Morgan turned around the side of the Commission and walked down the gravelled path towards Fanshawe’s official residence some hundred yards away in the spacious grounds. The Harmattan had withered every blade of grass to a uniform brown against which the clumps of hibiscus and thickets, of bouganvillea stood out like oases in a desert. To his left behind a straggling line of nim trees were the Commission’s servants’ quarters, two low concrete blocks that faced each other across a bald laterite square. Morgan could see, set up around the smoke-blackened verandahs of the quarters, the traders’ stalls bright with fruit and vegetables, and he could hear the singing of women as they pounded clothes at the concrete wash-place at the top end of the compound, the crying of children and the clucking of mangy hens. There were officially six dwelling units for the Commission’s staff but lean-tos had sprouted, grass shelters were erected, cousins, odd-job gardeners and nomadic relations had turned up, and on the last count forty-three people were living there. Fanshawe had asked Morgan to evict all unauthorized inhabitants, claiming that the noise level was becoming intolerable and that the rubbish dump behind the quarters was unsightly and encroaching on the main road. Morgan had yet to do anything about this, and he doubted strongly if he ever would.
He cut across the lawn to the front of Fanshawe’s house. He looked for Priscilla’s small Fiat and his heart leapt when he saw its rear poking out of the garage to the right of the house. She was at home then, he thought, unless Dalmire had taken her golfing. Self-consciously he adjusted the knot of his tie.
The Deputy High Commissioner’s residence in Nkong-samba was an imposing two-storeyed building. There was a porticoed entrance above steps which led up to a long stoop with a row of French windows running the length of it. Inside were high-ceilinged airy reception rooms, and the back of the house looked down upon one of the more select suburbs to the south-east of Nkongsamba. The sun was about to sink into the thunder clouds to the west and was casting dramatic beams onto the whitewashed façade.
Morgan was on the point of climbing up the steps when Fanshawe leaned over the stoop balustrade. He was wearing a lurid blue Chinese shirt with a round collar that was dotted with purple ideograms.
‘Evening, Morgan,’ he said briskly. ‘Anything I can do?’
Obviously he knew nothing of his wife’s phone call. This was a bad sign, Morgan felt worry tremors shiver through his body.
‘Chloe…Mrs Fanshawe asked me to look in,’ he explained.
‘Really?’ Fanshawe said as if unable to comprehend this aberration on his wife’s part. ‘Well, you’d better come on in.’
Morgan walked up the steps. Fanshawe stood beside a red plastic watering can. ‘Watering the plants,’ he said conversationally, nodding towards several crude black earthenware pots overflowing with fecund greenery. With an outspread palm he indicated the open door. Morgan went in and sat down.
He found it hard to fix or even identify his feelings about Fanshawe: they wavered between the three poles of nostril-wrinkling contempt, total indifference and temple-throbbing irritation like one of those executive toys where a wire-suspended ball vacillates between three magnets. He was a thin ascetic-looking man with balding grey hair brushed straight back from his forehead. He had a tiny, meticulously pruned moustache which maintained an exact horizontal line equidistant between his nose and upper lip. Its obliviousness of facial contours made him look as if he was always about to break into a smile even when he was at his most earnestly pro-British. Consequently Morgan found it almost impossible to take him seriously. Fanshawe was a Far East man and had spent his working life in consulates and embassies in such exotic places as Sumatra, Hong Kong, Saigon and Singapore. Nkongsamba was his last posting before his retirement and he interpreted it as a definite slight. He had almost two years left to serve and the prospect of eking them out as a Deputy High Commissioner in such a God-forsaken, insignificant spot was something his professional pride would not let him take easily. He nurtured a secret dream of a dramatic last posting, a brilliant finale to an uninspired career. This brought about periods of evangelical zeal in his administration of the Nkongsamba Commission, like a model prisoner on death-row hoping his good behaviour will bring him a last — minute reprieve. It also made him very depressed about living in Africa, particularly in a spot so comparatively uncivilized as Kinjanja. ‘Culture shock,’ he had mournfully told Morgan on several occasions, referring to his arrival on the dark continent. ‘Like a blow between the eyes. I don’t think Chloe will ever recover.’ Both Fanshawes were given to lyrical outbursts about the grace and dignity of the East, they would talk ecstatically about the centuries, the eons of culture and disciplined development the East had enjoyed. ‘Far more civilized than us, old man,’ Fanshawe would intone. ‘And the African, well, what can I say?’ Here would come a knowing smile and a cocked eyebrow. ‘A beautiful, elegant person, your Oriental. Harmony you know, that’s at the back of it all. Yin and Yang, that’s right isn’t it darling? Yin and Yang,’ he would call unselfconsciously across a crowded cocktail party to his embarrassed wife. Fanshawe had forced himself to believe all this, Morgan had come to realize, and like all zealots was incapable of even recognizing that any other point of view existed, and so Morgan had reluctantly given up trying to draw him into discussions about the grace and harmony of Gengis Khan, Changi Jail and Pearl Harbour. Fanshawe may have convinced himself, but as far as his wife was concerned Morgan knew instantly it was sheer affectation.
For example the Commission residence itself was got up like a cross between some makeshift Buddhist temple and a Chinese restaurant. There were carved wooden screens, paper lanterns, impossibly low furniture, stark driftwood flower arrangements, silk paintings and an immense brass gong in one corner hanging from a pole supported by two half life-size gilded wooden figures. Returning hbme with Priscilla one night (it seemed like years ago now, they had only just begun ‘going out’) Morgan, emboldened by the romance and drink, had seized the padded gong beater and effected a languid slow-motion swing at the gong, crying out in basso profundo over his shoulder ‘J- Arthur Rank presents’. It had not gone down welclass="underline" the shocked, unlaughing expressions of the family, the heretical implications suffusing the strained silent atmosphere, the fumbling tense seconds as he nervously strove to replace the gong-beater on its tiny impractical hook…He shivered slightly as he remembered it now, seeing the gong reposing brassily in the corner, and wondered what the old bag wanted him for.
Fanshawe, as if reading his thoughts, said, ‘I imagine Chloe’ll be down any moment,’ and, equally on cue, his wife stepped sedately down the stairs that led up to the first floor. Before he had met this one, Morgan had assumed that people called Chloe were either the neurotic brilliant daughters of Oxbridge dons or else silly screaming debutantes. Mrs Fanshawe was neither of these and Morgan had had to revise his Chloe-category considerably to fit her in. She was tall and palely fleshy, a moderately ‘handsome’ woman gone to fat, with short, dyed black hair swept back in a dramatic wave from her face and held immovably in position by a fearsomely strong lacquer; even in the most intemperate breezes Morgan had never seen a single hair stir from the solid lapidary mass of her coiffed head. She had a chest like an opera singer too, a single wedge of heavily trussed and boned undergarmentry from which the rest of her body tapered gradually into surprisingly small and elegant feet; too small, Morgan always thought, to support the impressive disequilibrium of her bosom. She held herself in a manner that encouraged this conclusion: poised, feet slightly apart, thighs braced, head canted back as if she felt she was about to crash forward onto her face. She ventured into the sun rarely, maintaining her unexercised pallor like a memsahib from the Raj by means of this reticence and also with the aid of unsparing applications from her powder compact, which she wielded often, and in public. Her other favourite cosmetic tool was a bright scarlet lipstick, which only served to emphasize the thinness of her lips.