And amazingly she had a telephone in her handbag and he had the driver’s mobile number in his pocket. So he moored the boat and sat beside her while he told the driver to go back to London on his own, which was like throwing away the compass, an act of shared self-marooning that was lost on neither of them. And after the river she took him back to her rooms and made love to him. And why she did that, and who she thought he was when she did it, and who he thought she was, and who either of them was by the end of that weekend, such mysteries, she told him as she peppered him with kisses at the railway station, would be solved by time and practice. The fact was, she said, she loved him, and everything else would fall into place when they were married. And Justin, in the madness that had seized him, made similar heedless declarations, repeated them and enlarged upon them, all on the wave of the folly that was conveying him—and he let it gladly, even if, in some recess of his consciousness, he knew that each hyperbole would one day have its price.
She made no secret of wanting an older lover. Like many beautiful young women he had known, she was sick of the sight of men her own age. In language that secretly repelled him, she described herself as a tramp, a tart with a heart and a bit of a little devil, but he was too smitten to correct her. The expressions, he later discovered, stemmed from her father, whom he thereafter detested, while taking pains to disguise this from her since she spoke of him as a saint. Her need for Justin’s love, she explained, was an unappeasable hunger in her, and Justin could only protest that the same went for him, no question. And at the time he believed himself.
His first instinct, forty-eight hours after returning to London, was to bolt. He had been hit by a tornado, but tornadoes, he knew from experience, did a lot of damage, some of it collateral, and moved on. His posting to an African hell-hole, still pending, suddenly looked inviting. His protestations of love alarmed him the more he rehearsed them: this is not true, this is me in the wrong play. He had had a string of affairs and hoped to have a few more— but only on the most contained and premeditated lines, with women as disinclined as he was to abandon common sense for passion. But more cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none. Not in human nature, not in God, not in the future, and certainly not in the universal power of love. Man was vile and evermore would be so. The world contained a small number of reasonable souls of whom Justin happened to be one. Their job, in his simple view, was to head off the human race from its worst excesses—with the proviso that when two sides were determined to blow each other to smithereens, there was precious little a reasonable person could do about it, however ruthless he might be in his efforts to stave off ruthlessness. In the end, the master of lofty nihilism told himself, all civilised men are Canutes these days, and the tide is coming in faster all the time. It was therefore doubly unfortunate that Justin, who regarded any form of idealism with the deepest scepticism, should have involved himself with a young woman who, though delightfully uninhibited in many ways, was unable to cross the road without first taking a moral view. Escape was the only sensible recourse.
But as the weeks went by and he embarked on what was intended to be the delicate process of disengagement, the wonder of what had happened gained ground in him. Little dinners planned for the regretful parting scene turning out instead to be feasts of enchantment followed by ever headier sexual delights. He began to feel ashamed of his secret apostasy. He was amused, not deterred, by Tessa’s kooky idealism—and in an untroubled way fired by it. Somebody should feel these things and say them. Until now he had regarded strongly held convictions as the natural enemies of the diplomat, to be ignored, humoured or, like dangerous energy, diverted into harmless channels. Now to his surprise he saw them as emblems of courage and Tessa as their standard-bearer.
And with this revelation came a new perception of himself. He was no longer the ageing debs’ delight, the nimble bachelor for ever sidestepping the chains of marriage. He was the droll, adoring father-figure to a beautiful young girl, indulging her every whim as the saying goes, letting her have her head any time she needed it. But her protector nonetheless, her rock, her steadying hand, her adoring elder gardener in a straw hat. Abandoning his plan of escape, Justin set course firmly towards her, and this time—or so he would wish the police officers to believe—he never regretted it, never looked back.
“Not even when she became an embarrassment to you?” Lesley asks after she and Rob, covertly astonished by his frankness, have sat in respectful silence for the regulation period.
“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 rôles 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 fervour. 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 watercolours 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.
8
Rob lounges while Lesley again unpacks her toys: the coloured 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 remi
nds 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 criticised 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.
“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 centre. 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.
“Hence the African hospital. In her extreme moments she talked of bearing her child in the slums of Kibera. Mercifully, Arnold and Ghita between them were able to restore her sense of proportion. Arnold has the authority of suffering. He not only treated torture victims in Algeria, he was tortured himself. He had earned his pass to the wretched of the earth. I hadn’t.”
Rob seizes on this, as if the point has not been made a dozen times before. “A bit hard to see where you came in, then, isn’t it? Bit of a spare wheel, you were, sitting up there in the clouds with your diplomatic pain and your high-level committee, weren’t you?”
But Justin’s forbearance is limitless. There are times when he is simply too well bred to disagree. “She exempted me from active service, as she put it,” he assents with a shameful dropping of the voice. “She invented specious arguments to put me at my ease. She insisted that the world needed both of us: me inside the System, pushing; herself outside it, in the field, pulling. ‘I’m the one who believes in the moral state,’ she would say. ‘If you lot don’t do your job, what hope is there for the rest of us?’ It was sophistry and we both knew it. The System didn’t need my job. Neither did I. What was the point of it? I was writing reports no one looked at and suggesting action that was never taken. Tessa was a stranger to deceit. Except in my case. For me, she deceived herself totally.”
“Was she ever afraid?” Lesley asks, softly in order not to violate the atmosphere of confession.
Justin reflects, then allows himself a half-smile of recollection. “She once boasted to the American Ambassadress that fear was the only four-letter word she didn’t know the meaning of. Her Excellency was not amused.”
Lesley smiles too, but not for long. “And this decision to have her baby in an African hospital,” she asks, her eye on her notebook. “Can you tell us when and how it was taken, please?”
“There was a woman from one of the slum villages up north that Tessa regularly visited. Wanza, surname unknown. Wanza was suffering from a mystery illness of some sort. She had been singled o
ut for special treatment. By coincidence they found themselves in the same ward at the Uhuru Hospital and Tessa befriended her.”
Do they hear the guarded note that has entered his voice? Justin does.
“Know what illness?”
“Only the generality. She was ill and might become dangerously so.”
“Did she have Aids?”
“Whether her illness was Aids-related I have no idea. My impression was that the concerns were different.”
“That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it, a woman from the slums giving birth in a hospital?”
“She was under observation.”
“Whose observation?”
It is the second time that Justin censors himself. Deception does not come naturally to him. “I assume one of the health clinics. In her village. In a shanty town. As you see, I’m hazy. I marvel at how much I managed not to know.”
“And Wanza died, didn’t she?”
“She died on the last night of Tessa’s stay at the hospital,” Justin replies, gratefully abandoning his reserve in order to reconstruct the moment for them. “I’d been in the ward all evening but Tessa insisted I go home for a few hours’ sleep. She’d told the same to Arnold and Ghita. We were taking alternate watches at her bedside. Arnold had supplied a safari bed. At four in the morning, Tessa telephoned me. There was no telephone in her ward so she used the Sister’s. She was distressed. Hysterical is the more accurate description, but Tessa, when she is hysterical, does not raise her voice. Wanza had disappeared. The baby also. She had woken to find Wanza’s bed empty and the baby’s cot vanished. I drove to Uhuru Hospital. Arnold and Ghita arrived at the same moment. Tessa was inconsolable. It was as if she’d lost a second child in the space of a few days. Between the three of us, we persuaded her that it was time for her to convalesce at home. With Wanza dead and the baby removed, she felt no obligation to remain.”
“Tessa didn’t get to see the body?”
“She asked to see it but was told it was not appropriate. Wanza was dead and her baby had been taken to the mother’s village by her brother. So far as the hospital was concerned, that was an end to the matter. Hospitals do not care to dwell on death,” he adds, speaking with the experience of Garth.