A Good Man in Africa Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 brightscarlet lipstick, which only served to emphasise the thinness of her lips.
    “Ah, here you are at last, Morgan,” she said (as if she were the one who had been kept waiting), sweeping across the room and cautiously lowering herself into a squat armchair. “Sherry, I think, Arthur,” she said to Fanshawe, who duly presented everyone with a pale Amontillado.
    “Well,” Mrs. Fanshawe exhaled, raising her glass. She then said something that, to Morgan’s ears, sounded very like
Nakana-hishana.
“A Siamese toast,” she added in condescending explanation.
    “Erm,
nakahish
 … um, cheers,” Morgan responded, taking a grudging sip at his warm cloying sherry and feeling sweat prickle all over his body. Nobody drank sherry in Africa, he fumed inwardly, and certainly not at this time of day when what your body craved for was something long, clinking with ice and possessing a kick like a mule. Morgan looked at Mrs. Fanshawe’s pale knees as she resettled the hem of her Thai silk dress around them. Nobody, he was acutely aware, had so much as breathed the name of Priscilla, so he resolutely took the bull by the horns.
    “Marvellous news about Priscilla and … mmm, very pleased,” he said feebly, raising his sticky glass to toast the couple for the second time that day.
    “Oh, you’ve heard,” Mrs. Fanshawe enthused. “I’m so glad. Did Dickie tell you? We’re terribly pleased, aren’t we, Arthur? He’s got such good prospects … Dickie, that is.” It all came out in a rush and was followed by an awkward silence as the implied comparison was swiftly picked up and inwardly digested.
    “Priscilla will be down in a minute,” Mrs. Fanshawe continued, her pale skin refusing to colour. “She’ll be glad to see you.”
    Sherry made Morgan depressed and this lie deepened the gloom that was settling on him as inevitably as night. He stared morosely at the dragon-patterned rugs on the Fanshawes’ floor as they filled him in on the details of Dickie and Priscilla’s good fortune and the excellent connections of her