I walk out to the garden and into the late-afternoon air, needing a little time to think, and look at the magnolia. It’s identical to the one we had in our London residence. Julia had planted this new one the very year we moved into the house, a house that was to be our permanent abode and our very last home. And for her it was, its finality unanticipated when cancer granted her the shortest of leases. There is still a lingering languid perfume from the creamy white flowers, even though the fierce flush of its earlier blossom has slowly faded with no trace of Lowell’s ‘murderous five days’ white’ igniting the coming evening, and when I touch the blossom it feels fleshy, ready to break in my hands, the soft pulp seared with a delicate blush of pink.

I take the petals, go back inside and set them in front of her photograph then return to my desk. Hannah, my housekeeper, comes to the doorway to tell me she’s going and that’s she left me something light for my supper in the kitchen. I have a growing dread of these moments. As always she asks, ‘Will that be all?’ and as always I answer yes and thank her but have no way to tell her that after she goes the house will fall again into a silence and increasingly a part of me wants her to never leave. I listen to the front door close, hear the familiar complaint of her car’s elderly engine as it starts up and try to focus again on the words.

But I’m distracted once more by the padded envelope on my desk that contains a DVD and the briefest of notes from someone I knew over forty years ago. Someone with whom I shared a part of my life in a far-off world that was short in duration but whose memories continue to accompany the counting down of my years. And there’s something in me doesn’t want to view it, because I don’t always trust the past and sometimes, if you stumble into it unaware, it can pull you in like quicksand, drag you down until you go under. And I know I have to hold my head up, so for the moment at least I set the envelope to one side and try to find my own path back, exercise some control over what is rising to meet me.

But perhaps I’m only avoiding committing to the details because it goes against the grain, against all the values of discretion that years of service inculcated. Discretion, secrecy, silence – these are still the trade’s accepted virtues, even in an age of supposed freedom of information where the idealists believe that it never requires a price to be paid. Those we bring through rendition to sit in cells with their interrogators in places that don’t exist and those we subject to ‘enhanced techniques’ know a different truth – that knowledge is often the most dangerous thing of all to possess and that in this world the safest lives are those who know nothing. But only if you are believed. Yes, only if you are believed.