He shook his head violently, like a man with water stuck in his ear. He put the file away in its drawer and dispiritedly turned the key in the lock. He must have seemed like a gift of heaven to Adekunle, he decided; a fat white man joyfully offering himself for sacrifice…At this point he rolled down the reinforced titanium steel blinds around his imagination, a mental trick he had perfected: he didn’t want to think about the future and resolutely ordered his mind to ignore that forbidding dimension. He could achieve the same effect of solitary confinement, a sort of cerebral Coventry, with other recalcitrant faculties like memory or conscience which could be irritating, nagging things in certain circumstances. If they didn’t behave they didn’t get spoken to. He closed his eyes, leant back, took deep breaths and allowed only the monotonous hum of the air-conditioning unit to fill his head.
He was on the point of dozing off’ when he heard a rap on his door and, squinting through his eyelashes, saw Kojo enter.
‘Oh Christ,’ he said impatiently. ‘Yes, what is it?’
Kojo approached his desk, unaffected by his hostility. ‘The letters, sah. For signing.’
Muttering complaints under his breath Morgan went through the outgoing mail. Three negative RSVPs to semiofficial functions; invitations to prominent Britons inviting them to a Boxing Day buffet lunch to celebrate the honoured visit of the Duchess of Ripon to Nkongsamba; the usual visa acknowledgements, though here was one rejection for a so-called minister of the Non-Denominational Methodist Brethren’s Church of Kinjanja who wanted to visit a sister mission in Liverpool. Finally there was a note to the British Council in the capital saying yes, they could put up an itinerant poet for a couple of days while he partook in a festival of Anglo-Kinjanjan culture at the University of Nkongsamba. Morgan re-read the poet’s name: Greg Bilbow. He had never heard of him. He signed all the mail quickly, confident in Kojo’s immaculate typing. Keeping the Union Jack flying, he thought, making the world safe for Democracy. But then he checked his sneers. From one point of view it had been the mindless, pettifogging boredom of his work and the consequent desire to escape it that had made him attack the KNP dossier with such patriotic zest — and look at the can of worms that had turned out to be, he admonished himself ruefully.
He handed the letters back to Kojo and looked at his watch.
‘You off home now?’ he asked, trying to sound interested.
Kojo smiled. ‘Yes, sah.’
‘How’s the wife…and baby? Boy, isn’t it?’
‘She is well, sah. But…I have three children,’ Kojo reminded him gently.
‘Oh yes. Of course. Silly of me. All well, are they?’ He stood up and walked with Kojo to the door. The little man’s woolly head came up to Morgan’s armpit. Morgan peered into Kojo’s office: it was festooned with decorations, ablaze with cheap paper streamers.
‘You like Christmas, don’t you, Kojo?’
Kojo laughed. ‘Oh yes, sah. Very much. The birth of our Lord Jesus.’ Morgan remembered now that Kojo was a Catholic, he also recalled seeing him with his family — a tiny wife in splendid lace costume and three minute children all identically dressed in gleaming white shirts and red shorts outside the Catholic church on the way in to town a few Sundays ago.
Morgan looked at his diminutive secretary with unconcealed curiosity.
‘Everything OK, Kojo?’ he asked. ‘I mean, no problems, no major worries?’
‘I beg pardon, sah?’ Kojo replied, genuinely puzzled.
Morgan went on, not really sure what answer he was trying to elicit. ‘You’re quite…happy are you? Everything going swimmingly, nothing bothering you?’
Kojo recognized ‘happy’. He laughed a high wheezy infectious chuckle. ‘Oh yes. I am a very happy man.’ As he walked back to his desk Morgan could see Kojo’s thin shoulders still shaking with merriment. Kojo probably thought he was mad, Morgan concluded. A not unreasonable diagnosis under the circumstances, he had to admit.
He took up his position again at the window and looked down at the driveway, trying not to think about Priscilla and Dalmire. He saw Peter, the imbecilic and homicidal Commission driver polishing Fanshawe’s long black Austin Princess. He saw Jones walking out to his Volkswagen with the unrelentingly cheery Mrs Bryce, wife of a geologist from the university, who acted as Fanshawe’s secretary. There were a couple of expatriate wives who did part-time clerical and secretarial work around the Commission, but Mrs Bryce was the only regular one. She was very tall and thin and the calves of her legs were always covered with shilling-sized, angry red mosquito bites. Podgy Jones waddled along beside her. They stood for a moment next to Mrs Bryce’s mobylette and chatted earnestly. No doubt, Morgan thought sourly, she’s telling Jones she’s ‘the happiest woman in Nkongsamba’, how she never grumbles and how everything is really ‘nice’ if only you think about it in the proper way. Seeing how friendly Jones was being, Morgan half-heartedly wondered if they might be having an affair. In anywhere else but West Africa that notion would have raised shouts of incredulous laughter, but Morgan had known stranger couplings. Feeling vaguely grubby as he did so, he tried to imagine Jones and Mrs Bryce making the beast with two backs, but the incompatibility of their respective physiques defeated his best endeavours. He turned away from his window wondering why he always ended up thinking about sex. Was it normal, and were other people similarly preoccupied? It made him depressed.
If Mrs Bryce was on her way home, he reasoned, trying to shake the mood from his shoulders, then Fanshawe must have packed up for the day, and he had every intention of following suit. He was in the process of unslinging his lightweight tropical jacket from the hanger on the back of his office door when the internal phone on his desk rang. He picked it up.
‘Leafy,’ he barked aggressively into the instrument.
‘Ah, Morgan,’ said a plummy, cultured feminine voice on the other end, ‘Chloe here.’
For a couple of desperate seconds Morgan was convinced he knew no Chloe, until he suddenly linked the name with the person who was Fanshawe’s wife: Mrs Chloe Fanshawe, wife to the Deputy High Commissioner in Nkongsamba. The mental lapse came about because Morgan never thought of her as Chloe, and only seldom as Mrs Fanshawe. Usually the kindest epithets were the Fat Bitch, or the Old Bag. The problem was that they hated each other. There had been no overt hostility, no bitter confrontation, no single act that set off the conflict. It was an understanding that they had both seemed to reach quite spontaneously, entirely natural and unsurprising, as if it were some unique genetic accident that had brought about this animosity. Morgan sometimes thought it was quite mature of them tacitly to acknowledge it in this unfussy way: it made co-existence less complex. For example, he knew instantly that this pointed exchange of Christian names in fact meant that she wanted something of him; so, guardedly, he replied: ‘Hello…ah, yes, Chloe,’ testing the name on his tongue.
‘Not busy are you, Morgan?’ Ostensibly a question, it clearly functioned as a statement: no response was required. ‘Care to pop over for a sherry? Five minutes? See you then. ‘Bye.’ The line clicked.
Morgan thought. For a brief moment an unfamiliar elation bloomed in his chest as he considered that it might have something to do with Priscilla, solitary offspring of the Fan-shawe loins, but the sensation died as abruptly as it had arisen: Dalmire had been crowing in his office not twenty minutes ago — nothing could have changed that quickly.
Wondering what she wanted, Morgan pulled on his jacket and walked through Kojo’s office and down the stairs. The sudden transit from air-conditioned chill to late-afternoon heat and humidity affected him as shockingly as it always did. His eyes began to water slightly, he was suddenly aware of the contact between his flesh and the material of his clothing and the wide tops of his thighs chafed uncomfortably together beneath his damp groin. By the time he reached the foot of the main stairs and had walked through the entrance vestibule and out of the front door, all the benefits of his afternoon’s cool comfort had disappeared. The sun hung low over Nkongsamba making the storm clouds menacingly dark and its glare struck him full in the face. The sun shone large and red through the dust haze of the Harmattan — a hot dry mistral off the Sahara that visited West Africa every year at this time, and that cut the humidity by a negligible few percent, filled the air and every crevice with fine sandy dust, and cracked and warped wood and plastic like some invisible force-field.