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understand them even if she could get at them. I keep them locked up, you see.’
    â€˜Oh, you innocent. Tell me, has she any relatives or friends in East Germany?’
    â€˜None that I know of. Look, if you think she’s on the spying game you’re greatly mistaken. Whatever’s going on is sexual, you take my word for it. Sex.’ This damnable. His mouth began to collapse. The whine came gargoyling out. ‘It’s not my fault if I get so tired in the evenings.’
    â€˜And on Sunday mornings too?’
    â€˜I don’t wake early. She’s up hours before I am.’ Now the tears were ready to flood, and I was ready to get him out of here before the fierce fat manageress came. I grinned to myself, remembering Father Byrne sermonising in the dormitory. I paid the bill, leaving all the change, and said, as we left, me supporting his left elbow: ‘Ican make a professional job of this, you know. Watching them, I mean. And if you want evidence for a divorce –’
    â€˜I don’t want a divorce. I want things to be as they used to be. I love her.’
    We walked down Dean Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘There was a time,’ I said, ‘when you were always having a jab at authority. Very independent you were, Renaissance man, knocking at all doors. You seem to need to lean on something now. Somebody, I mean.’
    â€˜We all need to lean. I was very young and inexperienced then.’
    â€˜Why don’t you go back into the Church?’
    â€˜Are you mad? One goes forward, not back. The Church is a lot of irrational nonsense. And you’re a right sod to talk, aren’t you?’ The Bradcaster way of speech had burrowed deep into us, despite our Southern background. ‘Been out of the Church yourself since God knows when.’
    â€˜Since taking up this kind of work, to be precise. A question of loyalties. In my dossier my religion is down as C of E. It’s safe. It means nothing. It offends nobody. The Department has an annual church parade, believe it or not. When all’s said and done, the Pope remains a foreigner.’
    â€˜Beat him up,’ said Roper, not meaning the Pope. ‘Teach him a lesson. You’ve done unarmed combat and judo and so forth. Knock his teeth in, the big blond swine.’
    â€˜In Brigitte’s presence? That won’t exactly endear you to her, will it? She called me your fiend, remember.’
    â€˜Get him alone, then. Outside at night. Back at wherever he lives.’
    â€˜I don’t see how that’s going to teach Brigitte a lesson. The true object of the exercise. Good God, this is really the war all over again, isn’t it?’
    We were approaching Piccadilly Underground. Roper stoppedin the middle of the pavement and began to cry. Some young louts stared at him, but more in commiseration than in the traditional guffawing contempt. The sex-patterns were merging with this new generation. But not for Roper, not for me. Sex was, for us, still damnable. I persuaded him to wipe his eyes and give me his address. Then he tottered off underground to reach it, as though it were somewhere in hell.
    I was going to do things my way, not Roper’s. At that time my position in the Department, as you remember, sir, was still more or less probationary. It was not yourself but Major Goodridge who gave me permission – treating it rather like an exercise – to spy on Brigitte Roper,
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Weidegrund, and this Wurzel man. I think I was even praised for initiative. Each afternoon after that Soho meeting I waited outside the Roper residence just off Islington High Street. It was a dingy bleak little terraced house, the windows unwashed perhaps because window-cleaners were too proud to call in this district. The dustbins stood, all along that street, like dismal battered front-door sentinels. At one end of the street was a dairy, cloudy milk-bottles stacked outside; at the other was a