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fifth floor, whom I never met and rarely saw in my brief period of service, had no idea why I’d been sent to them. They hedged their bets, but they never guessed that Professor Canning, an old MI5 hand himself, thought he was making them a gift in the spirit of expiation. His case was more complex and sadder than anyone knew. He wouldchange my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return. If I know so little about him even now, it’s because I accompanied him only a very small part of the way.

2
    M y affair with Tony Canning lasted a few months. At first I was also seeing Jeremy, but by late June, after finals, he moved to Edinburgh to start work on a PhD. My life became less fraught, though it still troubled me that I hadn’t cracked his secret by the time he left and couldn’t give him satisfaction. He had never complained or looked sorry for himself. Some weeks later he wrote a tender, regretful letter to say that he had fallen in love with a violinist he’d heard one evening at the Usher Hall playing a Bruch concerto, a young German from Düsseldorf with an exquisite tone, especially in the slow movement. His name was Manfred. Of course. If I’d been a little more old-fashioned in my thinking, I would have guessed it, for there was a time when every man’s sexual problem had only one cause.
    How convenient. The mystery was solved, and I could stop worrying about Jeremy’s happiness. He was sweetly concerned for my feelings, even offering to travel down and meet me to explain things. I wrote back to congratulate him, and felt mature as I exaggerated my delight for his benefit. Such liaisons had only been legal for five years and were a novelty to me. I told him that there was no need to come all the way to Cambridge, that I’d always have the fondest memories, that he was the loveliest of men, and I looked forward tomeeting Manfred one day, please let’s keep in touch, Goodbye! I would have liked to thank him for introducing me to Tony, but I saw no point in creating suspicion. Nor did I tell Tony about his former student. Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.
    And we were. We kept our tryst each weekend in an isolated cottage not far from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. You turned off a quiet narrow lane onto an indistinct track that crossed a field, you stopped at the edge of an ancient pollarded wood, and there, hidden by a tangle of hawthorn bushes, was a small white picket gate. A flagstone path curved through an overgrown country garden (lupins, hollyhocks, giant poppies) to a heavy oak door studded with rivets or nails. When you opened that door you were in the dining room, a place of giant flagstones and wormholed beams half buried in the plaster. On the wall opposite was a bright Mediterranean scene of whitewashed houses and sheets drying on a line. It was a watercolour by Winston Churchill, painted in Marrakech during a break from the Conference in 1943. I never learned how it came into Tony’s possession.
    Frieda Canning, an art dealer who travelled abroad a good deal, didn’t like coming here. She complained about the damp and the smell of mildew and the dozens of tasks associated with a second home. As it happened, the smell vanished as soon as the place warmed up, and it was her husband who did all the tasks. They required special knowledge and skills: how to light the stubborn Rayburn stove and force open the kitchen window, how to activate the bathroom plumbing and dispose of the broken-backed mice in the traps. I didn’t even have to cook much. For all his sloppy tea-making, Tony fancied himself in the kitchen. I was sometimes his sous-chef, and he taught me a good deal. He cooked in the Italian style, learned during four years as a lecturer at an institute in Siena. His back played up, so at the beginning of each visit I humped hessian sacks of food and wine through the garden from his ancient MGA parked in the field.
    It