‘Can’t you keep this bloody place tidy?’ he said complain-ingly. Then: ‘And where are you going tonight?’
Hazel was struggling into a tight pink cotton mini-dress and she was wobbly on high-heeled patent-leather shoes. ‘I can’t stay here all night,’ she said, not unreasonably. ‘I am going to the Executive. Josy Gboye is starring there.’
Morgan laughed sardonically.’
‘Oh yeah? And I suppose you’re going alone.’
Hazel adjusted her wig, a heavily back-combed straight-haired black one modelled after the hair style of a British pop-singer. ‘Of course not,’ she said simply, ‘I am going with my brother.’ She fastened on her gold earrings. Morgan thought she looked like a tart, lurid and sexual, and deeply attractive. He realized he was jealous; he would have liked to be going to the Executive with her, but it functioned as an unofficial campaign headquarters for Adekunle’s party workers, and it would not be wise for him to be spotted there with the elections just a week away. Besides, the last person in the world he wanted to see at the moment was Adekunle. The barbecue at the club would be safer: safe and dull.
Hazel saw his smouldering look and came over to him. She put her arms round his waist.
‘I want to go with you,’ she said, nuzzling his chest. The stiff nylon hairs of the wig tickled Morgan’s nose making him want to sneeze. ‘But if you won’t allow me, what can I do?’
Confronted by this logic he decided to be unreasonable.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. But be back here by 10:30. I think I’ll look in later.’ He thought this highly improbable but he didn’t like being taken for granted.
He bent down and touched his lips to her neck. Her skin was smooth and dry. He smelt ‘Amby’—a skin lightening agent most Kinjanjan girls used — talcum powder and a thin acidic whiffoffresh perspiration. He suddenly felt very aroused. He never failed to register amazement at the swiftness of his erections — and their subsidence — in Africa. He pressed himself against Hazel, and she backed off laughing, her almond eyes creased thinner with amusement. She gave her infectious, high-pitched laugh.
‘Dis man,’ she said in pidgin-English. ‘Dis man ‘e nevah done satisfy, ah-ah!’ She clapped her hands in delighted mirth. For some reason Morgan found himself smiling bashfully, a schoolboy blush spreading slowly across his face.
3
Morgan parked his Peugeot in the club car park. He got out and gazed across the warm roofs of the other cars at the club building. It was a dark night and the gathering rainclouds had obscured the stars. A coolish breeze blew from the west and Morgan smelt the damp-earth odour of impending rain.
The club was situated to the north of the city in one of the more seemly purlieus. Nearby stood a dusty racecourse and polo ground and the only Nkongsamban cinema regularly frequented by Europeans. The club itself was a large sprawling building which had been added to many times in the last half century and its haphazard design illustrated a variety of solid colonial architectural styles. It boasted also half a dozen red clay tennis courts, a sizeable swimming pool and a piebald eighteen-hole golf course. Inside were a couple of bars, a billiard room, a function suite of sorts that doubled as a discotheque and a large lounge-area filled with rickety under-stuffed armchairs which on festive occasions was cleared to provide space for dances, tombola and amateur dramatics or, should any crisis arise, acted as an assembly point for anxious expatriates.
It was a seedy-looking building, over-used, always seeming in need of a fresh coat of paint, but it was, by virtue of the poverty of alternatives, a popular place and Morgan, when he didn’t detest it as a repository for all the worst values of smug colonial British middle — classdom, often found himself savouring its atmosphere: the wide eaves providing ample shade for the long verandahs, the whirling roof fans rustling the tissue-thin airmail editions of The Times, the barefoot waiters in their white gold-buttoned uniforms clicking across the loose parquet flooring as they brought another tall green frosted bottle of beer to your chair.
But it wasn’t always shrouded in this nostalgic fog for him: there were bar-flies and bores, lounge-lizards and lechers. Adulterers and cuckolds brushed shoulders in the billiard room, idle wives played bridge or tennis or sunbathed round the pool, their children in the care of nannies, their housework undertaken by stewards, their husbands earning comfortable salaries all day. They gossiped and bitched, thought about having affairs and sometimes did, and the dangerous languor that infected their hot cloudless days set many a time-bomb ticking beneath their cosy, united nuclear families.
So Morgan changed his mind about the club from time to time. It had provided him with a few sexual partners — the hard, thin-faced wife of a civil engineer with five children, the large, moustachioed energetic spouse of the Italian Fiat representative in Nkongsamba — and for this he was duly grateful. He like the pool too, when it was free of the wives and their screaming brats, and he happily took advantage of the tennis courts and golf course when he felt so inclined. What he didn’t like so much was the deadening familiarity of the place after three years: the same tiresome old bachelors, the sun-wrinkled, gin-sodden couples with their endless dinner invitations and impoverished conversations. Being First Secretary at the Commission made him something of a social catch, and anyone who thought they might have a remote chance of landing an OBE or MBE shamelessly sought his company, plied him with drinks and meals and with remarkable lack of subtlety would tell him of their years of unstinting service in Kinjanja, what they had achieved and sacrificed for Britain. After three years of this Morgan was beginning to think he deserved some sort of reward himself for the hours of his young life he had sacrified listening to sententious political analyses and dreary racist diatribes.
There was another club up at the university where he was an honorary member and which he sometimes patronized. It had a swimming pool and tennis courts but no golf course, was newer and smaller and the intellectual levels of its members marginally higher. These two places, the cinema and private dinner parties represented all the social outlets available to the expatriate population of Nkongsamba. It’s no wonder, Morgan thought as he made his way through the parked cars towards the fairy-lit club façade and the jangling sound of pop-music, that we’re such a desperate lot.
He walked into the colonnaded entrance porch of the club house. A large noticeboard was covered with club rules, minutes of meetings and announcements of forthcoming events. His jaundiced eye swiftly surveyed what was on offer: XMAS GALA PARTY, HE READ, TO BE ATTENDED,BY HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF RIPON. He shuddered, wondering what had possessed him to agree to be Father Christmas. Next to that was the golf club’s GRAND BOXING DAY COMPETITION, all welcome, prizes for everyone, sign below. He turned away in despair. Outside the main door was a newsagent’s kiosk that sold European newspapers and magazines. Tucked away amongst the display ofheat-blanched copies of Newsweek, Marie-Claire and Bunte Morgan knew there were a few issues of American sex-magazines. He was surreptitiously leafing through one entitled Over-40—it was not a publication for gerontophiles, the number referred not to the models’ age but to their mammary development — when he heard footsteps on the concrete path behind him. Snatching up a copy of Reader’s Digest he looked round guiltily and saw Dr Murray approaching, accompanied by a young boy.