Then Roxanne Terrel stood up and undid all his good work. A sort of ne’er-frocked nun, what you might have called a lay martyr, Roxanne Terrel was an American Baha’i with an inner glow of self-satisfaction who seemed to make a living letting people see it. The Baha’is had sponsored the Peace Expo, and as I didn’t know anything about them I tried to listen hard for any clues Roxanne Terrel might give me as to what they believed. But it sounded like simple American evangelism most of the time. ‘We are learning to get inside ourselves. We have locked up our hearts, we have locked up our feelings . . . Didn’t you feel something yesterday? I did. Many people came to me and said, “I feel something. I don’t know what it is I feel, but it is something!”’

The something I felt was that maybe the Baha’is were in it with the CIA. There was so much talk of the personal here today, so strong an assumption of how much we were all to blame, how necessary it was to look within and find the peace we needed there – the strategy for disarmament, in other words, was so exclusively limited to an interior geography – that no representative of any belligerent nation secreted in the audience need have felt that there was pressure here on his government not to go on shooting as before.

‘What we need is affirmation,’ Roxanne Terrel said, ‘we need each other’s affirmation. We mustn’t be afraid of personal commitment.’

She touched her chest and talked of feelings of ‘new dimensions’. As for example when a toothless Chinese girl with an ugly communist haircut tugged at her dress (did she mean vestments?) and showed her some indiscriminate affection – ‘It really was like a gift for me – this simplicity.’

It was when she began crying through her squint, scarcely able to go on reading from the book about Vietnam, written by a friend of hers, which she just happened to have about her person, that Ros and I rose with that simultaneity which had eluded the Filipino women the night before. I’d noticed that in her irritation Ros had been polishing her bag with a tissue. Although it was made of a naturally dull nappa leather, it now shone like steel. As we left the hall the sun caught it, so that it sent out shafts of broken light, like those from a revolving glass ball on the ceiling of a palais de danse, or a dagger in the hand of an assassin. The last words we heard were those of Roxanne Terrel. Tearful and sticky. Like candy floss that had been wept into. ‘It really takes pain,’ she was saying, ‘to have compassion.’