And, for him, the war was over. He joined the Home Front of the struggle against poverty and for social justice. Like any demobbed soldier, it emptied him. He started to look for a job that would pay the rent – rather sweetly, he was, I think, setting up home – and I almost immediately started the search for one that would get me away. Local government for him, and for me, after The Fed, an NGO delivering social-support services to displaced populations. That’s what it said in its shiny little brochure. These days it would have delivered migration solutions. For me, the important thing was that it did this abroad as well as in the UK and offered plenty of foreign trips.
7
The next time I saw the Bishop he had Toby with him.
“Natalie, this is Rupert Naismith, whom I think is what is commonly known as a Foreign Office Flyer, though there is nothing common about him,” said the Bishop.
“No, it isn’t,” I said. I looked at Toby and he just shrugged. It was self-deprecating and that appealed, against my better judgement.
The meeting was brisk. Clearly it didn’t occupy diary time and the Bishop’s sole purpose was to despatch us, like children running an errand.
I came later to know that they’re all nicknamed Rupert, the officers and ex-officers of Guards regiments. I suppose he may as well have been called Rupert and I’m not sure I ever really knew his real name. Who cares? But he’ll always be Toby to me. Perhaps Rupert was his “cover” that day. Perhaps the Bishop really did think his name was Rupert. I have no idea whether the others I met told me their real names and again I don’t care. They were just avatars in my alternative reality.
We’d met in the Bishop’s office, so that he could introduce us, then I was to allow two hours for Toby to take me to meet his colleagues. I noticed more about him this time. He wore a pale yellow-and-white striped shirt, the collar of which seemed a little high, like I remember my father wearing. Or I may have seen it in a television revival of one of those intense boardroom dramas, in which men in such shirts did barely restrained anger all the time. The shirt fell loose at the front. He didn’t need to worry that his correct collar size might show his stomach; nothing inside it touched the shirt and, when he sat, you could still see his belt all the way round.
He wore a lilac tie with snail motifs on it. He wore it on the two or three times that I encountered him in these formal circumstances, though now I come to think of it, there may have been one with giraffes too. But, surprisingly for a spook, he dressed so you noticed his clothes. I remember his young pink neck too, scoured with shaving. The dimpled chin and the flush of cheeks that came with health that didn’t need exercise, ginger-blond eyebrows, balding at the top of the forehead, a stubbly outcrop at the front, like seaweed finding purchase on a freckled rock. Tortoiseshell glasses with top-frames. Lashed azure eyes and fair hair cropped up the sides. No earlobes. Yes, I think I could pick him out of a parade.
We left the cobblestone yard of the Old Deanery and walked up the narrow lane, with its barber shop and wine bar, little changed in function, I imagine, over the past half-millennium or so. It’s a dark little passage – the sun only shines on the new world.
“Are you Toby or Rupert, then?” I said, breaking into a trot to keep up with him.
“Call me Toby,” he said and smiled. “Because it’s my name.”
“Why then? Why the business with the name?”
“To tell the truth, I think the Bishop was just a bit confused. We’d just been talking about my army years.”
When we reached the traffic, I squinted up towards the cathedral. It was eighteen minutes past eleven.
“Shall we get a cab?” asked Toby and stepped towards the pavement edge. I noticed how elderly his natural posture was. He was so naturally fit, but held himself in that manner of the old moneyed classes, bent forward from the waist, his shirt collar emerging tightly from his suit lapel.
His hand should really have held a tightly furled umbrella as he hailed a taxi. I wasn’t inclined to follow his burst of military energy and stayed by the glass of the sandwich shop on the corner. The taxi passed and he stared after it indignantly. Another was passing in the opposite direction, its window open. I lay my forefinger and thumb on my tongue and whistled hard. I can do that, always have been able to, and it’s handy in the field. The cabbie glanced across his resting elbow and swung around. Toby smiled at me.
He barked something authoritatively through the cab’s front window and then turned, holding the door. His right hand performed a little swish towards me, as if sweeping me into the back. Momentarily, I wondered how many luckless bankers’ daughters had been swept along similarly in the outer reaches of SW postcodes. Swept off their feet, he probably imagined. What a knob.
Inside, as the cab swung left at the Circus for Victoria Embankment through a knot of office workers out for sandwiches, I thought Tobes was leaning forward to shut the sliding plastic window to the driver. But he was just jerking
