With a sigh of relief I stepped out into the corridor. The fly came with me.

That evening I was very happy to get back to my little house in Balaklava Road. Until now I had not felt much affection for this cramped and inconvenient suburban house, but after my cold and lonely bed in Berlin it had become a paradise. My unexpected arrival the previous evening had been discounted. Tonight was to be my welcome home.

The children had painted a bright banner – Welcome Home Daddy – and draped it across the fireplace where a real fire was flickering. Even though half of me was a Berliner, the sight of a coal fire always made me appreciate the many subtle joys of coming home. My wonderful Gloria had prepared a truly miraculous meal, as good as anything any local restaurant could have provided. She'd chilled a bottle of Bollinger and I sat in our neat little front room with the children squatting on the carpet and demanding to hear about my adventures in Berlin. Gloria had told them only that I was away on duty. After a couple of glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, I invented an involved story about tracking down a gang of thieves, keeping the narrative sufficiently improbable to get a few laughs.

I was more and more surprised at the manner in which the children were maturing. Amongst their ideas and jokes – comparatively adult and sophisticated for the most part – the evidence of some childish pleasure would break in. Requests for a silly game or a treasure hunt or infantile song. How lucky I was to be with them while they grew up. What misplaced sense of patriotic duty persuaded Fiona to be elsewhere? And was her choice of priorities some bounden commitment that enslaved only the middle classes? I'd grown up amongst working-class boys from communities where nothing preceded family loyalty. Fiona had inflicted her moral obligations upon me and the children. She had forced us to contribute to her sacrifice. Why should I not feel grievously wronged?

A timer pinged. Effortlessly Gloria led the way into the dining room where the table was set with our best china and glass. When the dinner came it was delicious. 'Would champagne be all right with the whole meal?' 'Can a fish swim?' Another bottle of Bollinger and a risotto made with porcini. After that there was baked lobster. Then a soft Brie with French bread. And, to finish, huge apples baked with honey and raisins. A big jug of rich egg custard came with it. It was a perfect end to a wonderful meal. Sally sorted out each and every raisin and arranged them around the edge of her plate but Sally always did that. Billy counted them, 'Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief…' to foretell that Sally would marry a beggarman. Sally said she'd always hated that rhyme and Gloria – optimist, feminist and mathematician – rejected it as inaccurate on the grounds that it gave a girl only one chance in four of a desirable partner.

The children were both in that no-man's-land between childhood and adult life. Billy was dedicated to motorcars and beautiful handwriting. Sally was chosen to play Portia in Julius Caesar and gave us her rendition of her favourite scene. Her Teddy Bear played Brutus.

'Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,

Is it excepted I should know no secrets

That appertain to you?'

Dismissing the marital prophecy we all declared it to be a memorable family occasion.

'The children are old enough now to enjoy celebrating together as a family,' said Gloria after they had been put to bed. She was standing looking into the dying embers of the open fire.

'I'll never forget this evening,' I said. 'Never.'

She turned. 'I love you, Bernard,' said Gloria as if she'd never said it before. 'Now before I sit down, do you want a drink or anything?'

'And I love you, Gloria,' I said. I'd resisted voicing my feelings for too long because I still felt a tinge of guilt about the difference in our ages but my time away from her had changed things. Now I was happy to tell her how I felt. 'You are wonderful,' I said, taking her hand and pulling her down to sit with me on the sofa. 'You work miracles for all of us. I should be asking you what I can do for you.'

Her face was very close. She looked sad as she put a hand on my cheek as if touching a statue, a precious statue but a statue nevertheless. She looked into my eyes as if seeing me for the very first time and said, 'Sometimes, Bernard, I wish you would say you loved me without my saying it to you first.'

'I'm sorry, darling. Did the children thank you for that delicious meal?'

'Yes. They are lovely children, Bernard.'

'You are good for all of us,' I said.

'I got all the food from Alfonso's,' she confessed in the little-girl voice she affected sometimes. 'Except the baked apples. I did the baked apples myself. And the egg custard.'

'The baked apples were the best part of the welcome home.'

'I hope the best part of the welcome home is yet to come,' she said archly.

'Let's see,' I said. She switched out the light. It was a full moon and the back garden was swamped with that horrid blue sheen that made it look like a picture on television. I hate moonlight.

'What is it?'

'It's good to be home,' I said, staring at the ugly little garden. She came up behind me and put her arm round me.

'Don't go away again,' she said. 'Not ever. Promise?'

'I promise.' This was no time to reveal that Dicky and Stowe had got a little jaunt to Vienna lined up for me. She might have thought that I welcomed the prospect and the truth was that I had some irrational dread of it. Vienna was not a big city and never has been: it is a little provincial town where narrow-minded peasants go to the opera, instead of the pig market, to exchange spiteful gossip. At least that's the way I saw it: in the past Vienna had not been a lucky town for me.

7

I remember telling a young probationer named MacKenzie that the more casual the briefing was, the more hazardous the operation you were heading into. It was the glib sort of remark that one was inclined to provide to youngsters like MacKenzie who hung upon every word and wanted to do everything the way it was done in the training school. But I was to be given plenty of time to think about the truth of it. When, afterwards, I considered the way in which I'd been brought into the Vienna operation, I inclined to the view that Stowe had been given no alternative: that he was instructed to choose me to go.

The operation was called Fledermaus, not 'Operation Fledermaus' since it had been decided that the frequency rate of the word 'operation', and the way in which it was always followed by a code name, made it too vulnerable to the opposition's computerized code breaking.

Certainly Fledermaus was cloaked in Departmental secrecy. These BOA – Briefing On Arrival – jobs always made me a little nervous, there being no way of preparing myself for whatever was to be done. It seemed as if the determination to keep this task secret from the Americans had resulted in a strictness of documentation, a signals discipline and a delicacy of application that were seldom achieved when the aim was no greater than keeping things secret from the KGB.

I flew to Salzburg, a glittering toytown dominated by an eleventh-century fortress with a widely advertised torture chamber. The narrow streets of the town are crammed with backpack tourists for twelve months of every year, and postcards, icecreams and souvenirs are readily available. My hotel – like almost everywhere else in Austria – was not far from a house in which the seemingly restless Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart once resided.

My arrival had been timed to coincide with an important philatelic auction and I checked into the hotel together with a dozen or more stamp dealers who'd come in on the same flight. Their entries in the book showed a selection of home addresses including Chicago, Hamburg and Zurich. On the reception desk a cardboard sign depicted a youthful Julie Andrews, arms outstretched, singing 'The Sound of Music tour – visit the places where the film was shot.' Behind the desk sat a fragile-looking old man in a black suit and stiff collar. He used a pen that had to be dipped in an inkwell and rocked a blotter upon each entry.