The Constant Gardener (6 page)

“And you have British business interests to represent,” she reminds him playfully.

“That is not a sin, Tessa,” he retorts, trying to wrest the lower half of his gaze from the shadow of her breasts through the puff of dress. “Commerce is not a sin. Trading with emerging countries is not a sin. Trade helps them to emerge, as a matter of fact. It makes reforms possible. The kind of reforms we all want. It brings them into the modern world. It enables us to help them. How can we help a poor country if we're not rich ourselves?”

“Bullshit.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Specious, unadulterated, pompous Foreign Office bullshit, if you want its full name, worthy of the inestimable Pellegrin himself. Look around you. Trade isn't making the poor rich. Profits don't buy reforms. They buy corrupt government officials and Swiss bank accounts.”

“I dispute that absolutely—”

She cuts him short. “So it's file and forget. Right? No action at this time. Signed, Sandy. Great. The mother of democracies is once more revealed as a lying hypocrite, preaching liberty and human rights for all, except where she hopes to make a buck.”

“That's not fair at all! All right, Moi's Boys are crooks and the old man still has a couple of years to run. But good things are on the horizon. A word in the right ear—the collective withholding of donor nations' aid—quiet diplomacy—they're all having their effect. And Richard Leakey is being drafted into the Cabinet to put a brake on corruption and reassure donors that they can start giving again without financing Moi's rackets.” He is beginning to sound like a guidance telegram, and knows it. Worse, she knows it too, as evidenced by a very big yawn. “Kenya may not have much of a present but it has a future,” he ends bravely. And waits for a reciprocal sign from her to indicate that they are moving toward some kind of cobbled truce.

But Tessa, he remembers too late, is not a conciliator, neither is her bosom pal Ghita. They are both young enough to believe there is such a thing as simple truth. “The document I gave you supplies names and dates and bank accounts,” she insists remorselessly. “Individual ministers are identified and incriminated. Will that be a word in the right ear too? Or is nobody listening out there?”

“Tessa.”

She is slipping away from him when he came here to be closer to her.

“Sandy.”

“I take your point. I hear you. But for heaven's sake—in the name of sanity—you can't seriously be suggesting that HMG in the person of Bernard Pellegrin should be conducting a witchhunt against named ministers of the Kenyan government! I mean, my God—it's not as if we Brits were above corruption ourselves. Is the Kenyan High Commissioner in London about to tell us to clean up our act?”

“Sheer bloody humbug and you know it,” Tessa snaps, eyes flaming.

He has not reckoned with Mustafa. He enters silently, at the stoop. First with great accuracy he sets a small table midway between them on the carpet, then a silver tray with a silver coffeepot and her late mother's silver sweetmeat basket filled with shortbread. And the intrusion clearly stimulates Tessa's ever-present sense of theater, for she kneels upright before the little table, shoulders back, dress stretched across her breasts while she punctuates her speech with humorously barbed inquiries about his tastes.

“Was it black, Sandy, or just a touch of the cream?—I forget,” she asks with mock gentility. This is the Pharisaic life we lead—she is telling him—a continent lies dying at our door, and here we stand or kneel drinking coffee off a silver tray while just down the road children starve, the sick die and crooked politicians bankrupt the nation that was tricked into electing them. “A witch-hunt—since you mention it—would make an excellent beginning. Name 'em, shame 'em, chop their heads off and spike 'em on the city gates, says I. The trouble is, it doesn't work. The same List of Shame is published every year in the Nairobi newspapers, and the same Kenyan politicians feature in it every time. Nobody is sacked, nobody is hauled up before the courts.” She hands him a cup, swiveling on her knees to reach him. “But it doesn't bother you, does it? You're a status quo man. That's a decision you've taken. It hasn't been thrust upon you. You took it. You, Sandy. You looked in the mirror one day and you thought: Hullo, me, from now on I'll treat the world as I find it. I'll get the best deal I can for Britain, and I'll call it my duty. Never mind if it's a duty that accounts for the survival of some of the foulest governments on the globe. I'll do it anyway.” She offers him sugar. He silently declines it. “So I'm afraid we can't agree, can we? I want to speak up. You want me to bury my head where yours is. One woman's duty is another man's cop-out. What's new?”

“And Justin?” Woodrow asks, playing his last useless card. “Where does he come into this, I wonder?”

She stiffens, sensing a trap. “Justin is Justin,” she replies warily. “He has made his choices as I have made mine.”

“And Bluhm's Bluhm, I suppose,” Woodrow sneers, driven by jealousy and anger to speak the name he has promised himself he will on no account utter. And she, apparently, has sworn not to hear it. By some bitter inner discipline she keeps her lips tightly closed while she waits for him to make an even bigger fool of himself. Which he duly does. Royally. “You don't think you're prejudicing Justin's career, for instance?” he inquires haughtily.

“Is that why you came to see me?”

“Basically, yes.”

“I thought you'd come here to save me from myself. Now it turns out you've come to save Justin from me. How very laddish of you.”

“I had imagined Justin's interests and yours were identical.”

A taut, humorless laugh, as her anger returns. But unlike Woodrow she does not lose her self-control. “Good heavens, Sandy, you must be the only person in Nairobi who imagines any such thing!” She stands up, the game over. “I think you'd better go now. People will begin to talk about us. I won't send you more documents, you'll be relieved to hear. We can't have you wearing out the High Commissioner's shredder, can we? You might lose promotion points.”

Reliving this scene as he had relived it repeatedly in the twelve months since it had taken place, feeling again his humiliation and frustration and her scornful gaze burning his back as he took his leave, Woodrow surreptitiously pulled open a slim drawer of the inlaid table that her mother had loved and swept his hand round the inside, gathering together anything he found. I was drunk, I was mad, he told himself in extenuation of this act. I had a craving to do something rash. I was trying to bring the roof tumbling round my head so that I would see clear sky.

One piece of paper—that's all he asked as he frantically slewed and skimmed his way through drawers and shelves—one insignificant sheet of Her Majesty's Stationery Office blue, with one side of writing, mine, saying the unsayable in words that for once do not equivocate, do not say, On the one hand this, but on the other hand there's nothing I can do about it—signed not S or SW but Sandy in good, legible script and very nearly the name WOODROW in block capitals after it to show the whole world and Tessa Quayle that, for five deranged minutes back in his office that same evening, with her naked silhouette still taunting his memory, and a king-sized glass of hospitality whisky at his timid lover's elbow, one Sandy Woodrow, Head of Chancery at the British High Commission in Nairobi, performed an act of unique, deliberate, calculated lunacy, putting at risk career, wife and children in a doomed effort to bring his life closer to his feelings.

And having written as he wrote, had enclosed said letter in Her Majesty's envelope and sealed said envelope with a whisky-flavored tongue. Had carefully addressed it and—ignoring all sensible internal voices urging him to wait an hour, a day, another lifetime, have himself another Scotch, apply for home leave or at the very least send the letter tomorrow morning after he has slept on it—had borne it aloft to the High Commission mail room where a locally employed Kikuyu clerk named Jomo after the great Kenyatta, not troubling to inquire why a Head of Chancery might be sending a hand-delivered letter marked PERSONAL to the naked silhouette of the beautiful young wife of a colleague and subordinate, had slung it in a bag marked LOCAL UNCLASSIFIED while obsequiously chanting, “Night, Mr. Woodrow, sir,” to his departing back.

•      •      •

Old Christmas cards.

Old invitation cards marked with a cross for “no” in Tessa's hand. Others, more emphatically marked, “never.”

Old get-well card from Ghita Pearson, portraying Indian birds.

A twist of ribbon, a wine cork, a bunch of diplomats' calling cards held together with a bulldog clip.

But no small, single sheet of HM Stationery Office blue ending with the triumphant scrawl: “I love you, I love you and I love you, Sandy.”

Woodrow sidled swiftly along the last shelves, flipping open books at random, opening trinket boxes, acknowledging defeat. Take a grip on yourself, man, he urged, as he fought to turn bad news into good. All right: no letter. Why should there be a letter? Tessa? After twelve months? Probably chucked it in the wastepaper basket the day she got it. A woman like that, compulsive flirt, husband a wimp, she gets a pass made at her twice a month. Three times! Weekly! Daily! He was sweating. In Africa, sweat broke out on him in a greasy shower, then dried up. He stood head forward, letting the torrent fall, listening.

What's the bloody man doing up there? Softly back and forth? Private papers, he had said. Lawyers' letters. What papers did she keep upstairs that were too private for the ground floor? The drawing room telephone was ringing. It had been ringing nonstop ever since they entered the house, but he had only now noticed it. Journalists? Lovers? Who cares? He let it ring. He was plotting the upstairs layout of his own house and applying it to this one. Justin was directly above him, left of the stairwell as you went up. There was a dressing room and there was the bathroom and there was the main bedroom. Woodrow remembered Tessa telling him she had converted the dressing room into a workroom: It's not only men who have dens, Sandy. Us girls have them too, she had told him provocatively, as if she were instructing him in body parts. The rhythm changed. Now you're collecting stuff from round the room. What stuff? Documents that are precious to both of us. To me too maybe, thought Woodrow, in a sickening reminder of his folly.

Discovering he was now standing at the window overlooking the back garden, he poked aside the curtain and saw festoons of flowering shrubs, the pride of Justin's “open days” for junior staff when he served strawberries and cream and cold white wine and gave them the tour of his Elysium. “One year's gardening in Kenya is worth ten in England,” he liked to claim as he made his comic little pilgrimages round Chancery, handing out his flowers to the boys and girls. It was the only subject, come to think of it, on which he had been known to boast. Woodrow squinted sideways along the shoulder of the hill. The Quayle house was no distance from his own. The way the hill ran, they could see one another's lights at night. His eye homed on the very window from which too often he had been moved to stare in this direction. Suddenly he was as near as he ever came to weeping. Her hair was in his face. He could swim in her eyes, smell her perfume and the scent of warm sweet grass you got from her when you were dancing with her at Christmas at the Muthaiga Club and by sheer accident your nose brushed against her hair. It's the curtains, he realized, waiting for his half tears to recede. They've kept her scent and I'm standing right up against them. On an impulse he grabbed the curtain in both hands, about to bury his face in it.

“Thank you, Sandy. Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

He swung round, shoving the curtain away from him. Justin was looming in the doorway, looking as flustered as Woodrow felt and clutching a long, orange, sausage-shaped leather Gladstone bag, fully laden and very scuffed, with brass screws, brass corners and brass padlocks either end.

“All set then, old man? Debt of honor discharged?” Woodrow asked, taken aback but, as a good diplomat, recovering his charm immediately. “Jolly good. That's the way then. And you've got everything you came for, all that?”

“I believe so. Yes. To a point.”

“You sound unsure.”

“Really? I don't mean to. It was her father's,” he explained, making a gesture with the bag.

“Looks more like an abortionist's,” said Woodrow, to be chummy.

He offered a hand to help him, but Justin preferred to carry his booty for himself. Woodrow climbed into the van, Justin climbed after him, to sit with one hand curled over its old leather carrying handles. The taunts of journalists came at them through the thin walls:

“Do you reckon Bluhm topped her, Mr. Quayle?”

“Hey, Justin, my proprietor is offering mega-megabucks.”

From the direction of the house, above the ringing of the telephone, Woodrow thought he heard a baby crying, and realized it was Mustafa.

Press coverage of Tessa's murder was at first not half as dire as Woodrow and his High Commissioner had feared. Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing, Coleridge cautiously observed, appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something. To begin with, that was what they did. “Bush Killers Slay British Envoy's Wife” ran the first reports, and this robust approach, written upward for the broadsheets and downward for the tabloids, served a discerning public well. The increasing hazards to aid workers around the globe were dwelled upon, there were stinging editorials on the failure of the United Nations to protect its own and the ever-rising cost of humanitarians brave enough to stand up and be counted. There was high talk of lawless tribesmen seeking whom they might devour, ritual killings, witchcraft and the gruesome trade in human skins. Much was made of the presence of roving gangs of illegal immigrants from Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. But nothing at all of the irrefutable fact that Tessa and Bluhm, in full view of staff and guests, had shared a cabin on the night before her death. Bluhm was “a Belgian aid official”—right—“a United Nations medical consultant”—wrong—“an expert in tropical diseases”—wrong—and was feared abducted by the murderers, to be held for ransom or killed.