On the Yankee Station: Stories

The Coup

Isaac knocked at his door at half past three in the morning. It took Morgan a few minutes to wake up; then he washed, shaved and put on his light-weight tropical suit. He was going home.

The verandah was cluttered with the trunks and packing cases that were being shipped back to England separately by sea. Morgan ate his breakfast among them in a mood of quite pleasant melancholy. He gazed across the empty sitting room and at the bare walls of his bungalow and thought about the three years he had spent in this stinking sweaty country. Three rotting years. Christ.

He was still thinking about how much he wouldn’t miss the place when the car from the High Commission arrived at half past four. Morgan registered a twinge of annoyance when he saw that instead of the air-conditioned Mercedes he’d requested, he’d been issued with a cream Ford Consul. It was three and a half hours from Nkongsamba to the capital by road; three and a half hours of switchbacked, pot-holed hell through dense rain forest. It seemed that his last hours in this wretched country were destined to be spent in the same perspiring, itching agony that so coloured his memories of the past three years. Typical of the bloody High Commissioner, thought Morgan, not bloody important enough for the Merc. Trust the little asthmatic bureaucrat to notice his transport application. He’d wanted the Merc desperately; to strap-hang in air-conditioned comfort, the Union Jack cracking on the bonnet. Go out in style — that had been the plan. He looked critically at the Consul; it needed a clean and one hub cap was missing, and they’d given him that imbecilic driver Peter. Morgan rolled his eyes heavenwards. He couldn’t wait to leave.

He said goodbye to Isaac, and Moses his cook, and Moses’ young wife Abigail, who helped with the washing and ironing. He’d given them all a sizeable farewell dash the previous evening and he noticed they were smiling hugely as they energetically pumped his hands. Bloody gang of Old Testament refugees, he thought, slightly put out at the absence of any sadness or solemnity; they’d never had it so good. He cast his eye fondly over Abigail’s plump, sleek body. Yes, he’d miss the women, he admitted, and the beer.

It was still quite black outside and a couple of toads burped at each other in the darkness of the garden as he eased himself onto the shiny plastic rear seat, gave a final wave, and told Peter to get going. They sped off through the deserted roads of the commercial reservation and passed quickly through the narrow empty streets of Nkongsamba before striking what was laughingly known as the transnational highway.

This particular road was a crumbling two-lane tarmacadam death trap that meandered through the jungle between Nkongsamba and the capital. A skilfully designed route of blind corners, uncambered Z-bends and savage gradients, it annually claimed hundreds of lives as the worst drivers in the world sought to negotiate its bizarre geometry. The small hours of the morning were the only time when it was anything like safe to travel — hence Morgan’s early rise, even though his plane left at half past eleven.

As a citron light spread over the jungle, Morgan reflected that they hadn’t made such bad progress. With the windows wound full down the speeding car had been filled with a cool breeze and Morgan barely sweated at all. As expected, the roads had been quiet. They had passed the still-guttering remains of a crashed petrol tanker and once had been forced off the road by a criminally overloaded articulated lorry, its two huge trailers towering with sacks of groundnuts, as its bonus-hunting driver, high on kolanuts, barrelled down the middle of the road en route for the capital and its busy port.

All in all a remarkably uneventful journey, thought Morgan as they raced through a town called Shagamu, which marked the halfway stage. But then it was only a matter of a few miles farther on, the sun’s heat concentrating, Morgan’s buttocks and the backs of his ample thighs beginning to chafe and fret on the plastic seats, that they had a puncture. The car veered suddenly, Morgan threw up his arms, Peter shouted “Good Lord!” and he pulled onto the laterite verge.

After the steady rumble of their passage on the tarmac, it was very quiet. The road stretched empty before and behind them, the avenue of jungle rearing up on either side like high green walls.

Peter got out and looked at the tyre, sucking in air through the prodigious gaps in his teeth. He grinned.

“Dis be poncture, sah,” he explained through the window.

Morgan didn’t budge. “Well, bloody fix it then,” he growled. “I’ve got a plane to catch, you know.”

Peter went round to the back of the car and threw open the boot. Morgan sat scowling, the absence of breeze through the car windows reminding him pointedly of the high humidity and the unrelenting heat of the early morning sun. He had a sudden agonising itch on his perineum. He scratched at it furiously.

Then Peter was back at the window.

“Ah-ah! Sah, dey never give us one spear.”

“Spear? Spear? What bloody spear?”

“Spear tyre, sah. Dere is no spear tyre for boot.”

Morgan climbed out of the car swearing. Sure enough, no spare. He felt an intolerable explosive frustration building up in him. This bloody country just wasn’t going to give up, was it? Oh, no, far too much to expect to catch a plane unhindered. He gazed wildly around at the green jungle before telling himself to calm down.

“You’d better take the wheel back to Shagamu.” He thrust some notes into Peter’s hand. “Try and get it fixed. And hurry!”

Peter jacked up the Consul, removed the wheel and trundled it back down the road to Shagamu. It was too hot to sit in the car, so Morgan crouched on the verge in what little shade it offered and watched the sun climb the sky.

A few cars whizzed past but nobody stopped. The highway, Morgan grimly noted, was particularly quiet today.

Two and a half hours later, Peter returned with a repaired and newly inflated tyre. It took another ten minutes to replace it before they were on their way once more. Morgan’s plane was due to leave in just over an hour. They would never make it. His face was taut and expressionless as they roared down the road to the airport.

The airport was situated on flat land about ten miles from the capital and was quite cut off, surrounded by a large light-industrial estate. As they drove past the small factories, freight depots and vehicle pools. Morgan again commented on the lack of traffic; everybody seemed to be staying away. Small groups of people gathered in the villages at the roadside and stared curiously at the cream Consul as it went by. Probably some bloody holiday, reasoned Morgan thankfully as he saw the signposts directing them to the airport. At least something was working in his favour.

Soon he saw the familiar roadside billboards advertising airlines and the exotic places they visited, and Morgan felt the first thrill of excitement at the thought of flying off home; the well-modulated chill of the aircraft, the crisp stewardesses and the duty-free liquor. He was straightening his tie as they rounded a corner and almost ran down a road-block.

The road-block consisted of three fifty-gallon oil drums surmounted by planks of wood. Parked to one side was a chubby armoured car, surrounded by at least two dozen soldiers wearing camouflage uniforms and armed with sub-machine-guns with sickle-shaped magazines.

Morgan stared in open-mouthed astonishment about him and at the airport buildings two hundred yards ahead. Four huge tanks were parked in front of the arrivals hall. Morgan noticed with alarm that several of the soldiers had levelled their guns at the car. Peter’s face was positively grey with fear. A young officer approached with a red cockade in his peaked cap. He politely asked Morgan to get out and produce his documents.

“What’s going on?” Morgan asked impatiently. “Is this some kind of an exercise? Terrorists? Or what? Look here”—he pointed to his identity card—“I’m a member of the British diplomatic corps and I’ve got a plane to catch.”

The young officer returned the documents.

“This airport is now under the command of the military government …” he began, as if reading prompt-cards behind Morgan’s head.

“What military government?” Morgan interrupted; then, as realisation dawned: “Oh, no. Oh, my God, no. A coup — it’s a coup. Don’t tell me. That’s all I need, a bloody coup.” He raised his right hand to his forehead in an unconsciously dramatic gesture of despair. He felt he was getting a migraine. A bad one.

Just then a BOAC staff car drove up from the airport buildings and a harassed official got out. After some conferring with the young officer he hurried over to Morgan.

“What on earth are you doing here, man?” he asked irritatedly. “Haven’t you heard about the coup? This place has been like an armed camp since six o’clock this morning.”

Morgan explained about his early start and the puncture. “Listen,” he went on agitatedly, “my plane. Have I missed my plane? When can I get out of here?”

“Sorry, old chap. The last plane left here at midnight. The airport’s closed to civil traffic. As you can see, there’s not a thing here. This is what usually happens, I believe. Nobody flies in or out for a few days until things have sorted themselves out. You know, until the radio blackout’s lifted, the fighting stops and the new government’s officially recognised.”

“But look here,” Morgan insisted, “I’m from the Commission at Nkongsamba. I’ve got diplomatic immunity, all that sort of stuff.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t carry any weight at all at the moment,” said the airlines official in an annoyingly good-humoured manner. “Britain hasn’t recognised the new government yet. I’d hang on for a few days before you start claiming any privileges.”

“Hang on! Good God, man, where do you suggest I hang on?”

“Well, you can’t get back to Nkongsamba. They’ll have road-blocks on the highway now, for sure. And there’s a twenty-four-hour curfew on in the capital as well. So if I were you, I’d go to the airport hotel down the road. Show them your ticket. I suppose you’re in our care now, after a fashion, and they’ll bill the airline. I should think they’ll be glad of the custom. Everyone else has kept well away, stayed at home. In fact you’re the only person who’s turned up to catch a flight today. I suppose you were just unlucky.”

Morgan turned away. Unlucky. Just unlucky. Story of his life. He climbed morosely into the car and told Peter to take him to the airport hotel. Peter backed up with alacrity and they drove off.

The airport hotel was a mile away. They were stopped by a patrol on the road and Morgan again explained his predicament, flourishing his passport and ticket. He was sunk in a profound depression; the final bizarre revenge of a hostile country. The magnitude of his ill-fortune left him feeling weak and exhausted.

Morgan had stayed at the airport hotel several times before. He remembered it as a lively, cosmopolitan place with two restaurants, several bars, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a small casino. It was usually populated by a mixed crowd of jet-lagged transit passengers, air-crew and stewardesses and a somewhat raffish and frontier collection of bush-charter pilots, oil company troubleshooters and indeterminate tanned and brassy females whom Morgan imaginatively took to be the mistresses of African politicians, part-time nightclub singers, croupiers, hostesses, expensive whores and bored wives. It was as close as Morgan ever came to being a member of the Jet Set and a stay there always made him feel vaguely mysterious and highly sexed. As they approached, he recalled how only last year he had almost successfully bedded a strong-shouldered female helicopter pilot, and his heart thumped in anticipation. Every cloud, he reminded himself, silver lining and all that. That had to be the one consolation of a truly awful day.

The airport hotel was large. A low-slung old colonial edifice at the centre was lined by shaded concrete pathways to more modern bedroom blocks, the pool, the hairdressing salon and the other amenities. As they swept up the drive, Morgan looked about him with something approaching eagerness.

The large car-park, however, was unsettlingly empty, and Morgan noticed that the familiar troupe of hawkers who spread their thorn carvings, their ithyphallic ebony statuary and ropes of ceramic beads on the steps up to the front door were absent. Also there was an unnatural hush and tranquillity in the foyer, as if Morgan had arrived at the dead of night rather than midday. Sitting on squeaky cane chairs in front of the reception desk were two bored soldiers with small aluminum machine pistols in their laps. The clerk behind the long desk was asleep, his head resting on the register. One of the soldiers shook him awake and as Morgan signed in he noticed that only a few names were registered along with his own.

“Are you busy?” he asked with faint hope.

The receptionist smiled. “Oh, no, sah. Everybody gone. Only eight people staying since last night. No planes,” he added, “no guests.”

An aged bellhop with bare feet and a faded blue uniform showed Morgan to his room in one of the new blocks. Morgan was glad to find the air-conditioning still functioned.

The day’s frustrations were not over. Morgan tried to phone the Commission in Nkongsamba but was informed that all the lines had been closed down by the army. He then went back outside and instructed Peter — who had elected to stay and live in the car in the car-park — to drive to the embassy in the capital and report Morgan’s plight.

Peter shook his head with a convincing display of bitter disappointment.

“You can never go dere,” he lamented. “Dey done build one big road-block for here,” he gestured at a point a few yards up from the end of the hotel drive. “Plenty soldier. Dey are never lettin’ you pass.”

So that was it. Morgan looked at his watch. By rights he should be high over Europe now, a stewardess handing him his meal on a tray, an hour or so from an early evening touchdown at Heathrow Airport. Instead he was marooned in a deserted hotel complex while a military coup raged outside the gate.

He walked sadly back to his room through the afternoon heat. Lizards basked on stones in the sun, idly doing press-ups as he approached, reverting to glazed immobility once more as he walked on by. To his left he saw the tall diving board of the swimming pool, and some asterisks of light flashed off the blue water he could glimpse through the perforated concrete screen that surrounded the pool area. Normally it would be lively with bathers, the bars crowded with sun-reddened guests, the nearby tennis courts resounding to the pock-pock of couples rallying. Where were the other people who were staying here? Morgan wondered. What were they like? He felt like some mad dictator, or eccentric millionaire recluse, alone in an entire multi-bedroom block with only his taciturn guards for company.

His second question was answered that evening when he went down to the restaurant. There was a table of four Syrians or Lebanese men, and an ancient, wrinkled American couple. The Lebanese ignored him; the Americans said, “Hello, there,” and looked anxious to exchange grumbles about their common predicament. Morgan sat as far away as he could. Pretend nothing has happened, he told himself; as soon as we start behaving like victims of a siege — sharing resources, privations and anecdotes — this enforced stay really will become a nightmare.

He was well into his rather firm avocado when the eighth guest arrived. If he had been asked to speculate, unseen, on his or her identity, Morgan — knowing his luck — would have laid long odds on the eighth guest being a nun, an overweight salesman or moustachioed spinster. He was surprised then, and almost enchanted when a young woman entered wearing the dark-blue skirt and white blouse of BOAC. She was quite pretty, too, Morgan assessed, his avocado untended, as he watched her sway through the empty tables to her seat close to the Americans.

For a minute or so Morgan’s heartbeat seemed to echo rather loudly in his chest as, more surreptitiously, he scrutinised the girl. “Girl” was perhaps a little too kind. She looked to be well into her thirties, that short blond hair certainly dyed, a slightly predatory air about her features due to the rather hooked nose, the liberally applied cosmetics, and lines that ran from the corners of her nostrils to the ends of her thin orange lips. She had amazingly long painted nails that matched the colour of her lipstick.

For the first time that day Morgan’s spirits were lifted. Something about her — the dark eye-shadow, her tan against the white cotton of her blouse — reminded him of the brisk sexual allure of the helicopter pilot of the year before. He passed the rest of the meal in a pleasantly absorbing miasma of sexual fantasy.

Fantasy was all he had to content himself with, however, as the girl appeared to return to her room directly after dinner. Morgan drank a couple of whiskies in the bar but was driven out by the increasingly clamorous garrulity of the four Lebanese, who played bridge with a quite un-English fervour and intensity. The American couple tried to befriend him once again but Morgan repelled their polite “Say, do you have any idea where we can change some dollars?” with a rush of eyebrow-jerking, shoulder-shrugging pseudo French: “Ah, desolé, haw … euh, je vous ne comprendre, non? Oui? Disdonc, eur, bof, vous savez haha parler pas Anglais. Mmm?” They wandered off with an air of baffled resignation.

The next morning, Morgan looked out of his fifth-floor window. From this height he commanded a considerable view of the hotel area. He could see Peter pissing into a bush on the edge of the car-park. A military jeep was pulled up in front of the central building. Over to his left and partially obscured by a clump of trees he could see the swimming pool: a static blue slab surrounded by grey concrete and ranks of empty lounging chairs. Then, as he watched, a small figure came into his line of vision. It was the stewardess, wearing what looked like a tiny yellow bikini. She jumped into the pool and swam round. Morgan watched dry-mouthed as she clambered dripping up the steps and fingered free the sodden material of her briefs, which had become wedged in the cleft between her buttocks. Morgan turned from the window and rummaged in his suitcase for his swimming trunks.

Morgan was not proud of the state he had allowed his body to get into. Always what his mother had called “a big lad,” he had assiduously developed at university a beer-gut which never disappeared and indeed had since expanded like some soft subcutaneous parasite around the sides of his torso, padding his back and swelling his already considerable buttocks and thighs. He could have done something about it once, he supposed as he stood in front of the full-length bathroom mirror; there was nothing he could do about his balding head, but the recent addition of a thick Zapata moustache had effected some positive transformation of his appearance. A straggling line of pale brown hair ran straight down from his throat, between his worryingly plump breasts, to disappear beneath the waistband of his capacious trunks. “Not a pretty sight,” a girlfriend had once remarked on observing him as he stumbled — soap-blind — from the shower, groping for a towel. Well, it was too late now, he concluded, inflating his chest and trying to suck in his stomach. In a suit he fancied he looked merely beefy; but this was another trouble with tropical climes: the terrible exposure that resulted through the regular need to shed as much clothing as possible.

Still, he felt quite good as he strolled down the walkway towards the pool, a carefully slung towel modestly covering his shuddering paps. A few more soldiers lounged by the hotel entrance, and the sun beat down from a perfectly blue sky. The enforced, unreal isolation and the unsettling threat of casually sported arms he found strangely invigorating, as if the deserted hotel complex were infused with a lurking wayward sexuality only waiting to be sprung from cover.

Morgan spread his towel a polite few chairs away from the girl. She was lying on her front, bikini top undipped. He was perturbed to see the Lebanese encamped on the other side of the pool playing bridge. There was a fat one, far fatter than Morgan, in a white shirt and Bermuda shorts. The others wore tiny swimming suits like jock straps: two thin weaselly men — one of whom had a face pitted like a peach stone — and the fourth, gratingly handsome in a lounge-lizard kind of way, with a thin moustache and a thick springy rug of hair over a lean and muscly chest. Morgan worried rather about him; he kept looking over at the girl.

There was a persistent roaring in his head; furious red static grumbled and flushed behind his eyes; slabs of heat burned his thighs and belly. Morgan was sunbathing. It was agony. He sat up, rockets and anti-aircraft shells pulsating and exploding everywhere he looked, and reached behind him for the bottle of beer he’d ordered and kept in the shade beneath a lounger. The bottle was still cool, the green glass slippy with beads of condensation. Morgan took great juddering pulls at it, beer spilling from the upended bottle over his chin, dripping onto his chest. His brain seemed to soar and cartwheel with the alcohol. He let out a silent, satisfying belch and stood up ready to plunge into the pool.

The first thing he noticed was the girl’s striped towel, occupied only by the damp imprint of her body. Then he heard a ripple of laughter from the shallow end of the pool and he saw her chatting to the hairy Lebanese, who, as Morgan gazed, stood on his hands and walked round with his brown legs waving comically above the water, to the delighted laughter of the girl.

It can only have been this flirtatious display of agility, coupled with the dizzying effects of the cold beer, that drove Morgan to the diving board. As he climbed laboriously to the top he grew increasingly aware of the absurdity of the position he had committed himself to, and of all its hackneyed connotations. He sensed, as he emerged on the highest board, the attention of the others below turn to him. He had only seconds to decide. Beyond the lip of the board he saw the girl looking up at him, and the frank interest of her gaze inspired him and yet was somehow depressing. Depressing to think that he had stooped to these despised macho techniques to gain the girl’s absorption, and inspiring to find that they actually worked. He hitched up the waistband of his trunks. He would compromise: he wouldn’t dive — he wasn’t sure if he could remember how — and he wouldn’t climb back down. No, he would jump. He tried to saunter casually to the edge of the board. The pool slowly revealed itself beneath him. He thought: good God, it seems higher from up here. Bloody high. Shouldn’t there be some kind of legal limit …? His doubts were cut off in midstream as he realised with a gulp of horror that he had missed his step and clownishly fallen forward off the board, not an elegant vertical jump, but at a gradually diminishing angle of forty-five degrees to the water. And as the glinting, shimmering surface rushed up to meet him, Morgan spread his arms in a grotesque parody of a swallow-dive and belly-flopped full force with a ghastly echoing smack.

Everything was white. White and fizzing as if he were immersed in a glass of Andrews Liver Salts. He felt strong arms pulling him to the side. He felt his hands on the tiled edge of the pool. He took great gasping mouthfuls of air. His vision cleared. The hairy Lebanese was by his side, an arm protectively round his shoulders. Morgan shrugged him off and looked up. The stewardess crouched on the pool edge above him, concern filling her eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “It made an awful sound.”

“Mmmm. Sure,” Morgan wheezed. “I’m … fine.”

He rested in his room all afternoon. The entire front of his body was flushed and tingling for at least two hours. The girl had gathered up his stuff, draped a towel across his winded shoulders and led him back to his block. He felt as if he had just swum the Channel; his lungs heaved, his body creaked with pain and he could barely gasp replies to the girl’s worried solicitations. And when the pain and the agony subsided it was replaced with an equally cruel shame. Morgan writhed with embarrassment on his bed, cursing his ridiculous pretensions, his preposterous life-guard conceit and his absurd gigolo rivalry.

He ate his evening meal as soon as the restaurant opened. Only the Americans accompanied him but they maintained a frosty indifference. He inquired at the desk if there had been any word about the coup or news of the airport opening. The reception clerk told him that there was nothing but martial music on the radio but he planned to listen to the BBC world service news at nine. Perhaps that would give them some reliable information.

Morgan found a dark corner of the bar and flicked through old magazines for a while. No one interrupted him. There was no sign of the stewardess or the Lebanese. He ordered a large whisky. To hell with everyone, he thought.

Shortly after nine Morgan went out to look for the receptionist but the desk was empty. He waited for a few minutes and then decided to turn in early. He was walking down the passageway that led out to his block when he heard noises coming from behind a door marked GAMES ROOM. He stopped. He could hear a man’s voice, an indistinct seductive bass. He then heard some feminine giggles. He was about to walk on when he heard the girl say, “No. Stop it. Come on now.” He listened again. She grew more insistent. “Look. Stop it. Really. Come on, it’s your serve.” She was still giggling but it seemed to Morgan that a worried tone had entered her voice. Then: “Ow! — Honestly, cut it out! No. Stop it, please.”

Morgan pushed open the door. The girl stood there in the hairy Lebanese’s arms. He seemed to be biting her shoulder. As Morgan entered they broke apart, and the girl, blushing, quickly readjusted the strap of her cream dress which had slipped down her arm. Morgan felt supremely foolish for the second time that day. He wasn’t at all clear about what one was meant to say in situations like this. The girl smiled; he felt slightly reassured. She seemed pleased to see him and backed away from the Lebanese. He smiled, too, white and gold teeth beneath his moustache.

“How you feel?” he asked Morgan confidently, tapping his stomach. “The belly. Is good?”

They were standing in front of a Ping-Pong table. Morgan walked over to it and picked up a bat. He swished it menacingly about.

“My turn to serve, I think,” he said pointedly, in as clipped and cool a tone as he could summon. “Why don’t you push off, Abdul? Eh?”

The Lebanese looked at the girl, who earnestly studied her fingernails. He gave a snort of laughter and pushed past Morgan out of the room, saying something harsh and guttural in Arabic, as if he had a forest of fish bones stuck in his throat. An expressive language, Morgan admitted to himself, hugely relieved.

Morgan and the stewardess went to the bar and had a quiet, mature laugh about it all. There had been no real problem, the girl insisted. He was just getting a little fresh. Still, she was glad Morgan had walked in. They had a few drinks. The stewardess said her name was Jayne Darnley. She’d come down with a touch of upset tummy and had to be left behind when the last plane took off. Morgan bought some more drinks. She was wearing a loose satin dress and Morgan admired the roll of her heavy breasts beneath the bodice as she reached down into her bag for a menthol cigarette. They got on famously; Morgan even laughed about his ill-fated dive. “It was terribly brave of you,” stated Jayne. She came, it transpired, from Tottenham and had worked on “promotions” before becoming a stewardess. The whisky made Morgan feel virile and capable; he could smell the pungent scent she used, and the click of the sentry’s boots in the foyer lent a frisson of exotic danger to the atmosphere. He started to lie grandly. Yes, he admitted, he was leaving this country for a new posting: Paris. He was going to be defence attaché at the Paris embassy. “Ooh, Paree,” enthused Jayne. “I love Paris.” And from there, Morgan confided, a spot of work at the UN perhaps. After that, who knows? Although his first loyalty had always been to the service, he’d always had a secret yearning for the cut and thrust of political life, and with his experience, maybe.… Morgan went on to conjure up a large, interesting and cultured family, a trendy public school, a starred first. He created a modest private income, a chic pied-à-terre in Chelsea; he fabricated costly hobbies and recondite enthusiasms, and spoke knowingly of half-famous intellectuals, minor royalty, television-show compères. As the whisky and his rising sexual excitement fuelled his imagination, so Jayne grew more entranced, edging forward on her chair, lips set apart in a ready smile of anticipation. Her eyes gleamed; what a good time she was having. Morgan concurred, and called for another Pernod and blackcurrant.

At midnight, both a little unsteady on their feet, they walked arm in arm up the pathway towards the residential blocks. Crickets telephoned endlessly all around. The path bifurcated. “Well,” Jayne sighed, raising her face to his, “I go this way.”

Morgan was quite satisfied with their love-making. It hadn’t exactly made the earth move for him but Jayne had produced a flattering tocsin of appreciative yips and mews as he had humped away in the dark heat of the room. He lay back now, his chest and belly heaving, and thought how perhaps events had not turned out so badly.

Jayne smoked a cigarette and whispered compliments to him. Then she propped herself on one elbow and gazed down at his face, tracing its contours with a sharp red fingernail.

“I can’t believe my luck,” she confided softly. “To … well, to meet you like this.” Her thin lips pecked at his face like a dabbing fish. “I’d just never have thought it possible. Someone like you. You know?”

Morgan wasn’t sure that he did, and for the first time he found the ambiguity somewhat unsettling.

Jayne still maintained the same vein of ingenuous lyricism in the morning before she returned to her own room. Strangely, and against his better judgement, she elicited similar vague responses from Morgan. He was half-asleep and unused to finding a warm naked woman in his bed on waking up. The associated sensations of comfort and cosy eroticism were agreeably complementary. They admitted that, yes, they both really liked each other; and it was funny how people like them — from such different backgrounds — got along so tremendously easily. It was almost, almost like fate really, wasn’t it? What with her illness, his puncture and, of course, the coup. Didn’t he think so? Jayne prompted, searching beneath the sheet. A squirming Morgan felt bound to agree, suggesting, almost before he realised what he was saying, that once this thing was over they really ought to see some more of each other. Miraculously, it seemed, Jayne had two weeks of leave coming up and nothing in particular planned for them. If Morgan had some time to spare before his Paris posting came through, it would be fun to see each other in London. Of course, Morgan whispered, nuzzling her neck, of course.

But then Jayne was out of bed and swiftly into her cream dress, patting her face with powder and applying fresh lipstick. She kissed him on the cheek.

“See you downstairs,” she said. “Let’s go to the pool again.”

Alone, Morgan dressed slowly. Post-coital tristesse, not an ailment he was usually afflicted with, weighed heavy on him today. He moved like a man deep in thought, like a hasty investor who’s just had the dubious ramifications of his latest deal explained. His early swaggering confidence, his locker-room bravado, his smug self-congratulation had mysteriously dissipated, leaving a querulous, nagging tone of rebuke and stale second thoughts.

He walked distractedly into the hotel lobby, his mind preoccupied, and was surprised to find it full of the guests, their luggage and the same flustered BOAC official who had met him at the airport gates two days previously.

“Ah, Mr. Leafy,” he said to Morgan. “Here at last. You’ll be glad to know that the airport has reopened, diplomatic relations have been established, and you’re flying out on”—he consulted his clipboard—“the third plane. Eleven forty-five this morning. We’re getting you all along to the airport as quickly as possible, as things are a bit chaotic, to put it mildly. If you could report back to me here in fifteen minutes?” He turned to answer a phone ringing on the reception desk.

Jayne came up to Morgan. She was wearing a lurid print dress and large round sunglasses.

“We’re on the same plane,” she said. “Isn’t that a stroke of luck? Don’t worry, I’ll see we get sitting beside each other. I’ve a friend at the airport.”

Morgan smiled wanly, muttered something about having to pack, and returned to his room.

As he laid his clothes in his suitcase he felt unfamiliar symptoms of panic sweep over him, as if he were some inefficient refugee too late to flee the advance of an invading army. He felt like a crapulous sailor who’s overstayed his shore leave, watching his ship steam out of harbour. Things were moving far too quickly, he realised; he no longer felt in control. Suddenly they were leaving for home and he found himself teamed up with this Jayne, thinking of themselves as a couple, without really understanding how it had all come about. He felt mystified, bemused. Who was this woman? Why was she making assumptions about him, organising his life?

The minibus that was to take them to the airport contained only two of the Lebanese and Jayne, who had kept Morgan a seat. As he settled in beside her, studiously avoiding the hostile looks of the others, she squeezed his hand and smiled at him. Morgan felt sick, queasy, like a man on a tossing ship who realises he should have refused those second helpings. God, he hadn’t envisaged anything like this at all, he reflected, as Jayne explained about her friend at the airport. No, by Christ, it was getting terribly out of hand. Why had he lied so convincingly; as if he were short-listed for foreign secretary? Why hadn’t he been callous and knowing, taken his pleasure like the chance acquaintances they were? Then he felt foolish and sad as he reasoned that it had only been the lies and false grandeur that had attracted the woman to him at all, and that without the fake glitter and borrowed glory, Morgan Leafy was of little consequence as a person, a minor district official leaving for a boring desk job in central London; and that without the stories and the make-believe, he could have stared and lusted at the side of the pool or fantasised in the bar for days and she would probably never have noticed he was there.

The low prefab shacks of the airport building heaved and pulsed with hot, irate travellers like some immense festering yeast culture. Queues intertwined and doubled back on themselves before makeshift desks, where airline clerks mindlessly flipped through damp sheets of passenger manifests and ticket counterfoils in a futile attempt to match names to seats, and parties to destinations. Beyond customs control, gangs of green-suited porters hurled bags onto lorries, and starched, impassive military police forced everyone to hand over their local currency.

After a two-hour struggle, Morgan and Jayne arrived in the departure lounge, their clothes mussed and sticky with perspiration, clutching handfuls of official departure forms and exchange-control declarations to be filled out in triplicate. Normally the blatant inefficiency and wanton lack of automation fixed Morgan in a towering rage, but today he was merely sullen and leaden-hearted. Jayne had clung to his arm throughout the obstacle course of the check-in and, dashing his last faint hope, had successfully arranged with her friend behind the desk for the two of them to have adjacent seats.

As she went up to the bar, Morgan gazed blindly at the ancient photographs of long-out-of-commission aircraft and thought of the appalling chain of events the coup had unwittingly set in motion. He mentally compared his parents’ semi-detached in Pinner, where he would be staying, with the Chelsea mews flat he had described to Jayne in such detail. He anguishedly contrasted his menial job off Whitehall, in a grimy office block, with the post of defence attaché at the Paris embassy. He sighed in frustration as he considered how he had meekly accepted Jayne’s invitation to meet her Mum and Dad the following Sunday. It was pathetic. He felt like weeping.

Jayne returned with two warm bottles of Fanta orange. “All they had,” she explained. “Come on, dear, move up. Make room for little me.”

Dear! Morgan’s spirit finally collapsed. He felt he couldn’t simply tell her to go away, as he himself had so deliberately contrived to deceive her. Perhaps when she found out the truth she’d reject him. But he looked at the tight lips sucking on a straw, the shrewd eyes with their delta of discreet lines, the coruscating talons gripping the Fanta bottle, and he thought, no, Jayne was running out of time, and there wasn’t much hope of that.

At eleven o’clock their plane was called and they assembled at the departure-lounge door. None of the airport buses was functioning and they had to walk across the shimmering apron to the plane. Morgan plodded across the hot tarmac, his eyes on the heels of the couple in front of him. The sun beat down on his exposed head, causing runnels of perspiration to drip from his brow. Jayne’s hand was latched firmly in the crook of his elbow.

They paused at the foot of the steps. Morgan looked up. Stewardesses beamed at the entrance to the plane. He’d never trust those smiles again. He felt he was about to climb the gallows. He looked at Jayne. Her eyes were invisible behind the opaque lenses of her sunglasses. She squeezed his arm and smiled, revealing patches of orange on her teeth that had smudged from her lips.

“Oh, look,” she said, gesturing beyond Morgan’s shoulder. “Must be someone important. Bet he tries to barge the queue.”

Morgan turned and saw an olive-green Mercedes driving across the tarmac from the airport buildings at some speed. A pennant cracked above the radiator grille. The car stopped and a young man got out. He held a piece of paper in his hand. He was tall and sunburnt and wore a well-pressed white tropical suit similar to the one Morgan had on. He was like the Platonic incarnation of everything Morgan had tried to create in his conversations with Jayne. And for Jayne, he was the misty image, the vague ideal of the man she fancied she had met in the airport hotel. They both stared uncomfortably at him for a brief moment, then simultaneously turned away, for his presence made reality a little hard to bear.

The young man walked up the line of waiting passengers.

“Mr. Leafy?” he called in a surprisingly high, piping voice. “Is there a Mr. Morgan Leafy here?”

At first, absurdly, Morgan didn’t react to the sound of his own name. What could this vision want with him? Then he put up his hand like a school-kid who’s been asked to own up.

“Telex,” the young man said, handing Morgan the piece of paper. “I’m from the embassy here,” he added. “Frightfully sorry we didn’t get to you before this. Hope it wasn’t too bad in the hotel …” He went on, but Morgan was reading the telex.

“LEAFY,” he read, “RETURN SOONEST NKONGSAMBA. YOU ARE URGENTLY REQD. RE LIAISING WITH NEW MILITARY GOVT. ALL CLEAR LONDON. CARTWRIGHT.”

Cartwright was the High Commissioner at Nkongsamba. Morgan looked at the young man. He couldn’t speak, his throat was choked with emotion. He handed the Telex to Jayne, She frowned with incomprehension.

“What does this mean?” she asked harshly, the poise cracking for an instant as Morgan stepped out of the queue.

“Duty calls, darling.” There seemed to be waves crashing and surging behind his rib cage. He felt dazed, abstracted from events. He waved his hands about meaninglessly, like a demented conductor. “Absolutely nothing I can do.” He had reached the Mercedes; the young man held the back door open for him. The embarking passengers looked on curiously. He saw the Americans. “Heyl” the woman shouted angrily, “you’re British!” He suppressed a whoop of gleeful laughter. “Sorry, darling,” he called again to Jayne, trying desperately to keep the elation from his voice. “I’ll write soon. I’ll explain everything.” A final shrug of his shoulders and he ducked into the car. It was deliciously cool; the air-conditioning whirred softly.

“I’ll come as far as the airport buildings,” the young man said deferentially. “Then this’ll take you straight back up the road to Nkongsamba if that’s okay with you.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” said Morgan, loosening his tie and waving to Jayne as the car moved off. “Oh, yes. That’s absolutely fine.”