a more neutral posture.
All the same, I had qualms about giving him the answer he was demanding. First question as always: is he setting me up, is he trying to draw me out or compromise me? To which with absolute confidence I could reply no: not this young man, not in a month of Sundays. So next question: do I ignore Old Fred the Swatownese barman’s hand-scrawled message stuck to the mirror behind the bar: ‘NO BREXIT TALK ALOUD’?
And finally, do I forget that I’m a civil servant, albeit a secret one, pledged to uphold my government’s policy, assuming it has one? Or do I rather say to myself: this is a courageous and sincere young fellow – eccentric, yes, not everyone’s cup of tea and the better for it in my opinion – whose heart is in the right place, is in need of someone to listen to him, is only seven or eight years older than my daughter – whose radical views on any known topic are a fact of family life – and plays a very decent game of badminton?
Then add another ingredient to the mix, one that only now I am willing to admit to, although I believe it was present in me from our first improbable exchange. I am speaking of an awareness on my part that I was in the presence of something rare in the life I had so far led, and particularly in such a young man: namely true conviction, driven not by motives of gain or envy or revenge or self-aggrandizement, but the real thing, take it or leave it.
Fred the barman pours his chilled lagers slowly and with deliberation into crested flutes, and this was the glass Ed brooded over while he prodded at its frosted sides with the tips of his long fingers, head bowed, waiting for my answer.
‘Well, Ed,’ I reply, when I have let enough time pass to indicate due consideration. ‘Let me put it this way. Yes, Brexit is indeed an unmitigated clusterfuck, though I doubt there is much we can do now to put the clock back. Will that do for you?’
It won’t, as both of us knew. My so-called decent quiet is as nothing beside Ed’s prolonged silences that, over time, I came to regard as a natural feature of our conversations.
‘What about President Donald Trump then?’ he demands, enunciating the name as if it were the very devil’s. ‘Do you or do you not regard Trump, which I do, as a threat and incitement to the entire civilized world, plus he is presiding over the systematic no-holds-barred Nazification of the United States?’
I think I must have been smiling by now, but I see no answering light in Ed’s lugubrious face which is turned at an angle to me, as if he needs my answer in sound only, without any moderating facial expression.
‘Well, if in a less fundamental way, yes, I’m with you there too, Ed, if that’s any consolation,’ I concede gently. ‘But he’s not President for ever, is he? And the Constitution is there to inhibit him, not just give him a free rein.’
But this is not enough for him:
‘What about all the tunnel-vision fanatics he’s got round him? The fundamentalist Christians who think Jesus invented greed? They’re not going anywhere, are they?’
‘Ed,’ I say, making a joke of it now. ‘When Trump’s gone, these people will scatter as ash in the wind. Now for God’s sake let’s have that other pint.’
By now, I really am expecting the broad grin that washes everything away. It doesn’t come. Instead, I get his big bony hand, reached towards me across the table.
‘Then we’re all right, aren’t we?’ he says.
And I shake his hand in return and say, yes we are, and only then does he fetch us another lager.
*
For the next dozen-odd Monday-evening games I made not the smallest effort to deny or water down anything he said to me, which meant that from our second encounter onwards – Match No. 2 in my diary – no post-badminton session at our Stammtisch was complete without Ed launching himself on a political soliloquy concerning some burning matter of the day.
And he got better over time. Forget his raw opening salvo. Ed was not raw. He was just deeply involved. And – easy to say it now – by being so deeply involved, obsessive. He had also, by Match No. 4 at the latest, revealed himself as a well-informed news junkie with every twist and turn