The Constant Gardener

The "darling" was technically addressed to Woodrow, but it might as well have been meant for Justin, for as she blurted it she dissolved into uncontrollable tears, the last of a long and tearful day. Sobbing wretchedly, she grasped Justin against her, punching his back and rolling her cheek against him and whispering, "Oh don't go, oh please, oh Justin," and other less decipherable exhortations before bravely thrusting herself free of him, elbowing her husband out of the light and charging up the stairs to her bedroom and slamming the door.

"Bit overwrought," Woodrow explained, grinning.

"We all are," said Justin, accepting Woodrow's hand and shaking it. "Thank you again, Sandy."

"We'll be in touch."

"Indeed."

"And you're quite sure you don't want a reception party the other end? They're all busting to do their stuff."

"Quite sure, thank you. Tessa's lawyers are preparing for my arrival."

And the next minute Justin was walking down the steps to the red car, with Mustafa one side of him with the Gladstone bag, and Livingstone carrying his gray suitcase on the other.

"I have left envelopes for you all with Mr. Woodrow," Justin told Mustafa as they drove. "And this is to be handed privately to Ghita Pearson. And you know I mean privately."

"We know you will always be a good man, Mzee," said Mustafa prophetically, consigning the envelope to the recesses of his cotton jacket. But there was no forgiveness in his voice for leaving Africa.

* * *

The airport, despite its recent facelift, was in chaos. Travel-weary groups of scalded tourists made long lines, harangued tour guides and frantically bundled huge rucksacks into X-ray machines. Check-in clerks puzzled over every ticket and murmured interminably into telephones. Incomprehensible loudspeaker announcements spread panic while porters and policemen looked idly on. But Woodrow had arranged everything. Justin had barely emerged from the car before a male British Airways representative spirited him to a small office safe from public gaze.

"I'd like my friends to come with me, please," Justin said.

"No problem."

With Livingstone and Mustafa hovering behind him, he was handed a boarding pass in the name of Mr. Alfred Brown. He looked on passively while his gray suitcase was similarly labeled.

"And I shall take this one into the cabin with me," he announced, as an edict.

The representative, a blond New Zealand boy, affected to weigh the Gladstone in his hand and let out an exaggerated grunt of exertion. "Family silver, is it, sir?"

"My host's," said Justin, duly entering into the joke, but there was enough in his face to suggest that the issue was not negotiable.

"If you can carry it, sir, so can we," said the blond representative, passing the bag back to him. "Have a nice flight, Mr. Brown. We'll be taking you through the arrivals side, if it's all the same to you."

"You're very kind."

Turning to say his last good-byes, Justin seized Livingstone's enormous fists in a double handshake. But for Mustafa the moment was too much. Silently as ever, he had slipped away. The Gladstone firmly in his grasp, Justin entered the arrivals hall in the wake of his guide, to find himself staring at a giant buxom woman of no definable race grinning down at him from the wall. She was twenty feet tall and five feet across her widest point and she was the only commercial advertisement in the entire hall. She was dressed in nurse's uniform and had three golden bees on each shoulder. Three more were prominently displayed on the breast pocket of her white tunic, and she was offering a tray of pharmaceutical delicacies to a vaguely multiracial family of happy children and their parents. The tray held something for each of them: bottles of gold-brown medicine that looked more like whisky for the dad, chocolate-coated pills just right for munching by the kiddies, and for the mum beauty products decorated with naked goddesses reaching for the sun. Blazoned across the top and bottom of the poster, violent puce lettering proclaimed the joyous message to all mankind:

ThreeBees

BUZZY FOR THE HEALTH OF AFRICA!

The poster held him.

Exactly as it had held Tessa.

Staring rigidly up at it, Justin is listening to her joyous protestations at his right side. Dizzy from travel, laden with last — minute hand luggage, the two of them have minutes earlier arrived here from London for the first time. Neither has set foot on the African continent before. Kenya — all Africa — awaits them. But it is this poster that commands Tessa's excited interest.

"Justin, look! You're not looking."

"What is it? Of course I am."

"They've hijacked our bloody bees! Somebody thinks he's Napoleon! It's absolutely brazen. It's an outrage. You must do something!"