“The aluminum chalice,” murmured Wavery aloud.

Premature senility was not the end he had envisaged over the calvados, thirty-five years before in Piccadilly. He had sat the Foreign Office exam to win a bet with friends, to enjoy their dinner at the Ritz. He achieved the second highest marks of that year’s entry.

“To Our Man in Paris,” was the toast at that table. “Lucky Penny, you’ve married a high flyer.”

At the age of twenty-three, he had been idealistic and patriotic. He believed the Service remained the Service of Harold Nicolson and Duff Cooper. Orchids embellished the pillars in the Paris Embassy and a footman stood behind every chair. Above all, he had been flattered. It had not taken long to learn the dispiriting truth that flattery, like patriotism and idealism, was all very well so long as you didn’t inhale.

Wavery was naturally a loyal man. These buff envelopes revived the loyal years. The years he had spent prattling to the very people he would prefer to insult. The years spent learning the gestures and the apparatus of betrayal. The years spent working with great effect on matters of no national importance whatever; the years during which it came to him that his own Service was the enemy, that all of it was about betrayal, that no one cared a damn what the Berbers were thinking.

After a week in Abyla, he was bored. The things that came naturally to him all his diplomatic life, he couldn’t do anymore. He didn’t see the point. For thirty-five years he had oiled wheels, polished corners, listened to people, solved problems, made everything work. The one time he had needed something to work for him, it hadn’t. Consul General to Abyla. It was like one of Silkleigh’s titles, echoing nowhere. He could have been Consul here when he was thirty. A week ago he was prepared to fulfil whatever duties the Abyla post required of him. Now he thought New Zealand might have been endurable. These letters were a reminder he was no distance from home. No distance at all. And on the other side of the Straits he was faced with the nightmare of Penny’s brother.

He kept until last a handwritten envelope containing the briefest of letters from Penny. Before opening it, he drafted a letter to Air Vice Marshal Sir Lawrence Tredwell, DFC, for Asunción to type:

Dear Larry

Thank you for your letter. You cannot imagine how sorry I am Penny is not with me in Abyla. I know she would expect us not to allow personal difficulties to develop into professional ones. Whatever we can do to make the Royal Visit a success will be worth our every effort. I was sorry about lunch, but glad to learn that you won your golf Edwina has much to be proud of. Please tell her that she will always he a welcome guest here, as you will be.

Yours ever.

Penny’s letter was brief and to the point. She had instructed her father’s solicitors and hoped the whole business wouldn’t be as messy as everyone was telling her it would be. She’d seen a house both she and Patrick had fallen for – she more than Patrick – and they were going to put in an offer. It was outside Poole, but from the top of an oak in the garden you could see Poole harbour. She hoped Tom’s residence was agreeable and he had found whatever he was looking for.