The Constant Gardener

CHAPTER SEVEN

Perched stiffly in his upgraded seat at the front of the plane, the Gladstone bag above him in the overhead locker, Justin Quayle stared past his reflection into the blackness of space. He was free. Not pardoned, not reconciled, not comforted, not resolved. Not free of the nightmares that told him she was dead, and waking to discover they were true. Not free of the survivor's guilt. Not free of fretting about Arnold. But free at last to mourn in his own way. Free of his dreadful cell. Of the jailers he had learned to detest. Of circling his room like a convict, driven half crazy by the dazzlement of his mind and the squalor of his confinement. Free of the silence of his own voice, of sitting on the edge of his bed asking why? on and on. Free of the shameful moments when he was so low and tired and drained that he almost succeeded in convincing himself that he didn't give a damn, the marriage had been a madness anyway and was over, so be thankful. And if grief, as he had read somewhere, was a species of idleness, then free of the idleness that thought of nothing but its grief.

Free also of his interrogation by the police, when a Justin he didn't recognize strode to the center of the stage and, in a series of immaculately sculpted sentences, laid his burden at the feet of his bemused interrogators — or as much of it as a puzzled instinct told him it was prudent to reveal. They began by accusing him of murder.

"There's a scenario hanging over us here, Justin," Lesley explains apologetically, "and we have to put it to you straightaway, so that you're aware of it, although we know it's hurtful. It's called a love triangle, and you're the jealous husband and you've organized a contract killing while your wife and her lover are as far away from you as possible, which is always good for the alibi. You had them both killed, which was what you wanted for your vengeance. You had Arnold Bluhm's body taken out of the jeep and lost so that we'd think Arnold Bluhm was the killer and not you. Lake Turkana's full of crocodiles, so losing Arnold wouldn't be a problem. Plus there's a nice inheritance coming your way by all accounts, which doubles up the motive."

They are watching him, he is well aware, for signs of guilt or innocence or outrage or despair — for signs of something anyway — and watching him in vain, because, unlike Woodrow, Justin at first does absolutely nothing. He sits groomed and pensive and remote on Woodrow's reproduction carving chair, his fingertips set to the table as if he has just played a chord of music and is listening to it fade away. Lesley is accusing him of murder, yet all she gets is a small frown linking him to his inner world.

"I had rather understood, from the little Woodrow has been good enough to tell me of the progress of your inquiries," Justin objects, more in the plaintive manner of an academic than a grieving husband, "that your prevailing theory was of a random killing, not a planned affair."

"Woodrow's full of shit," says Rob, keeping his voice down in deference to their hostess.

There is no tape recorder on the table yet. The notebooks of many colors lie untouched in Lesley's useful bag. There is nothing to hurry or formalize the occasion. Gloria has brought a tray of tea and, after a lengthy dissertation on the recent demise of her bull terrier, reluctantly departed.

"We found the marks of a second vehicle parked five miles from the scene of the murder," Lesley explains. "It was lying up in a gully southwest of the spot where Tessa was murdered. We found an oil patch, plus the remains of a fire." Justin blinks, as if the daylight is a bit too bright, then politely inclines his head to show he is still listening. "Plus freshly buried beer bottles and cigarette ends," she goes on, laying all this at Justin's door. "When Tessa's jeep drove by, the mystery wagon pulled out behind and tailed it. Then it pulled alongside. One of the front wheels of Tessa's jeep was shot off with a hunting rifle. That doesn't look like a random killing to us."

"More like corporate murder, as we like to call it," Rob explains. "Planned and executed by paid professionals at the behest of a person or persons unknown. Whoever tipped them off knew Tessa's plans inside out."

"And the rape?" Justin inquires with feigned detachment, keeping his eyes fixed on his folded hands.

"Cosmetic or incidental," Rob retorts crisply. "Villains lost their heads or did it with forethought."

"Which brings us back to motive, Justin," Lesley says.

"Yours," says Rob. "Unless you've got a better idea."

Their two faces are trained on Justin's like cameras, one to either side of him, but Justin remains as impervious to their double stare as he is to innuendo. Perhaps in his internal isolation he is not aware of either. Lesley lowers one hand to her useful bag in order to locate the tape recorder, but thinks better of it. The hand remains caught in flagrante, while the rest of her is turned to Justin, to this man of impeccably drafted sentences, this sitting committee of one.

"But I know no killers, you see," he is objecting — pointing out the flaw in their argument as he peers ahead of him with emptied eyes. "I hired nobody, instructed nobody, I'm afraid. I had nothing whatever to do with my wife's murder. Not in the sense you are implying. I did not wish it, I did not engineer it." His voice falters, and strikes an embarrassing kink. "I regret it beyond words."

And this with such finality that for an instant the police officers appear to have nowhere to go, preferring to study Gloria's watercolors of Singapore, which hang in a row across the brick fireplace, each priced at "l199 and NO BLOODY VAT!" each with the same scrubbed sky and palm tree and flock of birds and her name in lettering loud enough to read across the road, plus a date for the benefit of collectors.

Until Rob, who has the brashness, if not the self-assurance of his age, throws up his long thin head and blurts, "So you didn't mind your wife and Bluhm sleeping together, I suppose? A lot of husbands could get a bit ratty about a thing like that." Then snaps his mouth shut, waiting for Justin to do whatever Rob's righteous expectations require deceived husbands to do in such cases: weep, blush, rage against their own inadequacies or the perfidy of their friends. If so, Justin disappoints him.

"That is simply not the point," he replies, with such force that he takes himself by surprise, and sits upright, and peers round him as if to see who has spoken out of turn, and reprimand the fellow. "It may be the point for the newspapers. It may be the point for you. It was never the point for me, and it is not the point now."

"So what is the point?" Rob demands.

"I failed her."

"How? Not up to it, you mean?" — a male sneer — "failed her in the bedroom, did you?"

Justin is shaking his head. "By detaching myself." His voice fell to a murmur. "By letting her go it alone. By emigrating from her in my mind. By making an immoral contract with her. One that I should never have allowed. And nor should she."

"What was that then?" Lesley asks sweet as milk after Rob's deliberate roughness.

"She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction. It should never have been made. It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us. It was like drawing a chalk line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed."

Unfazed by the frankness of these admissions, and the nights and days of self-recrimination suggested by them, Rob makes to challenge him. His lugubrious face is set in the same incredulous sneer, his mouth round and open like the muzzle of a large gun. But Lesley is quicker than Rob today. The woman in her is wide awake and listening to sounds that Rob's aggressively male ear can't catch. Rob turns to her, seeking her permission for something: to challenge him again with Arnold Bluhm perhaps, or with some other telling question that will bring him nearer to the murder. But Lesley shakes her head and, lifting her hand from the region of the bag, surreptitiously pats the air, meaning "slowly, slowly."

"So how did the two of you get together in the first place, anyway?" she asks Justin, as one might ask a chance acquaintance on a long journey.

And this is genius on Lesley's part: to offer him a woman's ear and a stranger's understanding; to call a halt like this, and lead him from his present battlefield to the unthreatened meadows of his past. And Justin responds to her appeal. He relaxes his shoulders, half closes his eyes and in a distant, deeply private tone of recollection tells it the way it was, exactly as he had told it to himself a hundred times in as many tormented hours.

* * *

"So when is a state not a state, in your opinion, Mr. Quayle?" Tessa inquired sweetly, one idle midday in Cambridge four years ago, in an ancient attic lecture room with dusty sunbeams sloping through the skylight. They are the first words she ever addressed to him, and they trigger a burst of laughter from the languid audience of fifty fellow lawyers who, like Tessa, had enrolled themselves for a two-week summer seminar on Law and the Administered Society. Justin repeats them now. How he came to be standing alone on the dais, in a three-piece gray flannel suit by Hayward, clutching a lectern in both hands, is the story of his life so far, he explains, speaking away from both of them, into the fake Tudor recesses of the Woodrow dining room. "Quayle will do it!" some acolyte in the permanent undersecretary's private office had cried, late last night, not eleven hours before the lecture was due to be given. "Get me Quayle!" Quayle the professional bachelor, he meant, postable Quayle, the aging debs' delight, last of a dying breed, thank God, just back from bloody Bosnia and marked for Africa but not yet. Quayle the spare male, worth knowing if you're giving a dinner party and stuck, perfect manners, probably gay — except he wasn't, as a few of the better-looking wives had reason to know, even if they weren't telling.

"Justin, is that you? — Haggarty. You were in College a couple of years ahead of me. Look here, the PUS is delivering a speech at Cambridge tomorrow to a bunch of aspiring lawyers, except he can't. He's got to leave for Washington in an hour — "

And Justin the good chap already talking himself into it with: "Well, if it's already written, I suppose — if it's only a matter of reading it — "

And Haggarty cutting him short with, "I'll have his car and driver standing outside your house at the stroke of nine, not a minute later. The lecture's crap. He wrote it himself. You can sap it up on the way down. Justin, you're a brick."

So here he was, a fellow Etonian brick, having delivered himself of the dullest lecture he had read in his life-patronizing, puffy and verbose like its author, who by now presumably was relaxing in the lap of undersecretarial luxury in Washington, D.C. It had never occurred to him that he would be required to take questions from the floor, but when Tessa piped out hers, it never occurred to him to refuse her. She was positioned at the geometric center of the room, which was where she belonged. Locating her, Justin formed the foolish impression that her colleagues had deliberately left a space round her in deference to her beauty. The high neck of her legal white blouse reached, like a blameless choirgirl's, to her chin. Her pallor and spectral slimness made a waif of her. You wanted to roll her up in a blanket and make her safe. The sunbeams from the skylight shone so brightly on her dark hair that to begin with he couldn't make out the face inside. The most he got was a broad, pale brow, a pair of solemn wide eyes and a fighter's pebble jaw. But the jaw came later. In the meantime she was an angel. What he didn't know, but was about to discover, was that she was an angel with a cudgel.

"Well — I suppose the answer to your question is — " Justin began — "and you must please correct me if you think differently — " bridging the age gap and the gender gap and generally imparting an egalitarian air — "that a state ceases to be a state when it ceases to deliver on its essential responsibilities. Would that be your feeling, basically?"

"Essential responsibilities being what?" the angel-waif rapped back.

"Well — " said Justin again, not certain where he was heading anymore, and therefore resorting to those nonmating signals with which he imagined he was securing protection for himself, if not some kind of outright immunity — "Well — " troubled gesture of the hand, dab of the Etonian forefinger at graying sideburn, down again — "I would suggest to you that, these days, very roughly, the qualifications for being a civilized state amount to — electoral suffrage, ah — protection of life and property — um, justice, health and education for all, at least to a certain level — then the maintenance of a sound administrative infrastructure — and roads, transport, drains, et cetera — and what else is there? — ah yes, the equitable collection of taxes. If a state fails to deliver on at least a quorum of the above — then one has to say that the contract between state and citizen begins to look pretty shaky — and if it fails on all of the above, then it's a failed state, as we say these days. An unstate." Joke. "An ex-state." Another joke, but still no one laughed. "Does that answer your question?"

He had assumed that the angel would require a moment's reflection to ponder this profound reply, and was therefore rattled when, barely allowing him time to bring the paragraph home, she struck again.

"So can you imagine a situation where you personally would feel obliged to undermine the state?"

"I personally? In this country? Oh my goodness me, certainly not," Justin replied, appropriately shocked. "Not when I've just come home." Disdainful laughter from the audience, which was firmly on Tessa's side.

"In no circumstances?"

"None that I can envisage, no."

"How about other countries?"

"Well, I'm not a citizen of other countries, am I?" — the laughter beginning to go his way now — "Believe me, it is really quite enough work trying to speak for one country — " greeted by more laughter, which further heartened him — "I mean more than one is simply not — "

He needed an adjective but she threw her next punch before he found one: a salvo of punches, as it turned out, delivered in a rata-tat to face and body.

"Why do you have to be a citizen of a country before you make a judgment about it? You negotiate with other countries, don't you? You cut deals with them. You legitimize them through trading partnerships. Are you telling us there's one ethical standard for your country and another for the rest? What are you telling us, actually?"

Justin was first embarrassed, then angry. He remembered, a little late, that he was still deeply tired after his recent sojourn in bloody Bosnia and theoretically recuperating. He was reading for an African posting — he assumed, as usual, a gruesome one. He had not come back to Mother England to play whipping boy for some absentee undersecretary, let alone read his lousy speech. And he was damned if Eternally Eligible Justin was going to be pilloried by a beautiful harridan who had cast him as some kind of archetypal chinless wonder. There was more laughter in the air, but it was laughter on a knife edge, ready to fall either way. Very well: if she was playing to the gallery, so would he. Hamming it like the best of them, he raised his sculpted eyebrows and kept them raised. He took a step forward and flung up his hands, palms outward in self-protection.

"Madam," he began — as the laughter swung in his favor. "I think, madam — I very much fear — that you are attempting to lure me into a discussion about my morals."

At which the audience sent up a veritable thunder of applause — everyone but Tessa. The sun that had been shining down on her had disappeared and he could see her beautiful face and it was hurt and fugitive. And suddenly he knew her very well — better in that instant than he knew himself. He understood the burden of beauty and the curse of always being an event, and he realized he had scored a victory that he didn't want. He knew his own insecurities and recognized them at work in her. She felt, by reason of her beauty, that she had an obligation to be heard. She had set out on a dare and it had gone wrong for her, and now she didn't know how to get back to base, wherever base was. He remembered the awful drivel he had just read, and the glib answers he had given, and he thought: She's absolutely right and I'm a pig, I'm worse, I'm a middle-aged Foreign Office smoothie who's turned the room against a beautiful young girl who was doing what was natural to her. Having knocked her down, he therefore rushed to help her to her feet:

"However, if we are being serious for a moment," he announced in an altogether stiffer voice, across the room to her, as the laughter obediently died, "you have put your finger on precisely the issue that literally none of us in the international community knows how to answer. Who are the white hats? What is an ethical foreign policy? All right. Let's agree that what joins the better nations these days is some notion of humanistic liberalism. But what divides us is precisely the question you ask: when does a supposedly humanistic state become unacceptably repressive? What happens when it threatens our national interests? Who's the humanist then? When, in other words, do we press the panic button for the United Nations — assuming they show up, which is another question entirely? Take Chechnya — take Burma-take Indonesia — take three-quarters of the countries in the so-called developing world — "

And so on, and so on. Metaphysical fluff of the worst kind, as he would have been the first to admit, but it got her off the hook. A debate of sorts developed, sides were formed and facile points thrashed out. The meeting overran, and was therefore judged a triumph.

"I'd like you to take me for a walk," Tessa told him as the meeting broke up. "You can tell me about Bosnia," she added, by way of an excuse.

They walked in the gardens of Clare College and, instead of telling her about bloody Bosnia, Justin told her the name of every plant, first name and family name, and how it earned its living. She held his arm and listened in silence except for the odd "Why do they do that?" or "How does that happen?" And this had the effect of keeping him talking, for which he was at first grateful, because talking was his way of putting up screens against people — except that with Tessa on his arm he found himself thinking less of screens than how frail her ankles were inside her modish heavy boots as she set them one after the other along the narrow path they shared. He was convinced she had only to fall forward in them to snap her shinbones. And how lightly she bobbed against him, as if they weren't so much walking as sailing. After the walk they had a late lunch at an Italian restaurant, and the waiters flirted with her, which annoyed him, until it transpired that Tessa was half Italian herself, which somehow made it all right, and incidentally enabled Justin to show off his own Italian, of which he was proud. But then he saw how grave she had become, how pensive, and how her hands faltered, as if her knife and fork were too heavy for her, the way her boots had been in the garden.

"You protected me," she explained, still in Italian, face down inside her hair. "You always will protect me, won't you?"

And Justin, polite to a fault as always, said yes, well, if called upon he would, of course. Or he'd certainly do his best, put it that way. As far as he ever remembered, those were the only words that passed between them during lunch, although later to his amazement she assured him that he talked brilliantly about the threat of future conflict in Lebanon, a place he hadn't thought about for years, and about the Western media's demonization of Islam and the ludicrous posture of Western liberals who did not allow their ignorance to stand in the way of their intolerance; and that she was greatly impressed by how much feeling he brought to this important theme, which again puzzled Justin because so far as he knew he was totally divided on the issue.

But then something was happening to Justin that, to his excitement and alarm, he was unable to control. He had been drawn completely by accident into a beautiful play, and was captivated by it. He was in a different element, acting a part, and the part was the one he had often wanted to play in life, but never till now quite brought off. Once or twice, it was true, he had sensed the onset of a similar sensation, but never with such heady confidence or abandon. And all this while the practiced womanizer in him sent out dire warning signals of the most emphatic kind: abort, this one's trouble, she's too young for you, too real, too earnest, she doesn't know how the game is played.

It made no odds. After lunch, with the sun still shining on them, they went on the river, and he demonstrated to her what all good lovers are supposed to demonstrate to their womenfolk on the Cam — notably, how deft he was, and how polished, and how at ease, balanced up there in his waistcoat on the precarious stern of a punt, wielding a pole and making witty bilingual conversation — which again she swore was what he did, though all he could ever afterward remember was her long waif's body in its white blouse and her horsewoman's black skirt with a slash in it, and her grave eyes watching him with some kind of recognition he could not reciprocate, since he had never in his life been possessed by such a strong attraction or been so helpless in its spell. She asked him where he had learned his gardening, and he replied, "From our gardeners." She asked him who his parents were, and he was obliged to admit — reluctantly, certain it would offend her egalitarian principles — that he was well born and well heeled, and that the gardeners were paid for by his father, who had also paid for a long succession of nannies and boarding schools and universities and foreign holidays, and whatever else was needed to ease his path into the "family firm," which was what his father called the Foreign Office.

But to his relief she seemed to find this a perfectly reasonable description of his provenance, and matched it with a few confidences of her own. She too had been born into privilege, she confessed. But both her parents had died within the last nine months, both from cancer. "So I'm an orphan," she declared, with fake levity, "free to good home." After which they sat apart for a while, still in close communion.

"I've forgotten the car," he told her at some point, as if this in some way put a bar on further business.

"Where did you park it?"

"I didn't. It's got a driver. It's a government car."

"Can't you ring it up?"

And amazingly she had a telephone in her handbag and he had the driver's mobile number in his pocket. So he moored the boat and sat beside her while he told the driver to go back to London on his own, which was like throwing away the compass, an act of shared self-marooning that was lost on neither of them. And after the river she took him back to her rooms and made love to him. And why she did that, and who she thought he was when she did it, and who he thought she was, and who either of them was by the end of that weekend, such mysteries, she told him as she peppered him with kisses at the railway station, would be solved by time and practice. The fact was, she said, she loved him, and everything else would fall into place when they were married. And Justin, in the madness that had seized him, made similar heedless declarations, repeated them and enlarged upon them, all on the wave of the folly that was conveying him — and he let it gladly, even if, in some recess of his consciousness, he knew that each hyperbole would one day have its price.

She made no secret of wanting an older lover. Like many beautiful young women he had known, she was sick of the sight of men her own age. In language that secretly repelled him, she described herself as a tramp, a tart with a heart and a bit of a little devil, but he was too smitten to correct her. The expressions, he later discovered, stemmed from her father, whom he thereafter detested, while taking pains to disguise this from her since she spoke of him as a saint. Her need for Justin's love, she explained, was an unappeasable hunger in her, and Justin could only protest that the same went for him, no question. And at the time he believed himself.

His first instinct, forty-eight hours after returning to London, was to bolt. He had been hit by a tornado, but tornadoes, he knew from experience, did a lot of damage, some of it collateral, and moved on. His posting to an African hellhole, still pending, suddenly looked inviting. His protestations of love alarmed him the more he rehearsed them: this is not true, this is me in the wrong play. He had had a string of affairs and hoped to have a few more — but only on the most contained and premeditated lines, with women as disinclined as he was to abandon common sense for passion. But more cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none. Not in human nature, not in God, not in the future, and certainly not in the universal power of love. Man was vile and evermore would be so. The world contained a small number of reasonable souls of whom Justin happened to be one. Their job, in his simple view, was to head off the human race from its worst excesses — with the proviso that when two sides were determined to blow each other to smithereens, there was precious little a reasonable person could do about it, however ruthless he might be in his efforts to stave off ruthlessness. In the end, the master of lofty nihilism told himself, all civilized men are Canutes these days, and the tide is coming in faster all the time. It was therefore doubly unfortunate that Justin, who regarded any form of idealism with the deepest skepticism, should have involved himself with a young woman who, though delightfully uninhibited in many ways, was unable to cross the road without first taking a moral view. Escape was the only sensible recourse.

But as the weeks went by and he embarked on what was intended to be the delicate process of disengagement, the wonder of what had happened gained ground in him. Little dinners planned for the regretful parting scene turning out instead to be feasts of enchantment followed by ever headier sexual delights. He began to feel ashamed of his secret apostasy. He was amused, not deterred, by Tessa's kooky idealism — and in an untroubled way fired by it. Somebody should feel these things and say them. Until now he had regarded strongly held convictions as the natural enemies of the diplomat, to be ignored, humored or, like dangerous energy, diverted into harmless channels. Now to his surprise he saw them as emblems of courage and Tessa as their standard-bearer.

And with this revelation came a new perception of himself. He was no longer the aging debs' delight, the nimble bachelor forever sidestepping the chains of marriage. He was the droll, adoring father figure to a beautiful young girl, indulging her every whim as the saying goes, letting her have her head anytime she needed it. But her protector nonetheless, her rock, her steadying hand, her adoring elder gardener in a straw hat. Abandoning his plan of escape, Justin set course firmly toward her, and this time — or so he would wish the police officers to believe — he never regretted it, never looked back.

* * *

"Not even when she became an embarrassment to you?" Lesley asks after she and Rob, covertly astonished by his frankness, have sat in respectful silence for the regulation period.

"I told you. There were issues where we stayed apart. I was waiting. Either for her to moderate herself or for the Foreign Office to provide roles for us that were not at odds. The status of wives in the Foreign Service is in constant flux. They can't earn pay in the countries where they're posted. They're obliged to move when their husbands move. One moment they're being offered all the freedoms of the day. The next they're expected to behave like diplomatic geisha."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

"Because she told me."

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

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

"So what changed that?" Lesley asked.

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

"Did she say that?"

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

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

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