exclaims, as if that makes a change from all the other days.
Until now she has managed not to look at me. Now she does.
‘Do you mind telling me why the fuck you dragged me here?’ she demands into my face.
‘Very willingly,’ I reply in similarly clenched tones. ‘The man you are living with and apparently wish to marry has been identified by the Service you once belonged to as a willing asset of Russian intelligence. But perhaps that isn’t news to you? Or is it?’
Curtain up. We’re on. Shades of Prue and myself faking it for the microphones in Moscow.
*
They had told me at the Haven that Florence had a temper on her but until now I’d only seen it in action on the badminton court. Ask me whether it was real or simulated, I can only reply that she was a natural. This was improvisation on the grand scale: ad lib as art, inspired, spontaneous, merciless.
First she hears me out in deathly stillness, face rigid. I tell her we have unchallengeable visual and aural evidence of Ed’s betrayal. I tell her she’s welcome to a private view of the footage, a straight lie. I say we have every good reason to believe that by the time she crashed out of the Office she was consumed with hatred for Britain’s political elite and it therefore comes as no surprise to me to learn that she has bonded with an embittered loner on a vengeance jag who is offering our hottest secrets to the Russians. I tell her that despite this act of supreme folly or worse I am authorized to offer her a lifeline:
‘You first explain to Ed in simple English that he’s blown skyhigh. You tell him we have cast-iron proof, cooked all ways. You inform him that his own Service is thirsting for his blood, but there’s a path to salvation open to him if he agrees to collaborate unreservedly. And in case he doubts it, the alternative to collaboration is prison for a very long time.’
All this quietly spoken, you understand, no dramatics, interrupted once only by the arrival of the smoked salmon. I can tell by her continuing stillness that she is working herself into a froth of righteous anger, but nothing I have seen or heard of her till now prepares me for the scale of the detonation. Ignoring entirely the unequivocal message I have just delivered, she launches a full-frontal assault on its messenger: me.
I think that just because I’m a spy I’m one of God’s anointed, the navel of the fucking universe, whereas all I am is another over-controlled public-school wanker. I am a badminton trawler. Badminton is how I pull pretty boys. I got the hots for Ed and now I’ve set him up as a Russian spy because he refused my advances.
Tearing blindly into me like this, she is a wounded animal, a feral protector of her man and her unborn child. If she had spent the whole night dredging up every dark thought she ever had about me, she couldn’t have done a better job.
After a needless intervention by the maître d’ who insists on knowing that everything is satisfactory, she returns to the charge. Taking a lead straight out of the trainers’ manual, she gives me her first tactical fallback:
All right, let’s just suppose – for argument’s sake – that Ed has got his loyalties in a twist. Let’s suppose he went binge drinking one night and the Russians did a kompromat job on him. And that Ed went along with it, which he never would in a thousand years, but let’s suppose all the same. Do I then really imagine that on no terms at all he’s going to sign up as a fucking double agent in the full knowledge that he will be dropped down a hole any time we feel like it? So in a nutshell, kindly tell her, if I can, what sort of guarantees is my Office going to offer a double agent without a prayer to his name who’s about to put his head in the fucking lion’s mouth?
And when I reply that Ed is in no sort of position to bargain and he must either take us on trust or accept the consequences, I am only spared another onslaught by the arrival of the turbot, which she attacks in short, indignant stabs while calculating her second tactical fallback:
‘Suppose he does work for you,’ she concedes in an only slightly more emollient tone.