mirrored kind that you can’t see into.
‘Persuade how exactly?’ she resumes as soon as we set off.
‘Well, we’re not talking thumbscrews, Steff,’ I reply, which is pilot error on my part: Humour at serious moments is simply an escape route as far as Steff’s concerned.
‘So how?’ she persists, gnawing at the subject of persuasion.
‘Well, Steff, a lot of people will do a lot of things for money and a lot of people will do things for spite or ego. There are also people who do things for an ideal, and wouldn’t take your money if you shoved it down their throats.’
‘And what ideal would that be exactly, Dad?’ – from behind the shiny goggles. It’s the first time for weeks that she’s called me Dad. Also I notice that she is not swearing, which with Steff can be a bit of a red warning light.
‘Well, let’s say, just for instance, somebody has an idealistic vision of England as the mother of all democracies. Or they love our dear Queen with an unexplained fervour. It may not be an England that exists for us any more, if it ever did, but they think it does, so go with it.’
‘Do you think it does?’
‘With reservations.’
‘Serious reservations?’
‘Well, who wouldn’t have, for Christ’s sake?’ I reply, stung by the suggestion that I’ve somehow failed to notice that the country’s in free fall. ‘A minority Tory cabinet of tenth-raters. A pig-ignorant foreign secretary who I’m supposed to be serving. Labour no better. The sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit’ – I break off. I have feelings too. Let my indignant silence say the rest.
‘Then you do have serious reservations?’ she insists in her purest tone. ‘Even very serious. Yes?’
Too late I realize I have left myself wide open, but perhaps that was what I wanted to achieve all along: to give her the victory, acknowledge I’m not up to the standards of her brilliant professors, and then we can all go back to being who we were.
‘So if I’ve got this right,’ she resumes, as we embark on our next ascent, ‘for the sake of a country that you have serious reservations about, even very serious, you persuade other nationals to betray their own countries.’ And as an afterthought: ‘The reason being that they don’t share the same reservations that you have about your country, whereas they do have reservations about their own country. Yes?’
At which I let out a merry exclamation that accepts honourable defeat while simultaneously asking for mitigation:
‘But they’re not innocent lambs, Steff! They volunteer. Or most of them do. And we look after them. We welfare them. If it’s money they’re after, we give them a pot of it. If they’re into God, we do God with them. It’s whatever works, Steff. We’re their friends. They trust us. We provide for their needs. They provide for ours. It’s the way of the world.’
But she’s not interested in the way of the world. She’s interested in mine, as becomes apparent on the next ride up:
‘When you were telling other people who to be, did you ever consider who you were?’
‘I just knew I was on the right side, Steff,’ I reply, as my gall begins to rise despite Prue’s best injunctions.
‘And what side’s that?’
‘My Service. My country. And yours too, actually.’
And on our absolutely last ride up, after I have composed myself:
‘Dad?’
‘Fire away.’
‘Did you have affairs while you were abroad?’
‘Affairs?’
‘Love affairs.’
‘Did your mother say I did?’
‘No.’
‘Then why the hell don’t you mind your own bloody business?’ I snap before I can stop myself.
‘Because I’m not my bloody mother,’ she yells back with equal force.
On which unhappy note we uncouple for the last time and make our separate ways down to the village. Come evening, she declines all offers to blow the walls out with her Italian buddies, insisting that she needs to go to bed. Which she duly does, after drinking a bottle of red burgundy.
And I, after a decent interval, relay our conversation in broad-brush to Prue, omitting for both our sakes Steff’s gratuitous parting question. I even try to convince us both that our little talk was mission accomplished, but Prue knows me too well. On the flight back to London next morning Steff seats herself on the other side of the aisle. Next day – the eve of her return to Bristol – she and Prue have the most godawful bust-up. Steff’s fury, it emerges, is directed not at her father for being a spy, or even for persuading other