The Constant Gardener

"I take your point. I hear you. But for heaven's sake — in the name of sanity — you can't seriously be suggesting that HMG in the person of Bernard Pellegrin should be conducting a witch hunt against named ministers of the Kenyan government! I mean, my God — it's not as if we Brits were above corruption ourselves. Is the Kenyan High Commissioner in London about to tell us to clean up our act?"

"Sheer bloody humbug and you know it," Tessa snaps, eyes flaming.

He has not reckoned with Mustafa. He enters silently, at the stoop. First with great accuracy he sets a small table midway between them on the carpet, then a silver tray with a silver coffeepot and her late mother's silver sweetmeat basket filled with shortbread. And the intrusion clearly stimulates Tessa's ever-present sense of theater, for she kneels upright before the little table, shoulders back, dress stretched across her breasts while she punctuates her speech with humorously barbed inquiries about his tastes.

"Was it black, Sandy, or just a touch of the cream? — I forget," she asks with mock gentility. This is the Pharisaic life we lead — she is telling him — a continent lies dying at our door, and here we stand or kneel drinking coffee off a silver tray while just down the road children starve, the sick die and crooked politicians bankrupt the nation that was tricked into electing them. "A witch-hunt — since you mention it — would make an excellent beginning. Name 'em, shame 'em, chop their heads off and spike 'em on the city gates, says I. The trouble is, it doesn't work. The same List of Shame is published every year in the Nairobi newspapers, and the same Kenyan politicians feature in it every time. Nobody is sacked, nobody is hauled up before the courts." She hands him a cup, swiveling on her knees to reach him. "But it doesn't bother you, does it? You're a status quo man. That's a decision you've taken. It hasn't been thrust upon you. You took it. You, Sandy. You looked in the mirror one day and you thought: Hullo, me, from now on I'll treat the world as I find it. I'll get the best deal I can for Britain, and I'll call it my duty. Never mind if it's a duty that accounts for the survival of some of the foulest governments on the globe. I'll do it anyway." She offers him sugar. He silently declines it. "So I'm afraid we can't agree, can we? I want to speak up. You want me to bury my head where yours is. One woman's duty is another man's cop-out. What's new?"

"And Justin?" Woodrow asks, playing his last useless card. "Where does he come into this, I wonder?"

She stiffens, sensing a trap. "Justin is Justin," she replies warily. "He has made his choices as I have made mine."

"And Bluhm's Bluhm, I suppose," Woodrow sneers, driven by jealousy and anger to speak the name he has promised himself he will on no account utter. And she, apparently, has sworn not to hear it. By some bitter inner discipline she keeps her lips tightly closed while she waits for him to make an even bigger fool of himself. Which he duly does. Royally. "You don't think you're prejudicing Justin's career, for instance?" he inquires haughtily.

"Is that why you came to see me?"

"Basically, yes."

"I thought you'd come here to save me from myself. Now it turns out you've come to save Justin from me. How very laddish of you."

"I had imagined Justin's interests and yours were identical."

A taut, humorless laugh, as her anger returns. But unlike Woodrow she does not lose her self-control. "Good heavens, Sandy, you must be the only person in Nairobi who imagines any such thing!" She stands up, the game over. "I think you'd better go now. People will begin to talk about us. I won't send you more documents, you'll be relieved to hear. We can't have you wearing out the High Commissioner's shredder, can we? You might lose promotion points."

Reliving this scene as he had relived it repeatedly in the twelve months since it had taken place, feeling again his humiliation and frustration and her scornful gaze burning his back as he took his leave, Woodrow surreptitiously pulled open a slim drawer of the inlaid table that her mother had loved and swept his hand round the inside, gathering together anything he found. I was drunk, I was mad, he told himself in extenuation of this act. I had a craving to do something rash. I was trying to bring the roof tumbling round my head so that I would see clear sky.