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it’s money they’re after, we give them a pot of it. If they’re into God, we do God with them. It’s whatever works, Steff. We’re their friends. They trust us. We provide for their needs. They provide for ours. It’s the way of the world.’
    But she’s not interested in the way of the world. She’sinterested in mine, as becomes apparent on the next ride up:
    ‘When you were telling
other
people who to be, did you ever consider who
you
were?’
    ‘I just knew I was on the right side, Steff,’ I reply, as my gall begins to rise despite Prue’s best injunctions.
    ‘And what side’s that?’
    ‘My Service. My country. And yours too, actually.’
    And on our absolutely last ride up, after I have composedmyself:
    ‘Dad?’
    ‘Fire away.’
    ‘Did you have
affairs
while you were abroad?’
    ‘Affairs?’
    ‘Love affairs.’
    ‘Did your mother say I did?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then why the hell don’t you mind your own bloody business?’ I snap before I can stop myself.
    ‘Because I’m not my bloody mother,’ she yells back with equal force.
    On which unhappy note we uncouple for the last time and make our separate ways down tothe village. Come evening, she declines all offers to blow the walls out with her Italian buddies, insisting that she needs to go to bed. Which she duly does, after drinking a bottle of red burgundy.
    And I, after a decent interval, relay our conversation in broad-brush to Prue, omitting for both our sakes Steff’s gratuitous parting question. I even try to convince us both that our little talkwas mission accomplished, but Prue knows me too well. On the flight back to London next morning Steff seats herself on the other side of the aisle. Next day – the eve of her return to Bristol – she and Prue have the most godawful bust-up. Steff’s fury, it emerges, is directed not at her father for being a spy, or even for persuading other chaps to be spies, male or female, but at her own long-sufferingmother for keeping such a monumental secret from her own daughter, thereby violating the most sacred trust of womanhood.
    And when Prue gently points out that the secret was not hersto divulge but mine, and probably not mine either but the Office’s, Steff flounces out of the house, goes to ground at her boyfriend’s place and travels alone to Bristol, arriving two days late for the start of termafter sending the boyfriend to collect her luggage.
    *
    Does Ed put in a guest appearance anywhere in this family soap opera? Of course he doesn’t. How could he? He never left the island. Yet there was a moment – a mistaken one, but memorable nonetheless – when a young fellow walked in on Prue and myself while we were enjoying a
croûtes au fromage
and carafe of white in the Trois Sommets ski hutthat overlooks the whole terrain, and he could have been Ed’s double. In the flesh. Not an effigy, but himself.
    Steff was having a lie-in. Prue and I had skied early and were planning a gentle teeter down the hill and bed. And lo and behold in walked this Ed-like figure in a bobble hat – same height, same air of being alone, aggrieved and slightly lost – stubbornly stamping the snow off his bootsin the doorway while he held everyone up, then yanking off his goggles and blinking round the room as if he’d mislaid his specs. I had even flung up my arm halfway in greeting before stopping myself.
    But Prue, quick as ever, intercepted the gesture. And, when for reasons that still elude me I demurred, she demanded a full and frank explanation. So I gave her a capsule version: there was thisboy at the Athleticus who wouldn’t leave me alone till I’d agreed to give him a game. But Prue needed more. What had struck me so deeply about him on such brief acquaintance? Why had I reacted so spontaneously to his lookalike – not my style at all?
    To which it seems I reeled off a string of answers that, beingPrue, she remembers better than I do: an oddball, I seem to have said, something courageousabout him;