The Constant Gardener

Tessa Quayle believed in putting her body and her life wherever her convictions led her. She expected others to do the same. When Tessa was confined in the Uhuru Hospital, Nairobi, her very close friend Dr. Arnold Bluhm visited her every day and, according to some reports, most nights as well, even taking a folding bed with him so that he could sleep beside her in the ward.

Woodrow folded the broadsheet and put it in his pocket. "Think I'll just run this round to Porter, if it's all right by you. I can keep it, presumably?"

"All yours, old boy. Comps of the Firm."

Woodrow was moving toward the door but Donohue showed no sign of following him.

"Coming?" Woodrow asked.

"Thought I'd just hang on, if you didn't mind. Say my piece to poor old Justin. Where is he? Upstairs?"

"I thought we agreed you wouldn't do that."

"Did we, old boy? No problem at all. Another time. Your house, your guest. You haven't got Bluhm tucked away too, have you?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

Undeterred, Donohue loped to Woodrow's side, dipping at the knees, making a party piece of it. "Care for a lift? Only round the corner. Save you getting the car out. Too hot to walk."

Still half fearing Donohue might nip back to make another attempt on Justin, Woodrow accepted the lift and watched his car safely over the hill. Porter and Veronica Coleridge were sunning themselves in the garden. Behind them lay the High Commission's Surrey mansion, before them the faultless lawns and weedless flower beds of a rich stockbroker's garden. Coleridge had the swing seat and was reading documents from a despatch case. His blonde wife Veronica, in corn blue skirt and floppy straw hat, was sprawled on the grass beside a padded playpen. Within it, their daughter Rosie rolled to and fro on her back, admiring the foliage of an oak tree through the gaps between her fingers while Veronica hummed to her. Woodrow handed Coleridge the broadsheet and waited for the expletives. None came.

"Who reads this crap?"

"Every hack in town, I would imagine," said Woodrow tonelessly.

"What's their next stop?"

"The hospital," he replied with a sinking heart.

Slumped in a corduroy armchair in Coleridge's study, one ear listening to him trading guarded sentences with his detested superior in London over the digital telephone that Coleridge kept locked inside his desk, Woodrow in the recurrent dream he would not shake off until his dying day watched his white man's body striding at colonial speed through the immense crowded halls of Uhuru Hospital, pausing only to ask anybody in uniform for the right staircase, the right floor, the right ward, the right patient.

"The shit Pellegrin says shove the whole thing under the carpet," Porter Coleridge announced, slamming down the telephone. "Shove it far and fast. Biggest bloody carpet we can find. Typical."

Through the study window, Woodrow watched as Veronica lifted Rosie from her playpen and carried her toward the house. "I thought we were doing that already," he objected, still lost in his reverie.

"What Tessa did in her spare time was her own business. That includes having it off with Bluhm and any noble causes she may have been into. Off the record and only if asked, we respected her crusades but considered them underinformed and screwball. And we don't comment on irresponsible claims by the gutter press." A pause while he wrestled with his self-disgust. "And we're to put it about that she was crazy."

"Why on earth should we do that?" — waking sharply.

"Ours not to reason why. She was unhinged by her dead baby and unstable before it. She went to a shrink in London, which helps. It stinks and I hate it. When's the funeral?"

"Middle of next week is the earliest."

"Can't it be sooner?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"We're waiting for the postmortem. Funerals have to be booked in advance."

"Sherry?"

"No thanks. Think I'll get back to the ranch."

"The Office wants long-suffering. She was our cross but we bore her bravely. Can you do long-suffering?"

"I don't think I can."

"Neither can I. It makes me absolutely fucking sick."

The words had slipped from him so fast, with such subversiveness and conviction, that Woodrow at first doubted whether he had heard them at all.

"The shit Pellegrin says it's a threeline whip," Coleridge continued in a tone of mordant contempt. "No doubters, no defectors. Can you accept that?"

"I suppose so."

"Well done, you. I'm not sure I can. Any outside representations she made anywhere — he and Bluhm — together or separately — to anyone, including you or me — any bees she had in her bonnet — about matters animal, vegetable, political or pharmaceutical — " a long unbearable pause while Coleridge's eyes rested on him with the fervor of a heretic enjoining him to treason — "are outside our bailiwick and we know absolutely and completely fuck all about them. Have I made myself clear or would you like me to write it on the wall in secret ink?"

"You've made yourself clear."

"Because Pellegrin made himself clear, you see. Unclear he was not."