The Constant Gardener

Here's the first of what I hope will be a long line of letters to your kind aunt. I don't want to appear maudlin but if I go under a bus I would like you please to hand all the documents personally to the most bloody-minded, unclubbable member of your profession, pay him the earth and start the ball rolling. That way we'll both be doing Tessa a good turn. As ever, Justin

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Until late into the evening, when the whisky finally got the better of him, Sandy Woodrow had remained loyally at his post in the High Commission, shaping, redrafting and honing his forthcoming performance at tomorrow's Chancery meeting; passing it upward into the hierarchy of his official mind, then downward into that other mind that, like an erratic counterweight, dragged him without warning through a bedlam of accusing ghosts, forcing him to shout louder than they did: you do not exist, you are a series of random episodes; you are not related in any way to Porter Coleridge's abrupt departure for London with wife and child, on the questionable grounds that they had decided on the spur of the moment to take some home leave and find Rosie a special school.

And sometimes his thoughts had gone off on their own entirely, to be discovered addressing such subversive matters as divorce by mutual consent, and whether Ghita Pearson or that new girl called Tara Something in Commercial Section would make an appropriate life partner and, if so, which of them the boys would prefer. Or whether after all he was better off living this lone-wolf existence, dreaming of connection, finding none, watching the dream slip further and further from his reach. Driving home with locked doors and closed windows, however, he was able once more to see himself as the loyal family breadwinner and husband — all right, still discreetly open to suggestions, and what man wasn't? — but ultimately the same decent, stalwart, levelheaded soldier's son that Gloria had fallen head over heels in love with all those years ago. As he entered his house, he was therefore surprised, not to say hurt, to discover that Gloria had not by some act of telepathy divined his good intentions and waited up for him, but left him instead to forage for food in the refrigerator. After all, dammit, I am acting High Commissioner, I'm entitled to a little respect, even in my own house.

"Anything on the news?" he called up to her pathetically, eating his cold beef in unstately solitude.

The dining room ceiling, which was one plank of concrete thin, was also the floor to their bedroom.

"Don't you get news at the shop?" Gloria bawled back.

"We don't sit there listening to the radio all day, if that's what you mean," Woodrow replied, rather suggesting that Gloria did. And again waited, his fork poised halfway to his lips.

"They've killed two more white farmers in Zimbabwe, if that's news," Gloria announced, after an apparent breakdown in transmission.

"Don't I know it! We've had the Pellegrin on our backs the whole damn day. Why can't we persuade Moi to put the brakes on Mugabe, if you please? For the same reason we can't persuade Moi to put the brakes on Moi, is the answer to that one." He waited for a "Poor you, darling," but all he got was cryptic silence.

"Nothing else?" he asked. "On the news. Nothing else?"

"What should there be?"

Hell's come over the bloody woman? he marveled sulkily, pouring himself another glass of claret. Never used to be like this. Ever since her widowed lover boy took himself back to England, she's been moping round the house like a sick cow. Won't drink with me, won't eat with me, won't look me in the eye. Won't do the other thing either, not that it was ever high on her list. Hardly bothers with her makeup, amazingly.

All the same, he was pleased she had heard no news. At least he knew something she didn't for once. Not often London manages to sit on a red-hot story without some idiot in Information Department bubbling it to the media ahead of the agreed deadline. If they could just hold their water till tomorrow morning he'd get a clear run, which was what he'd asked Pellegrin for.

"It's a morale issue, Bernard," he'd warned him, in his best military tone. "Couple of people here are going to take it rather badly. I'd like to be the one to break it to them. Particularly with Porter away."