She wandered out into the center of the room looking for an empty table. There did not seem to be one, and certainly not one by the windows on the river side. She moved along beside the tables with the unfocused, purposeful step of a sleep-walker. Hot water spilled over into the saucer of her cup.

“Miss Kingslake. Miss Kingslake.”

“Oh, Mr. Willoughby.”

“I’ve got a table at the window, if someone hasn’t taken it.”

“I thought you’d gone to the Field. I heard your assignment to mission went through.”

“I leave tomorrow night. But not for Santiago after all. That was changed. Let me have your tray. They’re sending me to Kuala Lumpur.”

“Thanks, but I’d better not let go. I hadn’t heard.”

They made their way through to the windows. She balanced her tray on a corner of his table while he cleared it of the cups, plates, and tea-bags discarded by the previous occupants. When he had stacked these on the heating equipment, they sat down.

Claude Willoughby was a spare, fair-haired Anglo-Saxon who resembled nothing so much as a spar of bleached wood washed up on a beach. He was, for so industrious a man, remarkably able. He and Clelia Kingslake had been thrown together in Interim Reports, before her upgrading to Annual Reports and his lateral transfer to the World Commodity Index.

“I might—” he began.

She said at the same moment, “I’m so glad—”

They both said, “I’m sorry.”

“You might?” she inquired, squeezing her tea-bag and putting it in the ashtray.

“I was going to say that I might have inquired whether you really wanted to join me. You seemed to be in a trance.”

“I was afraid of seeing someone I didn’t want to sit with. Instead, what a nice surprise.” She took two paper napkins from the metal dispenser on the table, and gave him one.

“You were going to say?” he asked. “Something about being glad?”

“How glad I am, that’s all, to see you before you go. I thought you must have left without saying goodbye.”

“I’ve been terribly busy. Forms, clearances, briefing—and of course my replacement hasn’t even been appointed. They’re holding the post for an African candidate—or so I’m told. And then, at home—you can imagine—all the packing and storing, added to which we’ve already taken the children out of school.” Mr. Willoughby, having four children of school age, was a substantial beneficiary of the Staff Education Grant. “But don’t let’s get into that. And of course I wouldn’t have gone without saying goodbye.”

When he had said this, she stared out the window and he turned his head toward the next table, where two officials of the Department of Personnel were getting up from their coffee.