The Constant Gardener

Justin had started to give his name to the club porter at the door, but Pellegrin was ahead of him, pounding down the steps to claim him, smiling his decent chap's smile and calling out, "He's mine, Jimmy, shove his bag in your glory hole and put him down to me," before grasping Justin's hand and flinging his other arm round Justin's shoulders in a powerful un-English gesture of friendship and commiseration.

"You're up to this, are you?" he asked confidingly, first making sure no one was within earshot. "We can take a walk in the park if you'd rather. Or do it another time. Just say."

"I'm fine, Bernard. Really."

"The Beast of Landsbury didn't wear you out?"

"Not a bit."

"I've booked us in the dining room. There's a bar lunch, but it's eat off your crotch and a lot of ex-Office wrinklies moaning about Suez. Need a pee?"

The dining room was a risen catafalque with painted cherubs posturing in a ceiling of blue sky. Pellegrin's chosen place of worship was a corner sheltered by a polished granite pillar and a sad dracaena palm. Round them sat the timeless Whitehall brethren in chemical gray suits and school haircuts. This was my world, Justin explained to her. When I married you, I was still one of them.

"Let's get rid of the hard work first," Pellegrin proposed masterfully, when a West Indian waiter in a mauve dinner jacket had handed them menus shaped like Ping-Pong bats. And that was tactful of Pellegrin and typical of his decent chap's image, because by studying menus they were able to settle to each other and avoid eye contact. "Flight bearable?"

"Very, thank you. They upgraded me."

"Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous girl, Justin," Pellegrin murmured, over the parapet of his Ping-Pong bat. "Enough said."

"Thank you, Bernard."

"Great spirit, great guts. Bugger the rest. Meat or fish? — not a Monday — what have you been eating out there?"

Justin had known Bernard Pellegrin in snatches for most of his career. He had followed Bernard in Ottawa and they had briefly coincided in Beirut. In London they had attended a hostage survival course together and shared such gems as how to establish that you are being pursued by a group of armed thugs not afraid to die; how to preserve your dignity when they blindfold you and bind you hand and foot with sticky plaster and sling you into the boot of their Mercedes; and the best way to jump out of an upper-story window if you can't use the stairs but presumably have your feet free.

"All journalists are shits," Pellegrin declared confidently, still from inside his menu. "Know what I'm going to do one day? Doorstep the buggers. Do what they did to you, but do it back to 'em. Rent a mob, picket the editor of the Grauniad and the Screws of the World while they're having it away with their floozies. Photograph their kids going to school. Ask their wives what their old men are like in bed. Show the shits what it feels like to be at the receiving end. Did you want to take a machine gun to the lot of 'em?"

"Not really."

"Me too. Illiterate bunch of hypocrites. Herring fillet's all right. Smoked eel makes me fart. Sole meuniere's good if you like sole. If you don't, have it grilled." He was writing on a printed pad. It had SIR BERNARD P printed in electronic capitals at the top, and the food options listed on the left side, and boxes to tick on the right, and space for the member's signature at the bottom.

"A sole would be fine."

Pellegrin doesn't listen, Justin remembered. It's what got him his reputation as a negotiator.

"Grilled?"

"Meuniere."

"Landsbury in form?"

"Fighting fit."

"She tell you she was a Madeira cake?"

"I'm afraid she did."

"She wants to watch that one. She talk to you about your future?"

"I'm in trauma and on indefinite sick leave."

"Shrimps do you?"

"I think I'd prefer the avocado, thank you," Justin said, and watched Pellegrin tick shrimp cocktail twice.

"The Foreign Office formally disapproves of drinking at lunchtime these days, you'll be relieved to hear," Pellegrin said, surprising Justin with a full-beam smile. Then, in case the first application hadn't taken, a second one. And Justin remembered that the smiles were always the same: the same length, the same duration, the same degree of spontaneous warmth. "However, you're a compassionate case and it's my painful duty to keep you company. They do a passable sub-Meursault. You good for your half?" His silver propelling pencil ticked the appropriate box. "You're cleared, by the by. Off the hook. Sprung. Congratulations." He tore off the chit and weighed it down with the saltcellar to prevent it from blowing away.

"Cleared of what?"