The Constant Gardener (16 page)

“Is that Tessa speaking or you?” Lesley asks with a smile.

“Tessa never waited to be given her freedom. She took it.”

“And Bluhm didn't embarrass you?” asks Rob roughly.

“It is neither here nor there, but Arnold Bluhm was not her lover. They were joined by quite other things. Tessa's darkest secret was her virtue. She loved to shock.”

This is too much for Rob. “Four nights on the trot, Justin?” he objects. “Sharing a cottage on Turkana? A girl like Tessa? And you're seriously asking us to believe they didn't have it off?”

“You'll believe whatever you want,” Justin replies, the apostle of unsurprise. “I have no doubt of it whatever.”

“Why?”

“Because she told me.”

And to this they had no answer at all. But there was something more that Justin needed to say and, bit by bit, assisted by Lesley's prompting, he managed to get it out.

“She had married convention,” he began awkwardly. “Me. Not some high-minded do-gooder. Me. You really mustn't see her as somebody exotic. I never doubted—nor did she when we arrived here—that she would be anything other than a member of the diplomatic geisha she derided. In her own way. But toeing the line.” He deliberated, conscious of their disbelieving stares. “After her parents' death she had scared herself. Now, with me to steady her, she wanted to pull back from too much freedom. It was the price she was prepared to pay for not being an orphan anymore.”

“So what changed that?” Lesley asked.

“We did,” Justin retorted with fervor. He meant the other we. We her survivors. We the guilty ones. “With our complacency,” he said, lowering his voice. “With this.” And here he made a gesture that embraced not just the dining room and Gloria's hideous watercolors impaled along the chimney breast, but the whole house round them, and its occupants, and by inference the other houses in the street. “We who are paid to see what's going on, and prefer not to. We who walk past life with our eyes down.”

“Did she say that?”

“I did. It's how she came to regard us. She was born rich but that never impressed her. She had no interest in money. She needed far less of it than the aspiring classes. But she knew she had no excuse for being indifferent to what she saw and heard. She knew she owed.”

And Lesley on this note calls a break until tomorrow at the same time, Justin, if that's all right by you. It is.

And British Airways seemed to have come to much the same conclusion, for they were dousing the lights in the first-class cabin and taking last orders for the night.

8

Rob lounges while Lesley again unpacks her toys: the colored notebooks, pencils, the little tape recorder that yesterday remained untouched, the piece of india rubber. Justin has a prison pallor and a web of hairline cracks around his eyes, which is how the mornings take him now. A doctor would prescribe fresh air.

“You said you had nothing to do with your wife's murder in the sense we're implying, Justin,” Lesley reminds him. “What other sense is there, if you don't mind us asking?” And has to lean across the table to catch his words.

“I should have gone with her.”

“To Lokichoggio?”

He shook his head.

“To Lake Turkana?”

“To anywhere.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“No. She never criticized me. We never told each other what to do. We had one argument, and it was to do with method, not substance. Arnold was never an obstruction.”

“What was the argument about, exactly?” Rob demands, clinging determinedly to his literal view of things.

“After the loss of our baby, I begged Tessa to let me take her back to England or Italy. Take her anywhere she wanted. She wouldn't think of it. She had a mission, thank God, a reason to survive, and it was here in Nairobi. She had come upon a great social injustice. A great crime; she called it both. That was all I was allowed to know. In my profession, studied ignorance is an art form.” He turns to the window and peers out sightlessly. “Have you seen how people live in the slums here?”

Lesley shakes her head.

“She took me once. In a weak moment, she said later, she wanted me to inspect her workplace. Ghita Pearson came with us. Ghita and Tessa were naturally close. The affinities were ridiculous. Their mothers had both been doctors, their fathers lawyers, they'd both been brought up Catholic. We went to a medical center. Four concrete walls and a tin roof and a thousand people waiting to get to the door.” For a moment he forgets where he is. “Poverty on that scale is a discipline of its own. It can't be learned in an afternoon. Nevertheless, it was hard for me, from then on, to walk down Stanley Street without—” he broke off again—“without the other image in my mind.” After Woodrow's sleek evasions, his words ring out like the true gospel. “The great injustice—the great crime—was what kept her alive. Our baby was five weeks dead. Left alone in the house, Tessa would stare vacantly at the wall. Mustafa would telephone me at the High Commission—”Come home, Mzee, she is ill, she is ill.“ But it wasn't I who revived her. It was Arnold. Arnold understood. Arnold shared the secret with her. She'd only to hear his car in the drive and she became a different woman. ”What have you got? What have you got?“' She meant news. Information. Progress. When he'd gone, she'd retreat to her little workroom and toil into the night.”

“At her computer?”

A moment's wariness on Justin's part. Overcome. “She had her papers, she had her computer. She had the telephone, which she used with the greatest circumspection. And she had Arnold, whenever he was able to get away.”

“And you didn't mind that then?” Rob sneers, in an ill-judged return to his hectoring tone. “Your wife sitting about mooning, waiting for Dr. Wonderful to show up?”

“Tessa was desolate. If she'd needed a hundred Bluhms, as far as I was concerned, she could have them all and on whatever terms she wished.”

“And you didn't know anything about the great crime,” Lesley resumed, unwilling to be persuaded. “Nothing. What it was about, who the victims and the main players were. They kept it all from you. Bluhm and Tessa together, and you stuck out there in the cold.”

“I gave them their distance,” Justin confirmed doggedly.

“I just don't see how you could survive like that,” Lesley insists, putting down her notebook and opening her hands. “Apart, but together-the way you describe it—it's like—not being on speaking terms—worse.”

“We didn't survive,” Justin reminds her simply. “Tessa's dead.”

•      •      •

Here they might have thought that the time for intimate confidences had run its course and a period of sheepishness or embarrassment would follow, even recantation. But Justin has only begun. He jolts himself upright, like a man raising his game. His hands fall to his thighs and stay there until otherwise ordered. His voice recovers its power. Some deep interior force is driving it to the surface, into the unfresh air of the Woodrows' fetid dining room, still rank with last night's gravy.

“She was so impetuous,” he declares proudly, once more reciting from speeches he has made to himself for hours on end. “I loved that in her from the start. She was so desperate to have our child at once. The death of her parents must be compensated as soon as possible! Why wait till we were married? I held her back. I shouldn't have done. I pleaded convention—God knows why. ”Very well,“ she said, ”if we must be married in order to have a baby, let's get married immediately.“ So we went off to Italy and married immediately, to the huge entertainment of my colleagues.” He is entertained himself. “”Quayle's gone mad! Old Justin's married his daughter! Has Tessa passed her A levels yet?“' When she became pregnant, after three years of trying, she wept. So did I.”

He breaks off, but no one interrupts his flow.

“With pregnancy she changed. But only for the good. Tessa grew into motherhood. Outwardly she remained lighthearted. But inwardly a deep sense of responsibility was forming in her. Her aid work took on new meaning. I am told that's not unusual. What had been important now became a vocation, practically a destiny. She was seven months pregnant and still tending the sick and dying, then coming back for some fatuous diplomatic dinner party in town. The nearer the baby came, the more determined she was to make a better world for it. Not just for our child. For all children. By then she'd set her heart on an African hospital. If I'd forced her to go to some private clinic, she'd have done it, but I'd have betrayed her.”

“How?” Lesley murmurs.

“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.”

“But she was doing something about it,” Lesley objects.

“Hence the African hospital. In her extreme moments she talked of bearing her child in the slums of Kibera. Mercifully, Arnold and Ghita between them were able to restore her sense of proportion. Arnold has the authority of suffering. He not only treated torture victims in Algeria, he was tortured himself. He had earned his pass to the wretched of the earth. I hadn't.”

Rob seizes on this, as if the point has not been made a dozen times before. “A bit hard to see where you came in, then, isn't it? Bit of a spare wheel, you were, sitting up there in the clouds with your diplomatic pain and your highlevel committee, weren't you?”

But Justin's forbearance is limitless. There are times when he is simply too well bred to disagree. “She exempted me from active service, as she put it,” he assents with a shameful dropping of the voice. “She invented specious arguments to put me at my ease. She insisted that the world needed both of us: me inside the system, pushing; herself outside it, in the field, pulling. ”I'm the one who believes in the moral state,“ she would say. ”If you lot don't do your job, what hope is there for the rest of us?“' It was sophistry and we both knew it. The system didn't need my job. Neither did I. What was the point of it? I was writing reports no one looked at and suggesting action that was never taken. Tessa was a stranger to deceit. Except in my case. For me, she deceived herself totally.”

“Was she ever afraid?” Lesley asks, softly in order not to violate the atmosphere of confession.

Justin reflects, then allows himself a half smile of recollection. “She once boasted to the American Ambassadress that fear was the only four-letter word she didn't know the meaning of. Her Excellency was not amused.”

Lesley smiles too, but not for long. “And this decision to have her baby in an African hospital,” she asks, her eye on her notebook. “Can you tell us when and how it was taken, please?”

“There was a woman from one of the slum villages up north that Tessa regularly visited. Wanza, surname unknown. Wanza was suffering from a mystery illness of some sort. She had been singled out for special treatment. By coincidence they found themselves in the same ward at the Uhuru Hospital and Tessa befriended her.”

Do they hear the guarded note that has entered his voice? Justin does.

“Know what illness?”

“Only the generality. She was ill and might become dangerously so.”

“Did she have AIDS?”

“Whether her illness was AIDS-RELATED I have no idea. My impression was that the concerns were different.”

“That's pretty unusual, isn't it, a woman from the slums giving birth in a hospital?”

“She was under observation.”

“Whose observation?”

It is the second time that Justin censors himself. Deception does not come naturally to him. “I assume one of the health clinics. In her village. In a shantytown. As you see, I'm hazy. I marvel at how much I managed not to know.”

“And Wanza died, didn't she?”

“She died on the last night of Tessa's stay at the hospital,” Justin replies, gratefully abandoning his reserve in order to reconstruct the moment for them. “I'd been in the ward all evening but Tessa insisted I go home for a few hours' sleep. She'd told the same to Arnold and Ghita. We were taking alternate watches at her bedside. Arnold had supplied a safari bed. At four in the morning, Tessa telephoned me. There was no telephone in her ward so she used the Sister's. She was distressed. Hysterical is the more accurate description, but Tessa, when she is hysterical, does not raise her voice. Wanza had disappeared. The baby also. She had woken to find Wanza's bed empty and the baby's cot vanished. I drove to Uhuru Hospital. Arnold and Ghita arrived at the same moment. Tessa was inconsolable. It was as if she'd lost a second child in the space of a few days. Between the three of us, we persuaded her that it was time for her to convalesce at home. With Wanza dead and the baby removed, she felt no obligation to remain.”

“Tessa didn't get to see the body?”

“She asked to see it but was told it was not appropriate. Wanza was dead and her baby had been taken to the mother's village by her brother. So far as the hospital was concerned, that was an end to the matter. Hospitals do not care to dwell on death,” he adds, speaking with the experience of Garth.

“Did Arnold get to see the body?”

“He was too late. It had been sent to the morgue and lost.”

Lesley's eyes widen in unfeigned astonishment while, on the other side of Justin, Rob leans quickly forward, grabs the tape recorder and makes sure the tape is turning in the little window.

“Lost? You don't lose bodies!” Rob exclaims.

“To the contrary, I'm assured that in Nairobi it happens all the time.”

“What about the death certificate?”

“I can only tell you what I learned from Arnold and Tessa. I know nothing of a death certificate. None was mentioned.”

“And no postmortem?” Lesley is back.

“To my knowledge, none.”

“Did Wanza receive visitors at the hospital?”

Justin ponders this but evidently sees no reason not to reply. “Her brother Kioko. He slept beside her on the floor when he wasn't keeping the flies off her. And Ghita Pearson would make a point of sitting with her when she called on Tessa.”

“Anyone else?”

“A white male doctor, I believe. I can't be sure.”

“That he was white?”

“That he was a doctor. A white man in a white coat. And a stethoscope.”

“Alone?”

The reserve again, falling like a shadow across his voice. “He was accompanied by a group of students. Or so I took them to be. They were young. They wore white coats.”

With three golden bees embroidered on the pocket of each coat, he might have added, but his resolve held him back.

“Why do you say students? Did Tessa say they were students?”

“No.”

“Did Arnold?”

“Arnold made no judgment about them in my hearing. It is pure presumption on my part. They were young.”

“How about their leader? Their doctor, if that's what he was. Did Arnold say anything about him?”

“Not to me. If he had concerns, he addressed them to the man himself—the man with the stethoscope.”

“In your presence?”

“But not in my hearing.” Or almost not.

Rob like Lesley is craning forward to catch his every word. “Describe.”

Justin is already doing so. For a brief truce he has joined their team. But the reserve has not left his voice. Caution and circumspection are written round his tired eyes. “Arnold took the man to one side. By the arm. The man with the stethoscope. They spoke to each other as doctors do. In low voices, apart.”

“In English?”

“I believe so. When Arnold speaks French or kiSwahili he acquires a different body language.” And when he speaks English he is inclined to raise his pitch a little, he might have added.

“Describe him—the bloke with the stethoscope,” Rob commands.

“He was burly. A big man. Plump. Unkempt. I have a memory of suede shoes. I remember thinking it peculiar that a medical doctor should wear suede shoes, I am not sure why. But the memory of the shoes endures. His coat was grimy from nothing very particular. Suede shoes, a grimy coat, a red face. A showman of some kind. If it had not been for his white coat, an impresario.” And three golden bees, tarnished but distinct, embroidered on his pocket, just like the nurse in the poster at the airport, he was thinking. “He seemed ashamed,” he added, taking himself by surprise.

“What of?”

“Of his own presence there. Of what he was doing.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He wouldn't look at Tessa. At either of us. He'd look anywhere else. Just not at us.”

“Color of hair?”

“Fair. Fair to ginger. There was drink in his face. The reddish hair set it off. Do you know of him? Tessa was most curious about him.”

“Beard? Mustache?”

“Clean-shaven. No. He was not. He had a day's stubble at least. It had a golden color to it. She asked him his name repeatedly. He declined to give it.”

Rob comes crashing in again. “What kind of conversation did it look like?” he insists. “Was it an argument? Was it friendly? were they inviting each other to lunch? What was going on?”

The caution back. I heard nothing. I only saw. “Arnold appeared to be protesting-reproaching. The doctor was denying. I had the impression—” he pauses, giving himself time to choose his words. Trust nobody, Tessa had said. Nobody but Ghita and Arnold. Promise me. I promise. “My impression was, this was not the first time a disagreement had taken place between them. What I was witnessing was part of a continuing argument. So I thought afterward, at least. That I had witnessed a resumption of hostilities between adversaries.”

“You've thought about it a lot, then.”

“Yes. Yes, I have,” Justin agrees dubiously. “My other impression was that English was not the doctor's first language.”

“But you didn't discuss any of this with Arnold and Tessa?”

“When the man had gone, Arnold returned to Tessa's bedside, took her pulse and spoke in her ear.”

“Which again you didn't hear?”

“No and I was not intended to.” Too thin, he thinks. Try harder. “It was a part I had become familiar with,” he explains, avoiding their gaze. “To remain outside their circle.”

“What medication was Wanza on?” Lesley asks.

“I've no idea.”

He had every idea. Poison. He had fetched Tessa from the hospital and was standing two steps below her on the staircase to their bedroom, holding her night bag in one hand and the bag of Garth's first clothes and bedclothes and nappies in the other, but he was watching her like a wrestler because, being Tessa, she had to manage on her own. As soon as she started to crumple he let go the bags and caught her before her knees gave way, and he felt the awful lightness of her, and the shaking and despair as she broke into her lament, not about dead Garth, but about dead Wanza. They killed her! she blurted, straight into his face because he was holding her so close. Those bastards killed Wanza! Justin! They killed her with their poison. Who did, darling? he asked, smoothing her sweated hair away from her cheeks and forehead. Who killed her? Tell me. With his arm across her emaciated back he manhandled her gently up the stairs. What bastards, darling? Tell me who the bastards are. Those bastards in ThreeBees. Those phony bloody doctors. The ones that wouldn't look at us! What sort of doctors are we talking about?-lifting her up and laying her on the bed, not giving her the slightest second chance to fall. Do they have names, the doctors? Tell me.

From deep in his inner world, he hears Lesley asking him the same question in reverse. “Does the name Lorbeer mean anything to you, Justin?”

If in doubt, lie, he has sworn to himself. If in hell, lie. If I trust nobody—not even myself—if I am to be loyal only to the dead, lie.

“I fear not,” he replies.

“Not overheard anywhere—on the phone? Bits of chitchat between Arnold and Tessa? Lorbeer, German, Dutch—Swiss perhaps?”

“Lorbeer is not a name to me in any context.”

“Kovacs—Hungarian woman? Dark hair, said to be a beauty?”

“Does she have a first name?” He means no again, but this time it's the truth.

“Nobody does,” Lesley replies in a kind of desperation. “Emrich. Also a woman. But blonde. No?” She tosses her pencil onto the table in defeat. “So Wanza dies,” she says. “Official. Killed by a man who wouldn't look at you. And today, six months later, you still don't know what of. She just died.”

“It was never revealed to me. If Tessa or Arnold knew the cause of her death, I did not.”

Rob and Lesley flop in their chairs like two athletes who have agreed to take time out. Leaning back, stretching his arms wide, Rob gives a stage sigh while Lesley stays leaning forward, cupping her chin in her hand, an expression of melancholy on her wise face.

“And you haven't made this up, then?” she asks Justin through her knuckles. “This whole pitch about the dying woman Wanza, her baby, the so-called doctor who was ashamed, the so-called students in white coats? It's not a tissue of lies from end to end, for example?”

“What a perfectly ridiculous suggestion! Why on earth should I waste your time inventing such a story?”

“The Uhuru Hospital's got no record of Wanza,” Rob explains, equally despondent, from his half-recumbent position. “Tessa existed, so did your poor Garth. Wanza didn't. She was never there, she was never admitted, she was never treated by a doctor, pseudo or otherwise, no one observed her, no one prescribed for her. Her baby was never born, she never died, her body was never lost because it never existed. Our Les here had a go at speaking to a few of the nurses but they don't know nuffink, do they, Les?”