“You know that both the O’Gorman boys are in the Army? Very junior, mind you, but keen. Unfortunately not very bright—not in a Service way—but full of beans. And of course O’Gorman is up to his neck in what he calls his War Work—selling Victory Bonds and that sort of thing. I suppose somebody has to do it. You know, I think that fat ass is pushing for some kind of official recognition. He’s never recovered from that Knight of St. Sylvester fiasco. He wants something non-retractable.”

It occurred to Francis that his father could not be very young. He must be at least ten years older than his mother. But Sir Francis Cornish, never having looked young, had not grown to look old, and as he was still part of the profession he must have been good at whatever it was he did. Certainly he looked like a revenant from an Edwardian past, but his step was light, and he was slim without being scrawny.

“You know, Frank, looking back over the years, and the Canadian part of the family, I think I liked the old Senator best of all. If he had had a chance, he might have been a remarkable man.”

“I always thought he was remarkable. He certainly became very rich.”

“And founded the Trust. You’re right, of course; I was thinking of—well, of social advantages. The Cornish Trust—that always surprised me. He thought I was a figure-head, and I suppose I was, really. We lived in different worlds, and it’s rum that our worlds should ever have intersected. But they did, to everybody’s advantage.”

“Grand-père was a man of deep feeling.”

“Ah? I suppose so. I never understood much about that, myself. Y’know, Frank, you really must get some decent clothes. You look dreadful. It’s still possible to get good clothes, y’know. You’ve got lots of cash, haven’t you?”

“I suppose so. I never think about clothes. They don’t seem relevant to what’s going on.”

“Trust me, my boy, they’re always relevant. Even in the profession, you know, protective colouring is of different kinds. If you look like an underling you’ll be taken for an underling, because people haven’t always time to find out what you really are. So do smarten up. Go to my man, and get him to make you the best suit he can for your coupons. You should wear a school tie, or a college tie. Suppose you get knocked over in one of these raids? When they found you, how would they know who you were?”

“Would it matter?”

“Of course it would. Looking like a lout when you aren’t one is just as much affectation as being a dandy. Affectation in death is as ridiculous as affectation in life.”

The next day Francis was marched to Savile Row, measured, and promised a suit of dark grey, to be followed by a blue one, in God’s and the ration’s good time. Sir Francis, having cowed his son, pressed his advantage and gave Francis some decent socks and shirts from his own wardrobe. They were not too bad a fit. To be dressed by one’s father when one is thirty-three perhaps suggests unusual compliance of character, but Francis took it humorously; he had been aware for some time that his profession as a lurker had made him look like a lurker, and that something would have to be done about it. The Major provided the necessary shove.

He was well dressed, if still somewhat doubtful in the matter of shoes, when he called on Signora Saraceni at her house in South London. A note from the Meister, smuggled from Paris, had asked him to do so.

The Signora was very English, but perhaps some life in Italy had given her the swooning, fruity manner which she probably thought proper in the wife of an artist. She was confiding.

“Sometimes I wonder if, when this dreadful war is over, Tancred and I will live together again. It will have to be here. I keep my English passport still, you know. I never really liked Rome. And that apartment—well, it really was a bit much, wasn’t it? I mean, what domesticity can survive in the middle of so much history? There wasn’t a chair that didn’t have a lineage, and one really cannot relax perched on a lineage, can one? Not, you must understand, that there was any unkindness between Tancred and me. The war has kept us apart, but before that he visited me every year, and we were lovers. Oh, indeed we were! But I don’t suppose Tancred could ever settle happily in this house, and I love it. These chintzes, and this marvellous pickled-wood furniture—isn’t it divine? Really, Mr. Cornish, artist though you are, and friend of Tancred’s, isn’t it divine? From Heal’s, every stick of it, and nothing more than a few years old. One ought to live in one’s age, don’t you think? But I do hope we may live together again.”

Her wish was not to be granted. A few weeks later a stray bomb, which was probably meant for the City, wiped out the Signora’s street, and the Signora as well, and it was Francis’s miserable job to write to the Meister about it, and find a way of reaching him.

“She was the blood of my heart,” wrote the Meister in the reply which at last found its way to Francis, “and I truly believe that she would say the same of me. But Art, my dear Cornish, is a cruel obsession, as you may yet learn.”

This letter came shortly before Uncle Jack called Francis to him, and at last gave notice that he had never really forgotten about him. Forgetting was not Colonel Copplestone’s way.

“You know that we are going to win this war, don’t you? Oh yes we are, appearances to the contrary. It will take a while, but it’s perfectly clear that we shall win, in so far as anybody wins. The Americans and the Russians will probably be the big winners. And victory will bring some tricky problems, and we shall have to get to work on them now, or be caught unprepared. One of them will be the Art thing.

“It’s important, you know. Psychologically. A kind of barometer of psychological and spiritual strength. The losers mustn’t seem to be getting away with a lot of spiritual swag, or they’ll look too much like winners. So we must be ready to recover a lot of stuff that has gone astray—looted, quite frankly—during the fighting. That’s why I’m sending you to South Wales to work with some people who have been keeping an eye on all that. You have a name, you see. That Letztpfennig business gave you a name, but not too big a name, and you must be ready to move as soon as the time is right. Glad to see you’ve done something about your clothes. You had better do a little more in that direction. Mustn’t go to conference tables and sit on commissions looking like a loser, must you?”

Two weeks later Francis was in a quiet place near Cardiff, where what had been a manor-house was now, without attracting too much notice, a part of MI5’s curious domain. There, during some of the harshest days of the war, he studied for the coming victory.

It was here, so far from London, that he gained a better idea than ever before of what he was working for, and who he was working with. In London he had been a lowly kind of agent, a snoop, hoofing around dark streets making notes of the journeys and walks and appointments of suspects. He had studied to acquire the knack of invisibility. He learned the psychological hazard of the snoop’s trade; anybody one follows for a few days begins to look furtive. He had begun to feel foolish, but it was not for him to ask questions; his job was to lurk in doorways and around corners, to peep into shop windows at the image of the suspect as he passed, to take care that he did not himself attract suspicion, for a few of Uncle Jack’s snoops had made themselves ridiculous by reporting on unknown colleagues. In his long hours of waiting he had begun to hate his work, to hate all “systems” and all nationalism. He had begun, indeed, to fall into the state of mind that makes a snoop a possible recruit for the enemy; the lure of becoming a double agent. For what high principle can a man cling to when he has been brought to the lowly employment and personal bankruptcy of a snoop?