over these stressful days, I can only say they had never been more essential, or the two of us in better form. For the last three sessions I had been raising my exercise level in the gym and in the park in a desperate effort to contain Ed’s newfound mastery of the court, until a day comes when the struggle, for the first time ever, is of no account.
The date, never to be forgotten by either of us, is 16 July. We have played our usual strenuous match. I have lost again, but never mind, get used to it. Casually, towels round our necks, we head for our Stammtisch anticipating the usual sporadic Monday-evening clatter of voices and glasses in a largely empty room. Instead we are met by an unnatural, fidgety silence. At the bar, a half-dozen of our Chinese members are staring at a television screen that is routinely given over to sport of any kind from anywhere. But this evening we are not for once watching American football or Icelandic ice hockey but Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The two leaders are in Helsinki giving a joint press conference. They are standing shoulder to shoulder before the flags of both their nations. Trump, speaking as if to order, is disowning the findings of his own intelligence services, which have come up with the inconvenient truth that Russia interfered in the 2016 American presidential election. Putin smiles his proud jailer’s smile.
Somehow Ed and I grope our way to our Stammtisch and sit. A commentator reminds us, lest we have forgotten, that only yesterday Trump declared Europe to be his enemy and for good measure trashed NATO.
Where am I in my mind, as Prue would say? Part of me is with my former agent Arkady. I am replaying his description of Trump as Putin’s shithouse cleaner. I am remembering that Trump ‘does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself’. Another part of me is with Bryn Jordan in Washington, cloistered with our American colleagues as they stare incredulously at the same act of presidential treachery.
So where is Ed in his mind? He is bone still. He has retreated into himself: just deeper and further than I have seen him go. At first his mouth remains open in disbelief. His lips slowly come together and he licks them, then absentmindedly wipes them with the back of his hand. But even when old Fred the barman, who has his own sense of proprieties, switches us over to a cluster of frenzied women cyclists racing round a bowl, Ed’s eyes don’t leave the screen.
‘It’s a replay,’ he pronounces at last in a voice throbbing with discovery. ‘It’s 1939 all over again. Molotov and Ribbentrop, carving up the world.’
This was too rich for my blood and I told him so. Trump might be the worst President America has ever had, I said, but he was no Hitler, much as he might wish to be, and there were plenty of good Americans who weren’t going to take this lying down.
At first he didn’t seem to hear me.
‘Yeah, well,’ he agreed in the faraway voice of a man coming round from an anaesthetic. ‘There were plenty of good Germans too. And a fat lot of bloody good they did.’
14
S-night is upon us. In the Operations room on the top floor of Head Office, all is calm. The time is 1920 hours by the LED clock above the fake-oak double doors. If you’re Stardust-cleared, the show will start in fifty-five minutes. If you’re not, there are a couple of eagle-eyed janitors at the door who will be pleased to advise you of your mistake.
The mood is leisured and, as the deadline approaches, becoming more so. Already nobody is panicking, everybody has time for everything. Assistants drift in and out bearing open laptops, Thermos flasks, bottled water and sandwiches for the buffet table. A wit asks if there’s popcorn. A plump man with a fluorescent lanyard fiddles with two flat screens on the wall. Both show the same lush image of Lake Windermere in autumn. The chatter we are hearing over our earphones belongs to Percy Price’s surveillance team. By now his hundred souls will be dispersed as shoppers come home from work, stall-holders, waitresses, cyclists, Uber drivers and innocent bystanders who have nothing better to do than ogle passing girls and murmur into mobile phones. They alone know that the mobile phones they are murmuring into are encrypted; that they are talking, not