The Constant Gardener (13 page)

“Spanish, darling,” Elena replied.

“Nonsense,” Gloria riposted. “Her mother was a Tuscan contessa, it said so in the Telegraph.”

“The mantilla, darling,” Elena patiently corrected her. “Mantillas are Spanish, not Italian, I'm afraid.”

“Well, her mother was bloody well Italian,” Gloria snapped—only to ring again five minutes later, blaming her temper on the stress.

By then the Woodrow boys had been bundled off to school and Woodrow himself had left for the High Commission and Justin was hovering in the dining room wearing his suit and tie and wanting flowers. Not flowers from Gloria's garden, but his own. He wanted the yellow scenting freesias he grew for her all year round, he said, and always had waiting for her in the living room when she came back from her field trips. He wanted two dozen of them at the least for Tessa's coffin. Gloria's deliberations on how best to obtain these were interrupted by a confused call from a Nairobi newspaper purporting to announce that Bluhm's corpse had been found in a dried-up riverbed fifty miles east of Lake Turkana, and had anyone anything to say about it? Gloria bawled “No comment” into the receiver and slammed it down. But she was shaken, and of two minds whether or not to share the news with Justin now, or wait till the funeral was over. She was therefore greatly relieved to receive a call from Mildren not five minutes later saying that Woodrow was in a meeting but rumors about Bluhm's corpse were drivel: the body, for which a tribe of Somali bandits was demanding ten thousand dollars, was at least a hundred years old, and more like a thousand, and was it possible for him to have a tiny word with Justin?

Gloria brought Justin to the telephone and remained officiously at his side while he said yes—that suited him—you're very kind, and he would make sure he was prepared. But what Mildren was being kind about and what Justin would prepare himself for remained obscure. And no thank you—Justin said emphatically to Mildren, adding to the mystery-he did not wish to be met on arrival, he preferred to make his own arrangements. After which he rang off and asked—rather pointedly, considering everything she had done for him—to be left alone in the dining room to make a reverse-charge call to his solicitor in London, a thing he had done twice before in the last few days, also without admitting Gloria to his deliberations. With a show of discretion she therefore removed herself to the kitchen in order to listen at the hatch—only to find a grief-stricken Mustafa, who had arrived unbidden at the back door with a basketful of yellow freesias which on his own initiative he had picked from Justin's garden. Armed with this excuse Gloria marched into the dining room, hoping at least to catch the end of Justin's conversation, but he was ringing off as she entered.

Suddenly, without more time passing, everything was late. Gloria had finished dressing but hadn't touched her face, nobody had eaten a thing and it was past lunchtime, Woodrow was waiting outside in the Volkswagen, Justin was standing in the hall clutching his freesias—now bound into a posy-Juma was waving a plate of cheese sandwiches at everyone and Gloria was trying to decide whether to tie the mantilla under her chin or drape it over her shoulders like her mother.

Seated on the rear seat of the van next to Justin with Woodrow on the other side of her, Gloria privately acknowledged what Elena had been telling her for several days: that she had fallen head over heels in love with Justin, a thing that hadn't happened to her for years, and it was an absolute agony to think he would be gone any day. On the other hand, as Elena had pointed out, his departure would at least allow her to get her head straight and resume normal marital services. And if it should turn out that absence only made the heart grow fonder, well, as Elena had daringly suggested, Gloria could always do something about it in London.

The drive through the city struck Gloria as more than usually bumpy and she was too conscious for her comfort of the warmth of Justin's thigh against her own. By the time the Volkswagen pulled up at the funeral home, a lump had formed in her throat, her handkerchief was a damp ball in the palm of her hand and she no longer knew whether she was grieving for Tessa or Justin. The rear doors of the van were opened from outside, Justin and Woodrow hopped out, leaving her alone on the backseat with Livingstone in the front. No journalists, she recorded gratefully, struggling to regain her composure. Or none yet. She watched her two men through the windscreen as they climbed the front steps of a single-story granite building with a touch of the Tudors about the eaves. Justin with his tailored suit and perfect mane of gray-black hair that you never saw him brush or comb, clutching yellow freesias—and that cavalry officer's walk he had, and for all she knew all half Dudleys had, right shoulder forward. Why did Justin always seem to lead and Sandy follow? And why was Sandy so menial these days, so butler-like? she complained to herself. And it's time he bought himself a new suit; that serge thing makes him look like a private detective.

They disappeared into the entrance lobby. “Papers to sign, sweet,” Sandy had said in a superior voice. “Releases for the deceased's body and that kind of nonsense.” Why does he treat me like his Little Woman suddenly? Has he forgotten I arranged the whole bloody funeral? A gaggle of black-clad bearers had formed at the side entrance of the funeral home. Doors were opening, a black hearse was backing toward them, the word HEARSE gratuitously painted in white letters a foot high on its side. Gloria caught a glimpse of honey-varnished wood and yellow freesias as the coffin slid between black jackets into the open back. They must have taped the posy to the lid; how else did you get freesias to sit tight on a coffin lid? Justin thought of everything. The hearse pulled out of the forecourt, bearers aboard. Gloria had a big sniff, then blew her nose.

“It is bad, madam,” Livingstone intoned from the front. “It is very, very bad.”

“It is indeed, Livingstone,” said Gloria, grateful for the formality of the exchange. You are about to be watched, young woman, she warned herself firmly. Time to chin up and set an example. The back doors slammed open.

“All right, girl?” Woodrow asked cheerfully, crashing down beside her. “They were marvelous, weren't they, Justin? Very sympathetic, very professional.”

Don't you dare call me girl, she told him furiously—but not aloud.

•      •      •

Entering St. Andrew's Church, Woodrow took stock of the congregation. In a single sweep he spotted the pallid Coleridges and behind them Donohue and his weird wife Maud looking like an ex-Gaiety girl fallen on hard times, and next to them Mildren alias Mildred and an anorexic blonde who was held to be sharing his flat. The Heavy Mob from the Muthaiga Club —Tessa's phrase—had formed a military square. Across the aisle he picked out a contingent from the World Food Program and another that consisted entirely of African women, some in hats, others in jeans, but all with the determined glower of combat that was the hallmark of Tessa's radical friends. Behind them stood a cluster of lost, Gallic-looking, vaguely arrogant young men and women, the women with their heads covered, the men in open necks and designer stubble. Woodrow, after some puzzlement, concluded that they were fellow members of Bluhm's Belgian organization. Must be wondering whether they're going to be back here next week for Arnold, he thought brutally. The Quayles' illegal servants were ranged alongside them: Mustafa the houseboy, Esmeralda from South Sudan and the one-armed Ugandan, name unknown. And in the front row, towering over her furtive little Greek husband, stood the upholstered, carrot-haired figure of darling Elena herself, Woodrow's bete noire, decked out in her grandmother's funereal jet jewelry.

“Now, darling, should I wear the jet or is it over the top?” she had needed to know of Gloria at eight this morning. Not without mischief, Gloria had counseled boldness.

“On other people, frankly El, it might be a tad too much. But with your coloring, darling—go for it.”

And no policemen, he noticed with gratification, neither Kenyan nor British. Had Bernard Pellegrin's potions worked their magic? Whisper who dares.

He stole another look at Coleridge, so whey-faced, so martyred. He remembered their bizarre conversation in the residence last Saturday, and cursed him for an indecisive prig. His gaze returned to Tessa's coffin lying in state before the altar, Justin's yellow freesias safely aboard. Tears filled his eyes, to be sharply returned to where they came from. The organ was playing the Nunc Dimittis and Gloria, word-perfect, was singing lustily along. House evensong at her boarding school, Woodrow was thinking. Or mine. He hated both establishments equally. Sandy and Gloria, born unfree. The difference is, I know it and she doesn't. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. Sometimes I really wish I could. Depart and never come back. But where would the peace be? His eye again rested on the coffin. I loved you. So much easier to say, now it's in the past tense. I loved you. I was the control freak who couldn't control himself, you were good enough to tell me. Well, now look what's happened to you. And look why it's happened to you.

And no, I never heard of Lorbeer. I know no long-legged Hungarian beauties called Kovacs and I do not, will not listen to any more unproven, unspoken theories that are tolling like tower bells inside my head, and I am totally uninterested in the sleek olive shoulders of the spectral Ghita Pearson in her sari. What I do know is: after you, nobody need ever know again what a timorous child inhabits this soldier's body.

•      •      •

Needing to distract himself, Woodrow embarked on an energetic study of the church windows. Male saints, all white, no Bluhms. Tessa would go ballistic. Memorial window commemorating one pretty white boy in a sailor suit symbolically surrounded by adoring jungle animals. A good hyena smells blood ten kilometers away. Tears again threatening, Woodrow forced his attentions on dear old St. Andrew himself, a dead ringer for Macpherson the gillie that time we drove the boys to Loch Awe to fish the salmon. The fierce Scottish eye, the rusty Scottish beard. What must they make of us? he marveled, transferring his misty gaze to the black faces in the congregation. What did we imagine we were doing here, back in those days, plugging our white British God and our white Scottish saint while we used the country as an adventure playground for derelict upper-class swingers?

“Personally, I'm trying to make amends,” you reply when flirtatiously I put the same question to you on the floor of the Muthaiga Club. But you never answer a question without turning it round and using it in evidence against me: “And what are you doing here, Mr. Woodrow?” you demand. The band is boisterous and we are having to dance close to hear each other at all. Yes, those are my breasts, your eyes say when I dare to look down. Yes, those are my hips, gyrating while you hold me by the waist. You may look at them too, feast your eyes on them. Most men do, and you needn't try to be the exception.

“I suppose what I'm really doing is helping Kenyans to husband the things we've given them,” I yell pompously above the music and feel your body stiffen and slip away almost before I've finished the sentence.

“We didn't bloody give them a thing! They took it! At the end of a bloody gun! We gave them nothing—nothing!”

Woodrow swung sharply round. Gloria beside him did the same and so, from the other side of the aisle, did the Coleridges. A scream from outside the church had been followed by the smash of something big and glassy breaking. Through the open doorway Woodrow saw the forecourt gates being dragged shut by two frightened vergers in black suits as helmeted police formed a cordon along the railings, brandishing metal-tipped riot sticks in both hands, like baseball players limbering for a strike. In the street where the students had gathered a tree was burning and a couple of cars lay belly-up beneath it, their occupants too terrified to clamber out. To roars of encouragement from the crowd, a glistening black limousine, a Volvo like Woodrow's, was rising shakily from the ground, borne aloft by a swarm of young men and women. It rose, it lurched, it flipped, first to its side, then onto its back, before falling with a huge bang, dead beside its fellows. The police charged. Whatever they had been waiting for till then, it had happened. One second they were lounging, the next they were hacking themselves a red path through the fleeing rabble, only pausing to rain more blows on those they had brought down. An armored van drew up, half a dozen bleeding bodies were tossed into it.

“University's an absolute tinderbox, old chap,” Donohue had advised when Woodrow had consulted him on risk. “Grants have stopped dead, staff aren't being paid, places going to the rich and stupid, dormitories and classrooms packed out, loos all blocked, doors all pinched, fire risk rampant and they're cooking over charcoal in the corridors. They've no power, and no electric light to study by, and no books to study in. The poorest students are taking to the streets because the government is privatizing the higher education system without consulting anyone and education is strictly for the rich, plus the exam results are rigged and the government is trying to force students to get their education abroad. And yesterday the police killed a couple of students, which for some reason their friends refuse to take lightly. Any more questions?”

The church gates opened, the organ struck up again. God's business could resume.

•      •      •

In the cemetery the heat was aggressive and personal. The grizzled old priest had ceased speaking but the clamor had not subsided and the sun beat through it like a flail. To one side of Woodrow a ghetto blaster was playing a rock version of Hail Mary at full throttle to a group of black nuns in gray habits. To the other, a football squad of blazers was gathered round a coconut shy of empty beer cans while a soloist sang good-bye to a teammate. And Wilson Airport must have been holding some kind of air day, because brightly painted small planes were zooming overhead at twenty-second intervals. The old priest lowered his prayer book. The bearers stepped to the coffin. Each grasped an end of webbing. Justin, still alone, seemed to sway. Woodrow started forward to support him but Gloria restrained him with a gloved claw.

“He wants her to himself, idiot,” she hissed through her tears.

The press showed no such tact. This was the shot they had come for: black bearers lower murdered white woman into African soil, watched by husband she deceived. A pock-faced man with a crew cut and cameras bouncing on his belly offered Justin a trowel laden with earth, hoping for a shot of the widower pouring it on the coffin. Justin brushed it aside. As he did so, his gaze fell on two ragged men who were trundling a wooden wheelbarrow with a flat tire to the grave's edge. Wet cement was slopping over its gunwales.

“What are you doing, please?” he demanded of them, so sharply that every face turned to him. “Will somebody kindly find out from these gentlemen what they are intending to do with their cement? Sandy, I need an interpreter, please.”

Ignoring Gloria, Woodrow the general's son strode quickly to Justin's side. Wiry Sheila from Tim Donohue's department spoke to the men, then to Justin.

“They say they do it for all rich people, Justin,” Sheila said.

“Do what exactly? I don't understand you. Please explain.”

“The cement. It's to keep out intruders. Robbers. Rich people are buried in wedding rings and nice clothes. Wazungu are a favorite target. They say the cement's an insurance policy.”

“Who instructed them to do this?”

“No one. It's five thousand shillings.”

“They're to go, please. Kindly tell them that, will you, Sheila? I do not wish their services and I shall pay them no money. They're to take their barrow and leave.” But then, perhaps not trusting her to impart his message with sufficient vigor, Justin marched over to them and, placing himself between their barrow and the grave's edge, struck out an arm, Moseslike, pointing over the heads of the mourners. “Go, please,” he ordered. “Leave at once. Thank you.”

The mourners parted to make a path along the line his Outstretched arm commanded. The men with their barrow scuttled down it. Justin watched them out of sight. In the vibrating heat the men seemed to ride straight into the blank sky. Justin turned his body round, stiffly like a toy soldier, until he was addressing the press pack.

“I would like you all to go, please,” he said in the silence that had formed inside the din. “You have been very kind. Thank you. Goodbye.”

Quietly, and to the amazement of the rest, the journalists stowed their cameras and their notebooks and, with mumbles like “See you, Justin,” quit the field. Justin returned to his place of solitude at Tessa's head. As he did so, a group of African women trooped forward and arranged themselves in a horseshoe round the foot of the grave. Each wore the same uniform: a blueflowered frilly dress and head scarf of the same material. Separately they might have looked lost, but as a group they looked united. They began singing, at first softly. Nobody conducted them, there were no instruments to sing to, most of the choir were weeping but they didn't let their tears affect their voices. They sang in harmony, in English and kiSwahili alternately, gathering power in the repetition: Kwa heri, Mama Tessa … Little Mama, good-bye … Woodrow tried to catch the other words. Kwa heri, Tessa … Tessa our friend, good-bye … You came to us, Mama Tessa, Little Mama, you gave us your heart … Kwa heri, Tessa, good-bye.

“Where the hell did they spring from?” he asked Gloria out of the corner of his mouth.

“Down the hill,” Gloria muttered, nodding her head toward Kibera slum.

The singing swelled as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Justin watched it descend, then winced as it struck bottom, then winced again as the first shovel load of earth clattered onto the lid and a second crashed into the freesias, dirtying the petals. A frightful howl went up, as short as the shriek of a rusty hinge when a door is flung back, but long enough for Woodrow to watch Ghita Pearson collapse to her knees in slow motion, then roll onto one shapely hip as she buried her face in her hands; then, just as improbably, rise again on the arm of Veronica Coleridge and resume her mourner's pose.

Did Justin call out something to Kioko? Or did Kioko act of his own accord? Light as a shadow, he had moved to Justin's side and, in an unashamed gesture of affection, grasped his hand. Through a fresh flood of tears, Gloria saw their linked hands fidget till they found a mutually comfortable grip. Thus joined, the bereaved husband and bereaved brother watched Tessa's coffin disappear beneath the soil.

•      •      •

Justin left Nairobi the same night. Woodrow, to Gloria's eternal hurt, had given her no warning. The dinner table was laid for three, Gloria herself had uncorked the claret and put a duck in the oven to cheer us all up. She heard a footfall from the hall and assumed to her pleasure that Justin had decided on predinner drinkies, just the two of us while Sandy reads Biggles to the boys upstairs. And suddenly there stood his scruffy Gladstone bag, accompanied by a mossy gray suitcase that Mustafa had brought for him, parked in the hall with labels on them, and Justin standing beside them with his raincoat over his arm and a night bag on his shoulder, wanting to give her back the winestore key.

“But Justin, you're not off!”

“You've all been immensely kind to me, Gloria. I shall never know how to thank you.”

“Sorry about this, darling,” Woodrow sang cheerfully, tripping down the stairs two at a time. “Bit cloak-and-dagger, I'm afraid. Didn't want the servants gossiping. Only way to play it.”

At which moment there came a ping on the doorbell, and it was Livingstone the driver with a red Peugeot he'd borrowed from a friend to avoid telltale diplomatic license plates at the airport. And slumped in the passenger seat, Mustafa, glowering ahead of him like his own effigy.

“But we must come with you, Justin! We must see you off! I insist! I've got to give you one of my watercolors! What's going to happen to you the other end?” Gloria cried miserably. “We can't just let you go off into the night like this-darling!—”

The “darling” was technically addressed to Woodrow, but it might as well have been meant for Justin, for as she blurted it she dissolved into uncontrollable tears, the last of a long and tearful day. Sobbing wretchedly, she grasped Justin against her, punching his back and rolling her cheek against him and whispering, “Oh don't go, oh please, oh Justin,” and other less decipherable exhortations before bravely thrusting herself free of him, elbowing her husband out of the light and charging up the stairs to her bedroom and slamming the door.

“Bit overwrought,” Woodrow explained, grinning.

“We all are,” said Justin, accepting Woodrow's hand and shaking it. “Thank you again, Sandy.”

“We'll be in touch.”

“Indeed.”

“And you're quite sure you don't want a reception party the other end? They're all busting to do their stuff.”

“Quite sure, thank you. Tessa's lawyers are preparing for my arrival.”

And the next minute Justin was walking down the steps to the red car, with Mustafa one side of him with the Gladstone bag, and Livingstone carrying his gray suitcase on the other.

“I have left envelopes for you all with Mr. Woodrow,” Justin told Mustafa as they drove. “And this is to be handed privately to Ghita Pearson. And you know I mean privately.”

“We know you will always be a good man, Mzee,” said Mustafa prophetically, consigning the envelope to the recesses of his cotton jacket. But there was no forgiveness in his voice for leaving Africa.

•      •      •

The airport, despite its recent facelift, was in chaos. Travel-weary groups of scalded tourists made long lines, harangued tour guides and frantically bundled huge rucksacks into X-ray machines. Check-in clerks puzzled over every ticket and murmured interminably into telephones. Incomprehensible loudspeaker announcements spread panic while porters and policemen looked idly on. But Woodrow had arranged everything. Justin had barely emerged from the car before a male British Airways representative spirited him to a small office safe from public gaze.

“I'd like my friends to come with me, please,” Justin said.

“No problem.”

With Livingstone and Mustafa hovering behind him, he was handed a boarding pass in the name of Mr. Alfred Brown. He looked on passively while his gray suitcase was similarly labeled.

“And I shall take this one into the cabin with me,” he announced, as an edict.

The representative, a blond New Zealand boy, affected to weigh the Gladstone in his hand and let out an exaggerated grunt of exertion. “Family silver, is it, sir?”

“My host's,” said Justin, duly entering into the joke, but there was enough in his face to suggest that the issue was not negotiable.

“If you can carry it, sir, so can we,” said the blond representative, passing the bag back to him. “Have a nice flight, Mr. Brown. We'll be taking you through the arrivals side, if it's all the same to you.”

“You're very kind.”

Turning to say his last good-byes, Justin seized Livingstone's enormous fists in a double handshake. But for Mustafa the moment was too much. Silently as ever, he had slipped away. The Gladstone firmly in his grasp, Justin entered the arrivals hall in the wake of his guide, to find himself staring at a giant buxom woman of no definable race grinning down at him from the wall. She was twenty feet tall and five feet across her widest point and she was the only commercial advertisement in the entire hall. She was dressed in nurse's uniform and had three golden bees on each shoulder. Three more were prominently displayed on the breast pocket of her white tunic, and she was offering a tray of pharmaceutical delicacies to a vaguely multiracial family of happy children and their parents. The tray held something for each of them: bottles of gold-brown medicine that looked more like whisky for the dad, chocolate-coated pills just right for munching by the kiddies, and for the mum beauty products decorated with naked goddesses reaching for the sun. Blazoned across the top and bottom of the poster, violent puce lettering proclaimed the joyous message to all mankind: