“And the rape?” Justin enquires with feigned detachment, keeping his eyes fixed on his folded hands.
“Cosmetic or incidental,” Rob retorts crisply. “Villains lost their heads or did it with forethought.”
“Which brings us back to motive, Justin,” Lesley says.
“Yours,” says Rob. “Unless you’ve got a better idea.”
Their two faces are trained on Justin’s like cameras, one to either side of him, but Justin remains as impervious to their double stare as he is to innuendo. Perhaps in his internal isolation he is not aware of either. Lesley lowers one hand to her useful bag in order to locate the tape recorder, but thinks better of it. The hand remains caught in flagrante, while the rest of her is turned to Justin, to this man of impeccably drafted sentences, this sitting committee of one.
“But I know no killers, you see,” he is objecting—pointing out the flaw in their argument as he peers ahead of him with emptied eyes. “I hired nobody, instructed nobody, I’m afraid. I had nothing whatever to do with my wife’s murder. Not in the sense you are implying. I did not wish it, I did not engineer it.” His voice falters, and strikes an embarrassing kink. “I regret it beyond words.”
And this with such finality that for an instant the police officers appear to have nowhere to go, preferring to study Gloria’s watercolours of Singapore, which hang in a row across the brick fireplace, each priced at “£199 and NO BLOODY VAT!,” each with the same scrubbed sky and palm tree and flock of birds and her name in lettering loud enough to read across the road, plus a date for the benefit of collectors.
Until Rob, who has the brashness, if not the self-assurance of his age, throws up his long thin head and blurts, “So you didn’t mind your wife and Bluhm sleeping together, I suppose? A lot of husbands could get a bit ratty about a thing like that.” Then snaps his mouth shut, waiting for Justin to do whatever Rob’s righteous expectations require deceived husbands to do in such cases: weep, blush, rage against their own inadequacies or the perfidy of their friends. If so, Justin disappoints him.
“That is simply not the point,” he replies, with such force that he takes himself by surprise, and sits upright, and peers round him as if to see who has spoken out of turn, and reprimand the fellow. “It may be the point for the newspapers. It may be the point for you. It was never the point for me, and it is not the point now.”
“So what is the point?” Rob demands.
“I failed her.”
“How? Not up to it, you mean?”—a male sneer—“Failed her in the bedroom, did you?”
Justin is shaking his head. “By detaching myself.” His voice fell to a murmur. “By letting her go it alone. By emigrating from her in my mind. By making an immoral contract with her. One that I should never have allowed. And nor should she.”
“What was that then?” Lesley asks sweet as milk after Rob’s deliberate roughness.
“She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction. It should never have been made. It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us. It was like drawing a chalk-line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed.”
Unfazed by the frankness of these admissions, and the nights and days of self-recrimination suggested by them, Rob makes to challenge him. His lugubrious face is set in the same incredulous sneer, his mouth round and open like the muzzle of a large gun. But Lesley is quicker than Rob today. The woman in her is wide awake and listening to sounds that Rob’s aggressively male ear can’t catch. Rob turns to her, seeking her permission for something: to challenge him again with Arnold Bluhm perhaps, or with some other telling question that will bring him nearer to the murder. But Lesley shakes her head and, lifting her hand from the region of the bag, surreptitiously pats the air, meaning “slowly, slowly.”
“So how did the two of you get together in the first place, anyway?” she asks Justin, as one might ask a chance acquaintance on a long journey.
And this is genius on Lesley’s part: to offer him a woman’s ear and a stranger’s understanding; to call a halt like this, and lead him from his present battlefield to the unthreatened meadows of his past. And Justin responds to her appeal. He relaxes his shoulders, half closes his eyes and in a distant, deeply private tone of recollection tells it the way it was, exactly as he had told it to himself a hundred times in as many tormented hours.
“So when is a state not a state, in your opinion, Mr Quayle?” Tessa enquired 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 daïs, in a three-piece grey 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 under-secretary’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 ageing 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—patronising, puffy and verbose like its author, who by now presumably was relaxing in the lap of under-secretarial luxury in Washington DC. 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 centre 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 any more, and therefore resorting to those non-mating 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 greying sideburn, down again—“I would suggest to you that, these days, very roughly, the qualifications for being a civilised 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 un-state.” 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 rat-a-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 legitimise 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 under-secretary, 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 favour. “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 realised he had scored a victory that he didn’t want. He knew his own insecurities and recognised 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 forwards in them to snap her shin-bones. 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.
“You protected me,” she explained, still in Italian, face down inside her hair. “You always will protect me, won’t you?”
And Justin, polite to a fault as always, said yes, well, if called upon he would, of course. Or he’d certainly do his best, put it that way. As far as he ever remembered, those were the only words that passed between them during lunch, although later to his amazement she assured him that he talked brilliantly about the threat of future conflict in the Lebanon, a place he hadn’t thought about for years, and about the Western media’s demonisation of Islam and the ludicrous posture of Western liberals who did not allow their ignorance to stand in the way of their intolerance; and that she was greatly impressed by how much feeling he brought to this important theme, which again puzzled Justin because so far as he knew he was totally divided on the issue.
But then something was happening to Justin that, to his excitement and alarm, he was unable to control. He had been drawn completely by accident into a beautiful play, and was captivated by it. He was in a different element, acting a part, and the part was the one he had often wanted to play in life, but never till now quite brought off. Once or twice, it was true, he had sensed the onset of a similar sensation, but never with such heady confidence or abandon. And all this while the practised womaniser in him sent out dire warning signals of the most emphatic kind: abort, this one’s trouble, she’s too young for you, too real, too earnest, she doesn’t know how the game is played.
> It made no odds. After lunch, with the sun still shining on them, they went on the river, and he demonstrated to her what all good lovers are supposed to demonstrate to their womenfolk on the Cam—notably, how deft he was, and how polished, and how at ease, balanced up there in his waistcoat on the precarious stern of a punt, wielding a pole and making witty bilingual conversation—which again she swore was what he did, though all he could ever afterwards remember was her long waif’s body in its white blouse and her horsewoman’s black skirt with a slash in it, and her grave eyes watching him with some kind of recognition he could not reciprocate, since he had never in his life been possessed by such a strong attraction or been so helpless in its spell. She asked him where he had learned his gardening, and he replied, “From our gardeners.” She asked him who his parents were, and he was obliged to admit—reluctantly, certain it would offend her egalitarian principles—that he was well born and well heeled, and that the gardeners were paid for by his father, who had also paid for a long succession of nannies and boarding schools and universities and foreign holidays, and whatever else was needed to ease his path into the “family firm,” which was what his father called the Foreign Office.
But to his relief she seemed to find this a perfectly reasonable description of his provenance, and matched it with a few confidences of her own. She too had been born into privilege, she confessed. But both her parents had died within the last nine months, both from cancer. “So I’m an orphan,” she declared, with fake levity, “free to good home.” After which they sat apart for a while, still in close communion.
“I’ve forgotten the car,” he told her at some point, as if this in some way put a bar on further business.
“Where did you park it?”
“I didn’t. It’s got a driver. It’s a government car.”
“Can’t you ring it up?”