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have barely set off before she asks in a matter-of-fact voice whether I’ve ever killed anyone. I chuckle, say no, Steff, absolutely not,thank God, which is true. Others have, if only indirectly, but I haven’t. Not even arm’s length or third flag, not even as the Office calls it,
deniable authorship
.
    ‘Well if you
haven’t
killed anyone, what’s the
next
-worst thing you’ve done as a spy?’ – in the same casual tone.
    ‘Well, Steff, I suppose the
next
worst I’ve done is persuade chaps to do things they might not have done if I hadn’ttalked them into it, so to speak.’
    ‘Bad things?’
    ‘Arguably. Depends which side of the fence you’re on.’
    ‘Such as what, for instance?’
    ‘Well, betray their country for starters.’
    ‘And you persuaded them to do that?’
    ‘If they hadn’t persuaded themselves already, yes.’
    ‘Just
chaps
, or did you persuade
female
chaps too?’ – which if you’d heard Steff on the subject of feminism is not as light-heartedas it might otherwise sound.
    ‘Largely male chaps, Steff. Yes, men, overwhelmingly men,’ I assure her.
    We have reached the top. We again uncouple and descend, Steff streaking ahead. Once more we meet at the bottom of the lift. No queue. Until now she has pushed her goggles up on to her forehead for the ride. This time she leaves them in place. They’re the mirrored kind that you can’t see into.

    ‘Persuade
how
exactly?’ she resumes as soon as we set off.
    ‘Well, we’re not talking
thumbscrews
, Steff,’ I reply, which is pilot error on my part:
Humour at serious moments is simply an escape route as far as Steff’s concerned.
    ‘So how?’ she persists, gnawing at the subject of persuasion.
    ‘Well, Steff, a lot of people will do a lot of things for
money
and a lot of people will do things for
spite
or
ego
. There are also people who do things for an
ideal
, and wouldn’t take your money if you shoved it down their throats.’
    ‘And what ideal would that be exactly,
Dad
?’ – from behind the shiny goggles. It’s the first time for weeks that she’s called me Dad. Also I notice that she is not swearing, which with Steff can be a bit of a red warning light.
    ‘Well, let’s say, just for instance,somebody has an idealistic vision of England as the mother of all democracies. Or they love our dear Queen with an unexplained fervour. It may not be an England that exists for
us
any more, if it ever did, but they think it does, so go with it.’
    ‘Do
you
think it does?’
    ‘With reservations.’
    ‘Serious reservations?’
    ‘Well, who wouldn’t have, for Christ’s sake?’ I reply, stungby the suggestionthat I’ve somehow failed to notice that the country’s in free fall. ‘A minority Tory cabinet of tenth-raters. A pig-ignorant foreign secretary who I’m supposed to be serving. Labour no better. The sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit’ – I break off. I have feelings too. Let my indignant silence say the rest.
    ‘Then you
do
have serious reservations?’ she insists in her purest tone. ‘Even very serious.Yes?’
    Too late I realize I have left myself wide open, but perhaps that was what I wanted to achieve all along: to give her the victory, acknowledge I’m not up to the standards of her brilliant professors, and then we can all go back to being who we were.
    ‘So if I’ve got this right,’ she resumes, as we embark on our next ascent, ‘for the sake of a country that you have serious reservations about,even
very
serious, you persuade
other
nationals to betray their
own
countries.’ And as an afterthought: ‘The reason being that
they
don’t share the same reservations that
you
have about
your
country, whereas they
do
have reservations about their own country. Yes?’
    At which I let out a merry exclamation that accepts honourable defeat while simultaneously asking for mitigation:
    ‘But they’re notinnocent lambs, Steff! They
volunteer.
Or most of them do. And we look after them. We welfare them. If