The Constant Gardener

The soldier's son was debating with himself, and he was doing so with the glacial calculation that in crisis was his muse, while in his memory he was following the scene in the crowded hospital as if it had happened to someone else. Tessa is carrying a tapestry bag with cane handles. It is the first time he has seen it, but from now on and for the rest of her short life it is part of the tough image that she had formed of herself while she was lying in hospital with her dead baby in the morgue and a dying woman in the bed opposite her and the dying woman's baby at her breast. It goes with the less makeup and the shorter hair and the glower that is not so very different from the disbelieving stare that Lesley was bestowing on him this minute, while she waited for his edited version of the event. The light, as everywhere in the hospital, is fickle. Huge shafts of sunlight bisect the half dark of the interior. Small birds glide among the rafters. Tessa is standing with her back against a curved wall, next to an ill — smelling coffee shop with orange chairs. There is a crowd milling in and out of the sunbeams but he sees her immediately. She is holding the tapestry bag in both hands across her lower belly and standing the way tarts used to stand in doorways when he was young and scared. The wall is in shadow because the sunbeams don't reach the edges of the room and perhaps that's why Tessa has chosen this particular spot.

"You said you would listen to me when I was stronger," she reminds him in a low, harsh voice he scarcely recognizes.

It is the first time they have spoken since his visit to the ward. He sees her lips, so fragile without the discipline of lipstick. He sees the passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.

"The meeting you are referring to was not social," he told Rob, avoiding Lesley's unrelenting gaze. "It was professional. Tessa claimed to have stumbled on some documents which, if genuine, were politically sensitive. She asked me to meet her at the clinic so that she could hand them over."

"Stumbled how?" asked Rob.

"She had outside connections. That's all I know. Friends in the aid agencies."

"Such as Bluhm?"

"Among others. It was not the first time she had approached the High Commission with stories of high scandal, I should add. She made quite a habit of it."

"By High Commission, you mean you?"

"If you mean me in my capacity as Head of Chancery, yes."

"Why didn't she give them to Justin to hand over?"

"Justin must remain out of the equation. That was her determination, and presumably his." Was he explaining too much, another peril? He plunged on. "I respected that in her. To be frank, I respected any sign of scruple in her at all."

"Why didn't she give them to Ghita?"

"Ghita is new and young and locally employed. She would not have been a suitable messenger."

"So you met," Lesley resumed. "At the hospital. In the anteroom to the postnatal clinic. Wasn't that a rather conspicuous meeting place: two whites among all those Africans?"

You've been there, he thought, with another lurch into near-panic. You've visited the hospital. "It wasn't Africans she was afraid of. It was whites. She was not to be reasoned with. When she was among Africans she felt safe."

"Did she say that?"

"I deduced it."

"What from?" — Rob.

"Her attitude during those last months. After the baby. To me, to the white community. To Bluhm. Bluhm could do no wrong. He was African and handsome and a doctor. And Ghita's half Indian" — a little wildly.

"How did Tessa make the appointment?" Rob asked.

"Sent a note to my house, by hand of her houseboy Mustafa."

"Did your wife know you were meeting her?"

"Mustafa gave the note to my houseboy, who passed it to me."

"And you didn't tell your wife?"

"I regarded the meeting as confidential."

"Why didn't she phone you?"

"My wife?"

"Tessa."

"She distrusted diplomatic telephones. With reason. We all do."

"Why didn't she simply send the documents with Mustafa?"

"There were assurances she required of me. Guarantees."

"Why didn't she bring the papers to you here?" Still Rob, pressing, pressing.

"For the reason I have already given you. She had reached a point where she did not trust the High Commission, did not wish to be tainted by it, did not wish to be seen entering or leaving it. You speak as if her actions were logical. It's hard to apply logic to Tessa's final months."

"Why not Coleridge? Why did it have to be you all the time? You at her bedside, you at the clinic? Didn't she know anyone else here?"