The Constant Gardener (5 page)

“No food?” Woodrow protested. “Got to keep your strength up, you know, old boy.”

“You are very kind but I fear I have no appetite. Gloria, thank you again. Sandy, good night.”

“And the Pellegrin sends strong supporting messages from London. Whole Foreign Office struck down with grief, he says. Didn't want to intrude personally.”

“Bernard was always very tactful.”

She watched the door close, she heard his footsteps descend the concrete staircase, she saw his empty glass resting on the bamboo table beside the French window, and for a frightening moment she was convinced she would never see him again.

Woodrow bolted his dinner clumsily, not tasting it as usual. Gloria, who like Justin had no appetite, watched him. Juma their houseboy, tiptoeing restlessly between them, watched him too.

“How we faring?” Woodrow murmured with a conspiratorial slur, keeping his voice down and pointing at the floor to warn her to do the same.

“Been fine,” she said, playing his game. “Considering.” What are you doing down there? she wondered. Are you lying on your bed, flailing yourself in the darkness? Or are you staring through your bars into the garden, talking to her ghost?

“Anything of any significance come out?” Woodrow was asking, stumbling a bit on the word “significance” but still contriving to keep their conversation allusive on account of Juma.

“Like what?”

“About our lover boy,” he said and, leering shamefully, jabbed a thumb at her begonias and mouthed “bloom,” at which Juma hurried off to get a jug of water.

For hours Gloria lay awake beside her snoring husband until, fancying she heard a sound from downstairs, she crept to the landing and peered out of the window. The power cut was over. An orange glow from the city lifted to the stars. But no Tessa lurked in the lighted garden, and no Justin either. She returned to bed to find Harry diagonally asleep with his thumb in his mouth and one arm across his father's chest.

•      •      •

The family rose early as usual, but Justin was ahead of them, dressed in his crushed suit and hovering. He looked flushed, she thought, a little overbusy, too much color under the brown eyes. The boys shook his hand, gravely as instructed, and Justin meticulously returned their greetings.

“Oh Sandy, yes, good morning,” he said as soon as Woodrow appeared. “I wondered whether we might have a quick word.”

The two men withdrew to the sun lounge.

“It's about my house,” Justin began, as soon as they were alone.

“House here or house in London, old boy?” Woodrow countered in a fatuous effort to be cheerful. And Gloria, listening to every word through the serving hatch to the kitchen, could have brained him.

“Here in Nairobi. Her private papers, lawyers' letters. Her family-trust material. Documents that are precious to both of us. I can't leave her personal correspondence sitting there for the Kenyan police to plunder at will.”

“So what's the solution, old boy?”

“I'd like to go there. At once.”

So firm! Gloria rhapsodized. So forceful, in spite of everything!

“My dear chap, that's impossible. The hacks would eat you alive.”

“I don't believe that's true, actually. They can try and take my photograph, I suppose. They can shout at me. If I don't reply to them, that's about as far as they can go. Catch them while they're shaving.”

Gloria knew her husband's prevarications inside out. In a minute he'll call Bernard Pellegrin in London. That's what he always does when he needs to bypass Porter Coleridge and get the answer he wants to hear.

“Look here, tell you what, old boy. Why not write me a list of what you want and I'll pass it to Mustafa somehow and have him bring the stuff here?”

Typical, thought Gloria furiously. Dither, haver, look for the easy way out every time.

“Mustafa would have no idea what to select,” she heard Justin reply, as firmly as before. “And a list would be no good to him at all. Even shopping lists defeat him. I owe it to her, Sandy. It's a debt of honor and I must discharge it. Whether or not you come along.”

Class will out! Gloria applauded silently from her touchline. Well played, that man! But even then it did not occur to her, though her mind was opening up in all sorts of unexpected directions, that her husband might have his own reasons for wishing to visit Tessa's house.

•      •      •

The press were not shaving. Justin had that wrong. Or if they were, they were doing it on the grass verges outside Justin's house, where they had been camping all night in hire cars, dumping their garbage in the hydrangea bushes. A couple of African vendors in Uncle Sam pants and top hats had opened a tea stand. Others were cooking maize on charcoal. Lackluster policemen hung around a beaten-up patrol car, yawning and smoking cigarettes. Their leader, an enormously fat man in a polished brown belt and gold Rolex, was sprawled in the front passenger seat with his eyes shut. It was half past seven in the morning. Low cloud cut off the city. Large blackbirds were changing places on the overhead wires, waiting for their moment to swoop for food.

“Drive past, then stop,” Woodrow the soldier's son ordered from the back of the van.

It was the same arrangement as the day before: Livingstone and Jackson up front, Woodrow and Justin hunkered on the rear seat. The black Volkswagen had CD plates but so had every second vehicle in Muthaiga. An informed eye might have spotted the British prefix to the license number, but no such eye was present, nobody showed any interest as Livingstone drove sedately past the gates and up the gentle slope. Easing the van to a halt, he put on the hand brake.

“Jackson, get out of the van, walk slowly down the hill to the gates of Mr. Quayle's house. What's the name of your gatekeeper?” This to Justin.

“Omari,” Justin said.

“Tell Omari that as the van approaches he is to open the gates at the last minute, and close them as soon as it's through. Stay with him to make sure he does exactly what he's told. Now.”

Born to the part, Jackson clambered out of the van, stretched, fiddled with his belt and finally ambled down the hill to Justin's iron security gates where, under the eye of police and journalists, he took up a place beside Omari.

“All right, back down,” Woodrow ordered Livingstone. “Very slowly. Take your time.”

Livingstone released the hand brake and, with the engine still running, allowed the van to curl gently backward down the slope until the tailgate was tucked into the opening to Justin's drive. He's turning round, they may have thought. If so, they can't have thought it long, because in the next moment he had slammed down the accelerator and was racing backwards to the gates, scattering astonished journalists to left and right of him. The gates flew open, pulled on one side by Omari and on the other by Jackson. The van passed through, the gates slammed shut again. Jackson on the house side leaped back into the van while Livingstone kept it rolling all the way to Justin's porch and up the two steps, to rest inches from the front door, which Justin's houseboy Mustafa, with exemplary prescience, flung open from inside while Woodrow bundled Justin ahead of him, then sprang after him into the hall, slamming the front door shut behind them as he went.

•      •      •

The house was in darkness. Out of respect for Tessa or the newshounds, the staff had drawn the curtains. The three men stood in the hall, Justin, Woodrow, Mustafa. Mustafa was weeping silently. Woodrow could make out his crumpled face, the grimace of white teeth, the tears set wide on the cheeks, almost underneath the ears. Justin was holding Mustafa's shoulders, comforting him. Startled by this un-English demonstration of affection on Justin's part, Woodrow was also offended by it. Justin drew Mustafa against him until Mustafa's clenched jaw rested on his shoulder. Woodrow looked away in embarrassment. Down the passage other shadows had appeared from the servants' area: the one-armed illegal Ugandan shamba boy who helped Justin in the garden and whose name Woodrow had never managed to retain, and the illegal South Sudanese refugee called Esmeralda who was always having boy trouble. Tessa could no more resist a sob story than she could bow to local regulations. Sometimes her household had resembled a pan-African hostel for disabled down-and-outs. More than once, Woodrow had remonstrated with Justin on the subject but met a blank wall. Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishness or indifference. Woodrow knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This is how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

Gently pushing Mustafa away, Justin received Esmeralda in a double handshake during which she laid the side of her braided forehead against his. Woodrow had the sensation of being admitted to a circle of affection he had not dreamed of. Would Juma weep like this if Gloria got her throat cut? Like hell he would. Would Ebediah? Would Gloria's new maid, whatever her name is? Justin pressed the Ugandan outdoor boy against him, fondled his cheek, then turned his back on all of them and with his right hand took a grasp of the handrail on the staircase. Looking for a moment like the old man he soon would be, he began hauling himself upward. Woodrow watched him gain the shadows of the landing and vanish into the bedroom Woodrow had never entered, though he had imagined it in countless furtive ways.

Finding he was alone, Woodrow hovered, feeling threatened, which was how he felt whenever he entered her house: a country boy come to town. If it's a cocktail party, why don't I know these people? Whose cause are we being asked to espouse tonight? Which room will she be in? Where's Bluhm? At her side, most likely. Or in the kitchen, reducing the servants to paroxysms of helpless laughter. Remembering his purpose, Woodrow edged his way along the twilit corridor to the drawing room door. It was unlocked. Blades of morning sunlight thrust their way between the curtains, illuminating the shields and masks and frayed handwoven throw rugs made by paraplegics, with which Tessa had succeeded in enlivening her dreary government furnishings. How did she make everything so pretty with this junk? The same brick fireplace as ours, the same boxed-in iron girders masquerading as oak beams of Merrie England. Everything like ours but smaller, because the Quayles were childless and a rank lower. Then why did Tessa's house always seem to be the real thing, and ours its unimaginative ugly sister?

He reached the middle of the room and stopped, arrested by the power of memory. This is where I stood and lectured her, the contessa's daughter, from beside this pretty inlaid table that she said her mother had loved, while I clutched the back of this flimsy satinwood chair and pontificated like a Victorian father. Tessa standing over there in front of the window, and the sunlight cutting straight through her cotton dress. Did she know that I was talking to a naked silhouette? That just to look at her was to see my dream of her come true, my girl on a beach, my stranger on a train?

“I thought the best thing I could do was call by,” he begins sternly. “Now why did you think that, Sandy?” she asks.

Eleven in the morning. Chancery meeting over, Justin safely dispatched to Kampala, attending some useless three-day conference on Aid and Efficiency. I have come here on official business, but I have parked my car in a side street like a guilty lover calling on a brother officer's beautiful young wife. And God, is she beautiful. And God, is she young. Young in the high, sharp breasts that never move. How can Justin let her out of his sight? Young in the gray, wideangry eyes, in the smile too wise for her age. Woodrow can't see the smile because she is backlit. But he can hear it in her voice. Her teasing, foxing, classy voice. He can retrieve it in his memory anytime. As he can retrieve the line of her waist and thighs in the naked silhouette, the maddening fluidity of her walk, no wonder she and Justin fell for one another—they're from the same thoroughbred stable, twenty years apart.

“Tess, honestly, this can't go on.”

“Don't call me Tess.”

“Why not?”

“That name's reserved.”

Who by? he wonders. Bluhm, or another of her lovers? Quayle never called her Tess. Nor did Ghita, as far as Woodrow knew.

“You simply can't go on expressing yourself so freely. Your opinions.”

And then the passage he has prepared in advance, the one that reminds her of her duty as the responsible wife of a serving diplomat. But he never reaches the end of it. The word “duty” has stung her into action.

“Sandy, my duty is to Africa. What's yours?”

He is surprised to have to answer for himself. “To my country, if you'll allow me to be pompous. As Justin's is. To my Service and my Head of Mission. Does that answer you?”

“You know it doesn't. Not nearly. It's miles off.”

“How would I know anything of the kind?”

“I thought you might have come to talk to me about the riveting documents I gave you.”

“No, Tessa, I did not. I came here to ask you to stop shooting your mouth off about the misdoings of the Moi government in front of every Tom, Dick and Harry in Nairobi. I came here to ask you to be one of the team for a change, instead of—oh, finish the sentence for yourself,” he ends rudely.

Would I have talked to her like that if I'd known she was pregnant? Probably not so baldly. But I would have talked to her. Did I guess that she was pregnant while I tried not to notice her naked silhouette? No. I was wanting her beyond bearing, as she could tell by the altered state of my voice and the stiltedness of my movements.

“So you mean you haven't read them?” she says, sticking determinedly to the subject of the documents. “You'll be telling me in a minute that you haven't had time.”

“Of course I've read them.”

“And what did you make of them when you'd read them, Sandy?”

“They tell me nothing I don't know, and nothing I can do anything about.”

“Now Sandy, that's very negative of you. It's worse. It's pusillanimous. Why can't you do anything about them?”

Woodrow, hating how he sounds: “Because we are diplomats and not policemen, Tessa. The Moi government is terminally corrupt, you tell me. I never doubted it. The country is dying of AIDS, it's bankrupt, there is not a corner of it, from tourism to wildlife to education to transport to welfare to communications, that isn't falling apart from fraud, incompetence and neglect. Well observed. Ministers and officials are diverting lorry-loads of food aid and medical supplies earmarked for starving refugees, sometimes with the connivance of aid agency employees, you say. Of course they are. Expenditure on the country's health runs at five dollars per head per year and that's before everybody from the top of the line to the bottom has taken his cut. The police routinely mishandle anybody unwise enough to bring these matters to public attention. Also true. You have studied their methods. They use water torture, you say. They soak people, then beat them, which reduces visible marks. You are right. They do. They are not selective. And we do not protest. They also rent out their weapons to friendly murder gangs, to be returned by first light or you don't get your deposit back. The High Commission shares your disgust, but still we do not protest. Why not? Because we are here, mercifully, to represent our country, not theirs. We have thirty-five thousand indigenous Britons in Kenya whose precarious livelihood depends on President Moi's whim. The High Commission is not in the business of making life harder for them than it already is.”