"Tess, honestly, this can't go on."
"Don't call me Tess."
"Why not?"
"That name's reserved."
Who by? he wonders. Bluhm, or another of her lovers? Quayle never called her Tess. Nor did Ghita, as far as Woodrow knew.
"You simply can't go on expressing yourself so freely. Your opinions."
And then the passage he has prepared in advance, the one that reminds her of her duty as the responsible wife of a serving diplomat. But he never reaches the end of it. The word "duty" has stung her into action.
"Sandy, my duty is to Africa. What's yours?"
He is surprised to have to answer for himself. "To my country, if you'll allow me to be pompous. As Justin's is. To my Service and my Head of Mission. Does that answer you?"
"You know it doesn't. Not nearly. It's miles off."
"How would I know anything of the kind?"
"I thought you might have come to talk to me about the riveting documents I gave you."
"No, Tessa, I did not. I came here to ask you to stop shooting your mouth off about the misdoings of the Moi government in front of every Tom, Dick and Harry in Nairobi. I came here to ask you to be one of the team for a change, instead of — oh, finish the sentence for yourself," he ends rudely.
Would I have talked to her like that if I'd known she was pregnant? Probably not so baldly. But I would have talked to her. Did I guess that she was pregnant while I tried not to notice her naked silhouette? No. I was wanting her beyond bearing, as she could tell by the altered state of my voice and the stiltedness of my movements.
"So you mean you haven't read them?" she says, sticking determinedly to the subject of the documents. "You'll be telling me in a minute that you haven't had time."
"Of course I've read them."
"And what did you make of them when you'd read them, Sandy?"
"They tell me nothing I don't know, and nothing I can do anything about."
"Now Sandy, that's very negative of you. It's worse. It's pusillanimous. Why can't you do anything about them?"
Woodrow, hating how he sounds: "Because we are diplomats and not policemen, Tessa. The Moi government is terminally corrupt, you tell me. I never doubted it. The country is dying of AIDS, it's bankrupt, there is not a corner of it, from tourism to wildlife to education to transport to welfare to communications, that isn't falling apart from fraud, incompetence and neglect. Well observed. Ministers and officials are diverting lorry-loads of food aid and medical supplies earmarked for starving refugees, sometimes with the connivance of aid agency employees, you say. Of course they are. Expenditure on the country's health runs at five dollars per head per year and that's before everybody from the top of the line to the bottom has taken his cut. The police routinely mishandle anybody unwise enough to bring these matters to public attention. Also true. You have studied their methods. They use water torture, you say. They soak people, then beat them, which reduces visible marks. You are right. They do. They are not selective. And we do not protest. They also rent out their weapons to friendly murder gangs, to be returned by first light or you don't get your deposit back. The High Commission shares your disgust, but still we do not protest. Why not? Because we are here, mercifully, to represent our country, not theirs. We have thirty-five thousand indigenous Britons in Kenya whose precarious livelihood depends on President Moi's whim. The High Commission is not in the business of making life harder for them than it already is."
"And you have British business interests to represent," she reminds him playfully.
"That is not a sin, Tessa," he retorts, trying to wrest the lower half of his gaze from the shadow of her breasts through the puff of dress. "Commerce is not a sin. Trading with emerging countries is not a sin. Trade helps them to emerge, as a matter of fact. It makes reforms possible. The kind of reforms we all want. It brings them into the modern world. It enables us to help them. How can we help a poor country if we're not rich ourselves?"
"Bullshit."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Specious, unadulterated, pompous Foreign Office bullshit, if you want its full name, worthy of the inestimable Pellegrin himself. Look around you. Trade isn't making the poor rich. Profits don't buy reforms. They buy corrupt government officials and Swiss bank accounts."
"I dispute that absolutely — "
She cuts him short. "So it's file and forget. Right? No action at this time. Signed, Sandy. Great. The mother of democracies is once more revealed as a lying hypocrite, preaching liberty and human rights for all, except where she hopes to make a buck."
"That's not fair at all! All right, Moi's Boys are crooks and the old man still has a couple of years to run. But good things are on the horizon. A word in the right ear — the collective withholding of donor nations' aid — quiet diplomacy — they're all having their effect. And Richard Leakey is being drafted into the Cabinet to put a brake on corruption and reassure donors that they can start giving again without financing Moi's rackets." He is beginning to sound like a guidance telegram, and knows it. Worse, she knows it too, as evidenced by a very big yawn. "Kenya may not have much of a present but it has a future," he ends bravely. And waits for a reciprocal sign from her to indicate that they are moving toward some kind of cobbled truce.
But Tessa, he remembers too late, is not a conciliator, neither is her bosom pal Ghita. They are both young enough to believe there is such a thing as simple truth. "The document I gave you supplies names and dates and bank accounts," she insists remorselessly. "Individual ministers are identified and incriminated. Will that be a word in the right ear too? Or is nobody listening out there?"
"Tessa."
She is slipping away from him when he came here to be closer to her.
"Sandy."
"I take your point. I hear you. But for heaven's sake — in the name of sanity — you can't seriously be suggesting that HMG in the person of Bernard Pellegrin should be conducting a witch hunt against named ministers of the Kenyan government! I mean, my God — it's not as if we Brits were above corruption ourselves. Is the Kenyan High Commissioner in London about to tell us to clean up our act?"
"Sheer bloody humbug and you know it," Tessa snaps, eyes flaming.
He has not reckoned with Mustafa. He enters silently, at the stoop. First with great accuracy he sets a small table midway between them on the carpet, then a silver tray with a silver coffeepot and her late mother's silver sweetmeat basket filled with shortbread. And the intrusion clearly stimulates Tessa's ever-present sense of theater, for she kneels upright before the little table, shoulders back, dress stretched across her breasts while she punctuates her speech with humorously barbed inquiries about his tastes.
"Was it black, Sandy, or just a touch of the cream? — I forget," she asks with mock gentility. This is the Pharisaic life we lead — she is telling him — a continent lies dying at our door, and here we stand or kneel drinking coffee off a silver tray while just down the road children starve, the sick die and crooked politicians bankrupt the nation that was tricked into electing them. "A witch-hunt — since you mention it — would make an excellent beginning. Name 'em, shame 'em, chop their heads off and spike 'em on the city gates, says I. The trouble is, it doesn't work. The same List of Shame is published every year in the Nairobi newspapers, and the same Kenyan politicians feature in it every time. Nobody is sacked, nobody is hauled up before the courts." She hands him a cup, swiveling on her knees to reach him. "But it doesn't bother you, does it? You're a status quo man. That's a decision you've taken. It hasn't been thrust upon you. You took it. You, Sandy. You looked in the mirror one day and you thought: Hullo, me, from now on I'll treat the world as I find it. I'll get the best deal I can for Britain, and I'll call it my duty. Never mind if it's a duty that accounts for the survival of some of the foulest governments on the globe. I'll do it anyway." She offers him sugar. He silently declines it. "So I'm afraid we can't agree, can we? I want to speak up. You want me to bury my head where yours is. One woman's duty is another man's cop-out. What's new?"