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your flat. It’s natural.”
    â€œI understand,” I said as a fresh wave of disgust swept over me.
    â€œAfter all, there’s no one of his age whom he seems to like better than you.”
    â€œIt’s all right. I understand,” I repeated.
    â€œOn the other hand of course, he’s not a fool, so he’ll know how we’re reasoning. And he could hardly imagine you would hide him in your priest-hole without telling us. Well, you wouldn’t, would you?”
    â€œNo I couldn’t.”
    â€œWhich if he’s halfway rational he would also know, and that would rule you out for him. Still, he might drop by for advice or assistance, I suppose. Or a drink. It’s unlikely, but it’s not an assumption we can ignore. You must be far, far and away his best friend. Nobody to compare with you. Is there?”
    I was wishing very much he would stop talking like this. Until now, he had shown the greatest delicacy in avoiding the topic of Ben’s declared love for me. Suddenly he seemed determined to reopen the wound.
    â€œOf course he may have written to other people apart from you,” he remarked speculatively. “Men or women, both. It’s not so unlikely. There are times when one’s so desperate that one declares one’s love to all sorts of people. If one knows one’s dying or contemplating some desperate act. The difference in their case would be, he posted the letters. Still, we can’t go round Ben’s chums asking them whether he’s written them a steamy letter recently—it wouldn’t be secure. Besides, where would one start? That’s the question. You have to put yourself in Ben’s position.”
    Did he deliberately plant the germ of self-knowledge in me? Later, I was certain he did. I remember his troubled, perspicacious gaze upon me as he saw me to the cab. I remember looking back as we turned the corner, and seeing his stocky figure standing in the centre of the street as he peered after me, ramming hislast words into my departing head. “You have to put yourself in Ben’s position.”
    I was in vortex. My day had begun in the small hours in South Audley Street and continued with barely pause for sleep through the Panda’s monkey and Ben’s letter until now. Smiley’s coffee and my sense of being the prisoner of outrageous circumstance had done the rest. But the name of Stefanie, I swear it, was still nowhere in my head—not at the front, not at the back. Stefanie still did not exist. I have never, I am sure, forgotten anyone so thoroughly.
    Back in my flat, my periodical spurts of revulsion at Ben’s passion gave way to concern for his safety. In the living room I stared theatrically at the sofa where he had so often stretched out after a long day’s street training in Lambeth: “Think I’ll bunk down here if you don’t mind, old boy. Jollier than home tonight. Arno can sleep at home. Ben sleeps here.” In the kitchen I laid the palm of my hand on the old iron oven where I had fried him his midnight eggs: “Christ Almighty, Ned, is that a stove? Looks more like what we lost the Crimean War with!”
    I remembered his voice, long after I had switched out my bedside light, rattling one crazy idea after another at me through the thin partition—the shared words we had, our insider language.
    â€œYou know what we ought to do with Brother Nasser?”
    â€œNo, Ben.”
    â€œGive him Israel. Know what we ought to do with the Jews?”
    â€œNo, Ben.”
    â€œGive them Egypt.”
    â€œWhy, Ben?”
    â€œPeople are only satisfied with what doesn’t belong to them. Know the story of the scorpion and the frog crossing the Nile?”
    â€œYes, I do. Now shut up and go to sleep.”
    Then he’d tell me the story, nevertheless, as a Sarratt case history. The scorpion as penetration agent, needing to contact hisstay-behind team on the