We were at a party given to celebrate the last night of an Open University Summer School. The School was being held in a university near the city. After the mansion house and Muldoon’s ordeal, we had got back into the car and driven away. Behind us in the house we must have left Muldoon – conscious I hoped. I told myself it was stupid to be afraid that he might not be alive.

I was in favour because of the company I was keeping.

‘Professor Gracemount has been a good friend to the University,’ said a bald little man who had been introduced as a Professor of something. ‘He pulled strings for us in the early days when we were establishing ourselves, worrying about buildings – we have to be guests in so many places – and how our courses would be judged by the conventional institutions. It was our good fortune to have friends then. Now our units are purchased in colleges and universities in the United States,’ he gave what one of those units might have described as a self-deprecatory laugh, ‘Canada, Australia, New Zealand, several of the new African states as well as here at home in England . . . I suppose I should say,’ another laugh, ‘ “here in Britain.” ’

‘North Britain,’ Brond said, with a wink at me as if to share the joke.

‘People don’t,’ Professor Gracemount said, sniffing impatiently – was there a hint of evil-smelling cheese in the air? – ‘sensible people don’t fuss about that any more. If they ever did! I imagine sensible people must always have been concerned with substance rather than shadow. Problems of war and peace, economic problems, problems of social organisation. Good God! when Carlyle defined the Condition of England Question, he wasn’t interrupted by some fools piping up, “Britain please, Condition of Britain, if you please!” If he had been, I can imagine the short shrift they would have been given. Carlyle surpassed the parochial. I don’t think he would have tolerated his countrymen confining him as a Question to the Condition of Ecclefechan. And how much less that narrowness of vision is tolerable now, when we’re in the midst of the last of the wars of religion – Communism and Capitalism in conflict – and any smaller thought’s impossible.’

I was surprised by the energy he put into this, sounding at the end even poetic. I had thought he went in for languor rather than excitement, but then, apart from that one evening at his house, I had only encountered him before as a lecturer.

‘You divide the world so neatly,’ Brond said, ‘it sounds dull. Boredom may become the main motive for committing treason.’

‘Betrayal,’ the bald little Professor said in a North of England twang, ‘won’t wash for the old reasons that moved Quisling or Pétain or even von Stauffenberg. The only music we’ll pay attention to is that played by the “Rote Kapelle” – a tune that made us dance when it was Germans betraying Hitler – but that set our teeth on edge when Nunn May, Maclean, Burgess, Philby and the rest, came under the baton of the Great Heresiarch . . . Karl Marx, you see,’ he added in an aside for my benefit, who visibly hadn’t seen. ‘It’s possible to reject their actions without denying them idealism.’

‘We know where your sympathies lie,’ Brond said with a pale smile in the tone of someone indulging a child.

‘I am a Man of the Left,’ the little pedantic Professor said, turning his head towards a bray of horse-laughter from a group of students by the bar. ‘The Irish contigent,’ he explained, ‘they’re with us this week.’

‘The land of Sir Roger Casement,’ Brond said, ‘speaking of traitors.’

‘He sinned against the British Empire,’ the little Professor said, mouthing the phrase with distaste, ‘another religion, mighty and immoveable – but it passed like a dream between one night and the next morning’s awakening.’

‘Not entirely passed,’ Brond said cheerfully. ‘I had a friend who tortured little yellow men in Malaya for the Empire. And another who killed a child that had stumbled on some dangerous information – sense of duty, you see.’

‘That’s not duty as they understood it in the heyday of the British Empire,’ the little Professor said. ‘It’s trumpets and brass blaring over a secret longing for defeat. It’s wallowing in post-imperial vomit.’

I think he was trying to be rude, but he could not manage the effortless offensiveness better bred Britons brewed at preparatory school as a distillation of seven-year-old homesickness.

Distilled essences of Celtic sorrow, blended or malt, were equally hard to come by that evening – two litre bottles of Italian wine, beer, martini and unobtrusive sherries making up the booze scene. There seemed, however, to be a general resolution to shift as much of it as was humanly possible.

‘Ever heard,’ I asked, ‘about the old Italian peasant who was dying? “Gather round my sons.” So they gather round. “All-a my life, I make the wine. I teach you to make the wine. Now I am dying. We make a big-a fortune from the wine. Now I tell you my last-a secret. How to make-a the wine from grapes.” And all the boys fell back in astonishment from the bed, and then the oldest son says, “Poppa. You mean you can make it from that as well?” ’

‘I love the way you Scots talk,’ she said. ‘Say something else.’

We were sitting on the floor. She was a big girl with a strong face that had something in it to draw me across the room to her.

‘Don’t laugh at my funny accent,’ I said, ‘and I won’t laugh at yours. Where are you from?’

‘London. What do you mean “accent”?’

‘ “Maybe it’s because you’re a Londoner . . .” ’ I crooned to her.

‘But I don’t talk like a Cockney,’ she said. ‘I talk like ordinary people who sound as if they don’t come from anywhere. My mother has an accent, though – that’s why I wondered.’

‘Your mother?’

‘We came from Hungary. My mother and brother and me. I was only a baby. My brother was shot in the hand. He’s a lot older than me, and until then all he had wanted out of life was to be a violinist. After he was shot, he couldn’t bend his hand.’

‘That was the Russians?’

‘Yes. It was the second time my mother had left Hungary. She left before to get away from the Germans. This time it was the Russians. I don’t remember any of it. But my older brother can’t play the violin. If you could believe my mother, he was a child prodigy.’

‘That’s the thing about great disasters. Each one is a mosaic of personal tragedies.’

I was very solemn. I really liked her and her long strong face, her brown Jewish eyes and her long legs curled under the wide skirt that suddenly looked Hungarian. I could have wept for her brother. I had a desire to stroke her face and talk to her in some private place; something sparked between us and the feeling was not only mine. I really liked her.

A squat red-faced man half stood on me. Instead of apologising, he glared down, a tumbler in each hand.

‘You want to keep your legs in!’ he snarled in a thick brogue.

‘Talking of accents, a boy from the bogs,’ I said.

‘He’s a nasty bit of work,’ she said looking after him. ‘Rosemary – you know Rosemary – said that he walked her back after a lecture she’d given. He was carrying her books and he tried to touch her up. When she stopped him, he threw her books down. She told him to pick them up and he walked away. But next morning he came and apologised and said he hoped it wouldn’t prejudice her against his work. He’d been so smarmy to her before that I’d thought it was sickening – like a kid at school sucking up to the teacher.’

‘ “Servile when you must, insolent when you may.” ’

‘Who is?’

‘That’s what Liam O’Flaherty’s Liverpool landlady wrote to him – “You are like all your race, servile when you must, insolent when you may.” ’

‘Seems rather harsh.’

‘Understandable. He had preferred fleeing as a fugitive from the British army to staying in hiding with her and having to marry her daughter.’