of the Athleticus. He is impressed that Ed is my regular opponent. Florence arrives on time in charming disarray and is at once a hit with the waiters, who remember her from her last visit. She has come straight from coping with builders, and has the paint marks on her jeans to prove it.
By any rational standard I should by now be at my wits’ end, but even before we sit down my two most pressing anxieties are laid to rest. Florence has elected to remain loyal to our unlikely cover story: witness our friendly but detached well-hullo-agains. My invitation to a post-prandial coffee with Prue, on which my entire planning rests, meets with hearty exclamations of approval by the bridal couple. All I have to do is whistle up a bottle of spumante in their honour – the best the house can do in the way of champagne – and josh along with them until I can get them up to the house and sneak up alone to my den.
I ask them, as well I might, given that it seems like only yesterday that I introduced the young sweethearts to each other, whether it had been love at first sight. Both were puzzled by my question, not because they couldn’t answer it but because they regarded it as gratuitous. Well, there’d been the badminton foursome, hadn’t there? – as if that already explained everything, which it scarcely did, since my one abiding memory of that event was of Florence in a fury fit with me after resigning from the Office. Then there was the Chinese dinner that I missed out on – ‘at this same table where we’re sitting now, right, Flo?’ says Ed proudly – and so they are, chopsticks in one hand and caresses with the other. ‘And from there on – well, it was pretty much a done thing, wasn’t it, Flo?’
Is this really Flo I am hearing? Never call her Flo – unless you happen to be the man of her life? Their wedding chatter and inability to leave each other alone awaken echoes of Steff and Juno over Sunday lunch. I tell them Steff is engaged to be married and they dissolve in symbiotic merriment. I give them the benefit of what is by now my party piece about giant bats on Barro Colorado. My one problem is that each time Ed joins the conversation, I find myself comparing the cheery love-smitten voice I’m hearing with the grudging version of it that Valentina aka Anette aka Gamma had to put up with three nights previously.
Affecting to have difficulties getting a signal on my mobile, I step into the street and make a second call to Prue, adopting the same airy tone. A white van is parked across the road.
‘What’s the problem now?’ she asks.
‘None really. Just checking,’ I reply, and feel stupid.
I return to our table and confirm that Prue is back from her law shop and agog to receive us. My announcement is overheard by a male couple at the next table, both slow eaters. Mindful of their tradecraft they keep masticating as we leave.
It is bluntly stated in my personal file at Head Office that while I am capable of first-rate operational thinking on my feet, the same cannot always be said of my paperwork. As the three of us perambulate arm in arm the few hundred yards to my house – Ed, the better for a half-bottle of spumante and insisting that as his best man I suffer the clutch of his bony left hand – it occurs to me that while I may have been doing some first-rate operational thinking, all will now depend on the quality of my paperwork.
*
I have been sparing till now in my portrayal of Prue, but only because I was waiting for the clouds of our enforced estrangement to blow over and our regard for each other to emerge in its rightful colours, which thanks to Prue’s life-saving policy statement on the morning following my inquisition by my chers collègues it has now done.
If our marriage is not generally understood, neither is Prue. Outspoken, left-leaning lawyer to the poor and oppressed; intrepid champion of class actions; Battersea Bolshevik; none of the easy tag-lines that follow her around does justice to the Prue I know. For all her blue-chip background, she is self-made. Her father the judge was a bastard who hated competition in his children, made life hell for them and refused to support Prue