The Constant Gardener

"I told you. There were issues where we stayed apart. I was waiting. Either for her to moderate herself or for the Foreign Office to provide roles for us that were not at odds. The status of wives in the Foreign Service is in constant flux. They can't earn pay in the countries where they're posted. They're obliged to move when their husbands move. One moment they're being offered all the freedoms of the day. The next they're expected to behave like diplomatic geisha."

"Is that Tessa speaking or you?" Lesley asks with a smile.

"Tessa never waited to be given her freedom. She took it."

"And Bluhm didn't embarrass you?" asks Rob roughly.

"It is neither here nor there, but Arnold Bluhm was not her lover. They were joined by quite other things. Tessa's darkest secret was her virtue. She loved to shock."

This is too much for Rob. "Four nights on the trot, Justin?" he objects. "Sharing a cottage on Turkana? A girl like Tessa? And you're seriously asking us to believe they didn't have it off?"

"You'll believe whatever you want," Justin replies, the apostle of unsurprise. "I have no doubt of it whatever."

"Why?"

"Because she told me."

And to this they had no answer at all. But there was something more that Justin needed to say and, bit by bit, assisted by Lesley's prompting, he managed to get it out.

"She had married convention," he began awkwardly. "Me. Not some high-minded do-gooder. Me. You really mustn't see her as somebody exotic. I never doubted — nor did she when we arrived here — that she would be anything other than a member of the diplomatic geisha she derided. In her own way. But toeing the line." He deliberated, conscious of their disbelieving stares. "After her parents' death she had scared herself. Now, with me to steady her, she wanted to pull back from too much freedom. It was the price she was prepared to pay for not being an orphan any more."

"So what changed that?" Lesley asked.

"We did," Justin retorted with fervor. He meant the other we. We her survivors. We the guilty ones. "With our complacency," he said, lowering his voice. "With this." And here he made a gesture that embraced not just the dining room and Gloria's hideous watercolors impaled along the chimney breast, but the whole house round them, and its occupants, and by inference the other houses in the street. "We who are paid to see what's going on, and prefer not to. We who walk past life with our eyes down."

"Did she say that?"

"I did. It's how she came to regard us. She was born rich but that never impressed her. She had no interest in money. She needed far less of it than the aspiring classes. But she knew she had no excuse for being indifferent to what she saw and heard. She knew she owed."

And Lesley on this note calls a break until tomorrow at the same time, Justin, if that's all right by you. It is.

And British Airways seemed to have come to much the same conclusion, for they were dousing the lights in the first-class cabin and taking last orders for the night.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rob lounges while Lesley again unpacks her toys: the colored notebooks, pencils, the little tape recorder that yesterday remained untouched, the piece of india rubber. Justin has a prison pallor and a web of hairline cracks around his eyes, which is how the mornings take him now. A doctor would prescribe fresh air.

"You said you had nothing to do with your wife's murder in the sense we're implying, Justin," Lesley reminds him. "What other sense is there, if you don't mind us asking?" And has to lean across the table to catch his words.

"I should have gone with her."

"To Lokichoggio?"

He shook his head.

"To Lake Turkana?"

"To anywhere."

"Is that what she told you?"

"No. She never criticized me. We never told each other what to do. We had one argument, and it was to do with method, not substance. Arnold was never an obstruction."

"What was the argument about, exactly?" Rob demands, clinging determinedly to his literal view of things.

"After the loss of our baby, I begged Tessa to let me take her back to England or Italy. Take her anywhere she wanted. She wouldn't think of it. She had a mission, thank God, a reason to survive, and it was here in Nairobi. She had come upon a great social injustice. A great crime; she called it both. That was all I was allowed to know. In my profession, studied ignorance is an art form." He turns to the window and peers out sightlessly. "Have you seen how people live in the slums here?"

Lesley shakes her head.