The Constant Gardener

One thought he had — probably because the car was moving at a snail's pace — was that it was Ham, driving at his habitual five miles an hour below the speed limit, come to announce that Justin's letters to the ferocious aunt in Milan had been safely received, and that Tessa's great injustice would shortly be righted on the lines of her oft-stated conviction that the system must be forced to mend its own ways from within. Then he thought: It's not a car at all, I've got it wrong. It's a small plane. Then the sound stopped altogether, which almost succeeded in convincing him it had been an illusion in the first place — that he was hearing Tessa's jeep, for instance, and any second it was going to pull up just above him on the road there and she was going to hop out wearing both Mephisto boots, and come skipping down the slope to congratulate him on taking over where she'd left off. But it wasn't Tessa's jeep, it didn't belong to anyone he knew. What he was looking at was the elusive shape of a long-wheelbase jeep or four-track — no, safari truck — either dark blue or dark green, in the fast-vanishing light it was hard to tell, and it had stopped in exactly the spot where he had just been watching Tessa. And although he had been expecting something of the kind ever since he had returned to Nairobi — even in a remote way wishing for it, and had therefore regarded Donohue's warning to him as superfluous — he greeted the sight with an extraordinary sense of exultation, not to say completion. He had met her betrayers, of course — Pellegrin, Woodrow, Lorbeer. He had rewritten her scandalously discarded memorandum for her — if in a piecemeal form, but that couldn't be avoided. And now, it seemed, he was about to share with her the last of all her secrets.

A second truck had pulled up behind the first. He heard light footsteps and made out the fast-moving shapes of fit men in bulky clothes crouching at the run. He heard a man or woman whistle and an answering whistle from behind him. He imagined, and perhaps it was true, that he caught a whiff of Sportsman cigarette smoke. The darkness grew suddenly deeper as lights came on around him and the brightest of them picked him out, and held him in its beam.

He heard a sound of feet sliding down white rock.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Let me rush to the protection of the British High Commission in Nairobi. It is not the place I described, for I have never been inside it. It is not staffed by the people I have described, for I have never met nor spoken to them. I met the High Commissioner a couple of years back, and we had a ginger beer together on the veranda of the Norfolk Hotel and that was all. He bears not the least resemblance, externally or otherwise, to my Porter Coleridge. As to poor Sandy Woodrow — well, if there were a Head of Chancery at all in the British High Commission in Nairobi as I write, you may be sure he would be a diligent and upstanding man or woman who never covets a colleague's spouse or destroys inconvenient documents. But there isn't. Heads of Chancery in Nairobi, as in many other British missions, have fallen to the axe of time.

In these dog days when lawyers rule the universe, I have to persist with these disclaimers, which happen to be perfectly true. With one exception nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world, whether we are thinking of Woodrow, Pellegrin, Landsbury, Crick, Curtiss and his dreaded House of ThreeBees, or Messrs. Karel Vita Hudson, also known as KVH. The exception is the great and good Wolfgang of the Oasis Lodge, a character so imprinted upon the memory of all who visit him that it would be ridiculous to attempt to create a fictional equivalent. In his sovereignty, Wolfgang raised no objection to my traducing his name and voice.

There is no Dypraxa, never was, never will be. I know of no wonder cure for TB that has recently been launched on the African market or any other — or is about to be — so with luck I shall not be spending the rest of my life in the law courts or worse, though nowadays you can never be sure. But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.

On a happier note, let me warmly thank those who helped me and are willing to have their names mentioned, as well as others who helped me and for good reasons are not.

Ted Younie, a longtime and compassionate observer of the African scene, first whispered pharmaceuticals in my ear and later purged my text of several solecisms.

Dr. David Miller, a physician with experience of Africa and the Third World, first suggested tuberculosis as the way, and opened my eyes to the costly and sophisticated campaign of seduction waged by pharmaceutical companies against the medical profession.