The Constant Gardener

"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 well: 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.