3

“But he would have done Lisbon so well.” This was the general reaction of colleagues when they discovered that Thomas Wavery had not after all been appointed to Portugal. A day or two lapsed before the reason was whispered after him in corridors, and then it depended on who had spoken to whom as to which was the version retailed. On the whole, the mood was pro-Wavery. He had been harshly treated by Cullis.

A month after the Tennysons’ party, the Permanent Under Secretary stood in Heathrow waiting to collect his suitcase. He had spent the weekend in Strasbourg and was eager to be back in Berkhamsted. He had collected a trolley and was wheeling it towards the baggage claim when he passed a man and a woman clinging together in an embrace of such intensity he was reminded of his father’s departure from Golspie railway station, in the uniform of a fusilier. The young woman was close to tears. Sir Derek’s gaze would have discreetly passed over such private grief had he not all of a sudden recognised her companion.

The spectacle of Wavery with a strange woman at Heathrow airport was not an automatic cause for alarm. But there are certain rules you can break only if you are incredibly lucky. Wavery was clasping the woman’s hands, kissing the top of them. When he pressed her knuckles to his eyes, it seemed a gesture of utter desperation. She pulled away, distressed. It was at this moment as her knuckles were torn from him that Wavery became aware, over her shoulder, of Sir Derek’s astonished gaze.

Sir Derek could not dismiss the expression on Wavery’s face in the second before their eyes met. It was devoted to a single object – a person Cullis knew not to be Penny Wavery. Cullis had seen it on that platform in Golspie and once or twice afterwards, and he was familiar with its end. Where the devil could not reach he sent a most attractive woman.

Two days after the incident, Wavery’s expression remained fresh on Cullis’ mind as he walked through Whitehall and into the Ambassadors’ Entrance.

He prepared to show his pass, but the grandiose foyer, suffused with the aroma of Dettol, was empty. Along the corridor, he saw a cleaning lady in an ill-fitting blue coat. She rapped at the open door of Personnel Department. She was shouting, “Is there a Mr Dewsnap?” Cullis did not know whether she acted under specific instructions or whether she considered answering the telephone to be one of her responsibilities. But if she was cleaning an empty office and the telephone rang, she would always pick up the receiver.

He tucked away his pass and mounted the staircase towards Goetze’s mural of Britannia Pacificatrix.

Two doors away from his office Cullis came to the Sensitivity Room. Here for £65 a day a handful of former ambassadors sifted through thirty-year-old documents on the eve of their entry into the public domain. The idea had been Cullis’ own – a precautionary exercise designed on the face of it to prevent the dissemination of information which might continue to cause embarrassment, but in reality to discourage the Sensitivity Officers, who included a number of untidy individualists, from writing their memoirs. “The sinister censors of the FO,” the Daily Express had dubbed them.