"You want a disk of all her e-mails?" Guido asked, sensing correctly that Justin had seen as much of this as he could take.
"That would be very kind," said Justin very politely. "Then I want you to make copies of your work so that I can read it at my leisure and write to you: essays, your homework and all the things you would have wanted Tessa to see."
The disks duly made, Guido replaced the telephone flex with the flex attached to the modem, and they watched a fine herd of Thomson's gazelles in full gallop before the screen went dark. But when Guido tried to click back to the desktop he was forced to declare in a husky voice that the hard disk had been wiped clean just like Tessa's, but without that crazy message about clinical trials and toxicity.
"And she didn't send you anything to keep for her," Justin asked, sounding to himself like a customs officer.
Guido shook his head.
"Nothing that you were to pass on to anyone — she didn't use you as a post office or anything like that?"
More shakes of the head.
"So what material have you lost that is important to you?"
"Only her last messages," Guido whispered.
"Well, that makes two of us." Or three if you include Ham, he was thinking. "So if I can handle it, you can. Because I was married to her. OK? Perhaps there was some bug in her machine that infected your machine. Is that possible? She picked something up and passed it on to you by mistake. Yes? I don't know what I'm talking about, do I? I'm guessing. What I'm really telling you is, we'll never know. So we might just as well say "tough luck" and get on with our lives. Both of us. Yes? And you'll order whatever you need to get yourself set up again. Yes? I'll tell the office in Milan that's what you're going to do."
Reasonably confident that Guido was restored, Justin took his leave; which was to say he drove down the hill again to the villa, and parked the jeep in the courtyard where he had found it, and from the oil room carried her laptop to the seashore. He had been told on various training courses, and he was willing to believe, that there were clever people who could retrieve the text from computers supposedly wiped clean. But such people were on the official side of life to which he no longer belonged. It crossed his mind to contact Rob and Lesley somehow and prevail on them to assist him, but he was reluctant to embarrass them. And besides, if he was honest, there was something contaminated about Tessa's computer, something obscene that he would like to be rid of in a physical sense.
By the light of a half-hidden moon, therefore, he walked the length of a rickety jetty, passing on his way an ancient and rather hysterical notice declaring that whoever ventured further did so at their peril. Having reached the jetty's end, he then consigned her raped laptop to the deep before returning to the oil room to write his heart out until dawn.
* * *
Dear Ham,
Here's the first of what I hope will be a long line of letters to your kind aunt. I don't want to appear maudlin but if I go under a bus I would like you please to hand all the documents personally to the most bloody-minded, unclubbable member of your profession, pay him the earth and start the ball rolling. That way we'll both be doing Tessa a good turn. As ever, Justin
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Until late into the evening, when the whisky finally got the better of him, Sandy Woodrow had remained loyally at his post in the High Commission, shaping, redrafting and honing his forthcoming performance at tomorrow's Chancery meeting; passing it upward into the hierarchy of his official mind, then downward into that other mind that, like an erratic counterweight, dragged him without warning through a bedlam of accusing ghosts, forcing him to shout louder than they did: you do not exist, you are a series of random episodes; you are not related in any way to Porter Coleridge's abrupt departure for London with wife and child, on the questionable grounds that they had decided on the spur of the moment to take some home leave and find Rosie a special school.
And sometimes his thoughts had gone off on their own entirely, to be discovered addressing such subversive matters as divorce by mutual consent, and whether Ghita Pearson or that new girl called Tara Something in Commercial Section would make an appropriate life partner and, if so, which of them the boys would prefer. Or whether after all he was better off living this lone-wolf existence, dreaming of connection, finding none, watching the dream slip further and further from his reach. Driving home with locked doors and closed windows, however, he was able once more to see himself as the loyal family breadwinner and husband — all right, still discreetly open to suggestions, and what man wasn't? — but ultimately the same decent, stalwart, levelheaded soldier's son that Gloria had fallen head over heels in love with all those years ago. As he entered his house, he was therefore surprised, not to say hurt, to discover that Gloria had not by some act of telepathy divined his good intentions and waited up for him, but left him instead to forage for food in the refrigerator. After all, dammit, I am acting High Commissioner, I'm entitled to a little respect, even in my own house.
"Anything on the news?" he called up to her pathetically, eating his cold beef in unstately solitude.
The dining room ceiling, which was one plank of concrete thin, was also the floor to their bedroom.
"Don't you get news at the shop?" Gloria bawled back.
"We don't sit there listening to the radio all day, if that's what you mean," Woodrow replied, rather suggesting that Gloria did. And again waited, his fork poised halfway to his lips.
"They've killed two more white farmers in Zimbabwe, if that's news," Gloria announced, after an apparent breakdown in transmission.
"Don't I know it! We've had the Pellegrin on our backs the whole damn day. Why can't we persuade Moi to put the brakes on Mugabe, if you please? For the same reason we can't persuade Moi to put the brakes on Moi, is the answer to that one." He waited for a "Poor you, darling," but all he got was cryptic silence.
"Nothing else?" he asked. "On the news. Nothing else?"
"What should there be?"
Hell's come over the bloody woman? he marveled sulkily, pouring himself another glass of claret. Never used to be like this. Ever since her widowed lover boy took himself back to England, she's been moping round the house like a sick cow. Won't drink with me, won't eat with me, won't look me in the eye. Won't do the other thing either, not that it was ever high on her list. Hardly bothers with her makeup, amazingly.
All the same, he was pleased she had heard no news. At least he knew something she didn't for once. Not often London manages to sit on a red-hot story without some idiot in Information Department bubbling it to the media ahead of the agreed deadline. If they could just hold their water till tomorrow morning he'd get a clear run, which was what he'd asked Pellegrin for.
"It's a morale issue, Bernard," he'd warned him, in his best military tone. "Couple of people here are going to take it rather badly. I'd like to be the one to break it to them. Particularly with Porter away."
Always good to remind them who was in charge too. Circumspect but unflappable, that's what they look for in their high fliers. Not to make an issue of it, naturally; much better to let London notice for themselves how smoothly things are handled when Porter isn't around to agonize over every comma.