The Constant Gardener (7 page)

The bond between the experienced Dr. Arnold Bluhm and his beautiful young protegee was commitment, it was humanitarian. And that was all it was. Noah made it only to the first editions, then died a second death. Black blood, as every Fleet Street schoolboy knows, is not news, but a decapitation is worth a mention. The searchlight was remorselessly on Tessa, the Society Girl Turned Oxbridge Lawyer, the Princess Diana of the African Poor, the Mother Teresa of the Nairobi Slums and the FO Angel Who Gave a Damn. An editorial in the Guardian made much of the fact that the Millennium's New Woman Diplomat [sic] should have met her death at Leakey's cradle of mankind, and drew from this the disquieting moral that, though racial attitudes may change, we cannot plumb the wells of savagery that are to be found at the heart of every man's darkness. The piece lost some of its impact when a subeditor unfamiliar with the African continent set Tessa's murder on the shores of Lake Tanganyika rather than Turkana.

There were photographs of her galore. Cheerful baby Tessa in the arms of her father the judge in the days when His Honor was a humble barrister struggling along on half a million a year. Ten-year-old Tessa in plaits and jodhpurs at her rich girl's private school, docile pony in background. (though her mother was an Italian contessa, it was noted approvingly, the parents had wisely settled for a British education.) Teenaged Golden Girl Tessa in bikini, her uncut throat artfully highlighted by the photographic editor's airbrush. Tessa in saucily pitched mortarboard, academic gown and miniskirt. Tessa in the ludicrous garb of a British barrister, following in her father's footsteps. Tessa on her wedding day, and Old Etonian Justin already smiling his older Etonian's smile.

Toward Justin, the press showed an unusual restraint, partly because they wished nothing to tarnish the shining image of their instant heroine, partly because there was precious little to say about him. Justin was “one of the FO'S loyal middle-rankers”—read “pen pusher”—a long-term bachelor “born into the diplomatic tradition” who before his marriage had flown the flag in some of the world's least favored hot spots, among them Aden and Beirut. Colleagues spoke kindly of his coolness in crisis. In Nairobi he had headed a “hightech international forum” on aid. Nobody used the word “backwater.” Rather comically, there turned out to be a dearth of photographs of him either before or after his wedding. A “family snap” showed a clouded, inward-looking youth who with hindsight seemed marked down for early widowhood. It was abstracted, Justin confessed under pressure from his hostess, from a group picture of the Eton rugby team.

“I didn't know you were a rugger man, Justin! How very plucky of you,” cried Gloria, whose self-appointed task each morning after breakfast was to take him his letters of commiseration and newspaper cuttings sent up by the High Commission.

“It wasn't plucky at all,” he retorted in one of those flashes of spirit that Gloria so relished. “I was press-ganged into it by a thug of a housemaster who thought we weren't men till we'd been kicked to pieces. The school had no business releasing that photograph.” And cooling down: “I'm most grateful, Gloria.”

As he was for everything, she reported to Elena: for his drinks and meals and for his prison cell; for their turns together in the garden and their little seminars on bedding plants—he was particularly complimentary about the alyssum, white and purple, that she had finally persuaded to spread underneath the bombax tree—for her help in handling details of the approaching funeral, including going with Jackson to inspect the grave site and funeral home, since Justin by edict of London was to remain gated till the hue and cry died down. A faxed Foreign Office letter to this effect, addressed to Justin at the High Commission and signed “Alison Landsbury, Head of Personnel,” had produced an almost violent effect on Gloria. She could not afterward remember an occasion when she so nearly lost control of herself.

“Justin, you are being outrageously misused. ”Surrender the keys to your house until the appropriate steps have been taken by the authorities,“ my Aunt Fanny! Which authorities? Kenyan authorities? Or those flatfeet from Scotland Yard who still haven't even bothered to call on you?”

“But Gloria, I have already been to my house,” Justin insisted, in an effort to soothe her. “Why fight a battle that is won? Will the cemetery have us?”

“At two-thirty. We are to be at Lee's Funeral Parlor at two. A notice goes to the newspapers tomorrow.”

“And she's next to Garth”—Garth his dead son, so named after Tessa's father the judge.

“As near as we can be, dear. Under the same jacaranda tree. With a little African boy.”

“You're very kind,” he told her for the umpteenth time and, without further word, removed himself to the lower ground and his Gladstone bag.

The bag was his comforter. Twice now Gloria had glimpsed him through the bars of the garden window, seated motionless on his bed, head in hands and the bag at his feet, staring down at it. Her secret conviction—shared with Elena—was that it contained Bluhm's love letters. He had rescued them from prying eyes—no thanks to Sandy—and he was waiting till he was strong enough to decide whether to read them or burn them. Elena agreed, though she thought Tessa a stupid little tart to have kept them. “Read 'em and sling 'em is my motto, darling.” Noticing Justin's reluctance to stray from his room for fear of leaving the bag unguarded, Gloria suggested he put it in the wine store, which, having an iron grille for a door, added to the prisonlike grimness of the lower ground.

“And you shall keep the key, Justin”—grandly entrusting it to him. “There. And when Sandy wants a bottle he'll have to come and ask you for it. Then perhaps he'll drink less.”

•      •      •

Gradually, as one press deadline followed another, Woodrow and Coleridge almost persuaded themselves that they had held the dam. Either Wolfgang had silenced his staff and guests, or the press was so obsessed with the scene of the crime that nobody bothered to check out the Oasis, they told each other. Coleridge personally addressed the assembled elders of the Muthaiga Club entreating them, in the name of Anglo-Kenyan solidarity, to stem the flow of gossip. Woodrow delivered a similar homily to the staff of the High Commission. Whatever we may think privately we must do nothing that could fan the flames, he urged, and his wise words, earnestly delivered, had their effect.

But it was all illusion, as Woodrow in his rational heart had known from the start. Just as the press was running out of steam, a Belgian daily ran a front-page story accusing Tessa and Bluhm of “a passionate liaison” and featuring a page photocopied from the registration book at the Oasis and eyewitness accounts of the loving couple dining head to head on the eve of Tessa's murder. The British Sundays had a field day; overnight Bluhm became a figure of loathing for Fleet Street to snipe at as it wished. Until now, he had been Arnold Bluhm, M.d., the adopted Congolese son of a wealthy Belgian mining couple, educated Kinshasa, Brussels and the Sorbonne, medical monk, denizen of war zones, selfless healer of Algiers. From now on he was Bluhm the seducer, Bluhm the adulterer, Bluhm the maniac. A page-three feature about murderous doctors down the ages was accompanied by lookalike photographs of Bluhm and O. J. Simpson over the catchy heading “Which Twin is the Doctor?” Bluhm, if you were that kind of newspaper reader, was your archetypal black killer. He had ensnared a white man's wife, cut her throat, decapitated the driver and run off into the bush to seek new prey or do whatever those salon blacks do when they revert to type. To make the comparison more graphically, they had airbrushed out Bluhm's beard.

All day long Gloria kept the worst away from Justin, fearing it would unhinge him. But he insisted on seeing everything, warts and all. So come the evening hour and before Woodrow returned, she took him a whisky and reluctantly presented him with the whole garish bundle. Entering his prison space, she was outraged to discover her son Harry sitting opposite him at the rickety pine table, and both of them frowning in concentration over a game of chess. A wave of jealousy seized her.

“Harry, dear, that's most inconsiderate of you, badgering poor Mr. Quayle for chess when—”

But Justin interrupted her before she could finish her sentence.

“Your son has a most serpentine mind, Gloria,” he assured her. “Sandy will have to watch himself, believe me.” Taking the bundle from her, he sat himself languidly on the bed and flicked through it. “Arnold has a pretty good notion of our prejudices, you know,” he went on in the same remote tone. “If he's alive, he won't be surprised. If he's not, he's not going to care, is he?”

But the press had a far more lethal shot in its locker, which Gloria at her most pessimistic could not have foreseen.

•      •      •

Among the dozen or so maverick newsletters to which the High Commission subscribed—colored local broadsheets, pseudonymously written and printed on the hoof—one in particular had shown a remarkable capacity for survival. It was called, without adornment, “Africa Corrupt,” and its policy, if such a word could be applied to the turbulent impulses that drove it, was to rake mud regardless of race, color, truth or the consequences. If it exposed alleged acts of larceny perpetrated by ministers and bureaucrats of the Moi administration, it was equally at home laying bare the “grafting, corruption and pigs-in-clover lifestyle” of the aid bureaucrats.

But the newsletter in question—known ever after as Issue 64—was devoted to none of these matters. It was printed on both sides of a single sheet of shocking-pink paper a yard square. Folded small, it fitted nicely in the jacket pocket. A thick black border signified that Issue 64's anonymous editors were in mourning. The headline consisted of the one word TESSA in black letters three inches high, and Woodrow's copy was delivered to him on Saturday afternoon by none other than the sickly, shaggy, bespectacled, mustached, six-foot-six Tim Donohue in person. The front doorbell rang as Woodrow was playing tip-andrun cricket with the boys in the garden. Gloria, normally a tireless wicket keeper, was grappling with a headache upstairs; Justin was hull down in his cell with the curtains closed. Woodrow walked through the house and, suspecting some journalist's ruse, peered through the fish-eye. And there stood Donohue on the doorstep, a sheepish smile on his long sad face, flapping what looked like a pink table napkin back and forth.

“Frightfully sorry to disturb you, old boy. Holy Saturday and all that. Spot of shit seems to have hit the proverbial fan.”

With undisguised distaste Woodrow led him to the drawing room. What on earth's the bloody man up to now? What on earth was he ever up to, come to think of it? Woodrow had always disliked the Friends, as the spies were unaffectionately known to the Foreign Office. Donohue wasn't smooth, he had no known linguistic skills, he didn't charm. He was to all outward purposes past his sell-by date. His day hours appeared to be spent on the Muthaiga Club golf course with the fleshier members of Nairobi's business community, his evenings at bridge. Yet he lived high, in a grand hiring with four servants and a faded beauty called Maud who looked as ill as he did. Was Nairobi a sinecure for him? A kiss-off at the end of a distinguished career? Woodrow had heard the Friends did that sort of thing. Donohue was in Woodrow's judgment surplus ballast in a profession that was by definition parasitic and out of date.

“One of my boys just happened to be loafing in the marketplace,” Donohue explained. “A couple of chaps were handing out free copies in a shifty sort of way, so my lad thought he might as well have one.”

The front page consisted of three separate eulogies of Tessa, each purportedly written by a different African woman friend. The style was Afro-English vernacular: a little of the pulpit, a little of the soapbox, disarming flourishes of feeling. Tessa, each of the writers claimed in her different way, had broken the mold. With her wealth, parentage, education and looks she should have been up there dancing and feasting with the worst of Kenya's white supremacists. Instead she was the opposite of all they stood for. Tessa was in revolt against her class, race and whatever she believed was tying her down, whether it was the color of her skin, the prejudice of her social equals or the bonds of a conventional Foreign Service marriage.

“How's Justin holding up?” Donohue asked, while Woodrow read.

“Well, thank you, considering.”

“I heard he was over at his house the other day.”

“Do you want me to read this or not?”

“Pretty smart footwork, I must say, old boy, dodging those reptiles on the doorstep. You should join our lot. Is he around?”

“Yes, but not receiving.” If Africa was Tessa Quayle's adopted country, Woodrow read, Africa's women were her adopted religion.

Tessa fought for us no matter where the battleground, no matter what the taboos. She fought for us at posh champagne parties, posh dinner parties and any other posh party that was crazy enough to invite her, and her message was always the same. Only the emancipation of African women could save us from the blunderings and corruption of our menfolk. And when Tessa discovered she was pregnant, she insisted on bearing her African child among the African women she loved.

“Oh my Christ,” Woodrow exclaimed softly.

“Bit what I felt, actually,” Donohue agreed.

The last paragraph was printed in capitals. Mechanically, Woodrow read it also:

GOOD-BYE MAMA TESSA. WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF YOUR COURAGE. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, MAMA TESSA, FOR YOUR LIFE. ARNOLD BLUHM MAY LIVE ON BUT YOU ARE DEAD WITHOUT QUESTION. IF THE BRITISH QUEEN EVER AWARDS MEDALS POSTHUMOUSLY; THEN INSTEAD OF ELEVATING MR. PORTER COLERIDGE TO A KNIGHTHOOD FOR HIS SERVICES TO BRITISH COMPLACENCY, LET'S HOPE SHE'LL GIVE THE VICTORIA CROSS TO YOU, MAMA TESSA, OUR FRIEND, FOR YOUR OUTSTANDING GALLANTRY IN THE FACE OF POSTCOLONIAL BIGOTRY.

“Best bit's on the back, actually,” Donohue said. Woodrow turned the paper round.

MAMA TESSA'S AFRICAN BABY

Tessa Quayle believed in putting her body and her life wherever her convictions led her. She expected others to do the same. When Tessa was confined in the Uhuru Hospital, Nairobi, her very close friend Dr. Arnold Bluhm visited her every day and, according to some reports, most nights as well, even taking a folding bed with him so that he could sleep beside her in the ward.

Woodrow folded the broadsheet and put it in his pocket. “Think I'll just run this round to Porter, if it's all right by you. I can keep it, presumably?”

“All yours, old boy. Comps of the Firm.”

Woodrow was moving toward the door but Donohue showed no sign of following him.

“Coming?” Woodrow asked.

“Thought I'd just hang on, if you didn't mind. Say my piece to poor old Justin. Where is he? Upstairs?”

“I thought we agreed you wouldn't do that.”

“Did we, old boy? No problem at all. Another time. Your house, your guest. You haven't got Bluhm tucked away too, have you?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

Undeterred, Donohue loped to Woodrow's side, dipping at the knees, making a party piece of it. “Care for a lift? Only round the corner. Save you getting the car out. Too hot to walk.”

Still half fearing Donohue might nip back to make another attempt on Justin, Woodrow accepted the lift and watched his car safely over the hill. Porter and Veronica Coleridge were sunning themselves in the garden. Behind them lay the High Commission's Surrey mansion, before them the faultless lawns and weedless flower beds of a rich stockbroker's garden. Coleridge had the swing seat and was reading documents from a despatch case. His blonde wife Veronica, in corn blue skirt and floppy straw hat, was sprawled on the grass beside a padded playpen. Within it, their daughter Rosie rolled to and fro on her back, admiring the foliage of an oak tree through the gaps between her fingers while Veronica hummed to her. Woodrow handed Coleridge the broadsheet and waited for the expletives. None came.

“Who reads this crap?”

“Every hack in town, I would imagine,” said Woodrow tonelessly.

“What's their next stop?”

“The hospital,” he replied with a sinking heart.

Slumped in a corduroy armchair in Coleridge's study, one ear listening to him trading guarded sentences with his detested superior in London over the digital telephone that Coleridge kept locked inside his desk, Woodrow in the recurrent dream he would not shake off until his dying day watched his white man's body striding at colonial speed through the immense crowded halls of Uhuru Hospital, pausing only to ask anybody in uniform for the right staircase, the right floor, the right ward, the right patient.

“The shit Pellegrin says shove the whole thing under the carpet,” Porter Coleridge announced, slamming down the telephone. “Shove it far and fast. Biggest bloody carpet we can find. Typical.”

Through the study window, Woodrow watched as Veronica lifted Rosie from her playpen and carried her toward the house. “I thought we were doing that already,” he objected, still lost in his reverie.

“What Tessa did in her spare time was her own business. That includes having it off with Bluhm and any noble causes she may have been into. Off the record and only if asked, we respected her crusades but considered them underinformed and screwball. And we don't comment on irresponsible claims by the gutter press.” A pause while he wrestled with his self-disgust. “And we're to put it about that she was crazy.”

“Why on earth should we do that?”—waking sharply.

“Ours not to reason why. She was unhinged by her dead baby and unstable before it. She went to a shrink in London, which helps. It stinks and I hate it. When's the funeral?”

“Middle of next week is the earliest.”

“Can't it be sooner?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We're waiting for the postmortem. Funerals have to be booked in advance.”

“Sherry?”

“No thanks. Think I'll get back to the ranch.”

“The Office wants long-suffering. She was our cross but we bore her bravely. Can you do long-suffering?”

“I don't think I can.”

“Neither can I. It makes me absolutely fucking sick.”

The words had slipped from him so fast, with such subversiveness and conviction, that Woodrow at first doubted whether he had heard them at all.

“The shit Pellegrin says it's a threeline whip,” Coleridge continued in a tone of mordant contempt. “No doubters, no defectors. Can you accept that?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well done, you. I'm not sure I can. Any outside representations she made anywhere —she and Bluhm—together or separately-to anyone, including you or me—any bees she had in her bonnet—about matters animal, vegetable, political or pharmaceutical—” a long unbearable pause while Coleridge's eyes rested on him with the fervor of a heretic enjoining him to treason—“are outside our bailiwick and we know absolutely and completely fuck all about them. Have I made myself clear or would you like me to write it on the wall in secret ink?”

“You've made yourself clear.”

“Because Pellegrin made himself clear, you see. Unclear he was not.”

“No. He wouldn't be.”

“Did we keep copies of that stuff she never gave you? The stuff we never saw, touched or otherwise sullied our lily white consciences with?”

“Everything she gave us went to Pellegrin.”

“How clever of us. And you're in good heart, are you, Sandy? Tail up and all that, given that times are trying and you've got her husband in your guest room?”

“I think so. How about you?” asked Woodrow who for some time, with Gloria's encouragement, had been looking with favor on the growing rift between Coleridge and London, and wondering how best to exploit it.

“Not sure I am in good heart, actually,” Coleridge replied, with more frankness than he had shown to Woodrow in the past. “Not sure at all. In fact, come to think of it, I'm bloody un-sure that I can subscribe to any of it. I can't, in fact. I refuse. So scupper Bernard bloody Pellegrin and all his works. Bugger them in fact. And he's a bloody awful tennis player. I shall tell him.”

On any other day Woodrow might have welcomed such evidence of schism and done his modest best to foment it, but his memories of the hospital were hounding him with a vividness he could not escape, filling him with hostility toward a world that held him prisoner against his will. To walk from the High Commissioner's residence to his own took no more than ten minutes. Along the way he became a moving target for barking dogs, begging children calling “Five shillings, five shillings” as they ran after him, and well-intentioned motorists who slowed down to offer him a lift. Yet by the time he walked into his drive he had relived the most accusing hour of his life.