The Constant Gardener

"No. We can't. Poor you, Sandy. You seem to get all the dirty jobs. And now I am sure we should pay attention to Gloria. How right she was to leave us to ourselves. Sitting outside with the entire insect kingdom of Africa would be more than that fair English skin of hers could bear." Developing a sudden aversion to Woodrow's proximity, he had stood up and pushed open the French window. "Gloria, my dear, we have been neglecting you."

CHAPTER SIX

Justin Quayle buried his much-murdered wife in a beautiful African cemetery called Langata under a jacaranda tree between her stillborn son Garth and a five-year-old Kikuyu boy who was watched over by a plastercast kneeling angel with a shield declaring he had joined the saints. Behind her lay Horatio John Williams of Dorset, with God, and at her feet Miranda K. Soper, loved forever. But Garth and the little African boy, who was called Gitau Karanja, were her closest companions, and Tessa lay shoulder to shoulder with them, which was what Justin had wanted, and what Gloria, after an appropriate distribution of Justin's largesse, had obtained for him. Throughout the ceremony Justin stood apart from everyone, Tessa's grave to his left and Garth's to his right, and a full two paces forward of Woodrow and Gloria who until then had hovered protectively to either side of him, in part to give him comfort, in part to shield him from the attentions of the press, which, ever mindful of its duty to the public, was relentless in its determination to obtain pictures and copy concerning the cuckolded British diplomat and would-be father whose butchered white wife — thus the bolder tabloids — had borne a baby by her African lover and now lay beside it in a corner of a foreign field-to quote no less than three of them on the same day — that was forever England.

Beside the Woodrows and well clear of them stood Ghita Pearson in a sari, head forward and hands joined before her in the ageless attitude of mourning, and beside Ghita stood the deathly pale Porter Coleridge and his wife Veronica, and to Woodrow's eye it was as if they were lavishing on her the protection they would otherwise have lavished on their absent daughter Rosie.

Langata graveyard stands on a lush plateau of tall grass and red mud and flowering ornamental trees, both sad and joyful, a couple of miles from the town center and just a short step from Kibera, one of Nairobi's larger slums, a vast brown smear of smoking tin houses overhung with a pall of sickly African dust, crammed into the Nairobi river valley without a hand's width between them. The population of Kibera is half a million and rising, and the valley is rich in deposits of sewage, plastic bags, colorful strands of old clothing, banana and orange peel, corncobs, and anything else the city cares to dump in it. Across the road from the graveyard are the dapper offices of the Kenyan Tourist Board and the entrance to the Nairobi Game Park, and somewhere behind them the ramshackle hutments of Wilson Airport, Kenya's oldest.

To both of the Woodrows and many of Tessa's mourners there was something ominous as well as heroic in Justin's solitude as the moment of interment approached. He seemed to be taking leave not just of Tessa but of his career, of Nairobi, of his stillborn son, and of his entire life till now. His perilous proximity to the grave's edge appeared to signal this. There was the inescapable suggestion that a good deal of the Justin they knew, and perhaps all of it, was going with her to the hereafter. Only one living person seemed to merit his attention, Woodrow noticed, and that was not the priest, it was not the sentinel figure of Ghita Pearson, it was not the reticent and white-faced Porter Coleridge his Head of Mission, nor the journalists who jockeyed with each other for a better shot, a better view, nor the longjawed English wives locked in empathetic grief for their departed sister whose fate could so easily have been their own, not the dozen overweight Kenyan policemen who tugged at their leather belts.

It was Kioko. It was the boy who had been sitting on the floor of Tessa's ward in the Uhuru Hospital, watching his sister die; who had walked ten hours from his village to be with her at the end, and had walked ten more to be with Tessa today. Justin and Kioko saw each other at the same time and, having done so, held each other's gaze in a complicitous exchange. Kioko was the youngest person present, Woodrow noticed. In response to tribal tradition, Justin had requested that young people stay away.