I give up. I resign. You receive a death threat, through the letter box. You pick it up. You read it — once. Ugh! Then if you're like me, you hold it away from you because it's so vile, so physically repellent that you don't want it coming near your face. But you read it again. And again. Till you're word perfect. Like me.
So then what do you do? Phone me — "Darling, something simply foul has happened, you've got to come home at once"? Leap in a car? Drive like Jehu to the High Commission, wave the letter at me, march me in to Porter? Do you hell. Not a bit of it. As usual, your pride comes first. You don't show me the letter, you don't tell me about it, you don't burn it. You keep it secret. You classify it and you file it. Deep in a drawer of your no-go-area desk. You do exactly what you would laugh at me for doing: you file it among your papers and you preserve what in me you would mockingly call a patrician discretion about the matter. How you live with yourself after this — how you live with me — is anybody's guess. God knows how you live with the threat, but that's your business. So thanks. Thanks a lot, OK? Thanks for delivering the ultimate in marital apartheid. Bravo. And thanks again.
The rage left him as quickly as it had seized him, to be replaced by a sweating shame and remorse. You couldn't bear it, could you? The idea of actually showing someone that letter. Starting a whole landslide you couldn't control. The stuff about Bluhm, the stuff about me. It was just too much. You were protecting us. All of us. Of course you were. Did you tell Arnold? Of course not. He'd try to talk you out of going on.
* * *
Justin took a mental step back from this benign line of reasoning.
Too sweet. Tessa was tougher than that. And when her dander was up, nastier.
Think lawyer's intellect. Think icy pragmatism. Think very tough young girl, closing in for the kill.
She knew she was getting warm. The death threat confirmed it. You don't issue death threats to people who don't threaten you.
To scream "Foul!" at this stage would mean handing herself over to the authorities. The British are helpless. They have no powers, no jurisdiction. Our only recourse is to show the letter to the Kenyan authorities.
But Tessa had no faith in the Kenyan authorities. It was her frequently repeated conviction that the tentacles of Moi's empire reached into every corner of Kenyan life. Tessa's faith, like her marital duty, was invested for better or worse in the Brits: witness her secret assignation with Woodrow.
The moment she went to the Kenyan police, she would have to provide a list of her enemies, real and potential. Her pursuit of the great crime would be stopped in its tracks. She would be forced to call off the hunt. She would never do that. The great crime was more important to her than her own life.
Well, it is for me too. Than mine.
* * *
As Justin struggles to recover his balance, his eye falls on a hand-addressed envelope which in an earlier life he had extracted in blind haste from the same middle drawer of Tessa's workroom desk in Nairobi in which he had found the empty Dypraxa box. The writing on the envelope is reminiscent, but not yet familiar. The envelope has been torn open. Inside is a single folded page of HM Stationery Office blue. The script is hectic, the text dashed off in haste as well as passion.
My darling Tessa, whom I love beyond all others and always shall,
This is my only absolute conviction, my one piece of self-knowledge as I write. You were terrible to me today, but not as terrible as I was to you. The wrong person was speaking out of both of us. I desire and worship you beyond bearing. I am ready if you are. Let's both chuck in our ridiculous marriages and bolt to wherever you want, as soon as you want. If it's to the end of the earth, so much the better. I love you, I love you and I love you.
But this time the signature was not omitted. It was written loud and clear in letters of a size to match the death threat: Sandy. My name is Sandy, he was saying, and you can tell the whole damn world.
Date and time also given. Even in the throes of great love, Sandy Woodrow remains a conscientious man.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Justin the deceived husband is struck motionless by the moonlight as he stares rigidly at the sea's silvered horizon and takes long breaths of chill night air. He has the feeling he has inhaled something nauseous and needs to clean out his lungs. Sandy leads from weakness into strength, you once told me. Sandy deceives himself first and the rest of us afterward… Sandy is the coward who needs the protection of grand gestures and grand words because anything less leaves him unprotected…
So if you knew all this, what in God's name did you do to bring this down on yourself? he demanded, of the sea, the sky, the snapping night wind.
Nothing whatever, she replied serenely. Sandy mistook my flirtations for a promise, exactly as he mistook your good manners for weakness.
For a moment nonetheless, almost as a luxury, Justin lets his courage fail him, as in his inmost heart he has sometimes let it fail him over Arnold. But his memory is stirring. Something he has read yesterday, last night, the night before. But what? A printout, Tessa to Ham. A long e-mail, a little too intimate for Justin's blood at first reading, so he put it aside in a folder dedicated to enigmas to be resolved when I am strong enough to face them. Returning to the oil room, he exhumes the printout and examines the date.
E-mail printout Tessa to Ham, dated exactly eleven hours after Woodrow, contrary to Service rules regarding the use of official writing paper, declared his passion for a colleague's wife on Her Majesty's Stationery Office blue:
I'm not a girl anymore, Ham, and it's time I put away girlish things, but what girl does, even when she's in pig? And now I've landed myself with a five-star megacreep with the hots for me. Problem is, Arnold and I have struck gold at last, more accurately true excrement of the foulest sort, and we desperately need said creep to speak for us in the corridors of power, which is the only way I can bear to go if I'm Justin's wife and the loyal Brit I aspire to be despite all. Do I hear you say I'm still the same ruthless bitch who likes leading men around on a string even when they're super-creeps? Well, don't say it, Ham. Don't say it even if it's true. Shut up about it. Because I have promises to keep, and so have you, sweetheart. And I need you to stick by me like the dear, sweet pal you are, and tell me I'm a good girl really, because I am. And if you don't, I'll give you the wettest kiss since the day I pushed you into the Rubicon in your sailor suit. Love you, darling. Ciao. Tess.
P.S. Ghita says I'm a complete whore but she can't pronounce it properly so it comes out hooer, like a hoover that's lost its V. Love Tess (hooer).
Defendant innocent as charged, he told her. And I as usual can be duly ashamed of myself.
* * *
Mystically calmed, Justin resumed his puzzled journey.
Extract from Rob and Lesley's joint report to Superintendent Frank Gridley, Overseas Crime Division, Scotland Yard, on their third interview with Woodrow, Alexander Henry, Head of Chancery, British High Commission, Nairobi:
Subject forcefully echoes what he claims to be the opinion of Sir Bernard Pellegrin, FO Director of Affairs for Africa, that further inquiry along the lines urged by Tessa Quayle's memorandum would needlessly jeopardize HMG'S relations with the Kenyan Republic and harm U.k. trade interests… Subject refuses on security grounds to divulge the contents of the said memorandum… Subject disclaims all knowledge of an innovative drug being presently marketed by House of ThreeBees… Subject advises us that any request for a sight of Tessa Quayle's memorandum should be addressed directly to Sir Bernard, assuming that it still exists, which Subject is prepared to doubt. Subject portrays Tessa Quayle as a tiresome and hysterical woman who was mentally unstable in respect of matters related to her aid work. We interpret this as a convenient method of discounting the significance of her memorandum. A request is hereby made that a formal application be sent as soon as practical to the Foreign Office for copies of all papers submitted to Subject by the deceased Tessa Quayle.