’ He chuckled at his own waggishness. ‘Yes. You’ll keep me in touch? Every move?’

‘Naturally,’ Morgan said.

‘Good,’, Fanshawe said. ‘Excellent. We can work this one out together, Morgan. Soon have something solid to show them.’

Morgan suddenly had an idea. ‘What’s this Royal visit you mentioned? Is it coming up soon? We could use that as an excuse.’

‘No,’ Fanshawe looked crestfallen. ‘She’s coming out at Xmas. Not really a Royal either: someone called the Duchess of Ripon, third cousin twice removed to the Queen or something equally distant. She’s representing Her Majesty at the Independence celebrations. Tenth anniversary on New Year’s Eve you know. She’s doing a whistle-stop tour of the country — should be with us for a couple of days — finishing up in the capital for the big celebrations.’

‘And the elections,’ Morgan added.

‘Yes,’ Fanshawe mused. Tell you what, I’ll get Chloe to organize some party or other. She enjoys these functions. Priscilla can give her a hand.’ Fanshawe stroked his little moustache thoughtfully. ‘Speaking of which,’ he said, ‘I wonder if I could ask a little favour of you.’

Tire away,’ Morgan, said amicably; he wasn’t averse to doing any favours connected however remotely to Priscilla Fanshawe.

‘Chloe would murder me if she knew I was telling you this,’ he said sadly. ‘But it’s better if you’re fully in the picture.’ He paused. ‘Priscilla’s had a bit of a sticky time lately, you see.

She was engaged to a young chap in the Army — Marines — known him for ages, met him while we were in KL. Well, this summer he suddenly ups and offs back to Malaya, calls off the engagement, resigns his commission and marries a Chinese girl. Living out there now, working for her father.’ Fanshawe’s features registered tragic disbelief. ‘Can’t understand it. Such an appalling waste. Well brought-up young chap too, good family and all that. Quite inexplicable.’

Morgan said nothing. Since he’d started sleeping regularly with Hazel miscegenation had become a sensitive topic.

‘I was wondering if,’ Fanshawe cleared his throat, ‘if you could perhaps pop round from time to time. Show her round the place maybe. Cheer her up if you can as she’s naturally been down in the dumps rather since it all fell apart. I’d be most grateful.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Morgan said. ‘I’d be glad to. My pleasure entirely.’

3

Morgan tried to thrust his tongue into Priscilla Fanshawe’s mouth, but its flickering tip met only the immovable enamel barrier of her teeth. Resignedly he contented himself with another lingering dry Hollywood-style kiss until his lips began to hurt from their being continually pursed. He allowed his hand to drop from her forearm onto her hip and felt her body stiffen. He let it rest there for a couple of seconds before obligingly returning it to her unerogenous arm. He hadn’t indulged in such discreet inoffensive foreplay, such diffident tactical petting since the early days of his adolescence, but the nostalgic Proustian memory-glow had soon worn off and he was rapidly becoming bored with the game.

They were sitting in the front seat of Morgan’s Peugeot which was parked in a dark corner of the Ambassador Hotel’s car park. It was about half past ten at night. The Ambassador was Nkongsamba’s most exclusive and elite hotel. It sat proudly on a hill about two miles north of the city. It was a modern six-storey block with a reputedly international restaurant, a swimming pool and a casino. The food in the restaurant was appalling, the service disgracefully slovenly and the swimming pool grew green algae despite being so heavily chlorinated that you could practically see the gas rising from its surface. The casino, on the other hand, was the one place in Nkong-samba where tacky mediocrity wasn’t the watchword and a dash of sophistication had gained a precarious foothold. It was run by a Syrian entrepreneur who had imported two plump girl croupiers from Beirut and was patronized almost exclusively by fellow Middle-Easterners. Morgan and Priscilla hadjust passed a giddy hour in its dimly plush interior at the roulette and baccarat tables and Morgan had steadily lost twenty-three pounds, before prudence told him that Priscilla was unlikely to be impressed by a flawless capacity to back the wrong numbers.

It was turning out to be an expensive evening — the second he had spent in Priscilla’s company. They had started out at the university club’s restaurant, where Morgan had bought their priciest wine, a sweetish highly-scented Piesporter, and from there had proceeded to drinks in the ‘Embassy’ bar at the Ambassador where they had shared a joke at the curious aptness of the venue. When Priscilla informed him that she’d never been in a casino, Morgan offered to show her how one functioned.

He had planned that the evening should end this way. He had sought her hand as they sauntered from the casino entrance towards the car park. It was accepted, fingers were linked, they both turned wordlessly to face each other, smiled and squeezed. They sat in the car, maintaining the silence, looking out at the view of Nkongsamba’s glimmering lights before commenting huskily on its magnificence. Steadily a ‘mood’ was established, a tingling awareness of their warm breathing bodies close to one another in the enclosed unobserved darkness of the car. Priscilla had run both hands through her hair causing her sharp breasts to rise beneath the cream satin blouse she was wearing.

‘It’s been a marvellous evening,’ she had breathed. Morgan had leant across, his left elbow on the back of the car seat and whispered’Priscilla…’her head turned and their lips touched, exactly as they knew they would.

And here they still were.

Now Morgan applied his mouth to Priscilla’s again; gently at first, tenderly, sensitively — she had nice soft lips. Then he started breathing quickly through his nose — in-out, in-out — in simulated passion, wriggling his head around energetically as if their lips were stuck fast and he was trying, vainly, to wrench them apart. Priscilla responded in muted kind, eyes shut, shoulders alternately heaving. Thus encouraged, Morgan slid his hand off her upper arm and on to her left breast. Priscilla’s eyes immediately shot open and she clawed herself upright with the help of the dashboard.

‘Morgan, please,’ she said in half-hurt reproach.

He almost burst out in uproarious laughter at this display of coy restraint. Here he was, he said scornfully to himself, with a highly-sexed compliant black mistress in a down-town hotel — and he was putting himself through this obstacle course. Patience, he thought to himself, and said ‘I’m…I’m sorry, Priscilla,’ sticking manfully to the required formula. ‘I shouldn’t have, but, well, you’re to blame,’ he touched her face as though to emblematize her provocative beauty, smiling at her helplessly. She smiled too and lowered her gaze. He started the car engine. ‘We’d better get you home,’ he said.

During the silent drive back he asked himself why he was bothering, and offer up as he might reasons of boredom, masculine challenge, sex and so forth, he knew instinctively it was really because he had always wanted to — he searched for a word — go out, be linked, associated with, wanted by, even married to a girl like Priscilla Fanshawe. He had never ever so much as been acquainted with anyone like her before, so even a chaste and tiring ten-minute embrace and the millisecond’s impression of an impossibly firm breast beneath his palm represented a considerable triumph in the deprived scale of his life, a positive move up in his impoverished world. And although he felt a little ashamed to admit it he knew that if he could keep things as they were, gradually work on improving them, immense gains in self-esteem and personal kudos would ensue. Perhaps even a giant leap in social mobility, leaving his tawdry past unrecognized far behind him.

The ruthlessness of this desire for Priscilla, and the things she represented for him, surprised him rather when he objectively considered that aspects of her physiognomy and character were off-putting to say the least. There was her voice and her nose and the attitudes they seemed to embody: a profound incuriosity about any world other than her own, a bland superficiality in all her personal relations: always pleasant and charming — as if an evil, bitchy or hurtful thought never passed through her largely empty head — or, if it did, it was dressed up in rib-digging, simpering innuendo. Paradoxically, for they were attitudes he otherwise affected to loathe and deprecate, he found he slotted himself into those brainless behaviour patterns with a quisling’s ease. Everything became super or dreadful, shades of grey were not admitted. People were either ‘sweet’, ‘really sweet’ or ‘awfully sweet’ unless they overtly conspired against you. Human endeavour and general amiability were held to be in plentiful supply among the right sort of people, and with pluck, courage and good fellowship all sorts of grubby little problems could be seen off.

Accordingly, Morgan moved his birthplace nearer the Thames to Kingston, gave himself a scholarship to a minor public school, promoted his father to personnel manager, provided his mother with a private income and, to his surprise, even found himself saying ‘yah’ instead of yes.

They drove past the saw mill and he shot a glance at Priscilla. ‘Nearly there,’ he said. But as the gates of the Commission approached Priscilla suddenly called out ‘Stop!’ and Morgan obligingly pulled into the verge.

‘I don’t feel like going home yet,’ Priscilla said turning to face him. ‘It’s early, can we go somewhere else?’

Morgan thought quickly. ‘We could go back to my place…For a cup of coffee,’ he added promptly. ‘It’s not far away and it’ll be easy to get you back here before it gets too late.’ Kindly disinterested tones highlighted his voice. He felt so noble, so upright. So hypocritical.

Priscilla placed her hand on his which was resting on the steering wheel. ‘That’d be lovely,’ she said.

♦

Morgan and Priscilla sat side by side on Morgan’s settee. They were watching a TV programme in which a man with a battered suitcase and a cigarette jammed in his mouth solved problems the CIA and MI5 couldn’t cope with. It ended with the hero removing his cigarette to kiss the beautiful daughter of an American diplomat. In his contented mood Morgan interpreted this as a favourable omen. Priscilla had kicked off her sling-back shoes and had tucked her feet up beneath her. She was leaning against him and had lodged her head in the angle formed by his neck and shoulder.

‘More coffee?’ he asked. ‘Another brandy?’ Moses and Friday were away for the night.

‘Gosh no,’ Priscilla giggled, ‘I’ll be peeing all night.’ As if this mildest of improprieties were a signal Morgan bent his head round to kiss her. In the last half hour she had relaxed sufficiently to allow gentle tongue probing and the infrequent squeeze of a breast. Morgan kissed her neck, it was moist and tasted vaguely salty. He noted that her short black skirt had ridden pleasingly up her thighs.

‘Morgan,’ she said in a small voice, ‘do you know why I came out here. To Nkongsamba?’

‘Haven’t the faintest,’ he lied, nuzzling her ear while he undid a button on her blouse. He slid his hand beneath the satin and inched it along her chest until he met the abrupt gradient of her breast and the lacy reinforcement of her bra. Try as he might, and short of using his other hand as a lever, he could not prise his fingers under it.

‘I just wanted to say thank you,’ she said. Morgan withdrew his hand and looked at her in some astonishment.

‘What on earth for?’ he asked.

She pecked him on the cheek. ‘For not storming off in a rage because I wasn’t…relaxed.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he admonished.

‘It’s just that I’m not very sure of myself…I’m a bit ‘uptight’ as I believe the current expression goes.’ She picked up Morgan’s right hand and examined it minutely as if it were some mysterious and rare artefact. ‘Which is why I’ve come out here.’

‘Oh,’ Morgan said, carefully non-committal.

‘You see I used to be almost engaged to this chap Charles, only we had a terrific bust-up. The whole thing was getting fairly serious, I…I had practically moved into his flat.’ Morgan stored this piece of information away. ‘When I suddenly realized he just wasn’t the right sort of person for me. Just one day, no particular reason, I saw it was completely wrong. Hopeless.’ She paused. ‘Charles was a sweetie, but not for me, if you know what I mean.’ She looked at him for support. ‘You can’t, you shouldn’t let things go on under those sort of circumstances. It’s better to make a break.’

‘Oh yes. You’re right,’ Morgan agreed. ‘Absolutely. Yah.’ He looked serious, intensely understanding.

She cuddled up to him. ‘It was pretty gruesome. Shouting and crying. He was terribly upset. But I knew I had to do it.’ Morgan smoothed the hair on her head. ‘Which is why I’m a bit, you know, stiff and cautious. Emotionally bruised, Mummy calls it. You understand.’

Morgan nodded. ‘A case of once bitten.’

‘Exactly,’ she affirmed. ‘Exactly,’ squeezing him with gratitude.

Morgan deposited a kiss on the flipped-up end of her nose. ‘We’d better get you home,’ he said.

They enjoyed the final and the most passionate embrace of the evening in the dark driveway of the Fanshawes’ house. As he drove home Morgan was glowing with self-congratulation, attributing the persistent dull ache in his groin to an unrelieved night-long erection. Later, lying back in his bed, he lazily contemplated the vivid memories of Priscilla’s strong smooth legs and tried to imagine what her breasts looked like, gently releasing his frustration into a wad of toilet paper. As the tingling pleasure seeped along his legs and out of his toes it was replaced by a slight but uncomfortable burning, scorching sensation at the tip ofhis penis. Further examination established that there was a slight rawness there which was effectively soothed by the application of some Nivea cream. He assumed that it had been caused by the rubbing ofhis buckled hard-on against the zip of his trousers or raised hem of his Y-fronts, a small price to pay, he reflected, for such a well-conceived and executed evening’s wooing.

Before he fell asleep he thought about Priscilla’s lie: He scoffed briefly at the illusions people erected around themselves in desperate pretence before he realized that he himself wasn’t exactly in a strong position to deride this form of behaviour. Priscilla’s version of her falling-out with Charles made her the agent; moreover, a mature and sensible one, demanding overall a mutually fulfilling relationship and, by the by, just letting him know she was no virgin. Morgan smiled to himself: one gift he was blessed with, he considered, was the ability to see through people, to size them up, see what they really were beneath public pose: an invaluable talent.

As he thought on, it occurred to him that maybe this gift of Priscilla — young, unattached, not ignorant of his charms — meant that his luck was on the turn. Those drab years as an executive officer in overlit, overheated civil service offices in the South of England, the disastrous interviews and repeated failings of Foreign Office exams before the eventual scrape-through. The shaming training period, the snobbishness, the cold shoulders of his colleagues, the prolonged wait in some Whitehall cul-de-sac, the fifth-grade overseas posting to Nkongsamba where he’d already languished eighteen months longer than he should have, perhaps, perhaps all this had been arranged by someone just so he could meet Priscilla. Fate, Destiny, Big G — he offered up a prayer of thanks just in case — who knows? For the only time in his life he was the right man in the right place at the right time. He could feel a warmth welling up in his heart, a languor suffusing his body; he sensed his muscles bulge and flex, he spread his arms across the bed, stretching his fingers wide. He knew what it was; he felt pleased with himself, and, better still, he was sure he was falling in love with Priscilla.

4

The lawn of the Commission was bathed in a yellow glow from the high-powered floodlights strategically placed at first-floor windows. A hundred or more people, blacks and whites, swarmed around the cold buffet tables and the two bars. Over to the left was a large cinema screen with rows of seats ranged in front of it. Morgan looked down on the throng from one of the back windows, invisible behind the glare of the floodlights. He had been unable to spot Adekunle on the ground and had moved up here to get a better view. He saw many faces he recognized among the cream of Nkongsamba society who had been lured here tonight by the prospect of free booze and food and who were, because of this bait, prepared to suffer the private screening of yet another film on the Royal Family. That, Morgan had to admit, had been a stroke of genius on Fanshawe’s part. This film, billed as an ‘intimate portrait’, had been despatched recently to all the British High Commissions and embassies throughout the world as part of a large-scale diplomatic publicity stunt. It had not been scheduled to reach Nkongsamba for many months yet but some judicious pressure by Fanshawe had managed to get it sent up prematurely from the capital. A private viewing was duly arranged and official invitations hastily sent out. It was to be an excuse for a jingoistic explosion of self-admiration for the expatriate Britons, and the anticipated regular shots of splendid castles, historic artefacts, beaming Royalty and endless immaculate parades would surely provide a gentle but potent reminder to all the non-British present of precisely just what it was they didn’t possess and why, therefore, they just weren’t quite such special people. Normally these sorts of occasion had the same effect on Morgan as weddings: they were awash with false sincerity, hypocrisy and a dreadful backslapping bonhomie that always made him sweat with embarrassment. Tonight, however, was different. To his surprise he had found himself looking forward to it, and now as he peered down on the assorted heads beneath him — blond, brunette and balding, woolly peppercorn and towering head-ties — he felt an unmistakable surge of excitement. This was a set-up, he reminded himself; he was working — yes, undercover—for his government. It was a small job perhaps, merely the securing of information on a foreign country’s political party, fairly low-priority stuff, but such jobs, he told himself, were the broad base of intelligence, the firm foundations of global diplomatic gestures, the unnoticed background to those headlined ministerial initiatives.

Morgan had to confess that Fanshawe’s enthusiasm for their plan had been infectious. He had behaved like an excited schoolboy playing at spies; he had given a drawer of a filing cabinet over to the project, to which only he and Morgan had the key. He had even gone so far as to bestow a code name on the operation: he called it ‘Project Kingpin’, after Adekunle’s party’s initials — KNP. ‘We’d better have a Kingpin meeting,’ he would say cautiously to Morgan in the passageway, or, ‘This is material for the Kingpin file,’ or, ‘Any progress on Kingpin?’ Morgan had thought at first that it was all a bit sad really, but had happily gone along with it anyway as he was reaping the benefits of this new alliance with Priscilla’s father. ‘You know,’ Priscilla had said to him during one of their latest meetings, ‘Daddy’s been terribly impressed with you recently — singing your praises night and day. What are you two up to?’

‘Nothing really,’ he had said modestly. ‘Routine stuff, that’s all.’

Earlier on in the evening Morgan had been remarking on the excellence of the punch to the overweight wife of an engineering contractor when Fanshawe had sidled up and muttered in his ear ‘Kingpin’s arrived,’ and had glided off dramatically, like a courtier informing a prince of a plot against his life.

Now, looking down on the herd of loyal subjects, Morgan saw Adekunle standing by the beer bar with a white woman he took to be the politician’s wife. Adekunle was wearing native dress and was carrying a carved ebony stick. His wife, Morgan thought, looked unhappy and incongruous in a loose yoke-necked blouse, a wrap-around cloth skirt and bulky headscarf. As he watched, Morgan noticed the way people came up and paid court to Adekunle almost as if he were the host. Scanning the faces Morgan recognized two other political leaders keeping as widely separated from each other as possible. There was Femi Robinson, an angry little Marxist who was the local representative of the People’s Party of Kinjanja, and there was Chief Mabegun, governor of the Mid-West state and head of the Mid-West branch of the ruling United Party of Kinjanjan People. Widespread popular discontent over its bloated members and the inefficient lean years Kinjanja had suffered while it was in power had brought about the approaching general election. Mabegun, Morgan thought, looked like he was running on the graft and corruption ticket again. He was a vastly fat man who seemed to be implying by his own comfortable obesity that power had been good to him so a vote cast in his favour might, possibly, provide everybody with similar benefits.

But both Robinson and Mabegun were, Morgan accepted, small fry beside Adekunle. The main leaders of the PPK and the UPKP were in the capital; the Mid-West representatives were only minor luminaries, with little or no influence outside their own small state. Adekunle, on the other hand, was in a different league. He was a respected academic who had spoken at the last meeting of the Organization of African Unity. From the information Morgan had gathered thus far, Adekunle seemed to spend more time flying round the globe to various third-world conferences or UN special committees than he did giving lectures or, as dean, administering his faculty. There was also talk, Morgan had established, that he might be the next vice-chancellor of the university.

As Morgan watched, he saw Fanshawe and his wife go up and chat to Adekunle who smiled and beamed at them with urbane geniality. He saw Fanshawe, in response to some remark of Adekunle’s, laugh uneasily and shoot a quick glance over his shoulder up at the first-floor windows. Morgan swiftly pulled himself back behind the wall though he was fairly sure he couldn’t be seen. Typical Fanshawe, he fumed inwardly, the man clearly wasn’t suited for this covert work if he revealed the positions of his confederates so thoughtlessly. It was time, he decided, that he went down and sorted things out.

As he slowly descended the stairs on his way to meet Adekunle, he felt his pulse quicken and a tight ball of pressure establish itself securely behind his sternum. He stepped out of the back entrance of the Commission and on to the crowded lawn.

As he weaved his way through the groups of people towards Adekunle, he could feel his palms moistening and his mouth drying. Adekunle was a large man. He was going steadily to fat as all successful Kinjanjans seemed inevitably to do — as if it were a generic concomitant of power and esteem — and he had about him an aura of self confidence as unshakable as a force-field. He was talking sternly and in a low voice to his wife who looked sullen beneath her headdress and who was smoking a cigarette, nervously staring down at the trampled grass. As Morgan drew near they both looked up smiling suddenly in a well-practised insincere way.

‘Professor Adekunle,’ Morgan said. ‘How do you do? I’m Morgan Leafy, First Secretary here at the Commission. I think we met once briefly before.’ This was not true, they had only been in the same room, but it was his favourite introductory device, often throwing people into confusion as they racked their brains trying to remember the occasion. It had no such effect on Adekunle. He smiled beneath his wide moustache.

‘Did we? I’m afraid I don’t recall, but how do you do anyway.’ He shook Morgan’s hand. ‘This is my wife Celia.’

‘Hello,’ Celia Adekunle said in a demure voice. She kept her eyes on Morgan’s face. As with all direct looks that he received he found this one somewhat disconcerting; he suspected they stirred vast untapped reservoirs of guilt deep within him. He returned to Adekunle.

‘Very good of you to invite us here,’ Adekunle said, before Morgan could speak, in tones of thinly disguised sarcasm. ‘I see my distinguished rivals are present too.’

Morgan smiled. ‘All in the interests of balance,’ he laughed. ‘Talking about which…’

‘And to see a film of your wonderful Royal Family,’ Adekunle continued regardless. ‘Most thoughtful. Most uplifting.’

‘Well, between you and me,’ Morgan said confidentially, ‘any excuse for a bunfight, if you see what I mean.’

‘Ulterior motives. Now I understand. Devious people, you diplomats.’ Adekunle signalled over a waiter who was carrying a tray of drinks and helped himself to an orange juice. Morgan was distressed by the note of hostility and sardonic displeasure that still coloured Adekunle’s voice. He decided to be direct.

‘How’s the campaign going?’ he asked as innocently as he knew how. ‘Well, I hope.’

Adekunle affected surprise. ‘My campaign? Why on earth should the British be interested in my campaign? Why don’t you ask my opponents, Mr Leafy? I’m sure they can judge its effects better than I.’

‘Ah now, professor, let’s not be naive,’ Morgan chuckled knowingly. ‘I think it’s fairly common knowledge that the British government would naturally be very interested in the outcome of the elections.’

‘Very interested?’

Morgan looked around and became aware again of Celia Adekunle’s intense gaze. ‘Well yes, I think you could say that.’

‘How interested?’

‘Just a moment, professor,’ Morgan said quickly, realizing that the conversation was going further and faster than he’d intended. ‘We can hardly discuss such matters here.’ He flashed a nervous smile.

‘I don’t see why not,’ Adekunle insisted obstinately. ‘If you invite representatives of the three major parties to a function such as this you must expect politics to show her face, as the saying goes. Isn’t that so, Celia?’ Morgan couldn’t tell if this was banter or a serious point.

‘It shows its face everywhere else,’ Celia Adekunle said drily. ‘Why make an exception in this case?’

Alarmingly, Morgan noticed that Femi Robinson was edging closer to them.

‘Commissioner Fanshawe seemed most interested in my campaign too,’ Adekunle observed further.

‘Did he?’ Morgan said with as much unconcern as he could muster, thinking that Fanshawe was a stupid meddling old berk: he had probably got Adekunle’s back up. ‘He’s just returned from leave,’ Morgan said in explanation. ‘He’s probably catching up.’

‘You haven’t briefed him then?’ Adekunle asked.

Morgan felt his bow tie tighten round his throat. This just wasn’t going as he’d expected. Adekunle was being most aggressive. ‘I think we should change the subject,’ he said looking appealingly at Celia Adekunle and smiling broadly.

‘I think the film’s about to start,’ she said. Morgan looked round in astonishment to see Fanshawe clapping his hands and herding people towards the rows of seats. The stupid shit! Morgan swore inwardly, Fanshawe was meant to wait for his sign, couldn’t he see that he and Adekunle were still talking?

Adekunle meanwhile had deposited his untouched orange juice on the nearby bar. ‘At last,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘This is the icing on the cake, as the saying goes. Nice to meet you, Mr Leafy.’ He moved off towards the seats accompanied by his wife. Morgan was about to follow him when he felt a tug on his sleeve, he looked round to see Femi Robinson, the Marxist, his patchily bearded face by Morgan’s shoulder.

‘Mr Leafy?’ he said, ‘May I have a word with you?’

‘What?’ He wondered how Robinson knew his name. He looked back and saw Adekunle about to sit down. ‘No,’ he said with more force than he meant and snatched his jacket cuff from Robinson’s still clutching fingers. He ran after Adekunle. ‘Professor,’ he called desperately.

‘Ah, Mr Leafy, yet again. Always turning up like a bad penny, yes?’

Morgan kept his voice low. ‘It would, I think, be a good idea if we had a talk.’

‘Oh yes?’ Adekunle said sceptically. He turned to his wife. ‘This will do fine, Celia.’ He looked back at Morgan. ‘A talk, Mr Leafy? What could we have to discuss?’ He sat down beside his wife. His seat was on the end of a row next to the centre aisle. Morgan grew aware that most people had secured their places by now.

He leant forward, bringing himself into Celia Adekunle’s unflinching stare. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we could talk about…interest and balance, er, that sort of thing.’

Adekunle smiled, his muttonchop whiskers raised by his bulging cheeks. ‘No, Mr Leafy,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t really think they’re attractive topics. And by the way, I think you’re obstructing the projector.’

Morgan looked round. Jones, who was supervising the film, waved him aside impatiently. He heard Fanshawe call his name and saw him pointing to an empty seat in the front row between Mrs Fanshawe and Chief Mabegun. Priscilla was three places away beside the Jones children. There was a sudden whirr and a blinding light struck him on one side of his face, silhouetting his round head and thin hair sharply against the screen. There were a few high-spirited whistles and calls of ‘Get your head down.’ He crouched low and scurried back up the aisle towards the projector. He was emphatically not going to sit for an hour and ten minutes beside Mrs Fanshawe. He felt angry and frustrated at the unsatisfactory way his conversation with Adekunle had gone, and his mood was not helped by Jones who hissed as he went past: ‘What are you bloody playing at, Morgan?’

Shut up you stupid Welsh git, Morgan swore under his breath, otherwise ignoring him, standing for a moment behind the final row of chairs watching the credits roll over a huge royal crest. What a disaster, he thought, contemplating his talk with Adekunle. And what a cynical bastard he was too, leading him on like that. He felt ashamed of his ineptitude, his clumsy inability even to set up another meeting. Had he been too subtle? he wondered, or was it the other way round? He shook his head in despair. So much for covert diplomacy, he thought scathingly. The entire audience must have seen him trotting after Adekunle like some importunate salesman determined to make his pitch. He gritted his teeth with shame and embarrassment.

Slowly he became aware of the presence of figures in the dark around him. On both sides of him the Commission servants had quietly gathered and were gazing entranced at the film in open-mouthed wonder, their faces ghoulishly illuminated by the reflected light. Morgan turned to the screen. The Royal Family were engaged in setting up and enjoying a picnic in a stereotypical Scottish setting. They wore kilts, tweed jackets or thick woolly jerseys. In the background was a small loch and further off were purply-green hills and pine woods. It was a cloudy day with small patches of intense blue among the clouds, hurried on by a gusty wind that billowed kilts and blew strands of hair across Royal faces. The young princes ran about in childish abandon but the elders were agonizingly conscious of the camera crew’s presence and the conversation was sotto voce and bland. Occasionally a remark of mild humour was passed—‘Three sausages! You greedy thing!’—and the audience would scream with uproarious laughter.

Morgan looked about him. Above, the stars shone, all round the crickets chirruped, the air was hot and damp and the formal clothes on the arrayed guests were heavy and uncomfortable. The beam of light emanating from the projector was alive with fluttering moths and insects casting their tiny shadows onto the Scottish countryside. From time to time a bat would dive-bomb the flickering insects, a darker more solid mass flashing across the picnicking group. The incongruity of the scene was so bizarre, so surreal — the fascinated servants stealing a glimpse of this family in their distant northern landscape — that Morgan felt it must be trying to tell him something significant, but he could see nothing in it apart from incongruity. Moreover, he found such juxtapositions unsettling: he could almost feel the chilly Scottish weather, the clear scouring breeze, and the sudden ideal vision of Britain made him depressed, reminded him painfully of his current location.

As the scene changed to Windsor Castle he turned away, knowing that Feltham was just down the road. He walked with leaden feet back to the Commission building, weighed down with dissatisfaction and failure. He stopped at a bar and helped himself to a large whisky before continuing on his way. He went up to the first floor. On the landing was a small bathroom equipped with a bath, basin and WC, for, as well as the main offices being there, there was a suite of rooms for important guests. Morgan relieved himself and sat morosely on the edge of the bath. There was an old wall shower attachment which was dripping. He turned the tap tighter and it stopped. He fingered the plastic shower curtain distractedly, his mind far away. It was decorated with a motif of angel fishes, bubbles and seaweed fronds. A similar curtain covered the bathroom window. He pulled it aside and looked over the back lawn. The cinema screen burned with lambent colours like a jewel in the huge navy-blue night. The crowd of spellbound servants had been swelled by the soft arrival of their families from the nearby quarters. He saw the red and black pattern of a parade and faintly heard the tinny accompaniment of martial music. He drained his glass and set it down. For some reason the scene made him feel like weeping.

He splashed his face with water and adjusted his bow tie. He paused for a moment on the landing, wondering how he would describe the night’s events to Fanshawe, before going slowly downstairs.

He had just reached the bottom when a woman’s voice said, ‘Oh…Hello.’

He gave a start of alarm as he had imagined himself to be quite alone. He looked round and saw Mrs Adekunle standing in the shadows of the large entrance hall, her headscarf removed and hanging from her hand. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you take the film either?’

‘Made me homesick,’ she said, stepping out into the light. Morgan saw she had mid-blonde hair, a little thin and lank, and a deep tan, which he hadn’t noticed outside.

She held up the headscarf. ‘This was coming off as well. And I needed the loo.’ She undipped her handbag, small and expensive-looking, and took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Cigarette?’ she offered.

‘No thanks,’ Morgan said. ‘Given up.’

‘Mmm.’ Celia Adekunle made an impressed noise as she lit her cigarette. ‘Where is it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The loo.’

‘Oh. The official ones are back down that corridor. But why don’t you go upstairs. The wwofficial one’s up there, bit plusher, second on your left on the landing.’

‘My. I’m honoured. Thank you.’ She moved towards the stair.

‘I’d better warn you,’ he said. ‘For some reason it only locks from the outside. You have to clear your throat very loudly every five seconds or whistle a tune if you don’t want to be interrupted.’

She laughed. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But I think everyone’s engrossed out there.’

Morgan looked at his watch. ‘Only another twenty minutes. I think I’ll sit this one out.’

‘That’s not very British of you.’

‘Nor of you come to that.’

‘Ah. But I’m not British any more,’ she smiled a little grimly. ‘I’m Kinjanjan.’

‘Oh I see,’ he said. ‘Then I’m the only guilty one.’

‘What is it you do exactly?’ she asked, ‘Here, in the Commission?’ She sounded interested so he told her.

‘It’s fairly routine in a small place like this. It’s just a presence that’s required really, in case of any problems and so on. But what I mainly do is take care of immigration. Vet the visa applications, issue them, keep up the records, that sort of thing. It’s amazing how many people want to go to the UK, even from somewhere like Nkongsamba. There’s a lot of paperwork and documentation. Not a very exciting life, unless it’s enlivened by occasions like this.’ He pointed in the direction of the back lawn, but she ignored his irony.

‘I see,’ she nodded. ‘So you get to decide who goes?’

‘That’s about it.’

‘Right,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll go and practise my whistling.’ She climbed the stairs. ‘Second door on the left?’

‘That’s right,’ he said after her. ‘I’ll keep guard down here if you like.’

She laughed. ‘My goodness, special privileges.’

Morgan heard her walk across the landing and open and close the door. She seemed a nice sort of person, he remarked to himself, he wondered what it must be like for her being married to someone like Adekunle. He paced about the hall trying not to imagine her sitting urinating but found, to his vague self-disgust, that he did so all the same. He was thankful when he heard the noisy flush of the cistern.

She came down the stairs shortly after tucking up a fold in her remade head-tie.

‘Looks nice,’ he said. ‘The clothes.’ He thought she looked ridiculous.

‘Nice of you to say so,’ she said drily, clearly not believing him. ‘Sam’s made me wear them at these official functions ever since he became seriously involved in politics, though I still feel a bit of a fraud. I think you need a black skin for this style. I just feel I look weedy and washed out.’

‘I think it looks nice,’ he insisted, not very convincingly.

‘You’re very kind,’ she said in cynical tones reminiscent of her husband. Just then there was a loud and prolonged burst of applause from the garden.

‘Looks like you’ve missed the end,’ he said.

‘Yes, I’d better find Sam.’ She seemed to have lost some of her poise. ‘Listen,’ she said suddenly. ‘Do you really want to speak to him?’

Morgan was confused. ‘Well…Yes, actually, I suppose I would rather, but…unofficially, you know.’ He smiled shamefacedly. ‘He didn’t seem too keen.’

‘He wasn’t on his home ground. He’s always more…difficult then. That’s why you should come to his birthday party.’

‘Birthday?’

‘Yes. It’snextweek. Friday night at the Hotel de Executive.’ She enunciated the name carefully, conscious of its pretensions. ‘Do you know it?’

Morgan nodded. ‘It’s on the way into town from here.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll send you an invitation. You can be my guest.’

‘Are you sure he won’t mind?’ Morgan asked. ‘I mean, I won’t be intruding or anything, will I? Do I need to bring a present?’

She laughed out loud. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘There’ll be about three hundred people there. But don’t worry. I’ll tell him you’ll be there. Look, I must be off.’

Morgan felt mingled sensations of relief and gratitude. ‘That’s amazingly kind of you, Mrs Adekunle. I’m indebted to you. Very.’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘See you on Friday.’

5

The Commission staff waved goodbye to the last of the departing cars. Morgan stood on the steps beside Jones and Fanshawe; behind them, as though assembled for a photograph, were Mrs Fanshawe, Priscilla, Mrs Jones and her children and another expatriate couple Morgan didn’t recognize. He glanced at his watch: it was just after ten, he was to pick Hazel up at eleven.

‘Great success,’Jones opined, his Welsh accent seeming to Morgan’s ears stronger than ever. ‘Marvellous film, I thought, marvellous. So…so relaxed, wasn’t it? How you imagine they must really be, you know, behind the scenes, like.’

Fanshawe grunted absentmindedly. Morgan said nothing, he was thinking about Hazel, now that Celia Adekunle had solved his more immediate problem. Jones moved offin search of more enthusiastic appraisals.

‘How did you get on?’ Fanshawe asked immediately, snapping Morgan out of his sex-dream. ‘I tried to sound him out a little myself. Tricky customer I thought,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Surprisingly…I don’t know — sophisticated. Very confident man.’ He paused. ‘So, how did it go?’

Morgan inspected his fingernails. ‘Oh, not too bad,’ he said modestly, extracting maximum mileage from his stroke of good fortune. ‘He’s invited me to a party he’s giving next Friday — his birthday party in fact.’

Fanshawe’s face lit up with delighted surprise. ‘But that’s absolutely marvellous, Morgan. Marvellous. Great progress. Where’s the party?’

‘Hotel de Executive, in town.’

‘Splendid. Into the lion’s den, eh? How did he react to your moves?’

‘He’s a wary sort of character,’ Morgan said evasively. ‘I was just sounding him out really. He seems…approachable, anyway.’

‘Going well though,’ Fanshawe said. ‘A good night’s work, well worth setting the whole thing up.’ He looked round. ‘Do you know the Wagners?’ he asked, referring to the couple Morgan hadn’t recognized. ‘He’s from the American consulate in the capital. Come and meet them. We’re all going over to the house for a drink.’

‘Oh, I’ll give it a miss if you don’t mind, Arthur,’ he said. ‘Been a long day.’

‘Fine, fine. Please yourself.’ They joined the group gathered round the front door and Morgan was presented to the Wagners — the ‘w’ was not pronounced as a V. Errol and Nancy Wagner had greatly enjoyed the film, it transpired. Mrs Fanshawe turned to Morgan, just as he was about to speak to Priscilla, and smiled at him, but only with her mouth. Her eyes remained suspicious and probing.

‘Joining us for a drink, Morgan?’ she asked unpersuasively.

‘No, I’m afraid I’m…’

‘Shame. Never mind.’ She turned to the others. ‘Come on everybody, let’s go Geraldine? Are the children all right?…’ The party moved off leaving Morgan alone with Priscilla. She had established the beginnings of a tan which was offset by a straight white and green sleeveless dress and white shoes. Morgan began by apologizing as he could sense she was a little upset by his neglect of her.

‘I am sorry, Priscilla,’ he said. ‘But it was semi-official buttering up of a local dignitary.’

‘Well, it wasn’t much fun for me.’

He stole a look at the backs of the retreating group, almost invisible in the darkness now, and gave Priscilla a fraternal kiss on the cheek.

‘It wasn’t exactly fun for me either,’ he said reproachfully. ‘I’d much rather have been with you.’ She was looking very fanciable tonight, he thought. If only she’d get rid of that sulky, hard-done-by expression.

‘But why can’t you come along now? Honestly, Morgie, I haven’t talked to you all day.’

Every tendon and sinew in his body seemed to go into spasm, triggered by the revolting diminutive she’d recently adopted. Did he look remotely like a ‘Morgie’ he wondered, nauseated? Where the hell had she dug that up from? No one had ever called him that, ever. With an effort he controlled himself and tried to think of a reasonable excuse. He thought for a moment. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Do you fancy going fishing next week? Make a day of it? Picnic and all that,’ he improvised hastily, silently thanking the Royal Family for inspiring him.

‘Fishing?’

‘Yes. It’s great fun. I’ve done it once or twice. A place about seventy miles away. Called Olokomeji.’

‘Well…Yes.’ She thought about it. ‘Sounds lovely.’

‘Great,’ Morgan exclaimed, hugely relieved. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make all the arrangements.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘See you tomorrow maybe. I’m really bushed. Sorry,’ he abased himself again. He kissed her on the lips, allowing his own to linger there a moment or so, but he sensed that nothing more passionate was likely to ensue. He understood implicitly that in the rules of the game they were playing his behaviour had been less than satisfactory tonight — even though the prospect of the fishing trip had mollified her slightly — and he would have to take his punishment like a man.

6

The road to Olokomeji was quiet and through thick rainforest. They had made an early start, at around seven, as the river was a two and a half hour ride away from Nkongsamba. Every now and then they would pass a small cluster of mud huts and roadside trading stalls that marked a village. The fascinated stares Morgan and Priscilla attracted spoke of the curiosity value that still attended white people as soon as the main roads and towns were left behind. Morgan had got Moses to make up a picnic of a cold roast chicken and sandwiches and he had also filled a cooler-bag with fridge-chilled bottles of beer. They stopped at one of the larger villages to buy fruit: a pineapple, oranges and bananas. Priscilla said she was entranced by the primitive nature of it all but her subdued demeanour seemed to tell another story as she unexcitedly took in the naked children, women pounding cassava in wooden tubs and slack-breasted old mammies expertly chopping sugar cane. Priscilla wore a red polka-dot dress with large white buttons down the front. When she removed her sunglasses she had dark rings under her eyes.

As they approached the large bridge across the river that marked the fishing pool Morgan kept his eyes peeled for the secluded turning that would lead them down to the bottom of the gorge. He saw it at the last moment and had to reverse back. It was a rutted laterite track that wound gingerly down the thickly forested slope to a small clearing. There he stopped the car and got out. The great pale-barked trees towered above them screening the sun, birds and insects chattered and buzzed setting up a surprising volume of noise. A well-trodden path led down to the fishing pool.

Morgan pounded his chest, ‘Aaah-ooah-ooah, ooah-ooah!’ he bellowed, adding in a throaty basso profundo: ‘me Jane.’

It wasn’t very funny, any wood or copse prompted the same display, but as expected, it made Priscilla giggle. ‘You are a silly,’ she said. That was better, he thought, she needed to cheer up a bit — she had probably never been forced to get up this early for ages. They unloaded the picnic gear and the fishing rods and walked down to the river. To their right, about two hundred yards upstream and almost obscured by a bend in the river, were the high arches of the road bridge. The river was about fifty yards across and the colour of milky coffee. Ten or fifteen yards out into the stream from where they were standing were some rock outcrops beyond which were the deep pools where the Niger perch lurked. The far bank rose in a steepish rocky cliff amongst whose boulders and crannies lived a colony of baboons. It was very quiet. The sky was a washed-out blue and the water was so sluggish it seemed hardly to be moving.

‘Pretty spectacular eh?’ Morgan commented proudly, as if he owned it. ‘Real Heart of Darkness stuff don’t you think?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Real Heart of… nothing. Not important.’

‘Are you sure it’s all right to swim in that?’ Priscilla asked. ‘It looks filthy.’

‘Of course it is,’ Morgan said, putting his arm round her shoulders and pecking her on the cheek. ‘All right to swim in I mean. Here, give us a hand to spread this groundsheet.’ They laid the groundsheet on the narrow bar of greyish sand at the bank. Morgan opened a bottle of beer, put it to his lips and took a long swig.

‘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 prim-itiveness 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 pus-like 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 fibreglass 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 jack-knifed 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 necked with tiny sand grains. Priscilla lay still with an uncertain look on her face and her shoulders hunched as if she wasn’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 realized 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.

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 goodwill 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 Claridges. 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 charge 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. Ijustpopped 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 front 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.

Muller shrugged and stroked his goatee. ‘A few people know about it,’ he said. ‘It’s not a very great secret. I thought you would have heard it somewhere.’

Morgan changed the subject. ‘Are these tarts on the house too? Like the beer?’

‘Why don’t you try and see?’

‘No thanks.’ A few people were out on the dance floor, shuffling rhythmically around in the pronounced stick-arsed fashion of highlife as the band thumped and perspired away manfully. Morgan glanced out of the side of his eye at Muller. His wife was long dead and it was rumoured that he slept with his cook’s thirteen-year-old daughter. But Muller never gave anything away and Morgan suspected that the story — like most of the poisonous anecdotes floating round Nkongsamba — had its source in a vindictive, drunken midnight conversation. Muller looked too ascetic for sex, Morgan decided, like some life-long opium-toker, genitals withered and redundant. He found it rather disgusting that he should be speculating on the state of Muller’s loins so he changed the subject.

A short while later there was a commotion at the door as a passageway was cleared through the crowd and Adekunle appeared, flanked by a praesidium guard, waving his short stick above his head. The band halted in mid-number and there was a great shout from the assembled guests and a burst of tumultuous applause. ‘KNP. KNP. KNP,’they chanted.

Tonight Adekunle more than ever resembled an African Henry VIII. His already considerable girth was amplified by the voluminous folds of his native costume which was white, trimmed and embroidered with gold thread. He moved slowly among his guests shaking hands, waving and smiling broadly. Some people bowed, others genuflected, ducking down and brushing the floor in front of him with the fingers of their right hand.

‘Of course,’ Morgan whispered to Muller, ‘he’s a chief isn’t he?’

‘One of the biggest,’ Muller replied, ‘his father owned virtually all of Nkongsamba before the British took it away.’

‘Did they?’ Morgan said, astonished.

‘Oh yes. Compulsory purchase, sometime before the war. I think they gave him about two hundred pounds for it.’ He paused, an amused look in his eye as he saw Morgan digesting this information. ‘Look,’ he added. ‘There’s Celia.’ Morgan looked and saw Celia Adekunle amongst the others in Adekunle’s train. She was wearing a rich red and blue native costume, her thin face small under the hugely knotted head-tie. She was smiling in a strained unrelaxed way as she received and returned greetings from and to the party faithful. He suddenly felt very sorry for her.

Adekunle returned eventually to the centre of the dance floor where a small dais had been placed. He took up his position on this and raised his hands to still the applause.

‘My friends,’ his voice boomed out powerfully. ‘My friends, thank you, thank you. I just have a few words for you tonight. As the saying goes, ‘Make sure you fit talk, fore dey drink all de beer.’’ The burst of pidgin English brought shrieks of delighted laughter and foot stamping. Morgan and Muller took this opportunity to withdraw to the bar where snatches of Adekunle’s speech came to them over the packed heads of the spectators. There was a great deal of bellowed rhetoric and crude mud-slinging in it, and at one point Morgan caught a glimpse of the politician, his face distorted with emphasis, brandishing his stick, his broad shoulders heaving as he vilified the policies of an opponent. Morgan knew that for the sake of Project Kingpin he really ought to try and listen more closely but demagoguery seemed to switch off vital circuits in his brain. As the shouts of passionate agreement began to crescendo Morgan whispered in Muller’s ear.

‘He’s a different man on a platform, isn’t he.’

‘They expect it,’ Muller said. ‘They think that if a man can’t make his voice heard then his argument must be weak.’

Morgan was suddenly conscious of his almost total inexperience. ‘How long have you been out here, Georg?’ he asked.

‘In Kinjanja? Since 1948. But before that I was in the Cameroons.’

‘Think Adekunle’s going to win?’ he said as casually as possible.

‘He’ll win here in the Mid-West. And I should think the KNP will win overall. That is, if the Army let them.’

Morgan nodded sagely in agreement. What the hell did the Army have to do with it? he asked himself in confusion.

‘I don’t see any Army boys here tonight, do you?’ he asked spontaneously, playing for time.

Muller scanned the crowd. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Good point. Not even in mufti. Of course, politicians are very unpopular with the military just now.’

Morgan felt vaguely excited by his lucky observation, but a little confused as to its ramifications. Still, he had actually gathered some information tonight. He could now say to Fanshawe, ‘Do you know, there wasn’t a single Army boy at Adekunle’s party. Very interesting I think,’ and Fanshawe wouldn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about, but he’d be impressed just the same. Following up on his good fortune Morgan recalled a headline in a local newspaper about recent Army promotions.

‘Interesting reshuffles going on at the barracks,’ he said to Muller out of the side of his mouth.

Muller nodded. ‘Orimir-Peters is a Moslem, you’know.’

That’s right,’ Morgan said. ‘Very interesting.’ The opaque cloudy void of his ignorance seemed to stretch away in front of him. He decided he’d better stop talking before Muller realized he was a complete fraud. He felt suddenly rather ashamed of himself. Kinjanja was a mystery to him, he realized, he knew next to nothing about the way its inhabitants’ minds worked, the way its colonially imposed institutional superstructure related with the traditional tribal background; he knew nothing of the ethnic, racial and religious pressures surreptitiously influencing events. He felt suddenly like leaving and was aware of an absurd resentment directed at Muller, with his assured range of knowledge and his calm experience. Perhaps that’s what comes of sleeping with your servant’s children, he observed cruelly, and was immediately further ashamed by his mean-mindedness. A prolonged cheering outburst signalled the end of Adekunle’s speech at that point.

‘Have another drink?’ Morgan asked Muller, as if to make up for his pusillanimous thoughts.

‘No thanks,’ Muller said. ‘Only one a night. Doctor’s orders.’

‘Not Dr Murray, I trust,’ Morgan said scornfully.

‘Alex Murray?’ Muller asked. ‘I wish it was, but you have to be in the university to get him.’

‘At least he’s consistent,’ Morgan sneered.

‘Oh he’s very consistent,’ Muller said, misinterpreting. ‘A very consistent man.’

Muller left shortly after that, and Morgan chatted for a while to some people from the university he knew and wondered how he was going to get near enough to Adekunle to put his new proposition to him. He spent a fair bit of time actively building up his confidence which had slipped alarmingly low since arriving at the Hotel de Executive. He felt like some medieval underling trying to present a suit to a feudal lord or overweight bishop, or one of those minor characters in Shakespeare’s Roman plays who intrude upon the principals with petty wrangles about legacies Or property disputes. Adekunle’s stature and prestige now impressed itself on him much more forcefully as a result of the massive adulation and respect the assembled dignitaries were offering up. He felt simultaneously the unreality, stupidity and ill-conceived nature of Fanshawe’s ‘mission’ for hjm. He and Fanshawe were like a couple of retarded kids playing a game together as the real world rumblfed by unaffected.

‘Cheer up;’ Celia Adekunle said coming up to him. ‘Why so gloomy? It’s meant to be a party, you know.’

‘Sorry,’ he said glumly. ‘Lot on my mind.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘Anything I can do?’

Morgan laughed more harshly than he intended. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. Then, ‘Sorry. Thanks for asking, but it’s not that important. I must say that’s a splendid…um, outfit you’re wearing.’ The cloth was heavy and the colours glowing, and she wore a lot of gold around her neck and wrists.

‘Thank you,’ she said without much enthusiasm. ‘I don’t wear this stuff all the time, you know, I’d hate you to think I’d gone totally native.’ The surprising stress she put on this last word embarrassed them both. Morgan looked away.

‘Big crowd,’ he said. ‘Is there any chance of talking to your husband, do you think? Or is that a vain hope?’

‘You’re very keen to see Sam, aren’t you,’ she said thoughtfully, lighting a cigarette. ‘I told him you were coming. He’s expecting you.’

‘Oh,’ Morgan said gratefully. ‘That’s very good of you.’

‘That’s OK,’ Celia Adekunle said, scrutinizing him through a cloud of smoke. ‘Just wait until the official meeting and greeting is over.’

‘Right,’ Morgan said. ‘Let me get you a drink in the meantime.’ He replenished her glass and stood chatting to her for a while. He asked her where she and Adekunle had met.

‘Sheffield of all places,’ she said. ‘Sam did his BA there. I was secretary to his professor. Sam had some trouble at one time with his bursary and so I saw a lot of him in the office one term, getting forms signed and letters written.’ She paused. ‘He was so different from the other students. Much older of course, very ambitious and somehow experienced, even though he was at a bit of a loss in Sheffield at first. It wasn’t much fun being a black student in those days. We went out together a few times…got our share of strange looks.’

‘When did you get married?’ Morgan prompted, feeling mildly interested.

‘Sam went off to Harvard to do his PhD. He came back suddenly after a year and asked me to marry him, and I did.’ She shrugged. ‘We had two years in the States. My first boy was born there. Then we came here.’

Morgan smiled awkwardly. The story had been delivered in a curiously dead-pan tone. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. ‘So you’re a secretary by trade,’ he said lamely.

‘No, I started off as a nurse. But I couldn’t stick it. My mother had been a midwife and I was rather forced into the profession. But it’s not something you can just do. You have to be a certain kind of person. It just got me down. $ick people all the time, people dying.’ She gave a brittle clear laugh. ‘I should have been a midwife. Get people going, instead of meeting them at the end-of the race.’

‘So you became a secretary.’ Morgan felt his line of questioning was uninspired to say the least, but she seemed happy to talk about herself.

‘I was waiting round, undecided. It seemed a good stop-gap, but then I found I quite liked it, especially working in a university. Intelligent people all around you, all that. My boss was nice too.’

‘Sam’s professor,’ Morgan suspected that there was another story there too.

‘Yes. He was a kind man. He…Then,’ she made a mock-dramatic gesture, ‘Sam Adekunle walked into my life, needing a signature on a bursary form.’

Morgan saw it all: the bored, frustrated secretary; Adekunle — black, potent. A chief’s son, no doubt hints dropped of great wealth and limitless tribal lands. The sense of failure prompting a spirit of rebellion: go out with a black man, show how free you are, how you spurn the conventions of your life…

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘But I can assure you it wasn’t how you imagine.’ Morgan protested vehemently. ‘It’s alright,’ she said, ‘I know what they say about the white wives of Kinjanjans out here, and it’s probably fairly accurate. But with Sam it wasn’t like that. He was quite a different person in those days.’

Morgan found himselfblushing. ‘Look,’he insisted, ‘I wasn’t thinking anything, for heaven’s sake.’

‘I believe you,’ she smiled. ‘Relax. Only it’s just that I haven’t spoken about me and Sam for ages. And I do know what the expats say, I’ve been on the receiving end of enough nasty gossip.’

‘Please. Don’t classify me as a typical expat. Anything but.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But I became pretty good at recognizing that ‘look’ in people’s eyes.’ She jokingly speared two fingers at Morgan’s eyes. ‘I thought I saw it flashing there.’ She glanced over her shoulder, ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘I think Sam’s available now.’

♦

Adekunie steered Morgan into a corner of the courtyard. He muttered something to one of his aides. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Morgan. ‘We won’t be disturbed.’

Morgan looked about him. ‘Isn’t there somewhere less…exposed?’

Adekunle’s laugh boomed out. ‘My dear fellow, it would attract far more attention if I were seen leaving my own birthday party with you.’ Morgan realized he was right.

‘I found your speech very interesting,’ he said.

‘Did you?’ Adekunie asked sceptically. ‘And how does the Deputy High Commission rate the KNP’s chances?’

‘Good.’ Morgan drew the word out as if it were the product of long deliberation. ‘If the Army let you.’ Adekunie looked at him sharply. Morgan was gratified by the accuracy of his shot in the dark.

‘What do you mean by that?’ Adekunie said with more interest.

‘I don’t think we need to go into detail, do we?’

‘As you wish,’ Adekunie said. ‘We’ll take a rain-check on it, as the saying goes. Anyway, Mr Leafy, I believe you wanted to talk to me.’

Morgan took a deep breath. ‘I’m here — unofficially — to convey the, how shall I put it? less unofficial nature of Britain’s, um, interest in the fortunes of the KNP.’

Adekunie thought about this. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t be talking to me. I am only, as our French friends say, a fonctionnaire.’

‘Ah yes. But an important one. Certainly in the field of foreign affairs.’

‘Just a supposition, Mr Leafy. I don’t everi know yet if I will be a member of the National Assembly.’

Morgan smiled patiently. ‘You have a point there. But, after all, a lot of diplomacy never gets further than supposition. And, on the strength of this one we…we would be interested in preliminary consultation with the, ah, putative Foreign Minister.’ Morgan finished, he was quite pleased with the way he’d expressed himself and with his neat ambiguities.

‘Consultation?’ queried Adekunle.

‘In London,’ Morgan said.

‘I see. In London.’

‘Yes,’ Morgan said, suppressing his impatience. This dainty circumlocution was suddenly getting on his nerves. ‘We will be happy to arrange the flight — first class of course — and your accommodation.’

‘In Claridges, I assume,’ Adekunle said with a broad grin.

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact.’ Morgan was surprised.

Adekunle gave a loud laugh. ‘My good God,’ he said. ‘You British are indeed astonishing. You still think that all you need to do to get an African politician eating out of your hands is to offer first class air tickets and bed and breakfast at Claridges.’ He wheezed with laughter. A few people nearby looked round and started to laugh too.

‘Thank you,’ Adekunle said finally. ‘Thank you for your offer. I will see if I can fit it into my itinerary.’

‘Itinerary?’ Morgan repeated, nonplussed. ‘Do you mean…?’

‘Yes, my dear Mr British Deputy High Commission man. You are a very late bird to catch this worm, as the saying goes. Once I’ve been to Washington, Paris, Bonn and Rome I’ll see if I can drop in on London. Thank you again, Mr Leafy,’ he said still smiling. ‘No wonder the Empire went. Yes?’ He broke off and wandered away to speak to his waiting guests.

♦

Morgan ordered a whisky and soda from the barman. The hot blush had left his face but he felt his ears were still glowing. That stupid old fool Fanshawe, he railed to himself, nothing but shame, disgrace and public humiliation had attached itself to this spectacularly misconceived piece of under-the-counter dealing, and most of it was particularly closely associated with him. He heard Adekunle’s laugh above the hum of conversation and imagined him amusing his friends with the details of their recent conversation.

The barman put down his glass.

‘What of ice?’ Morgan asked tersely.

‘Ice ‘e dey finish,’ the barman snapped back equally shirtily and turned away. Bloody rude black bastard, Morgan seethed to himself, this fucking country was determined to…

‘Go all right?’ asked a voice at his shoulder. It was Celia Adekunle.

‘Oh fine,’ Morgan said frostily. ‘Listen, do you think you could tell this snotty so-and-so to get me some ice for my drink?’

♦

Morgan lay back on the bed in Hazel’s hotel room. He could hear the high-pitched whine of a mosquito around but he didn’t care. He threw the sheet off his damp body, sweat slicked every crevice and fold. The neon lights on the façade of the cheap hotel filtered through the shutters, the tinny music from the bar competed with the honking and revving of the traffic outside. He peered at the luminous dial of his watch: twenty past twelve. Hazel slept silently beside him on the grubby bed. He felt itches spring up spontaneously all over his body. He needed to piss. He needed a bath. He felt dreadful in fact: he had drunk far too much, he was sweaty and uncomfortable and the vigour of his sex with Hazel had supplied him with a tingling electric ache in his penis. The details of the night’s unsatisfactory events crowded in on him. He let out an apologetic sigh: he had been unpardonably rude to Celia Adekunle. On being informed that the bar had indeed run out of ice due to excessive demand he had loudly declaimed that it was exactly what he had come to expect of Kinjanja and was a small but cogent illustration of what was wrong with the country. He had then bidden her a curt good night and sniffily walked out of the party. He could still clearly recall the hurt and surprise that had registered on her face as he strode past her. He clenched his fists beneath the sheets and groaned silently to himself. It wasn’t her fault that he had been made to look a complete fool: she had only been friendly and helpful. He buried his knuckles in his eye sockets in an agony of futile remorse.

He had driven straight to Hazel’s hotel. To his astonishment she was in. He upbraided her for the filthy state of her room and had sent down to the bar for a bottle of whisky, half of which was still left. Silently, he swung himself off the bed. He stood and stretched. The room was warm and fetid. With his hands as paddles he fanned air around his genitals. His penis felt hot and sore from the two brutal couplings he had experienced with Hazel. His attempts to take out his bruised pride on her had rebounded as unsatisfactorily as ever; she had responded to his harsh gusto in kind, uncomplaining and unresentfully, with patience and as far as he could see no bad feeling whatsoever, falling into a deep and apparently untroubled sleep as soon as he switched the light out.

He pulled on his trousers and shirt. There was a bathroom of sorts along the corridor where he planned on heading. He pulled open the door a crack and peered out. There was no one in sight. He padded along the passageway and into the bathroom. Gagging from the stench, he flicked on the light. Two geckos levered themselves back into their crevices in the ceiling and a large moth went into a stall, careered into the cistern and fell fluttering to the floor.

He lifted the top off the cistern and, as expected, he found it empty. With finger and thumb he jiggled the ballcock but no water flowed. Cursing, he unzipped his fly and aimed in the general direction of the brackish toilet bowl. It was quite disgusting, this, he thought to himself. Why should he have to put up with these privations and disreputable surroundings? He had to get Hazel into a flat. Something had to change in his life, something revolutionary and drastic: it couldn’t go on this way, it just couldn’t. He thought fondly of Priscilla in this connection, emblem of a bright tomorrow, rather as a martyr would invoke an image of the Virgin as the flames licked round his knees. There, he told himself, there his hope lay, and he relaxed his sphincter’s faltering hold on his straining bladder.

The burning sulphurous pain brought a shrill yelp to his lips ancl he did a high-stepping jig of surprise and agony, his urine stream carelessly playing across the lavatory seat and immediate environs. The initial sting died down fairly quickly and as soon as he was able to he leant weakly against the wall. Careful examination revealed nothing other than post-sex inflammation and heightened colouring — for a minute he had thought it might have been a vengeful bite from a lavatorial insect he had disturbed — and as he zipped himself up he put it down to the combined effects of latex rubber, heat and prolonged friction on what was — let’s face it — a fairly sensitive organ.

8

Morgan had forgotten about his diagnosis the next morning as he sat on his verandah in the grip of an averagely acute hangover. Something in Hazel’s room had indeed bitten him later, and savagely too, along his right thigh, which area he now scratched steadily as he stared blearily at the Daily Graphic, one of Kinjanja’s more literate papers, whose headline read: ‘UPKP corruption probe demanded.’ It wasn’t clear at this range whether the UPKP were demanding the probe or being investigated themselves but his headache wouldn’t allow him to bring the small print into focus.

He finished his boiled egg and shouted for Friday to bring him some more orange juice. He tightened the belt on his dressing-gown. He wasn’t looking forward to going into work. Friday had told him that Fanshawe had phoned three times between nine and half past ten last night: he would be waiting on the steps of the Commission for Morgan’s report. He finished his juice, said ‘shit’ at the light fixture above the verandah table, got up and went to his bedroom. Friday had laid out a clean, pressed shirt, socks and trousers on the bed. Morgan saw he’d forgotten to put out fresh underpants. He looked in the drawer he kept them in but could only find ones he’d abandoned because the rubber in the elastic waistband had perished, making them suitable exclusively for unfortunate creatures with four-foot girths. He frowned, unable at this stage of the day to comprehend this mystery. As far as he could remember he had three functioning pairs of underpants. Friday washed them every day. He had changed twice yesterday but that still should have left one clean pair at least for him to wear this morning.

In the corner of his room was a wicker basket into which he threw all his clothes that needed washing. He lifted the lid. Three soiled white underpants nestled in the bottom like some flayed rodent brood savaged by a ferret.

‘Friday!’ Morgan bellowed down the verandah.

Friday came panting up impelled by the violence in Morgan’s shout.

‘Underpants!’ Morgan accused his cowering diminutive servant. ‘No bloody underpants. Why you nevah wash ‘im?’

Friday hung his head. ‘Je ne peux pas le faire,’ he said meekly. ‘I don’t like wash dis one.’

Morgan picked a pair out and held it dangling from his hand. Friday reared back, a grin of alarm on his face.

‘It’s not bloody funny!’ Morgan growled furiously. ‘Just because you’re so bloody fastidious I’ve got to go to work in dirty knickers. Big joke eh? You’ve been washing them for two years, why stop now?’

Friday gestured at them. ‘C’est de gueulasse. I don’t like dis ting for inside. Nevah fit wash ‘im like dis.’

Morgan was puzzled. What was he talking about? Skid-marks? Sweat stains? He took the offending pair and spread the waistband wide with the fingers of both hands. What was the silly bugger objecting to now, he wondered as he peered in?

♦

Morgan sat in the car park at the university clinic telling himself to keep calm. His heart seemed on the point of retreating to its warm niche in his chest. He breathed out slowly: it had been a dreadful shock — that vile stuff — he had let the pants fall from his trembling fingers, reeling back, his eyes bulging with horror. He now wore one of his pairs with an expanded waistband secured with a safety pin. He held his hands out in front of him: they were still shaking slightly but they would do. He got out of the car and walked nervously towards the clinic. He noticed with surprise a long queue of students winding out of the waiting room. Inside there wasn’t a seat to spare. He went up to the reception window. The same little clerk sat behind it. Morgan leant against the wall.

‘Dr Murray here?’ he asked tiredly, like a man who hadn’t slept all night. He remembered his sworn promise to himself that he would never visit Murray again. That sort of brash statement was all very well when you were healthy, he told himself but it was a different matter when horrible oozings were coming out of your body.

‘Yes, sah,’ the clerk said. ‘Excuse me, sah, but are you senior staff?’

‘What?…Yes I suppose I am. Just tell Dr Murray that it’s Mr Leafy here. And that I need to see him urgently.’

‘I’m sorry, sah. Senior staff clinic is at twelve o’clock. If you can return then…’

‘Good God,’ Morgan said in angry despair. ‘What’s going on in this place? I’m not a car or something, I just can’t be sick to some timetable you’ve dreamt up. Look, look,’ he shooed his hands at the clerk, ‘go and tell Dr Murray it’s an emergency. I’m Mr Leafy, from the Commission. Got that? Now go on.’

The clerk protested, ‘Doctor will tell you to come back.’

‘Never you mind,’ Morgan hissed. ‘Let me worry about that. Just tell him.’ The clerk grudgingly left his position. Morgan paced distractedly up and down, his hands in his pockets, trying to ignore the rude stares and hostile mutters of the students who objected to him blatantly jumping the queue in this way. Presently the clerk came back and in whispers told him to go round to the dispensary and wait. Morgan went outside and round the corner of the building to a small bottle-lined annex where a genial chemist directed him to a row of wooden chairs against the wall of the verandah. Two African women sat there already, one nursing a child, and he reluctantly sat down beside her, modestly averting his eyes. What in God’s name was Murray playing at? he wondered, feeling hot and uncomfortable. Who did he think he was to park him out here like some welfare case? A little boy wearing only a shirt came round from behind the other woman and stood in front of him gazing at the large white man in frank curiosity. He had a streaming cold and grey phlegm covered his upper lip like a shiny moustache. Below the hem of his shirt a bulging domed navel protruded a good two inches. Morgan looked away, uncomfortable. The nursing baby slurped noisily at its mother’s breast. The little boy’s thin dark penis pointed at Morgan’s shiny shoes. Realities hounded you unmercifully in Africa, Morgan thought; just when he needed a bit of unreflecting peace, here they were, crowding round him.

Twenty sweaty minutes later Murray came out. He looked capable and cool in his normal outfit, supplemented this time by a stethoscope round his neck. Morgan stood up and went along the verandah to meet him halfway.

‘Ah Dr Murray,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad…’

‘My senior staff clinic’s not for another hour, Mr Leafy.’ Murray was firm and unsmiling.

‘I know that,’ Morgan said impatiently, ‘but this was important.’ He paused and decided it would be wise to make his tone more amenable. ‘I thought it was an emergency.’

‘I’ll give you five minutes,’ Murray said. ‘There are sixty students out there who’ve been waiting longer than you.’ Morgan followed him into his consulting room. The man was impossible, Morgan thought, almost deranged. It was as though he was doing you some astonishing favour in deigning to treat his patients. Still, he decided to keep his feelings to himself; this whole business was far too serious and delicate to allow his personal dislike of Murray to get in the way. He remembered the frosty exchanges of his last visit with vague regret and resolved not to let the mood deteriorate like that today.

‘What’s the trouble?’ Murray asked, taking up his seat behind his desk. Morgan paused, trying to find appropriate words to convey the intimate nature of his problem.

‘Well, this morning…’ he began. ‘That is to say I’ve been noticing some pain — actually more like discomfort really, a sort of tingling, really.’ He swallowed, his tongue suddenly dry as pumice. Murray looked on steadily, giving nothing away. Morgan wondered what he was thinking.

‘What in fact is wrong?’ Murray asked bluntly.

‘Discharge,’ Morgan blurted out the word as if it were some dreadful obscenity. ‘This morning I noticed, well, what you might call, ah, discharge, on my underpants, that is.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Pardon? Oh no, as I was saying there’s been some discomfort on, when I go…when I urinate.’ Morgan felt exhausted, as if he’d been running for miles. He wiped moisture from his upper lip. ‘Not always,’ he said feebly. ‘Just sometimes.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ Murray asked. The man was incredible, Morgan thought, not a trace of sympathy, no preliminary chat to put the patient at his ease.

‘Couple of days I suppose,’ Morgan confessed. Murray pulled his chair round to the side of his desk.

‘Right,’ he said briskly, ‘Let’s have a look.’

‘You mean?’ Morgan cleared his throat. ‘Off?’

‘Aye. Breeks down, the lot.’

Morgan thought there was a good chance he might faint. With trembling fingers he undid his trousers and let them drop to his ankles. Too late he remembered his baggy, perished underpants. He felt his face blaze with miserable embarrassment as he unfastened the safety pin holding up his useless Y-fronts.

‘I think I should say these are not my normal…’ he began in a rush. ‘My steward refused to wash…So I had to…I do have some perfectly good ones…’ This was appalling, he screamed to himself. Murray looked on unmoved. Morgan could hardly breathe from the effort he was making to stay calm; the powerful urge to explain overwhelmed him. With intense care he placed the safety pin on the edge of Murray’s desk. It was useless, he let his underpants fall and looked anguishedly at the ceiling. He felt giddy and weak. The average human body, such as the one he possessed, couldn’t tolerate, he felt sure, the extremes of shame and humiliation that his had been subjected to recently. Perhaps this ghastly discharge was a sign that it was finally cracking up, falling apart at the seams.

He reached out and caught the edge of the desk to steady himself. He felt his genitals contracting in the cool air of the consulting room. He was sure his penis had shrunk to about one inch long. Murray probably couldn’t even see it: he’d need a magnifying glass or a microscope.

‘What do you think?’ he croaked.

‘Looks alright,’ Murray said noncommittally. He reached into a drawer for something. Morgan squinted down: it was a wooden spatula, like an ice-lolly stick… Murray used it to raise Morgan’s penis. His head reeled.

‘Any chancres?’ Murray asked.

‘What?’ Morgan squeaked in horror.

‘Sores, crabs, lice, rashes?’

‘Good God no!’

‘Fine. You can put your pants on now.’

Morgan shakily pulled up and pinned his pants round his waist. He could feel huge sobs of frustration and despair building up in his chest, crushing his lungs against his rib cage, making it increasingly hard to breathe. He zipped up his trousers with numb and unresponsive fingers, like a man in sub-zero temperatures.

‘What is it?’ he gasped weakly.

Murray was washing his hands at a small sink. ‘No way of telling at the moment,’ he said calmly. ‘It could be nothing. People often get discharges for no significant reason at all, a natural defence mechanism. On the other hand it could be a non-gonococcal toxemia.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘They’re very common out here. But don’t worry. You seem well, but I think we’d still better check. Go down to, the sister at the end of the corridor. See if you can get some discharge on a slide. And we’ll do a urinalysis as well.’

‘Right,’ Morgan gulped, trying to stop his throat from closing — his Adam’s apple seemed three times its normal size.

Murray walked down the corridor with him. ‘What do you think it is?’ Morgan asked again, ‘Is it serious? Am I…?’

‘I doubt it very much,’ Murray said reassuringly. ‘But it wouldn’t be very clever of me to try and guess before we’ve got the tests back. Don’t you agree?’ They stopped at a door with ‘Surgery’ written on it. ‘Come back tomorrow, Mr Leafy,’ Murray said. ‘But try and make it at the right time.’

Five minutes later a plump kindly sister in a gleaming and rigidly starched uniform happily accepted the smeared glass slide and the squat brimming bottle from a wordless Morgan, whose face still glowed pinkly and who felt that if he dared to open his mouth only an insane gibbering chatter would emerge. He swayed unreflectingly out to his car and sat hunched over the wheel for a full ten minutes trying to exert some minimal control over the cartwheeling and tumbling emotions that were furiously rioting within him.

When he had calmed himself sufficiently he drove slowly down the road to the Commission where he sat quietly at his desk and methodically worked his way through his in-tray, his mind concentrated on the work in front of him, trying not to think, attempting to erase the morning from his memory.

Fanshawe, however, interrupted him and called him into his office for a report on his meeting with Adekunle, and seemed disappointed in the lack of immediate progress. Morgan told him that, as requested, he had put the proposition to Adekunle and that he had said he would think about it. It seemed safer to describe the disastrous events of last night in as unsensational a way as possible.

‘Think about a free trip to London and a buckshee stay at Claridges?’ Fanshawe demanded rhetorically. ‘What is there to think about, for God’s sake?’

Morgan tried to implant a tone of reasonableness and lied spontaneously: ‘It seems he’s got to refer this to his central office or the Emir or something. He can’t just up and off without telling anybody.’

‘Well I don’t know,’ Fanshawe said, obviously flabbergasted that anyone should have even to consider such a gilt-edged opportunity.

‘It’s not just a question of buying their good intentions,’ Morgan cautioned, trying to initiate the complex process of bringing Fanshawe round to face reality. ‘They’re sophisticated politicians.’

‘Think so?’ Fanshawe said dubiously, sounding surprised at the novelty of this idea. ‘To be quite frank they seem more like a bunch of cowboys to me.’

‘With respect, Arthur,’ Morgan said. ‘I think you’re underestimating them. Especially Adekunle.’

Fanshawe snorted his disbelief. ‘Well, keep at it Morgan. Follow it up in a day or so. We’re doing well, but we don’t want any hitches in Project Kingpin at this stage.’

Morgan stood up, his heart heavy in the knowledge that to all intents and purposes Project Kingpin had passed away in the night. Later he would have to feed Fanshawe some doctored story about American or French counter-pressure, but for the moment it would be best to let him carry on believing it was still underway.

He left Fanshawe’s office and walked moodily back to his own. On the way he bumped into Jones.

‘Hello there, Morgan,’ said the little Welshman cheerily. ‘Don’t worry, man. Worse things happen at sea.’

‘What?’ Morgan said, irritation giving an edge to his voice.

‘Cheer up. You look dreadful.’

‘Do I?’ he said, suddenly alarmed. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s your chin,’Jones quipped. Morgan touched his jaw. Had one of Murray’s chancres suddenly bloomed there like a septic flower?

‘My chin?’ he said, mystified, feeling its contours.

‘Yer, it’s dangling round your ankles. You’ll trip over it any second.’ Morgan did not find this funny.

Jones went on unperturbed. ‘What’s happened? Arthur chew you up for something?’

Morgan wished Jones would go away. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘Things on my mind.’

‘You want to relax a bit, my boy. Working too hard. Why don’t you come to the dance tonight with me and Geraldine?’

‘What dance?’

‘The club dance. The usual monthly one. Come and have a meal first and we’ll all go down later.’

Morgan was surprised at Jones’s thoughtfulness. ‘No thanks, Denzil. But it’s good of you to ask. I’ve got other things on.’ Dinner with Jones and his wife was the last thing he required. Why was Jones being so nice though?

‘Well, don’t work too hard,’Jones advised. ‘Leave some of it for the new man. He’ll be here next week.’

♦

Morgan sat at his desk and stared out at the familiar view of Nkongsamba. The afternoon sun was filtered through a dust haze and the distant hills on the horizon were softened like an aquatint. He had visited the lavatory twice that day with no ill-effects or recurrence of his symptoms and some of his fears were beginning to recede. Perhaps Murray’s supposition was correct: it was probably some horrible coincidence, the climate, his sex-life, a temporary malfunction of his metabolism. Christ only knew, it was easy enough to happen in this place. He decided he’d just have to look after himself a little better. He made up his mind to have a quiet evening at home tonight: a couple of paperbacks, get Moses to cook him one of his specialities. As he was feeling a little improved he allowed himself a wry smile at the thought of his fierce embarrassment in Murray’s consulting room. The man was unbelievable, he thought, he couldn’t detect a trace of compassion in him, he ran that clinic as if it were a meat-processing factory or an army barracks.

The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up. ‘Leafy,’ he said.

‘Morgie,’ came a familiar voice. It was Priscilla, naturally. ‘I’m back,’ she informed him.

‘Marvellous. When did you arrive?’ He felt a surge of momentary elation. This was what he needed after his shocks of the morning.

‘Late last night. We had a lovely time.’

‘Good. Good.’ To his mild surprise and annoyance he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to say to her.

‘I’d have phoned you earlier but I’ve been at the club with Mummy. We had lunch.’

‘Uh-uh. Good. Good.’ Morgan remarked. He was now a little alarmed. This total inability to converse with the girl he loved was absurd.

‘Morgie, they’ve got a dance on there tonight.’

‘Yes, I know.’ He wished she wouldn’t call him that.

‘Honestly! What’s got into you today?’ she said impatiently. ‘Let’s go to it, shall we? It’ll be fun.’

‘What? Oh yes, if you like. Of course.’ He paused, what was happening to him? ‘I’m sorry Priscilla, I’ve been working all day. Not thinking straight.’

‘Pick me up about eightish?’

‘Sure. On the dot. Ah, looking forward to seeing you,’ he added with grotesque formality.

‘Me too. Miss me?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Miss me, silly.’

‘Oh…terribly.’

‘Oh good. See you tonight. ‘Bye.’

Morgan put down the phone. He felt an immense lassitude descend on him, and he realized that he still didn’t feel like going out tonight. And, what was more perturbing, he didn’t particularly want to spend the evening with Priscilla.

9

Priscilla was wearing a new dress, or at least one that Morgan hadn’t seen before. It had a white bodice with thin straps tied in a bow at her shoulders, a red plastic belt and a navy-blue skirt. Her tan had deepened as a result of her days on the coast and she looked healthy and efficient, like a successful sales promotion girl or an air hostess. Tonight, also, she was wearing pinky-orange lipstick and pale-blue eyeshadow. Her cheeks and forehead were still red from sunburn and her nose was peeling slightly.

‘You look great,’ Morgan said, a sherry poised in his hand. ‘Doesn’t she?’ he turned to Mrs Fanshawe for confirmation.

‘She’s always been fond of clothes, ever since she was a tiny baby,’ Mrs Fanshawe declared proudly. ‘I remember once when she was in her pram…’

‘Oh Mummy,’ Priscilla interrupted with a laugh, ‘Please don’t tell that story again. I’m sure Morgie isn’t the slightest bit interested.’ Everyone tittered politely. ‘Morgie’ took a sip of his sherry and placed the glass on the table beside his armchair as Mrs Fanshawe dutifully completed the anecdote. For the first time he sensed Priscilla’s parents eyeing him as a potential suitor for their daughter and this realization brought with it its usual cargo of conflicting emotions. He glanced at Mrs Fanshawe, smoke curling from her cigarette jammed in its black holder, her teeth clamped on its stem, her wide pale face beneath the jet-black hair, the immense prow of her chest. He tried to imagine her talking with his mother and Reg at the wedding reception and panic fluttered for a moment in his belly like a trapped bird. Chloe Fanshawe would be his mother-in-law…He abruptly stopped that train of thoughts from going any further.

‘We’d better be off,’ he said with a nervous smile.

Priscilla ran up the stairs to fetch her handbag and Morgan stood alone in the centre of the room, like a slave at auction, conscious again of the Fanshawes’ evaluating stares.

‘Priscilla enjoyed her day’s fishing,’ Fanshawe said. ‘Sounds like quite a place. Must take me up sometime, Morgan.’

Oh no, Morgan thought. ‘Gladly,’ he said. He felt the bosom of the family mushily enfolding him with slow inexorability. He should be pleased, he realized; he firmly told himself he was. Then Priscilla arrived and the Fanshawes walked them to the door and waved them down the steps.

‘Have a good time, you two,’ Mrs Fanshawe cooed at them as they got into his car.

When they arrived at the club Morgan and Priscilla kissed restrainedly for a while in the car park. Priscilla put her arms round him and squeezed.

‘I have missed you,’ she said. ‘Mummy and I talked a lot about you when we were staying with the Wagners.’

‘You did?’ Morgan said uncertainly.

‘They’re both very fond of you, you know.’

‘The Wagners? But I’ve only met them once.’

‘No, dopey!’ Priscilla poked him in the side. ‘Mummy and Daddy.’

‘Are they?’ he said in considerable surprise, but then covered this with a hasty ‘of course, I’m very fond of them too,’ amazed at his ability to form the words without choking. Everything, he remarked to himself, seemed to be advancing with exceptional smoothness. Perhaps tonight would be fine after all. He kissed Priscilla again to remind himself why he was going through with this factitious exchange of vows. He put his hand on her knee and ran it up her thigh under her dress until his fingers met the cotton of her pants. To his astonishment the expected reproachful wrist-slap was not forthcoming, in fact her own hand applied gentle pressure to the small of his back. They broke apart, her eyes bright and smiling. The familiar suffocating feeling established itself in Morgan’s chest; it was like having your lungs stuffed with cotton wool. The evening was shaping up in an incredibly good-natured, accommodating way. Tonight could well be the night.

They walked arm-in-arm into the club where the dance was underway. The club had a regular dance once a month. There was nothing special in this, it was simply a way of bringing people in, of injecting a faint sense of occasion into Nkongsamba’s unremarkable social life, and giving a boost to the restaurant and bar sales. Sometimes they hired a band but tonight Morgan saw they were relying solely on records. The lounge area had been cleared, the chairs pushed back to the wall and the central lights switched off. The armchairs had been arranged in intimate groups around small tables upon which candles burned in old Chianti bottles. A young man — manager of Nkongsamba’s Barclay’s Bank and social secretary of the club — sat behind the table that held the record player, flanked by two large speakers, leafing self-importantly through a pile of LPs. Some indeterminate jazz was playing, a clarinet dominant. Morgan found the music soothingly melancholic. A few people sat in the armchairs and three couples danced stiffly on the loose parquet flooring that rattled gently beneath their feet like distant castanets. The bar was busier, surrounded by people who looked only slightly better-dressed than usual: a tie there, a dab of make-up; here, a string of pearls; but the atmosphere was little different from the one that usually prevailed in the club. This came as no surprise to Morgan — the monthly dance, for all its aspirations, had never brought out the best in Nkongsamba’s avid socialites — but Priscilla seemed to be disappointed.

‘I thought there’d be a band,’ she wailed sadly.

‘There is sometimes,’ Morgan apologized.

‘But they’re not even trying,’ she protested. ‘It’s like a party in somebody’s flat.’ Morgan had to agree. He put the blame on the unimaginative social secretary, who, as if to confirm this adverse judgement, replaced the jazz with cha-cha and successfully cleared the dance floor.

‘It gets better as Christmas approaches,’ Morgan said in compensation. ‘Honestly. Anyway, let’s have a drink.’

♦

Morgan and Priscilla danced. They held each other close and moved slowly to and fro as somebody sang ‘Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play.’ Morgan rested his cheek on Priscilla’s head. He smelt her straight clean hair, shiny and fine. It seemed to him, a little fancifully he had to admit, to be a symbol of everything his life was shortly to become. He shifted his erection against Priscilla’s belly and dropped his head to kiss her bare shoulder. She locked her wrists around his neck and pulled him closer to her. Her prim façade was rapidly falling away he realized; she was probably missing Chinese Charlie’s attentions by now. She had drunk two large scotches and had been very flirtatious in her own way: he had quite enjoyed himself. He squinted at his watch: it was twenty to ten, they had been here just over an hour.

While standing at the bar shortly after they had arrived, Jones and his wife accosted them. Jones had seemed somewhat put out to find Morgan at the club after refusing his invitation, and the Welshman had accepted his excuses with bad grace. The bloody oaf, Morgan thought to himself as he swayed gently with Priscilla in his arms, it should be pretty obvious to him by now why his offers to dine chez Jones were so regularly turned down: the drab unintelligent wife, the squalling brats who always woke up, the inferior food. Poor Jones, he thought, poor bloody Jones. The inept social secretary again demonstrated his sensitive feel for the mood of a party by playing some loud rock and roll and the dance floor soon emptied once more. Morgan and Priscilla stood undecided between the lounge and the bar. Priscilla looked like she had just been woken up.

‘Drink?’ Morgan suggested.

‘Oh let’s not stay on,’ she said suggestively. ‘Can you wait a minute? I just want to go to the loo.’ Morgan said that would be no problem. He watched her go, watched her firm-muscled calves, the shimmying buttocks beneath the blue skirt. He felt his heart begin to beat faster: the house was tidy, there was drink and food if necessary, by chance clean sheets had been placed on the bed only yesterday — all was in order…Apart from himself, he thought, acknowledging the inopportune nag of his conscience at the memory of his visit to the clinic and the dreadful affliction Murray had mentioned: non-gonococcal something. But surely not, he thought, persuading himself. Even Murray had been happy to suspend his verdict. Furthermore there’d been no repetition of the burning pain, not another besmirching drop of discharge either. It must be all right — just a scary coincidence. However, he told himself, to satisfy his own mind finally, and quieten his conscience, he’d make one last check. He slipped off, humming the catchy refrain of the rock and roll number that was still blasting across the empty dance floor, by-passed the crowd around the bar and strolled jauntily down the passageway that led to the lavatory.

He stood in front of the urinals and passed water without so much as a twinge. He smiled to himself: he’d squared up to his responsibilities, he couldn’t be accused in any mental tribunal of evading the issue. He’d done all that could reasonably be asked of a man about to bed his loved one. He zipped up his trousers and washed his hands. He considered his reflection for a moment in the mirror, straightened his tie and cautiously touched his hair with his hands. He wondered cursorily if he ought to grow a moustache — one of those fashionable droopy ones: it would probably suit him. ‘Narcissist,’ he fondly accused his reflection, and turned away.

He stepped out into the dark corridor and bumped into someone. They both backed off apologizing. Morgan recognized Murray’s accent before he distinguished his features. But this evening his benevolence could include anyone — even Murray — so he said pleasantly, ‘Evening, Doctor. Here for the dance?’

Murray didn’t reply straight away. ‘No…’he said thoughtfully, as if remembering something. ‘The library.’

‘Didn’t think you were a dancing man somehow, Doctor,’ he observed facetiously, almost enjoying what he interpreted as the first signs of discomfort he had ever witnessed on Murray’s face. ‘Well, good night to you,’ he said gaily, moving off.

‘Mr Leafy,’ Murray said, calling him back. ‘I suppose it’s all right for me to tell you now. We’ve had the results of the tests we ran. I’m afraid I was wrong in my preliminary diagnosis.’ He looked over his shoulder to ensure they were alone. ‘About the non-gonococcal toxemia.’

‘Ah-hah,’ Morgan said triumphantly. ‘I thought you probably were. No more symptoms by the way. Everything tip-top, never felt better. But don’t worry, Doc,’ he added boldly, ‘can’t win ‘em all.’

‘I was about to say,’ Murray went on. ‘I’m afraid it’s not non-gonococcal.’

‘I…I don’t quite understand,’ Morgan said falteringly, doubt spreading through his mind like a rumour of war. ‘What are you saying?’

‘That it is gonococcal. I’m sorry to say this, but you have gonorrhoea, Mr Leafy. It’s nothing to be alarmed about, but it’s definitely gonorrhoea.’

♦

When Priscilla came down the stairs from the ladies’ powder room she commented on Morgan’s flushed appearance and asked him if he was feeling all right.

‘I’m just a bit hot,’ Morgan said dazedly. In fact he felt his head was about to explode, as if primed by the fatal words he had heard. Murray had calmed him down after his initial hysterical reaction, telling him repeatedly that it was nothing to worry about and to conic to the clinic the next day as planned. ‘I wouldn’t drink anything more tonight if I were you, Mr Leafy,’ he had added. ‘In fact just let abstinence be your watchword all round for a while.’

Morgan felt like a frustrated Samson chained between the two mighty pillars of his predicament. On the one hand was the frightful sentence of sexual disease, and on the other was the daunting prospect of the next hour or so. As he had stood there immobile, waiting for Priscilla to reappear all he could say to himself in futile repetition was ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?’ Somehow he managed to chat until they reached the car where, once inside, Priscilla flung herself on him, her tongue scouring the inside of his mouth, her teeth clashing painfully on his. He responded as best as he could, agonizingly aware of his total detumescence. My God, he screamed to himself in sudden horror, what if I become impotent? He thought of the swarming regiments of bacilli at this very moment billeting themselves throughout his body, searching out the most comfortable spots. And anyway, he moaned, what happened to you when you had gonorrhoea? Did your nose fall off? Did you go mad? Did your balls swell to bloated pumpkins? He felt like weeping hot bitter tears of rage and disappointment.

‘Morgie, you’re not listening,’ Priscilla complained petulantly.

‘Sorry, um, darling,’ he said, with a crazy smile. ‘What is it?’

‘What are we doing now?’

‘Shall I drop you off?’ he said unreflectingly.

‘Morgie!’ she cried. ‘That’s not funny!’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he insisted again. ‘Dreaming, don’t know what I’m thinking about.’ He kissed her distractedly; whatever happened she must never know. ‘Let’s go to my place,’ he suggested as he knew she wanted him to. He needed time, he thought, time to calm down, to think of some way out of this filthy dilemma.

They pulled out of the club car park and quickly drove through the seedy quarters of Nkongsamba, past the glowing fires, the bright youths, the screeching clubs. Car headlights flashed in his eyes, the tooting horns and booming radios assaulted his ears. It was like some African bedlam. He thought ofblack Bosch-like devils with long pincers and barbed tridents grabbing and prodding at his vitals.

Priscilla wound down the window and leant her head back against the seat. Her hot palm rested casually on his thigh.

‘Gosh,’ she giggled. ‘I’ve had too much to drink. When I shut my eyes the car feels like a roller-coaster.’

Morgan didn’t reply. As some semblance of order returned to his jumbled brain a single question obsessively edged its way to the forefront of his mind. If he had gonorrhoea, how, pray, how in the name of God had he contracted it in the first place? There was, he knew, only one possible answer which might have been emblazoned along the horizon in mile-high letters of fire it was so obvious. HAZEL! Hazel. The slut, the whore, the rancid filthy tart! It was her and her yobbo boyfriends — she had given it to him!

While they roared up the main road north Morgan plotted unspeakably crude and violent acts of revenge which he intended personally and lingeringly to visit on her corrupt body, but as they steadily approached his house his more immediate problems began to reoccupy his mind. As he turned into his driveway and parked his car in the garage the options that were available to him presented themselves and were discarded. One: be honest, tell her the truth, or as much of it as was necessary. But no, he thought almost at once, that was impossible. What if it got back to her mother? And also it would rule out any hope of marriage — people just didn’t get these afflictions in her world. Two: forget it, simply go ahead as if nothing were wrong. He almost passed out as he considered the possible consequences of this course of action. Priscilla would get it, he’d infect his future wife, and then…he stopped thinking about that one. Three: lie. His old friend Mendacity, or its siblings Delay and Prevarication, however unlikely they might seem. He saw now that in reality his only hope lay in keeping himself and Priscilla out of the same bed…He thought suddenly and maniacally of a self-inflicted wound: perhaps he could slice his hand while making sandwiches, or trip on the way back into the house and crack his head on the doorstep. But he knew he just didn’t have the guts to carry it off. Maybe he could simulate some other more sympathetic disease, like epilepsy, dropsy or sleeping sickness…

‘Come on, slowcoach,’ Priscilla’s voice was a little woozy. ‘I’m not going to wait all night.’ Morgan got out of the car and walked back to the house with her, his arm round her shoulders. She hugged herself to him and in this way they awkwardly shuffled to the door.

Fifteen minutes later Morgan fought himself free of Priscilla’s embrace and stumbled over to his drinks trolley where, despite Murray’s warning, he poured himself a huge measure of whisky. He hoped the alcohol would somehow inspire him, lend whatever feeble excuse he managed to dream up authenticity. He contemplated the idea of drinking himself unconscious but he realized with renewed despair that it would only postpone the inevitable crunch. Tomorrow would bring no escape: the problem would still be there as it was clear that, although Priscilla might accept drunken senselessness for one night, she was generally behaving in a way that suggested she saw sexual congress with him as a desirable thing in principle. This was no one — night stand, after all, and there was no telling how long he might have to abstain. ‘Let abstinence be your watchword,’ Murray had said in typical fashion, like some doom-laden sybil or prophetic crone in a morality play. Recalling his words, Murray’s features swam into his mind: the unsmiling blue eyes, the stern accent. Morgan felt positively light-headed with hatred: it was Murray’s fault, he accused with passionate illogicality — Murray’s intervention had landed him in this wickedly, poignantly ironic situation. He’d been trying to get into Priscilla’s pants ever since she had arrived, and, now that she was actively encouraging this move, he was the one who had to advocate restraint.

‘What are you doing, Morgie?’ he heard Priscilla ask. He wasn’t sure now that he liked the effect alcohol had on her: it made her winsome, lewdly coy, like some depraved child-prostitute.

‘Nothing, darling,’ he said, putting down his glass and turning round. She had risen from the couch, her mouth bruised from their kissing, her dress rumpled. She held out her arms towards him. Reluctantly he took her hands in his. She tugged him in the direction of the bedroom.

‘Let’s go, Morgie.’

He applied gentle braking pressure. He willed the alcohol to percolate through his system. ‘Darling,’ he said, trying to imbue his voice with subtle gradations of regret, prudence and reluctant moral wisdom. ‘Let’s not. I think we…Well, we should just stay here…’

Simultaneously he tried to mould his features into a complementary amalgam of love, respect and sage sincerity. Somewhere along the line his conception of facial expressions and tones of voice and Priscilla’s refused to coincide. A look of delighted sly adventure came into her eyes. He watched this transmogrification with all the horror of a scientist observing the first stirrings of a monster he’s unwittingly created.

‘Here?’ she said. ‘On the floor, Morgie? Oh Morgie.’ In front of his dumbfounded face she turned to the sofa and with a vandal’s relish flung its cushions on the floor, hastily piling them into a makeshift harem-bed. She quickly switched off all the lights but one, running around excitedly, paying no heed to Morgan’s beseeching rejoinders of’Priscilla, wait. No, I didn’t mean…Priscilla, please.’ She kicked off her shoes and slid onto the cushion pile, giggling tipsily as she stretched and pouted in cinematic sensual abandon. ‘Come on, Morgan,’ she simpered. ‘Don’t keep a girl waiting.’

Morgan felt he couldn’t go on much longer. What had happened to her? He had always suspected she was something of a goer — she had hinted as much herself — but it could only be drink that was producing this ghastly parody of a Hollywood vamp. Of course, he thought, remembering Olokomeji, she had no reason to believe that he wouldn’t be highly stimulated by these sexy cavortings. He groaned softly, looking wildly around his room as if the Medici Gallery prints on its wall held some encoded inspiration. His eyes swivelled reluctantly back to Priscilla and he almost screamed when he saw she was wriggling out of her pants. She slipped them over her ankles and flung them playfully at him. She smiled in his direction, her eyes a little glazed. She reached up and undid the bows of her dress. The front flap dropped forward to reveal a lacy strapless bra that needlessly supported her small breasts. Morgan’s mouth opened wordlessly as she reached behind her to unclasp it, the joints in her shoulders bulging roundly, her bottom lip caught in her teeth in exaggerated concentration. The bra fell away and for a brief moment he saw the pink nipples, before, in mad spontaneity, doing the only thing that came into his mind, he leapt across the room, dropped to his knees beside her and frenziedly replaced the bra over her breasts, like some fervent sexual reformer at a burlesque show.

‘No!’ he gasped. ‘Don’t, Priscilla. For God’s sake don’t go on.’

Astonishment registered for a second in her eyes before she giggled again, drunkenly enjoying the game. He looked in appalled consternation as she tried to wriggle free, one breast pinging out of its ill-applied cup, and grabbed at Morgan’s crutch.

‘No!’ he yelped, attempting to fend her off with one hand while still using the other to keep her bra roughly clamped to some portion of her body above the waist. Her dress had rucked up to her thighs in the struggle and Morgan caught a flash of her dark triangle which he promptly tried to cover up, maintaining his fight against nudity, with his one unencumbered hand, hoping to flip the skirt back in place. Suddenly unimpeded now, Priscilla’s fingers fastened on his fly-zip and before he knew it the zip was down and her right hand was thrust energetically into the gap. Morgan felt her sharp nails on his thighs, felt her fingers slip beneath his underpants and close round his infected organ.

‘Don’t touch it!’ he shrieked violently, as though to an innocent child about to pet an adder, and leapt immediately to his feet, backing away from the cushions, his hand groping along the wall behind him. He switched on the main light and stood panting in aghast dismay by the door to the front verandah.

The sudden illumination from the twin ceiling lights dazzled Priscilla and for a moment she looked about her uncompre-hendingly, before the harshness of her exposure dawned on her: the knowledge that in fact it hadn’t been a game, that, after all, there was no fun involved slowly penetrated her drink-befuddled mind.

Morgan looked at her in dismal misgiving, as if she were a bloodied corpse planted in his sitting room. Her dress girdled her thighs, the brassiere lay strung over a cushion, her small pink-tipped breasts heaved from the recent exertions. He watched her pass the back of her hand slowly across her eyes like someone awakening from a sleep. Awkwardly, almost meekly, she pulled her dress down over her legs and covered her exposed breasts with her arms.

‘You bastard,’ she said softly and then, suddenly, she snatched up the bra and her shoes and crouch-ran past him through the screen door and up the passage to the bathroom. Morgan hung his head in shame and abject despondency. He experienced Priscilla’s humiliation as if it had been his own: the defenceless prurience of her position on the floor, the retroactive embarrassment, the baleful unsympathetic light, him standing over her, shock written across his face. But he knew too, instinctively, and with an assurance gained from his own experience that, publicly at least, it wouldn’t stay that way for long. The self-defence mechanisms of the human psyche would swing efficiently into action, shrouding the truth, reallocating the shame, imposing new guilts and transferring the disgrace to him, where, he confessed, it properly belonged.

Numbly he replaced the scattered cushions on the sofa. He wanted to bawl like a baby, cry his frustration to the world, but instead he drank some more whisky, sat down and waited for Priscilla to reappear.

Presently the sharp clicks of her heels on the concrete floor of the corridor told him that, as expected, more than fresh make-up; had been applied in her absence. In glum trepidation he noted the frozen little smile on her face.

‘Will you take me home, please,’ she spoke as to a waiting taxi-driver. They walked out to the car in silence, Morgan wondering what he could possibly say to prevent this damage from becoming irreparable. Priscilla got into the car and sat stiffly erect.

‘Priscilla,’ he began. ‘I can explain. You see I thought it would be best if…’

‘Would. You. Just. Take. Me. Home.’ There was no trace of dejection in her voice, just cold, emphatic hatred. He started the car and backed it out into the driveway. The return journey to the Commission passed without another word being exchanged.

As he drove along the road Morgan saw his future disappearing in front of him with the remorseless inevitability of a torpedoed liner slipping beneath the waves. Already, only the creases in Priscilla’s dress, like the bubbling ripples of water, bore witness to their former intimacy. But then they too would be ironed out tomorrow. It would be like nothing had ever happened. Morgan found it hard to believe that such glowing possibilities — an actual breathing state of affairs — could be blotted out with such ease; that all the hints and talk of love, the moments of passion, his eminently realizable dreams, could be erased, as he surely knew they would be, so abruptly. But the bitter chill that existed in the car confirmed this fact unsparingly.

Hepulledup outside the Fanshawes’ house. He saidimmedi-ately, pleadingly ‘Priscilla, believe me, darling, there is an explanation for all this. I can explain. Please don’t feel that because I didn’t…’

She turned to face him. ‘I feel sorry for men like you,’ she said sofdy and venomously. ‘What I can’t understand is how I failed to see it in the beginning. It’s so obvious. You’re pathetic creatures, all of you, with your big talk, your sexy swaggering behaviour. Pathetic, feeble weak creatures. I don’t hate you, Morgan, I pity you.’

As Morgan listened to this his faltering hopes turned on one wing and went into a howling death-dive. He was horror-struck at her version of his behaviour: she thought he’d chickened out, couldn’t take the heat, hadn’t the lead in his pencil, which was absolutely the last thing he wanted. He had been assuming that she would think he was too ‘nice’, too ‘decent’ to compromise their love with a bit of fornication, but he saw the utter vanity of his wishes. His assault on her at Olokomeji on the river bank made any connection between him and ideas of gentlemanly restraint singularly inappropriate. With a sudden sickening feeling he saw just how apt Priscilla’s interpretation of his behaviour was. It was also clear to him that for all this talk of pity on her part what she really felt for him was seething contempt. Then he was shocked to see Fanshawe walk on to the verandah and beckon them inside.

‘Goodbye,’ Priscilla said quickly, and got out of the car. She ran up the steps towards her father. Morgan gave a casual wave and drove off promptly so as not to see them talking. He tried not to think what Priscilla might say, what explanation she would provide for her early return and his refusal to join the family inside. He tilted his head towards the window and let the breeze play across his face. He couldn’t actually recall from his anthology of personal disasters a more traumatic and ruinous evening; and yet it had hovered so tantalizingly close to being perfect, to cementing firmly the first bricks in the new future he had planned to build for himself.

With a surge of faint hope he thought that it might, just, be possible to salvage something from the wreckage: perhaps by dint of tears or lovelorn propositions convince her that he was truly sincere and hadn’t wanted to affect or alter their relationship by making it sexual at this early stage. He tried out an impromptu draft apologia on himself, but it sounded irredeemably bogus and unlikely. And he saw too, with a soured midnight clarity, that it had all gone too far, that after what Priscilla had in fact done — ripping off her clothes, practically begging him — there was no chance of rewriting her version of the night’s events. He saw himself cast permanently in the role of rugby club braggart, victim of his own preposterous life-guard conceit: the trumpeted exploits of the local stud exposed as sham, the empty, well-hung innuendoes of a redundant gigolo. He felt his face go red with anger as he saw the details of the portrait emerge. If only she knew what he was really capable of…but then his choler turned to shame as he saw the stereotype close in around him. He didn’t care what people said. Women always held the last card — he couldn’t win this one.

When he arrived back home he went straight to bed. Like a Napoleon at his Waterloo, he had briefly cast his eyes over the scene of his defeat — and had spotted Priscilla’s pants lying in the corner of the room where she had hurled them in pert abandon. The thought that he had driven a pantless Priscilla home was just the final ironic straw. He picked them up, successfully resisting the impulse to sniff them. They were white with blue lace trim round the leg-holes. They rested now in the drawer of his bedside table, a sad trophy of what might have been. As he masochistically re-ran the evening in his mind he reflected that if he hadn’t met Murray at the club, if he’d even decided to have a trial pee when he reached home instead, none of this would have happened: in fact he’d be lying in bed with Priscilla at this very moment. But no, the random events and occurrences of his and Murray’s day had to, like the Titanic and the iceberg, converge outside the gentlemen’s lavatory at that precise moment with finely adjusted timing. And equally, he thought malevolently, it had to be Murray too. The man was assuming a daemonic, fatal role in his life, it seemed to him. Murray’s untimely collision had jolted his conscience out of that closet in his mind where only seconds before it had been securely enclosed for the night and Morgan strongly doubted if he could ever forgive him for that. One side of him grudgingly admitted that Murray couldn’t ever have known the effect of his on-the-spot diagnosis but this was more than countered by the hateful aptness of him being the reminder, the catalyst that had set his rusty creaking sense of values juddering into action. For he knew that it had been his inclination to do the ‘decent’ thing by Priscilla that had landed him in this mess — but it was with no sense of comfort or self-congratulation that he acknowledged this was so. His moral niceties — he blankly calculated — had cost him Priscilla and all the bright tomorrows that queued entrancingly behind her. With a sudden flash of prophetic inspiration he felt he knew why there was so much evil in the world: the price you paid for being good was simply quite out of proportion, preposterously over-valued. And as prime consumers of the commodity of goodness the human race had decided that as far as they were concerned they were just not prepared to pay the going rate any more. He turned over in his bed and furiously punched his pillows, tears of frustration at his own weakness pricking his eyes. That is, he thought, except for a few silly mugs: except for a few soft, stupid bastards like himself.

10

Morgan closed the book and thought he could actually hear the blood draining from his face. He leant against a nearby wall and felt a tremor of blind fear run through his body. With shaking hands he re-inserted the thick volume back in its slot in the medical section. The book was called Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

He had decided not to go into the office until after his appointment with Murray. An agonizing tear-jerking session above his toilet bowl this morning had forcibly reminded him of his condition and, also, he wasn’t at all keen to confront Fanshawe. There was no telling what Priscilla might have related to her parents about the previous night. As a result he had killed time over a lengthy but morose breakfast during which he had made up his mind to face facts and be ruthlessly honest with himself. To this end he had driven up to the university bookshop to see what details he could establish about his ailment. After hovering around the medical section for a while, making sure no one was watching him, he had found the book he wanted and had uneasily opened its shiny, copiously illustrated pages.

He now gazed sightlessly out at the bright sunlit piazza of the administrative block which was visible through the windows at this side of the bookshop. His head was a glossy catalogue of frightful images, a rotten putrefying grocer’s filled with deliquescing cucumbers, split tomatoes, rancid sprouts, slime-ravaged lettuces. Crumbling noses, perforated palates, grotesquely swollen limbs danced in front of his eyes like images from some carnival for the terminally ill. His ears rang with some of the most foul, potent nomenclature he’d ever encountered: ‘Teeming treponemes’, ‘purulent meatus’, ‘macules’, ‘pustules’, trichomonasvaginilus, gmnuloma iguinale, bejel, venereal warts, Candida albicans—the bleak, muscular terminology of medicine.

Unthinkingly he touched the blackhead in a nostril cleft, traced the contours of his mouth with his tongue, checked the torsion of his knee joints. There had been an entire lurid chapter on vicious tropical strains. His eyes caught words like ‘chancroid’, ‘giant herpes’, ‘phagedenic lesions’. There were bizarre afflictions called ‘pinta’, ‘crab-yaws’ and, with horrific aptness, ‘loath’. A severe tic established itself in his right cheek and his eyes watered as he read on in despairing astonishment. How, he wondered, could such things exist? What dreadful plight had brought these hopeless mutations before the lab-technician’s lens? How, even, did they haul their friable, exuding and bloated bodies from place to place? He swallowed, trying to coax his drought-stricken saliva glands into action. He looked down at his stocky frame, sent out cautious messages, twitching feet and fingers. He seemed to sense electric current surging down the branching neurones, the capillaries faithfully irrigating the out-of-condition muscles and tissues, the tendons and cartilege pinning the frail armature of his body together. Don’t give up on me, he silently beseeched, hold up a bit longer, he pleaded, don’t fall apart. He promised his body he’d keep fit, eat high-fibre foods, treat it well, cosset and cherish its individual parts. He’d become an athletic, Vegan monk, he swore — anything to avoid joining the shiny spot-lit wrecks in the medical illustrations. Anything.

♦

He felt tremulous and abashed as he timidly knocked on Murray’s door half an hour later. Murray looked up from his desk as he entered and said good morning. He was writing something on a sheet of paper.

‘Won’t be a minute,’ he said. Morgan wondered how Murray intended breaking it to him: whether he would do it gently, leading up to the grim prognosis, or deliver it as a no-nonsense broadside.

‘We did a culture on the specimen you gave us,’ Murray said, signing his name at the bottom of the piece of paper. He looked up with a brief smile on his face. ‘Many urino-genital infections turn out to be non-gonococcal, but, as I told you last night, yours hasn’t.’

‘How,’ Morgan cleared his throat to bring his voice down from piping falsetto. ‘How…serious is it? I mean, have you the facilities out here to deal with such cases? You see I’m worried about whether I’ll have to be flown home.’ He swallowed. ‘And what about my…f-f-face…and the rest of my body?’

Murray scrutinized the blurred hieroglyphics on his blotting pad. Oh Jesus, Morgan thought, he can’t look me in the eye.

‘You’ve been reading books, haven’t you?’ Murray said resignedly.

‘I’ve been what? Books?…Well, I may have glanced…’

‘Let me do the diagnosing, Mr Leafy. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief.’

Morgan resented the patronizing tone in Murray’s voice. ‘One’s naturally concerned…to know. The worst, I mean.’

Murray looked at him intently. ‘A few cc’s of penicillin, Mr Leafy, and three weeks quarantine.’

‘Quarantine! What do you mean? Isolation?’

‘No, I mean going without sex. Abstinence.’

‘That’s all?’ Morgan questioned, sudden relief mingled with an obscure sense of being somehow cheated. ‘An injection and…only three weeks?’

Murray raised his eyebrows in mild amusement. ‘Two injections actually, just to make sure. Why, what were you expecting? Sulphur baths and amputation?’

Morgan felt foolish, an emotion he was coming to associate with Murray more and more. ‘Well,’ he said reproachfully. ‘One has no idea.’

‘Precisely,’ Murray said with some force. ‘We get on average three or four cases of non-specific sexual diseases a day. And not all of them among the students or the workers. We inject a lot of penicillin into senior staff.’ Murray’s voice was studiously neutral but Morgan felt he was automatically being classed with a gang of mental defectives. Now that the prospect of a lingering piecemeal death had receded he found Murray was beginning to get on his nerves yet again.

‘I need a few facts,’ Murray said, and took up his pen. ‘First the names of your sexual partners over the last two months.’

‘Is that absolutely necessary?’

‘The law requires it.’

‘Oh. I see. Well, there’s only been one.’ He spoke Hazel’s name with some venom, thinking how close he had come to adding a second. Murray asked her age and address.

‘Now,’ he said briskly. ‘Have you and, ah, your partner indulged in oral or anal sex?’

‘Good God!’ Morgan said, reddening. ‘This is absurd. You’re not doing research, are you? What do you need to know that for?’

Murray’s features hardened. ‘She could get oral or rectal ulcers, Mr Leafy — if it’s not treated.’ Morgan gulped and muttered oral in a chastened tone of voice. He’d never thought about the other alternative. ‘Right,’ Murray went on. ‘I have to pass her name and this information on to the Ademola clinic in town. It might be better if you personally made sure she went along there. She must be treated too, obviously, and her other sexual partners traced.’ He smiled grimly.

‘There aren’t any other sexual partners,’ Morgan said righteously but without much confidence. He thought for a moment or two. ‘Listen, Dr Murray,’ he said. ‘Do I, ah, need to get involved in this any further. I mean go to the clinic — have my name passed along. There is my…my position here to consider — it could prove a little embarrassing. Couldn’t we on this occasion forego the absolute letter…?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Leafy,’ Murray interrupted unsympath-etically. ‘It takes two to tango, as they say, and I’m afraid it’s unwise to give too much thought to embarrassment under these circumstances. Why should you get treatment you’d deny…?’

‘All right, all right,’ Morgan interrupted bitterly. ‘Point taken. But at least can’t she be treated here? Don’t worry, I’ll pay. I’m happy to pay for her as a private patient.’

‘No,’ Murray said. ‘Absolutely out of the question.’ He scribbled something down on a piece of paper. ‘Take that to sister in the surgery. She’ll give you your first injection. Come back in six days for the next.’ He walked to the door and held it open for him. ‘Remember, Mr Leafy,’ he said. ‘No sexual intercourse and no alcohol for four weeks.’

‘Four? I thought you said three,’ Morgan objected.

‘I think in your case we’d better make it four.’

♦

Sitting in his office an hour later Morgan calmly decided that currently he probably hated Murray more intensely than any other human being in his life, though as always, there were a few contenders for first place. He couldn’t understand, though, why he was letting Murray persistently get up his nose like this. He was just a functionary, after all; someone with a temporary responsibility for his health who he was obliged to consult at the moment. One met lots of obnoxious people in this category — civil servants, bank clerks, traffic wardens, dental receptionists and so on — in the necessary course of one’s life, but they didn’t inspire this energy-consuming hate. What was it about Murray, he wondered, that made him want to dash out his brains, run him over with his car, hack him into dog meat with a machete? It wasn’t simply his repeated unhelpfulness towards a fellow Briton, his refusal to acknowledge his diplomatic status, or the cynical enjoyment he seemed to take in his, Morgan’s, discomfort. Thinking about it further he decided it must be something to do with the way that Murray implicitly set himself in judgement — as a sort of human rebuke, a living breathing admonition to others. It was as if he was saying, look how feeble, pathetic and pretentious you lot are. Certainly that was the dominant impression Morgan gained from his encounters with him. And it was the cast of his features too, he thought: the short hair, the wrinkled suntanned wisdom of his face, his clean clothes, his exclusive healer’s knowledge, the apparent absence of doubt and uncertainty in everything the man said. That was it, Morgan thought: when you met Murray all the shabby moral evasions that made up your life, all the grey zones of questionable behaviour, the whole sad compendium of self-regarding acts suddenly stood up to be counted. But what was worse, what was particularly galling about Murray was that, having somehow brought this effect about, he didn’t really seem to care any further, wasn’t especially surprised to find out that there were so many. We all meet people from time to time who make us feel like shits, Morgan admitted, but Murray was different. He was like a hygiene inspector who points out the filth, the grease and the rat droppings in the condemned kitchen but then goes away, clears off without telling you what to do to get rid of the mess, quite unconcerned whether you clean up the place or not.

Morgan wandered over to the window and stared out at Nkongsamba baking in the heat of the afternoon sun. He was getting tired of the view, it brought no relief, provided no sensations sweet, afforded no glimpses into the life of things for all the hours he spent contemplating it. He was annoyed to find his thoughts dwelling so exclusively on Murray, he had more important problems that demanded all his attention, namely how he was going to repair the awful damage to his relationship with Priscilla, what he was going to do about Adekunle, and the nature of the retribution he was going to inflict on Hazel.

For this last item he contented himself, three hours later, with a ringing slap on her face, but when Hazel collapsed wailing on the bed he was stricken with remorse and apologized, comforting her and covering her face with kisses. He felt like hitting her again, though, when she admitted to three other part-time lovers. He raged up and down the room for five minutes fouling the air with his curses and threats. He then drove her up to the Ademola clinic, a mean and fetid building down a side street near the law courts. They sat in a grubby, finger-smeared waiting room filled with crying children and tired mothers while they waited for a harassed Kinjan-jan doctor to attend them. Eventually they were called into a small room and the doctor took down the details of the case. Hazel gave her name and those of her three sexual partners in a quiet voice, her eyes fixed on her hands which fidgeted on her lap.

The doctor looked up at Morgan. ‘I believe you are having treatment at the university clinic,’ he stated. Morgan admitted this, reflecting that Murray hadn’t wasted any time getting on the phone. ‘And your name?’ the doctor asked. Morgan was surprised, Murray had obviously not told him everything. ‘My name?’ Morgan said thinking fast, and applying a silencing pressure on Hazel’s elbow. ‘Jones,’ he said. ‘Denzil Jones. D, e, n, z, i, l. And my address is…’

11

Five days later Morgan stood again in the small arrivals hall of Nkongsamba’s airport. A sense of deja vu impressed itself on him strongly. There was the same heat, the Dakota stood on the tarmac, its nacelle still shrouded. The sulky girl still sat behind her badly-stocked bar and the magazines in the revolving rack were unchanged. Only the well-dressed family were absent. Morgan looked at his watch: thirty-five minutes late. He’d made a point of ringing the airport in advance and had been assured that the plane was on time. He paced about the floor shaking his head in disbelief. He couldn’t even rely on his precautionary measures in this country: all your prudent checks on projected actions turned out to be a waste of time too.

He was at the airport to meet the new man, one Richard Dalmire. He had brought his own car and was to take Dalmire to the university guest-house where he would be staying until his accommodation was fixed up, and then on to the Fanshawes’ for a lunchtime welcome drink. Morgan had been invited too but was not looking forward to it. He had kept a very low profile as far as the Fanshawe family were concerned since his disastrous night with Priscilla, immersing himself in his work, and he wasn’t at all sure what sort of reaction he’d get from mother and daughter in public. Fanshawe himself had been away in the capital for a couple of days, finalizing arrangements for Project Kingpin, about which he still enthused, and briefing the High Commissioner on developments in the Mid-West regarding the approaching election. Morgan had been busy cobbling together a report of sorts for him to deliver, based entirely on studious sifting through the previous month’s newspapers and what gossip he could pick up around the bar in the club. It was wholly subjective and largely unverifiable but he’d peppered it with jargon and official-sounding language and he had to admit that it looked rather in-depth and professional. He had worried a little about its lack of objectivity but he was coming round to the opinion that it was an impossible ideal, and anyway, nobody else in the capital would know any more than he did about it all.

He spotted Dalmire immediately among the plane’s passengers and was surprised to find him so young. He was wearing a light-coloured suit with a pale-blue shirt and, of all things, a straw panama hat. He didn’t seem to be feeling the heat at all and Morgan thought he looked like a courier on an up-market package tour, confident, and primed with all the requisite knowledge.

‘Hello,’ Morgan said, going up to him. ‘Dalmire, isn’t it? I’m Morgan Leafy, First Secretary.’

Dalmire beamed at him and shook his hand energetically. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Glad to be here. I’m Dickie by the way.’ His voice had a high, perfectly accented pitch.

Morgan had a curious reluctance to address Dalmire so familiarly; he couldn’t explain why, but it would seem somehow like giving in before a shot had been fired. ‘Let’s get your bags,’ he said.

On the way to the university guest-house Dalmire told him how grateful he was to be met by Morgan himself, how pleased he was to make his acquaintance and how thrilling he found it to be sent out to Nkongsamba. ‘I mean, just look at it,’ he said indicating some flimsy huts and a small herd of goats by a railway crossing they were drawing near. ‘Unique, isn’t it. Africa. That heat…the life…It’s all so different. We’ll never really change it. Not deep down.’

Morgan averted his face to conceal the smile that had appeared on it. Jesus Christ, he thought, where do they dig them up from? He had romanticized about Africa too, once, but that had been back in Britain, before he’d left for it. His colourful images and fond illusions had lasted about five minutes. Dispelled by the furnace blast of heat, littering his path on the walk from the plane to the humming immigration shacks at the international airport. All his Rider Haggard, Jock of the Bushveldt, Dr Livingstone-I-presume, Heart of the Matter pretensions fell from him with the sweat from his brow. Dalmire’s naivety was of a firmer more adamantine cast than his had been: he would give him about two weeks.

They booked Dalmire into the guest-house, deposited his luggage and set out, after a pause to freshen up, on the road again for the Commission. Dalmire was full of questions, like a new boy on his first day at school, and happily conceded the rightness of every opinion Morgan expressed.

‘Fanshawe’s a Far East man, isn’t he?’ Dalmire asked.

‘Yes,’ Morgan said. ‘So they sent him to Africa.’

‘Does seem a bit odd,’ Dalmire agreed, still gazing entranced at the passing landscape. ‘How long have you been out here?’

‘Getting on for three years.’

‘Ah well, I suppose that’s why they could send Fanshawe — you’d know the ropes.’ Morgan looked round sharply to see if Dalmire was joking, but he seemed serious.

‘You may be right,’ he said, turning into the driveway of the Commission.

Half an hour later Morgan stood with an orange juice in his hand watching sidelong as Dalmire talked with Priscilla. It had not been as bad as he had feared, Priscilla had greeted him pleasantly enough — no one would have guessed anything was amiss. Fanshawe had been bluff and hearty, needlessly reintroducing him to Dalmire and making some patronizing but flattering remarks about his value. Only from Mrs Fanshawe had a palpable chill emerged, her eyes narrowing slightly as she asked him if it was sherry as usual. Morgan had smiled as broadly as he could and said no, he felt like a soft drink if she didn’t mind.

‘Oh,’ she said obviously surprised. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Oh fine,’ Morgan said confidently. ‘Spot of upset tummy, that’s all.’ The frosty smile on her face as she handed him an orange squash let him know that she wanted to hear nothing further of his intestinal complaints. He was astonished, though, to hear Dalmire’s response to Mrs Fanshawe’s fluted, ‘Sherry for you, Dickie?’

‘I’d rather have a G and T if that’s no bother,’ Dalmire had replied.

It only went to show, Morgan told himself, resignedly, that he had never really fitted in. He’d been drinking their wretched sherry for years because misguidedly he thought they’d like him better for it. He’d never asked for anything else, apart from today, thinking it would be impolite and pushy, and so it had come to be known as his drink. He was just a fool to himself, he decided sadly, looking enviously at Dalmire’s clear bluey gin with its clinking ice cubes. He felt suddenly depressed. Fanshawe was wittering on at his elbow about Project Kingpin and how useful his report had been, but Morgan only half-listened. Dalmire was talking to Mrs Fanshawe, asking her intelligent questions about her furniture. Priscilla wandered over to them with a tray of canapes and soon all three were nattering earnestly and easily away in a manner, he instinctively sensed, that he had never achieved.

Later, on the verandah saying their goodbyes, the Fanshawes led Dalmire off to show him their potted plants and he found himself miraculously alone with Priscilla.

‘Priscilla,’ he began, feeling like an awkward teenager. ‘About the other night…’ She interrupted him with a smile of such seraphic brightness that he wondered if she’d suddenly gone mad.

‘Morgan,’ she said. ‘Let’s not talk about it. Let’s forget it totally. I’m to blame as well — in a way — so we’ll just pretend it never happened. OK?’ She paused. ‘He seems very nice, Dickie.’

Morgan ignored her. Hope was fluttering in his heart like a moth round a candle flame. ‘Priscilla, would you…can you?…Well, what about coming out tonight. Just a drink that’s all, only a quiet drink, we’ll…’

The bright smile returned. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ she asked patiently. ‘Nothing’s happened. Nothing’s going to happen. Let’s just leave it at that. I think it’s best. It was all a dreadful mistake. I think it’s better that way.’

Morgan hung his head. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Of course. But I just wanted to say…’ He never got the chance because Mrs Fanshawe swept up at that moment with Dalmire and Fanshawe in tow.

On the way back to the university Dalmire said musingly, ‘They seem very nice sorts. Very nice indeed.’

‘Mmm,’ Morgan said non-committally, thinking: there’s no hope for you, boy. But his mind was soon locked back on other matters, such as the utter wreckage of his prospects with Priscilla.

‘…Priscilla too.’

‘What?’

‘I was just saying that I liked their daughter too. Very attractive girl,’ Dalmire commented appreciatively.

‘Yes. I’ve, ah, been out with her a few times myself since she arrived,’ Morgan said possessively, adding subtle emphasis to the words ‘been out’.

‘Oh I’m sorry…I hope you didn’t think. Really, I was just…’

‘It’s OK,’ Morgan laughed without much conviction. Dalmire was genuinely confused. ‘She is attractive,’ Morgan went on in a worldly manner. ‘As nice as you’ll find out here.’

‘I am sorry,’ Dalmire continued. ‘It’s just that she’s offered to take me down to the club tonight. Show me around. I would hate you to think,’ he twirled his hands around each other, ‘that I was trying…anything.’

Morgan forced himself to smile. ‘I’d come with you,’ he said, spreading unconcern over his features like butter, ‘only I’m tied up with work.’

12

It was mid-morning. A clear washed-out blue sky was visible in the top half of the window of Morgan’s office. He had been at work since seven-thirty. The phone went.

‘Leafy here.’

‘Mr Leafy, this is Sam Adekunle.’ Morgan almost dropped the phone in surprise. ‘Mr Leafy?’ Adekunle repeated.

‘Hello,’ Morgan gasped. ‘Good to hear from you. Anything I can do?’

‘Yes,’ Adekunle admitted. ‘There is actually.’ His voice was confident and smooth. ‘About our last discussion. I think it might be worth resuming it, if you get my drift, so to speak, as you British say.’

Morgan agreed. He said he would be very happy to resume discussions.

‘Let’s meet at my house then,’ Adekunle suggested. ‘Do you krtow where it is on the university campus? Ask at the main gate. Shall we say three-thirty this afternoon?’ Morgan said that was fine with him. He put the phone down and sat there feeling excited. At last, the break he wanted. But what did it all mean? Fanshawe had been pestering him for progress on Project Kingpin and Morgan had barely managed to keep him satisfied with the endless sections of his file on Adekunle’s party. He felt he could apply for the job of official KNP historian so thorough was his knowledge of its background, membership, power base and influence. And since Dalmire had arrived and taken over most of the routine immigration work, Morgan had had plenty of time to amass his quantities of pointless information. It had become obvious though, that the initial singling-out of the KNP had been the right one to make as far as Britain was concerned. It had an ostensibly liberal-democratic, capitalist base and represented a coalition of Kinjanjan tribal loyalties in contrast to the limited regional background of the ruling UPKP. Whether it would win, however, was another matter. Popular rumblings of discontent over the evident corruption and earnest graft of politicians was intense. Absurdly, Kinjanja was in the top ten of champagne importers worldwide; the rival party newspapers assailed the impoverished, bureaucratically harassed populace with scandalous stories of weekend shopping sprees in Paris and London, village-sized parties with the guests shuttled in by helicopter, forced requisition of Kinjanjan Airlines planes for private use, and so on. Morgan had pages of clippings on gross abuse of power. Clearly the UPKP had to go but it was not so clear that any unchallenged winner would emerge from any of the opposition parties. Ultimately these things were decided on tribal and theological grounds, Morgan had come to learn, and the ethnic and religious mix in Kinjanja seemed, as far as he could establish, to point to no majority government. Still, he thought, closing his file, if you’ve got to back one horse in this field you could do worse than bet on the KNP.

♦

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 makes 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 sufficient, 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.

A while later, after a swim and some conversation, he ordered drinks and a sandwich. The steward brought the clinking tray over. Celia looked across her vodka and tonic at him sipping his Coke and said, ‘I don’t know how you do it, Morgan. You must be the only man in Nkongsamba who doesn’t drink.’

Morgan tapped his stomach. ‘I promised myself I’d lose some beef…’

Celia laughed. ‘Well, drinking Coke won’t help.’ She had a point there, he thought. He was about to say that he reckoned he’d be packing it in soon anyway when he saw a sight that made his chest thump with apprehension.

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ he swore. Emerging from the ladies’ half of the changing block at the far end of the pool were Priscilla and her mother. Priscilla was wearing her reinforced Oloko-meji costume while her mother favoured a short white towelling robe which blew apart as she walked to reveal an immense two-piece maroon swimsuit of the sort favoured by pregnant women or demure American matrons; the kind that has two loose theatre-curtain flaps hanging from the upper half that effectively retain the necessary modesty while allowing the wearer the freedom of a two piece — if she’s pregnant — or the impression she’s still young enough for one — if she’s conceited. Through the gap in the curtain Morgan caught a glimpse of very, very white skin, and above the top half noted the razor-thin crease of compressed cleavage surrounded by a juddering jelly-sea of tightly packed and constrained bosom. Two sturdy blue-veined thighs completed this vision of an ageingjuno, a thickened, middle-aged and middle — class Botticelli Venus returning to the waves, clutching in her right hand a rubber flower-bedecked bathing cap.

As they drew near it became obvious to Morgan that they had seen him but were, independently or by mutual pact, going to pretend they hadn’t. From sheer obstinacy he decided he wasn’t going to let this happen.

‘Chloe! Priscilla!’ he hailed as they came closer, the joviality of his tones belying the nervousness he felt. He hadn’t seen Priscilla since the day he’d bumped into her and Dalmire at the club: Dalmire genial and talkative, Priscilla proudly independent. Recognition made inevitable by his shout, he saw her adopt this no-hard-feelings pose again.

‘Hello,’ she said gaily. ‘Thought I’d seen those trunks before.’

He looked down, suddenly conscious of how prominently his groin bulged. ‘Yes,’ he said, sensing the nervousness about to overwhelm him. ‘They are rather crying out for attention, aren’t they.’ He hurriedly introduced Celia. ‘You know Celia Adekunle I think. Chloe Fanshawe, Priscilla Fanshawe.’ They agreed they did. Morgan sensed the eyes of Mrs Fanshawe burning behind the opaque discs of the sunglasses she wore, sizing up, evaluating, condemning.

‘Day off?’ she asked through smiling teeth.

He was furious at the implication. He turned to face her. ‘All work and no play,’ he said in a steely voice. ‘Don’t want Jack turning into a dull boy, do we.’

There was an uncomfortable silence as the hostility seemed to crackle between them. ‘Well, we mustn’t keep you,’ Mrs Fanshawe said. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Adekunle…Morgan.’ They marched off, Morgan stared hatefully at her broad beam.

‘Goodness me,’ Celia said. ‘What on earth did you do to offend her?’

‘God knows,’ Morgan said uncomfortably. ‘Something to do with being alive I think.’ He sat there in silence, seething and cursing at being witnessed like this.

‘Morgan,’ Celia said. ‘What’s going on…?’ For a horrible moment he thought she was going to ask about Priscilla, but the pause only came about because she was lighting a cigarette. ‘…between you and Sam? What’s this great interest all about?’

He breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Nothing really,’ he said cautiously, though he felt instinctively he could trust her, ‘just some footling idea of Fanshawe’s. He thinks Sam’s party’s going to win the election so we’re being very friendly.’ His mind was still on Priscilla so he added without thinking, ‘That’s why we’re giving him the flight.’

‘Flight? Where?’

‘To London. For two weeks.’ He looked round. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know? Shit, I’m sorry.’

Celia smiled grimly and took a long trembling drag on her cigarette. As she exhaled she shook her head. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t know. To London?’

‘Yes,’ he said, wondering if he’d given something vital away. ‘He asked specifically for two seats — I had the tickets delivered today — I just assumed he’d be takingyou…Perhaps it’s a surprise,’ he added gamely.

She laughed harshly. ‘Fat chance,’ she said. ‘You see, Sam’s got this possessive thing about me. He doesn’t allow me to leave the country. I haven’t been home for three years. He thinks that if I ever get back to Britain he’ll never see me again.’

Morgan swallowed. ‘Is he right? I mean, would you run away?’

She seemed quite composed again. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Like a shot.’

13

It was 3.45 in the afternoon. Morgan’s Peugeot was parked down a laterite track in the shade of a towering mango tree which stood somewhere in the middle of a half-grown teak forest. Slim twenty-foot teak trees stretched away on both sides of the track, their oversized soup-plate leaves hanging motionless in the afternoon’s torpid dust-heat. Celia Adekunle’s Mini was parked just in front of Morgan’s car which had all its doors open, as if the driver and passengers had suddenly abandoned it in the face of an ambush or air attack and run into the forest.

Celia and Morgan knelt naked facing each other on the towel-draped back seat. This seemed to be the point to which all their conversations and meetings had inevitably been heading. There was a sense of something final in the air, of something ended, reached. They had talked calmly, kissed and removed their clothes with no trace of self-consciousness. Beyond the pool of shadow cast by the mango tree the sun seemed to beat down on the growing forest with a metallic solid strength, like bars round a prison cell. Morgan felt a sweat-drop trickle down the side of his face. Celia’s hair looked damp and tousled. She dragged it back and held if off her neck with both hands, causing her small flat breasts with their disproportionately large nipples to rise.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘It’s too hot for sex.’

Morgan leant forward over his thickening penis and licked the shine between her breasts. He felt as though he were in some kind of tin sauna, every inch of his body was moist, warm and dripping.

‘Oh no it’s not,’ he said.

♦

‘Most impressive,’ Fanshawe said. ‘They were most impressed in the High Commission. Most impressed.’ He handed back the Project Kingpin file. Morgan tucked it under his arm. Fanshawe had just returned from an important meeting in the capital. He settled back in his chair. ‘We’ve done well, Morgan,’ he said. ‘Exactly the results I hoped this little…exercise would bring. I can tell you that as a result of our assessment of the political future in Kinjanja there’s talk of substantially increasing UK investment here. Going to buy more oil from them too.’ He held his hand out across the table. ‘Pat on the back time, I think.’ Morgan shook his hand, feeling a little foolish. ‘It’s not over yet though,’ Fanshawe went on, wagging a cautionary finger. ‘Let’s hope they don’t lose the election.’ He laughed ‘Mwah. Mwah-hwah-hwah.’ He was joking.

Morgan managed a cheesy grin, a chill dispersing the brief warmth of self-congratulation. He wished in a way that Fanshawe took him along to these meetings he had at the High Commission in the capital; without that check, there was no telling what lies and embellishments he passed on. Fanshawe was still talking. Morgan heard the word ‘ambition’.

‘Sorry, Arthur,’ he redirected his attention. ‘What was that?’

Fanshawe frowned. ‘I was saying that the one thing we want to know a bit more about is Adekunle’s personal ambitions. Apparently there’s some feeling that he’s got his sights set higher than Foreign Minister. What do you think?’

‘I’ll see what I can dig up,’ Morgan said efficiently. He would ask Celia. He was seeing her again at six in the teak forest. Adekunle was out of town for a couple of days. The thought crossed his mind that this was using her rather. It crossed his mind and kept on going.

‘I hear you’ve got a source very close to our Mr Kingpin,’ Fanshawe said slyly. His wife must have been talking, Morgan thought.

Morgan put on a stagily innocent look. ‘Oh, I just keep my ear to the ground you know.’

Fanshawe chuckled, ‘Good man,’ he said and stood up. ‘Well, I’m off to lunch.’ Morgan deposited the file in his office and walked down the main stairs with him. They passed Dalmire’s office on the ground floor. Eight document-clutching visa supplicants sat outside the door on wooden benches.

Morgan and Fanshawe stood in the shade of the portico and gazed down the drive like a couple of squires surveying their property.

‘I see Kingpin hasn’t got round to making his trip yet,’ Fanshawe commented.

‘No,’ Morgan said. ‘I sent him the tickets a couple of days ago. He wanted the dates left open.’

‘I know,’ Fanshawe said. ‘It’s just that I keep getting asked when he’s coming. Trouble with the hotel apparently. Can’t you tell him to get his skates on?’

‘He’s not that sort of a person,’ Morgan explained. ‘But it must be soon, what with the elections being so close.’

‘Beats me,’ Fanshawe said: ‘I’d have thought these fellas would have jumped at the chance of a few days in London…’ He paused for a few seconds, as if pondering the natives’ curious behaviour. ‘Young Dalmire seems to have settled in well,’ he said, changing tack.

‘Yes,’ Morgan agreed. Now they were a couple of housemasters discussing a new appointee to prefect. ‘Pleasant chap,’ he added. He found the implied status and importance conferred by their conversation not at all unpleasant. For an instant he understood what it must have been like in the old days, as they scrunched onto the gravel on the driveway. The uniformed doorman saluted, the sweating gardeners in their tattered shorts stopped their hoeing and weeding to greet them with wide subservient smiles.

‘We’ve got this official visit coming up soon too,’ Fanshawe reminded him, gazing imperiously across the dusty brown lawn. ‘Duchess of Ripon. It seems she’ll be with us for Christmas now. Bit of a stop over before going down to the capital for the Independence celebrations at New Year.’

‘Ah. Yes. I see,’ Morgan nodded importantly; Fanshawe had already told him about this and he wondered what he could be leading up to.

‘Thought it could be Dickie’s pigeon.’

‘Sorry? Who?’

‘Dalmire, Dickie Dalmire, man.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Thought I’d let him handle the arrangements. Turns out his mother knows the Duchess quite well.’

‘Right.’ Morgan was surprised and a little resentful. ‘Best to keep it in the family I suppose. I didn’t know there was this connection.’

‘Neither did I,’ Fanshawe said. ‘He told us all about it at dinner last night.’

♦

Morgan walked round the flat with Hazel. It was sparsely furnished but it would do for her. It was in a good part of town too, as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t a slum, nor near one, and there were some shops around, which could explain his presence if he was ever seen in the street. And it was a district only rarely visited by expatriates. Their neighbours were the Lebanese landlord’s brother with his fat monog-lot wife, and an assistant producer from the KTV studios. If he was discreet — or more importantly if Hazel was — there should be no problems, and it would in any event be better than the sordid hotel she had been staying in.

Mr Selim, the landlord, was downstairs in his boutique and fabric shop waiting while Morgan looked over the premises. He wandered into the bedroom. There was an iron frame bed with a thin, pink and dubiously stained Dunlopillo mattress on it. Hazel came in and bounced up and down on the bed setting up a cacophony of shouting metal.

‘Ah-ah,’ she said in pidgin. ‘Dis bed ‘e done need oilo.’ This allusion to the main purpose of establishing her in the flat was another example of her compulsive tactlessness, Morgan thought. There was a kind of recalcitrant primitive innocence beneath the European clothes and make-up;, a sort of happy fatalism. She contracted gonorrhoea, she was unfaithful, she cajoled him into renting her a flat: it was all the same to her. He could fume and rant, posture and pontificate, her attitude seemed to say, but pretty soon he’d calm down — the next time he felt like getting into bed. Lately he’d been finding this refusal to pretend, this satisfaction with brute facts intensely annoying, but, at the same time, he rather envied it. He suspected that life might possibly appear a lot less complicated that way.

Hazel came over and put her arms round his neck. She was wearing a short orange dress and white-rimmed sunglasses. ‘What do you think of it, Morgan?’ she asked. She accentuated the second syllable when she pronounced his name. ‘It will be good. Don’t you think so?’

‘Take those bloody sunglasses off,’ he ordered crossly. She meekly complied. He looked around. ‘It’s a bit of a dump,’ he said, ‘but it’ll do, I suppose.’ Hazel gave a squeal of pleasure and kissed him. Morgan returned it. She took his bottom lip between her teeth and nibbled it gently.

Morgan broke away. He had not made love with Hazel since their quarantine period had ended. Something about the brazen health of her body was holding him back, also the obscure idea that he still had to punish her somehow, show he was maintaining his displeasure at her earlier conduct. He wondered if she appreciated the subtle vindictive motives behind his behaviour. No, bethought, she probably considered him an idiot. In compensation he reminded himself of Celia’s worn, flawed body: the small sagging breasts, the dull over-tanned skin, the appendix scar, her accommodating thighs. At least there was somebody who — however amazing it seemed — liked him for himself.

He looked at Hazel’s buttocks straining the orange fabric of her dress, her thin legs in their high heels, the false luxury of her wig. But he needed Hazel too, he conceded. The last time he’d met Celia she’d reminded him of the impending arrival of her two boys for their Christmas holidays; it would be hard to meet then, she’d told him, if not impossible.

He congratulated himself on his well-laid contingency plans; he felt the satisfaction of a food-hoarder in a time of hardship — how clever he’d been, how well-off he’d be. But he also felt the inward bite of lonely selfishness and he despairingly admitted to himself that he just wasn’t the kind of man who could take the money and run; he always had to stop outside the bank and have a think about it.

‘You haven’t told Mr Selim who I am, have you?’ Morgan demanded of Hazel. ‘He doesn’t know anything about me, does he?’ Hazel assured him Selim knew no more than was absolutely necessary. Morgan hoped she was telling the truth. Selim was no fool, he’d guess what was going on — just as long as he didn’t make the connection between him and the Commission. A scandal of those proportions would be disastrous and not even the good opinions he’d amassed over Project Kingpin could help him there.

He counted out a month’s rent and handed the notes to Hazel. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I’ll look in tomorrow evening, see how you’ve settled down. Expect me around seven.’

14

Morgan slipped his feet into his shoes and stood up. The sun had nearly set, he could see its orange syrupy light gilding the flat leaves at the top of the higher teak trees. He stretched and rested his side for a moment against the warm metal of the Peugeot. He was naked. He peered into the car and saw Celia dabbing at herself with a tissue.

‘Just off for a pee,’ he said. He strode a few yards into the teak trees, his shoes crushing the brittle leaf-carpet with resounding crackles, and drenched a column of ants with his urine stream. The column broke up in confusion, and he entertained himself picking off stragglers while the pressure lasted. He wondered what the ant-world would make of that little episode. Did it, he wondered, somewhere fit into the scheme of ant-things?

He made his way back to the car, ducking under branches, brushing aside some of the lower boughs carelessly. He felt a slight breeze on his naked body and felt his skin respond with goosepimples. He heard the moronic unvaried chirrup of crickets and the beeping sonar of a fruit-bat on the wing.

‘One man against nature,’ he said to himself in a deep American accent, ‘nood, in the African farst.’ For a second or two he tried to imagine himself thus exposed, a creature of pure instinct. The setting was right: dusk, heat, foliage, animal noise, mysterious crepitations in the undergrowth. But he was wrong. What would anyone think if they saw him? A naked overweight freckled white man pissing on some ants. He looked down at his feet. And, he added, wearing brown suede Chelsea boots.

As he approached the car he plucked off a teak leaf and held it over his genitals. Celia sat in the rear seat, her head resting in the angle its back made with the window. She had a dreamy, peaceful look on her face. She saw him and laughed.

‘And they saw that they were naked,’ he said in a sonorous voice, ‘and were sore ashamed. Come on Eve, make thyself an apron of teak leaves.’ He flung his leaf into the car and clambered in to join her. He pressed his face into her lap feeling the wiry moistness of her pubic hair on his cheek and nose. He smelt the spermy salty smell of their sex.

She ran her fingers through his hair. He wished she wouldn’t do that.

He sat up and looked at her. He traced the areola of her nipple with his fingernail, watching it pucker and thicken. He pressed it as if it were some kind of fleshy bell-push.

‘OK?’ he said. She nodded, still smiling. ‘Recovered?’ he asked.

‘Yes thank you, Adam dear.’

‘It’s God, if you don’t mind. I’ve just drowned a few hundred ants out there.’

‘Why God, you sod!’

He gave her a kiss. ‘We’d better go I suppose.’

‘There’s no hurry,’ she said, stroking his face. ‘I told you, Sam’s away until tomorrow.’

‘Great,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we go and have a drink somewhere then?’

They dressed, got into their separate cars and drove carefully up the track and on to the road. Morgan looked in his rear-view mirror and saw the lights of Celia’s Mini close behind him. He felt stiff, tired and, remarkably, he thought, happy.

About two miles from Nkongsamba he pulled into the car park of a largish hotel at a major road junction. It was called the Nkongsamba Road Motel. In Kinjanja names moved between extravagant, metaphorical fancy or prosaic, no-nonsense literalness. There was no in-between. They went into the bar which was lit with green neon and decorated with soft drink and beer advertisements. There were a dozen tin tables with chipped and peeling chairs round them. On one wall was a large poster of Sam Adekunle, and the message ‘KNP for a united Kinjanja’ below it.

Celia smiled grimly at Morgan. ‘Can’t seem to get away from him, can I?’

‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ Morgan asked feeling an acid sickness spread throughout his stomach at the sight of Adekunle’s face.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind and there’s no chance of anybody recognizing me.’ She sat down to put a stop to any further argument and Morgan ordered two beers. The bar was quiet at this time of night; there were a couple of the inevitable sunglassed youths and a table of four soldiers. Morgan and Celia attracted curious but unhostile stares: the Nkongsamba Road Motel didn’t entice many white clients.

They sipped at their beers in silence. Morgan felt ill at ease though, with Adekunle’s face staring at him over Celia’s shoulder.

‘Relax,’ she said. ‘It’s only a poster.’

But he’s looking straight at me,’ Morgan said only half-jokingly. ‘It’s uncanny the way his eyes follow you round the room.’ He held up his beer. ‘Cheers,’ he said, ‘here’s to the Garden of Eden.’ They clinked glasses.

‘It’s hot though, isn’t it,’ Celia said. ‘Can’t you do something about the weather, God dearest?’ Morgan smiled, it was their first private joke, sacrosanct, like a code no one could crack.

‘Bloody uncomfortable as well,’ he said. ‘I shall have to get on to Peugeot’s design team. They’ve slipped up badly with their back seat, I must say. Real lack of foresight.’

‘Oh for a bed,’ Celia sighed.

‘I’ll drink to that.’ He raised his glass again.

‘Guess what,’ Celia said, dropping her voice to a husky whisper. ‘I can feel you slowly oozing out of me while I’m sitting here.’ For some reason the unadulterated candour of this statement left him at a loss for words.

‘Sorry,’ was all he managed to come up with.

She reached over and laid her hand on his arm. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said softly. ‘It’s lovely.’

They finished their beers and went back out to the car park. A nail-sickle of moon hung suspended over Nkongsamba.

‘Morgan,’ Celia said, ‘why don’t you come back tonight? While Sam’s away.’

‘Are you sure?’ Morgan questioned seriously. ‘Isn’t it a bit risky?’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘The kids’ll be back in a week. It might be our only chance.’

He hesitated. ‘Well, if you’re sure it’s not too difficult.’ He paused. ‘This sounds absurdly Victorian,’ he said, trying not to smile, ‘but what about the servants?’

She was not so inhibited and gave a high clear laugh. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said eventually, ‘I can easily take care of them. Come on.’

♦

He lay on Celia’s bed. His head was propped on some pillows. A glass of whisky balanced on his chest. He squinted at it hypnotically as it tipped and wobbled with the rise and fall of his breathing.

‘Do you feel at all guilty?’ he asked. ‘About Sam?’ It was a question he asked of all the wives he slept with. Celia put her drink down on the bedside table and slipped in beside him. Morgan steadied his glass.

‘No,’ she said bluntly, as they all did. Celia leant back against the headboard and drew her knees up. ‘Why should I? He’s been through all his so-called cousins and nieces who hang around the house. God knows what he gets up to when he’s away from home.’

‘Is this the first time you’ve…?’ He let the question hover unfinished in the air.

She looked at him steadily. ‘No. But let’s not talk about that.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He wasn’t sure how he felt about that admission. He had thought he was something of a liberator — exclusive. He put it out of his mind.

Celia had gone to the house in advance of him, told the servants they could go home and, as soon as the coast was clear, had driven back to where he had parked the Peugeot — three hundred yards down the road — and picked him up.

Bereft of the pragmatic necessities brought about by sex in the back seat of a car their love-making had taken on a new and unfamiliar character that Morgan had found strange and a little discomfiting. It had been passionate and emotional — largely on Celia’s part — straightforward and humour-free. She had caressed him almost maternally, whispering endearments, holding him tightly to her and he had felt like saying ‘Hang about, just stop there a minute. This is sex, mature pleasure, not a love affair.’ But he hadn’t, and to his consternation had found himself joining in, closing his eyes, gasping romantically, dabbing little kisses here and there.

When the lights went back on things had sobered down, and the loosed and soaring emotions had been wound in like kites. Morgan lay on his back thinking about it all, a frown on his face. He wasn’t sure if this was the way he wanted his relationship with Celia to go.

‘Penny for them,’ she said.

‘What?…Oh, not worth it,’ he smiled. She snuggled up to him and he put his drink on the bedside table. The air-conditioner was on and the roof fan beat above the bed too. The sheet lay dry across their two bodies. Morgan relished the absence of sweat. ‘It’s been a marvellous day,’ he said, half-meaning it.

She kissed his chest. ‘Hasn’t it,’ she agreed with enthusiasm, ‘hasn’t it just.’

♦

Morgan whispered goodbye as Celia let him out of the front door. It was nearly four o’clock and still quite dark. He cautiously walked up the wide drive, through the open unattended gates and along the road to where he’d left his car. He felt tired, mentally and physically. The prospect of work in four hours was singularly unappealing.

He fumbled in the dark for his car keys.

‘Good morning, Mr Leafy,’ came a deep voice at his shoulder. The shock was so great his heart seemed to leap from his chest and bounce off the inside of his skull. He whirled round in fear and appalled surprise, his pulse thumping wildly somewhere in the region of his throat. It was Adekunle.

‘Oh my God. Shit. Jesus,’ Morgan whimpered in frantic despair, the keys falling from his hand to tinkle on the road. Adekunle bent down to retrieve them for him. Morgan accepted them back with trembling fingers.

‘Did you have a pleasant night?’ Adekunle asked sardonically, no trace of anger in his voice. ‘Did you ‘make a catch’ with my wife?’ His cultured tones accentuated the Kinjanjan expression, he seemed astonishingly calm.

‘Listen,’ Morgan began defensively, trying to control an overpowering urge to take to his heels. ‘I don’t want you to think…’

‘Don’t tell me what to think, Mr Leafy,’ Adekunle interrupted, hostility creeping into his voice. ‘I don’t need your observations on that matter. At all.’ He paused. ‘No, we have a problem with you here; the cat is now among the pigeons, as the saying goes, don’t you think?’ At the word ‘we’ Morgan looked around and saw two dark figures standing sortie yards off. Adekunle allowed him to take this in before saying, ‘I wonder what your Mr Fanshawe will say when I make my protest to him about the…ah, nocturnal activities of his staff.’ He poked Morgan savagely in the shoulder. ‘What do you think his reaction will be, Mr Leafy?’ Morgan couldn’t answer: he was trying to stop himself being sick all over Adekunle’s shoes. Adekunle prodded him again. ‘You are a very greedy man, Mr Leafy. Very big appetite. My wife and your black girl in town.’

Morgan felt his legs were about to collapse spastically beneath him. He leant shakily against his car. ‘How do you know all this?’ he asked faintly. ‘About Hazel and…and tonight?’

‘It’s my business to know these things,’ Adekunle said silkily. He said it ‘beezness’, emotion cracking his Western accent. ‘I have some very loyal servants working for me. No small detail escapes them.’

Morgan strove to make out Adekunle’s features in the gloom. He felt queasy with fear and terror-struck anticipation. Surely Adekunle wouldn’t go to Fanshawe with this? he reasoned; the shame, the loss of face would be too acute. But then he remembered that Hazel was to be reckoned with too.

Perhaps it might be best if Adekunle simply set his hefties on him.

‘Look,’ Morgan, began desperately, ‘I don’t know what you mean to do but I think you…’

‘One moment, Mr Leafy,’ Adekunle broke in venomously. ‘You are making an error there. It is a question of what you are going to do. For me.’

Morgan felt hysterical laughter rise in his throat. ‘Me?’ he repeated slowly as if he were mentally retarded. ‘For yow?’

‘You have hit the nail on the head first time, as the saying goes,’ Adekunle congratulated him. Morgan saw with a sudden terrorized clarity the impossibility of his situation. If Adekunle went to Fanshawe that would truly be the end, there would be no conceivable way he could talk himself out of it. He groaned softly to himself. Sleeping with Kingpin’s wife! Fanshawe would go mad. And he could imagine how Adekunle could play it up: Fanshawe would see it as the end of all his expansionist dreams — the oil refinery, the investment, his new posting — he’d take it as a personal affront. And there was Hazel too. Morgan felt the blood drain from his face. If he wanted his life to continue in anything like the way he’d planned he would have to do whatever Adekunle asked of him. The alternatives were too mortifying and disastrous to consider. Adekunle had him in the palm of his hand.

‘What are you going to do?’ Morgan croaked. He didn’t care: as long as he could save his neck and his job.

‘As I told you, Mr Leafy, I am going to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. In return for which you will do me a favour — nothing too difficult for a man like you.’ He paused. ‘We are both civilized people, men of the world, Mr Leafy. I think we can both benefit from this…this indiscretion on your part. You retain your job, your status and your reputation. While I…’ He left it unsaid.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Morgan said tiredly. He couldn’t see how he could be of any benefit to Adekunle: he just wasn’t powerful enough.

‘All I want you to do is get to know somebody,’ Adekunle said. ‘That’s all. Just get to know him.’

‘Who is this somebody?’

‘Dr Alex Murray. Perhaps you’re familiar with him already?’

15

Adekunle gave him other instructions that night. First, he was to stay away from Celia — their affair was effectively over. Adekunle, it soon transpired, was making his London trip in three days’ time and under no circumstances was Morgan to approach Celia while he was away. He assured Morgan that he would know immediately if he made any attempt to get in touch. Second, he was never to tell her about their meeting tonight: Celia was to remain ignorant of Adekunle’s knowledge of the affair. Morgan dolefully agreed to every condition — the only contact he was permitted to make was to be in the form of a brief note pleading a sudden increase in work or any other rational excuse he could think up.

As for Murray, Adekunle told Morgan that he wanted him to become an acquaintance, a friend if possible, but, failing that, someone who had social contact with him, moved in the same circles.

‘That’s all I’m asking you to do,’ Adekunle had said, the creeping onset of drawn revealing the pale gleam of his teeth as he smiled. ‘Not a very onerous task in return for an error as potentially damaging as yours. Starting from tomorrow I want you to…to cultivate Dr Murray, get to know him, let him get to know you. I don’t think that will be such a difficult job.’

Good God, thought Morgan, if only you knew. ‘But why?’ he had asked wretchedly. ‘Why Murray? What’s he got to do with you?’

‘Let us say that at this stage, it is a precautionary matter,’ Adekunle had replied. ‘I will tell you in good time.’ He tapped the bonnet of Morgan’s car to emphasize his words. ‘What you do not know cannot hurt you, as the saying goes. And believe me, Mr Leafy, I do not want you to be hurt in any way.’

Morgan smiled edgily. He didn’t believe him at all. What, to him, was just about as worrying as hearing that Murray was the target was the almost complete absence of cuckolded rage on Adekunle’s part. It crossed his mind for a moment that the whole thing had been allowed to develop — with him and Celia unwitting players — precisely with this contingency plan in mind. Adekunle was behaving more like a man disputing a reserved parking place than an irate husband confronting his wife’s lover, and Morgan found this reasonableness, this lack of justifiable wrath most disturbing. What did it all signify? he wondered, searching Adekunle’s features for a clue. Either he didn’t give a damn about Celia’s extra-marital flings or else his pressganging of Morgan as temporary ally for purposes unknown greatly outweighed in importance any injured pride or anger which he might feel like giving vent to. Both might be true of course, but Morgan came down heavily in favour of the last explanation. He felt sure that if he couldn’t have served any purpose Adekunle’s revenge would have been swift, no-nonsense and severe. He felt his chest seemingly fill up with something hard and solid — like quick-setting cement — as he contemplated this and the testing time that surely lay ahead.

♦

That had been ten days ago. Stricken with cowardice he wrote a brief note to Celia informing her about the bales of paperwork that had suddenly appeared on his desk. He had Kojo and Friday intercept all his calls at home and office with stories of Herculean busyness and endeavour and soon Celia stopped trying to get through. He became wary of seeing Hazel too, suspecting Adekunle’s agents in every passer-by, and only visited her twice. Hazel didn’t seem put out by this neglect: there was a new sleekness and confidence in her, he thought, no doubt fostered by the move to her own apartment. He suspected she was entertaining her own friends there — against his strict instructions — but was too preoccupied to do anything about it.

Half-heartedly he set about trying to follow Adekunle’s directives. He made some surreptitious inquiries amongst his university acquaintances about Murray and it soon became clear that, as he had instinctively sensed, Murray was not a social man, seldom visiting the university club. He did have some close friends but saw them privately. Short of bearding him at the clinic, ambushing his car as he drove home from work or gatecrashing his dinner parties Morgan could see no way of easing himself into Murray’s life. He would sit and fret about his task at home woefully conscious that time was running out. Adekunle was due back from London in a matter of days and would be expecting him to have made progress. What, he kept asking himself all the time, could be the link between Adekunle and Murray? They seemed about as far apart as it was possible for two people to be.

He became a subdued solitary figure at work, dutifully adding charts, graphs and tables of statistics to the Project Kingpin file, restricting his discussions with his colleagues to business matters. He spent quiet lonely nights at home, aimlessly flicking through his paperbacks, watching egregious Kinjanjan TV, steadily depleting his drinks trolley. He caught concerned glances from Friday and Moses over this untypical melancholia and careworn brooding. Friday even went so far as to approach him one evening and ask him what was wrong.

‘Masta ‘e nevah well,’ Friday stated.

‘No,’ Morgan admitted.

‘Wetin dis trouble? Make you tell me.’

Morgan thought of ways he could explain the nature of his problem. ‘C’est cafard,’ he said finally, the French word summing everything up admirably.

‘Ah bon,’ Friday said. ‘Maintenant je comprends.’

As his problems continued and he found he was powerless to alleviate them he turned to alcohol in dire need of its amnesiac properties. For the last three nights since his confession to Friday he’d drunk himself into a whimpering blob of self-pity, crouching in the corner of his sitting room, from time to time dragging himself across the floor to his drinks trolley to make lethal cocktails which he gulped down with all the relish of a Socrates draining his cup of hemlock. Occasionally he would break out into short periods of intense vein-popping rage. His face volcanic with fury, bellowing foul curses at all those who were conspiring to ruin his life, he would prance and fume around his house for a minute or two before it subsided, passing with the suddenness of a tropical storm.

With the dim logic of nauseous, gunge-encrusted mornings he would offer himself sound advice, tell himself to calm down, get back in control, and utter stern warnings about the possibility of cracking up.

Slowly but surely his own brand of aversion therapy seemed to be having some effect. He was sitting in his office one such bleary afternoon asking himself if he’d finally hit the bottom and could perhaps now contemplate the long climb back up, and wondering whether to get Kojo to make him another Alka-Seltzer to help him on his way, when there was a tentative knock on his door.

‘Come in,’ he said.

It was Dalmire.

‘Have you got a minute, Morgan?’ he said. ‘There’s something, ah, I’d sort of like you to know.’

‘Sit down,’ Morgan said, trying to keep the weariness from his voice. He massaged his temples. Dalmire was wearing his old-colonial outfit of white shorts and beige knee socks. Morgan thought he looked slightly apprehensive.

‘I wanted you to be the first to know,’ he said. Then, correcting himself, ‘among the first to know.’

‘Mmm? Know what?’ Morgan said, raising his eyebrows politely, wondering why it was he could taste every filling in his head.

‘Last night,’ Dalmire said. ‘I know that once…well, that at one time you and she…’ he paused. ‘It was just that I particularly wanted to tell you myself, wouldn’t have liked you to hear it from someone else.’

What is he wittering on about? Morgan thought. ‘I’m sorry, Richard,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a rather lax grip on things today and I’m just not with you. Do you think you could spell it out in words of one syllable?’ He pointed to his head. ‘Touch of the morning afters.’

‘Oh sorry,’ Dalmire said with a prudent smile. ‘Must say I feel a bit that way myself.’ He illustrated a rapidly expanding and contracting head with his hands. ‘All that champagne. Stronger than you think.’

‘Champagne, you said?’

‘Yes. For me and Priscilla.’

‘You. And. Priscilla.’

‘Yes,’ Dalmire smiled modestly. ‘We got engaged last night.’

There was a long pause. A car tooted on the Nkongsamba road.

Morgan rose unsteadily to his feet, his face set. He wasn’t allowing himself to think. He’d switched on to remote control, automatic pilot. He wound his lips back from his furred teeth in what he hoped was the semblance of a congratulatory smile and cranked his arm across the desk.

‘Congratulations,’ he said, as Dalmire eagerly shook his outstretched hand. ‘Mar-marvellous news.’ He turned to his filing cabinet. ‘What about a drink?’ He held up the gin bottle he kept in the top drawer. Dalmire mimed enthusiastic assent. Morgan poured out two gins and added the remains of a tonic bottle. He handed the glass to Dalmire.

‘Good man,’ Dalmire said, gratefully accepting the gin. ‘Oh, good man.’