The Constant Gardener

"No. He wouldn't be."

"Did we keep copies of that stuff she never gave you? The stuff we never saw, touched or otherwise sullied our lily white consciences with?"

"Everything she gave us went to Pellegrin."

"How clever of us. And you're in good heart, are you, Sandy? Tail up and all that, given that times are trying and you've got her husband in your guest room?"

"I think so. How about you?" asked Woodrow who for some time, with Gloria's encouragement, had been looking with favor on the growing rift between Coleridge and London, and wondering how best to exploit it.

"Not sure I am in good heart, actually," Coleridge replied, with more frankness than he had shown to Woodrow in the past. "Not sure at all. In fact, come to think of it, I'm bloody un-sure that I can subscribe to any of it. I can't, in fact. I refuse. So scupper Bernard bloody Pellegrin and all his works. Bugger them in fact. And he's a bloody awful tennis player. I shall tell him."

On any other day Woodrow might have welcomed such evidence of schism and done his modest best to foment it, but his memories of the hospital were hounding him with a vividness he could not escape, filling him with hostility toward a world that held him prisoner against his will. To walk from the High Commissioner's residence to his own took no more than ten minutes. Along the way he became a moving target for barking dogs, begging children calling "Five shillings, five shillings" as they ran after him, and well-intentioned motorists who slowed down to offer him a lift. Yet by the time he walked into his drive he had relived the most accusing hour of his life.

* * *

There are six beds in the ward at the Uhuru Hospital, three to either wall. None has sheets or pillows. The floor is concrete. There are skylights but they are unopened. It is winter, but no breeze passes through the room, and the stench of excreta and disinfectant is so fierce that Woodrow seems to ingest as well as smell it. Tessa lies in the middle bed of the left-hand wall, breast-feeding a child. He sees her last, deliberately. The beds either side of her are empty except for perished sheets of rubber buttoned to the mattresses. Across the room from her, one very young woman huddles on her side, her head flat on the mattress, one bare arm dangling. A teenaged boy crouches on the floor close beside her, his wide beseeching gaze turned unflinchingly to her face as he fans it with a piece of cardboard. Next to them a dignified old woman with white hair perches sternly upright reading a mission Bible through hornrimmed spectacles. She wears a kanga cloth of cotton, the type sold to tourists as a cover-up. Beyond her, a woman with earphones scowls at whatever she is hearing. Her face is etched in pain, and deeply devout. All this Woodrow takes in like a spy, while out of the corner of his eye he watches Tessa and wonders whether she has seen him.

But Bluhm has seen him. Bluhm's head has lifted as soon as Woodrow steps awkwardly into the room. Bluhm has risen from his place at Tessa's bedside, then stooped to whisper something in her ear, before coming silently toward him to take his hand and murmur, "Welcome," man to man. Welcome to what precisely? Welcome to Tessa, courtesy of her lover? Welcome to this reeking hellhole of lethargic suffering? But Woodrow's only response is a reverent, "Good to see you, Arnold," as Bluhm slips discreetly into the corridor.