The Constant Gardener

Driving up the hill and into the darkening trees, Justin thought of nothing and nobody but Guido. Guido was a wounded friend and Justin's one aim was to take him safely home to his mother, and restore his calm and make sure that from here on Guido was going to stop moping, and get on with being a healthy, arrogant little genius of twelve instead of a cripple whose life had ended with Tessa's death. And if, as he suspected, they — whoever they were — had done to Guido's computer what they had done to Ham's and Tessa's, then Guido must be consoled and, so far as it was possible, have his mind set at rest. That was Justin's sole priority, excluding all other aims and emotions, because to entertain them meant anarchy. It meant deflecting himself from the path of rational inquiry and confusing the quest for vengeance with the quest for Tessa.

He parked andwitha sense of last things put his hand under Guido's arm. And Guido, somewhat to Justin's surprise, did not shake himself free. His mother had made a stew with fresh-baked bread that she was proud of, so on Justin's insistence they ate it first, the two of them, and praised it while she kept guard over them. Then Guido fetched his computer from his bedroom and for a while they didn't go on-line, but sat shoulder to shoulder, the two of them, reading Tessa's bulletins about the sleepy lions she had seen on her travels, and the TERRIBLY playful elephants that would have sat on her jeep and squashed it if she had given them half a chance and the really DISDAINFUL giraffes who are NEVER happy unless somebody is admiring their elegant necks.

"You want a disk of all her e-mails?" Guido asked, sensing correctly that Justin had seen as much of this as he could take.

"That would be very kind," said Justin very politely. "Then I want you to make copies of your work so that I can read it at my leisure and write to you: essays, your homework and all the things you would have wanted Tessa to see."

The disks duly made, Guido replaced the telephone flex with the flex attached to the modem, and they watched a fine herd of Thomson's gazelles in full gallop before the screen went dark. But when Guido tried to click back to the desktop he was forced to declare in a husky voice that the hard disk had been wiped clean just like Tessa's, but without that crazy message about clinical trials and toxicity.

"And she didn't send you anything to keep for her," Justin asked, sounding to himself like a customs officer.

Guido shook his head.

"Nothing that you were to pass on to anyone — she didn't use you as a post office or anything like that?"

More shakes of the head.

"So what material have you lost that is important to you?"

"Only her last messages," Guido whispered.

"Well, that makes two of us." Or three if you include Ham, he was thinking. "So if I can handle it, you can. Because I was married to her. OK? Perhaps there was some bug in her machine that infected your machine. Is that possible? She picked something up and passed it on to you by mistake. Yes? I don't know what I'm talking about, do I? I'm guessing. What I'm really telling you is, we'll never know. So we might just as well say "tough luck" and get on with our lives. Both of us. Yes? And you'll order whatever you need to get yourself set up again. Yes? I'll tell the office in Milan that's what you're going to do."

Reasonably confident that Guido was restored, Justin took his leave; which was to say he drove down the hill again to the villa, and parked the jeep in the courtyard where he had found it, and from the oil room carried her laptop to the seashore. He had been told on various training courses, and he was willing to believe, that there were clever people who could retrieve the text from computers supposedly wiped clean. But such people were on the official side of life to which he no longer belonged. It crossed his mind to contact Rob and Lesley somehow and prevail on them to assist him, but he was reluctant to embarrass them. And besides, if he was honest, there was something contaminated about Tessa's computer, something obscene that he would like to be rid of in a physical sense.

By the light of a half-hidden moon, therefore, he walked the length of a rickety jetty, passing on his way an ancient and rather hysterical notice declaring that whoever ventured further did so at their peril. Having reached the jetty's end, he then consigned her raped laptop to the deep before returning to the oil room to write his heart out until dawn.

* * *

Dear Ham,