The Constant Gardener (45 page)

“Not yet, Gloria, but no doubt he will.”

Sandy being useless as usual. Forgetting everything about her as soon as he walks out of the front door. And when he comes home, drinking himself to sleep.

“Well, anyway, what we're looking at, Mike,” she bowled on, “is a big marquee. As big as we can find, frankly, with a kitchen at the side. We're going to have a slap-up hot buffet and a live, really good local band. Not a disco like Elena's, and not cold salmon either. Sandy's offering up a hefty chunk of his precious allowances, and the Service attaches are digging into their piggy banks, which is a start, shall we say. Still with me?”

“Indeed I am, Gloria.”

Pompous little boy. Too many of his master's airs and graces. Sandy will knock him into shape, once he gets the chance.

“So two questions, really, Mike. Both a bit delicate, but never mind, I'll plunge in. One. With Porter AWOL, if I dare say it, and no financial input from H.e.'s frais, as it were, is there, well, a slush fund available, or might Porter be persuaded to chip in from afar, as it were?”

“Two?”

He really is insufferable.

“Two, Mike, is where? Given the size of the event—and the vast marquee—and its importance to the British community at this rather difficult time, and the cachet we want to attach to it, if that's what you do with a cachet—well, we were thinking—I was—not Sandy, he's too busy, obviously—that the best place to have a five-star knees-up for Commonwealth Day just might be-provided everybody agreed, of course—the High Commissioner's lawn. Mike?” She had the eerie feeling that he had dived underwater and swum away.

“Still listening, Gloria.”

“Well, wouldn't it? For parking and everything. I mean nobody need go inside the house, obviously. It's Porter's. Well, except for pit stops, obviously. We can't put porta-loos in H.e.'s garden, can we?” She was getting hung up over Porter and Portaloos, but forged on. “I mean everything's there waiting, isn't it? Servants, cars, security, and so on?” She hastily corrected herself. “I mean waiting for Porter and Veronica, obviously. Not waiting for us. Sandy and I are just holding the fort till they come back. It's not a takeover or anything. Mike, are you still there? I feel I'm talking to myself.”

She was. The rebuff came the same evening in the form of a typed, hand-delivered note of which Mildred must have kept a copy. She didn't see him deliver it. All she saw was an open car driving away with Mildred in the passenger seat and his pool boy at the wheel. Department was emphatic, he wrote pompously. The High Commissioner's residence and its lawns were a no-go area for functions of all kinds. There was to be no “de facto annexation of High Commissioner status,” he ended cruelly. A formal Foreign Office letter to this effect was on its way.

Woodrow was furious. He had never let fly at her like this before. “Serves you bloody well right for asking,” he raged, stomping up and down the drawing room. “Do you really suppose I'll land Porter's job by going and camping on his bloody lawn?”

“I was only prodding them a bit,” she protested pathetically, as he ranted on. “It's perfectly natural to want you to be Sir Sandy one day. It isn't the borrowed glory I'm after. I just want you to be happy.”

But her afterthought was typically resilient. “Then we'll jolly well have to do it better here,” she vowed, staring mistily into the garden.

•      •      •

The great Commonwealth Day bash had begun.

All the frantic preparations had paid off, the guests had arrived, music was playing, drink flowing, couples were chatting, the jacarandas in the front garden were in bloom, life was really rather super at last. The wrong marquee had been replaced with the right one, paper napkins with linen, plastic knives and forks with plate, vile puce bunting with royal blue and gold. A generator that brayed like a sick mule had been replaced with one that bubbled like a hot saucepan. The sweep in front of the house no longer looked like a building site and some brilliant last-minute whipping in by Sandy on the telephone had procured some jolly good Africans, including two or three from Moi's retinue. Sooner than rely on untried waiters—just look at what had happened at Elena's!—or rather hadn't happened! —Gloria had mustered staff from other diplomatic households. One such recruit was Mustafa, Tessa's spearman, as she used to call him, who had been too grief-stricken, by all accounts, to find another job. But Gloria had sent Juma off in pursuit of him, and here he finally was, flitting among the tables on the other side of the dance floor, a bit down in the mouth, bless him, but obviously pleased to have been thought of, which was the important thing. The Blue Boys miraculously had arrived on time to direct parking, and the problem as usual would be to keep them away from the drink, but Gloria had read them the riot act and all one could do was hope. And the band was marvelous, really jungle, and a good strong beat for Sandy to dance to if he had to. And didn't he look simply splendid in the new dinner jacket Gloria had bought him as a “sorry” present? What a parade horse he was going to make one day! And the hot buffet, what she had tasted of it—well, good enough. Not sensational, you didn't expect that in Nairobi, there was a limit to what you could buy even if you could afford it. But streets better than Elena's, not that Gloria felt in the least competitive. And darling Ghita in her gold sari, divine.

•      •      •

Woodrow too has every reason to congratulate himself. Watching the couples gyrate to music he detests, sipping methodically at his fourth whisky, he is the storm-tossed mariner who has made it back to harbor against all odds. No, Gloria, I never made a pass at her—or at any other her. No to all of it. No, I will not provide you with the means to destroy me. Not you, not the Archbitch Elena, and not Ghita, the scheming little puritan. I'm a status quo man, as Tessa rightly observed.

Out of the corner of his eye Woodrow spots Ghita, matching bodies with some gorgeous African she has probably never seen in her life until tonight. Beauty like yours is a sin, he tells her in his mind. It was a sin with Tessa, it is with you. How can any woman inhabit a body like yours and not share the desires of the man she inflames? Yet when I point this out to you—just the odd confiding touch, nothing gross—your eyes blaze and you hiss at me in a stage whisper to get my hands off you. Then you flounce home in a huff, closely observed by the Archbitch Elena … His reverie was disturbed by a pallid, balding man, who looked as though he'd lost his way, accompanied by a six-foot Amazon in bangs.

“Why, Ambassador, how awfully good of you to come!” Name forgotten but with this bloody music going no one's counting. He bawled at Gloria to join him—“Darling, meet the new Swiss Ambassador who arrived a week ago. Very sweetly called to pay his compliments to Porter! Poor chap got me instead! Wife will be joining you in a couple of weeks' time, isn't that right, Ambassador? So he's on the loose tonight, ha ha! Lovely to see you here! Forgive me if I do the rounds! Ciao!”

The bandleader was singing, if that was how you described his caterwaul. Clutching his microphone in one fist and fondling its tip with the other. Rotating his hips in copulative ecstasy.

“Darling, aren't you the teeniest bit turned on?” Gloria whispered as she whirled past him in the arms of the Indian Ambassador. “I am!”

A tray of drinks went by. Woodrow deftly put his empty glass on it and helped himself to a full one. Gloria was being led back to the dance floor by the jovial, shamelessly corrupt Morrison M'Gumbo, known also as Minister for Lunch. Woodrow cast round gloomily for somebody with a decent enough body to dance with. It was this non-dancing that got his goat. This mincing about, parading your parts. It made him feel like the clumsiest, most useless lover a woman ever had to put up with. It evoked all the do-this-don't-do-thats and the for-God's-sake-Woodrows that had rung in his ears since the age of five.

“I said, I've been running away from myself all my life!” he was bellowing into the puzzled face of his dancing partner, a busty Danish aid worker called Fitt or Flitt. “Always known what I was running away from, but never had the least idea where I was heading. How about you? I said, how about you?” She laughed and shook her head. “You think I'm mad or drunk, don't you?” he shouted. She nodded. “Well, you're wrong. I'm both!” Chum of Arnold Bluhm's, he remembered. Jesus, what a saga. When on earth will that show end? But he must have pondered this loud enough for her to hear him above the awful din because he saw her eyes go down and heard her say, “Maybe never,” with the kind of piety good Catholics reserve for the Pope. Alone again, Woodrow headed upstream toward tables of deafened refugees, huddled together in shell-shocked groups. Time I ate something. He untied his bow tie and let it hang loose.

“Definition of a gentleman, my daddy used to say,” he explained to an uncomprehending black Venus. “Chap who ties his own bow tie!”

Ghita had staked a territorial claim at one corner of the dance floor and was twisting pelvises with two jolly African girls from the British Council. Other girls were joining them in a witches' circle and the entire band was standing at the edge of the rostrum, singing yeh, yeh, yeh at them. The girls were slapping each other's palms, then turning round and tipping their bottoms at each other and Christ alone knew what the neighbors were saying up and down the road because Gloria hadn't invited all of them, or the tent would have been knee-deep in gunrunners and dope dealers—a joke Woodrow must have shared with a brace of very big chaps in native rig because they dissolved into hoots of laughter and retold the whole thing to their womenfolk who cracked up too.

Ghita. What the hell's she up to now? It's the Chancery meeting all over again. Every time I look at her she looks away. Every time I look away, she looks at me. It's the damnedest thing I ever saw. And once again Woodrow must have externalized his thoughts because a bore called Meadower from the Muthaiga Club immediately agreed with him, saying that if young people were determined to dance like that, why didn't they just fuck on the dance floor and be done with it? Which as it happened accorded perfectly with Woo.row's opinion, a point he was bellowing into Meadower's ear as he came face-to-face with Mustafa the black angel, standing square in front of him as if he were trying to stop him passing, except that Woodrow wasn't proposing to go anywhere. Woodrow noticed that Mustafa wasn't carrying anything, which struck him as impertinent. If Gloria out of the goodness of her heart has hired the poor dear man to fetch and carry, why the hell isn't he fetching and carrying? Why's he standing here like my bad conscience, empty-handed except for a folded bit of paper in one hand, mouthing unintelligible words at me like a goldfish?

“Chap says he's got a message for you,” Meadower was shouting.

“What?”

“Very personal, very urgent message. Some beautiful girl fallen base-over-bum in love with you.”

“Mustafa said that?”

“What?”

“I said, did Mustafa say that?”

“Aren't you going to find out who she is? Probably your wife!” roared Meadower, dissolving in hysterics.

Or Ghita, thought Woodrow, with an absurd leap of hope.

He took half a step away and Mustafa kept alongside him, turning his shoulder into him so that from Meadower's eye line they resembled two men hunched together lighting their cigarettes in the wind. Woodrow held out his hand and Mustafa reverently laid the note onto his palm. Plain A4 paper, folded small.

“Thank you, Mustafa,” Woodrow yelled, meaning bugger off.

But Mustafa stood firm, commanding Woodrow with his eyes to read it. All right, damn you, stay where you are. You can't read English anyway. Can't speak it either. He unfolded the paper. Electronic type. No signature.

Dear Sir,

I have in my possession a copy of the letter that you wrote to Mrs. Tessa Quayle inviting her to elope with you. Mustafa will bring you to me. Please tell nobody and come at once, or I shall be forced to dispose of it elsewhere.

No signature.

•      •      •

With one burst of the riot police's water cannon, it seemed to Woodrow, he had been drenched cold sober. A man on his way to the scaffold thinks of a multitude of things at once and Woodrow, for all that he had a skinful of his own tax-free whisky inside him, was no exception. He suspected that the transaction between Mustafa and himself had not escaped Gloria's attention and he was right: she would never again take her eyes off him at a party. So he threw her a reassuring wave across the room, mouthed something to suggest “no problem” and set himself submissively in Mustafa's wake. As he did so, he caught Ghita's gaze full beam for the first time this evening and found it calculating.

Meanwhile, he was speculating hard about the identity of his blackmailer and associating him with the presence of the Blue Boys. His argument went as follows. The Blue Boys had at some point searched the Quayles' house and discovered what Woodrow himself had failed to find. One of their number had kept the letter in his pocket until he saw an opportunity to exploit it. That opportunity had now arisen.

A second possibility occurred to him pretty well simultaneously, which was that Rob or Lesley or both, having been removed from a high-profile murder case against their will, had decided to cash in. But why here and now, for Christ's sake? Somewhere in this mix he also included Tim Donohue, but that was because Woodrow regarded him as an active if senile nonbeliever. Only this evening, seated with his beady wife Maud in the darkest corner of the tent, Donohue had, in Woodrow's opinion, maintained a malign and untrusting presence.

Meanwhile Woodrow was taking intimate note of the physical things around him, rather in the way he might look for emergency doors when an aeroplane hits turbulence: the inadequately driven tent pegs and slack guy ropes—my God, the smallest breeze could blow the whole thing over!—the mud-caked coconut matting along the tented corridor—somebody could slip on that and sue me!—the unguarded open doorway to the lower ground—bloody burglars could have emptied the whole house and we'd never have been the wiser.

Skirting the edges of the kitchen, he was disconcerted by the number of unauthorized camp followers who had converged on his house in the hope of a few leftovers from the buffet, and were sitting around like Rembrandt groups in the glow of a hurricane lamp. Must be a dozen of them, more, he reckoned indignantly. Plus about twenty children camping on the floor. Well, six, anyway. He was equally incensed by the sight of the Blue Boys themselves, sodden with sleep and drink at the kitchen table, their jackets and pistols draped over the backs of their chairs. Their condition, however, persuaded him that they were unlikely to be the authors of the letter that he was still clutching, folded, in his hand.