And Christopher had shrugged his shoulders, then placed a hand on Hepton’s own.

‘Maybe when you go to visit Paul, you and he should swap places. What do you say?’

Then they had both laughed and gone to watch the night’s television.

Was something wrong with the weather, then? Or had the Zephyr malfunction caused some tinting of the lens, some aberration to appear on the glass? What the hell. He’d think about it some other time. For today, he had forty-eight hours’ worth of off-base permission, and he intended to use the time well. He switched on the radio and found a station broadcasting a phone-in about the Geneva arms talks. The Soviets were offering yet more deals. Jesus, what were they going to do with all those redundant guns and tanks and missiles? Better yet, what would they do with all that redundant manpower?

On another station, two critics discussed the latest high-grossing American film, Gun Law. They’d had a bootleg tape of that on the base last week. Usual vigilante stuff, all about how the USA should pull up the drawbridge and let everyone outside the moat rot. Laughable really, yet some of the men on the base had started acting tough the very next morning, and come in wearing black T-shirts and white jeans, the way the hero did.

‘Strange times,’ Hepton said out loud, flicking to another channel. Mahler. Radio 3, he supposed; some lunchtime concert. He didn’t know which Mahler it was, but he knew it was Mahler. Jilly had listened to Mahler before, during and after each session of lovemaking. Which had seemed weird to him at first. In fact, it had seemed weird all the time. She would push his prone body away from her so that she could go and change the cassette tape and then would come to him again and give him a hug, just to show that she liked him a little bit too.

But not enough to stop her taking the newspaper job in London, not enough to stop her zipping a bag and throwing it into the back of her MG, giving him a brief embrace while her eyes glazed over with thoughts of leader columns and front-page scoops. A peck on the cheek, and then into the driving seat where she belonged, no seat belt necessary, though he had warned her before.

‘Phone me!’ he had called, but she never had. And now it was over. He had toyed with the idea of using Zephyr to track her down, to peek through some bedroom window as she pushed away another prone body and went to change the tape.

It was a nice dream.