The Constant Gardener

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.