The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER TWO

The Woodrows lived in a suburban house of quarried stone and leaded mock-Tudor windows, one of a colony set in large English gardens in the exclusive hilltop suburb of Muthaiga, a stone's throw from the Muthaiga Club and the British High Commissioner's residence and the ample residences of ambassadors from countries you may never have heard of till you ride the closely guarded avenues and spot their nameplates planted among warnings in kiSwahili of dangerous dogs. In the wake of the bomb attack on Nairobi's U.S. Embassy, the Foreign Office had supplied all staff of Woodrow's rank and upward with crash-proof iron front gates and these were conscientiously manned day and night by shifts of exuberant Baluhya and their many friends and relatives. Round the garden's perimeter, the same inspired minds had provided an electrified fence crowned with coils of razor wire and intruder lights that blazed all night. In Muthaiga there is a pecking order about protection, as there is about many other things. The humblest houses have broken bottles on stone walls, the middle-rankers razor wire. But for diplomatic gentry, nothing less than iron gates, electric fences, window sensors and intruder lights will secure their preservation.

The Woodrow house stood three floors high. The two upper floors comprised what the security companies called a safe haven protected by a folding steel screen on the first landing, to which the Woodrow parents alone had a key. And in the ground-floor guest suite, which the Woodrows called the lower ground because of the slope of the hillside, there was a screen on the garden side to protect the Woodrows from their servants. There were two rooms to the lower ground, both severe and white-painted and, with their barred windows and steel grilles, distinctly prisonlike. But Gloria in anticipation of her guest's arrival had decked them out with roses from the garden and a reading light from Sandy's dressing room, and the staff television set and radio because it would do them good to be without them for a change. It wasn't exactly five-star even then — she confided to her bosom friend Elena, English wife to a softpalmed Greek official at the United Nations — but at least the poor man would have his aloneness, which everybody absolutely had to have when they lost someone, El, and Gloria herself had been exactly the same when Mummy died, but then of course Tessa and Justin did have — well, they did have an unconventional marriage, if one could call it that — though speaking for herself Gloria had never doubted there was real fondness there, at least on Justin's side, though what there was on Tessa's side — frankly, El darling, God alone knows, because none of us ever will.

To which Elena, much divorced and worldly wise where Gloria was neither, remarked, "Well, you just watch your sweet arse, honey. Freshly widowed playboys can be very raunchy."

* * *

Gloria Woodrow was one of those exemplary Foreign Service wives who are determined to see the good side of everything. If there wasn't a good side in sight, she would let out a jolly good laugh and say, "Well, here we all are!" — which was a bugle call to all concerned to band together and shoulder life's discomforts without complaint. She was a loyal old girl of the private schools that had produced her and she sent them regular bulletins of her progress, avidly devouring news of her contemporaries. Each Founder's Feast she sent them a witty telegram of congratulation or, these days, a witty e-mail, usually in verse, because she never wanted them to forget that she had won the school poetry prize. She was attractive in a forthright way, and famously loquacious, especially when there wasn't much to say. And she had that tottery, extraordinarily ugly walk that is affected by Englishwomen of the royal class.

Yet Gloria Woodrow was not naturally stupid. Eighteen years ago at Edinburgh University she had been rated one of the better brains of her year and it was said of her that if she hadn't been so taken up with Woodrow, she would have landed a decent 2:1 in politics and philosophy. However, in the years between, marriage and motherhood and the inconstancies of diplomatic life had replaced whatever ambitions she might have had. Sometimes, to Woodrow's private sadness, she appeared to have deliberately put her intellect to sleep in order to fulfill her wifely role. But he was also grateful to her for this sacrifice, and for the restful way in which she failed to read his inner thoughts, yet pliantly shaped herself to fit his aspirations. "When I want a life of my own, I'll let you know," she would assure him when, seized by one of his bouts of guilt or boredom, he pressed her to take a higher degree, read law, read medicine — or at least read something, for God's sake. "If you don't like me as I am, that's different," she would reply, deftly shifting his complaint from the particular to the general. "Oh but I do, I do, I love you as you are!" he would protest, earnestly embracing her. And more or less he believed himself.

Justin became the secret prisoner of the lower ground on the evening of the same black Monday on which the news of Tessa's death had been brought to him, at the hour when limousines in ambassadorial driveways were starting to champ and stir inside their iron gates before processing toward the evening's mystically elected watering hole. Is it Lumumba Day? Merdeka Day? Bastille Day? Never mind: the national flag will be flying in the garden, the sprinklers will be turned off, the red carpet will be laid out, black servants in white gloves will be hovering, just as they did in the colonial times we all piously disavow. And the appropriate patriotic music will be issuing from the host's marquee.

Woodrow rode with Justin in the black Volkswagen van. From the hospital morgue, Woodrow had escorted him to police headquarters and watched him compose, in his immaculate academic hand, a statement identifying his wife's corpse. From headquarters Woodrow had called ahead to inform Gloria that, traffic permitting, he would be arriving in fifteen minutes with their special guest — "and he'll be keeping his head down, darling, and we've got to make sure it stays that way" — though this did not prevent Gloria from putting through a crash call to Elena, dialing repeatedly till she got her, to discuss menus for dinner — did poor Justin love fish or hate it? she forgot, but she had a feeling he was faddish — and God, El, what on earth do I talk to him about while Sandy's off manning the fort and I'm stuck with the poor man alone for hours on end? I mean all the real subjects are off limits.

"You'll think of something, don't worry, darling," Elena assured her, not altogether kindly.

But Gloria still found time to give Elena a rundown of the absolutely harrowing phone calls she'd taken from the press, and others she'd refused to take, preferring to have Juma, her Wakamba houseboy, say that Mr. or Mrs. Woodrow are not available to come to the telephone at present — except that there was this frightfully well-spoken young man from the Telegraph whom she would have adored to talk to, but Sandy had said no on pain of death.

"Perhaps he'll write, darling," said Elena consolingly.

The Volkswagen van with tinted windows pulled up in the Woodrow driveway, Woodrow sprang out to check for journalists and immediately afterwards Gloria was treated to her first sight of Justin the widower, the man who had lost his wife and baby son in the space of six months, Justin the deceived husband who would be deceived no longer, Justin of the tailored lightweight suit and soft gaze that were habitual to him, her secret fugitive to be hidden in the lower ground, removing his straw hat as he climbed out of the tailgate with his back to the audience, and thanking everybody — which meant Livingston the driver, and Jackson the guard, and Juma who was hovering uselessly as usual — with a distracted bow of his handsome dark head as he moved gracefully along the line of them to the front door. She saw his face first in black shadow, then in the shortlived evening twilight. He advanced on her and said, "Good evening, Gloria, how very good of you to have me," in a voice so bravely mustered that she could have wept and later did.

"We're just so relieved to be able to do anything to help, Justin darling," she murmured, kissing him with cautious tenderness.

"And there's no word of Arnold, one takes it? Nobody rang while we were on the road?"

"I'm sorry, dear, not a peep. We're all on tenterhooks, of course." One takes it, she thought. I'll say one does. Like a hero.

Somewhere in the background Woodrow was advising her in a bereaved voice that he needed another hour in the office, sweet, he'd ring, but she barely bothered with him. Who's he lost? she thought scathingly. She heard car doors clunk and the black Volkswagen drive away but paid it no attention. Her eyes were with Justin, her ward and tragic hero. Justin, she now realized, was as much the victim of this tragedy as Tessa was, because Tessa was dead while Justin had been lumbered with a grief he would have to cart with him to his grave. Already it had grayed his cheeks and changed the way he walked and the things he looked at as he went along. Gloria's cherished herbaceous borders, planted to his specification, passed him by without a glance. So did the rhus and two malus trees he had so sweetly refused to let her pay for. Because it was one of the marvelous things about Justin that Gloria had never really got used to — this to Elena in a lengthy resume the same evening — that he was hugely knowledgeable about plants and flowers and gardens. And I mean, where on earth did that come from, El? His mother probably. Wasn't she half a Dudley? Well, all the Dudleys gardened like mad, they'd done it for eons. Because we're talking classic English botany here, El, not what you read in the Sunday papers.

Ushering her treasured guest up the steps to the front door, across the hall and down the servants' stairs to the lower ground, Gloria gave him the tour of the prison cell that would be home to him for the duration of his sentence: the warped plywood wardrobe for hanging up your suits, Justin — why on earth had she never given Ebediah another fifty shillings and told him to paint it? — the worm-eaten chest of drawers for your shirts and socks — why had she never thought to line it?

But it was Justin, as usual, who was doing the apologizing. "I'm afraid I haven't much in the way of clothes to put in them, Gloria. My house is besieged by newshounds and Mustafa must have taken the phone off the hook. Sandy kindly said he'd lend me whatever I need until it's safe to smuggle something round."

"Oh Justin, how stupid of me," Gloria exclaimed, flushing.

But then, either because she didn't want to leave him, or didn't know how to, she insisted on showing him the awful old fridge crammed with bottles of drinking water and mixers — why had she never had the rotting rubber replaced? — and the ice here, Justin, just run it under the tap to break it up — and the plastic electric kettle that she'd always hated, and the bumblebee pot from Ilfracombe with Tetley tea bags and a crack in it, and the battered Huntley and Palmer's tin of sugared biscuits in case he liked a nibble last thing at night, because Sandy always does, although he's been told to lose weight. And finally — thank God she'd got something right — the splendid vase of many-colored snapdragons that she had raised from seed on his instructions.

"Well, good, I'll leave you in peace then," she said — until, reaching the door, she realized to her shame that she had still not spoken her words of commiseration. "Justin darling — " she began.

"Thanks, Gloria, there's really no need," he cut in with surprising firmness.

Deprived of her tender moment, Gloria struggled to recover a tone of practicality. "Yes, well, you'll come up whenever you want, won't you, dear? Dinner at eight, theoretically. Drinkies before if you feel like it. Just do whatever you wish. Or nothing. Heaven knows when Sandy will be back." After which she went gratefully upstairs to her bedroom, showered and changed and did her face, then looked in on the boys at their prep. Quelled by the presence of death, they were working diligently, or pretending to.

"Does he look terrifically sad?" asked Harry, the younger one.

"You'll meet him tomorrow. Just be very polite and serious with him. Mathilda's making you hamburgers. You'll eat them in the playroom, not the kitchen, understood?" A postscript popped out of her before she had even thought about it: "He's a very courageous fine man, and you're to treat him with great respect."

Descending to the drawing room she was surprised to find Justin ahead of her. He accepted a hefty whisky and soda, she poured herself a glass of white wine and sat in an armchair, actually Sandy's, but she wasn't thinking of Sandy. For minutes — she'd no idea how many in real time — neither of them spoke, but the silence was a bond that Gloria felt more keenly the longer it went on. Justin sipped his whisky, and she was relieved to note that he had not caught Sandy's thoroughly irritating new habit of closing his eyes and pouting as if the whisky had been given him to test. Glass in hand, he moved himself to the French window, looking out into the floodlit garden — twenty 150-watt bulbs hooked up to the house generator, and the blaze of them burning one half of his face.

"Maybe that's what everyone thinks," he remarked suddenly, resuming a conversation they had not had.

"What is, dear?" Gloria asked, not certain she was being addressed, but asking anyway because he clearly needed to talk to someone.

"That you were loved for being someone you weren't. That you're a sort of fraud. A love thief."

Gloria had no idea whether this was something everyone thought, but she had no doubts at all that they shouldn't. "Of course you're not a fraud, Justin," she said stoutly. "You're one of the most genuine people I know, you always were. Tessa adored you and so she should have done. She was a very lucky young girl indeed." As for love thief, she thought-well, no prizes for guessing who did the love thieving in that duo!

Justin did not respond to this glib assurance, or not that she could see, and for a spell all she heard was the chain reaction of barking dogs — one started, then all the others did, up and down Muthaiga's golden mile.

"You were always good to her, Justin, you know you were. You mustn't go castigating yourself for crimes you didn't commit. A lot of people do that when they lose someone, and they're not being fair on themselves. We can't go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute, or we'd never get anywhere. Well, would we? You were loyal to her. Always," she asserted, thereby incidentally implying that the same could not be said for Tessa. And the implication was not lost on him, she was sure of it: he was on the brink of talking about that wretched Arnold Bluhm when to her vexation she heard the clunk of her husband's latchkey in the door and knew the spell was broken.

"Justin, you poor chap, how's it going?" Woodrow cried, pouring himself an unusually modest glass of wine before crashing onto the sofa. "No more news, I'm afraid. Good or bad. No clues, no suspects, not as yet. No trace of Arnold. The Belgians are supplying a helicopter, London's coming up with a second. Money, money, curse of us all. Still, he's a Belgian citizen, so why not? How very pretty you're looking, sweet. What's for dins?"

He's been drinking, Gloria thought in disgust. He pretends to work late and he sits there in his office drinking while I make the boys do their homework. She heard a movement from the window and saw to her dismay that Justin had braced himself to take his leave — scared off, no doubt, by her husband's elephantine flat-footedness.

"No food?" Woodrow protested. "Got to keep your strength up, you know, old boy."

"You are very kind but I fear I have no appetite. Gloria, thank you again. Sandy, goodnight."

"And the Pellegrin sends strong supporting messages from London. Whole Foreign Office struck down with grief, he says. Didn't want to intrude personally."

"Bernard was always very tactful."

She watched the door close, she heard his footsteps descend the concrete staircase, she saw his empty glass resting on the bamboo table beside the French window, and for a frightening moment she was convinced she would never see him again.

Woodrow bolted his dinner clumsily, not tasting it as usual. Gloria, who like Justin had no appetite, watched him. Juma their houseboy, tiptoeing restlessly between them, watched him too.

"How we faring?" Woodrow murmured with a conspiratorial slur, keeping his voice down and pointing at the floor to warn her to do the same.

"Been fine," she said, playing his game. "Considering." What are you doing down there? she wondered. Are you lying on your bed, flailing yourself in the darkness? Or are you staring through your bars into the garden, talking to her ghost?

"Anything of any significance come out?" Woodrow was asking, stumbling a bit on the word "significance" but still contriving to keep their conversation allusive on account of Juma.

"Like what?"

"About our lover boy," he said and, leering shamefully, jabbed a thumb at her begonias and mouthed "bloom," at which Juma hurried off to get a jug of water.

For hours Gloria lay awake beside her snoring husband until, fancying she heard a sound from downstairs, she crept to the landing and peered out of the window. The power cut was over. An orange glow from the city lifted to the stars. But no Tessa lurked in the lighted garden, and no Justin either. She returned to bed to find Harry diagonally asleep with his thumb in his mouth and one arm across his father's chest.

* * *

The family rose early as usual, but Justin was ahead of them, dressed in his crushed suit and hovering. He looked flushed, she thought, a little overbusy, too much color under the brown eyes. The boys shook his hand, gravely as instructed, and Justin meticulously returned their greetings.

"Oh Sandy, yes, good morning," he said as soon as Woodrow appeared. "I wondered whether we might have a quick word."

The two men withdrew to the sun lounge.

"It's about my house," Justin began, as soon as they were alone.

"House here or house in London, old boy?" Woodrow countered in a fatuous effort to be cheerful. And Gloria, listening to every word through the serving hatch to the kitchen, could have brained him.

"Here in Nairobi. Her private papers, lawyers' letters. Her family-trust material. Documents that are precious to both of us. I can't leave her personal correspondence sitting there for the Kenyan police to plunder at will."

"So what's the solution, old boy?"

"I'd like to go there. At once."

So firm! Gloria rhapsodized. So forceful, in spite of everything!

"My dear chap, that's impossible. The hacks would eat you alive."

"I don't believe that's true, actually. They can try and take my photograph, I suppose. They can shout at me. If I don't reply to them, that's about as far as they can go. Catch them while they're shaving."

Gloria knew her husband's prevarications inside out. In a minute he'll call Bernard Pellegrin in London. That's what he always does when he needs to bypass Porter Coleridge and get the answer he wants to hear.

"Look here, tell you what, old boy. Why not write me a list of what you want and I'll pass it to Mustafa somehow and have him bring the stuff here?"

Typical, thought Gloria furiously. Dither, haver, look for the easy way out every time.

"Mustafa would have no idea what to select," she heard Justin reply, as firmly as before. "And a list would be no good to him at all. Even shopping lists defeat him. I owe it to her, Sandy. It's a debt of honor and I must discharge it. Whether or not you come along."

Class will out! Gloria applauded silently from her touchline. Well played, that man! But even then it did not occur to her, though her mind was opening up in all sorts of unexpected directions, that her husband might have his own reasons for wishing to visit Tessa's house.

* * *

The press were not shaving. Justin had that wrong. Or if they were, they were doing it on the grass verges outside Justin's house, where they had been camping all night in hire cars, dumping their garbage in the hydrangea bushes. A couple of African vendors in Uncle Sam pants and top hats had opened a tea stand. Others were cooking maize on charcoal. Lackluster policemen hung around a beaten-up patrol car, yawning and smoking cigarettes. Their leader, an enormously fat man in a polished brown belt and gold Rolex, was sprawled in the front passenger seat with his eyes shut. It was half past seven in the morning. Low cloud cut off the city. Large blackbirds were changing places on the overhead wires, waiting for their moment to swoop for food.

"Drive past, then stop," Woodrow the soldier's son ordered from the back of the van.

It was the same arrangement as the day before: Livingstone and Jackson up front, Woodrow and Justin hunkered on the rear seat. The black Volkswagen had CD plates but so had every second vehicle in Muthaiga. An informed eye might have spotted the British prefix to the license number, but no such eye was present, nobody showed any interest as Livingstone drove sedately past the gates and up the gentle slope. Easing the van to a halt, he put on the hand brake.

"Jackson, get out of the van, walk slowly down the hill to the gates of Mr. Quayle's house. What's the name of your gatekeeper?" This to Justin.

"Omari," Justin said.

"Tell Omari that as the van approaches he is to open the gates at the last minute, and close them as soon as it's through. Stay with him to make sure he does exactly what he's told. Now."

Born to the part, Jackson clambered out of the van, stretched, fiddled with his belt and finally ambled down the hill to Justin's iron security gates where, under the eye of police and journalists, he took up a place beside Omari.

"All right, back down," Woodrow ordered Livingstone. "Very slowly. Take your time."

Livingstone released the hand brake and, with the engine still running, allowed the van to curl gently backward down the slope until the tailgate was tucked into the opening to Justin's drive. He's turning round, they may have thought. If so, they can't have thought it long, because in the next moment he had slammed down the accelerator and was racing backwards to the gates, scattering astonished journalists to left and right of him. The gates flew open, pulled on one side by Omari and on the other by Jackson. The van passed through, the gates slammed shut again. Jackson on the house side leaped back into the van while Livingstone kept it rolling all the way to Justin's porch and up the two steps, to rest inches from the front door, which Justin's houseboy Mustafa, with exemplary prescience, flung open from inside while Woodrow bundled Justin ahead of him, then sprang after him into the hall, slamming the front door shut behind them as he went.

* * *

The house was in darkness. Out of respect for Tessa or the newshounds, the staff had drawn the curtains. The three men stood in the hall, Justin, Woodrow, Mustafa. Mustafa was weeping silently. Woodrow could make out his crumpled face, the grimace of white teeth, the tears set wide on the cheeks, almost underneath the ears. Justin was holding Mustafa's shoulders, comforting him. Startled by this un-English demonstration of affection on Justin's part, Woodrow was also offended by it. Justin drew Mustafa against him until Mustafa's clenched jaw rested on his shoulder. Woodrow looked away in embarrassment. Down the passage other shadows had appeared from the servants' area: the one-armed illegal Ugandan shamba boy who helped Justin in the garden and whose name Woodrow had never managed to retain, and the illegal South Sudanese refugee called Esmeralda who was always having boy trouble. Tessa could no more resist a sob story than she could bow to local regulations. Sometimes her household had resembled a pan-African hostel for disabled down-and-outs. More than once, Woodrow had remonstrated with Justin on the subject but met a blank wall. Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishness or indifference. Woodrow knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This is how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

Gently pushing Mustafa away, Justin received Esmeralda in a double handshake during which she laid the side of her braided forehead against his. Woodrow had the sensation of being admitted to a circle of affection he had not dreamed of. Would Juma weep like this if Gloria got her throat cut? Like hell he would. Would Ebediah? Would Gloria's new maid, whatever her name is? Justin pressed the Ugandan outdoor boy against him, fondled his cheek, then turned his back on all of them and with his right hand took a grasp of the handrail on the staircase. Looking for a moment like the old man he soon would be, he began hauling himself upward. Woodrow watched him gain the shadows of the landing and vanish into the bedroom Woodrow had never entered, though he had imagined it in countless furtive ways.

Finding he was alone, Woodrow hovered, feeling threatened, which was how he felt whenever he entered her house: a country boy come to town. If it's a cocktail party, why don't I know these people? Whose cause are we being asked to espouse tonight? Which room will she be in? Where's Bluhm? At her side, most likely. Or in the kitchen, reducing the servants to paroxysms of helpless laughter. Remembering his purpose, Woodrow edged his way along the twilit corridor to the drawing room door. It was unlocked. Blades of morning sunlight thrust their way between the curtains, illuminating the shields and masks and frayed handwoven throw rugs made by paraplegics, with which Tessa had succeeded in enlivening her dreary government furnishings. How did she make everything so pretty with this junk? The same brick fireplace as ours, the same boxed-in iron girders masquerading as oak beams of Merrie England. Everything like ours but smaller, because the Quayles were childless and a rank lower. Then why did Tessa's house always seem to be the real thing, and ours its unimaginative ugly sister?

He reached the middle of the room and stopped, arrested by the power of memory. This is where I stood and lectured her, the contessa's daughter, from beside this pretty inlaid table that she said her mother had loved, while I clutched the back of this flimsy satinwood chair and pontificated like a Victorian father. Tessa standing over there in front of the window, and the sunlight cutting straight through her cotton dress. Did she know that I was talking to a naked silhouette? That just to look at her was to see my dream of her come true, my girl on a beach, my stranger on a train?

"I thought the best thing I could do was call by," he begins sternly.

"Now why did you think that, Sandy?" she asks.

Eleven in the morning. Chancery meeting over, Justin safely dispatched to Kampala, attending some useless three-day conference on Aid and Efficiency. I have come here on official business, but I have parked my car in a side street like a guilty lover calling on a brother officer's beautiful young wife. And God, is she beautiful. And God, is she young. Young in the high, sharp breasts that never move. How can Justin let her out of his sight? Young in the gray, wide-angry eyes, in the smile too wise for her age. Woodrow can't see the smile because she is backlit. But he can hear it in her voice. Her teasing, foxing, classy voice. He can retrieve it in his memory anytime. As he can retrieve the line of her waist and thighs in the naked silhouette, the maddening fluidity of her walk, no wonder she and Justin fell for one another — they're from the same thoroughbred stable, twenty years apart.

"Tess, honestly, this can't go on."

"Don't call me Tess."

"Why not?"

"That name's reserved."

Who by? he wonders. Bluhm, or another of her lovers? Quayle never called her Tess. Nor did Ghita, as far as Woodrow knew.

"You simply can't go on expressing yourself so freely. Your opinions."

And then the passage he has prepared in advance, the one that reminds her of her duty as the responsible wife of a serving diplomat. But he never reaches the end of it. The word "duty" has stung her into action.

"Sandy, my duty is to Africa. What's yours?"

He is surprised to have to answer for himself. "To my country, if you'll allow me to be pompous. As Justin's is. To my Service and my Head of Mission. Does that answer you?"

"You know it doesn't. Not nearly. It's miles off."

"How would I know anything of the kind?"

"I thought you might have come to talk to me about the riveting documents I gave you."

"No, Tessa, I did not. I came here to ask you to stop shooting your mouth off about the misdoings of the Moi government in front of every Tom, Dick and Harry in Nairobi. I came here to ask you to be one of the team for a change, instead of — oh, finish the sentence for yourself," he ends rudely.

Would I have talked to her like that if I'd known she was pregnant? Probably not so baldly. But I would have talked to her. Did I guess that she was pregnant while I tried not to notice her naked silhouette? No. I was wanting her beyond bearing, as she could tell by the altered state of my voice and the stiltedness of my movements.

"So you mean you haven't read them?" she says, sticking determinedly to the subject of the documents. "You'll be telling me in a minute that you haven't had time."

"Of course I've read them."

"And what did you make of them when you'd read them, Sandy?"

"They tell me nothing I don't know, and nothing I can do anything about."

"Now Sandy, that's very negative of you. It's worse. It's pusillanimous. Why can't you do anything about them?"

Woodrow, hating how he sounds: "Because we are diplomats and not policemen, Tessa. The Moi government is terminally corrupt, you tell me. I never doubted it. The country is dying of AIDS, it's bankrupt, there is not a corner of it, from tourism to wildlife to education to transport to welfare to communications, that isn't falling apart from fraud, incompetence and neglect. Well observed. Ministers and officials are diverting lorry-loads of food aid and medical supplies earmarked for starving refugees, sometimes with the connivance of aid agency employees, you say. Of course they are. Expenditure on the country's health runs at five dollars per head per year and that's before everybody from the top of the line to the bottom has taken his cut. The police routinely mishandle anybody unwise enough to bring these matters to public attention. Also true. You have studied their methods. They use water torture, you say. They soak people, then beat them, which reduces visible marks. You are right. They do. They are not selective. And we do not protest. They also rent out their weapons to friendly murder gangs, to be returned by first light or you don't get your deposit back. The High Commission shares your disgust, but still we do not protest. Why not? Because we are here, mercifully, to represent our country, not theirs. We have thirty-five thousand indigenous Britons in Kenya whose precarious livelihood depends on President Moi's whim. The High Commission is not in the business of making life harder for them than it already is."

"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 witch hunt 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.