The Constant Gardener

I give up. I resign. You receive a death threat, through the letter box. You pick it up. You read it — once. Ugh! Then if you're like me, you hold it away from you because it's so vile, so physically repellent that you don't want it coming near your face. But you read it again. And again. Till you're word perfect. Like me.

So then what do you do? Phone me — "Darling, something simply foul has happened, you've got to come home at once"? Leap in a car? Drive like Jehu to the High Commission, wave the letter at me, march me in to Porter? Do you hell. Not a bit of it. As usual, your pride comes first. You don't show me the letter, you don't tell me about it, you don't burn it. You keep it secret. You classify it and you file it. Deep in a drawer of your no-go-area desk. You do exactly what you would laugh at me for doing: you file it among your papers and you preserve what in me you would mockingly call a patrician discretion about the matter. How you live with yourself after this — how you live with me — is anybody's guess. God knows how you live with the threat, but that's your business. So thanks. Thanks a lot, OK? Thanks for delivering the ultimate in marital apartheid. Bravo. And thanks again.

The rage left him as quickly as it had seized him, to be replaced by a sweating shame and remorse. You couldn't bear it, could you? The idea of actually showing someone that letter. Starting a whole landslide you couldn't control. The stuff about Bluhm, the stuff about me. It was just too much. You were protecting us. All of us. Of course you were. Did you tell Arnold? Of course not. He'd try to talk you out of going on.

* * *

Justin took a mental step back from this benign line of reasoning.

Too sweet. Tessa was tougher than that. And when her dander was up, nastier.

Think lawyer's intellect. Think icy pragmatism. Think very tough young girl, closing in for the kill.

She knew she was getting warm. The death threat confirmed it. You don't issue death threats to people who don't threaten you.

To scream "Foul!" at this stage would mean handing herself over to the authorities. The British are helpless. They have no powers, no jurisdiction. Our only recourse is to show the letter to the Kenyan authorities.

But Tessa had no faith in the Kenyan authorities. It was her frequently repeated conviction that the tentacles of Moi's empire reached into every corner of Kenyan life. Tessa's faith, like her marital duty, was invested for better or worse in the Brits: witness her secret assignation with Woodrow.

The moment she went to the Kenyan police, she would have to provide a list of her enemies, real and potential. Her pursuit of the great crime would be stopped in its tracks. She would be forced to call off the hunt. She would never do that. The great crime was more important to her than her own life.

Well, it is for me too. Than mine.

* * *

As Justin struggles to recover his balance, his eye falls on a hand-addressed envelope which in an earlier life he had extracted in blind haste from the same middle drawer of Tessa's workroom desk in Nairobi in which he had found the empty Dypraxa box. The writing on the envelope is reminiscent, but not yet familiar. The envelope has been torn open. Inside is a single folded page of HM Stationery Office blue. The script is hectic, the text dashed off in haste as well as passion.

My darling Tessa, whom I love beyond all others and always shall,

This is my only absolute conviction, my one piece of self-knowledge as I write. You were terrible to me today, but not as terrible as I was to you. The wrong person was speaking out of both of us. I desire and worship you beyond bearing. I am ready if you are. Let's both chuck in our ridiculous marriages and bolt to wherever you want, as soon as you want. If it's to the end of the earth, so much the better. I love you, I love you and I love you.

But this time the signature was not omitted. It was written loud and clear in letters of a size to match the death threat: Sandy. My name is Sandy, he was saying, and you can tell the whole damn world.

Date and time also given. Even in the throes of great love, Sandy Woodrow remains a conscientious man.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Justin the deceived husband is struck motionless by the moonlight as he stares rigidly at the sea's silvered horizon and takes long breaths of chill night air. He has the feeling he has inhaled something nauseous and needs to clean out his lungs. Sandy leads from weakness into strength, you once told me. Sandy deceives himself first and the rest of us afterward… Sandy is the coward who needs the protection of grand gestures and grand words because anything less leaves him unprotected…