Sorry, didn’t I say? Pandora line, so-called after the locked box in which it’s kept. Big black telephone encased in a rectangular tin and the joke goes that if you open it you should be prepared to let all the evils of the world flood out the receiver. It’s the line used by people from the old days – the real Cold War faces whose connection with the Service went back to the dark ages. It was a dull grey Tuesday and I was counting the minutes until I could throw on my coat and head for the bus back to my flat in Chelsea. We had a house in Knightsbridge but Cranham had that weeknights and the flat was more in keeping with the me I was trying to be. There were three or four bright young things in the office: floppy hair and nice suits and the right accents, but they still looked to me when the phone went off in the section chief’s office and boredom alone made me act like the departmental secretary. The key for the lockbox was on a string attached to a nail in the central pillar of the office. It had rung eight times before I got the key in the lock, checked the duty log for the day’s code word, and finally raised the receiver to my ear. And that’s when a cheerful voice I hadn’t heard in an age addressed me as ‘bonny lass’ and told me that he had something to share that was so hot, so fresh and so damn delicious that he couldn’t think of anybody to share it with but me.

CORDELIA

Sorry, I did say we’d start at the graveyard. That’s old age for you. I have a chronic fear of becoming one of those people who ramble. Felicity says I haven’t adjusted to old age yet and that I could still give Helen Mirren a run for her money, but Felicity has started putting her tongue out before her spoon reaches her mouth so she has absolutely no right to give opinions on anything any more. I’m not old. Not properly. Felicity bloody is. Eighty-eight in August. Eighty-eight! Mind’s still sharp as broken glass but her body’s a real butcher’s shop of a thing. There’s barely a bit of her that isn’t breaking down or eating itself or dropping off. She doesn’t complain, of course, though she has a way of not complaining that sounds like a Sicilian widow has just stubbed her toe.