George understood her irritation. For a lobbyist, the chance to meet powerful people socially was priceless. “I’m here now,” he said.

“I am not the maid! When we make an arrangement you have to keep it!”

This tirade was not unusual. She often got angry and screamed at him. He always tried to take it calmly. “Is Nanny Tiffany here?”

“No, she’s not, she went home sick, that’s why I had to wait for you.”

“Where’s Jack?”

“Watching TV in the den.”

“Okay, I’ll go and sit with him now. You go on out.”

She made a furious noise and stalked off.

He kind of envied whoever was going to sit next to her at dinner. She was still the sexiest woman he had ever met. However, he now knew that being her long-distance lover, as he had for many years, was better than being her husband. In the old days they had had sex more times in a weekend than they did now in a month. Since they got married their frequent and furious rows, usually about child care, had eroded their affection for one another like a slow drip of strong vitriol. They lived together, they took care of their son, and they pursued their careers. Did they love one another? George no longer knew.

He went into the den. Jack was on the couch in front of the TV. The boy was George’s great consolation. He sat next to him and put his arm around his small shoulders. Jack snuggled up.

The show featured a group of high school pupils involved in some kind of adventure. “What are you watching?” George asked.

“Whiz Kids. It’s great.”

“What’s it about?”

“They catch crooks with their computers.”

One of the child geniuses was black, George noticed, and he thought: How the world turns.

• • •

“We’re really lucky to be invited to this dinner,” said Cam Dewar to his wife, Lidka, as their cab pulled up outside a grand mansion on R Street near the Georgetown Library. “I want us both to make a good impression.”

Lidka was scornful. “You are an important person in the secret police,” she said. “I think they need to impress you.”

Lidka did not understand how America worked. “The CIA is not the secret police,” Cam said. “And I’m not a very important person by the standards of these people.”

Cam was not exactly a nobody, all the same. Because of his past experience in the White House, he was now the CIA’s liaison man with the Reagan administration. He was thrilled to have the job.

He had got over his disappointment with Reagan’s failure in Poland. He put that down to inexperience. Reagan had been president for less than a year when Solidarity was crushed.

In the back of Cam’s mind, a devil’s advocate said that a president ought to be smart enough and knowledgeable enough to make confident decisions from the moment he takes office. He recalled Nixon saying: “Reagan is a nice guy, but he doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in foreign policy.”