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talk.” It sounded good: mature, seasoned, unhysterical.
    Priscilla had been fiddling with the key in the ignition. She flashed the same smile at him again, the one that said you can talk all you want but I can’t hear a thing.
    “Coming to the barbecue?” she asked blithely.
    “What?”
    “Tonight. At the club.”
    It was no use. “Yes, I expect so.”
    “See you there then,” she said. She switched on the engine, backed out of the garage and headed off down the drive. Morgan watched it go. How could she treat him like this?
    “You bitch,” he uttered softly at the departing car. “Selfish, unfeeling bitch.”

Chapter 2
    Morgan walked morosely back to the Commission. He looked at his watch: half-past five. He had told Hazel he’d be at the flat before five. He could smell smoke from the charcoal braziers in the servants’ quarters: dinner time, the Commission would be closed. He went in to the staff car-park and saw his car was the only one remaining, his cream Peugeot 404, or “Peejott” as they were known locally. He had bought it in the summer when everyone else was on leave. Hazel had suggested a Peugeot; they carried a lot of status in Kinjanja. By his car shall ye know him. Mercedes Benzes came at the top of the list; you hadn’t arrived until you did in a Mercedes. They were for heads of state, important government officials, high-ranking soldiers, very successful businessmen and chiefs. Next came the Peugeot, for the professional man: lawyers, senior civil servants, doctors, university heads of department. It spelt respectability. Citroens, grade three, were for young men on the make, pushy executives, lecturers,
arrivistes
of all kinds. Morgan publicly scoffed at such overt status symbols and justified buying a Peugeot for sound engineering reasons, but nonetheless, he enjoyed the appraising looks it received, felt vaguely flattered by the open weighing-up people subjected him to when he stepped out of the car—not important enough for a Merc, but a man of some qualityjust the same. It was too bad for Hazel that he only drove her about under cover of darkness; none of her friends had ever seen her in it.
    He headed the car down to the main gate, saluted the night watchman and turned left down the long straight road into town. The Commission lay off the main road between the town of Nkongsamba and the state university campus. It was a two-mile drive down a gentle slope into the town. The Commission was placed atop a ridge of low hills that over-looked Nkongsamba from the north-east. One and a half miles further up the road lay the university campus where a significant portion of the expatriate British population of the Mid-West lived and worked.
    Morgan considered going home for a shower but then abandoned the idea. Home was on an enclosed residential estate prosaically called New Reservation (he sometimes felt like an American Indian when he gave his address), which was about twenty minutes away from the Commission on the major highway north out of Nkongsamba. He had told his servants, Moses and Friday, to expect him back but he could always ring them from the club. It would keep the idle bastards on their toes, he thought savagely.
    The road was lined with flamboyant trees on the point of bursting into radiant scarlet bloom. The rain, if it came tonight, would bring all the flowers out. He drove past the saw-mill where Muller, the saw-mill manager and West German chargé d’affaires, lived. There was a French agronomist at a nearby agricultural research station who looked after the interests of the few French people in the state, but between them and the Commission they made up the official diplomatic presence in Nkongsamba. All the big embassies and consulates were concentrated in the capital on the coast, a four-hour drive away on a deathtrap road.
    He began to approach the outskirts of town. The verges widened, dusty and bare of grass; empty stalls and cleared rickety tables of day-time