Jeff Pollard was a sometime employee of Turadup, William and Schaper, a firm known throughout the construction business as Throw’em Up, Bill’em and Scarper. Since the European Development Fund had decided to finance the building of the blacktop road, he had been in and out of southern Africa, weighing up prospects and buying people drinks. He was a man of thirty-five, unmarried, with a loose and dusty appearance and shifting eyes; he had a gray-white skin, but the back of his neck was at all times mysteriously and painfully sunburned. He had an unsparing fund of anecdote, a knowing, dirty laugh; a British passport, and a vaguely Australian accent. He wore his shirt open, and around his neck on a chain a small block of gold incised with the legend CREDIT SUISSE. When the Shores were leaving Africa there had been a lot of people like Jeff around, doing their recruiting in golf-club bars. They were cowboys, headhunters, entrepreneurs; anywhere they hung their hat was their domicile, for fiscal purposes.
Turadup had got a toehold in Zambia before the bottom dropped out of copper, putting up expatriate housing in Kabwe, the mining town that had once been known as Broken Hill; then when Zambia went down the drain they moved south a bit, putting in an unsuccessful tender for work on the new international airport at Gaborone; then picking up work around that city, piping water and building a clinic for a shanty town that had become permanent
Andrew first poured himself a brandy; then he sat for some time and regarded the phone in their bungalow, like a man in a trance, or a man praying. Then he picked up the receiver; the lines were not down that day, and it was a mere ten minutes before he got an answer from the operator in Gaborone. He told her what he wanted: Johannesburg. There seemed to be a party going on in the background. He could hear women laughing, and what was perhaps crockery being smashed. The operator came back once or twice, bellowing in his ear, but she didn’t forget him entirely; in time she came up with what might be her best offer, a line to Mafeking. He took it. A guttural voice answered him in Afrikaans. Seconds later he was speaking to Eric Parsons, at his hotel. It was the Carlton, he noted; Turadup did not penny-pinch.
He did not suggest making the drive to Johannesburg, but waited until Parsons said, “I’ll come to you then, shall I?” He knew how he would employ the time, as he drove to Gaborone to meet Parsons: he pictured himself at the wheel of his truck, the empty road and the low brown hills unwinding before him, while his practiced eye was half alert for cattle and children, and his inner will concentrated, mile after mile, upon making Parsons offer him more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in his life. This, in due course, Parsons did.
The details were fixed up, at the President Hotel this time (there being, in Gaborone, a choice of two) over a tough T-bone steak and a glass of Lion lager. Andrew Shore shook hands with Eric Parsons, the Saudi man; Jeff Pollard, talking, conducted him down from the terrace and out into the street. Across the road, the nation’s only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and
When he arrived home late that afternoon, Frances was on the porch packing a tea chest, wrapping up their dinner service in pieces of the
“Yes, I did it, it’s all fixed. But we can’t go together—I have to be in the Kingdom before they’ll grant you a visa. When we finish up here I’m to fly to Nairobi, and pick up a businessman’s entry permit—then once I’m in, Turadup will fix it for me to stay. They’re in a hurry.”
“Why? Has someone quit without notice?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I would have asked.”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“So you won’t even be coming to England first?”
“And stay with your mother?”
“It looks as if I’ll have to.”
“Well listen, Fran, we won’t be apart for long. And by the time you get out to Jeddah, we’ll be fixed up with a house, and everything will be ready for you.”
“I’d rather go with you. But I suppose they have their rules. Oh, look, am I to pack these?” She held out a candlestick, one of a pair from a local pottery, rough, heavy, unglazed.
“Sure,” he said. “Souvenir. Take those funny baskets as well, the ones that fall over.”
She began to wrap the candlestick, rolling it in her hands. “Are you sure that this is the right thing to do?” she said. “Is this what you want?”
“They’re doubling my salary,” he said flatly.
“What?”
“You heard.”
She turned away and bent over the tea chest again, cleanly stabbed by avarice, like a peach with a silver knife.
“We could be in and out within three years,” he said. “Your salary is paid in riyals, tax-free. All you need out of it is your day-to-day living expenses and you can bank the rest where you like, in any currency you like. Turadup are offering free housing, a car allowance, paid utilities, yearly leave ticket, school fees—though of course—”
“That would be plain greedy,” she said, “having children so that you could get their school fees paid.”
“Pollard did say—” He looked at her in slight anxiety. “He said that his only reservation was how you’d settle in. As you’ve been a working woman.”
“I won’t be able to work?”
