“This is ahead of the post-mortem of course, so it’s premature and off the record,” he went on, avoiding Justin’s eye. “But they seem to have no doubt.” He felt a need to offer practical consolation. “The police feel it’s actually quite thought-clearing—to have a motive at least. It helps them with the broad thrust of the case, even if they can’t point a finger yet.”
Justin was sitting to attention, holding his brandy glass in front of him with both hands, as if someone had handed it to him as a prize.
“Only a probability?” he objected at last. “How very strange. How can that be?”
Woodrow had not imagined that, once again, he would be subjected to questioning but in some ghastly way he welcomed it. A devil was driving him.
“Well, obviously they do have to ask themselves whether it could have been consensual. That’s routine.”
“Consensual with whom?” Justin enquired, puzzled.
“Well, whoever—whoever they have in mind. We can’t do their job for them, can we?”
“No. We can’t. Poor you, Sandy. You seem to get all the dirty jobs. And now I am sure we should pay attention to Gloria. How right she was to leave us to ourselves. Sitting outside with the entire insect kingdom of Africa would be more than that fair English skin of hers could bear.” Developing a sudden aversion to Woodrow’s proximity, he had stood up and pushed open the french window. “Gloria, my dear, we have been neglecting you.”
6
Justin Quayle buried his much-murdered wife in a beautiful African cemetery called Langata under a jacaranda tree between her stillborn son Garth and a five-year-old Kikuyu boy who was watched over by a plaster-cast kneeling angel with a shield declaring he had joined the saints. Behind her lay Horatio John Williams of Dorset, with God, and at her feet Miranda K. Soper, loved for ever. But Garth and the little African boy, who was called Gitau Karanja, were her closest companions, and Tessa lay shoulder to shoulder with them, which was what Justin had wanted, and what Gloria, after an appropriate distribution of Justin’s largesse, had obtained for him. Throughout the ceremony Justin stood apart from everyone, Tessa’s grave to his left and Garth’s to his right, and a full two paces forward of Woodrow and Gloria who until then had hovered protectively to either side of him, in part to give him comfort, in part to shield him from the attentions of the press which, ever mindful of its duty to the public, was relentless in its determination to obtain pictures and copy concerning the cuckolded British diplomat and would-be father whose butchered white wife—thus the bolder tabloids—had borne a baby by her African lover and now lay beside it in a corner of a foreign field—to quote no less than three of them on the same day—that was for ever England.
Beside the Woodrows and well clear of them stood Ghita Pearson in a sari, head forward and hands joined before her in the ageless attitude of mourning, and beside Ghita stood the deathly pale Porter Coleridge and his wife Veronica, and to Woodrow’s eye it was as if they were lavishing on her the protection they would otherwise have lavished on their absent daughter Rosie.
Langata graveyard stands on a lush plateau of tall grass and red mud and flowering ornamental trees, both sad and joyful, a couple of miles from the town centre and just a short step from Kibera, one of Nairobi’s larger slums, a vast brown smear of smoking tin houses overhung with a pall of sickly African dust, crammed into the Nairobi river valley without a hand’s width between them. The population of Kibera is half a million and rising, and the valley is rich in deposits of sewage, plastic bags, colourful strands of old clothing, banana and orange peel, corn cobs, and anything else the city cares to dump in it. Across the road from the graveyard are the dapper offices of the Kenyan Tourist Board and the entrance to the Nairobi Game Park, and somewhere behind them the ramshackle hutments of Wilson airport, Kenya’s oldest.
To both of the Woodrows and many of Tessa’s mourners there was something ominous as well as heroic in Justin’s solitude as the moment of interment approached. He seemed to be taking leave not just of Tessa but of his career, of Nairobi, of his stillborn son, and of his entire life till now. His perilous proximity to the grave’s edge appeared to signal this. There was the inescapable suggestion that a good deal of the Justin they knew, and perhaps all of it, was going with her to the hereafter. Only one living person seemed to merit his attention, Woodrow noticed, and that was not the priest, it was not the sentinel figure of Ghita Pearson, it was not the reticent and white-faced Porter Coleridge his Head of Mission, nor the journalists who jockeyed with each other for a better shot, a better view, nor the long-jawed English wives locked in empathetic grief for their departed sister whose fate could so easily have been their own, nor the dozen overweight Kenyan policemen who tugged at their leather belts.
It was Kioko. It was the boy who had been sitting on the floor of Tessa’s ward in the Uhuru Hospital, watching his sister die; who had walked ten hours from his village to be with her at the end, and had walked ten more to be with Tessa today. Justin and Kioko saw each other at the same time and, having done so, held each other’s gaze in a complicitous exchange. Kioko was the youngest person present, Woodrow noticed. In response to tribal tradition, Justin had requested that young people stay away.
White gateposts marked the graveyard’s entrance as Tessa’s cortège arrived. Giant cacti, red mud tracks and docile sellers of bananas, plantain and ice-creams lined the path to her grave. The priest was black and old and grizzled. Woodrow had a recollection of shaking his hand at one of Tessa’s parties. But the priest’s love of Tessa was effusive, and his belief in the afterlife so fervent, and the din of road and air traffic so persistent—not to mention the proximity of other funerals and the blare of spiritual music from mourners’ lorries and the competing orators with bullhorns who harangued the rings of friends and family picnicking on the grass around their loved ones’ coffins—that it was not surprising that only a few of the holy man’s winged words reached the ear of his audience. And Justin, if he heard them at all, showed no sign of having done so. Dapper as ever in the dark double-breasted suit he had mustered for the occasion, he kept his gaze fixed on the boy Kioko who, like Justin, had sought out his own bit of space apart from everyone, and appeared to have hanged himself in it, for his spindly feet scarcely touched the ground and his arms swung raggedly at his side and his long crooked head was craned in a posture of permanent enquiry.
Tessa’s final journey had not been a smooth one, but neither Woodrow nor Gloria would have wished it to be. Each tacitly found it fitting that her last act should contain the element of unpredictability that had characterised her life. The Woodrow household had risen early although there was nothing to rise early for, except that in the middle of the night Gloria realised she had no dark hat. A crack-of-dawn phone call established that Elena had two, but they were both a bit twenties and aviator-like, did Gloria mind? An official Mercedes was despatched from her Greek husband’s residence, conveying a black hat in a Harrod’s plastic carrier. Gloria returned it, preferring a black lace headscarf of her mother’s: she would wear it like a mantilla. After all, Tessa was half Italian, she explained.
“Spanish, darling,” Elena replied.
“Nonsense,” Gloria riposted. “Her mother was a Tuscan contessa, it said so in the Telegraph.”
“The mantilla, darling,” Elena patiently corrected her. “Mantillas are Spanish, not Italian, I’m afraid.”
“Well, her mother was bloody well Italian,” Gloria snapped—only to ring again five minutes later, blaming her temper on the stress.
By then the Woodrow boys had been bundled off to school and Woodrow himself had left for the High Commission and Justin was hovering in the dining room wearing his suit and tie and wanting flowers. Not flowers from Gloria’s garden, but his own. He wanted the yellow scenting freesias he grew for her all year round, he said, and always had waiting for her in the living room when she came back from her field trips. He wanted two dozen of them at the least for Tessa’s coffin. Gloria’s deliberation
s on how best to obtain these were interrupted by a confused call from a Nairobi newspaper purporting to announce that Bluhm’s corpse had been found in a dried-up river bed fifty miles east of Lake Turkana, and had anyone anything to say about it? Gloria bawled “No comment” into the receiver and slammed it down. But she was shaken, and in two minds whether or not to share the news with Justin now, or wait till the funeral was over. She was therefore greatly relieved to receive a call from Mildren not five minutes later saying that Woodrow was in a meeting but rumours about Bluhm’s corpse were drivel: the body, for which a tribe of Somali bandits was demanding ten thousand dollars, was at least a hundred years old, and more like a thousand, and was it possible for him to have a tiny word with Justin?
Gloria brought Justin to the telephone and remained officiously at his side while he said yes—that suited him—you’re very kind, and he would make sure he was prepared. But what Mildren was being kind about and what Justin would prepare himself for remained obscure. And no thank you—Justin said emphatically to Mildren, adding to the mystery—he did not wish to be met on arrival, he preferred to make his own arrangements. After which he rang off and asked—rather pointedly, considering everything she had done for him—to be left alone in the dining room to make a reverse-charge call to his solicitor in London, a thing he had done twice before in the last few days, also without admitting Gloria to his deliberations. With a show of discretion she therefore removed herself to the kitchen in order to listen at the hatch—only to find a grief-stricken Mustafa, who had arrived unbidden at the back door with a basketful of yellow freesias which on his own initiative he had picked from Justin’s garden. Armed with this excuse Gloria marched into the dining room, hoping at least to catch the end of Justin’s conversation, but he was ringing off as she entered.
Suddenly, without more time passing, everything was late. Gloria had finished dressing but hadn’t touched her face, nobody had eaten a thing and it was past lunchtime, Woodrow was waiting outside in the Volkswagen, Justin was standing in the hall clutching his freesias—now bound into a posy—Juma was waving a plate of cheese sandwiches at everyone and Gloria was trying to decide whether to tie the mantilla under her chin or drape it over her shoulders like her mother.
Seated on the rear seat of the van next to Justin with Woodrow on the other side of her, Gloria privately acknowledged what Elena had been telling her for several days: that she had fallen head over heels in love with Justin, a thing that hadn’t happened to her for years, and it was an absolute agony to think he would be gone any day. On the other hand, as Elena had pointed out, his departure would at least allow her to get her head straight and resume normal marital services. And if it should turn out that absence only made the heart grow fonder, well, as Elena had daringly suggested, Gloria could always do something about it in London.
The drive through the city struck Gloria as more than usually bumpy and she was too conscious for her comfort of the warmth of Justin’s thigh against her own. By the time the Volkswagen pulled up at the funeral home, a lump had formed in her throat, her handkerchief was a damp ball in the palm of her hand and she no longer knew whether she was grieving for Tessa or Justin. The rear doors of the van were opened from outside, Justin and Woodrow hopped out, leaving her alone on the back seat with Livingstone in the front. No journalists, she recorded gratefully, struggling to regain her composure. Or none yet. She watched her two men through the windscreen as they climbed the front steps of a single-storey granite building with a touch of the Tudors about the eaves. Justin with his tailored suit and perfect mane of grey-black hair that you never saw him brush or comb, clutching yellow freesias— and that cavalry officer’s walk he had, and for all she knew all half-Dudleys had, right shoulder forward. Why did Justin always seem to lead and Sandy follow? And why was Sandy so menial these days, so butler-like? she complained to herself. And it’s time he bought himself a new suit; that serge thing makes him look like a private detective.
They disappeared into the entrance lobby. “Papers to sign, sweet,” Sandy had said in a superior voice. “Releases for the deceased’s body and that kind of nonsense.” Why does he treat me like his Little Woman suddenly? Has he forgotten I arranged the whole bloody funeral? A gaggle of black-clad bearers had formed at the side entrance of the funeral home. Doors were opening, a black hearse was backing towards them, the word HEARSE gratuitously painted in white letters a foot high on its side. Gloria caught a glimpse of honey-varnished wood and yellow freesias as the coffin slid between black jackets into the open back. They must have taped the posy to the lid; how else did you get freesias to sit tight on a coffin lid? Justin thought of everything. The hearse pulled out of the forecourt, bearers aboard. Gloria had a big sniff, then blew her nose.
“It is bad, madam,” Livingstone intoned from the front. “It is very, very bad.”
“It is indeed, Livingstone,” said Gloria, grateful for the formality of the exchange. You are about to be watched, young woman, she warned herself firmly. Time to chin up and set an example. The back doors slammed open.
“All right, girl?” Woodrow asked cheerfully, crashing down beside her. “They were marvellous, weren’t they, Justin? Very sympathetic, very professional.”
Don’t you dare call me girl, she told him furiously—but not aloud.
Entering St Andrew’s Church, Woodrow took stock of the congregation. In a single sweep he spotted the pallid Coleridges and behind them Donohue and his weird wife, Maud, looking like an ex-Gaiety Girl fallen on hard times, and next to them Mildren alias Mildred and an anorectic blonde who was held to be sharing his flat. The Heavy Mob from the Muthaiga Club— Tessa’s phrase—had formed a military square. Across the aisle he picked out a contingent from the World Food Programme and another that consisted entirely of African women, some in hats, others in jeans, but all with the determined glower of combat that was the hallmark of Tessa’s radical friends. Behind them stood a cluster of lost, Gallic-looking, vaguely arrogant young men and women, the women with their heads covered, the men in open necks and designer stubble. Woodrow, after some puzzlement, concluded that they were fellow members of Bluhm’s Belgian organisation. Must be wondering whether they’re going to be back here next week for Arnold, he thought brutally. The Quayles’ illegal servants were ranged alongside them: Mustafa the houseboy, Esmeralda from South Sudan and the one-armed Ugandan, name unknown. And in the front row, towering over her furtive little Greek husband, stood the upholstered, carrot-haired figure of Darling Elena herself, Woodrow’s bête noire, decked out in her grandmother’s funereal jet jewellery.
“Now, darling, should I wear the jet or is it over the top?” she had needed to know of Gloria at eight this morning. Not without mischief, Gloria had counselled boldness.
“On other people, frankly El, it might be a tad too much. But with your colouring, darling—go for it.”
And no policemen, he noticed with gratification, neither Kenyan nor British. Had Bernard Pellegrin’s potions worked their magic? Whisper who dares.
He stole another look at Coleridge, so whey-faced, so martyred. He remembered their bizarre conversation in the Residence last Saturday, and cursed him for an indecisive prig. His gaze returned to Tessa’s coffin lying in state before the altar, Justin’s yellow freesias safely aboard. Tears filled his eyes, to be sharply returned to where they came from. The organ was playing the Nunc Dimittis and Gloria, word-perfect, was singing lustily along. House evensong at her boarding school, Woodrow was thinking. Or mine. He hated both establishments equally. Sandy and Gloria, born unfree. The difference is, I know it and she doesn’t. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. Sometimes I really wish I could. Depart and never come back. But where would the peace be? His eye again rested on the coffin. I loved you. So much easier to say, now it’s in the past tense. I loved you. I was the control freak who couldn’t control himself, you were good enough to tell me. Well, now look what’s happened to you. And look why it’s happened to you.
&n
bsp; And no, I never heard of Lorbeer. I know no long-legged Hungarian beauties called Kovacs and I do not, will not listen to any more unproven, unspoken theories that are tolling like tower bells inside my head, and I am totally uninterested in the sleek olive shoulders of the spectral Ghita Pearson in her sari. What I do know is: after you, nobody need ever know again what a timorous child inhabits this soldier’s body.
Needing to distract himself, Woodrow embarked on an energetic study of the church windows. Male saints, all white, no Bluhms. Tessa would go ballistic. Memorial window commemorating one pretty white boy in a sailor suit symbolically surrounded by adoring jungle animals. A good hyena smells blood ten kilometres away. Tears again threatening, Woodrow forced his attentions on dear old St Andrew himself, a dead ringer for Macpherson the gillie that time we drove the boys to Loch Awe to fish the salmon. The fierce Scottish eye, the rusty Scottish beard. What must they make of us? he marvelled, transferring his misty gaze to the black faces in the congregation. What did we imagine we were doing here, back in those days, plugging our white British God and our white Scottish saint while we used the country as an adventure playground for derelict upper-class swingers?
“Personally, I’m trying to make amends,” you reply when flirtatiously I put the same question to you on the floor of the Muthaiga Club. But you never answer a question without turning it round and using it in evidence against me: “And what are you doing here, Mr Woodrow?” you demand. The band is boisterous and we are having to dance close to hear each other at all. Yes, those are my breasts, your eyes say when I dare to look down. Yes, those are my hips, gyrating while you hold me by the waist. You may look at them too, feast your eyes on them. Most men do, and you needn’t try to be the exception.
“I suppose what I’m really doing is helping Kenyans to husband the things we’ve given them,” I yell pompously above the music and feel your body stiffen and slip away almost before I’ve finished the sentence.