The Constant Gardener

"So when is a state not a state, in your opinion, Mr. Quayle?" Tessa inquired sweetly, one idle midday in Cambridge four years ago, in an ancient attic lecture room with dusty sunbeams sloping through the skylight. They are the first words she ever addressed to him, and they trigger a burst of laughter from the languid audience of fifty fellow lawyers who, like Tessa, had enrolled themselves for a two-week summer seminar on Law and the Administered Society. Justin repeats them now. How he came to be standing alone on the dais, in a three-piece gray flannel suit by Hayward, clutching a lectern in both hands, is the story of his life so far, he explains, speaking away from both of them, into the fake Tudor recesses of the Woodrow dining room. "Quayle will do it!" some acolyte in the permanent undersecretary's private office had cried, late last night, not eleven hours before the lecture was due to be given. "Get me Quayle!" Quayle the professional bachelor, he meant, postable Quayle, the aging debs' delight, last of a dying breed, thank God, just back from bloody Bosnia and marked for Africa but not yet. Quayle the spare male, worth knowing if you're giving a dinner party and stuck, perfect manners, probably gay — except he wasn't, as a few of the better-looking wives had reason to know, even if they weren't telling.

"Justin, is that you? — Haggarty. You were in College a couple of years ahead of me. Look here, the PUS is delivering a speech at Cambridge tomorrow to a bunch of aspiring lawyers, except he can't. He's got to leave for Washington in an hour — "

And Justin the good chap already talking himself into it with: "Well, if it's already written, I suppose — if it's only a matter of reading it — "

And Haggarty cutting him short with, "I'll have his car and driver standing outside your house at the stroke of nine, not a minute later. The lecture's crap. He wrote it himself. You can sap it up on the way down. Justin, you're a brick."

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.