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school and Charlie was always curious why the man wore a white coat, as if he were a member of the medical section. The time before last they’d played a few games of chess together when all the tests of the day were over, and the man had even kept it on then. Perhaps Shearer didn’t like his role and felt the protective clothing prevented his becoming contaminated.
    â€˜Quite a turn-up for the books in every subject this time,’ announced Shearer. ‘You’ve excelled yourself.’ He’d cut himself that morning shaving and it had stained the collar of his check shirt.
    Although he was sure he’d done well it was still good to hear it for a fact. Charlie said: ‘You know me: always try my best.’
    â€˜I do know you, so cut the bullshit,’ stopped Shearer. ‘You usually treat all this as a great big joke. Why the sudden seriousness?’
    â€˜I’ve always passed,’ insisted Charlie.
    â€˜Because you don’t find it as difficult as most because you’re a born cheat and a liar and that’s what good intelligence officers mostly are, born cheats and liars,’ said the Director. ‘And that’s not an answer to my question. I asked why the sudden seriousness?’
    â€˜No reason,’ avoided Charlie. Was he a cheat and a liar? Only when he had to be: circumstances forced it on him, more often than not.
    â€˜Worried about lasting to collect your pension,’ demanded Shearer with unknowing prescience.
    Not the pension, conceded Charlie, honest again with himself. It was the other bit: the staying on. It was, he supposed, all part of the loneliness. He filled his spare time well enough, at the Festival Hall and the Old Vic and the Barbican. And he went to movies and he read books. But filled was the operative word. There was almost a conscious anxiety completely to occupy one off-duty period until he could go the next morning to Westminster Bridge Road. Charlie thought he was like a pit pony that had spent all its life down an old-fashioned coal mine until it went blind and couldn’t find its way around in any other environment: all he’d ever known, all his working life, was espionage. He wouldn’t know what to do without it. Stirring himself to reply, Charlie said: ‘Never thought of what I do as a pensionable occupation.’
    Shearer moved through the papers assembled on the desk before him and Charlie wondered if he were genuinely reading them or doing it for effect. The Director looked up abruptly and said: ‘One of the blood tests is good for measuring residual alcohol content. You know that?’
    â€˜No,’ admitted Charlie uncomfortably.
    â€˜You’re a good friend to the whisky distillers.’
    â€˜I take a drink or two sometimes,’ said Charlie.
    â€˜You take more than a drink or two a lot of the time,’ disputed the man responsible for presenting the final report upon him. ‘You think it’s a problem for you?’
    â€˜Definitely not,’ said Charlie, as forcefully as possible. Harkness was a teetotaller: it was the sort of thing he would seize upon. Medical progress was a bloody nuisance.
    â€˜Why so sure?’
    â€˜Drunks get swept up. Caught. I haven’t been swept up. I won’t be.’
    â€˜It’s only got to happen once.’
    â€˜It won’t,’ insisted Charlie.
    â€˜Liver shows no fatty tissue, which it would if the body regarded the intake as excessive,’ mused Shearer. ‘In fact, considering how you abuse yourself, you’re remarkably fit.’
    Something else that was good to know: when he was a kid the teachers said abusing yourself when they meant masturbation. Charlie decided against trying to make a joke of it. ‘I feel fine,’ he said.
    Shearer half raised himself from his chair, so he could look unnecessarily over his desk, then sat down again. ‘Still scuffing about in those preposterous