It is the busiest day he can remember: winding up bank accounts, dismantling and disposing of his revolver—how he would love to take it!—saying goodbye to some of his old friends, settling the rent and doing the packing. And then Eileen puts a wrench in the works by saying that maybe they should go to Dublin instead. Not on your Nelly, he tells her. They’ll be much safer in Berlin—they could be kidnapped from Dublin, but from Berlin, no way. He has contacts there, he knows people, high-up people—Berlin is the place to be, the center of the civilized world. She’s still reluctant, but that’s too bad. It will be his decision, and his alone. If she doesn’t want to come, she can stay here, weeping into her mother’s apron down in Sussex.

They don’t sleep that night, and the next morning they get up early and take a taxi to Victoria. A small panic as Eileen nearly forgets her passport—he thinks she’s done it on purpose, but she swears she hasn’t.

At the station, he’s looking around for them, waiting for a hand on his shoulder, waiting for a “Stop!” There’s no line at the ticket office, and they walk straight up and order two tickets for the boat train.

“Through to where, sir?” asks the bearded functionary behind the small window.

He coughs.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Berlin. Through to Berlin.”

The man looks taken aback.

“Berlin, you say? You’re quite sure?”

“Yes, dammit! Just give me two tickets for Berlin.”

“Very well, sir. Single or return?”

He’s already thought about this. Asking for a single will look too suspicious, and even though he can scarcely afford the return, he knows he must buy it.

“Return, of course!”

“Quite, sir. You wouldn’t want to stay there, would you?”

He smiles nervously as Eileen grips his arm.

“Oh no—I’ll be coming back all right. Hopefully we won’t be there for long.”

SEPTEMBER 1958

“I came up with your father in ’32. A good chap, I thought—a little on the wild side, but great fun. Sharp too, although come to think of it, he was a rotten card player, despite what he thought. I remember comprehensively fleecing him during our first term.”

Amy smiled. Now up at Oxford herself, she was sitting in the study of one of her father’s contemporaries, a classics professor called Ian Massey.