So here he was, a fellow Etonian brick, having delivered himself of the dullest lecture he had read in his life-patronizing, puffy and verbose like its author, who by now presumably was relaxing in the lap of undersecretarial luxury in Washington, D.C. It had never occurred to him that he would be required to take questions from the floor, but when Tessa piped out hers, it never occurred to him to refuse her. She was positioned at the geometric center of the room, which was where she belonged. Locating her, Justin formed the foolish impression that her colleagues had deliberately left a space round her in deference to her beauty. The high neck of her legal white blouse reached, like a blameless choirgirl's, to her chin. Her pallor and spectral slimness made a waif of her. You wanted to roll her up in a blanket and make her safe. The sunbeams from the skylight shone so brightly on her dark hair that to begin with he couldn't make out the face inside. The most he got was a broad, pale brow, a pair of solemn wide eyes and a fighter's pebble jaw. But the jaw came later. In the meantime she was an angel. What he didn't know, but was about to discover, was that she was an angel with a cudgel.
"Well — I suppose the answer to your question is — " Justin began — "and you must please correct me if you think differently — " bridging the age gap and the gender gap and generally imparting an egalitarian air — "that a state ceases to be a state when it ceases to deliver on its essential responsibilities. Would that be your feeling, basically?"
"Essential responsibilities being what?" the angel-waif rapped back.
"Well — " said Justin again, not certain where he was heading anymore, and therefore resorting to those nonmating signals with which he imagined he was securing protection for himself, if not some kind of outright immunity — "Well — " troubled gesture of the hand, dab of the Etonian forefinger at graying sideburn, down again — "I would suggest to you that, these days, very roughly, the qualifications for being a civilized state amount to — electoral suffrage, ah — protection of life and property — um, justice, health and education for all, at least to a certain level — then the maintenance of a sound administrative infrastructure — and roads, transport, drains, et cetera — and what else is there? — ah yes, the equitable collection of taxes. If a state fails to deliver on at least a quorum of the above — then one has to say that the contract between state and citizen begins to look pretty shaky — and if it fails on all of the above, then it's a failed state, as we say these days. An unstate." Joke. "An ex-state." Another joke, but still no one laughed. "Does that answer your question?"
He had assumed that the angel would require a moment's reflection to ponder this profound reply, and was therefore rattled when, barely allowing him time to bring the paragraph home, she struck again.
"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 welclass="underline" 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 middle-aged 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.