Until his posting to Lima he had been regarded as a successful diplomat. “Which means,” observed Penny, “he’s been away at the right time and ill at crucial moments.” But his Peruvian tour coincided with the counter-revolution. He had grown a frothy beard as a security measure and taken to arriving at the Embassy under a blanket.

“The Labour MPs were flying Eastern.” Queesal, the First Secretary Commercial, was speaking. “The strike will mean reorganising their schedule PDQ.”

The Ambassador shifted in his chair, plucking a feather from his sleeve. He suspected the MPs were interested in political developments only in so far as they affected British interests, of which in Peru there were relatively few.

“Is it a vital half day or what?” said the Ambassador. He regarded Queesal as “very dynamic”. Penny, too, was fond of the Commercial Attaché: “He does a good job in a talkative way.” But Wavery could never take him seriously. In George Queesal he saw his own faults writ large.

The Commercial Attaché was a great one for doing what was expected of him. A creature of tidy habits, he had a primitive attitude to inefficiency. Wavery suspected a swirl of chaos beneath his pert appearance. He had been married twice. Both wives had left him, in each case for a local man. Bernice, for a public relations executive in Panama City and Shirley, four months ago, for a young graduate at the International Potato Centre. In the office his ideas were made exclusively with the Ambassador in mind and packaged to his own preferment. Whenever he could, Wavery booted them into touch.

“They’ve lost all their talks,” said Queesal.

“That’s fine. They can spend another day at Macchu Piccu. Anything else?”

“On the drugs front, the US Attorney General is in town to see the DEA. Fourteen planes were impounded last week.”

The Ambassador looked at Wavery. “Remind me to tell you what Denver told me the other night.”

Wavery nodded. “Right.”

“George, we might talk to the Americans after he’s gone. Or I’ll talk to Denver. Either way, let’s talk. There should be some useful ideas there. Anything else?’

“I’ve had a call from Smock, our ex-Consul in Tumbes. He wants to know why he’s not coming to the Queen’s Birthday Party. Sounds unhappy.”

“We’re not here to keep the British community happy, dammit,” snapped the Ambassador who had promulgated a despotic reduction in the number of invitations. “Deirdre?”

Penny described Deirdre as “one of those fragile English ladies who leave England for reasons of health only to blossom in places where conditions were ten times worse”. Under Wavery, her responsibility was to oversee the Embassy’s aid programme. In the Ambassador’s view, the aid scene was a “bottomless pit”, but in Peru, as elsewhere, aid was the means by which you bought political importance. A country was judged by the amount it donated and its ambassador was respected in proportion. According to Deirdre’s computations, Britain gave a fraction more to Peru than did Gabon.