‘Will you be joining me?’ she asks, making room on the sea wall. ‘Room for one more.’

‘I won’t, if it’s all the same,’ he says, with a look of genuine apology. ‘Takes an age for me to get myself properly situated and once I start walking I prefer to remain upright. I don’t so much walk as fall down over a considerable distance. It’s a controlled totter.’

Cordelia permits herself a smile. ‘I didn’t hear you approaching,’ she confides. ‘Is that a mark against me?’

‘You spotted me before I got close enough to do anything outlandish.’ He shrugs. ‘I’d call that a win. All a bit silly, isn’t it? All this simulation and dissembling, this learning how to lie. Good God, the whole organization is made up of public schoolboys and they learn how to dissemble at the teat. One must never show emotional honesty, you realize that, yes? Not a whiff of humanity. Otherwise, how the devil can you be expected to lead? How can one make decisions about what is good for people if you are beset by those God-awful feelings every moment.’

Cordelia isn’t sure how to reply. He seems genuine in his contempt for the upper classes and yet his own accent is pure old Etonian.

‘You’re reading Orwell,’ he says, with a genuine grin of approval. ‘My my, what a splendid find you are. True subversive literature within a spit of Fort Monckton. I can’t decide whether you don’t give a damn or just want to be seen as somebody who doesn’t give a damn. Or perhaps you’re too guileless to realize it might not be the wisest choice of reading material when your every spit and cough is being pored over by men who want you to fail. Either way, with the Geordie accent and the steel blue eyes, you really are a discovery. I feel like Sir Joseph Banks poking around Botany Bay.’

Cordelia lights herself a cigarette while she considers her response. ‘That’s a very odd way to compliment somebody.’