She was. The rebuff came the same evening in the form of a typed, hand-delivered note of which Mildred must have kept a copy. She didn’t see him deliver it. All she saw was an open car driving away with Mildred in the passenger seat and his pool-boy at the wheel. Department was emphatic, he wrote pompously. The High Commissioner’s Residence and its lawns were a no-go area for functions of all kinds. There was to be no “de facto annexation of High Commissioner status,” he ended cruelly. A formal Foreign Office letter to this effect was on its way.
Woodrow was furious. He had never let fly at her like this before. “Serves you bloody well right for asking,” he raged, stomping up and down the drawing room. “Do you really suppose I’ll land Porter’s job by going and camping on his bloody lawn?”
“I was only prodding them a bit,” she protested pathetically, as he ranted on. “It’s perfectly natural to want you to be Sir Sandy one day. It isn’t the borrowed glory I’m after. I just want you to be happy.”
But her afterthought was typically resilient. “Then we’ll jolly well have to do it better here,” she vowed, staring mistily into the garden.
The great Commonwealth Day bash had begun.
All the frantic preparations had paid off, the guests had arrived, music was playing, drink flowing, couples were chatting, the jacarandas in the front garden were in bloom, life was really rather super at last. The wrong marquee had been replaced with the right one, paper napkins with linen, plastic knives and forks with plate, vile puce bunting with royal blue and gold. A generator that brayed like a sick mule had been replaced with one that bubbled like a hot saucepan. The sweep in front of the house no longer looked like a building site and some brilliant last-minute whipping-in by Sandy on the telephone had procured some jolly good Africans, including two or three from Moi’s retinue. Sooner than rely on untried waiters—just look at what had happened at Elena’s!—or rather hadn’t happened!—Gloria had mustered staff from other diplomatic households. One such recruit was Mustafa, Tessa’s spear-man, as she used to call him, who had been too griefstricken, by all accounts, to find another job. But Gloria had sent Juma off in pursuit of him, and here he finally was, flitting among the tables on the other side of the dance floor, a bit down in the mouth, bless him, but obviously pleased to have been thought of, which was the important thing. The Blue Boys miraculously had arrived on time to direct parking, and the problem as usual would be to keep them away from the drink, but Gloria had read them the riot act and all one could do was hope. And the band was marvellous, really jungle, and a good strong beat for Sandy to dance to if he had to. And didn’t he look simply splendid in the new dinner jacket Gloria had bought him as a “sorry” present? What a parade horse he was going to make one day! And the hot buffet, what she had tasted of it—well, good enough. Not sensational, you didn’t expect that in Nairobi, there was a limit to what you could buy even if you could afford it. But streets better than Elena’s, not that Gloria felt in the least competitive. And darling Ghita in her gold sari, divine.
Woodrow too has every reason to congratulate himself. Watching the couples gyrate to music he detests, sipping methodically at his fourth whisky, he is the storm-tossed mariner who has made it back to harbour against all odds. No, Gloria, I never made a pass at her—or at any other her. No to all of it. No, I will not provide you with the means to destroy me. Not you, not the Archbitch Elena, and not Ghita, the scheming little puritan. I’m a status quo man, as Tessa rightly observed.
Out of the corner of his eye Woodrow spots Ghita, matching bodies with some gorgeous African she has probably never seen in her life until tonight. Beauty like yours is a sin, he tells her in his mind. It was a sin with Tessa, it is with you. How can any woman inhabit a body like yours and not share the desires of the man she inflames? Yet when I point this out to you—just the odd confiding touch, nothing gross—your eyes blaze and you hiss at me in a stage whisper to get my hands off you. Then you flounce home in a huff, closely observed by the Archbitch Elena . . . His reverie was disturbed by a pallid, balding man, who looked as though he had lost his way, accompanied by a six-foot Amazon in bangs.
“Why, Ambassador, how awfully good of you to come!” Name forgotten but with this bloody music going no one’s counting. He bawled at Gloria to join him—“Darling, meet the new Swiss Ambassador who arrived a week ago. Very sweetly called to pay his compliments to Porter! Poor chap got me instead! Wife will be joining you in a couple of weeks’ time, isn’t that right, Ambassador? So he’s on the loose tonight, ha ha! Lovely to see you here! Forgive me if I do the rounds! Ciao!”
The bandleader was singing, if that was how you described his caterwaul. Clutching his microphone in one fist and fondling its tip with the other. Rotating his hips in copulative ecstasy.
“Darling, aren’t you the teeniest bit turned on?” Gloria whispered as she whirled past him in the arms of the Indian Ambassador. “I am!”
A tray of drinks went by. Woodrow deftly put his empty glass on it and helped himself to a full one. Gloria was being led back to the dance floor by the jovial, shamelessly corrupt Morrison M’Gumbo, known also as Minister for Lunch. Woodrow cast round gloomily for somebody with a decent enough body to dance with. It was this non-dancing that got his goat. This mincing about, parading your parts. It made him feel like the clumsiest, most useless lover a woman ever had to put up with. It evoked all the do-this-don’t-do-thats and the for-God’s-sake-Woodrows that had rung in his ears since the age of five.
“I said, I’ve been running away from myself all my life!” he was bellowing into the puzzled face of his dancing partner, a busty Danish aid worker called Fitt or Flitt. “Always known what I was running away from, but never had the least idea where I was heading. How about you? I said, how about you?” She laughed and shook her head. “You think I’m mad or drunk, don’t you?” he shouted. She nodded. “Well, you’re wrong. I’m both!” Chum of Arnold Bluhm’s, he remembered. Jesus, what a saga. When on earth will that show end? But he must have pondered this loud enough for her to hear him above the awful din because he saw her eyes go down and heard her say, “Maybe never,” with the kind of piety good Catholics reserve for the Pope. Alone again, Woodrow headed upstream towards tables of deafened refugees, huddled together in shell-shocked groups. Time I ate something. He untied his bow tie and let it hang loose.
“Definition of a gentleman, my daddy used to say,” he explained to an uncomprehending black Venus. “Chap who ties his own bow tie!”
Ghita had staked a territorial claim at one corner of the dance floor and was twisting pelvises with two jolly African girls from the British Council. Other girls were joining them in a witches’ circle and the entire band was standing at the edge of the rostrum, singing yeh, yeh, yeh at them. The girls were slapping each other’s palms, then turning round and tipping their bottoms at each other and Christ alone knew what the neighbours were saying up and down the road because Gloria hadn’t invited all of them, or the tent would have been knee-deep in gunrunners and dope dealers—a joke Woodrow must have shared with a brace of very big chaps in native rig because they dissolved into hoots of laughter and retold the whole thing to their womenfolk who cracked up too.
Ghita. What the hell’s she up to now? It’s the Chancery meeting all over again. Every time I look at her she looks away. Every time I look away, she looks at me. It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw. And once again Woodrow must have externalised his thoughts because a bore called Meadower from the Muthaiga Club immediately agreed with him, saying that if young people were determined to dance like that, why didn’t they just fuck on the dance floor and be done with it? Which as it happened accorded perfectly with Woodrow’s opinion, a point he was bellowing into Meadower’s ear as he came face to face with Mustafa the black angel, standing square in front of him as if he were trying to stop him passing, except that Woodrow wasn’t proposing to go anywhere. Woodrow noticed that Mustafa wasn’t carrying anything, which struck him as impertinent. If Gloria out of the
goodness of her heart has hired the poor dear man to fetch and carry, why the hell isn’t he fetching and carrying? Why’s he standing here like my bad conscience, empty-handed except for a folded bit of paper in one hand, mouthing unintelligible words at me like a goldfish?
“Chap says he’s got a message for you,” Meadower was shouting. “What?”
“Very personal, very urgent message. Some beautiful girl fallen base-over-bum in love with you.”
“Mustafa said that?”
“What?”
“I said, did Mustafa say that?”
“Aren’t you going to find out who she is? Probably your wife!” roared Meadower, dissolving in hysterics.
Or Ghita, thought Woodrow, with an absurd leap of hope.
He took half a step away and Mustafa kept alongside him, turning his shoulder into him so that from Meadower’s eyeline they resembled two men hunched together lighting their cigarettes in the wind. Woodrow held out his hand and Mustafa reverently laid the note onto his palm. Plain A4 paper, folded small.
“Thank you, Mustafa,” Woodrow yelled, meaning bugger off.
But Mustafa stood firm, commanding Woodrow with his eyes to read it. All right, damn you, stay where you are. You can’t read English anyway. Can’t speak it either. He unfolded the paper. Electronic type. No signature.
Dear Sir,
I have in my possession a copy of the letter that you wrote to Mrs Tessa Quayle inviting her to elope with you. Mustafa will bring you to me. Please tell nobody and come at once, or I shall be forced to dispose of it elsewhere.
No signature.
With one burst of the riot police’s water cannon, it seemed to Woodrow, he had been drenched cold sober. A man on his way to the scaffold thinks of a multitude of things at once and Woodrow, for all that he had a skinful of his own tax-free whisky inside him, was no exception. He suspected that the transaction between Mustafa and himself had not escaped Gloria’s attention and he was right: she would never again take her eyes off him at a party. So he threw her a reassuring wave across the room, mouthed something to suggest “no problem” and set himself submissively in Mustafa’s wake. As he did so, he caught Ghita’s gaze full beam for the first time this evening and found it calculating.
Meanwhile, he was speculating hard about the identity of his blackmailer and associating him with the presence of the Blue Boys. His argument went as follows. The Blue Boys had at some point searched the Quayles’ house and discovered what Woodrow himself had failed to find. One of their number had kept the letter in his pocket until he saw an opportunity to exploit it. That opportunity had now arisen.
A second possibility occurred to him pretty well simultaneously, which was that Rob or Lesley or both, having been removed from a high-profile murder case against their will, had decided to cash in. But why here and now, for Christ’s sake? Somewhere in this mix he also included Tim Donohue, but that was because Woodrow regarded him as an active if senile non-believer. Only this evening, seated with his beady wife Maud in the darkest corner of the tent, Donohue had, in Woodrow’s opinion, maintained a malign and untrusting presence.
Meanwhile Woodrow was taking intimate note of the physical things around him, rather in the way he might look for emergency doors when an aeroplane hits turbulence: the inadequately driven tent-pegs and slack guy-ropes—my God, the smallest breeze could blow the whole thing over!—the mud-caked coconut matting along the tented corridor—somebody could slip on that and sue me!—the unguarded open doorway to the lower ground—bloody burglars could have emptied the whole house and we’d never have been the wiser.
Skirting the edges of the kitchen, he was disconcerted by the number of unauthorised camp-followers who had converged on his house in the hope of a few leftovers from the buffet, and were sitting around like Rembrandt groups in the glow of a hurricane lamp. Must be a dozen of them, more, he reckoned indignantly. Plus about twenty children camping on the floor. Well, six, anyway. He was equally incensed by the sight of the Blue Boys themselves, sodden with sleep and drink at the kitchen table, their jackets and pistols draped over the backs of their chairs. Their condition, however, persuaded him that they were unlikely to be the authors of the letter that he was still clutching, folded, in his hand.
Leaving the kitchen by the back stairs, Mustafa led the way by hand-torch up to the hall, and so to the front door. Philip and Harry! Woodrow remembered in sudden terror. God in Heaven, if they should see me now. But what would they see? Their father in a dinner jacket with his black tie loose around his neck. Why should they suppose it was loosened for the hangman? Besides—he remembered now—Gloria had farmed the boys out to friends for the night. She had seen enough diplomatic children at dances and couldn’t be doing with any of it for Philip and Harry.
Mustafa was holding the front door open, waving his torch at the drive. Woodrow stepped outside. It was pitch dark. For romantic effect, Gloria had had the outside lights switched off, relying on rows of candles in sandbags which had for the most part mysteriously gone out. Talk to Philip, who had recently taken up domestic sabotage as a pastime. It was a fine night but Woodrow wasn’t in a mood to study stars. Mustafa was skimming towards the gate like a will-o’-the-wisp, beckoning him forward with his torch. The Baluhya gateman opened the gates while his extended family observed Woodrow with their usual intense interest. Cars were parked on both sides of the road, their minders dozing on the verge or murmuring to each other over little flames. Mercedes with drivers, Mercedes with minders, Mercedes with Alsatian dogs in them, and the usual crowd of tribespeople with nothing to do but watch life pass them by. The din from the band was as bloody awful out here as it was in the marquee. Woodrow wouldn’t be surprised if he got a couple of formal complaints tomorrow. Those Belgian shippers in number twelve will slap a writ on you the moment your dog farts in their air space.
Mustafa had stopped at Ghita’s car. Woodrow knew it well. Had watched it often from the safety of his office window, usually with a glass in his hand. It was a tiny Japanese thing, so small and low that when she wriggled into it, he could imagine her putting on her swimsuit. But why are we stopping here? his gaze was demanding of Mustafa. What’s Ghita’s car got to do with me being blackmailed? He began to work out what he was worth in terms of ready cash. Would they want hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? He’d have to borrow from Gloria, but what could he dream up for an excuse? Well, it was only money. Ghita’s car was parked as far from a street lamp as possible. The lamps were out with the power cut, but you never knew when they might come on. He worked out that he had around eighty pounds in Kenyan shillings on him. How much silence would that buy? He began thinking in terms of negotiation. What sanctions did he have as the purchaser? What guar-antee would there be that the fellow didn’t come back in six months or six years? Get on to Pellegrin, he thought, in a burst of gallows humour: ask old Bernard to get the toothpaste back in the tube.
Unless.
Drowning, Woodrow reached for the craziest straw of them all.
Ghita!
Ghita stole the letter! Or, more likely, Tessa gave it to her for safekeeping! Ghita sent Mustafa to haul me out of the party, and she’s about to punish me for what happened at Elena’s. And look, there she is! In the driver’s seat, waiting for me! She slipped round the back of the house and she’s sitting in the car, my subordinate, waiting to blackmail me!
His spirits soared, if only for a second. If it’s Ghita, we can do business. I can outgun her any time. Maybe more than business. Her desire to hurt me is only the reverse side of different, more con-structive desires.
But it wasn’t Ghita. Whoever the figure was or wasn’t, it was unmistakably male. Ghita’s driver, then? Her regular boyfriend, come to take her home after the dance so that nobody else gets her? The passenger door stood open. Under Mustafa’s impassive gaze, Woodrow lowered himself into the car. Not like wriggling into his swimsuit, not for Woodrow. More like getting into a bumper car with Philip at the fair. Mustafa closed the door after h
im. The car rocked, the man in the driver’s seat made no movement. He was dressed the way some urban Africans dress, Saint Moritz-style in defiance of the heat, in a dark quilted anorak and woollen skullcap low over the brow. Was the fellow black or white? Woodrow breathed in, but caught no sweet scent of Africa.
“Nice music, Sandy,” Justin said quietly, reaching out an arm to start the engine.
22
Woodrow sat at a carved desk of rainforest teak priced at five thousand US dollars. He was hunched sideways, one elbow on a silver-framed blotter which cost less. The glow of a single candle glistened on his sweated, sullen face. From the ceiling above him mirrored stalactites reflected the same candle flame to infinity. Justin stood across the room from him in the darkness, leaning against the door, much as Woodrow had leaned against Justin’s door on the day he brought him the news of Tessa’s death. His hands were squeezed behind his back. Presumably he wanted no trouble from them. Woodrow was studying the shadows thrown onto the walls by the candlelight. He could make out elephants, giraffes, gazelles, rhinos rampant and rhinos couchant. The shadows on the wall opposite were all birds. Roosting birds, water birds with long necks, birds of prey with smaller birds in their talons, giant singing birds perched on tree trunks with musical boxes inside them, price on application. The house was in a wooded side street. Nobody drove past it. Nobody tapped on the window to find out why a half-drunk white man in a dinner jacket with his tie untied was talking to a candle in Mr Ahmad Khan’s African & Oriental Art Emporium, on a leafy hillside five minutes’ drive from Muthaiga at half past midnight.
“Khan a friend of yours?” Woodrow asked.
No answer.