chaps to be spies, male or female, but at her own long-suffering mother for keeping such a monumental secret from her own daughter, thereby violating the most sacred trust of womanhood.
And when Prue gently points out that the secret was not hers to divulge but mine, and probably not mine either but the Office’s, Steff flounces out of the house, goes to ground at her boyfriend’s place and travels alone to Bristol, arriving two days late for the start of term after sending the boyfriend to collect her luggage.
*
Does Ed put in a guest appearance anywhere in this family soap opera? Of course he doesn’t. How could he? He never left the island. Yet there was a moment – a mistaken one, but memorable nonetheless – when a young fellow walked in on Prue and myself while we were enjoying a croûtes au fromage and carafe of white in the Trois Sommets ski hut that overlooks the whole terrain, and he could have been Ed’s double. In the flesh. Not an effigy, but himself.
Steff was having a lie-in. Prue and I had skied early and were planning a gentle teeter down the hill and bed. And lo and behold in walked this Ed-like figure in a bobble hat – same height, same air of being alone, aggrieved and slightly lost – stubbornly stamping the snow off his boots in the doorway while he held everyone up, then yanking off his goggles and blinking round the room as if he’d mislaid his specs. I had even flung up my arm halfway in greeting before stopping myself.
But Prue, quick as ever, intercepted the gesture. And, when for reasons that still elude me I demurred, she demanded a full and frank explanation. So I gave her a capsule version: there was this boy at the Athleticus who wouldn’t leave me alone till I’d agreed to give him a game. But Prue needed more. What had struck me so deeply about him on such brief acquaintance? Why had I reacted so spontaneously to his lookalike – not my style at all?
To which it seems I reeled off a string of answers that, being Prue, she remembers better than I do: an oddball, I seem to have said, something courageous about him; and how, when a rowdy bunch at the bar had tried to take the mickey out of him, he’d gone on hammering away at me till he’d got what he wanted and, implicitly telling them to go screw themselves, pushed off.
*
If you love mountains as much as I do, coming down from them is always going to be depressing, but the sight of a run-down three-storey red-brick eyesore in a Camden back street at nine a.m. on a rain-drenched Monday when you haven’t got the least idea of what you’ll do with it when you get inside takes some beating.
How any substation came to finish up in this neck of the woods was a mystery in itself. How it had acquired the ironic sobriquet of the Haven was another. There was a theory the place had been used as a safe house for captured German spies in the ’39–’45 war; another that a former Chief had kept his mistress here; and yet another that Head Office, in one of its endless policy lurches, had decreed that security was best served by scattering its substations across London, and the Haven by its sheer insignificance had got overlooked when the policy was scrapped.
I mount the three cracked steps. The peeling front door opens before I have a chance to insert my aged Yale key. Directly in front of me stands the once redoubtable Giles Wackford, overweight and leaky-eyed, but in his day one of the smartest agent-runners in the Office stable, and just three years older than myself.
‘My dear fellow,’ he declares huskily through last night’s whisky fumes. ‘Punctilious to the minute as ever! My warmest salaams to you, sir. What an honour! Can’t think of a better chap to succeed me.’
Then meet his team, which is dispersed in two-man outposts up and down a narrow wooden staircase:
Igor, depressed sixty-five-year-old Lithuanian, one-time controller of the best Cold War Balkan network the Office ever ran, now reduced to handling a stable of tame office cleaners, doormen and typists employed by soft foreign embassies.
Next, Marika, Igor’s reputed Estonian lover, widow of a retired Office agent who died in Petersburg when it was still Leningrad.
Then Denise, a tubby, feisty, Russian-speaking Scottish daughter of part-Norwegian parents.
And last little Ilya,