session.’
‘Are you angry with them?’
‘I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.’
‘Then stay in bed and find out. The call you’re expecting at six p.m. will presumably be on the house line.’
‘It will have to be, yes.’
‘I’ll email Steff and make sure she doesn’t plan to Skype at the same time. You’ll need all your concentration.’ Then reaching the door she changes her mind, turns round and resumes her place on the bed. ‘Can I say something, Nat? Non-invasive? Just a small mission statement?’
‘Of course you can.’
She has taken my hand back, this time not to feel my pulse.
‘If the Office is buggering you about,’ she says very firmly, ‘and if you’re determined to hang in there nonetheless, you have my unstinted support till death do us part, and fuck boys’ clubs. Do I make myself clear?’
‘You do. Thank you.’
‘Equally, if the Office is buggering you about, and you decide on the spur of the moment to tell them to shove it up their arses and to hell with your pension, we’re solvent and we can make do.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘And you can tell that to Bryn too, if it’s any help,’ she adds just as firmly. ‘Or I will.’
‘Safer not,’ I say – followed by unforced laughter and relief on both sides.
Mutual expressions of love are seldom impressive to anyone not taking part in them, but the things we said to each other that day – notably Prue to me – ring in my memory like a rallying call. It was as if, in one shove, she had pushed open an invisible door between us. And I like to think that it was by way of this same door that I first started to make vague sense of the scatterbrained theories and bits of half-baked intuition regarding Ed’s incomprehensible behaviour that kept springing up at me like fireworks and fizzling out.
*
‘My bit of German soul,’ Ed liked to say to me with an apologetic grin after he had sounded too earnest for his own blood, or too didactic.
Always his bit of German soul.
In order to pull him up on his bicycle Tadzio had spoken German to Ed.
Why? Would Ed really have otherwise mistaken him for a street drunk?
And why am I thinking German, German, when all the time I should be thinking Russian, Russian?
And tell me, please, since I am tone-deaf, why is it that every time my memory replays the dialogue between Ed and Gamma, I have a sensation of listening to the wrong music?
If I have no clear answer to these fumbled questions, if the effect of them is only to intensify my mystification, the fact remains that by six o’clock that evening, thanks to Prue’s ministrations, I felt more belligerent, more able and a whole lot more ready than I had been at five that morning to take on whatever the Office had left to throw at me.
*
Six o’clock by the church clock, six o’clock by my wristwatch, six o’clock by Prue’s family grandfather clock in the hall. Another sun-baked evening of the great London drought. I’m sitting in my den upstairs wearing shorts and sandals. Prue is in the garden, watering her poor, parched roses. A bell rings, but it’s not the house phone. It’s the front door.
I leap up, but Prue gets there first. We meet halfway on the stairs.
‘I think you’d better change into something more respectable,’ she says. ‘There’s a large man with a car outside who says he’s come to fetch you.’
I go to the landing window and peer down. A black Ford Mondeo, two aerials. And Arthur, longtime driver to Bryn Jordan, propped against it enjoying a quiet fag.
*
The church stands at the top of Hampstead hill and that’s where Arthur sets me down. Bryn never held with comings and goings outside his house.
‘You know your way then,’ says Arthur, as a statement not a question. It’s the first time he has spoken since ‘Hullo, Nat.’ Yes, Arthur, know it well, thanks.
Ever since I was the new boy of Moscow Station and Prue my Service spouse, Bryn, his beautiful Chinese wife Ah Chan, their three musical daughters and one difficult son had lived in this massive eighteenth-century hilltop villa overlooking Hampstead Heath. If we were recalled from Moscow for a brainstorming session, or on spells of home leave, this mellowed brick pile behind high gates with one bell-button was where we would all assemble for jolly family suppers with the daughters playing Schubert lieder and the bravest of us