A Spy by Nature

1 An Exploratory Conversation

The door leading into the building is plain and unadorned, save for one highly polished handle. No sign outside saying FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE, no hint of top brass. There is a small ivory bell on the right-hand side and I push it. The door, thicker and heavier than it appears, is opened by a fit-looking man of retirement age, a uniformed policeman on his last assignment.

‘Good afternoon, sir.’

‘Good afternoon. I have an interview with Mr Lucas at two o’clock.’

‘The name, sir?’

‘Alec Milius.’

‘Yes, sir.’

This almost condescending. I have to sign my name in a book and then he hands me a security dog-tag on a silver chain which I slip into the hip pocket of my suit trousers.

‘Just take a seat beyond the stairs. Someone will be down to see you in a moment.’

The wide, high-ceilinged hall beyond the reception area exudes all the splendour of imperial England. A vast panelled mirror dominates the far side of the room, flanked by oil portraits of black-eyed, long-dead diplomats. Its soot-flecked glass reflects the bottom of a broad staircase, which drops down in right-angles from an unseen upper storey, splitting left and right at ground level. Arranged around a varnished table beneath the mirror are two burgundy leather sofas, one of which is more or less completely occupied by an overweight, lonely looking man in his late twenties. Carefully, he reads and rereads the same page of the same section of The Times, crossing and uncrossing his legs as his bowels swim in caffeine and nerves. I sit down on the sofa opposite his.

Five minutes pass.

On the table the fat man has laid down a strip of passport photographs, little colour squares of himself in a suit, probably taken in a booth at Waterloo sometime early this morning. A copy of the Daily Telegraph lies folded and unread beside the photographs. Bland non-stories govern its front page: IRA hints at new ceasefire, rail sell-offwill go ahead, 56 per cent of British policemen want to keep their traditional bobbies’ helmets. I catch the fat man looking at me, a quick spotcheck glance between rivals. Then he looks away, shamed. His skin is drained of ultra-violet, a grey flannel face raised on nerd books and Panorama. Black oily Oxbridge hair.

‘Mr Milius?’

A young woman has appeared on the staircase wearing a neat red suit. She is unflustered, professional, demure. As I stand up, Fat Man eyes me with wounded suspicion, like someone on their lunch break queue-barged at the bank.

‘If you’d like to come with me. Mr Lucas will see you now.’

This is where it begins. Following three steps behind her, garbling platitudes, adrenalin surging, her smooth calves lead me up out of the hall. More oil paintings line the ornate staircase.

Running a bit late today. Oh, that’s OK. Did you find us all right? Yes.

‘Mr Lucas is just in here.’

Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

A firm handshake. Late thirties. I had expected someone older. Christ, his eyes are blue: I’ve never seen a blue like that. Lucas is dense-boned and tanned, absurdly handsome in an old-fashioned way. He is in the process of growing a moustache which undercuts the residual menace in his face. There are wispy black puppy-fluff tufts sprouting on his upper lip, cut-price Errol Flynn.

He offers me a drink, an invitation seconded by the woman in red who, when I refuse, seems almost offended.

‘Are you sure?’ she says, as if I have broken with sacred tradition. Never accept tea or coffee at an interview. They’ll see your hand shaking when you drink it.

‘Absolutely, yes.’

She withdraws and Lucas and I go into a large, sparsely furnished room near by. He has not yet stopped looking at me, not out of laziness or rudeness, but purely because he is a man entirely at ease when it comes to staring at people. He’s very good at it.

He says:

‘Thank you for coming today.’

And I say:

‘It’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. It’s a great privilege to be here.’

There are two armchairs in the room, upholstered in the same burgundy leather as the sofas downstairs. A large bay window looks out over the tree-lined Mall, feeding weak, broken sunlight into the room. Lucas has a broad oak desk covered in neat piles of paper and a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman whom I take to be his wife.

‘Have a seat.’

I drop down low into the leather, my back to the window. There is a coffee table in front of me, an ashtray and a closed red file. Lucas occupies the chair opposite mine. As he sits down he reaches into the pocket of his jacket for a pen, retrieving a blue Mont Blanc. I watch him, freeing the trapped flaps of my jacket and bringing them back across my chest. The little physical tics that precede an interview.

‘Milius. It’s an unusual name.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your father, he was from the Eastern Bloc?’

‘His father. Not mine. Came over from Lithuania in 1938. My family have lived in Britain ever since.’

Lucas writes something down on a brown clipboard braced between his thighs.

‘I see. Why don’t we begin by talking about your present job. The CEBDO. That’s not something I’ve heard much about.’

All job interviews are lies. They begin with the CV, a sheet of word-processed fictions. About halfway down mine, just below the name and address, Philip Lucas has read the following sentence:

I have been employed as a Marketing Consultant at the Central European Business Development Organization (CEBDO) for the past eleven months.

Elsewhere, lower down, are myriad falsehoods: periods of work experience on national newspapers (‘Could you do some photocopying please?’); a season as a waiter at a leading Genevan hotel; eight weeks at a London law firm; the inevitable charity work.

The truth is that CEBDO is run out of a small, cramped garage in a mews off the Edgware Road. The kitchen doubles for a toilet; if somebody has a crap, no one can make a cup of tea for ten minutes. There are five of us: Nik (the boss), Henry, Russell, myself and Anna. It’s very simple. We sit on the phone all day talking to businessmen in central — and now eastern — Europe. I try to convince them to part with large sums of money, in return for which we promise to place an advertisement for their operation in a publication known as the Central European Business Review. This, I tell my clients, is a quarterly magazine which enjoys a global circulation of 400,000 copies, ‘distributed free around the world’. Working purely on commission I can make anything from two to three hundred pounds a week, sometimes more, peddling this story. Nik, I estimate, makes seven or eight times that amount. His only overheads (apart from telephone calls and electricity) are printing costs. These are paid to his brother-in-law who desktop publishes, on recycled matt paper, five hundred copies of the Central European Business Review four times a year. These he posts to a few selected embassies across Europe and to all of the clients who have placed advertisements in the magazine. Any spares, he throws in the bin.

On paper, it’s legal.

I look Lucas directly in the eye.

‘The CEBDO is a fledgling organization which advises new businesses in central — and now eastern — Europe about the perils and pitfalls of the free market.’

He taps his jawline with the bulbous fountain pen.

‘And it’s entirely funded by private individuals? There’s no grant from the EC?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Who runs it?’

‘Nikolas Jarolmek. A Pole. His family have lived in Britain since the war.’

‘And how did you get the job?’

‘Through the Guardian. I responded to an advertisement.’

‘Against how many other candidates?’

‘I couldn’t say. I was told about a hundred and fifty.’

‘Could you describe an average day at the office?’

‘Broadly speaking I act in an advisory capacity, either by speaking to people on the telephone and answering any questions they may have about setting up in business in the UK, or by writing letters in response to written queries. I’m also responsible for editing our quarterly magazine, the Central European Business Review. That lists a number of crucial contact organizations that might prove useful to small businesses that are just starting out. It also gives details of tax arrangements in this country, language schools, that kind of thing.’

‘I see. It would be helpful if you could send me a copy.’

‘Of course.’

To explain why I am here.

The interview was set up on the recommendation of a man I barely know, a retired diplomat named Michael Hawkes. Six weeks ago I was staying at my mother’s house in Somerset for the weekend and he came to dinner. He was, she informed me, an old university friend of my father’s.

Until that night I had never met Hawkes, had never heard my mother mention his name. She said that he had spent a lot of time with her and Dad when they were first married in the 1960s, but when the Foreign Office posted him to Moscow, the three of them had lost touch. All this was before I was born.

Hawkes retired from the Diplomatic Service earlier this year to take up a directorship at a British oil company called Abnex. I don’t know how Mum tracked down his phone number, but he showed up for dinner alone, no wife, on the stroke of eight o’clock.

There were other guests there that night, bankers and insurance brokers in bulletproof tweeds, but Hawkes was a thing apart. He had a blue silk cravat slung around his neck like a noose, and a pair of velvet loafers embroidered on the toe with an elaborate coat-of-arms. There was nothing ostentatiously debonair about any of this, nothing vain: it just looked as if he hadn’t taken them off in twenty years. He was wearing a washed-out blue shirt with fraying collar and cuffs, and stained silver cufflinks that looked as though they had been in his family since the Opium Wars. In short, we got on. We sat next to each other at dinner and talked for close on three hours about everything from politics to infidelity. Three days after the party my mother told me that she had spotted Hawkes in Waitrose, stocking up on Stolichnaya and tomato juice. Almost immediately, like a task, he asked her if I had ever thought of ‘going in for the Foreign Office’. My mother said that she didn’t know.

‘Ask him to give me a ring if he’s interested.’

So on the telephone that night, wind on the line from Somerset, my mother did what mothers are supposed to do.

‘You remember Michael, who came to dinner?’

‘Yes,’ I said, stubbing out a cigarette.

‘He likes you. Thinks you should try out for the Foreign Office.’

‘He does?’

‘What an opportunity, Alec. To serve Queen and Country.’

I nearly laughed at this, but checked it out of respect for her old-fashioned convictions. Instead, I said:

‘Mum, an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.’

And she sounded impressed.

‘Who said that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Anyway, Michael says to give him a ring if you’re interested. I’ve got the number. Fetch a pen.’

I had tried to stop her. I didn’t like the idea of her putting shape on my life. But she was insistent.

‘Not everyone gets a chance like this. You’re twenty-four now. You’ve only got that small amount of money your father left you in his Paris account. It’s time you started thinking about a career and stopped working for that crooked Pole.’

I argued with her a little more, just enough to convince myself that if I went ahead it would be of my own volition, and not because of some parental arrangement. Then, two days later, I rang Hawkes.

It was shortly after nine o’clock in the morning. He answered after one ring, the voice crisp and alert.

‘Michael. It’s Alec Milius.’

‘Hello.’

‘About the conversation you had with my mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘In Waitrose.’

‘You want to go ahead?’

‘If that’s possible. Yes.’

His manner was strangely abrupt. No friendly chat, no excess fat.

‘I’ll talk to one of my colleagues. They’ll be in touch.’

‘Good. Thanks.’

‘Goodbye.’

Three days later a letter arrived in a plain white envelope marked PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.

Enclosed was a standard issue, four-page application form: name and address, education, brief employment history, etc. I completed it within twenty-four hours — replete with lies — and sent it back to Lucas. He replied by return of post, inviting me here today.

I have spoken to Hawkes only once in the intervening period.

Yesterday afternoon, with less than twenty-four hours to go before my appointment, I was becoming edgy about what the interview would entail. I wanted to find out what to expect, what to prepare, what to say. So I queued outside an Edgware Road phone box for ten minutes, far enough away from the CEBDO office not to risk being seen by Nik. None of them know that I am here today.

Hawkes answered on the first ring. Again his manner was curt and to the point. Acting as if people were listening in on the line.

‘I feel as if I’m going into this thing with my trousers down,’ I told him. ‘I know nothing about what’s going on.’

He sniffed what may have been a laugh and replied:

‘Don’t worry about it. Everything will become clear when you get there.’

‘So there’s nothing you can tell me? Nothing I need to prepare for?’

‘Nothing at all, Alec. Just be yourself. It’ll all make sense when you get there.’

How much of this Lucas knows I do not know. I simply give him edited highlights from the dinner and a few sketchy impressions of Hawkes’s character. Nothing permanent. Nothing of any significance.

In truth we do not talk about him for long: the subject soon runs dry. Lucas moves on to my father and, after that, spends a quarter of an hour questioning me about my school years, dredging up the forgotten paraphernalia of my youth. He notes down all my answers, scratching away with the Mont Blanc, nodding imperceptibly at given points in the conversation.

Building a file on a man.

2 Official Secrets

The interview drifts on.

In response to a series of bland, straightforward questions about various aspects of my life — friendships, university, bogus summer jobs — I give a series of bland, straightforward answers designed to show myself in the correct light: as a stand-up guy, an unwavering patriot, a citizen of no stark political leanings. Just what the Foreign Office is looking for. Lucas’s interviewing technique is strangely shapeless: at no point am I properly tested by anything he asks. And he never takes the conversation up to a higher level. We do not, for example, discuss the role of the Foreign Office, or British policy overseas. The talk is always general, always about me.

In due course I begin to worry that my chances of recruitment are slim. Lucas has about him the air of someone doing Hawkes a favour: he will keep me in here for a couple of hours, fulfil what is required of him, but the process will go no further. Things feel over before they have really begun.

But then, at around three thirty, I am again offered a cup of tea. This seems significant, yet the thought of it deters me. I do not have enough conversation left to last out another hour. But it is clear that he would like me to accept.

‘Yes, I would like one,’ I tell him. ‘Black. Nothing in it.’

‘Good,’ he says.

In this instant something visibly relaxes in Lucas, a crumpling of his suit. There is a sense of formalities passing. This impression is reinforced by his next remark, an odd, almost rhetorical question entirely at odds with the established rhythm of our conversation.

‘Would you like to continue with your application after this initial discussion?’

Lucas phrases this so carefully that it is like a briefly glimpsed secret, a sight of the interview’s true purpose. And yet the question does not seem to deserve an answer. What candidate, at this stage, would say no?

‘Yes, I would.’

‘In that case I am going to go out of the room for a few moments. I will send someone in with your cup of tea.’

It is as if he has changed to a different script whose words I have not yet learned. Lucas looks relieved to be free of the edgy formality that has characterized the interview thus far. There is, at last, a general sense of getting down to business.

From the clipboard on his lap he releases a brown piece of paper, smaller than A4, printed on both sides. This he places on the table in front of me.

‘There’s just one thing,’ he says, with well-rehearsed blandness. ‘Before I leave I’d like you to sign the Official Secrets Act.’

The first thing I think of, even before I am properly surprised, is that Lucas actually trusts me. I have said enough here today to earn the confidence of the State. That was all it took: sixty minutes of half-truths and evasions. I stare at the document and feel suddenly catapulted into something adult, as though from this moment onwards things will be expected and demanded of me. Lucas, his blue eyes flared, is keen to assess my reaction. Prompted by this I lift the document and hold it in my hand like a courtroom exhibit. I am surprised by its cursoriness. It is simply a little brown sheet of paper with space at the base for a signature. I do not even bother to read the smallprint because to do so might seem odd or improper. So I sign my name at the bottom of the page, scrawled and lasting. Alec Milius. The moment passes with what seems an absurd absence of seriousness, an absolute vacuum of drama. I give no thought to the consequence of it.

Almost immediately, before the ink can be properly dry, Lucas snatches the document away from me and stands to leave. Distant traffic noise on the Mall. A brief clatter in the secretarial enclave next door.

‘Do you see the file on the table?’

It has been sitting there, untouched, for the duration of the interview.

‘Yes.’

‘Please read it while I am gone. We will discuss the contents when I return.’

I look at the file, register its hard red cover, and agree.

‘Good,’ says Lucas, moving outside. ‘Good.’

Alone now in the room.

I lift the file from the table like a magazine in a doctor’s surgery. It is bound in cheap leather and well-thumbed. I open it to the first page.

Please read the following information carefully. You are being appraised for recruitment to the Secret Intelligence Service.

I look at this sentence again and it is only on the third reading that it begins to make any sort of sense. I cannot, in my consternation, smother a belief that Lucas has the wrong man, that the intended candidate is still sitting downstairs flicking nervously through the pages of The Times. But then, gradually, things start to take shape. There was that final instruction in Lucas’s letter: ‘As this letter is personal to you, I should be grateful if you could respect its confidentiality.’ A remark which struck me as odd at the time, though I made no more of it. And Hawkes was reluctant to tell me anything about the interview today. ‘Just be yourself, Alec. It’ll all make sense when you get there.’ Jesus. How they have reeled me in. What did Hawkes see in me in just three hours at a dinner party to convince him I would make a suitable employee of the Secret Intelligence Service? Of MI6.

A sudden consciousness of being alone in the room checks me out of bewilderment. I feel no fear, no great apprehension, only a sure sense that I am being watched through a small panelled mirror to the left of my chair. I swivel and examine the glass. There is something false about it, something not quite aged. The frame is solid, reasonably ornate, but the glass is clean, far more so than the larger mirror in the reception area downstairs. I look away. Why else would Lucas have left the room but to gauge my response from a position next door? He is watching me through the mirror. I am certain of it.

So I turn the page, attempting to look settled and businesslike.

The text makes no mention of MI6, only of SIS, which I assume to be the same organization. This is all the information I am capable of absorbing before other thoughts begin to intrude.

It has dawned on me, a slowly revealed thing, that Michael Hawkes was a Cold War spy. That’s why he went to Moscow in the 60s.

Did Dad know that about him?

I must look studious for Lucas. I must suggest the correct level of gravitas.

The first page is covered in information, three-line blocks of facts.

The Secret Intelligence Service (hereafter SIS), working independently from Whitehall, has responsibility for gathering foreign intelligence…

SIS Officers work under diplomatic cover in British Embassies overseas…

There are at least twenty pages like this one, detailing power structures within SIS, salary gradings, the need at all times for absolute secrecy. At one point, approximately halfway through the document, they have actually written: ‘Officers are certainly not licensed to kill.’

On and on it goes, too much to take in. But I tell myself to keep on reading, to try to assimilate as much of it as I can. Lucas will return soon with an entirely new set of questions, probing me, establishing whether or not I have the potential to do this.

It’s time to move up a gear. What an opportunity, Alec. To Serve Queen and Country.

The door opens, like air escaping through a seal.

‘Here’s your tea, sir.’

Not Lucas. A sad-looking, perhaps unmarried woman in late middle-age has walked into the room carrying a plain white cup and saucer. I stand up to acknowledge her, knowing that Lucas will note this display of politeness from his position behind the mirror. She hands me the tea, I thank her, and she leaves without another word.

No serving SIS officer has been killed in action since World War Two.

I turn another page, skimming the prose.

The meanness of the starting salary surprises me: only PS17,000 in the first few years, with bonuses here and there to reward good work. If I do this, it will be for love. There’s no money in spying.

Lucas walks in, no knock on the door, a soundless approach. He has a cup and saucer clutched in his hand and what looks like a renewed sense of purpose. His watchfulness has, if anything, intensified. Perhaps he hasn’t been observing me at all. Perhaps this is his first sight of the young man whose life he has just changed.

He sits down, tea on the table, right leg folded over left. There is no ice-breaking remark. He dives straight in.

‘And what are your thoughts about what you’ve been reading?’

The weak bleat of an internal phone sounds on the other side of the door, stopping efficiently. Lucas waits for my response. But it does not come. My head is suddenly loud with noise and I am rendered incapable of speech. His gaze intensifies. He will not speak until I have done so. Say something, Alec. Don’t blow it now. His mouth is melting into what I perceive as a disappointment close to pity. I struggle for something coherent, some sequence of words that will do justice to the very seriousness of what I am now embarked upon. But the words simply do not come. Lucas appears to be several feet closer now than he was before, and yet his chair has not moved an inch. How could this have happened? In an effort to regain control of myself I try to remain absolutely still, to make our body language as much of a mirror as possible: arms relaxed, legs crossed, head upright and looking ahead. In time — what seem vast vanished seconds — the beginnings of a sentence form in my mind, just the faintest of signals. And when Lucas makes to say something, as if to end my embarrassment, it acts as a spur. I say:

‘Well… now that I know… I can understand why Mr Hawkes didn’t want to say exactly what I was coming here to do today.’

‘Yes.’

The shortest, meanest, quietest ‘Yes’ I have ever heard.

‘I found the pamphl… the file very interesting. It was a surprise.’

‘Why is that exactly? What surprised you about it?’

‘I thought, obviously, that I was coming here today to be interviewed for the Diplomatic Service, not for SIS.’

‘Of course,’ he says, reaching for his tea.

And then, to my relief, he begins a long and practised monologue about the work of the Secret Intelligence Service, an eloquent, spare resume of its goals and character. This lasts as long as a quarter of an hour, and allows me the chance to get myself together, to think more clearly and focus on the task ahead. Still spinning from the embarrassment of having frozen openly in front of him, I find it difficult to concentrate on Lucas’s voice. But his description of the work of an SIS officer appears to be disappointingly devoid of macho derring-do. He paints a lustreless portrait of a man engaged in the simple act of gathering intelligence, doing so by the successful recruitment of foreigners sympathetic to the British cause who are prepared to pass on secrets for reasons of conscience or financial gain. That, in essence, is all that a spy does. As Lucas tells it, the more traditional aspects of espionage — burglary, phone-tapping, honeytraps, bugging — are a fiction. It’s mostly desk work. Officers are certainly not licensed to kill.

‘Clearly, one of the more unique aspects of SIS is the demand for absolute secrecy,’ he says, his voice falling away. ‘How would you feel about not being able to tell anybody what you do for a living?’

That is how it would be. Nobody, not even Kate, knowing any longer who I really was. A life of absolute anonymity.

‘I wouldn’t have any problem with that at all.’

Lucas begins to take notes again. That was the answer he was looking for.

‘And it doesn’t concern you that you won’t receive any public acclaim for the work you do?’

He says this in a tone which suggests that it bothers him a great deal.

‘I’m not interested in acclaim.’

A seriousness has enveloped me, nudging panic aside. An idea of the job is slowly composing itself in my imagination, something that is at once very straightforward, but ultimately obscure. Something clandestine and yet moral and necessary.

Lucas ponders the clipboard in his lap.

‘You must have some questions you want to ask me,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘Would members of my family be allowed to know that I am an SIS officer?’

Lucas appears to have a check-list of questions on his clipboard, all of which he expects me to ask. That was obviously one of them, because he again marks the page in front of him with his snub-nosed fountain pen.

‘Obviously, the fewer people that know the better. That usually means wives.’

‘Children?’

‘No.’

‘But obviously not friends or other relatives?’

‘Absolutely not. If you are successful after Sisby, and the panel decides to recommend you for employment, then we would have a conversation with your mother to let her know the situation.’

‘What is Sisby?’

‘The Civil Service Selection Board. Sisby as we call it. If you are successful at this first interview stage, you will go on to do Sisby in due course. This involves two intensive days of intelligence tests, interviews and written papers at a location in Whitehall, allowing us to establish if you are of a high enough intellectual standard for recruitment to SIS.’

The door opens without a knock and the same woman who brought in my tea (now cold and untouched on the table) walks in. She smiles apologetically in my direction, with a flushed, nervous glance at Lucas. He looks visibly annoyed.

‘I do apologize, sir.’ She is frightened of him. ‘This just came through for you and I felt you should see it right away.’

She hands him a single sheet of fax paper. Lucas looks over at me quickly and proceeds to read it.

‘Thank you,’ he whispers and the woman leaves. Then he turns to me. ‘I have a suggestion. If you have no further questions I think we should finish here. Will that be all right?’

‘Of course.’

There was something on the fax that necessitated this.

‘You will obviously have to think things over. There are a lot of issues to consider when deciding to become an SIS officer. So let’s end this discussion now. I will be in touch with you by post in the next few days. We will let you know at that stage if we want to proceed with your application.’

‘And if you do?’

‘Then you will be invited back here for a second interview with one of my colleagues.’

As he stands up to leave Lucas folds the piece of paper in two and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Leaving the recruitment file on the table, he gestures with an extended right arm towards the door which has been left ajar by the secretary. I walk out ahead of him and immediately begin to feel all the stiffness of formality falling away from me. It is a relief to leave the room.

The girl in the neat red suit is standing outside waiting, somehow prettier than she was at two o’clock. She looks at me, gauges my mood, and then sends out a warm broad smile that is full of friendship and understanding. She knows what I’ve just been through. I feel like asking her out for dinner.

‘Ruth, will you show Mr Milius to the door? I have some business to attend to.’

Lucas has barely emerged from his office: he is lingering in the doorway behind me, itching to get back inside.

‘Of course,’ she says.

So our separation is abrupt. A last glance into each other’s eyes, a grappled shake of the hand, a reiteration that he will be in touch. And then Lucas vanishes back into his office, firmly closing the door.

3 Tuesday, 4 July

At dawn, five days later, my first waking thought is of Kate, as though someone trips a switch behind my closed eyes and she blinks into the morning. It has been like this, on and off now, for four months. Sometimes, still caught in a half-dream, I will reach for her as though she were actually beside me in bed. I try to smell her, try to gauge the pressure and softness of her kisses, the delicious sculpture of her spine. Then we lie together, whispering quietly, kissing. Just like old times.

Drawing the curtains I see that the sky is white, a cloudy mid-summer morning that will burn off at noon and break into a good blue day.

All that I have wanted is to tell Kate about SIS. At last something has gone right for me, something that she might be proud of. Someone has given me the chance to put my life together, to do something constructive with all these mind wanderings and ambition. Wasn’t that what she always wanted? Wasn’t she always complaining about how I wasted opportunities, how I was always waiting for something better to come along? Well this is it.

But I know that it will not be possible. I have to let her go. Finding it so difficult to let her go.

I shower, dress and take the Tube to Edgware Road, but I am not the first at work. Coming down the narrow, sheltered mews, I see Anna ahead of me, fighting vigorously with the lock on the garage door. A heavy bunch of keys drops from her right hand, jingling like sleigh-bells. She stands up to straighten her back and sees me in the distance, her expression one of unambiguous contempt. Not so much as a nod. She rests her hands on the backs of her hips and tilts backwards fractionally, flattening her breasts. I push a splay-fingered hand through my hair and say good morning.

‘Hello,’ she says archly, leaning forward again, twisting the key in the lock.

She’s growing her hair. Long brown strands flecked with old highlights and trapped light.

‘Why the fuck doesn’t Nik give me a key that fucking works?’

‘Try mine.’

I steer my key in towards the garage door, a movement which causes Anna to pull her hand out of the way like a flick knife. Her keys fall on to the grey step and she says fuck again. Simultaneously her bicycle, which has been resting on the wall beside us, topples to the ground with a metal clatter. She walks over to pick it up as I unlock the door and go inside.

The air is wooden and musty. Anna comes through the door behind me with a squeezed smile. She is wearing a summer dress of pastel blue cotton dotted with pale yellow flowers. A thin layer of sweat glows on the freckled skin above her breasts, soft as moons. With my index finger I flick the switches one by one. The strip lights in the small office strobe.

There are five desks inside, all hooked up to phones. I weave through them to the far side of the garage, turning right into the kitchen. The kettle is already full and I press it, lifting two mugs from the drying-up rack. The toilet perches in the corner of the narrow room, topped by pink rolls of Andrex. Someone has left a half-finished cigarette on the cistern which has stained the ceramic. The kettle’s scaly deposits crackle faintly as I open the door of the fridge.

Fresh milk? No.

When I come out of the kitchen Anna is already on the phone, talking softly to someone in the voice that she uses for boys. Perhaps she left him slumbering in her wide, low bed, the smell of her sex on the pillow. She has opened up the wooden doors of the garage so that daylight has filled the room. I hear the kettle click. Anna catches me looking at her and swivels her chair so that she is facing out on to the mews. I light a cigarette, my last one, and wonder who he is.

‘So,’ she says to him, her voice a naughty grin. ‘What are you going to do today? Oh Bill, you’re so lazy…’

She likes his being lazy, she approves of it.

‘Yeah, OK, that sounds good. Mmmm. I’ll be finished here at six, maybe earlier if Nik lets me go.’

She turns and sees that I am still watching her.

‘Just Alec. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.’

Her voice drops as she says this. He knows all about what happened between us. She must have told him everything.

‘Well, they’ll be here in a minute. OK. See you later. Bye.’

She turns back into the room and hangs up the phone.

‘New boyfriend?’

‘Sorry?’ she says with heavy sarcasm, standing up and passing me on her way into the kitchen. I hear her opening the door of the fridge, the minute electric buzz of its bright white light, the soft plastic suck of it closing.

‘Nothing,’ I say, raising my voice so that she can hear me. ‘I just said, is that your new boyfriend?’

‘No, it was yours,’ she says, coming out again. ‘I’m going to buy some milk.’

As she leaves a telephone rings in the unhoovered office, but I let the answering machine pick it up. Anna’s footsteps clip away along the cobbles and a car starts up in the mews. I step outside.

Des, the next-door neighbour, is buckled into his magnesium E-Type Jag, revving the engine. Des always wears loose black suits and shirts with a sheen, his long silver hair tied back in a ponytail. None of us has ever been able to work out what Des does for a living: he could be an architect, a film producer, the owner of a chain of restaurants. It’s impossible to tell just by looking into the windows of his house, which reveal expensive sofas, a widescreen television, plenty of computer hardware and, right at the back in the sleek white kitchen, an industrial-size espresso machine. On the rare occasions that Des speaks to anyone in the CEBDO office, it is to complain about excessive noise or car-parking violations. Otherwise, he is an unknown quantity.

Nik shuffles his shabby walk down the mews just as Des is sliding out of it in his low-slung, antique fuck machine. I go back inside and look busy. Nik comes through the open door and glances up at me, still moving forwards. He is a small man.

‘Morning, Alec. How are we today? Ready for a hard day’s work?’

‘Morning, Nik.’

He swings his briefcase up on to his desk and wraps his old leather jacket around the back of the chair.

‘Do you have a cup of coffee for me?’

Nik is a bully and, like all bullies, sees everything in terms of power. Who is threatening me, whom can I threaten? To suffocate the constant nag of his insecurity he must make others feel uncomfortable. I say:

‘Funnily enough, I don’t. The batteries are low on my ESP this morning and I didn’t know exactly when you’d be arriving.’

‘You being funny with me today, Alec? You feeling confident or something?’

He doesn’t look at me while he says this. He just shuffles things on his desk.

‘I’ll get you a coffee, Nik.’

‘Thank you.’

So I find myself back in the kitchen, re-boiling the kettle. And it is only when I am crouched on the ground, peering into the fridge, that I remember Anna has gone out to buy milk. On the middle shelf a hardened chunk of over-yellow butter wrapped in torn gold foil is slowly being scarved by mould.

‘We don’t have any milk,’ I call out. ‘Anna’s gone out to get some.’

There’s no answer, of course.

I put my head around the door of the kitchen and say to Nik:

‘I said there’s no milk. Anna’s gone — ‘

‘I hear you. I hear you. Don’t be panicking about it.’

I ache to tell him about SIS, to see the look on his cheap Polish face. Hey, Nik, you’re twice my age and this is all you’ve been able to come up with: a low-rent, dry-rot garage in Paddington, flogging lies and phoney advertising space to your own countrymen. That’s the extent of your life’s work. This is what you have to show for yourself: a few phones, a fax machine, and three second-hand computers running on outdated software. That’s all you are. I’m twenty-four and I’m being recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service.

It is five o’clock in the afternoon in Brno, one hour ahead of London. I am talking to a Mr Klemke, the managing director of a firm of building contractors with ambitions to move into western Europe.

‘Particularly France,’ he says.

‘Well, then I think our publication would be perfect for you, sir.’

‘Publicsation? I’m sorry. This word.’

‘Our publication, our magazine. The Central European Business Review. It’s published every three months and has a circulation of four hundred thousand copies worldwide.’

‘Yes, yes. And this is new magazine, printed in London?’

Anna, back from a long lunch, sticks a Post-It note on the desk in front of me. Scrawled in girly swirls she has written: ‘Saul rang. Coming here later.’

‘That’s correct,’ I tell Klemke. ‘Printed here in London and distributed worldwide. Four hundred thousand copies.’

Nik is looking at me.

‘And Mr Mills, who is the publisher of this magazine? Is it yourself?’

‘No, sir. I am one of our advertising executives.’

‘I see.’

I envisage him as large and rotund, a benign Robert Maxwell. I envisage them all as benign Robert Maxwells.

‘And you want me to advertise, is that what you are asking?’

‘I think it would be in your interest, particularly if you are looking to expand into western Europe.’

‘Yes, particularly France.’

‘Yes. France.’

‘And you have still not told me who is publishing this magazine in London. The name of person who is editor.’

Nik has started reading the sports pages of Henry’s Independent.

‘It’s a Mr Jarolmek.’

He folds one side of the newspaper down with a sudden crisp rattle, alarmed.

Silence in Brno.

‘Can you say this name again, please?’

‘Jarolmek.’

I look directly at Nik, eyebrows raised, and spell out ‘J-A-R-O-L-M-E-K’ with great slowness and clarity down the phone. Klemke may yet bite.

‘I know this man.’

‘Oh, you do?’

Trouble.

‘Yes. My brother, of my wife, he is a businessman also. In the past he has published with this Mr Jarolmek.’

‘In the Central European Business Review?’

‘If this is what you are calling this now.’

‘No, it’s always been called that.’

Nik puts the paper down, pushes his chair out behind him and stands up. He walks over to my desk and perches on it. Watching me. And there, on the other side of the mews, is Saul, leaning coolly against the wall smoking a cigarette like a private investigator. I have no idea how long he has been standing there. Something heavy falls over in Klemke’s office.

‘Well, it’s a small world,’ I say, gesturing to Saul to come in. Anna is grinning as she dials a number on her telephone. Long brown slender arms.

‘It is my belief that Jarolmek is a robber and a conman.’

‘I’m sorry, uh, I’m sorry, why… why do you feel that?’

A quizzical look from Nik, perched there. Saul now coming in through the door.

‘My brother paid a large sum of money to your organization two separate times…’

Don’t let him finish.

‘… and he didn’t receive a copy of the magazine? Or experience any feedback from his advertisement?’

‘Mr Mills, do not interrupt me. I have something I want to say to you and I do not wish to be interrupted.’

‘I’m sorry. Do go on.’

‘Yes, I will go on. I will go on. My brother then met with a British diplomat in Prague at a function dinner who had not heard of your publication.’

‘Really?’

‘And when he goes to look it up, it is not listed in any of our documentation here in Czech Republic. How do you explain this?’

‘There must be some misunderstanding.’

Nik stands up and spits, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ in an audible whisper. He presses the loudspeaker button on my telephone and Klemke’s riled gravelly voice echoes out into the room.

‘Misunderstanding? No I don’t believe it is. You are a fraud. My brother of my wife has made enquiries into your circulation and it appears that you do not sell as widely as you say. You are lying to people in Europe and making promises. My brother was going to report you. And now I will do the same.’

Nik stabs the button again and pulls the receiver out of my hand.

‘Hello. Yes. This is Nikolas Jarolmek. Can I help you with something?’

Saul looks at me quizzically, nodding his head at Nik, fishing lazily about in the debris on my desk. He has had his hair cut very short, almost shaved to the skull.

Suddenly Nik is shouting, a clatter of a language I barely understand. Cursing, sweating, chopping the air with his small stubby hands. He spits insults into the phone, parries Klemke’s threats with raging animosities, hangs up with a bang.

‘YOU STUPID FUCKING ARSEHOLE!’

He turns on me, shouting, his arms spread like press-ups on the desk.

‘WHAT WERE YOU DOING KEEPING THAT FUCKER ON THE PHONE? YOU COULD GET ME IN JAIL. YOU STUPID FUCKING… CUNT!’

‘Cunt’ sounds like a word he has just learned in the playground.

‘What, for fuck’s sake? What the fuck was I supposed to do?’

‘What were you… you stupid. Fucking hell, I should pay my dog to sit there. My fucking dog would do a better job than you.’

I am too ashamed to look at Saul.

‘Nik, I’m sorry, but — ‘

‘Sorry? Oh, well then, that’s all right…’

‘No, sorry, but — ‘

‘I don’t care if you’re sorry.’

‘Look!’

This from Saul. He is on his feet. He’s going to say something. Oh, Jesus.

‘He’s not saying he’s sorry. If you’d just listen, he’s not saying he’s sorry. It’s not his fault if some wanker in Warsaw catches on to what you’re up to and starts giving him an earful! Why don’t you calm down, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Who the fuck are you?’ says Nik. He really likes this guy.

‘I’m a friend of Alec’s. Take it easy.’

‘And he can’t take care of himself? Can’t you take care of yourself now, Alec, eh?’

‘Of course he can take care of himself…’

‘Nik, I can take care of myself. Saul, it’s all right. We’ll go and get a coffee. I’ll just get out of here for a while.’

‘For more than a while,’ says Nik. ‘Don’t come back. I don’t want to see you. You come back tomorrow. It’s enough for one day.’

‘Jesus, what a cunt.’

Now Saul is someone who really knows the time and place for effective use of the word ‘cunt’. I feel like asking him to say it again.

‘I can’t believe you work for that guy.’

We are standing on either side of a table football game in a cafe on the Edgware Road. I take a worn white ball from the trough below my waist and feed it through the hole on to the table. Saul traps the ball with the still black feet of his plastic man before gunning it down the table into my goal.

‘The object of the game is to stop that kind of thing from happening.’

‘It’s my goalkeeper.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He has personal problems.’

Saul gives a wheezy laugh, lifts his cigarette from a Coca-Cola ashtray and takes a drag.

‘What language was it that Nik was speaking?’

‘Czech. Slovak. One of the two.’

‘Play, play.’

The ball thunders and slaps on the rocking table.

‘Better than Nintendo, eh?’

‘Yes Grandpa,’ says Saul, scoring.

‘Fuck.’

He slides another red counter along the abacus. Five-nil.

‘Don’t be afraid to compete, Alec. Carpe diem.’

I attempt a deft sideways shunt of the ball in midfield, but it skewers away at an angle. Coming back down the table, Saul saying, ‘Now that is skill’, it rolls loose in front of my centre half. I grip the clammy handle with rigid fingers and whip it so that the neat row of figures rotate in a propeller blur. Saul’s hand flies to the right and his goalkeeper saves the incoming ball.

‘That’s illegal,’ he says. The shorter haircut suits him.

‘I’m competing.’

‘Oh, right.’

Six-nil.

‘How did that happen?’

‘Because you’re very bad at this game. Listen, I’m sorry if I interfered back there…’

‘No.’

‘What?’

‘It’s OK.’

‘No, I mean it. I’m sorry.’

‘I know you are.’

‘I probably shouldn’t have stuck my foot in.’

‘No, you probably shouldn’t have stuck your foot in. But that’s how you are. I’d rather you spoke your mind and stood up for your friends than bit your tongue for the sake of decorum. I understand. You don’t have to explain. I don’t care about the job, so it’s OK.’

‘OK.’

We tuck the subject away like a letter.

‘So what are you doing up here?’

‘I just thought I’d come up and see you. I’ve been busy with work, haven’t seen you for a week or so. You free tonight?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We can go back to mine and eat.’

‘Good.’

Saul has been the only person in whom I have considered confiding, but now that we have been face to face it does not seem necessary to tell him about SIS. My reluctance has nothing to do with official secrecy: if I asked him to, Saul would keep his mouth shut for thirty years. Trust is not an element in the decision.

There has always been something quietly competitive about our friendship — a rivalry of intellects, a need to kiss the prettier girl. Adolescent stuff. Nowadays, with school just a vague memory, this competitiveness manifests itself in an unspoken system of checks and balances on each other’s lives: who earns more money, who drives the faster car, who has laid the more promising path into the future. And this rivalry, which is never articulated but constantly acknowledged by both of us, is what prevents me from talking to Saul about what is now the most important and significant aspect of my life. I cannot confide in him when the indignity of rejection by SIS is still possible. It is, perversely, more important to me to save face with him than to seek his advice and guidance.

I take out the last ball.

We eat stir-fry side by side off a low table in the larger of the two sitting-rooms in Saul’s flat, hunched forward on the sofa, sweating under the chilli.

‘So is your boss always like that?’

It takes me a moment to realize that Saul is talking about the argument with Nik this afternoon.

‘Forget about it. He was just taking advantage of the fact that you were there to ridicule me in front of the others. He’s a bully. He gets a kick out of scoring points off people. I couldn’t give a shit.’

‘Right.’

Small black-and-white marble squares are sunk into the top of the table, forming a chess board which is chipped and stained after years of use.

‘How long have you been there now?’

‘With Nik? About a year.’

‘And you’re going to stay on? I mean, where’s it going?’

I don’t like talking about this with Saul. There’s something hidden in his questions, a glimpse of disappointment.

‘What d’you mean, where’s it going?’

‘Just that. I didn’t think you’d stay there as long as you have.’

‘You think I ought to have a more serious job? Something with a career graph, a ladder of promotion?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You sound like my headmaster.’

We are silent for a while. Staring at walls.

‘I’m applying to join the Foreign Office.’

This just comes out. I hadn’t planned it.

‘Don’t take the piss.’

‘Seriously.’ I turn to look at him. ‘I’ve filled in the application forms and done some preliminary IQ tests. I’m waiting to hear back from them.’

I feel the lie fall in me like a dropped stitch.

‘Christ. When did you decide this?’

‘About two months ago. I just had a bout of feeling unstretched, needed to take some action and sort my life out.’

‘What, so you want to be a diplomat?’

‘Yeah.’

It doesn’t feel exactly wrong to be telling him this. At some point in the next eighteen months a time will come when I may be sent overseas on a posting to a foreign embassy. Saul’s knowing now of my intention to join the Diplomatic Service will help to allay any suspicions he might have in the future.

‘I’m surprised,’ he says, on the brink of being opinionated. ‘You sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, why would you want to join the Foreign Office?’

A little piece of spring onion flies out of his mouth on to the table.

‘I’ve already told you. Because I’m sick of working for Nik. Because I need a change.’

‘You need a change.’

‘Yes.’

‘So why become a civil servant? That’s not you. Why join the Foreign Office? Fifty-seven old farts pretending that Britain still has a role to play on the world stage. Why would you want to become a part of something that’s so obviously in decline? All you’ll do is stamp passports and attend business delegations. The most fun a diplomat ever has is bailing some British drug smuggler out of prison. You could end up in Albania, for fuck’s sake.’

We are locked into the absurdity of arguing about a problem that does not exist.

‘Or Washington.’

‘In your dreams.’

‘Well, thanks for your support.’

It is still light outside. Saul puts down his fork and twists around. A flicker of eye contact and then he looks away, the top row of his teeth pressing down on a reddened bottom lip. He looks up and raises his eyebrows, as if something on the ceiling had just shared a secret with him.

‘Look. Whatever. You’d be good at it.’

He doesn’t believe that for a second.

‘You don’t believe that for a second.’

‘No, I do.’ He plays with his unfinished food, looking at me again. ‘Have you thought about what it would be like to live abroad? I mean, is that what you really want?’

For the first time it strikes me that I may have confused the notion of serving the State with a longstanding desire to run away from London, from Kate and from CEBDO. This makes me feel foolish. I am suddenly drunk on weak American beer.

‘Saul, all I want to do is put something back in. Living abroad or living here, it doesn’t matter. And the Foreign Office is one way of doing that.’

‘Put something back into what?’

‘The country.’

‘What is that? You don’t owe anyone. Who do you owe? The Queen? The Empire? The Conservative Party?’

‘You’re just being glib.’

‘No I’m not. I’m serious. The only people you owe are your friends and your family. That’s it. Loyalty to the Crown, improving Britain’s image abroad, whatever bullshit they try to feed you, that’s an illusion. I don’t want to be rude, but your idea of putting something back into society is just vanity. You’ve always wanted people to rate you.’

Saul watches carefully for my reaction. What he has just said is actually fairly offensive. I say:

‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting people to have a good opinion of you. Why not strive to be the best you can? Just because you’ve always been a cynic doesn’t mean that the rest of us can’t go about trying to improve things.’

‘Improve things?’ he says, astonished. Neither of us is in the least bit angry.

‘Yes. Improve things.’

‘That’s not you, Alec. You’re not a charity worker. Leave that to Anneka Rice.’

‘Don’t you think we’ve been spoiled as a generation? Don’t you think we’ve grown used to the idea of take, take, take?’

‘Not really. I work hard for a living. I don’t go around feeling guilty about that.’

I want to get this theme going, not least because I don’t in all honesty know exactly how I feel about it.

‘Well I really believe we have,’ I say, taking out a cigarette, offering one to Saul, and then lighting them both with a stubborn Clipper. ‘And that’s not because of vanity or guilt or delusion.’

‘Believe what?’

‘That because none of us have had to struggle or fight for things in our generation we’ve become incredibly indolent and selfish.’

‘Where’s this coming from? I’ve never heard you talk like this in your life. What happened, did you see some documentary about the First World War and feel guilty that you didn’t do more to suppress the Hun?’

‘Saul…’

‘Is that it? Do you think we should start a war with someone, prune the vine a bit, just to make you feel better about living in a free country?’

‘Come on. You know I don’t think that.’

‘So — what? — is it morality that makes you want to join the Foreign Office?’

‘Look. I don’t necessarily think that I’m going to be able to change anything in particular. I just want to do something that feels… significant.’

‘What do you mean “significant”?’

Despite the fact that our conversation has been premised on a lie, there are nevertheless issues emerging here about which I feel strongly. I stand up and walk around, as if being upright will lend some shape to my words.

‘You know — something worthwhile, something meaningful, constructive. I’m sick of just surviving, of all the money I earn being ploughed back into rent and council tax and TV licence. It’s OK for you. You don’t have to pay rent on this place. At least you’ve met your landlord.’

‘You’ve never met your landlord?’

‘No.’ I am gesticulating like a TV preacher. ‘Every month I write a cheque for four hundred and eighty quid to a Mr J. Sarkar — I don’t even know his first name. He owns an entire block in Uxbridge Road: flats, shops, taxi ranks, you name it. It’s not like he needs the money. Every penny I earn seems to go towards making sure that somebody else is more comfortable than I am.’

Saul extinguishes his cigarette in a pile of cold noodles. He looks suddenly awkward. Money talk always brings that out in him. Rich guilt.

‘I’ve got the answer,’ he says, trying to lift himself out of it. ‘You need to get yourself an ideology, Alec. You’ve got nothing to believe in.’

‘What do you suggest? Maybe I should become a born-again Christian, start playing guitar at Holy Trinity Brompton and holding prayer meetings.’

‘Why not? We could say grace whenever you come round for dinner. You’d get a tremendous kick out of feeling superior to everyone.’

‘At the LSE I always wanted to be one of those guys selling the Living Marxist. Imagine having that much faith.’

‘It’s a little passe,’ Saul says. ‘And cold during the winter months.’

I pour the last dregs of my beer into a glass and take a swig that is sour and dry. On the muted television screen the Nine O’Clock News is beginning and we both look up to see the headlines. Saul turns up the volume as Norman Tebbit appears, addressing a Eurosceptic rally full of blue-rinse Tories.

‘Why must we endure Norman Tebbit?’ he says. His voice is much deeper than his face would suggest. ‘Christ, I hate these out-of-work Tory grandees with nothing better to do than drum up petty nationalism.’

He switches it off.

‘Game of chess?’

‘Sure.’

We play the opening moves swiftly, the thunk of the pieces falling regularly on the strong wooden surface. I love that sound. There are no early captures, no immediate attacks. We exchange bishops, castle king-side, push pawns. Neither one of us is prepared to do anything risky. Saul keeps up an impression of easy joviality, making gags and farting away the stir-fry, but I know that, like me, he is concealing a deep desire to win.

After twenty-odd moves the game is choking up. If Saul wants it, there’s the possibility of a three-piece swap in the centre of the board that will reap two pawns and a knight each. But it isn’t clear who will be left with the advantage if the exchange takes place. Saul ponders things, staring intently at the board, occasionally taking a gulp of wine. To hurry him along I say: ‘Is it my go?’ and he says: ‘No. Me. Sorry, taking a long time.’ Then he thinks for another three or four minutes. My guess is he’ll shift his rook into the centre of the back rank, freeing it to move down the middle.

‘I’m going for a piss.’

‘Make your move first.’

‘I’ll do it when I come back,’ he sighs, standing up and making his way down the hall.

What I do next is achieved almost without thinking. I listen for the sound of the bathroom door closing, then quickly advance the pawn on my f-file a single space. I retract my right hand and study the difference in the shape of the game. The pawn is protected there by a knight and another pawn, and it will, in three or four moves’ time, provide a two-pronged defence when I slide in to attack Saul’s king. It’s a simple, minute adjustment to the game which should go unnoticed in the thick gathering of pieces fighting for control of the centre.

When he returns from the bathroom, Saul’s eyes seem to fix immediately on the cheating pawn. He may have spotted it. His forehead wrinkles and he chews the knuckle on his index finger, trying to establish what has changed. But he says nothing. Within a few moments he has made his move — the rook to the centre of the back rank — and sat back deep into the sofa. Play continues nervously. I develop king-side, looking to use the advanced pawn as cover for an attack. Then Saul, as frustrated as I am, offers a queen swap after half an hour of play. I accept, and from there it’s a formality. With the pawn in such an advanced position, my formation is marginally stronger: it’s just a matter of wearing him down. Saul parries a couple of attacks, but sheer weight of numbers begins to tell. He resigns at twenty to eleven.

‘Nice going,’ he says, offering me a sweaty palm.

We always shake hands afterwards.

At one a.m., drunk and tired, I sit slumped on the back seat of an unlicensed minicab, going home to Shepherd’s Bush.

There is a plain white envelope on my doormat, second post, marked PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.

4 Positive Vetting

The second interview passes like a foregone conclusion.

This time around I am treated with deference and respect by the cop on the door, and Ruth greets me at the bottom of the staircase with the cheery familiarity of an old friend.

‘Good to see you again, Mr Milius. You can go straight up.’

Throughout the morning there is a pervading sense of acceptance, a feeling of gradual admission to an exclusive club. My first encounter with Lucas was clearly a success: everything about my performance that day has impressed them.

In the secretarial enclave Ruth introduces me to Patrick Liddiard, who exudes the clean charm and military dignity of the typical Foreign Office man. This is the face that built the Empire: slim, alert, colonizing. He is impeccably turned out: gleaming brogues and a wife-ironed shirt that is tailored and crisp. His suit, too, is evidently custom-made, a rich grey flannel cut lean against his slender frame. He looks tremendously pleased to see me, pumping my hand with vigour, cementing an immediate connection between us.

‘Very nice to meet you,’ he says. ‘Very nice indeed.’

His voice is gentle, refined, faintly plummy, exactly as his appearance suggested it would be. Not a wrong note. There is a warmth suddenly about all of this, a clubbable ease entirely absent on my previous visit.

The interview itself does nothing to dispel this impression. Liddiard appears to treat it as a mere formality, something to be gone through before the rigours of Sisby. That, he tells me, will be a test of mettle, a tough two-day candidate analysis comprising IQ tests, essays, interviews and group discussions. But he makes it clear to me that he has every confidence in my ability both to succeed at Sisby and to go on to become a successful SIS officer.

There is only one conversational exchange between us which I think of as especially significant. It comes just as the first hour of the interview is drawing to a close.

We have finished discussing monetary union — issues of sovereignty and so on — when Liddiard makes a minute adjustment to his tie, glances down at the clipboard in his lap, and asks me very straightforwardly how I would feel about manipulating people for a living.

Initially I am surprised that such a question could emerge from the apparently decent, old-fashioned gent sitting opposite me. Liddiard has been so courteous, so civilized up to this point, that to hear talk of deception from him is jarring. As a result, our conversation turns suddenly watchful with implication, and I have to check myself out of complacency. We have arrived at what feels like the nub of the thing, the rich centre of the clandestine life.

I repeat the question, buying myself some time.

‘How would I feel about manipulating people?’

‘Yes,’ he says, with more care in his voice than he has allowed so far.

I must, in my answer, strike a delicate balance between the appearance of moral rectitude and the implied suggestion that I am capable of pernicious deceits. It is no good telling him outright of my preparedness to lie, although that at root is the business he is in. On the contrary, Liddiard will want to know that my will to do so is born of a deeper dedication, a profound belief in the ethical legitimacy of SIS. He is clearly a man possessed of values and moral probity: like Lucas, he sees the work of the Secret Intelligence Service as a force for good. Any suggestion that the intelligence services are involved in something fundamentally corrupt would appal him.

So I pick my words with care.

‘If you are searching for someone who is genetically manipulative, then you’ve got the wrong man. Deceit does not come easily to me. But if you are looking for somebody who would be prepared to lie when and if the circumstances demanded it, then that would be something I would be capable of doing.’

Liddiard allows an unquiet silence to linger in the room. And then he suddenly smiles, warmly, so that his teeth catch a splash of light. I have said the right thing.

‘Good,’ he says, nodding. ‘Good. And what about being unable to tell your friends about what you do? Have you had any concerns about that? We obviously prefer it that you keep the number of people who know about your activities to an absolute minimum. Some candidates have a problem with that.’

‘Not me. Mr Lucas told me in my previous interview that officers are able to tell their parents.’

‘Yes.’

‘But as far as friends are concerned…’

‘…Of course.’

‘That’s what I’d come to understand.’

Both of us nod simultaneously and suddenly, for no better reason than that I want to appear solid and reliable, I do something quite unexpected. It is unplanned and dumb. A needless lie to Liddiard which could prove costly.

‘It’s just that I have a girlfriend.’

‘I see. And have you told her about us?’

‘No. She knows that I’m here today, but she thinks I’m applying for the Diplomatic Service.’

‘Is this a serious relationship?’

‘Yes. We’ve been together for almost five years. It’s very probable that we’ll get married. So she should know about this, to see if she’s comfortable with it.’

Liddiard touches his tie again.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘What is the girl’s name?’

‘Kate. Kate Allardyce.’

He copies this into his notes. Liddiard writes down Kate’s name in his notes. Why am I doing this? They won’t care that I am about to get married. They won’t think any more of me for being able to sustain a long-term relationship. If anything, they would prefer me to be alone.

He asks when she was born.

‘December 28th 1971.’

‘Where?’

‘Argentina.’

A tiny crease saunters across his forehead.

‘And what is her current address?’

I had no idea that he would ask so much about her. I give the address where we used to live together.

‘Will you want to interview her? Is that why you want all this information?’

‘No, no,’ he says quickly. ‘It’s purely for vetting purposes. There shouldn’t be a problem. But I must ask you to refrain from discussing your candidature with her until after the Sisby examinations.’

‘Of course.’

Then, as a savoured afterthought, he adds:

‘Sometimes wives can make a substantial contribution to the work of an SIS officer.’

5 Day One / Morning

It’s six a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, 9 August. There are two and a half hours until Sisby.

I have laid out a grey flannel suit on my bed and checked it for stains. Inside the jacket there’s a powder blue shirt at which I throw ties, hoping for a match. Yellow with faint white dots. Pistachio green shot through with blue. A busy paisley, a sober navy one-tone. Christ I have awful ties. Outside, the weather is overcast and bloodless. A good day to be indoors.

After a bath and a stinging shave I settle down in the sitting-room with a cup of coffee and some back issues of The Economist, absorbing its opinions, making them mine. According to the Sisby literature given to me by Liddiard at the end of our interview in July, ‘all SIS candidates will be expected to demonstrate an interest in current affairs and a level of expertise in at least three or four specialist subjects’. That’s all I can prepare for.

I am halfway through a profile of Gerry Adams when the faint moans of my neighbours’ early-morning lovemaking start to perforate through the floor. In time there is a faint groan, what sounds like a cough, then the thud of wood on wall. I have never been able to decide whether or not she is faking it. Saul was over here once when they started up and I asked his opinion. He listened for a while, ear close to the floor, and made the solid point that you can only hear her and not him, an imbalance which suggests female over-compensation. ‘I think she wants to enjoy it,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘But something is preventing that.’

I put the dishwasher on to smother the noise, but even above the throb and rumble I can still hear her tight, sobbing emissions of lust. Gradually, too rhythmically, she builds to a moan-filled climax. Then I am left in the silence with my mounting anxiety.

Time is passing. It frustrates me that I can do so little to prepare for the next two days. The Sisby programme is a test of wits, of quick thinking and mental panache; you can’t revise for it, like an exam. It’s survival of the fittest.

I go to the fridge and take out the ham and cheese sandwich that I made last night, knowing I wouldn’t have time to do it this morning. There’s also a yoghurt in there, and a banana for the Tube. Getting on for seven thirty now. I sit down at the kitchen table and spoon back the yoghurt, leaning over the carton so as not to drop gobbets of strawberry goo on my suit trousers. That and the soggy sandwich, as well as a second cup of coffee, initiate the first adrenalin quiver in my bowels, and by the time I come out it’s nearly a quarter to eight.

Grab your jacket and go.

The Sisby examination centre is at the north end of Whitehall. This is the part of town they put in American movies as an establishing shot to let audiences in South Dakota know that the action has moved to London: a wide-angled view of Nelson’s Column, with a couple of double-decker buses and taxis queuing up outside the broad, serious flank of the National Gallery. Then cut to Harrison Ford in his suite at The Grosvenor.

The building is a great slab of nineteenth-century brown brick. People are already starting to go inside. There is a balding man in grey uniform behind a reception desk enjoying a brief flirtation with power. He looks shopworn, overweight, inexplicably pleased with himself. One by one, Sisby candidates shuffle past him, their names ticked off on a list. He looks nobody in the eye.

‘Yes?’ he says to me impatiently, as if I were trying to gatecrash a party.

‘I’m here for the Selection Board.’

‘Name?’

‘Alec Milius.’

He consults the list, ticks me off, gives me a flat plastic security tag.

‘Third floor.’

Ahead of me, loitering in front of a lift, are five other candidates. Very few of them will be SIS. These are the prospective future employees of the Ministry of Agriculture, Social Security, Trade and Industry, Health. The men and women who will be responsible for policy decisions in the governments of the new millennium. They all look impossibly young.

To their left a staircase twists away in a steep spiral and I begin climbing it, unwilling to wait for the lift. The stairwell, like the rest of the building, is drab and unremarkable, with a provincial university aesthetic that would have been considered modern in the mid-1960s. The third-floor landing is covered in brown linoleum and nicotine-yellow paint clings to the walls. My name, and those of four others, have been typed on a sheet of A4 paper which is stuck up on a pock-marked notice board.

A woman — a girl — who can’t be much older than twenty is standing in front of the notice board, taking in what it has to say. She appears to be reading an advertisement requesting blood donors. She doesn’t turn to look at me; she just keeps on reading. She has pretty hair, thick black curls tied halfway down with a dark blue velvet band. Strands of it have broken free and are holding on to the fabric of her tartan jacket. She is tall with thin spindly legs under a knee-length skirt. Wearing tights. A pair of thick National Health glasses obliterates the shape and character of her face.

A middle-aged man comes around the corner and passes her at the top of the stairs. She turns to him and says:

‘Hello. By any chance you wouldn’t know where Common Room B3 is, would you?’

She has a Northern Ireland accent, full of light and cunning. That was brave of them to take her on. Imagine the vetting.

The man, probably a Sisby examiner, is more helpful than I expect him to be. He says yes of course and points to a room no more than ten feet away on the far side of the landing with B3 clearly written on the door. The girl looks embarrassed not to have noticed it but he makes nothing of it and heads off down the stairs.

‘Good start, Ann,’ she says under her breath, but the remark is directed at me. ‘Hello.’

She looks at me directly, for the first time.

‘Hi. I’m Alec.’

‘This Alec?’ she says, tapping ALEC MILIUS on the notice board.

‘The same.’

Her skin is very pale and lightly freckled. She has a slightly witchy way about her, a creepy innocence.

‘I’m so nervous. Are you? Did you find it OK?’

‘Mmmm. Where are you from?’

‘Northern Ireland.’

We are walking into B3. Cheap brown sofas, dirty window panes, a low MFI table covered in newspapers.

‘Oh. Which town?’

‘Do you know Enniskillen?’

‘I’ve heard of it, yes.’

Old men with medals pinned to their chests, severed in two by the IRA. Maybe an uncle of hers, a grandpa.

‘How about you?’

‘I’m English.’

‘Aye. I could tell by your accent.’

‘I live here. In London.’

The small talk here is meaningless, just words in a room. But the beats and gaps in the conversation are significant: Ann’s sly glances at my suit and shoes, the quick suspicion in her wide brown eyes.

‘Which part of London?’

‘Shepherd’s Bush.’

‘I don’t know that.’

No talk for a moment while we survey the room, our home for the next forty-eight hours. The carpet is a deep, worn brown.

‘Do you want a drink?’ she asks, with a smile that is too full of effort. There is a machine in the corner surrounded by polystyrene cups, threatening appalling coffee.

‘I’m all right, thanks.’

A gnomic man appears now in the doorway of the common room, carrying a brown leather satchel. He looks tired and bewildered, encumbered by the social ineptitude of the fabulously intelligent.

‘Is this B3?’ he asks. His hair is slightly greasy.

‘Yes,’ Ann says, keenly.

He nods, heavy with nerves. A hobbit of a man. He shuffles into the room and sits across from me in an armchair which has sponge pouring out of its upholstery. Ann seems to have decided against coffee, moving back towards the window at the back of the room.

‘So you’re either Sam or Matthew,’ she asks him. ‘Which one?’

‘Matt.’

‘I’m Alec,’ I tell him. We are near one another and I shake his hand. The palm is damp with lukewarm sweat.

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘And Ann.’

She has swooped in, bending over to introduce herself. The Hobbit is nervous around women: when Ann shakes his hand, his eyes duck to the carpet. She fakes out a smile and retreats below a white clock with big black hands that says half past eight.

Not long now.

I pick up a copy of The Times from the low table and begin reading it, trying to remember interesting things to say about Gerry Adams. Matt takes a cereal bar out of his jacket pocket and begins tucking into it, oblivious of us, dropping little brown crumbs and shards of raisin on his Marks & Spencer blazer. It has occurred to me that in the eyes of Liddiard and Lucas, Matt and I have something in common, some shared quality or flaw that is the common denominator among spies. What could that possibly be?

Ann looks at him.

‘So what do you do, Matt?’

He almost drops the cereal bar in his lap.

‘I’m studying for a Masters degree at Warwick.’

‘What in?’

‘Computer Science and European Affairs.’

He says this quietly, as though he were ashamed. His skin is fighting a constant, losing battle with acne.

‘So you just came down from Warwick last night? You’re staying in a hotel?’

She’s nosey, this one. Wants to know what she’s up against.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Not far from here.’

I like it that he does not ask the same question of her.

A young man appears in the door. This must be Sam Ogilvy, the third male candidate. He has an immediate, palpable influence on the room which is controlling: he makes it his. Ogilvy is the sort of guy you see in shaving foam advertisements hugging their fathers. He has a healthy, vitamin-rich complexion, vacuous turquoise eyes and a dark, strong jawline. He’ll be good at games, for sure: probably plays golf off eight or nine, bats solidly in the middle order and pounds fast, flat serves at you which kick up off the court. So he’s handsome, undoubtedly, a big hit with the ladies, but a drink with the lads will come first. His face, in final analysis, lacks character, is easily forgettable. I would put money on the fact that he attended a minor public school. But I could be wrong. My guess is he works in oil, textiles or finance, reads Grishams on holiday and is chummy with all the secretaries at work, most of whom harbour secret dreams of marrying him. That’s about all there is to go on.

‘Good morning,’ he says, as if we had all been waiting for him and can now get started. He has broad athletic shoulders which manage to make his off-the-peg suit look stylish. ‘I’m Sam Ogilvy.’

And, one by one, he makes his way around the room, shaking hands, moving with the easy confidence of an PS80,000 per annum salesman used to getting what he wants: a closed deal, a wage increase, a classy broad.

Ann goes first. She is reserved but warm; it’s a certainty that she’ll find him attractive. Their handshake is pleasant and formal: it says we can do business together.

The Hobbit is up next, standing up from the armchair to his full height, which still leaves him a good five or six inches short. Ogilvy looks to get the measure of him pretty quickly: a bright shining nerd, a number cruncher. The Hobbit looks suitably deferential.

And now it’s my turn. Ogilvy’s eyes swivel left and scope my face. He knew as soon as he came in that I’ll be the one he’s up against, the biggest threat to his candidature. I knew it too; Ann and Matt won’t cut it.

‘How do you do? Sam.’

He has a strong, captain-of-the-school grip on him.

‘Alec.’

‘Have you been here long?’ he asks, touching the tip of his tanned nose.

‘About ten minutes,’ Ann replies from behind him.

‘Feeling nervous?’

This goes out to anyone who feels like answering. Not me. Matt murmurs ‘Mmmm’, which I find oddly touching.

‘Yeah, me too,’ says Sam, just so we know he’s like the rest of us, even if he does look like Pierce Brosnan. ‘You ever done anything like this before?’

‘No,’ says Matt, sitting down with a deep, involuntary sigh. ‘Just interviews for university.’

Matt picks up a Sisby booklet from the table and starts flicking through it like a man shuffling cards. For a moment, Ann is stranded in the middle of the room, as if she had been on the point of saying something but had decided at the last minute to remain silent on the grounds that it would have been of no consequence. Sam smiles a friendly smile at me. He wants me to like him, but to let him lead. I stand up, a sudden attack of nerves.

‘Where are you off to?’ Ann asks, quick and awkward. ‘If you’re looking for the toilet it’s down the hall to the right. Just keep on going and you’ll come to it.’

She stretches out her long, pale right arm and indicates the direction to me by swatting it from left to right. A ring on her middle finger bounces a spot of reflected sunlight around the common room.

‘I was looking for it,’ I tell her. ‘Thanks.’

The loo is a clean, white-painted cuboid room with smoked-glass windows, three urinals, a row of push-tap basins and two cubicles. Half-a-dozen other candidates are crowded inside. I squeeze past them and go into one of the cubicles. There is a stale, hanging odour and I lock the door. Twenty to nine. Outside, one of the candidates says ‘Good luck’, to which another replies ‘Yeah’. Then the door leading out into the corridor swishes open and clunks shut. Somebody at the sink nearest my cubicle splashes cold water on to his face and emits a shocked, cleansing gasp.

I remain seated and motionless, feeling no need to shit now, only apprehension. I just want to focus, to be alone with my thoughts, and this is the only place in which to do so. The atmosphere in the building is so at odds with the princely splendour of Lucas and Liddiard’s office as to be almost comic. I put my head between my knees and close my eyes, breathing slowly and deliberately. Just pace yourself. You want this. Go out and get it. I can feel something inside my jacket weighing against the top of my thigh. The banana. I sit up, take it out, peel away the skin and eat it quickly in five gulped bites. Slow-burn carbohydrates. Then I lean back against the cistern and feel the flush handle dig hard into my back.

The water has stopped running out of the taps on the other side of the cubicle door. I check my watch. The time has drifted on to 8.50 without my keeping track of it. I slam back the lock on the door and bolt out of the cubicle. The room is empty. And the corridors too. Just get there, move it, don’t run. My black shoes clap on the linoleum floors, funnelling down the corridor back to B3. I re-enter, trying to look nonchalant.

‘Right, he’s here,’ says a man I haven’t seen before who obviously works in the building. He has a strangulated Thames Valley accent. ‘Everything all right, Mr Milius?’

‘Fine, sorry, yes.’

Leaning against the window in the far corner of the common room is the fifth and last candidate, Elaine Hayes. I don’t have time to look at her.

‘Good. We can make a start then.’

I find a seat between Ogilvy and Matt on one of the sofas, dropping down low into its springless upholstery. One of them is wearing industrial-strength aftershave with a curiously androgynous fragrance. Must be Ogilvy. The man hands me a piece of paper with my timetable on it for the next two days. The four other candidates have theirs already.

‘As I was saying, my name is Keith Heywood.’

Keith’s sparse hair is grease-combed and badger grey. He has skin the colour of chalk and puffy hairless arms. A man who looks sixty-five but is probably twenty years younger. Most of his working life has been spent in this building. He wears a light blue sleeveless shirt and black flannel trousers with meandering creases. His shoes, also black, are on their last legs: no amount of polishing could save them now. He looks, to all intents and purposes, like a janitor.

‘I’m your Intake Manager,’ he says. ‘If you have any questions about anything at all over the course of the next two days, you come to me.’

Everyone nods.

‘I’ll also be invigilating the Cognitive Tests. You won’t, of course, be permitted to talk to me during those.’

This is obviously Keith’s big opening-speech gag, and Ogilvy is polite enough to laugh at it. As he smiles and sniggers he looks across and catches my eye. Rivalry.

‘Now,’ Keith says, clapping his hands. ‘Do you have any questions about your timetables?’

I look down at the sheet of paper. It is headed ‘AFS NON-QT CANDIDATES‘, a phrase which I do not understand. I am known only as ‘CANDIDATE NO. 4’.

‘No. No questions,’ says Ann, answering for us all.

‘Right,’ says Keith. ‘Let’s get started.’

Keith lumbers down the corridor to a small classroom filled with desks in rows and orange plastic chairs. We follow close behind him like children in a museum. Once inside he stands patiently at one end of the room beside a large wooden invigilator’s table while each of us chooses a desk.

Ann sits immediately in front of Keith. Matt settles in behind her. He places a red pencil case on the desk in front of him which he unzips, retrieving a chewed blue Bic and a fresh pencil. Ogilvy heads for the back of the room, separating himself from the rest of us. Elaine, who is older than me, sits underneath a single-pane window overlooking the trees of St James’s Park. She looks bored. I position myself at the desk nearest the door.

‘I have in my hand a piece of paper,’ says Keith, surprisingly. ‘It’s a questionnaire which I am obliged to ask you to complete.’

He begins dishing them out. Ann, helpfully, takes two from his pile, swivelling to hand one back to Matt. She moves stiffly, from the waist and hips, as if her neck were clamped in an invisible brace.

‘It’s just for our own records,’ says Keith, moving between the desks. ‘None of your answers will have any bearing on the results of the Selection Board.’

The first page of the questionnaire is straightforward: name, address, date of birth. It then becomes more complicated.

What do you think are your best qualities?

And weaknesses?

What recent achievement are you most proud of?

These are big subjects for nine o’clock in the morning. I ponder evasive answers, wild fictions, blatant untruths, struggling to get my brain up to speed.

‘Of course,’ says Keith, as we begin filling out the form, ‘you’re not obliged to answer all of the questions. You may leave any section blank.’

This suits me. I complete the first page and ignore all three of the questions, sitting quietly until the time elapses. But the others, with the exception of Elaine, begin scribbling furiously. Within ten minutes, Ann is on to her third page, unravelling herself with a frightening candour. Matt treats the exercise with a similar seriousness, letting it all out, telling them how he really feels. I turn to look at Ogilvy, but he catches my glance and half-smiles. I turn away. No time to see how much, if anything, he has written. Surely he’d be smart enough not to give anything away unless he had to?

It’s over after twenty minutes. Keith collects the questionnaires and returns to his desk. I turn around to see Ogilvy leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling like a matinee idol.

Keith coughs.

‘In just over ten minutes you’ll begin the group exercise,’ he says, leaning to pick up a small pile of papers from the right-hand top corner of his desk. ‘This involves a thirty-minute discussion between the five of you on a specific problem which is described in some detail on this document.’

He flaps one of the sheets of paper beside his ear and then begins distributing them, one to each of us.

‘You have ten minutes to read the document. Try to absorb as much of it as possible. The Board will explain how the assessment works once you have gone into the second examination area. Any questions?’

Nobody says a word.

‘Right, then. Can I suggest that you begin?’

This is what it says.

A nuclear reprocessing plant on the Normandy coast, built jointly in 1978 by Britain, Holland and France, is allegedly leaking minute amounts of radiation into a stretch of the English Channel used by both French and British fishermen. American importers of shellfish from the region have run tests revealing the presence of significant levels of radiation in their consignments of oysters, mussels and prawns. The Americans have therefore announced their intention to stop importing fish and shellfish from all European waters, effective immediately.

The document — which has been written from the British perspective by a fictional civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food — suggests that the American claims are nebulous. Their own tests, carried out in conjunction with the French authorities, have shown only trace levels of radiation in that section of the English Channel, and nothing in the shellfish from the area which might be construed as dangerous. The civil servant suspects an ulterior motive on the part of the Americans, who have objected in the past to what they perceive as unfair fishing quotas in European waters. They have asked for improved access to European fishing grounds, and for the French plant to be shut down until a full safety check has been carried out.

The document suggests that the British and French ministries should present a united, pan-European resistance to face-off the American demands. However, there are problems. An American motor-car company is one step away from signing a contract with the German government to build a factory near Berlin which would bring over 3,000 jobs to an economically deprived area. The Germans are unlikely to do anything at this stage which might upset this agreement. Ditto the Danes, who have an ongoing row with the French over a recent trade agreement. The Spanish, who would suffer more than anyone under any prolonged American export ban, will side firmly with the British and French, though their position is weakened by the fact that the peseta is being propped up by the US dollar.

It’s a fanciful scenario, but this is what we are required to talk about.

Keith has given each of us a sheet of blank paper on which to scribble notes, but I write down as little as possible. Eye contact will be important in front of the examiners: I must appear confident and sure of my brief. To be constantly buried in pages of notes will look inefficient.

Ten minutes pass quickly. Then Keith asks us to gather up our things and accompany him to another section of the building. It takes about four minutes to get there.

Two men and an elderly lady are lined up behind a long rectangular desk, like judges in a bad production of The Crucible. They have files, notepads, full glasses of water and a large chrome stopwatch in front of them. The classroom is again small and cheaply furnished, with just the one window. Somehow I expected a grander set-up: varnished floors, an antique table, old men in suits peering at us over half-moon spectacles. Something that would at least convey the gravity of SIS. A stranger might walk in here and be offered no hint that the three people inside were part of the most secret government department of them all. And that, of course, is as it should be. The last thing we are supposed to do is draw attention to ourselves.

‘Good morning,’ says the older of the two men. ‘If you’d all like to take a seat, we’ll make a start.’

From his accent he is unmistakably English, yet his suntan is so pronounced he might almost be Indian. He looks well into his fifties.

There is a table with five chairs positioned around it no more than two feet away from the examiners, within easy earshot. We move towards it and are suddenly very polite to one another. Shall I go here? Is that all right? After you. Ann, I think, overdoes it, actually holding Elaine’s chair for her. I find myself in the seat furthest away from the door, flushed with shirt sweat, trying to remember everything that I have read while at the same time appearing relaxed and self-assured. An age passes until we are all comfortably seated. Then the man speaks again.

‘First off, allow us to introduce ourselves. My name is Gerald Pyman. I am a recently retired SIS officer and I’ll be chairing the Selection Board for the next two days.’

Pyman’s eyes are black holes, as if they have seen so much that is abject and contemptible in human nature that they have simply withdrawn into their sockets. He wears a tie, a smart one, but no jacket in the heat.

‘To my left is Dr Hilary Stevenson.’

‘Good morning,’ she says, taking up his cue. ‘I’m the appointed psychologist to the board. I’m here to evaluate your contributions to the group exercises and — as you will all have seen from your timetables — I will also be conducting an interview with each of you over the course of the next two days.’

She has a kind, refined way of speaking, the trusting softness of a grandmother. The room is absolutely still as she speaks: her words seem to filter through the strands of her fine white hair.

Each of us has adopted a relaxed but businesslike body language: arms on laps or resting on the table in front of us. Ogilvy is the exception. His arms are folded tight against his chest. He seems to realize this and lets them drop to his sides. It is the turn of the man on Pyman’s right to speak. He is a generation younger, overweight by about three stone, with a pale, rotund face that is tired and paunchy.

‘And I’m Martin Rouse, a serving SIS officer working out of our embassy in Washington.’

Washington? Why do we need intelligence operations in Washington?

‘Can I just emphasize that you are not in competition. There’s nothing at all to be gained from scoring points off one another.’

Rouse has a faint Mancunian accent, diluted by a life lived overseas.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘we’ll just go around the table and allow you to introduce yourselves, to us and to each other. Beginning with Mr Milius.’

I experience the sensation of breathing in both directions at once, inhalation and exhalation cancelling each other out. Every face in the room shifts minutely and settles on mine. I look up and for some reason fix Elaine in the eye as I say:

‘My name is Alec Milius. I am a marketing consult-ant.’

Then I slide my gaze away to the right, taking in Stevenson, Rouse and Pyman, a sentence for each of them.

‘I work in London for the Central European Business Development Organization. I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics. I’m twenty-four.’

‘Thank you,’ says Rouse. ‘Miss Butler.’

Ann dives right in, no trace of nerves, and introduces herself, quickly followed by the Hobbit. Then it’s Ogilvy’s turn. He visibly shifts himself up a gear and in a clear, steady voice announces himself as the sure-fire candidate.

‘Good morning.’

Eye contact to us, not to the examiners. Nice touch. He stares me right down without a flinch and then turns to face Elaine. She remains unmoved.

‘I’m Sam Ogilvy. I work for Rothmans Tobacco in Saudi Arabia.’

This information knocks me sideways. Ogilvy can’t be much older than I am and yet he’s already working for a major multinational corporation in the Middle East. He must be earning thirty or forty grand a year, with a full expense account and company car. I’m on less than fifteen thousand and live in Shepherd’s Bush.

‘I graduated from Cambridge in 1992 with a First in Economics and History.’

Bastard.

‘Thank you, Mr Ogilvy,’ says Rouse, planting a full stop on his pad as he looks up at Elaine and smiles for the first time. He doesn’t need to say anything to her. He merely nods and she begins.

‘Good morning. I’m Elaine Hayes. I’m already employed by the Foreign Office, working out of London. I’m thirty-two and I can’t remember when I graduated from university it was such a long time ago.’

Both Pyman and Rouse laugh at this and we follow their cue, mustering strained chuckles. The room briefly sounds like a theatre where only half of the audience have properly understood a joke. It intrigues me that Elaine is already employed by the Foreign Office. Surely if she were looking to join SIS, they would promote her internally without the bother of going through Sisby.

‘We’d like to proceed now with the group exercise,’ Pyman says, interrupting this thought. ‘The discussion is unchaired. That is to say you are free to make a contribution whenever you choose to do so. It is scheduled to conclude after thirty minutes, at which time you must all have agreed upon a course of action. If you find yourselves in agreement before the thirty minutes are up, we shall call a stop then. I must emphasize the importance of making your views known. There is no point in holding back. We cannot assess your minds if you will not show them to us. So do participate. There’s a stopwatch here. Miss Hayes, if you’d like to start it up and set it on the desk where everyone can see it.’

Elaine is closest to Rouse, who takes the stopwatch from Pyman and hands it to her with his right arm outstretched. She takes it from him briskly and sets it down on the table, positioning the face in such a way that we can all see it. Then, with her thumb, she pushes the bulbous steel knob at the top of the stopwatch, starting us off.

It has a tick like chattering teeth.

‘Can I just say to begin with that I think it’s very important that we maintain a tight alliance with the French, though the problem is of their making. Initially, at least.’

Ann, God bless her, has had the balls to kick things off, although her opening statement has a forced self-confidence about it which betrays an underlying insecurity. Like a pacesetter in a middle-distance track event, she’ll lead for a while but soon tire and fall away.

‘Do you agree?’ she says, to no one in particular, and her question has a terrible artificiality about it. Ann’s words hang there unanswered for a short time until the Hobbit chips in with a remark that is entirely unrelated to what she has said.

‘We have to consider how economically important fish exports are to the Americans,’ he says, touching his right cheekbone with a chubby index finger. ‘Do they amount to much?’

‘I agree.’

I said that, and immediately regret it, because everyone turns in my direction and expects some sort of follow-up. And yet it doesn’t come. What happens now, for a period of perhaps five or six seconds, is appalling. I become quite incapable of functioning within the group, of thinking clearly in this unfamiliar room with its strange, artificial rules. This happened with Lucas and it is happening again. My mind is just terrible blank white noise. I see only faces, looking at me. Ogilvy, Elaine, Ann, Matt. Enjoying, I suspect, the spectacle of my silence. Think. Think. What did he say? I agree with what? What did he say?

‘I happen to know that annual exports of fish and shellfish to the United States amount to little more than twenty or thirty million pounds.’

The Hobbit, tired of waiting, has kept on going, has, in effect, dug me out of a hole. Immediately attention shifts back to him, allowing me the chance to blank out what has just happened. I have to think positively. I may not have betrayed my anxiety to the others, nor to Pyman, Rouse or Stevenson. It may, after all, have been just a momentary gap in real time, no more than a couple of beats. It just felt like a crisis; it didn’t look like one.

Stay with them. Listen. Concentrate.

I look over at Elaine, who has taken a sip from a glass of water in front of her. She appears to be on the point of saying something in response to the Hobbit. She has a perplexed look on her face. You happen to know that, Hobbit? How can someone happen to know something like that?

Ann speaks.

‘We can’t just abandon exports of fish and shellfish to America on the grounds that they only bring in a small amount of revenue. That’s still twenty million pounds’ worth of business to the fishing community.’

This is the humanitarian angle, the socialist’s view, and I wonder if it will impress Rouse and Pyman, or convince them that Ann is intellectually unevolved. I suspect the latter. Elaine shapes as if to put her straight, moving forward in her chair, elbows propped on the table. A woman in her twenties who is not a socialist has no heart; a woman in her thirties who is still a socialist has no brain, etc. But instead she ignores what Ann has said and takes the conversation off on a different tack. We are all of us rushing around this, just trying to be heard. Everything is moving too fast.

‘Can I suggest trying to persuade the Americans to at least accept imports of fish from European waters that are not affected by the alleged nuclear spillage? We can accept a temporary export ban on shellfish, but to put a stop to all fish exports to the US seems a bit draconian.’

Elaine has a lovely, husky voice, a been there, done that, low-bullshit drawl with a grin behind it. All the time the examiners are busy scribbling. I have to operate at a level of acute self-consciousness: every mannerism, every gesture, every smile is being minutely examined. The effort is all-consuming.

A pause opens up in the discussion. My brain fog has cleared completely, and a sequence of ideas has formed in my mind. I must say something to erase the memory of my first interruption, to make it look as though I can bounce back from a bad situation. Now is my chance.

‘On the other — ‘

Ogilvy, fuck him, started speaking at the same time as me.

‘Sorry, Alec,’ he says. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Thank you, Sam. I was just going to say that I think it’s going to be difficult to make a distinction between fish and shellfish in this instance. Nuclear contamination is nuclear contamination. The Americans have a very parochial view of Europe. They see us as a small country. Our waters, whether they be the English Channel or the Mediterranean, are connected geographically in the minds of the Americans. If one is polluted, particularly by nuclear waste, then they all are.’

‘I think that’s quite a patronizing view of America.’

This comes from Elaine. I had made the mistake of perceiving her as an ally. In my peripheral vision I can see Rouse and Pyman duck into their pads.

‘OK, perhaps it is. But consider this.’

This had better be good or I’m finished.

‘Any lasting export ban of radioactive shellfish to America will quickly become an international ban. No one wants to eat contaminated food. If we don’t put a stop to it soon, other countries, even in Europe, will refuse to buy shellfish and fish from British and French waters. It’s a domino effect.’

This goes down well. Both Ann and the Hobbit nod respectfully. But Ogilvy has decided he has been silent too long. He leans forward, like a chess grand master on the point of making a telling move in the endgame. He’s going to make me look ineffectual. A little puff of his aftershave drifts across the room and a bird sounds territorially outside.

‘The question is an interesting one,’ he says, drawing us into his web of good-naturedness. ‘Is this a direct face-off between the United States of America and a United States of Europe? Do we as British citizens want to see ourselves that way, as part of a federal Europe? Or do we value our sovereignty too much, our prerogative to dictate terms to other European states and to the world at large?’

This is inch-perfect, not a fluffed line. He goes on.

‘I suggest that we see this problem in those terms. There are too many conflicting European interests to mount an effective British campaign. We must do it with the assistance of our European partners and present a united front to the Americans. We hold many of the cards. Our major problem is Germany, and that is what we have to address. Once they’re onside, the rest will follow.’

This is the smart move. He has set the foundations for the conversation, given it a clear starting point from which it can develop and assume some shape. To all intents and purposes Ogilvy has proposed to chair the discussion, and this aptitude for leadership will not go unnoticed.

Ann takes up the argument.

‘I don’t see why we have to present pan-European resistance to America as the civil servant in this document suggests.’

As she says this, she taps the printed sheet quite vigorously with the point of her middle finger. But she is not as good at this as Ogilvy is, and she knows it. Every contour of her body language betrays this to the rest of us, but some dark stubbornness in her, some Ulster obstinacy, will not allow her to back down. So she will wade in, deeper and deeper, pretending to know about things she barely understands, feigning a self-confidence which she does not possess.

‘To put it bluntly, this is France’s problem,’ she says, and her voice is now over-excited. ‘It’s a French nuclear reprocessing’ — her tongue trips on this last word several times — ‘plant that is leaking. I suggest that, perhaps with EU funding, you know, we conduct some definitive checks on the plant with American observers on site. On the site. If it proves to be clean, then there’s no reason why the Americans shouldn’t begin re-buying European fish. If it’s leaking, we demand that the French get it fixed. We then try to persuade the Americans to buy fish and shellfish from non-French, uncontaminated waters.’

‘So you’re suggesting we just abandon the French?’ I ask, just so that my voice is heard, just to make it look like I’m still taking part.

‘Yes,’ she says impatiently, hardly taking the time to look at me.

‘There’s a problem with that solution.’

Ogilvy says this with the calm bedside manner of a family GP.

‘What?’ says Ann, visibly unsettled.

‘The plant was built in 1978 with joint British, French and Dutch co-operation.’

This trips everyone up; nobody had recalled it from the printed sheet except Ogilvy, who is happy to let this fact make its way across the room to the impressed examiners.

‘Yes, I’d forgotten that,’ Ann admits, to her credit, but she must know that her chance has passed.

‘I still think Ann has a point,’ says a gallant Hobbit. He is surely too kind to be caught up in this. ‘The French facility needs to have a thorough check-up with American observers. If it’s leaking, we all have to put it right collectively and be completely open about that. But I suspect it’s fine and that these American claims are disingenuous.’

In the tight lightless classroom, this last word sounds laboured and pretentious. Ann’s face has flushed red and the hand in which she is holding her pen is shaking. Ogilvy inches forward.

‘Let’s look at it this way,’ he says. ‘We don’t know all the facts. What we do know is that the Americans are playing games. And in my view the best way to deal with a bully is to bully them back.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘I’m suggesting, Alec, that if the Americans are proposing to squeeze us, then we in turn should squeeze them.’

They’ll like this. We’re supposed to play hardball. We’re supposed to be capable of a trick or two. Ogilvy glances across at Rouse, then back at the Hobbit.

‘Matthew, you seem to know about the levels of import and export of fish and shellfish going to and fro between Britain and America.’

The Hobbit, flattered, says ‘Yes.’

‘Well, I suspect that the Americans export significantly higher numbers of fish and shellfish to Europe than we export to them. Is that right?’

‘Off the top of my head, yes, as much as three times the amount,’ says the Hobbit.

It’s just between the two of them for now and it’s an impressive thing to watch. Ogilvy is giving us all a lesson in man management, in how to make the little guy feel good about himself. A trace of sweat has formed above the Hobbit’s upper lip, a little vapour of nerves, but he is otherwise entirely without self-consciousness. Just getting the words out, happy to talk in facts. Maybe even enjoying himself. Ogilvy has rested his elbows on the table, fingers interlocked and raised up to his dark face.

‘So a ban on American fish and shellfish imports would hit them even harder?’

‘In theory,’ says Elaine, a dismissiveness in her voice.

‘Of course,’ says Ogilvy, cutting her off before she has a chance to tell him how unworkable a trade embargo with the United States would be. ‘I actually don’t think that we’ll have to go as far as reciprocating their ban with one of our own.’

He wants to show Rouse and Pyman that he’s seen all the angles.

‘The key to this, as I’ve said, is the Germans. If we can get them onside, and as long as any problem with the reprocessing plant can be addressed, I can’t foresee the Americans continuing with their demands. It’s important that we be seen to stand up to them.’

It’s time to steal some ideas off Ogilvy, before he runs away with it.

‘The sticking point is the automobile manufacturer. We have to make sure that that contract is secured and goes ahead. At the same time, we might offer the Germans a sweetener.’

‘What kind of a sweetener?’ Elaine asks. She lingers on ‘sweetener’ as if it is the most absurd word she has ever heard.

‘Sell them something. At a bargain price. Or we could buy more of their exports.’

This sounds meek and ill-informed; it is clear that I have not thought it through. But Ogilvy bails me out, saying ‘Yes’ with a degree of enthusiasm that I had not anticipated. Ironically, however, this leads to a bad mistake. He says:

‘We could offer to buy up deutschmarks, to push up their value briefly against the pound.’

This is ludicrous and Elaine tells him so.

‘You try it. You’d have to be owed some pretty big favours at the Exchequer to get something like that done.’

She delivers this in a tone of weary experience and for a moment Ogilvy is stumped. His square jaw tremors with humiliation and it gives me a small buzz of pleasure to watch him ride it out. It’s important that I don’t let this opportunity slip. Shut him down.

‘I have to agree with Elaine, Sam. We mustn’t pass the buck to another department. It’s difficult, without knowing more about our other negotiations with the Germans, to determine how exactly we might go about persuading them to side with us. It may not even be necessary, for two reasons. The first has already been made clear. The French plant may in fact be safe and the Americans may be acting illegally. If that’s the case, we’re in the clear. But if it does prove necessary to get the Germans onside, we could try another tactic.’

‘Yes, I — ‘ says Ann, but I’m not about to be interrupted.

‘If I could just finish. Thank you. If we succeed in convincing a majority of other European states to form a united front against the Americans, the Germans will not relish being isolated. Whilst they may not want to be seen to be taking issue with the United States, at the same time they won’t want to be seen by their European partners to be forming an unholy alliance with America. We can, in effect, shut them up.’

‘We shouldn’t underestimate the Germans, or their influence,’ the Hobbit mumbles. ‘Nobody here wants to acknowledge the truth of this situation, which is that the Germans are the dominant economic force in European politics. They are, in effect, our masters.’

This annoys me.

‘Well if that’s what they’re teaching you on your European Affairs course at Warwick, I’m not signing up.’

Elaine, Pyman and Rouse all emit snorty laughs. I’m winning this, I’m coming through. The Hobbit’s cheeks rouge nicely. He can’t think of a comeback, so I carry on.

‘This notion of the Germans as the European master race is contrived. Their economy will slow in the next few years, unemployment is chronic since unification and Kohl’s days are numbered.’

I read this in The Economist.

‘Let’s not get off the point.’ Ogilvy wants back in. ‘Let’s talk about how to get the Spaniards and the Danes on board.’

Suddenly Ann sneezes, a great lashing a-choo which she only half covers with her hand. In stereo, Ogilvy and I say ‘Bless you’, to which he adds: ‘Are you OK?’ Ann, not one to be patronized, lets her guard drop and says ‘Yeah’ with sullen indifference. Her voice, with its sour accent, sounds impatient and spoiled, and in that brief moment we can all see her for what she really is: a tough-nut of steely ambition, looking for a one-way ticket to London and a better life. In the wake of it Ogilvy glides away, talking with great efficiency about how to get the Spaniards and Danes ‘on board’. As time ticks away, the stopwatch edging towards our thirty-minute limit, he is left more or less on his own, with occasional interjections from the Hobbit, whose knowledge of European Union by-laws is as extensive as it is tedious. He must be the star pupil at Warwick. Ann, for the most part, turns in on herself and merely disagrees for the sake of disagreeing. Elaine barely speaks. From my own point of view, I feel that I have done enough to please the examiners, both by what I have said and by my personal conduct, which has been forthright but respectful of the other candidates. I also feel that Ogilvy and the Hobbit are flogging a dead horse. Most of the points that were there to be made have been made saliently some time ago. Nevertheless, it will look good if I try to wrap things up.

‘If I could just interrupt you there, Sam, because we’re running out of time and I think we should try to reach some sort of conclusion.’

‘Absolutely.’

He gives me the floor. Don’t fuck it up.

‘I think we’ve covered most of the angles on this problem. Judging from the last ten minutes or so, we’re mostly agreed on a course of action.’

‘Which is?’ says Ann, coldly.

‘That we need to — as you pointed out right at the start — present a united front to the Americans. We must conduct conclusive tests on the French plant. If needs be, we should bargain with the Germans to get them on our side.’

‘We never said how we were going to do that.’ The manner in which Elaine says this, with just under a minute to go, implies that this is largely my responsibility.

‘No, we didn’t. But that’s not something that should worry us. I think the Germans would be unlikely to do anything that would undermine the EU.’

‘And what do we do about the American export ban?’ the Hobbit asks, looking in my direction as he tips forward on his chair. It was a mistake to take this on.

‘Well, there’s very little we can do…’

‘I don’t agree,’ says Ann, cutting me off short so that my incomplete sentence sounds weak and defeatist.

‘Me too,’ says Ogilvy, but he too is interrupted.

‘I’m afraid that your thirty minutes is up.’

Rouse has tapped his pen twice — tap tap — on the hard surface of the examiners’ table. We all turn to face him.

‘Thank you all very much. If you’d like to gather up your things and make your way back to the common room where Mr Heywood is waiting for you.’

I think we all share a sense of disappointment at not managing to conclude the discussion within the allocated time: it will reflect badly on the five of us, although I may score points for trying to tidy things up towards the end. Ogilvy is first up and out of the room, followed by the rest of us in a tight group, waddling out like tired ducks. Elaine is the last to leave, closing the door behind her. She does this with too much force and it slams shut with a loud clap.

Keith is waiting for us in the common room, idling near the coffee machine. But as soon as we are all inside, he instructs us to follow him back down the corridor to begin the first of the written examinations. There is no time to relax, no time to ruminate or grab a drink. They won’t let the pressure off until five o’clock this evening, and then it starts all over again tomorrow.

On the way to the classroom, Elaine and Ann peel away from the group to go to the loo. This flusters Keith. While Ogilvy, the Hobbit and I are taking our seats in the classroom, he lurks nervously in the corridor, waiting for their return.

The Hobbit, who has taken a seat by the window, grabs this opportunity to tuck into yet another cereal bar. Ogilvy returns to his previous spot at the back of the room. To annoy him I move to the desk nearest his, close in and to the left. For a moment it looks as though he may move, but politeness checks him. He looks across at me and smiles very slowly.

With no sign of Elaine and Ann, Keith trundles back in, head bowed, and starts handing out a thick pink booklet which he leaves face down on every candidate’s desk. The Hobbit thanks him through the crumbly munch of his mid-morning snack and Ogilvy begins twirling a pencil in his right hand, rotating it quickly through his fingers like a helicopter blade. It’s a poser’s party trick and it doesn’t come off: the pencil spins out of his hand and clatters on to the lino between our two desks. I make no attempt to retrieve it, so Ogilvy has to bend down uncomfortably to pick it up. As he is doing so, Elaine and Ann bustle in, sharing the cosy mutual smiles and solidarity of women returning from a shared trip to the loo.

‘This section of the Sisby programme is known as the Policy Exercise,’ Keith says, beginning his introductory talk before they have had a chance to sit down. He’s on a strict timetable, and he’s sticking to it. ‘It is a two-hour written paper in which you will be asked to analyse a large quantity of complex written material, to identify the main points and issues, and to write a thorough and cogently argued case for one of three possible options.’

I stare at the pink booklet and pray for something other than shellfish.

‘You may start when you are ready. I will let you know when one hour of the examination has passed, and again when there are ten minutes of the exercise remaining’

A crackle of paper, an intake of breath, the incidental noises of beginning. Here we go again.

The document outlines the difficulties surrounding the planned construction of a by-pass near the southerly commuter town of Dorton. (To my knowledge no such town exists, so this must be the Civil Service’s idea of using their imagination.)

The text inside takes the form of a series of mocked-up letters, memos, newspaper articles, speeches, e-mails and faxes. These have been written by parties concerned with the building of the road: government ministers, civil servants, journalists, local residents, even the Mayor of Dorton. Some are in favour of its construction, others are not.

The first item in the booklet, for example, is a ‘confidential’ two-page letter written by the Minister of State for Transport. She is keen to get a decision on the by-pass before Parliament’s summer recess, not least because the government wants to avoid the issue becoming a battleground for environmentalists. She points out the benefits of the five-mile ring-road both for Dorton itself, where traffic congestion would be sharply reduced, and for long-distance lorry drivers gaining quicker access to the Channel ports. There is the added benefit, too, of job creation through restaurants and petrol stations along the by-pass.

In subsequent pages there are documents supporting the Minister’s view from, among others, a representative of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. But there are others, equally persuasive, criticizing it. In particular, there are several groups and individuals worried about the damage road construction would cause to an area around Dorton that is abundant with local history and rich in wildlife.

Three possible solutions are presented to the problem: I have to choose one of them and say why I rejected the other two. Each solution comes with its own pros and cons.

Option One supports the plan to implement construction. This would appease the majority of public — though not local — opinion. It would also stain the government’s already poor record on environmental issues.

Option Two is to cave in to local pressure and shelve the plan. This would mean the loss of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, and set a precedent for future road-building projects which may prove damaging. On the plus side, a vast stretch of green-belt land would be preserved.

Option Three proposes building the road along a different route, avoiding the area of outstanding natural beauty and historical significance. This would mean a greater cost to the taxpayer — the new by-pass would be one and a half miles longer — but disarm many of the arguments put forward by the green lobby.

I decide to go with Option One, for a variety of reasons. From the point of view of my recruitment to SIS, it will not look good to Rouse and Pyman if I am seen to cave in to the interests of marginal pressure groups. Better to argue for job creation and improved transport links with the Continent than to kow-tow to the ephemeral concerns of historians and New Age travellers. Option One, in short, provides me with a better opportunity to appear tough and pragmatic rather than weak and indecisive.

So I speed-read everything in the document looking for evidence to support my decision. I learn quite quickly that the trick is to ignore the notes written by incompetent press officers (one of which stretches for four pages) and to pass over any lengthy memos to the Minister from ingratiating second-tier civil servants in London. It is more constructive to respond to the views of people in power, or to those who have direct and unignorable experience of the issue in hand.

Shrewdly, the examiners have placed some of the most important documents towards the end of the booklet. One, from a senior figure in the DTI who backs the project, follows just after a ridiculous handwritten letter — complete with spelling mistakes — from an insane geriatric with ‘grave concerns’ that the village outside Dorton where she has lived for the past sixty-five years will ‘forever lose its unique local caracter’ if the by-pass is built.

I finish fifteen minutes before the two-hour time limit expires. Towards one o’clock, a group of other candidates walk by in the corridor, talking animatedly on their way to lunch. Their voices gradually disappear like a radio losing its frequency in a tunnel.

The Hobbit asks for more paper and Keith gives it to him.

Ann finishes, her body a slump of fatigue as the time limit runs down. At five past Keith checks his watch and calls a halt. Everybody, with the exception of the Hobbit, breathes out, as if each of us has come up from a prolonged surface dive. The Hobbit jerks up his head, panicked, and continues writing.

‘Mr Frears.’

No response.

‘Candidates must stop writing please.’

‘Just finishing now,’ he says, pen scratching busily in his hand. ‘Just finishing now.’

6 Day One / Afternoon

After lunch — a ham and cheese sandwich at the National Gallery — we sit in the stifling classroom faced by a phalanx of numerical facility tests divided into three separate sections: ‘Relevant Information’, ‘Quantitative Relations’ and ‘Numerical Inferences’. Each batch of twenty questions lasts twenty-two minutes, after which Keith allows a brief interlude before starting us on the next paper. Each problem, whether it be number- or word-based, must be solved in a matter of seconds with no time available for checking the accuracy of an answer. Calculators are ‘forbidden’. It is by far the most testing part of Sisby so far and the mind-thud of intellectual fatigue is overwhelming. I crave water.

We are all of us squeezed by time, clustered in the classroom like battery hens as the heat intensifies. Everything — even the most testing arithmetical calculation — has to be answered more or less on instinct. At one point I have to estimate 43 per cent of 2,345 in under seven seconds. Often my brain will work ahead of itself or lag behind, concentrating on anything but the problem at hand. The tests blur into a soup of numbers, traps of contradictory data, false assumptions and trick questions. Any apparent simplicity is quickly revealed as an illusion: every word must be examined for what it conceals, every number treated as an elaborate code. My ability to process information gradually wanes. I don’t complete any of the three batches of tests to my satisfaction.

Shortly before four o’clock, Keith asks us with nasal exactitude to stop writing. Ogilvy immediately glances across to gauge how things have gone. He tilts his head to one side, creases his brow and puffs out his cheeks at me, as if to say: ‘I fucked that up and I hope you did too.’ For a moment I am tempted into intimacy, a powerful urge to reveal to him the extent of my exhaustion. But I cannot allow any display of weakness. So instead I respond with a self-possessed, almost complacent shrug which will suggest that things have gone particularly well. This makes him look away.

A few minutes later we emerge narrow-eyed into the bright white light of the corridor. Better air out here, cool and clean. The Hobbit and Ann immediately walk away in the direction of the toilets, but Ogilvy lingers outside, looking bloodshot and leathery.

‘Christ,’ he says, pulling on his jacket with exaggerated swagger. ‘That was tough.’

‘You found it difficult?’ Elaine asks. My impression has been that she does not like him.

‘God, yeah. I couldn’t seem to concentrate. I kept looking at you guys scribbling away. How did it go for you, Alec?’

He smiles at me, like we’re long-term buddies.

‘I don’t go in for post mortems, much.’ To Elaine: ‘You got a cigarette?’

She takes out a packet of high-tar Camels.

‘I only have one left. We can share.’

She lights up, crushing the empty packet in her hand. Ogilvy mutters something about giving up smoking, but he looks excluded and weary.

‘I need to get some fresh air,’ he says, moving away from us down the hall. ‘I’ll see you later on.’

Elaine exhales through her nostrils, two steady streams of smoke, watching him leave with a critical stare.

‘Have you got anything else today?’ she asks me. ‘An interview or anything?’

I don’t feel like talking. My mind is looped around the penultimate question in the last batch of tests. The answer was closer to 54 than 62, and I circled the wrong box. Damn.

‘I have to meet Rouse. The SIS officer.’

She glances quickly left and right.

‘Careless talk costs lives, Alec,’ she whispers, half-smiling. ‘Be careful what you say. The five of us are the only SIS people here today.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s obvious,’ she says, offering the cigarette to me. The tip of the filter is damp with her saliva and I worry that when I hand it back she will think the wetness is mine. ‘They only process five candidates a month.’

‘According to who?’

She hesitates.

‘It’s well known. A lot more reach the initial interview stage, but only five get through to Sisby. We’re the lucky ones.’

‘So you work in the Foreign Office already. That’s how you know?’

She nods, glancing again down the corridor. My head has started to throb.

‘Pen-pushing,’ she says. ‘I want to step up. Now, no more shop talk. What time are you scheduled to finish?’

‘Around five.’

Her hair needs brushing and she has a tiny spot forming on the right-hand side of her forehead. Thirty-two years old.

‘That’s late,’ she says, sympathetically. ‘I’m done for the day. Back tomorrow at half-eight.’

The cigarette is nearly finished. I had been worried that it would set off a fire alarm.

‘I guess I’ll see you then.’

‘Guess so.’

She is turning to leave when I say:

‘You don’t have anything for a headache, do you? Dehydration.’

‘Sure. Just a moment.’

She reaches into the pocket of her jacket, rustles around for something and then uncurls her right hand in front of me like a Nescafe ad. There in the palm of her hand is a short strip of plastic containing four paracetamol.

‘That’s really kind of you. Thanks.’

She answers with a wide, conspiratorial smile, dwelling on the single word: ‘Pleasure.’

In the bathroom I turn on the cold tap and allow it to run out for a while. There is a flattery implicit in Elaine’s flirtations: she has ignored the others — particularly Ogilvy — but made a conscious effort to befriend me. I puncture the foil on the plastic strip of pills and extract two paracetamol, feeling them dry and hard in my fingertips. Drinking water from a cupped hand, I tip back my head and let the pills bump down my throat. My reflection in the mirror is dazed and washed-out. Have to get myself together for Rouse.

Behind me, the door on one of the cubicles unbolts. I hadn’t realized there was someone else in the room. I watch in the mirror as Pyman comes out of the cubicle nearest the wall. He looks up and catches my eye, then glances down, registering the strip of pills lying used on the counter. What looks like mild shock passes quickly over his face. I say hello in the calmest, it’s-only-aspirin voice I can muster, but my larynx cracks and the words come out sub-falsetto. He says nothing, walking out without a word.

I spit a hoarse ‘Fuck’ into the room, yet something body-tired and denying immediately erases what has just occurred. Pyman saw nothing untoward, nothing that might adversely affect my candidature. He was simply surprised to see me in here, and in no mood to strike up conversation. I cannot be the first person at Sisby to get a headache late in the afternoon on the first day. He will have forgotten all about it by the time he goes home.

This conclusion allows me to concentrate on the imminent interview with Rouse, whose office — B14 — I begin searching for along the corridors of the third floor. The room is situated in the north-western corner of the building, with a makeshift nameplate Sellotaped crudely to the door.

I knock confidently and there is a loud ‘Come in.’

His office smells of bad breath. Rouse is pacing by the window like a troubled general, the tail of a crumpled white shirt creeping out of the back of his trousers.

‘Sit down, Mr Milius,’ he says. There is no shaking of hands.

I settle into a hard-backed chair opposite his desk, which has just a few files and a lamp on it, nothing more. A temporary home. The window looks out over St James’s Park.

‘Everything going OK so far?’

‘Fine, thank you. Yes.’

He has yet to sit down, yet to look at me, still gazing out of the window.

‘Candidates always complain about the numerical facility tests. You find those difficult?’

It isn’t clear from his tone whether he is being playful or serious.

‘It’s been a long time since I had to do maths without a calculator. Good exercise for the brain.’

‘Yes,’ he says, murmuring.

It is as if his thoughts are elsewhere. It was not possible during the group exercise to get a look at the shape of the man, the actual physical presence, but I can now do so. His chalky face is entirely without distinguishing characteristics, neither handsome nor ugly, though the cheekbones are swollen with fat. He has the build of a rugby player, but any muscle on his broad shoulders has turned fleshy, pushing out his shirt in unsightly lumps. Why do we persist with the notion of the glamorous spy? Rouse would not look out of place behind the counter of a butcher’s shop. He sits down.

‘I imagine you’ve come well prepared.’

‘In what sense?’

‘You were asked to revise some specialist subjects.’

‘Yes.’

His manner is dismissive of routine. He is fiddling with a fountain pen on his desk. Too many thoughts in his head at any one time.

‘And what have you read up on?’

I am starting to feel awkward.

‘The Irish peace process…’

He interrupts before I have a chance to finish.

‘Ah! And what were your conclusions?’

‘About what?’

‘About the Irish peace process,’ he says impatiently. The speed of his voice has quickened considerably.

‘Which aspect of it?’

He plucks a word out of the air.

‘Unionism.’

‘I think there’s a danger that the Major government will jeopardize the situation in Ulster by pandering to the Unionist vote in the House of Commons.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what would you do instead? I don’t see that the Prime Minister has any alternative. He requires legislation to be passed, motions of no confidence to be quashed. What would you do in his place?’

This quick, abrasive style is what I had expected from Lucas and Liddiard. More of a contest, an absence of civility.

‘It’s a question of priorities.’

‘What do you mean?’

He is coming at me quickly, rapid jabs under pressure, allowing me no time to design my answers.

‘I mean does he value the lives of innocent civilians more than he values the safety of his own job?’

‘That’s a very cynical way of looking at a very complex situation. The Prime Minister has a responsibility to his party, to his MPs. Why should he allow terrorists to dictate how he does his job?’

‘I don’t accept the premise behind your question. He’s not allowing terrorists to do that. Sinn Fein/IRA have made it clear that they are prepared to come to the negotiating table and yet Major is going to make decommissioning an explicit requirement of that, something he knows will never happen. He’s not interested in peace. He’s simply out to save his own skin.’

‘You don’t think the IRA should hand over its weapons?’

‘Of course I do. In an ideal world. But they never will.’

‘So you would just give in to that? You would be prepared to negotiate with armed terrorist organizations?’

‘If there was a guarantee that those arms would not be used during that negotiating process, yes.’

‘And if they were?’

‘At least then the fault would lie with Sinn Fein. At least then the peace process would have been given a chance.’

Rouse leans back. The skin of his stomach is visible as pink through the thin cotton of his shirt. Here sits a man whose job it is to persuade Americans to betray their country.

‘I take your point.’

This is something of a breakthrough. There is a first smile.

‘What else, then?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘What else have you prepared?’

‘Oh.’ I had not known what he meant. ‘I’ve done some research on the Brent Spar oil platform and some work on the Middle East.’

Rouse’s face remains expressionless. I feel a droplet of sweat fall inside my shirt, tracing its way down to my waist. It appears that neither of these subjects interests him. He picks up a clipboard from the desk, turning over three pages until his eyes settle on what he is looking for. All these guys have clipboards.

‘Do you believe what you said about America?’

‘When?’

He looks at his notes, reading off the shorthand, quoting me:

‘“The Americans have a very parochial view of Europe. They see us as a small country.”’

He looks up, eyebrows raised. Again it is not clear whether this is something Rouse agrees with, or whether his experience in Washington has proved otherwise. Almost certainly, however, he will listen to what I have to say and then take up a deliberately contrary position.

‘I believe that there is an insularity to the American mind. They are an inward-looking people.’

‘Based on what evidence?’

His manner has already become more curt.

‘Based on the fact that when you go there, they think that Margaret Thatcher is the Queen, that Scotland is just this county in a bigger place called England. That kind of ignorance is unsettling when you consider that American capitalism is currently the dominant global culture. But to anyone living in Texas, global news is what happens in Alabama. The average American couldn’t care less about the European Union.’

‘Surely you can appreciate that in our line of work we don’t deal with “the average American”?’

I feel pinned by this.

‘I can see that. Yes.’

Rouse looks dissatisfied that I have capitulated so early. I press on.

‘But my point is still valid. Now that America is the sole superpower, there’s a kind of arrogance, a tunnel vision, creeping into their foreign policy. They don’t make allowances for the character and outlook of individual states. Unless countries fall into line with the American way of thinking, they risk making an enemy of the most economically powerful nation on earth. This is the position that Britain finds itself in all the time.’

‘In what respect?’

‘In order to keep the special relationship alive, successive governments have had to ignore their better judgement and do some pretty unsavoury things when called upon to do so by the United States. They would defend that by saying it’s in the nature of politics.’

‘You don’t think the special relationship is worth preserving?’

‘I didn’t say that. I think it’s worth preserving at any cost. Maintaining close ties with America will make the UK a pivotal force within the European Union.’

Rouse nods. He knows this is true.

‘But you remain cynical about the government in Washington?’

Now I take a risk.

‘Well, with respect, so do you.’

That may have been a mistake. Rouse appears to withdraw slightly from the improving familiarity of our conversation, stopping to write something in longhand on the clipboard.

‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ he says, bringing the pen up to his mouth.

‘You’re a serving SIS officer in Washington. It’s your job to be cynical.’

He goes cold on me.

‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss that.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry I brought it up.’

I have gone too far.

‘Not a problem,’ he says, as suddenly relaxed as he was distant just seconds before. I am relieved by this, yet the swing in his mood was eerie. He can be all things to all people. ‘At Sisby we are perfectly free to discuss the work of an SIS officer in general terms. That, after all, is one of the reasons why you are here.’

‘Yes.’

‘So is there anything in particular you would like to ask?’

That he is permitting me to question him on matters of national secrecy is in itself astonishing, yet the blank slate provided somehow makes the process of thinking up a question more difficult. Rouse glances coolly at his watch. I have to say something.

‘It would interest me to know what sort of work SIS is involved in now that the Cold War is over. Is industrial espionage the main focus?’

Rouse knits his fingers.

‘For obvious reasons I can’t talk about the specifics of my own operation. But, yes, industrial espionage, competitive intelligence — whatever you want to call it — poses a very grave threat to British interests. Purely in economic terms, allowing British secrets to pass into the hands of rival organizations and companies is catastrophic. There is an argument, in fact, that industrial spies are more damaging to British interests in the long term even than Cold War traitors. That’s not to say that we aren’t still concerned with traditional counter-espionage measures.’

‘What about organized crime?’

Rouse stalls. I may have hit upon his area of expertise.

‘You’re talking about Russia, I assume?’

‘Yes.’

‘A local problem, though one that will spread to the West if allowed to go unchecked. Likewise, the danger posed by religious fundamentalism. These are the kinds of issues we also take an interest in.’

Rouse has folded his arms across his belly, where they rest defensively. He will say no more on this subject.

‘Can I ask a more specific question about your lifestyle?’

‘Of course,’ he says, apparently surprised by the frankness of my request. He moves forward in his chair, all of that weight now bulked on the desk in front of him.

‘Have you lost contact with the friends you had before you joined the intelligence service?’

Rouse runs a finger down the left-hand side of his cheek.

‘Have I lost contact with my friends?’ A wistful silence lingers. ‘You’re perhaps talking to the wrong man. I’ve never been one for cultivating friendships.’ A grin appears at the side of his mouth, a little memory tickling him. ‘In fact, when I was applying for the job, I was asked for a number of written references and I had trouble finding enough people who knew me well enough to give an account of my character.’

I smile. It seems the right thing to do. Rouse sees this.

‘Is that something that has been worrying you? Losing touch with your friends?’

I reply quickly:

‘Not at all. No.’

‘Good. It shouldn’t necessarily. During my initial two-year training period in London I worked alongside an officer who had a very busy social life. Seemed to enjoy himself a great deal. There’s no absolute standard.’

‘But you have friends in Washington? Professional associates? People that you are able to see on a private basis away from work?’

Rouse emits a stout snort. And what he says now crystallizes everything.

‘Let me tell you this,’ he says, his eyes fixed on mine. ‘An SIS officer is asked to blend his private and professional selves into a seamless whole. We make no distinction between the two. An officer has, in a sense, no private life, because it is through his private life that much of his professional work is done. He uses his friendships, brokers trusts outside of the professional world, in order to gather information. That is how the system operates.’

‘I see.’

He glances at his watch, a digital.

‘It appears that our time is up.’ It isn’t, but he knows where this conversation is going. They cannot risk telling me too much. ‘Why don’t I leave you with that thought?’

He stands up out of his chair with heaviness, the white shirt more dishevelled now. A man with no friends.

‘Thank you for coming in,’ he says, as if it were a matter of choice.

‘It’s been interesting talking to you.’

‘Good,’ he replies, without emphasis. I start backing away towards the door. ‘I’m glad I could be of some assistance. We will see you in the morning, I trust.’

‘Yes.’

And with that I close the door. No handshake again, no contact. I walk briskly in the direction of the common room with a light, flushed sense of success. The building is strangely quiet. The doors to the various classrooms and offices leading off the corridor have been closed and in the distance I can hear a Hoover being dragged up and down on a worn floor.

The common room, too, is empty. Everyone has gone home. There are plastic cups strewn across the low table in the centre of the room, one of which has tipped over and soaked a portion of the pink business insert of the Evening Standard. Chewed broadsheet pages lie stiffly against the back of the sofa, fanned out like a tramp’s bed. I just look in and turn away.

Elaine is in the downstairs foyer, slouched against the wall. She is inspecting her nails. They are clear-varnished, neatly manicured.

‘Fancy a post-mortem drink?’ she asks.

‘Oh, no. No thanks. I’m just going to go home. Watch some TV.’

‘Just like the others.’

‘Just like the others. They’ve all gone home, have they?’

‘MMmmm.’

‘How come you’re still here?’ I ask. ‘I thought you finished an hour ago.’

‘Met an old friend. Went for a coffee and forgot my bag.’

A lie.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ I tell her unconvincingly. ‘Tomorrow we’ll all go out.’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow.’

7 Day Two

The morning of the second day is taken up with more written papers, beginning at nine a.m.

The In-Tray Exercise is a short, sharp, sixty-minute test of nerve, a lengthy document assessing both the candidate’s ability to identify practical problems arising within the Civil Service and his capacity for taking rapid and decisive action to resolve them. The focus is on leadership, management skills, the means to devolve responsibility and ‘prioritize’ decisions. SIS are big on teamwork.

Most of us seem to cope OK: Ogilvy, Elaine and Ann all finish the test within the allocated time. But the Hobbit looks to have messed up. At his desk his shoulders heave and slump with sighing frustration, and he writes only occasionally, little half-hearted scribbles. He has not responded well to having his mind channelled like this: concision and structure are contrary to his nature. When Keith collects his answer sheet at the end of the exercise, it looks sparse and blotched with ink, the script of a cross-wired mind.

The Letter-Writing Exercise, which takes us up to lunch, is more straightforward. A member of the public has sent a four-page letter to a Home Office minister complaining about a particular aspect of the legislation outlined in the In-Tray Exercise. We are asked to write a balanced, tactful reply, conscious of the government’s legal position, but firm in its intent not to cave in to outside pressure. The Hobbit seems to find this significantly easier: sitting there in his blue-black blazer with its cheap gold buttons, he is no longer a sweating, panting blob of panic: the letter allows for a degree of self-expression, for leaps of the imagination, and with these he is more comfortable. There is a general sense that we have all returned here today locked into a surer knowledge of how to proceed.

I have lunch for the second time at the National Gallery, and again buy a ham and cheese sandwich, finding something comforting in the routine of this. Then the greater part of the final afternoon is taken up with more cognitive tests: Logical Reasoning, Verbal Organization, two Numerical Facility papers. Again there is not enough time, and again the tests are rigorous and probing. Yet much of the nervousness and uncertainty of yesterday has disappeared. I know what’s required now. I can pace myself. It’s just a question of applying the mind.

At three thirty I find Elaine in the common room, alone and drinking coffee. She is sitting on a radiator below one of the windows, her right leg lifted up and resting on the arm of the sofa. Her skirt has ridden up to the mid-section of her thighs, but she makes no attempt to cover herself, or to lower her leg when I come in.

‘Nearly over,’ she says.

I must look exhausted. I settle into one of the armchairs and sigh heavily.

‘My brain is numb. Numb.’

Elaine nods in agreement. Bare-skinned thighs, no tights.

‘You finished?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘One more.’

Our conversation is slow monosyllables. It feels as if we are talking like old friends.

‘What is it?’

‘Interview with the Departmental Assessor.’

‘Rouse? He’s a straight-talker. You’ll like him.’

‘What about you? What do you have?’

‘Just the shrink. Four thirty.’

‘Nice way to finish off. Get to talk about yourself for half an hour.’

‘You’ve had her?’

‘Yesterday. Very cosy. Like one of those fireside chats on Songs of Praise.’ Elaine stands up, smoothing down her skirt. ‘We’re all going to the pub later. Sam’s idea.’

‘He’s a leader of men, isn’t he? Takes control.’

Elaine smiles at this. She agrees with me.

‘So meet you back here around five fifteen?’

I don’t feel like drinking with all of them. I’d rather just go home and be alone. So I ignore the question and say:

‘Sounds all right. Good luck with your interview.’

‘You too,’ she replies.

But in Dr Stevenson’s office I fall into a trap.

There are two soft armchairs in the corner of a hushed warm room. We face one another and I am looking into the eyes of a kindly grandmother. Stevenson’s face has such grace and warmth that there is nothing I can do but trust it. She calls me Alec — the first time that one of the examiners has referred to me by my first name — and speaks with such refinement that I am immediately lulled into a false sense of security. The lights are dim, the blinds drawn; there is a sensation of absolute privacy. We are in a place where confidences may be shared.

Everything starts out OK. Her early questions are unobtrusive, shallow even, and I give nothing away. We discuss the format of Sisby, what improvements, if any, I would make to it. There is a brief reference to school — an enquiry about my choice of A-levels — and an even shorter discussion about CEBDO. That these topics go largely unexplored is not due to any reticence on my part: Stevenson simply seems happy to skirt around the edges of a subject, never probing too deeply, never overstepping the mark. In doing so she brokers a trust which softens me up. And by the time the conversation has moved into a more sensitive area, my guard is down.

‘I would like to talk about Kate Allardyce, if that would be all right?’

My first instinct here should be defensive. Nobody ever asks Alec about Kate; it’s a taboo subject. And yet I quickly find that I want to talk to Stevenson about her.

‘Could you tell me a little bit about the two of you?’

‘We broke up over six months ago.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she says, and then, with sudden horror, I remember the lie to Liddiard. ‘I was led to believe that she was your girlfriend.’ She looks down at her file, staring at it in plain disbelief. Mistakes of this kind do not happen. She moves awkwardly in her seat and mutters something inaudible.

It was a throwaway deceit: I only did it to make myself appear more solid and dependable, a rounded man in a long-term relationship. He asked for her full name, for a date and place of birth, so that SIS could run a check on her. And now that the vetting process is over they want to square their deep background with mine. They want to know whether or not Kate will make a decent diplomatic wife, a spy’s accomplice. They want to hear me talk about her.

My left hand is suddenly up around my mouth, squeezing the ridge of skin under my nose. It is almost funny to have been caught out by something so crass, so needless, but this feeling quickly evaporates. The humiliation is soon total.

Out of it, I knit together a shoddy retraction.

‘I’m sorry. No, no it’s my fault. I’m sorry. We just… We just got back together again, about three months ago. Secretly. We don’t want anybody to know. We prefer things to be private. I’m just so used to telling people that we’re not back together that it’s become like a reflex.’

‘So you are together?’

‘Very much so, yes.’

‘But no one else knows?’

‘That’s correct. Yes. Except for a friend of mine. Saul. Otherwise, nobody.’

‘I see.’

There is a disappointment in the tone of this last remark, as if I have let her down. I feel ten again, a scolded child in the headteacher’s study.

‘Perhaps we should talk about something else,’ she says, turning a page on my file.

I have to rescue this situation or the game is up.

‘No, no. I’m happy to talk about it. I should explain. Sorry. It’s just that after we broke up I never spoke about it to anyone. No one would have understood. They might have tried to, but they would never have understood. They would have put things in boxes and I didn’t want that. It would have trivialized it. And now that we are back together both of us have made a decision to keep things between ourselves. So we’re used to lying about it. Nobody else knows.’ An uneasy pause. ‘This must sound childish to you.’

‘Not at all.’ I may have got away with it. ‘But can I ask why you broke up in the first place?’

This is expressed in such a way that it would be easy for me not to answer the question. But my sense of embarrassment at having been caught out by Stevenson is substantial and I do not want to refuse her request.

‘Largely on account of my selfishness. I think Kate grew tired of the fact that I was always withholding things from her. I had this insistence on privacy, a reluctance to let her in. She called it my separateness.’

There is suddenly a look of deep satisfaction in the lined wise eyes of Stevenson. Separateness. Yes. A good word for it.

‘But you don’t have a problem with that any more?’

‘With privacy? No. Not with Kate at least. I’m still an intensely private person, but I’ve become far more open with her since we got back together.’

This emphasis on privacy could even work in my favour: it is in the nature of intelligence work.

‘And why did you want to give the relationship a second chance? Do stop me if you think I’m being unduly intrusive.’

‘No, no. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. I wanted to try again because I started thinking about the future. It was that simple. I looked around and thought about where I wanted to be in ten years’ time. The sort of life I wanted to have. And I realized I’d thrown away the best chance I had of a kind of happiness.’

Stevenson nods encouragingly, as if this makes absolute sense to her. So I continue.

‘It’s one of the cliches of breaking up, but you simply don’t know how much you love something until it’s taken away from you. I’m sure you come across this all the time in your profession.’

‘All the time, yes.’

‘That’s the dangerous thing about being in a serious relationship with someone. In a very worrying sense, love guarantees you.’

‘And then all that was taken away from you?’

‘Yes.’

A first gathering of pain here. Don’t show it to her. Tell her what you know she wants to hear.

‘So I set myself a task. I tried to get it back. And luckily we hadn’t killed too much of it off.’

‘I’m glad,’ Stevenson says, and I believe that she is. Everything I have told her is the truth about me, save for the plain fact that Kate has refused to come back. I had killed off too much of it, and she has now moved on.

Stevenson writes something down on my file, at least three lines of notes, and for some time the room is quiet save for the whisper of her pen. I wonder if the others were as open with her as I have been.

‘I was interested by what you said about not knowing how much you love somebody until they are taken away from you. Is that how you felt about your father?’

This comes out of the silence, spoken into her lap, and it takes me by surprise. I don’t recall mentioning my father’s death either to Liddiard or to Lucas. Hawkes must have told them.

‘In a way, yes, though it’s more complicated than that.’

‘Could you say why?’

‘Well, I was only seventeen at the time. There’s a toughness in you then. An unwillingness to feel. What do Americans call it — “denial”?’

A lovely amused laugh. Making out that she is charmed by me.

‘But more recently?’

‘Yes. Recently his death has affected me more.’

‘Could you say why?’

‘On a basic level because I saw the relationships my male friends were having with their fathers in the transitional period from their late teens into early twenties. That was obviously a key period for some of them and I missed out on that.’

‘So the two of you weren’t particularly close when you were a child? You felt that your father kept you at a distance?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. He was away from home a lot.’

Oddly, to speak about Dad in this way feels more deceptive than what I have told Stevenson about Kate. It is not a true account of him, nor of the way we were together, and I want to explain some of this to her.

‘This is difficult for me,’ I tell her. ‘I am rationalizing complex emotions even as I am talking to you.’

‘I can understand that. These matters are never simple.’

‘I can hear myself say certain things to you about my father and then something else inside me will contradict that. Does that make sense? It’s a very confusing situation. What I’m trying to say is that there are no set answers’

Stevenson makes to say something, but I speak over her.

‘For example, I would like my father to be around now so that we could talk about Sisby and SIS. Mum says that he was like me in a lot of ways. He didn’t keep a lot of friends, he didn’t need a lot of people in his life. So we shared this need, this instinct for privacy. And maybe because of that we might have become good friends. Who knows? We could have confided in one another. But I don’t actively miss him because he’s not here to fulfil that role. Things are no more difficult because he’s not available to offer me guidance and advice. It’s more a feeling that I’ll never see his face again. Sometimes it’s that simple.’

Stevenson’s tender eyes are sunk in rolls of ageing skin.

‘How do you think he would have felt about you becoming an SIS officer?’

‘I think he would have been very proud. Perhaps even a little envious.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s every young man’s dream, isn’t it, to join SIS, to serve his country. Dad wouldn’t have thought ideas like that were out of date, and neither do I. And I think he would have been good at the job. He was smart, concealed, he could keep a secret. In fact, sometimes I feel like I’m doing this for him, in his memory. That’s why it’s so important to me. I want to show him that I can be a success. I want to make him proud of me.’

Stevenson looks perplexed and I feel that I may have gone too far.

‘Yes,’ she says, writing something down. ‘And Kate? How does she feel?’

This may be a test: they will want to know if I have broken the Official Secrets Act.

‘I haven’t told her yet. I didn’t see that there was any point. Until I actually became one.’

Stevenson smiles.

‘Don’t you think you ought to tell her?’

‘I don’t think it’s necessary at this stage. And I was advised against it by Mr Liddiard. But if I advance to the next level, then it would become increasingly difficult to keep things from her.’

‘Yes,’ she says, giving nothing away. Stevenson looks at her watch and her eyebrows hop. ‘Good Lord, look at the time.’

‘Are we finished?’

‘I’m afraid so. I hadn’t realized how late it was.’

‘I thought the interview would last longer.’

‘It can do,’ she replies, uncrossing her legs and allowing her right foot to drop gently to the floor. ‘It depends on the candidate.’

And abruptly I am concerned: the implication of this last remark is troubling. I should have been less candid, made her work harder for information. Stevenson looks too satisfied with what I have given her. She closes my file with knuckles that are swollen with arthritis.

‘So you’re happy with what I’ve told you? Everything’s OK?’

That was a dumb thing to ask. I am letting my concern show.

‘Oh, yes,’ she says, very calmly. ‘Do you have anything else you might want to ask?’

‘No,’ I say immediately. ‘Not that I can think of.’

‘Good.’

She moves forward, beginning to stand. Things have shut down too quickly. She sets my file on a small table beside her chair.

‘I should have thought you were keen to be off. You must be tired after all your exertions.’

‘It’s been hard work. But I’ve enjoyed it.’

Stevenson is on her feet, barely taller than the back of the chair. I stand up.

‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you,’ she says, moving towards the door. There is a distance about her now, a sudden coldness. ‘Good luck.’

What does she mean by that? Good luck with what? With SIS? With CEBDO?

She is holding the door open, a pale tweed suit.

What did she mean?

Brightness in the corridor. As a reflex I look back into the office to check that I have left nothing behind. But there is only low light and Stevenson’s papers in a neat pile beside her chair. I want to go back in and start again. Without shaking her hand I move out into the corridor.

‘Goodbye, Mr Milius.’

I turn around.

‘Yes. Goodbye.’

I walk back down the corridor feeling light and stunned. Ogilvy, Elaine, the Hobbit and Ann are waiting for me in the common room. They stand up and approach me as I come in, a surge of kinship and relief, smiling broadly. This is the thrill of finishing, but I feel little of it. We have all done what we came here to do, but I experience no sense of solidarity.

‘What happened to ya, Alec?’ Ann asks, touching my arm.

‘I had a tough one with the shrink. Grilled me.’

‘You look knackered. Did it go badly?’

‘Difficult to say. Sorry to keep you waiting.’

‘You didn’t,’ Ogilvy says warmly. ‘Matt only finished ten minutes ago.’

I look across at the Hobbit, whose nod confirms this.

‘Pub, then?’ Ogilvy asks.

‘You know what? I may just go home,’ I tell them, hoping they’ll just let me leave. ‘I have to have dinner with a friend later on and I’d like to have a shower, get my head together.’

Elaine appears offended.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she says. ‘Just have a couple of drinks with us.’

‘I’d love to. Really. But I have so much I have to do before…’

‘What? Like having a shower? Like getting your head together?’

Her mimicry irritates me, and only hardens my resolve.

‘No. You guys go ahead. I’m done for. I’ll see you all in the autumn.’

I smile here and it works: the joke relaxes them.

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Ogilvy says. He’s probably relieved. Centre stage will be his.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Either way,’ says Ann, and this seals it, ‘we should go now, ‘cos I’ve got a flight to Belfast at half-nine.’

So we say our goodbyes and Sisby is over.

8 Pursuit of Happiness

In the early hours of the following Sunday morning, I wake with a specific dream image of Kate being fucked by another man.

She is in a strange, lightless room, almost suffocating with the pleasure of it. Her arched body is in a seizure of lust, but the lovemaking is so intense that she makes no sound. To desire and to be desired this much is inspiring in her a kind of awe. She has discovered a sexual pleasure far greater than the one that we shared in our innocence. She is relishing it because it has nothing to do with compromise or responsibility, nothing to do with the stagey romance of first love. She feared that she would never again experience the passion and tenderness that she knew in those first years with me. But now I look into her face and see that all of that has been consigned to the past.

My room is in absolute darkness as these thoughts peck away at my heart. The shock of them has quickened my breathing to something approaching the panic of an asthma attack, and I have to sit up in bed and then walk slowly around the room, gathering myself together.

I open the curtains and look outside. The colour of the sky is caught between the city’s reflected glow and the first light of dawn. She is out there with him somewhere, lying against pale sheets.

I take out Kate’s T-shirt from the bottom of my chest of drawers and bury my face in its soft cotton folds. Her perfume has disappeared from it entirely. From a bottle of scent that I keep in the bathroom, I replenish the smell, tipping droplets of Chanel No. 19 on to the material before scrunching it up in a tight ball. It is the fourth time that I have had to do this since we separated. Time is passing by.

I cannot get back to sleep, so I sit in the kitchen drinking coffee, my mind shuttling between memories of Kate and apprehension over the results of Sisby.

Whatever happens now, win or lose, I can’t go back to CEBDO. Not after all this. I couldn’t shrink myself. So tomorrow, first thing, there’s something I must do.

‘Look, Nik, here’s the thing. I want to move on.’

This has been coming for months. It feels good to be telling him.

‘You want to move on.’

This isn’t said as a question. More as a statement. Nik swallowing the news whole.

‘I feel I’ve achieved everything that I can working for you. And things have got very bad between me and Anna. We can’t work together any more and it’s better that one of us should go.’

I have brought him to a small greasy spoon on the Edgware Road. Ten a.m. Traffic and people clapping by outside. There’s a red plastic bottle containing ketchup — probably not Heinz — sitting on the table between us. Nik stares at it.

‘OK,’ he says.

I had expected more of a reaction, a trace of hurt.

‘I’ve been offered a chance to do something… larger. Something more meaningful. You know?’

Nik shakes his head, still looking at the ketchup.

‘No, I don’t know. You tell me what that is, Alec. I’m not a mind reader.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve hurt your feelings. You’ve invested a lot of time in me and I’ve let you down.’

Now he lifts his head and looks me straight in the eye. There may be pity in his leering, condescending grin.

‘Oh, Alec. That’s what I always hated about you. You always think you’re the most important person in the room. Let me tell you something. The world is bigger than you. You understand? You don’t hurt my feelings. You think something like you handing in your notice could hurt my feelings? You think I can’t go out on to that street right now and find someone to replace you? You think I can’t do that?’

This is more like it. This is what I was expecting.

‘I’m sure you can, Nik. I’m sure you can. You’re amazing like that.’

‘Don’t make fun of me, all right. I gave you a job of work. You come in to my offices and all you’re interested in doing is fucking my staff, fucking Anna. And now you say you cannot speak with her. This is your problem. I gave you a job of work. That is a precious thing…’

‘Oh, please.’

I really draw out the ‘please’ here, and it deflects him. I often wonder when he is angry like this how much gets lost in translation, how much of what he wants to say is denied to him by his mediocre English.

‘This operation I have,’ he says, gesturing freely with his right hand. He’s about to embark on one of his delusional monologues. ‘You’re just a tiny fragment of something much larger. Something that you can’t even comprehend. I plan expansion, more offices, more people and workers. And do you know why you can’t comprehend that?’

‘Is it just too complicated for me, Nik? Is it just too global and secret and amazing?’

‘I tell you why. It’s not because I don’t allow you to comprehend it. No. It’s because you won’t allow yourself to see it. You see only what’s in front of your nose. You never see the bigger picture, the possibilities your work can offer. You and me, we could go places, make some money. The world is bigger than you, Alec. The world is bigger than you.’

‘What does that fucking mean, Nik? What exact brand of shit are you talking?’

‘You’re a clever boy. I thought this when I first met you. I still think it. But you need to take your head out of your arse. You’re soft.’

It’s time to draw things to a close.

‘Nik, I’m not about to take life lessons from you. These plans, these ambitions you talk about. I can’t tell you how little I care about them. You’re not running Ogilvy and Mather. You’re a crook, a petty thief.’

‘You want to be careful what you — ‘

I interrupt him.

‘I don’t have much stuff at the office. Someone will come and get it next week.’

‘Fine.’

And with that he stands up, pivots away from the table and walks out of the cafe, leaving me with the bill.

Now it’s just a question of waiting for SIS to call.

I don’t go outside for twenty-four hours in case the telephone rings, but by three o’clock on Tuesday I am growing impatient. The only person to have rung since lunchtime on Monday is Saul, who was just back from Spain. Perhaps SIS want us to call them.

I dial Liddiard’s office and a woman answers.

‘Seven-two-oh-four.’

They never say anything other than the number of the extension. It might just as well be a laundrette.

‘Patrick Liddiard, please.’

‘May I say who’s speaking?’

‘Alec Milius.’

‘Yes. Just one moment.’

Five seconds of dead noise. Ten. Then a click and Liddiard picks up.

‘Alec.’

‘Good afternoon. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

I can’t tell anything by the tone of his voice. He’s cheery and polite, but that is his manner.

‘I was ringing about the results of Sisby.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

Well say something, then. Tell me. Good or bad.

‘I wondered if you knew anything.’

‘Yes we do.’

And there’s a terrible beat now, a gathering of courage before bad news.

‘I’m afraid that the Board felt you were not up to the very high standards required. I’m sorry, Alec, but we won’t be able to take your application any further.’

My first instinct is that he has mistaken me for somebody else: the Hobbit, perhaps even Ogilvy. But there has been no confusion. Soon every glimpse of promise I have ever shown is ebbing away from me like a wound. Liddiard is talking but I cannot pick up the words: I feel debilitated, bone-weak, crushed. In the circumstances I should try to say something dignified, accept defeat graciously and withdraw. But I am too shocked to react. I stand in the hall holding the phone against my ear, ingesting failure. And because I am not saying anything, Liddiard tries to placate me.

‘Would you like me to indicate to you where we felt the weakness was in your application?’

‘OK.’

‘It was the group exercise primarily. The Board felt you did not display sufficient depth of knowledge about the subjects under discussion.’

‘Did anybody else make it through? Sam? Matthew?’

This is all I want to know. Just tell me that I came the closest out of all of them.

‘For obvious reasons I can’t reveal that.’

I think I detect contempt in the way he says this, as if my asking such a stupid question has only verified their decision not to hire me.

‘No, of course you can’t.’

‘But thank you for your enthusiastic participation in the recruitment procedure. We all very much enjoyed meeting you.’

Oh, fuck off.

‘It’s nice of you to say so. Thank you.’

‘Goodbye.’

And the line goes dead. It’s over that quickly.

9 This Is Your Life

My first instinct, and this shames me, is to ring Mum. No sooner have I put the phone down on Liddiard than I am picking it up again and dialling her number in Somerset. She never goes out in the afternoon. She’ll tell me everything’s all right.

The number rings out shrill and clean. I can tell her everything, I can get it all off my chest. And I can do so in the full assurance that she will actually express relief at my failure: she might even be horrified to learn that I had even considered employment in such a murky organization. That her only child, her son, could have gone into such a thing without telling his mother…

I hang up. She’ll never know. It’s as simple as that.

Receiving bad news is always like this: there’s too much information to process, too much at stake that has been irretrievably lost. Something similar happened when Mum told me that my father had died. My mind went absolutely numb and there was nothing I could do to put his loss into perspective.

The telephone rings, a volt of shock in my chest. I don’t even think about screening the call on my answering machine. I know it’s Hawkes.

‘Alec?’

‘Yes. Hello, Michael.’

‘I’ve just heard the news. I’m very sorry. I really thought you’d go the whole way.’

‘You weren’t the only one.’

‘They telephoned me about an hour ago.’

‘Why? Why did they call you? I thought you’d retired?’

He stalls here, as if making something up.

‘Well, given that it was me who initiated your candidature, they wanted to keep me informed.’

‘But I thought you’d left? I thought you were in the oil business now.’

‘You never really leave, Alec. It’s an ongoing thing.’

‘So you’re not doing that any more?’

‘Don’t be concerned about me. Let’s talk about your situation.’

‘OK.’

His voice has thinned out, flustered, concealing something.

‘They suggested to me that your cognitive tests were fractionally below par. That’s all they said.’

‘They told me it was the group exercise, not the cognitive tests.’

Another awkward pause.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Said I wasn’t fully in control of my brief or something. Hadn’t covered all the angles.’

‘Well, yes, there was that too.’

He has obviously squared what to tell me with Liddiard, but one of them has fucked up. It must have been the interview with Stevenson. They know I lied about Kate.

‘Did they give you any other reason why I failed?’

‘Don’t see it as a failure, Alec.’

‘That’s what it is, isn’t it?’

Why can’t he just be honest about it? I’ve let him down. He recommended me and I’ve embarrassed him. I was so sure it was going to be all right.

‘The vast majority of candidates don’t even make it through to Sisby. To have progressed beyond the initial interviews is an achievement in itself.’

‘Well, it’s good of you to say so,’ I say, suddenly wanting to be rid of him. ‘Thanks for recommending me in the first place.’

‘Oh, not at all. What will you do now? Go back to your old job?’

‘Probably.’

He pauses briefly before saying:

‘We haven’t exhausted every avenue, of course. There are alternatives.’

But for now this is of no interest to me. I simply want the conversation to end.

‘You’ve done enough. Don’t worry. Thank you for everything.’

‘You’re sure?’ He sounds disappointed. ‘Think about it, Alec. And in the meantime, if there’s anything I can do, just let me know.’

‘That’s kind. Thank you.’

‘I’ll be in touch.’

A lie. Why would he bother contacting me again? My usefulness to him has passed.

‘I’ll look forward to it,’ I tell him.

‘Don’t be too down, Alec. As I say, there are other options.’

‘Yes.’

Then he replaces the receiver.

At around six I go over to Saul’s in my car; for company, and for some way of shaking off the gloom. It takes about three-quarters of an hour to get there through the rush-hour traffic, and to find somewhere to park. He has put a notice up on the door of his flat. It reads: ‘Just As Much Junk Mail As You Can Spare, Please.’ When I see it, I smile for the first time in hours.

He pours two vodkas — mine without ice — and we sit in front of the television in the sitting-room. A balding actor on This Is Your Life has just been surprised by Michael Aspel, sporting his big red book. Saul says something about minor celebrities in Britain being ‘really minor’ and retrieves a cigarette he had going from an ashtray.

‘Who’s that?’ he asks as a middle-aged woman in pink emerges on to the stage, mugging to camera.

‘No idea.’

She starts telling a story. Saul leans back.

‘Christ. Is there anything more tedious than listening to people telling anecdotes on This Is Your Life?’

I do not respond. There is a constant, nagging disquiet inside me which I cannot shake off.

‘What’ve you been up to?’ he asks me. ‘Day off as well?’

‘Yeah. I’ve had a lot happening.’

‘Right.’

He twists towards me on the sofa.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You look knackered.’

‘I am.’

There shouldn’t be any need to, but I try to convey a greater sense of melancholy than may be visible, just in case Saul hasn’t detected it.

‘Alec, what is it?’

He switches the television off with the remote control. The image sucks into itself until it forms a tiny white blob which snuffs out.

‘Bad news.’

‘What? Tell me.’

‘I’ve done a stupid thing. I handed in my notice to Nik.’

‘That isn’t stupid. It’s about time.’

This irritates me. He always thought I was wasting away at CEBDO. Fiddling while Rome burns.

‘I did it for the wrong reason. I did it because I was sure I was set at the Foreign Office.’

‘That job you were applying for?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you didn’t get it?’

‘No. I found out today.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You didn’t tell anyone else I was applying for it, did you?’

‘No. Course not. You told me not to.’

I believe him.

‘Thanks.’

‘So what happened?’ he asks. ‘Did you fuck up the exams?’

‘Yeah. Toughest thing I’ve ever done.’

‘You shouldn’t be disappointed. I’ve heard they’re like that. Hardly anyone gets through.’

‘It’s more shame than disappointment. It’s as if my worst fears about myself have been confirmed. I thought I was clever enough to make a career out of it. It really seemed to make sense. I spent so long thinking I was good enough to do top-level work, but now it turns out I was just deluding myself.’

I don’t like admitting failure to Saul. It doesn’t feel right. But there’s an opportunity here to talk through a few things, in confidence, which I want to take advantage of.

‘Well, I never knew why you wanted to join in the first place,’ he says.

I drain the vodka.

‘Because I was flattered to be asked.’

‘To be asked? You never said anything about being asked. You didn’t say anything about anyone approaching you.’

Careful.

‘Didn’t I? No. Well I met someone at a dinner party at Mum’s. He’d just retired from the Diplomatic Service. Put me on to it. Gave me a phone number.’

‘Oh.’

Saul offers me a cigarette, lights one of his own.

‘What was his name?’

‘George Parker.’

‘And why did you want to join?’

‘Because it was exciting. Because I wanted to do it for Dad. Because it beat ripping Czechs off for a living. I don’t know. What’s the most exciting thing that happens nowadays? John Major beats John Redwood in a contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Big fucking deal. But this meant so much to me. I’ll never get a chance like that again. To be on the top table.’

The conversation dies now for a second or two. I don’t think Saul is really in the mood for it: I’ve come around uninvited on his day off.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I think you’re lucky not to have got in.’

This is exactly the wrong thing to say.

‘Why? Why am I in any way lucky? This was my big chance to get ahead, to start a career.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think — ‘

‘It’s been every day for four months.’

‘I had no idea — ‘

‘You’re not the only one who’s ambitious, you know. I have ambitions.’

‘I didn’t say you didn’t.’

He is being defensive now, a little patronizing. My shouting has unnerved him.

‘I wanted to work abroad, to have some excitement. I wanted to stop pissing away my youth.’

‘So what’s stopping you? Go out and get a different job. The Foreign Office isn’t the only organization that offers positions overseas.’

‘What’s the point? What’s the point in a corporate job when you can get downsized or sacked whenever the next recession comes along?’

‘Don’t exaggerate. Don’t just repeat what you’ve heard on TV.’

‘Anyway, it’s too late. I should have done it straight out of LSE. That’s the time to spend two or three years working away from home. Not now. I’m supposed to be establishing myself in a career.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

‘Look around, Saul. Everybody we knew at university did the milk round, did their finals, and then went straight into a sensible job where they’ll be earning thirty or forty grand in a couple of years’ time. These were people who were constantly stoned, who never went to lectures, who could barely string a sentence together. And now they’re driving company cars and paying fifty quid a month into pension plans and BUPA. That’s what I should be doing instead of fucking around waiting for things to happen to me. It doesn’t work that way. You have to make your own luck. How did they know what to do with their lives when they were only twenty-one?’

‘People grow up.’

‘Evidently. I should’ve gone into the City. Read law. Taken a risk. What was the point in spending four years reading Russian and business studies if I wasn’t going to use them?’

‘Jesus, Alec. You’re twenty-four, for Christ’s sake. You can still do whatever you like. It just requires a bit of imagination.’

There’s a glimmer here of something hopeful, a zip of optimism, but the stubbornness in me won’t grasp it.

‘If you could have just met some of the people I did the entrance exams with. To think that they could have got the job and not me. There was this one Cambridge guy. Sam Ogilvy. Smooth, rich, vacuous. I bet they took him.’

‘What does it matter if they did? You jealous or something?’

‘No. No, I’m not. He was… he was…’ How to describe Ogilvy to Saul? In an uncomfortable way, they reminded me of one another. ‘What did that man on TV call Tony Blair? “A walking Autocue in a sensible suit.” That’s exactly what this guy was like. In order to get anywhere these days we have to be like Sam Ogilvy. An ideas-free zone. A platitude in patent leather shoes. That’s what employers are looking for. Coachloads of Tony Blairs.’

There is a message from Hawkes on my answering machine when I get home at eight fifteen. Were it not for the fact that I have had four vodkas, I might be more surprised to hear from him.

‘Alec. It’s Michael. I’m coming to London tomorrow and I suggest we get together for lunch. Have a chat about things. Give me a ring in the country.’

His voice sounds stern. He leaves a contact number and I say ‘Yeah, fuck off’ to the machine, but out of inquisitiveness I scribble it down on a pad.

For dinner I microwave some pasta and watch television for an hour, unable to concentrate on much beyond the shock of SIS. The rejection begins to act like heartbreak: just when I think I’ve found some respite, after six hours of soul-searching and self-pity, something triggers the pain again — a memory of Stevenson, of Rouse standing firm in the window. So many ideas and plans, so many secret aspirations that will now remain untested. I was absolutely prepared to live my life as a shadow of who I really am. Surely they saw that? Surely there was something I could have done for them? I cannot understand why I have been discarded with such speed and ruthlessness: it makes no sense. To be left with this shaming feeling, the grim realization that there is nothing which marks me out from the crowd.

At around nine, after finishing a half-empty bottle of wine in the fridge, I go out to the corner shop and buy a four-pack of Stella. By the time I have finished the first can, I have written this in longhand:

I read it back a couple of times and extract ‘by return of post’, which doesn’t sound right. Then, with the letter stamped, addressed and in my pocket, I lock up the flat and head for a bar in Goldhawk Road.

10 Meaning

I am woken at nine forty-five by the noise of the telephone, the sound of it moving towards me out of a deep sleep, growing louder, more substantial, incessant. At first I turn over in bed, determined to let it ring out, but the answering machine is switched off and the caller won’t relent. So I throw back the duvet and stand up.

It is as if one part of my brain lurches from the right side of my head to the left. I almost fall to the floor with the pain of it. And the phone keeps on ringing. Naked, stumbling across the hall, I reach the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Alec?’

It’s Hawkes. And with the sound of his voice I immediately re-experience the stab of my failure at SIS, the numb regret and the shame.

‘Michael. Yes.’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No. I was just listening to the radio. Didn’t hear it ring.’

‘My apologies.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Can you meet me for lunch?’

The thought of gathering myself together sufficiently to spend two or three hours with Hawkes feels impossible with such a headache. But there is a temptation here, a sense of unfinished business. I spot his telephone number scribbled down on the pad beside the phone.

We haven’t exhausted every avenue. There are alternatives.

‘Sure. Where would you like to meet?’

He gives me an address in Kensington, and then hangs up.

There had better be something in this. I don’t want to waste my time listening to Hawkes telling me where I went wrong, saying over and over again how sorry he is. I’d rather he just left me alone.

He cooks lunch for the two of us in the kitchen of a small flat on Kensington Court Place, beef Stroganoff and rice that is still crunchy, with a few tired beans on the side. Never been married and he still can’t cook. There is an open bottle of Chianti but I stick to mineral water as the last of my hangover fades.

Thankfully, we barely discuss either SIS or Sisby. His exact words are: ‘Let’s put that behind us. Think of it as history,’ and instead the subjects are wide-ranging and unconnected, with Hawkes doing most of the talking. I have to remind myself continuously that this is only the second occasion on which we have met: it is strange once again to encounter the man who has shaped the course of my life these last few months, the aloof figure that lurked on the perimeter of my subconscious. There is something capricious about his face: I had forgotten how thin it is, drawn out like an addict’s. And he is still wearing a frayed shirt and a haphazard cravat, still the same pair of velvet loafers embroidered on the toe with a coat-of-arms. How odd that a person who has given his life to secrecy and concealment should be so willing to stand out from the crowd.

Afterwards, scraping creamy leftovers of rice into a swing-bin, he says:

‘I often like to go for a walk after lunch. Do you have time?’

And largely because there has not yet been any talk of improving my situation, I agree to go.

Hyde Park is buzzing with rollerbladers and a warm wind is blowing north to south across the grass. I have a desire for good, strong coffee, a double espresso to give me a lift after lunch. My energy feels sapped by the exercise.

We have been talking about Mum when Hawkes says:

‘You remind me very much of your father. Not so much in the way you look — he always seemed about twenty-one, never appeared to age — but in manner. In approach.’

‘You’d lost touch? You said when we met…’

‘Yes. Work took me away. It’s what happens in the Office, I’m afraid.’

I don’t feel like asking a lot of questions about Dad. I’d rather Hawkes brought up another subject. But as we are passing the Albert Memorial he says:

‘I admired his tenacity tremendously. He was entrepreneurial almost before the word had been invented. Always working on a plan, a scheme for making money. Not a fast buck. Not to cheat anyone. But he loved working, he was ambitious. He wanted to make the best of himself.’

And this intrigues me. I remember Dad more as an absence, always away on business, and never wanting to talk about work when he came home. Mum has certainly never spoken about him in such a way.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Let me give you an example,’ he says. ‘I imagine that you have friends from school or university who spend a lot of their time just sitting around, or wasting away in dead-end jobs.’

I sure do. I’m one of them.

‘I don’t have that many friends,’ I tell him. ‘But yes, there are a lot of people who come out of higher education and feel that their choices are limited. People with good degrees with nowhere to go.’

Hawkes coughs, as if he wasn’t listening. ‘And this job you’re doing at the moment. I suspect it’s a waste of your time, yes?’

The remark catches me off guard, but I have to admire his nerve.

‘Fair enough,’ I smile. ‘But it’s not a waste of time any more. I quit over the weekend.’

‘Did you now?’ he says, not disguising a degree of surprise, perhaps even of pleasure. Is it possible that Hawkes really does have some plan for me, some opportunity? Or am I simply clinging to the impossible hope that Liddiard and his colleagues have made an embarrassing mistake?

‘So what are you going to do?’ he asks.

‘Well, right now it looks as though I’m going to become one of those people who spend a lot of their time just sitting around.’

He laughs aloud at this, breaking into a rare smile, which stretches his face like a clown. Then he looks me in the eye, that old paternal thing, and says:

‘Why don’t you come and work for me?’

And the offer does not surprise me: somehow I had expected it. A halfway house between CEBDO and the coveted world of espionage. A compromise. A job in the oil business.

‘At your company? At Abnex?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m very flattered.’

‘You have Russian, don’t you? And a grounding in business?’

‘Yes,’ I reply confidently.

‘Well then, I would urge you to think about it.’

We have stopped walking and I look down at the ground, drawing my right foot up and down on the grass. Perhaps I should say more about how grateful I am.

‘This is extraordinary,’ I tell him. ‘I’m amazed by how — ‘

‘There is something I would need to ask in return,’ he says, before I become too gushy.

I look at him, trying to gauge what he means, but his face is unreadable. I simply nod as he says:

‘If you decided that you wanted to take up a position…’ Then he stalls. ‘What are your feelings, instinctively? Is oil something you’d like to become involved in?’

In my confused state it is almost impossible to decide, but I am intrigued by Hawkes’s caveat. What would he ask for in return?

‘I would need to get my head together a little bit, to think things through,’ I tell him, but no sooner have the words come out than I am thinking back to what he said about my father. His ambition. His need to improve himself, and I add quickly:

‘But I can’t think of any reason why I would want to throw away an opportunity like that.’

‘Good. Good,’ he says.

‘Why? What would you need me to do?’

The question sets us moving again, walking slowly down a path towards Park Lane.

‘It’s nothing that would be beyond you.’

He smiles at this, but the inference is clandestine. There is something unlawful here that Hawkes is concealing.

‘Sorry, Michael. I’m not understanding.’

He turns and looks behind us, almost as if he feels we are being followed. A reflex ingrained into his behaviour. But it’s just a group of four or five schoolchildren kicking a football fifty metres away.

‘Abnex has a rival,’ he says, turning back to face me. ‘An American oil company by the name of Andromeda. We would need you to befriend two of their employees.’

‘Befriend?’

He nods.

‘Who is “we”?’ I ask.

‘All that I can tell you is that you would need to maintain absolute secrecy, in exactly the same way as was described to you during your selection procedure for SIS.’

‘So this has something to do with them?’

He does not respond.

‘Or MI5? Are they the “alternative” you were talking about on the phone yesterday?’

Without answering, Hawkes breathes deeply and looks to the sky, but a satisfied expression on his face seems to confirm the truth of this. Then he simply puts his arm across my back, the right hand squeezing my shoulder, and says:

‘Later, Alec. Later.’