The Constant Gardener

"She took me once. In a weak moment, she said later, she wanted me to inspect her workplace. Ghita Pearson came with us. Ghita and Tessa were naturally close. The affinities were ridiculous. Their mothers had both been doctors, their fathers lawyers, they'd both been brought up Catholic. We went to a medical center. Four concrete walls and a tin roof and a thousand people waiting to get to the door." For a moment he forgets where he is. "Poverty on that scale is a discipline of its own. It can't be learned in an afternoon. Nevertheless, it was hard for me, from then on, to walk down Stanley Street without — " he broke off again — "without the other image in my mind." After Woodrow's sleek evasions, his words ring out like the true gospel. "The great injustice — the great crime — was what kept her alive. Our baby was five weeks dead. Left alone in the house, Tessa would stare vacantly at the wall. Mustafa would telephone me at the High Commission — "Come home, Mzee, she is ill, she is ill." But it wasn't I who revived her. It was Arnold. Arnold understood. Arnold shared the secret with her. She'd only to hear his car in the drive and she became a different woman. "What have you got? What have you got?"' She meant news. Information. Progress. When he'd gone, she'd retreat to her little workroom and toil into the night."

"At her computer?"

A moment's wariness on Justin's part. Overcome. "She had her papers, she had her computer. She had the telephone, which she used with the greatest circumspection. And she had Arnold, whenever he was able to get away."

"And you didn't mind that then?" Rob sneers, in an ill-judged return to his hectoring tone. "Your wife sitting about mooning, waiting for Dr. Wonderful to show up?"

"Tessa was desolate. If she'd needed a hundred Bluhms, as far as I was concerned, she could have them all and on whatever terms she wished."

"And you didn't know anything about the great crime," Lesley resumed, unwilling to be persuaded. "Nothing. What it was about, who the victims and the main players were. They kept it all from you. Bluhm and Tessa together, and you stuck out there in the cold."

"I gave them their distance," Justin confirmed doggedly.

"I just don't see how you could survive like that," Lesley insists, putting down her notebook and opening her hands. "Apart, but together-the way you describe it — it's like — not being on speaking terms — worse."

"We didn't survive," Justin reminds her simply. "Tessa's dead."

* * *

Here they might have thought that the time for intimate confidences had run its course and a period of sheepishness or embarrassment would follow, even recantation. But Justin has only begun. He jolts himself upright, like a man raising his game. His hands fall to his thighs and stay there until otherwise ordered. His voice recovers its power. Some deep interior force is driving it to the surface, into the unfresh air of the Woodrows' fetid dining room, still rank with last night's gravy.

"She was so impetuous," he declares proudly, once more reciting from speeches he has made to himself for hours on end. "I loved that in her from the start. She was so desperate to have our child at once. The death of her parents must be compensated as soon as possible! Why wait till we were married? I held her back. I shouldn't have done. I pleaded convention — God knows why. "Very well," she said, "if we must be married in order to have a baby, let's get married immediately." So we went off to Italy and married immediately, to the huge entertainment of my colleagues." He is entertained himself. ""Quayle's gone mad! Old Justin's married his daughter! Has Tessa passed her A levels yet?"' When she became pregnant, after three years of trying, she wept. So did I."

He breaks off, but no one interrupts his flow.

"With pregnancy she changed. But only for the good. Tessa grew into motherhood. Outwardly she remained lighthearted. But inwardly a deep sense of responsibility was forming in her. Her aid work took on new meaning. I am told that's not unusual. What had been important now became a vocation, practically a destiny. She was seven months pregnant and still tending the sick and dying, then coming back for some fatuous diplomatic dinner party in town. The nearer the baby came, the more determined she was to make a better world for it. Not just for our child. For all children. By then she'd set her heart on an African hospital. If I'd forced her to go to some private clinic, she'd have done it, but I'd have betrayed her."

"How?" Lesley murmurs.

"Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans."

"But she was doing something about it," Lesley objects.