My career saw me move at intervals around capital cities, although sadly never Paris, and I had my longest posting in London that my friends tell me permanently anglicised me. I met Julia in London. She was a curator in one of the city’s smaller museums and we encountered each other at a temporary exhibition the Embassy was sponsoring. I liked her right from the start and after a year’s courtship we got married. My parents and sister flew in for the wedding – it was the first time my parents had ever been outside their own country and they seemed both disorientated and excited by the adventure. Julia proved a good partner in every way and took to the diplomatic life with a polished ease – sensitive, intelligent, and with a good supply of humour that shored me up at various times when it was needed, or when my inherent anxieties rose too close to the surface. She was someone who didn’t like fuss and wasn’t interested in getting involved in any of the petty disputes and rivalries that sometimes characterise the world of diplomatic wives who can give the impression they are longing to be in a rerun of Peyton Place. Our marriage was mostly happy but, despite Madame Binh’s distant prophecy, produced no children. If I don’t like to talk about her too much it’s because she was someone who valued her privacy and there is also a reluctance to bring her into a story when it involves so many things in which she played no part. So out of respect and out of love I try to keep her in a separate place in my memory, untouched by what else needs to be told.

There is only one memory I want to share. In 1995 I was part of Clinton’s entourage when we flew into Northern Ireland where we had played a pivotal part in the Peace Process and after tortuous negotiations produced an agreement that most of the main players could put their name to. Julia came too – she had family in the North and took the opportunity to introduce me to a bewildering number of aunts and uncles, distant cousins. On the night when the President switched on the Belfast Christmas tree lights, huge crowds turned out, buoyed up on the optimistic embrace of peace. The city was bedecked in lights, Van Morrison sang ‘Days Like This’ and Julia insisted we watch not from the windows of the City Hall but stand with the crowd. There was a sense of pride in what some labelled American ‘soft power’, although I don’t think of it in this way. When the President made his later speech in Derry, he quoted the lines by Seamus Heaney about a once-in-a-lifetime moment when hope and history rhyme and just for a time we felt as if we had brought something good into existence. Now, of course, they have floundered into recurring stalemates, that precious momentum lost, and we are left to wonder if, rather than that rhyme of hope and history, we have what Heaney in one of his poems in North called ‘exhaustions nominated peace’. But that night as I stood with Julia we experienced an intimacy with each other and with those around us that made us believe, however falsely, that the future could blossom into everything our hopes might conceive.