The Constant Gardener

And amazingly she had a telephone in her handbag and he had the driver's mobile number in his pocket. So he moored the boat and sat beside her while he told the driver to go back to London on his own, which was like throwing away the compass, an act of shared self-marooning that was lost on neither of them. And after the river she took him back to her rooms and made love to him. And why she did that, and who she thought he was when she did it, and who he thought she was, and who either of them was by the end of that weekend, such mysteries, she told him as she peppered him with kisses at the railway station, would be solved by time and practice. The fact was, she said, she loved him, and everything else would fall into place when they were married. And Justin, in the madness that had seized him, made similar heedless declarations, repeated them and enlarged upon them, all on the wave of the folly that was conveying him — and he let it gladly, even if, in some recess of his consciousness, he knew that each hyperbole would one day have its price.

She made no secret of wanting an older lover. Like many beautiful young women he had known, she was sick of the sight of men her own age. In language that secretly repelled him, she described herself as a tramp, a tart with a heart and a bit of a little devil, but he was too smitten to correct her. The expressions, he later discovered, stemmed from her father, whom he thereafter detested, while taking pains to disguise this from her since she spoke of him as a saint. Her need for Justin's love, she explained, was an unappeasable hunger in her, and Justin could only protest that the same went for him, no question. And at the time he believed himself.

His first instinct, forty-eight hours after returning to London, was to bolt. He had been hit by a tornado, but tornadoes, he knew from experience, did a lot of damage, some of it collateral, and moved on. His posting to an African hellhole, still pending, suddenly looked inviting. His protestations of love alarmed him the more he rehearsed them: this is not true, this is me in the wrong play. He had had a string of affairs and hoped to have a few more — but only on the most contained and premeditated lines, with women as disinclined as he was to abandon common sense for passion. But more cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none. Not in human nature, not in God, not in the future, and certainly not in the universal power of love. Man was vile and evermore would be so. The world contained a small number of reasonable souls of whom Justin happened to be one. Their job, in his simple view, was to head off the human race from its worst excesses — with the proviso that when two sides were determined to blow each other to smithereens, there was precious little a reasonable person could do about it, however ruthless he might be in his efforts to stave off ruthlessness. In the end, the master of lofty nihilism told himself, all civilized men are Canutes these days, and the tide is coming in faster all the time. It was therefore doubly unfortunate that Justin, who regarded any form of idealism with the deepest skepticism, should have involved himself with a young woman who, though delightfully uninhibited in many ways, was unable to cross the road without first taking a moral view. Escape was the only sensible recourse.

But as the weeks went by and he embarked on what was intended to be the delicate process of disengagement, the wonder of what had happened gained ground in him. Little dinners planned for the regretful parting scene turning out instead to be feasts of enchantment followed by ever headier sexual delights. He began to feel ashamed of his secret apostasy. He was amused, not deterred, by Tessa's kooky idealism — and in an untroubled way fired by it. Somebody should feel these things and say them. Until now he had regarded strongly held convictions as the natural enemies of the diplomat, to be ignored, humored or, like dangerous energy, diverted into harmless channels. Now to his surprise he saw them as emblems of courage and Tessa as their standard-bearer.

And with this revelation came a new perception of himself. He was no longer the aging debs' delight, the nimble bachelor forever sidestepping the chains of marriage. He was the droll, adoring father figure to a beautiful young girl, indulging her every whim as the saying goes, letting her have her head anytime she needed it. But her protector nonetheless, her rock, her steadying hand, her adoring elder gardener in a straw hat. Abandoning his plan of escape, Justin set course firmly toward her, and this time — or so he would wish the police officers to believe — he never regretted it, never looked back.

* * *

"Not even when she became an embarrassment to you?" Lesley asks after she and Rob, covertly astonished by his frankness, have sat in respectful silence for the regulation period.