“As near as we can be, dear. Under the same jacaranda tree. With a little African boy.”
“You’re very kind,” he told her for the umpteenth time and, without further word, removed himself to the lower ground and his Gladstone bag.
The bag was his comforter. Twice now Gloria had glimpsed him through the bars of the garden window, seated motionless on his bed, head in hands and the bag at his feet, staring down at it. Her secret conviction—shared with Elena—was that it contained Bluhm’s love letters. He had rescued them from prying eyes—no thanks to Sandy—and he was waiting till he was strong enough to decide whether to read them or burn them. Elena agreed, though she thought Tessa a stupid little tart to have kept them. “Read ’em and sling ’em is my motto, darling.” Noticing Justin’s reluctance to stray from his room for fear of leaving the bag unguarded, Gloria suggested he put it in the wine store which, having an iron grille for a door, added to the prison-like grimness of the lower ground.
“And you shall keep the key, Justin”—grandly entrusting it to him. “There. And when Sandy wants a bottle he’ll have to come and ask you for it. Then perhaps he’ll drink less.”
Gradually, as one press deadline followed another, Woodrow and Coleridge almost persuaded themselves that they had held the dam. Either Wolfgang had silenced his staff and guests, or the press was so obsessed with the scene of the crime that nobody bothered to check out the Oasis, they told each other. Coleridge personally addressed the assembled elders of the Muthaiga Club entreating them, in the name of Anglo-Kenyan solidarity, to stem the flow of gossip. Woodrow delivered a similar homily to the staff of the High Commission. Whatever we may think privately we must do nothing that could fan the flames, he urged, and his wise words, earnestly delivered, had their effect.
But it was all illusion, as Woodrow in his rational heart had known from the start. Just as the press was running out of steam, a Belgian daily ran a front-page story accusing Tessa and Bluhm of “a passionate liaison” and featuring a page photocopied from the registration book at the Oasis and eye-witness accounts of the loving couple dining head to head on the eve of Tessa’s murder. The British Sundays had a field day; overnight Bluhm became a figure of loathing for Fleet Street to snipe at as it wished. Until now, he had been Arnold Bluhm MD, the adopted Congolese son of a wealthy Belgian mining couple, educated Kinshasa, Brussels and the Sorbonne, medical monk, denizen of war zones, selfless healer of Algiers. From now on he was Bluhm the seducer, Bluhm the adulterer, Bluhm the maniac. A page-three feature about murderous doctors down the ages was accompanied by lookalike photographs of Bluhm and O.J. Simpson over the catchy heading “Which Twin is the Doctor?” Bluhm, if you were that kind of newspaper reader, was your archetypal black killer. He had ensnared a white man’s wife, cut her throat, decapitated the driver and run off into the bush to seek new prey or do whatever those salon blacks do when they revert to type. To make the comparison more graphically, they had airbrushed out Bluhm’s beard.
All day long Gloria kept the worst away from Justin, fearing it would unhinge him. But he insisted on seeing everything, warts and all. So come the evening hour and before Woodrow returned, she took him a whisky and reluctantly presented him with the whole garish bundle. Entering his prison space, she was outraged to discover her son Harry sitting opposite him at the rickety pine table, and both of them frowning in concentration over a game of chess. A wave of jealousy seized her.
“Harry, dear, that’s most inconsiderate of you, badgering poor Mr Quayle for chess when—”
But Justin interrupted her before she could finish her sentence.
“Your son has a most serpentine mind, Gloria,” he assured her. “Sandy will have to watch himself, believe me.” Taking the bundle from her, he sat himself languidly on the bed and flicked through it. “Arnold has a pretty good notion of our prejudices, you know,” he went on in the same remote tone. “If he’s alive, he won’t be surprised. If he’s not, he’s not going to care, is he?”
But the press had a far more lethal shot in its locker which Gloria at her most pessimistic could not have foreseen.
Among the dozen or so maverick newsletters to which the High Commission subscribed—coloured local broadsheets, pseudonymously written and printed on the hoof—one in particular had shown a remarkable capacity for survival. It was called, without adornment, AFRICA CORRUPT, and its policy, if such a word could be applied to the turbulent impulses that drove it, was to rake mud regardless of race, colour, truth or the consequences. If it exposed alleged acts of larceny perpetrated by ministers and bureaucrats of the Moi administration, it was equally at home laying bare the “grafting, corruption and pigs-in-clover lifestyle” of the aid bureaucrats.
But the newsletter in question—known ever after as Issue 64— was devoted to none of these matters. It was printed on both sides of a single sheet of shocking-pink paper a yard square. Folded small, it fitted nicely in the jacket pocket. A thick black border signified that Issue 64’s anonymous editors were in mourning. The headline consisted of the one word TESSA in black letters three inches high, and Woodrow’s copy was delivered to him on the Saturday afternoon by none other than the sickly, shaggy, bespectacled, moustached, six-foot-six Tim Donohue in person. The front door bell rang as Woodrow was playing tip-and-run cricket with the boys in the garden. Gloria, normally a tireless wicketkeeper, was grappling with a headache upstairs; Justin was hull-down in his cell with the curtains closed. Woodrow walked through the house and, suspecting some journalist’s ruse, peered through the fish-eye. And there stood Donohue on the doorstep, a sheepish smile on his long sad face, flapping what looked like a pink table napkin back and forth.
“Frightfully sorry to disturb you, old boy. Holy Saturday and all that. Spot of shit seems to have hit the proverbial fan.”
With undisguised distaste Woodrow led him to the drawing room. What on earth’s the bloody man up to now? What on earth was he ever up to, come to think of it? Woodrow had always disliked the Friends, as the spies were unaffectionately known to the Foreign Office. Donohue wasn’t smooth, he had no known linguistic skills, he didn’t charm. He was to all outward purposes past his sell-by date. His day hours appeared to be spent on the Muthaiga Club golf course with the fleshier members of Nairobi’s business community, his evenings at bridge. Yet he lived high, in a grand hiring with four servants and a faded beauty called Maud who looked as ill as he did. Was Nairobi a sinecure for him? A kiss-off at the end of a distinguished career? Woodrow had heard the Friends did that sort of thing. Donohue was in Woodrow’s judgment surplus ballast in a profession that was by definition parasitic and out of date.
“One of my boys just happened to be loafing in the market place,” Donohue explained. “A couple of chaps were handing out free copies in a shifty sort of way, so my lad thought he might as well have one.”
The front page consisted of three separate eulogies of Tessa, each purportedly written by a different African woman friend. The style was Afro-English vernacular: a little of the pulpit, a little of the soapbox, disarming flourishes of feeling. Tessa, each of the writers claimed in her different way, had broken the mould. With her wealth, parentage, education and looks she should have been up there dancing and feasting with the worst of Kenya’s white supremacists. Instead she was the opposite of all they stood for. Tessa was in revolt against her class, race and whatever she believed was tying her down, whether it was the colour of her skin, the prejudice of her social equals or the bonds of a conventional Foreign Service marriage.
“How’s Justin holding up?” Donohue asked, while Woodrow read.
“Well, thank you, considering.”
“I heard he was over at his house the other day.”
“Do you want me to read this or not?”
“Pretty smart footwork, I must say, old boy, dodging those reptiles on the doorstep. You should join our lot. Is he around?”
“Yes, but not receiving.”
If Africa was Tessa Quayle’s adopted cou
ntry, Woodrow read, Africa’s women were her adopted religion.
Tessa fought for us no matter where the battleground, no matter what the taboos. She fought for us at posh champagne parties, posh dinner parties and any other posh party that was crazy enough to invite her, and her message was always the same. Only the emancipation of African women could save us from the blunderings and corruption of our menfolk. And when Tessa discovered she was pregnant, she insisted on bearing her African child among the African women she loved.
“Oh my Christ,” Woodrow exclaimed softly.
“Bit what I felt, actually,” Donohue agreed.
The last paragraph was printed in capitals. Mechanically, Woodrow read it also:
GOODBYE MAMA TESSA. WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF YOUR COURAGE. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, MAMA TESSA, FOR YOUR LIFE. ARNOLD BLUHM MAY LIVE ON BUT YOU ARE DEAD WITHOUT QUESTION. IF THE BRITISH QUEEN EVER AWARDS MEDALS POSTHUMOUSLY, THEN INSTEAD OF ELEVATING MR PORTER COLERIDGE TO A KNIGHTHOOD FOR HIS SERVICES TO BRITISH COMPLACENCY, LET’S HOPE SHE’LL GIVE THE VICTORIA CROSS TO YOU, MAMA TESSA, OUR FRIEND, FOR YOUR OUTSTANDING GALLANTRY IN THE FACE OF POST-COLONIAL BIGOTRY.
“Best bit’s on the back, actually,” Donohue said.
Woodrow turned the paper round.
MAMA TESSA’S AFRICAN BABY
Tessa Quayle believed in putting her body and her life wherever her convictions led her. She expected others to do the same. When Tessa was confined in the Uhuru Hospital, Nairobi, her very close friend Dr Arnold Bluhm visited her every day and, according to some reports, most nights as well, even taking a folding bed with him so that he could sleep beside her in the ward.
Woodrow folded the broadsheet and put it in his pocket. “Think I’ll just run this round to Porter, if it’s all right by you. I can keep it, presumably?”
“All yours, old boy. Comps of the Firm.”
Woodrow was moving towards the door but Donohue showed no sign of following him.
“Coming?” Woodrow asked.
“Thought I’d just hang on, if you didn’t mind. Say my piece to poor old Justin. Where is he? Upstairs?”
“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t do that.”
“Did we, old boy? No problem at all. Another time. Your house, your guest. You haven’t got Bluhm tucked away too, have you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Undeterred, Donohue loped to Woodrow’s side, dipping at the knees, making a party piece of it. “Care for a lift? Only round the corner. Save you getting the car out. Too hot to walk.”
Still half fearing Donohue might nip back to make another attempt on Justin, Woodrow accepted the lift and watched his car safely over the brow. Porter and Veronica Coleridge were sunning themselves in the garden. Behind them lay the High Commission’s Surrey mansion, before them the faultless lawns and weedless flower beds of a rich stockbroker’s garden. Coleridge had the swing seat and was reading documents from a despatch case. His blonde wife Veronica, in corn-blue skirt and floppy straw hat, was sprawled on the grass beside a padded playpen. Within it, their daughter Rosie rolled to and fro on her back, admiring the foliage of an oak tree through the gaps between her fingers while Veronica hummed to her. Woodrow handed Coleridge the broadsheet and waited for the expletives. None came.
“Who reads this crap?”
“Every hack in town, I would imagine,” said Woodrow tonelessly. “What’s their next stop?”
“The hospital,” he replied with a sinking heart.
Slumped in a corduroy armchair in Coleridge’s study, one ear listening to him trading guarded sentences with his detested superior in London over the digital telephone that Coleridge kept locked inside his desk, Woodrow in the recurrent dream he would not shake off until his dying day watched his white man’s body striding at colonial speed through the immense crowded halls of Uhuru Hospital, pausing only to ask anybody in uniform for the right staircase, the right floor, the right ward, the right patient.
“The shit Pellegrin says shove the whole thing under the carpet,” Porter Coleridge announced, slamming down the telephone. “Shove it far and fast. Biggest bloody carpet we can find. Typical.”
Through the study window, Woodrow watched as Veronica lifted Rosie from her playpen and carried her towards the house. “I thought we were doing that already,” he objected, still lost in his reverie.
“What Tessa did in her spare time was her own business. That includes having it off with Bluhm and any noble causes she may have been into. Off the record and only if asked, we respected her crusades but considered them under-informed and screwball. And we don’t comment on irresponsible claims by the gutter press.” A pause while he wrestled with his self-disgust. “And we’re to put it about that she was crazy.”
“Why on earth should we do that?”—waking sharply.
“Ours not to reason why. She was unhinged by her dead baby and unstable before it. She went to a shrink in London, which helps. It stinks and I hate it. When’s the funeral?”
“Middle of next week is the earliest.”
“Can’t it be sooner?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We’re waiting for the post-mortem. Funerals have to be booked in advance.”
“Sherry?”
“No thanks. Think I’ll get back to the ranch.”
“The Office wants long-suffering. She was our cross but we bore her bravely. Can you do long-suffering?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Neither can I. It makes me absolutely fucking sick.”
The words had slipped from him so fast, with such subversiveness and conviction, that Woodrow at first doubted whether he had heard them at all.
“The shit Pellegrin says it’s a three-line whip,” Coleridge continued in a tone of mordant contempt. “No doubters, no defectors. Can you accept that?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well done, you. I’m not sure I can. Any outside representations she made anywhere—she and Bluhm—together or separately—to anyone, including you or me—any bees she had in her bonnet— about matters animal, vegetable, political or pharmaceutical—” a long unbearable pause while Coleridge’s eyes rested on him with the fervour of a heretic enjoining him to treason—“are outside our bailiwick and we know absolutely and completely fuck all about them. Have I made myself clear or would you like me to write it on the wall in secret ink?”
“You’ve made yourself clear.”
“Because Pellegrin made himself clear, you see. Unclear he was not.”
“No. He wouldn’t be.”
“Did we keep copies of that stuff she never gave you? The stuff we never saw, touched or otherwise sullied our lily-white consciences with?”
“Everything she gave us went to Pellegrin.”
“How clever of us. And you’re in good heart, are you, Sandy? Tail up and all that, given that times are trying and you’ve got her husband in your guest room?”
“I think so. How about you?” asked Woodrow who for some time, with Gloria’s encouragement, had been looking with favour on the growing rift between Coleridge and London, and wondering how best to exploit it.
“Not sure I am in good heart, actually,” Coleridge replied, with more frankness than he had shown to Woodrow in the past. “Not sure at all. In fact, come to think of it, I’m bloody unsure that I can subscribe to any of it. I can’t, in fact. I refuse. So scupper Bernard bloody Pellegrin and all his works. Bugger them in fact. And he’s a bloody awful tennis player. I shall tell him.”
On any other day Woodrow might have welcomed such evidence of schism and done his modest best to foment it, but his memories of the hospital were hounding him with a vividness he could not escape, filling him with hostility towards a world that held him prisoner against his will. To walk from the High Commissioner’s Residence to his own took no more than ten minutes. Along the way he became a moving target for barking dogs, begging children calling “five shillings, five shillings” as they ran after him, and well-intent
ioned motorists who slowed down to offer him a lift. Yet by the time he walked into his drive he had relived the most accusing hour of his life.
There are six beds in the ward at the Uhuru Hospital, three to either wall. None has sheets or pillows. The floor is concrete. There are skylights but they are unopened. It is winter, but no breeze passes through the room, and the stench of excreta and disinfectant is so fierce that Woodrow seems to ingest as well as smell it. Tessa lies in the middle bed of the left-hand wall, breastfeeding a child. He sees her last, deliberately. The beds either side of her are empty except for perished sheets of rubber buttoned to the mattresses. Across the room from her, one very young woman huddles on her side, her head flat on the mattress, one bare arm dangling. A teenaged boy crouches on the floor close beside her, his wide beseeching gaze turned unflinchingly to her face as he fans it with a piece of cardboard. Next to them a dignified old woman with white hair perches sternly upright reading a Mission Bible through horn-rimmed spectacles. She wears a kanga cloth of cotton, the type sold to tourists as a cover-up. Beyond her, a woman with earphones scowls at whatever she is hearing. Her face is etched in pain, and deeply devout. All this Woodrow takes in like a spy, while out of the corner of his eye he watches Tessa and wonders whether she has seen him.
But Bluhm has seen him. Bluhm’s head has lifted as soon as Woodrow steps awkwardly into the room. Bluhm has risen from his place at Tessa’s bedside, then stooped to whisper something in her ear, before coming silently towards him to take his hand and murmur, “Welcome,” man to man. Welcome to what precisely? Welcome to Tessa, courtesy of her lover? Welcome to this reeking hellhole of lethargic suffering? But Woodrow’s only response is a reverent, “Good to see you, Arnold,” as Bluhm slips discreetly into the corridor.
English women feeding children, in Woodrow’s limited experience of the species, exercised a decent restraint. Certainly Gloria had done so. They open their fronts as men open theirs, then use their arts to obscure whatever lies within. But Tessa in the stifling African air feels no need of modesty. She is naked to her waist which is covered in a kanga cloth similar to the old woman’s, and she is cradling the child to her left breast, her right breast free and waiting. Her upper body is slender and translucent. Her breasts, even in the aftermath of child-birth, are as light and flawless as he has so often imagined them. The child is black. Blue-black against the marble whiteness of her skin. One tiny black hand has found the breast that is feeding it, and is working it with eerie confidence while Tessa watches. Then slowly she raises her wide grey eyes and looks into Woodrow’s. He reaches for words but hasn’t any. He leans over her and past the child and, with his left hand resting on her bedhead, kisses her brow. As he does so he is surprised to see a notebook on the side of the bed where Bluhm has been sitting. It is balanced precariously on a tiny table, together with a glass of stale-looking water and a couple of ballpoint pens. It is open, and she has been writing in it in a vague, spidery hand that is like a bad memory of the privately tutored italic script he associates with her. He lowers himself side-saddle onto the bed while he thinks of something to say. But it is Tessa who speaks first. Weakly, a voice drugged and strangled after pain yet unnaturally composed, still managing to strike the mocking note she always has for him.