in the Leicester Square brasserie.
A more sophisticated camera takes over: a sniper-type camera levelled, I suspect, from the upper window of a broken-down double-decker bus with warning triangles that Percy installed this very morning as one of his static posts. No camera shake. We zoom in. Hold Tadzio alone at his table sucking Coca-Cola through a straw while he scrolls his smartphone.
A woman’s back enters the frame. It is not a tweedy back. It is not an ample back. It is an elegant female back and tapers at the waist. It has a hint of the gym about it. It wears a long-sleeved white blouse and a lightweight Bavarian-style waistcoat. A slender neck is topped by a man’s straw trilby. Its voice – which comes to us from two unsynchronized sources, the one I suspect being the cruet set sitting on the table, the other further away and directional – is forceful, foreign and amusing:
‘Excuse me, kind sir. Is this chair actually occupied, or is it for your jacket only?’
To which Tadzio, as if on command, springs to his feet and exclaims cheerfully, ‘All yours, lady, absolutely free!’
Whisking his denim jacket off the chair with showy gallantry, Tadzio drapes it over the back of his own chair and sits down again.
A different angle, a different camera. With a deafening chime the tapered back sets down its tray, transfers a paper mug, tea or coffee presumed, two packets of sugar, a plastic fork and a slice of sponge cake to the table, and deposits the tray on an adjacent trolley before sitting herself beside Tadzio without turning to camera. With no further word passing between them, she picks up the fork, cuts into her sponge cake and takes a sip of tea. The brim of the straw trilby casts a black shadow over her face, which is turned downward. Her head lifts in response to an enquiry we have yet to hear. In the same moment, Tadzio glances at his wristwatch, mutters an inaudible exclamation, leaps to his feet, grabs his denim jacket and, as if remembering an urgent appointment, makes a hasty departure. As he does so, we are treated to a full shot of the woman he has abandoned. She is trim, handsome, dark haired, strong featured and, in her mid to late fifties, well preserved. She wears a long, dark-green cotton skirt. She has more presence than is comfortable in an itinerant female intelligence agent operating under natural cover. She always did have: why else would Arkady have fallen for her? She was his Valentina then, she is our Valentina now. Somewhere in the outer reaches of the building we are sitting in, the face-recognition team must have come to the same conclusion because the pre-awarded codename Gamma is winking at us in red phosphorescent print from our twin screens.
‘You wish, sir?’ she enquires into camera with heavy playfulness.
‘Yeah, well. I wondered whether it was all right to sit here,’ Ed explains, plonking his tray on the table with a monumental crash, and sits himself in what, seconds earlier, was Tadzio’s chair.
*
If today I boldly write Ed as an instantaneous, positive identification, that does not accurately reflect my response. This is not Ed. It can’t be. It’s Delta. An Ed body-type, yes, I grant you. A nearly-Ed, similar to the version of him that appeared in the doorway of the Trois Sommets, covered in snow, while Prue and I were tucking into our croȗtes au fromage and a bottle of white. Tall, ungainly and the same leftward list of the shoulder, the same refusal to stand up straight: granted. The voice? Yes, well, an Ed-like voice, no question: slurred, northern, graceless till you got to know it, the universal voice of our British young when they wish you to know they’re not about to take your bullshit. So an Ed soundalike, yes. And an Ed lookalike. But not your real Ed, no way. Not even on two screens at once.
And it was while I was still in this short-lived state of resolute denial that I either failed – or refused – for ten, twelve seconds by my rough calculation, to take aboard whatever further courtesies passed between Ed and Gamma after Ed plonked himself in the chair beside her. I am assured – since I never saw the footage again – that I missed nothing of substance, and the exchanges were as trivial as they were intended to be. My recollection is further complicated by the fact that,