forehead. There was a touch of the 1970s dandy about him. He wore a soft, chocolate-coloured suede jacket, camel slip-ons, and his cheekbones were framed with a delicate suggestion of sideburns.
‘Miss Paula Shackleton?’ I reached up and we shook hands. There seemed to be no fat on his bones. ‘I’m Abraham. Mr Peabody sent me. Welcome to Lira.’
His English was good – that was a relief. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here.’
He shouldered one bag with ease and waved away my half-hearted attempt to take responsibility for the second. ‘Hotel OK?’
‘Perfect. I’ve settled up, as I was told to.’
‘Mr Peabody thought it would be more comfortable to spend the first night here. It opened after Liberation – the owners are from the Canadian diaspora. But you will have your own villa, sharing with Sharmila, the other expatriate.’
‘Really?’ I felt a pang of dismay. I hadn’t shared with anyone other than Jake since university. In my misanthropic state, solitude had become a Janus-faced friend, hated yet necessary. I made a mental note to discuss the arrangement with Winston.
He stowed my bags in the back of the Toyota and started the engine, throwing me a quick glance as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘You smoke.’
‘Is that a problem?’ I looked around anxiously for the ashtray, my US instincts kicking in.
‘No,’ he said, letting go of the wheel to reach into his back pocket for his own pack, the Red Marlboro of the serious player rather than my half-hearted Marlboro Lights. ‘It’s good. Everyone smokes here.’
‘Even the women?’
He raised an elegant eyebrow as he went through the gear changes, face expressionless. ‘You’re a woman? I thought you were our new lawyer.’ I laughed, suddenly certain that I was going to enjoy working with Abraham.
We drove through bleached, single-storey suburbs whose flaking walls were draped with bougainvillaea, Abraham occasionally lifting one long index finger from the steering-wheel to point out a landmark. The headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force – a vast fleet of white SUVs behind barbed wire and cement bollards (‘We could do with some of those’) – the new 500-room Africa Hotel (‘Lira’s only swimming-pool’), the gate into the Imperial Botanical Gardens (‘“Giardini”, the Italians called them’) behind which I caught a glimpse of cypress groves and gravel paths.
‘Is it safe on the streets in the evening? I like to run.’
‘Foreigners say it’s the safest capital in Africa. I wouldn’t know. No one will touch a hair of your head, I promise you, whatever time of day it is.’
We reached the centre of town and were bowling along a palm-fringed boulevard (‘Liberation Avenue’), lined with imposing Modernist buildings, what looked like a theatre, a high court, ministries and a giant art-deco cinema plastered with posters of big-eyed Bollywood stars. I leaned eagerly out of the window, taking it all in. Jake would have loved this, I thought. He’d have known the architects’ names, effortlessly identified the various styles, and could have explained the ideas and accidents behind the city’s final layout. Without him, it was a meaningless agglomeration of buildings.
We branched to the right, up a street lined with shoe shops and grocers. I caught snatches of jangling metallic music from a café’s open doorway. There was a driving, zesty quality to it, but the vocalist sounded closer to screaming than singing. Every now and then a garish mural flashed past, clearly a commissioned work of art. I craned my neck, but we were travelling too fast for anything more than a glimpse: a geyser of fire; khaki-clad fighters storming some citadel; a clenched male fist; prone bodies splotched with blood.
Abraham drew up next to a pollarded fig tree. ‘That is the office,’ he said, indicating a sober wooden door with a brass plaque next to it. ‘And there on the corner is Ristorante Torino. Mr Peabody is waiting inside.’
There had been exchanges of emails while I’d been in the States, though not as many as my mother would have liked – ‘Typical of you, Paula,’ she’d wailed, ‘moving to darkest Africa on the strength of a fax’ – but I hadn’t actually laid eyes on Winston since our Boston meeting. He seemed somehow larger, louder, a player in his element.
‘So, first impressions?’ he asked. Two beers magically appeared in stumpy unlabelled brown bottles. As the meal progressed, dishes kept materialising without orders being placed, and I realised he must eat at the Torino every day. Winston might be innovative and risk-taking inside the courtroom, but out of it he was a creature not so much of habit but of obsessive routine.
‘Weeell … the city isn’t what I was expecting at all. I don’t know what I thought an African capital would be like, but it feels more like a riviera resort, or a stretch of LA. The palm trees definitely bring Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald to mind.’
He tilted his glass and carefully dribbled in some beer from the bottle. ‘Most African capitals barely existed before colonialism, so the cities often still look as their colonial masters intended. Infrastructure that stands the test of time can be a mixed blessing. It’s impossible to shake off.’
‘It seems incredibly clean. I suppose I was expecting open sewers and tin-shack slums.’
‘There are plenty of those, believe me, but not in this district. You’re in what was once Lira’s European quarter, which used to be off-limits to the “natives,”’ he made inverted commas in the air, ‘after the sun went down. It’s still the most elegant part of town. All the embassies and most of the hotels are here.’
‘And the climate …’
‘The climate?’
‘I realise I was a bit naïve, but I automatically assumed it would be hot and sweaty. I’m already wearing most of the clothes I packed.’
He looked nonplussed. ‘Ah. Sorry about that. I should have asked Sharmila to brief you. We’re very high up, so it gets pretty cold once the sun goes down. I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me that would be an issue. My own wardrobe barely changes, irrespective of the season. You might be able to pick something up at the local market. Everything’s made in China, of course.’
‘Abraham mentioned I’ll be living with Sharmila. I don’t want to sound like a prima donna, but is there any chance I could have my own place, however small? I’m not used to sharing.’
He gave me a probing look, alert for potential trouble. ‘Sorry, can’t do. It’s not penny-pinching, in case you’re wondering. The government designates where expatriates on the payroll live. Getting us to share makes keeping tabs on us easier.’
‘That sounds a bit paranoid. We’re on their side, after all.’
‘Not paranoid, just careful. The client’s prerogative.’
He started elliptically, so much so that for the first fifteen minutes I wondered if he was meandering, a man who liked to talk for the sake of talking. But then I saw what he was doing. Like any good lawyer, he knew that context dictates meaning. He was painting in the background, sketching in the lines of perspective, ensuring that when he finally came to the story’s core, it would be properly framed.
He ran through his curriculum vitae. A boy who had been parked for long hours in the library of the school in West Philadelphia, where his mother worked as a cleaner, who had grown to love the institution’s smell of old leather, the hush of concentration and masculine gravitas, the atmosphere, he would later learn, of a gentleman’s club. What would have been a tiresome ordeal for most boys his age providing him with a glimpse of a way out. A truck-driver father, whose absences were compensated for by a grandfather’s loving attention: Winston Peabody I, despairing of his pool-hall-frequenting son, was self-taught, politically active, the kind of iconoclast who felt compelled to declare his atheism to all and sundry, had poured his frustrated aspirations into his grandson, who had soaked up the references to Orwell and Fanon, Garvey and Du Bois, safe harbours of thought and inspiration