else. I might have added, but didn’t, that since my return to hearth and home I was becoming increasingly irked by her light-hearted disdain for me, and by her practice, left over from adolescence, of either tolerating me as a necessary domestic encumbrance or plonking herself on my lap as if I were some kind of fuddy-duddy in the evening of his life, usually for the benefit of her latest admirer. I was also irked, if I am being cruelly honest, by the way Prue’s much deserved eminence as a human rights lawyer encouraged Steff in her belief that I had been left standing.
At first the lawyer-mother in Prue is wary. How much exactly did I propose to tell her? Presumably there were limits. What were they precisely? Who set them? The Office or me? And how did I intend to handle follow-up questions, should there be any, had I thought about that? And how could I be sure of not getting carried away? We both knew Steff’s reactions were never predictable, and Steff and I wound each other up too easily. We had form in this respect. And so on.
And Prue’s warning words were, as ever, eminently sound and well founded. Steff’s early adolescence had been a bit of a living nightmare, as Prue didn’t need to remind me. Boys, drugs, screaming matches – all the usual modern-age problems, you might say, but Steff had turned them into an art form. While I was gravitating between overseas stations, Prue had spent every spare hour reasoning with head teachers and form teachers, attending parents’ evenings, ploughing through books and newspaper articles and trawling advisory services on the internet for guidance on how best to handle your hell-bent daughter, and blaming herself for all of it.
And I for my part had done my humble best to share the load, flying home for weekends, sitting in conclave with psychiatrists and psychologists and every other kind of ist. The only thing they seemed to agree on was that Steff was hyper-intelligent – no great surprise to us – was bored stiff by her peer group, rejected discipline as an existential threat, found her teachers insufferably tedious, and what she really needed was a challenging intellectual environment that was up to her speed: a statement, as far as I was concerned, of the blindingly obvious, but not so to Prue, who has rather more faith than I have in expert opinion.
Well, now Steff had her challenging intellectual environment. At Bristol University. Mathematics and Philosophy. And she was entering her second semester of it.
So tell her.
‘You don’t think you’d make a better job of it, darling?’ I suggest to Prue, keeper of the family wisdom, in a weak moment.
‘No, darling. Since you’re determined to do it, it will be far better coming from you. Just remember you are quick-tempered, and don’t on any account do self-deprecation. Self-deprecation will drive her straight round the bend.’
*
Having run my eye over possible locations, rather in the way I’d calculate a risky approach to a potential source, I concluded that the best setting and the most natural must surely be the little-used ski-lift for slalom practice running up the north slope of the Grand Terrain. It had a T-bar of the old type: you went up side by side, no need for eye contact, nobody within earshot, pine forest to the left, steep drop to the valley on the right. A short sharp descent to the bottom of the one and only lift, so no fear of losing touch, obligatory cut-off point at the top, any follow-up questions to be dealt with on the next ascent.
It’s a sparkling winter’s morning, perfect snow. Prue has pleaded fictional tummy trouble and taken herself shopping. Steff had been out on the tiles with her young Italians till God knows what hour, but seemed none the worse for it, and pleased to be getting some alone-time with Dad. Obviously there was no way I could go into detail about my shady past beyond explaining that I’d never been a real diplomat, just a pretend one, which was the reason why I’d never landed a knighthood or an ambassadorship to Beijing, so maybe she could leave that one out now that I’d come home because it was seriously getting on my nerves.
I’d like to have told her why I’d failed to phone her on her fourteenth birthday, because I knew it still rankled. I’d like to have explained that I had been sitting on