She loved me, but from a height.
‘Let’s face it, sport, they’re not going to appoint us ambassador to Beijing or give us a knighthood, are they?’ she reminded me cheerfully when the question came up over dinner. As usual, I took it on the chin. For as long as I was a diplomat abroad, I at least had status. Back in the mother country, I was part of the grey mass.
It was not till our second evening in the mountains, while Steff was out gallivanting with a bunch of Italian kids who were staying in our hotel, and Prue and I were enjoying a quiet cheese fondue and a couple of glasses of kirsch at Marcel’s, that I was seized with the urge to come clean to Prue about my job offer at the Office – really clean – not tiptoe around as I had been planning, not another cover story, but tell it to her from the heart, which was the least she deserved after all I’d put her through over the years. Her air of quiet resignation told me she had already sensed that I was a long way from opening that outward-bound club for disadvantaged kids.
‘It’s one of those run-down London substations that’s been resting on its laurels since the glory days of the Cold War and not producing anything worth a damn,’ I say grimly. ‘It’s a Mickey Mouse outfit, light miles from the mainstream, and my job will be either to get it on its feet or speed it on its way to the graveyard.’
With Prue, on the rare occasions we get to talk in relaxed terms about the Office, I never know whether I’m swimming against the tide or with it, so I tend to do a bit of both.
‘I thought you always said you didn’t want a command post,’ she objects lightly. ‘You preferred to be second man, not bean-counting and bossing other people around.’
‘Well, this isn’t really a command post, Prue,’ I assure her warily. ‘I’ll still be second man.’
‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ she says, brightening. ‘You’ll have Bryn to keep you on the rails. You always admired Bryn. We both did’ – gallantly setting aside her own scruples.
We exchange nostalgic smiles as we recall our short-lived honeymoon as Moscow spies, with Station head Bryn our ever-watchful guide and mentor.
‘Well, I won’t be under Bryn directly, Prue. Bryn’s Czar of All the Russias these days. A sideshow like the Haven’s a bit below his pay grade.’
‘So who’s the lucky person who’s going to be in charge of you?’ she enquires.
This is no longer the kind of full disclosure I had in mind. Dom is anathema to Prue. She met him when she came out to visit me in Budapest with Steff, took one look at Dom’s distraught wife and children and read the signs.
‘Well, officially I’ll be under what’s called London General,’ I explain. ‘But of course in reality, if it’s anything really major, it trickles up the pyramid to Bryn. It’s just for as long as they need me, Prue. Not a day longer,’ I add by way of consolation, though which of us I’m consoling is not clear to either of us.
She takes a forkful of fondue, a sip of wine, a sip of kirsch and, thus fortified, reaches both her hands across the table and grasps mine. Does she guess Dom? Does she intuit him? Prue’s near-psychic insights can verge on the disturbing.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Nat,’ she says after due reflection. ‘I think it’s your good right to do exactly what you want to do, for as long as you want to do it, and bugger the rest. And I’ll do the same. And it’s my turn to pay the bill, so there. The whole of it this time. I owe it to my barefaced integrity,’ she adds, in a joke that never pales.
And it was on this happy note, while we’re lying in bed and I’m thanking her for her generosity of spirit over the years and she is telling me sweet things about myself in return, and Steff is dancing the night away, or so we hope, that I come up with the notion that now is the ideal opportunity to make a clean breast to our daughter about the true nature of her father’s work, or as clean as Head Office allows. It was high time she knew, I reasoned, and far better she hear it from me than from anyone