The Constant Gardener

And it was at this point, visiting her parents in Tanzania, that she decided, again on impulse, to apply for local employment by the British High Commission, and to look for advancement once she was accepted. And if she had not done this she would never have met Tessa. She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to — even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites — but, above all, an inherited belief, derived from both her parents and entrenched by Tessa, that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. Which brought her back to the largest question of them all. She had loved Tessa, she had loved Bluhm, she loved Justin still and, if she was truthful, a little more than was proper or comfortable or whatever the word was. And the fact that she was working for the system did not oblige her to accept the system's lies, as she had heard them only yesterday from Woodrow's mouth. On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the system back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth. Which explained to Ghita's total satisfaction what she was doing here and why. "Better to be inside the system and fighting it," her father — an iconoclast in other ways — would say, "than outside the system, howling at it."

And Tessa, which was the wonderful thing, had said exactly the same.

The Beechcraft shook itself like an old dog and lurched forward, bumping laboriously into the air. Through her tiny window Ghita saw all Africa spread itself below her: slum cities, herds of running zebras, the flower farms of Lake Naivasha, the Aberdares, Mount Kenya faintly painted on the far horizon. And joining them like a sea, the endless tracts of misted brown bush scribbled over with pocks of green. The plane entered rain cloud, a brown dusk filled the cabin. Scorching sunlight replaced it, and was accompanied by an almighty explosion from somewhere out to Ghita's left. Without warning the plane rolled on its side. Lunch boxes, rucksacks and Ghita's travel bag skeltered across the gangway to a chorus of alarm bells and sirens and a flashing of red lights. Nobody spoke except for one old African man, who let out a peal of laughter and bellowed, "We love you, Lord, and don't you go forgettin' that," to the relief and nervous merriment of the other passengers. The plane had still not righted itself. The engine note dropped to a murmur. The African copilot with side-whiskers had found a handbook and was consulting a checklist while Ghita tried to read it over his shoulder. The rawhide captain turned in his seat to address his craven passengers. His sloped, leathern mouth matched the angle of the plane's wings.

"As you may have noticed, ladies and gentlemen, one engine has cracked up," he said drily. "Which means we're going to have to go back to Wilson and pick up another of these things."

And I'm not afraid, Ghita noted, pleased with herself. Until Tessa died, things like this happened to other people. Now they're happening to me, and I can handle them.

Four hours later, she was standing on the tarmac at Lokichoggio.

* * *

"You Ghita?" an Australian girl yelled over the roar of engines and other people's shouted greetings. "I'm Judith. Hi!"

She was tall and red-cheeked and happy and wore a man's curly brown trilby and a T-shirt proclaiming the United Tea Services of Ceylon. They embraced, spontaneous friends in a wild roaring place. White U.N. cargo planes were taking off and landing, white lorries shunted and thundered, and the sun was a furnace, and the heat of it leaped up at her from the runway and the fumes of aircraft fuel shimmered in her eyes and dazzled her. With Judith to guide her, she squeezed herself into the back of a jeep amid sacks of mail to sit beside a sweating Chinese man in a dog collar and a black suit. Jeeps hurtled past them in the opposite direction, pursued by a convoy of white lorries headed for the cargo planes.

"She was a real nice lady!" Judith shouted from the passenger seat in front of her. "Very dedicated!" She was evidently talking about Tessa. "Why would anybody want to arrest Arnold? They're just plain stupid! Arnold wouldn't squash a fly. You're booked three nights, right? Only we got a bunch of nutritionists coming in from Uganda!"

Judith is here to feed the living not the dead, thought Ghita as the jeep clattered through a gateway and joined a strip of hard road. They drove past a camp followers' shantytown of bars, stalls and a facetious notice saying Piccadilly This Way. Tranquil brown hills rose ahead of them. Ghita said she'd love to walk up there. Judith said if she did she'd never come back.

"Animals?"

"People."