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Obviously from someone who thinks you’re beginning to sound like a pompous prat. I thought the same a moment or two ago.”
    â€œI got it on the day I got the Education job.”
    â€œOh . . . still, they could have been following you during the election. Was likely victory and possible government position making you swell like a bullfrog? All right, don’t answer that. Maybe it was one of the people standing against you wrote the card, wanting to get a dig in. Everyone knew it was going to be a landslide, but if it hadn’t been the Tories and the Liberal Democrats would both have been in with a chance in the Milton seat.”
    â€œHmmm. I’ll keep the possibility in mind.”
    â€œThough actually, when I come to think about it . . .”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œIt always struck me that physically you had not the slightest resemblance to your father or your mother.”
    â€œThat’s not unusual.”
    â€œNo. But you have such a strongly marked face: thick eyebrows, strong chin, somehow assertive in the effect you make. Whereas your father’s was a quiet, retiring type of face, in spite of the cragginess. And your mother, even in old age, was sweetly pretty.”
    â€œI never thought I resembled them as a person either.”
    â€œNo. Too hail-fellow, too assured and emphatic.”
    â€œI love your command of English, but I can think of nicer adjectives for myself.”
    I could hear Susan thinking. We really know each other very well by now.
    â€œColin, if you ever want any digging done about yourself, just say the word. Either I can do it myself, or I could find someone who would do it for you without charging the earth. You know I’m interested in demographic change in the postwar period, particularly relocation.”
    â€œYou mean people moving. Now who’s sounding like a pompous prat? At least you’re not telling me to let it alone.”
    â€œWhen did that ever stop you doing what you want to do?”
    â€œThanks anyway, Susan. I may well get in touch.”
    â€œI could tell you were worried, and wanted to talk. Otherwise you’d never have said that about he’d always be your dad.”
    She knew me quite as well as I knew her, or better. She knew I hadn’t been thinking aloud, but had dropped it into the conversation deliberately. Susan is a historian specializing in the postwar period, with a bias in favor of the view that changes of government generally made no difference at all to ordinary people’s lives. That hadn’t helped when I spent on politicalmatters most of the time I should have spent with her. I stood for a moment when I’d put the phone down, wondering whether I welcomed her reappearance in my life, and deciding that on this semiprofessional level I did welcome it, but it didn’t change the fact that I was not interested in getting into a relationship that was a sort of spare-time recreation, coming a bad second to my job.
    I often think I have a lot of rather old-fashioned Puritan attitudes, probably inherited or acquired from my father.
    The next morning I got a postcard in my mail. It read:
    NOT WHO YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE, ARE YOU?
    At least now I could discount the idea that somebody thought I was getting too big for my boots.

CHAPTER FOUR
A Figure From the Past
    S pring wore on into summer—a chilly, unfriendly one it was, in June and July. The infatuation of the country with its new government should have been wearing off, but to everyone’s surprise, including our own, it wasn’t. Polls put our approval rating at an impossible high. Could a honeymoon last forever? Reason told us it could not, but, basking in what seemed like universal affection, reason’s voice was often ignored. We were like children who imagine that they will live forever.
    As the session wound down toward the summer recess, I was asked to dinner by the formidable Margaret Stevens, the