The Constant Gardener (15 page)

“So can you imagine a situation where you personally would feel obliged to undermine the state?”

“I personally? In this country? Oh my goodness me, certainly not,” Justin replied, appropriately shocked. “Not when I've just come home.” Disdainful laughter from the audience, which was firmly on Tessa's side.

“In no circumstances?”

“None that I can envisage, no.”

“How about other countries?”

“Well, I'm not a citizen of other countries, am I?”—the laughter beginning to go his way now—“Believe me, it is really quite enough work trying to speak for one country—” greeted by more laughter, which further heartened him—“I mean more than one is simply not—”

He needed an adjective but she threw her next punch before he found one: a salvo of punches, as it turned out, delivered in a rata-tat to face and body.

“Why do you have to be a citizen of a country before you make a judgment about it? You negotiate with other countries, don't you? You cut deals with them. You legitimize them through trading partnerships. Are you telling us there's one ethical standard for your country and another for the rest? What are you telling us, actually?”

Justin was first embarrassed, then angry. He remembered, a little late, that he was still deeply tired after his recent sojourn in bloody Bosnia and theoretically recuperating. He was reading for an African posting—he assumed, as usual, a gruesome one. He had not come back to Mother England to play whipping boy for some absentee undersecretary, let alone read his lousy speech. And he was damned if Eternally Eligible Justin was going to be pilloried by a beautiful harridan who had cast him as some kind of archetypal chinless wonder. There was more laughter in the air, but it was laughter on a knife edge, ready to fall either way. Very well: if she was playing to the gallery, so would he. Hamming it like the best of them, he raised his sculpted eyebrows and kept them raised. He took a step forward and flung up his hands, palms outward in self-protection.

“Madam,” he began—as the laughter swung in his favor. “I think, madam—I very much fear—that you are attempting to lure me into a discussion about my morals.”

At which the audience sent up a veritable thunder of applause—everyone but Tessa. The sun that had been shining down on her had disappeared and he could see her beautiful face and it was hurt and fugitive. And suddenly he knew her very well —better in that instant than he knew himself. He understood the burden of beauty and the curse of always being an event, and he realized he had scored a victory that he didn't want. He knew his own insecurities and recognized them at work in her. She felt, by reason of her beauty, that she had an obligation to be heard. She had set out on a dare and it had gone wrong for her, and now she didn't know how to get back to base, wherever base was. He remembered the awful drivel he had just read, and the glib answers he had given, and he thought: She's absolutely right and I'm a pig, I'm worse, I'm a middleaged Foreign Office smoothie who's turned the room against a beautiful young girl who was doing what was natural to her. Having knocked her down, he therefore rushed to help her to her feet:

“However, if we are being serious for a moment,” he announced in an altogether stiffer voice, across the room to her, as the laughter obediently died, “you have put your finger on precisely the issue that literally none of us in the international community knows how to answer. Who are the white hats? What is an ethical foreign policy? All right. Let's agree that what joins the better nations these days is some notion of humanistic liberalism. But what divides us is precisely the question you ask: when does a supposedly humanistic state become unacceptably repressive? What happens when it threatens our national interests? Who's the humanist then? When, in other words, do we press the panic button for the United Nations—assuming they show up, which is another question entirely? Take Chechnya—take Burma-take Indonesia—take three-quarters of the countries in the so-called developing world—”

And so on, and so on. Metaphysical fluff of the worst kind, as he would have been the first to admit, but it got her off the hook. A debate of sorts developed, sides were formed and facile points thrashed out. The meeting overran, and was therefore judged a triumph.

“I'd like you to take me for a walk,” Tessa told him as the meeting broke up. “You can tell me about Bosnia,” she added, by way of an excuse.

They walked in the gardens of Clare College and, instead of telling her about bloody Bosnia, Justin told her the name of every plant, first name and family name, and how it earned its living. She held his arm and listened in silence except for the odd “Why do they do that?” or “How does that happen?” And this had the effect of keeping him talking, for which he was at first grateful, because talking was his way of putting up screens against people—except that with Tessa on his arm he found himself thinking less of screens than how frail her ankles were inside her modish heavy boots as she set them one after the other along the narrow path they shared. He was convinced she had only to fall forward in them to snap her shinbones. And how lightly she bobbed against him, as if they weren't so much walking as sailing. After the walk they had a late lunch at an Italian restaurant, and the waiters flirted with her, which annoyed him, until it transpired that Tessa was half Italian herself, which somehow made it all right, and incidentally enabled Justin to show off his own Italian, of which he was proud. But then he saw how grave she had become, how pensive, and how her hands faltered, as if her knife and fork were too heavy for her, the way her boots had been in the garden.

“You protected me,” she explained, still in Italian, face down inside her hair. “You always will protect me, won't you?”

And Justin, polite to a fault as always, said yes, well, if called upon he would, of course. Or he'd certainly do his best, put it that way. As far as he ever remembered, those were the only words that passed between them during lunch, although later to his amazement she assured him that he talked brilliantly about the threat of future conflict in Lebanon, a place he hadn't thought about for years, and about the Western media's demonization of Islam and the ludicrous posture of Western liberals who did not allow their ignorance to stand in the way of their intolerance; and that she was greatly impressed by how much feeling he brought to this important theme, which again puzzled Justin because so far as he knew he was totally divided on the issue.

But then something was happening to Justin that, to his excitement and alarm, he was unable to control. He had been drawn completely by accident into a beautiful play, and was captivated by it. He was in a different element, acting a part, and the part was the one he had often wanted to play in life, but never till now quite brought off. Once or twice, it was true, he had sensed the onset of a similar sensation, but never with such heady confidence or abandon. And all this while the practiced womanizer in him sent out dire warning signals of the most emphatic kind: abort, this one's trouble, she's too young for you, too real, too earnest, she doesn't know how the game is played.

It made no odds. After lunch, with the sun still shining on them, they went on the river, and he demonstrated to her what all good lovers are supposed to demonstrate to their womenfolk on the Cam—notably, how deft he was, and how polished, and how at ease, balanced up there in his waistcoat on the precarious stern of a punt, wielding a pole and making witty bilingual conversation—which again she swore was what he did, though all he could ever afterward remember was her long waif's body in its white blouse and her horsewoman's black skirt with a slash in it, and her grave eyes watching him with some kind of recognition he could not reciprocate, since he had never in his life been possessed by such a strong attraction or been so helpless in its spell. She asked him where he had learned his gardening, and he replied, “From our gardeners.” She asked him who his parents were, and he was obliged to admit—reluctantly, certain it would offend her egalitarian principles—that he was well born and well heeled, and that the gardeners were paid for by his father, who had also paid for a long succession of nannies and boarding schools and universities and foreign holidays, and whatever else was needed to ease his path into the “family firm,” which was what his father called the Foreign Office.

But to his relief she seemed to find this a perfectly reasonable description of his provenance, and matched it with a few confidences of her own. She too had been born into privilege, she confessed. But both her parents had died within the last nine months, both from cancer. “So I'm an orphan,” she declared, with fake levity, “free to good home.” After which they sat apart for a while, still in close communion.

“I've forgotten the car,” he told her at some point, as if this in some way put a bar on further business.

“Where did you park it?”

“I didn't. It's got a driver. It's a government car.”

“Can't you ring it up?”

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 hellhole, 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 civilized 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 skepticism, 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, humored 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 aging debs' delight, the nimble bachelor forever 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 anytime 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 toward 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 roles 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.”