The Constant Gardener

"I said, I've been running away from myself all my life!" he was bellowing into the puzzled face of his dancing partner, a busty Danish aid worker called Fitt or Flitt. "Always known what I was running away from, but never had the least idea where I was heading. How about you? I said, how about you?" She laughed and shook her head. "You think I'm mad or drunk, don't you?" he shouted. She nodded. "Well, you're wrong. I'm both!" Chum of Arnold Bluhm's, he remembered. Jesus, what a saga. When on earth will that show end? But he must have pondered this loud enough for her to hear him above the awful din because he saw her eyes go down and heard her say, "Maybe never," with the kind of piety good Catholics reserve for the Pope. Alone again, Woodrow headed upstream toward tables of deafened refugees, huddled together in shell-shocked groups. Time I ate something. He untied his bow tie and let it hang loose.

"Definition of a gentleman, my daddy used to say," he explained to an uncomprehending black Venus. "Chap who ties his own bow tie!"

Ghita had staked a territorial claim at one corner of the dance floor and was twisting pelvises with two jolly African girls from the British Council. Other girls were joining them in a witches' circle and the entire band was standing at the edge of the rostrum, singing yeh, yeh, yeh at them. The girls were slapping each other's palms, then turning round and tipping their bottoms at each other and Christ alone knew what the neighbors were saying up and down the road because Gloria hadn't invited all of them, or the tent would have been knee-deep in gunrunners and dope dealers — a joke Woodrow must have shared with a brace of very big chaps in native rig because they dissolved into hoots of laughter and retold the whole thing to their womenfolk who cracked up too.

Ghita. What the hell's she up to now? It's the Chancery meeting all over again. Every time I look at her she looks away. Every time I look away, she looks at me. It's the damnedest thing I ever saw. And once again Woodrow must have externalized his thoughts because a bore called Meadower from the Muthaiga Club immediately agreed with him, saying that if young people were determined to dance like that, why didn't they just fuck on the dance floor and be done with it? Which as it happened accorded perfectly with Woodrow's opinion, a point he was bellowing into Meadower's ear as he came face to face with Mustafa the black angel, standing square in front of him as if he were trying to stop him passing, except that Woodrow wasn't proposing to go anywhere. Woodrow noticed that Mustafa wasn't carrying anything, which struck him as impertinent. If Gloria out of the goodness of her heart has hired the poor dear man to fetch and carry, why the hell isn't he fetching and carrying? Why's he standing here like my bad conscience, empty-handed except for a folded bit of paper in one hand, mouthing unintelligible words at me like a goldfish?

"Chap says he's got a message for you," Meadower was shouting.

"What?"

"Very personal, very urgent message. Some beautiful girl fallen base-over-bum in love with you."

"Mustafa said that?"

"What?"

"I said, did Mustafa say that?"

"Aren't you going to find out who she is? Probably your wife!" roared Meadower, dissolving in hysterics.

Or Ghita, thought Woodrow, with an absurd leap of hope.

He took half a step away and Mustafa kept alongside him, turning his shoulder into him so that from Meadower's eye line they resembled two men hunched together lighting their cigarettes in the wind. Woodrow held out his hand and Mustafa reverently laid the note onto his palm. Plain A4 paper, folded small.

"Thank you, Mustafa," Woodrow yelled, meaning bugger off.

But Mustafa stood firm, commanding Woodrow with his eyes to read it. All right, damn you, stay where you are. You can't read English anyway. Can't speak it either. He unfolded the paper. Electronic type. No signature.

Dear Sir,

I have in my possession a copy of the letter that you wrote to Mrs. Tessa Quayle inviting her to elope with you. Mustafa will bring you to me. Please tell nobody and come at once, or I shall be forced to dispose of it elsewhere.

No signature.

* * *

With one burst of the riot police's water cannon, it seemed to Woodrow, he had been drenched cold sober. A man on his way to the scaffold thinks of a multitude of things at once and Woodrow, for all that he had a skinful of his own tax-free whisky inside him, was no exception. He suspected that the transaction between Mustafa and himself had not escaped Gloria's attention and he was right: she would never again take her eyes off him at a party. So he threw her a reassuring wave across the room, mouthed something to suggest "no problem" and set himself submissively in Mustafa's wake. As he did so, he caught Ghita's gaze full beam for the first time this evening and found it calculating.