means they are not overly impressed by the self-serving ramblings of a grounded field man stuck in the boondocks of Camden, or his somewhat untested head of London General.’
‘You’re mad,’ Dom says again, as he retreats behind his files.
*
I am back at the Haven. Turning the key on the long faces of my team, I go to work drafting a letter to my former agent Woodpecker, alias Arkady. I write in my notional capacity as Secretary of a badminton club in Brighton. I invite him to bring a team of mixed players to our beautiful seaside town. I propose dates and times of play and offer free accommodation. The uses of open word-code are older than the Bible and rest on mutual understandings between writer and recipient. The understanding between Arkady and myself owed nothing to any codebook and everything to the concept that every premise contains its opposite. Thus I was not inviting him, but seeking an invitation from him. The dates on which the notional club was prepared to welcome its guests were the dates on which I hoped to be received by Arkady. My offers of hospitality were a deferential enquiry about whether he would receive me, and where we might meet. The times of play indicated that any time was fine by me.
In a paragraph that came as near to reality as cover allowed, I reminded him of the amicable relations that had long existed between our two clubs in defiance of ever-changing tensions in the larger world, and signed myself Nicola Halliday (Mrs) because Arkady over the five years of our collaboration had known me as Nick, despite the fact that my real name was blazoned on Trieste’s official list of consular representatives. Mrs Halliday did not provide her home address. Arkady knew plenty of places to write to if he chose to do so.
Then I sat back and resigned myself to the long wait, because Arkady never took his big decisions in haste.
*
If I was apprehensive about what I had let myself in for with Arkady, my badminton battles with Ed and our political tours d’horizon at the Stammtisch were becoming ever more precious to me – and this despite the fact that Ed, to my grudging admiration, was beating me hands down.
It seemed to happen overnight. Suddenly he was playing a faster, freer, happier game, and the age gap between us was yawning at me. It took a session or two before I was able to relish his improvement objectively, and as best I could congratulate myself for my part in it. In other circumstances I might have cast round for a younger player to take him on, but when I proposed this to him he was so offended that I backed off.
The larger issues of my life were less easily resolved. Each morning I checked the Office’s cover addresses for Arkady’s response. Nothing. And if Arkady wasn’t my problem, Florence was. She had been friendly with Ilya and Denise but, press them as I might, they knew no more of her whereabouts or doings than any other member of the team. If Moira knew where to get hold of her, I was the last person she was telling. Every time I tried to imagine how Florence, of all people, could have walked out on her beloved agents, I failed. Every time I attempted to reconstruct her seminal encounter with Dom Trench, I failed again.
After much soul searching, I tried my luck with Ed. It was a long shot and I knew it. My makeshift cover story allowed Florence and myself to know nothing of each other beyond the one notional encounter in my notional friend’s office and one badminton session with Laura. All I had going for me otherwise was a growing hunch that the two had been mutually attracted on sight, but since I was now aware of Florence’s state of mind by the time she showed up at the Athleticus, it was hard to imagine she was in a mood to be attracted to anyone.
We’re sitting at the Stammtisch. We’ve finished our first pints and Ed has fetched us a second. He has just trounced me four–one to his understandable satisfaction if not to mine.
‘So how was the Chinese?’ I ask him, picking my moment.
‘Chinese who?’ – Ed as usual absorbed elsewhere.
‘The Golden Moon restaurant up the road, for God’s sake. Where we were all going to have dinner together until I had to rush off to rescue a business