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at a jump.
    “Why are you doing this?” she said thickly.
    I looked at her with a mildly enquiring frown. She stood with her fists clenched in front of her hip bones and her little face thrust forward, sulky-sullen, glaring at an ivory paperknife on my desk. Not so serene after all.
    “Why am I doing what, my dear?”
    “I know how well read you are,” she said, almost spitting, “I know how cultured you are.”
    She made the word sound like an ailment. I thought: she can’t be from Skryne, he would never send someone with so little self-control. After a beat of flushed silence I said softly:
    “In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.”
    Still fixed on that paperknife, she set her lips so tightly they turned white, and gave her head a quick, stubborn little shake, and I thought, almost with fondness, of Vivienne, my sometime wife, who was the only supposedly grown-up person I ever knew who used actually to stamp her foot when she was angry.
    “There are,” she said, in a surprisingly restrained tone, “there are simple questions; there are answers. Why did you spy for the Russians? How did you get away with it? What did you think you would achieve by betraying your country and your country’s interests? Or was it because you never thought of this as your country? Was it because you were Irish and hated us?”
    And at last she turned her head and looked at me. What fire! I would never have expected it. Her father, the admirable Admiral, would be proud of her. I looked away from her, smiling my weary smile, and considered The Death of Seneca. How superbly executed are the folds of the dying man’s robe, polished, smooth and dense as fluted sandstone, yet wonderfully delicate, too, like one of the philosopher’s own carven paragraphs. (I must have the picture valued. Not that I would dream of selling it, of course, but just now I find myself in need of financial reassurance.)
    “Not the Russians,” I murmured.
    I could feel her blink. “What?”
    “I did not spy for the Russians,” I said. “I spied for Europe. A much broader church.”
    This really is the most unsettling weather. Just now out of nowhere a violent shower started up, pelting big fat splatters against the windows in which the watercolour sunlight shinesunabated. I should not like just yet to leave this world, so tender and accommodating even in the midst of its storms. The doctors tell me they got all of it and that there is no sign of any new malignancy. I am in remission. I feel I have been in remission all my life.

M y father was a great bird’s-nester. I could never learn the trick of it. On Sunday mornings in springtime he would take Freddie and me walking with him in the fields above Carrickdrum. I imagine he was escaping those of his parishioners— he was still rector then—who made it a practice to call to the house after service, the boisterously unhappy country wives in their pony-and-traps, the working people from the back streets of the town, the glittery-eyed mad spinsters who spent their weekdays doing sentry-go behind lace-curtained windows in the villas on the seafront. I wish I could describe these outings as occasions of familial conviviality, with my father discoursing to his wide-eyed sons on the ways and wiles of Mother Nature, but in fact he rarely spoke, and I suspect he was for the most part forgetful of the two little boys scrambling desperately over rock and thorn to keep up with him. It was rough country up there, skimpy bits of field isolated between outcrops of bare grey stone, with whin bushes and the odd stand of mountain ash deformed by the sea gales. I do not know why my father insisted on bringing Freddie with us, for he always grew agitated in those uplands, especially on windy days, and went along uttering little moos of distress and tearing at the skin around his fingernails and gnawing at his