stroll in the park on this perfect summer’s night?
*
There’s a bench on the northern edge of the park that is set back from the footpath on its own bit of space between the river and a clump of willow trees. Prue and I call it our bench and it’s where we like to sit and roost after a dinner party if the weather’s right and we’ve got rid of our guests at a reasonable hour. It’s my memory that, by some leftover instinct from our Moscow days, we didn’t exchange one compromising word until were sitting on it, our voices drowned by the clatter of the river and the grumble of the night city.
‘Do you reckon it’s real?’ I ask her after a lengthy silence between us that I am the first to break.
‘You mean the two of them together?’
Prue, normally so cautious in her judgements, has no doubt on the matter.
‘They were a pair of drifting corks and now they’ve found each other,’ she declares in her forthright way. ‘That’s Florence’s view and I’m happy to share it. They were cut from the same cork tree at birth and for as long she believes that they’re fine because he’ll believe whatever she does. She hopes she’s pregnant, but isn’t sure. So whatever you’ve been cooking up for Ed, just remember we’ll be doing it for all three of them.’
*
Prue and I may diverge about which of us thought what or said what in the murmured exchange that followed, but I remember very clearly how our two voices sank to Moscow level as if we were sitting on a bench in Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure rather than Battersea. I told her everything that Bryn had told me, everything that Reni had told me, and she listened without comment. I scarcely bothered with Valentina and the saga of Ed’s unmasking, since that was already in the far past. The issue, as so often with operational planning, was how to use the enemy’s resources against him, although I was less eager than Prue to define the Office as enemy.
And I remember that I was filled with simple gratitude, as we embarked on the fine-tuning of what gradually became our master plan, for the way our thoughts and words merged into a single flow where ownership became irrelevant. But Prue, for all the best reasons, doesn’t want to hear that. She points to the preparatory steps I had already taken, citing my all-important handwritten letter of instructions to Florence. In her version I am the driving force and she is trailing in my slipstream: just anything, as far as she’s concerned, rather than concede that the Office spouse of her youth and the lawyer of her maturity are even distantly related.
What is certain is that by the time I stood up from our bench and strode a few yards along the river path while careful to remain within Prue’s hearing, and touched the key for Bryn Jordan on the doctored mobile he had given me, Prue and I were, as she would have it, in full and frank agreement on all matters of substance.
*
Bryn had warned me that he might be on his way between London and Washington, but the background clamour I am hearing in the earpiece tells me that he is on terra firma, has people round him, mostly men, and they’re American. My presumption therefore is that he is in Washington DC and I am interrupting a meeting, which means that with any luck I may not have his full attention.
‘Yes, Nat. How are we?’ – the habitually kindly tone, tinged with impatience.
‘Ed’s getting himself married, Bryn,’ I inform him flatly. ‘On Friday. To my former number two at the Haven. The woman we talked about. Florence. At a Register Office in Holborn. They left our house a few moments ago.’
He offers no surprise. He knows already. He knows more than I do. When didn’t he? But I am not his to command any more. I’m my own man. He needs me more than I need him. So remember it.
‘He wants me to be his best man, if you can believe it,’ I add.
‘And you accepted?’
‘What do you expect me to do?’
Offstage burbles while he dispatches some pressing matter. ‘You had a full hour alone with him at the Club,’ Bryn reminds me testily. ‘Why the hell didn’t you go for him?’
‘How was I supposed to do that?’
‘Tell him that before you accept the job of best