Terry did not look at his menu. “Seriously, Percy, why are you still in town?”

Godliman’s eyes seemed to clear, like the image on a screen when the projector is focused, as if he had to think for the first time since he walked in. “It’s all right for children to leave, and national institutions like Bertrand Russell. But for me—well, it’s a bit like running away and letting other people fight for you. I realize that’s not a strictly logical argument. It’s a matter of sentiment, not logic.”

Terry smiled the smile of one whose expectations have been fulfilled. But he dropped the subject and looked at the menu. After a moment he said, “Good God. Le Lord Woolton Pie.”

Godliman grinned. “I’m sure it’s still just potatoes and vegetables.”

When they had ordered, Terry said, “What do you think of our new Prime Minister?”

“The man’s an ass. But then, Hitler’s a fool, and look how well he’s doing. You?”

“We can live with Winston. At least he’s bellicose.”

Godliman raised his eyebrows. “‘We’? Are you back in the game?”

“I never really left it, you know.”

“But you said—”

“Percy. Can’t you think of a department whose staff all say they don’t work for the Army?”

“Well, I’m damned. All this time…”

Their first course came, and they started a bottle of white Bordeaux. Godliman ate potted salmon and looked pensive.

Eventually Terry said, “Thinking about the last lot?”

Godliman nodded. “Young days, you know. Terrible time.” But his tone was almost wistful.

“This war isn’t the same at all. My chaps don’t go behind enemy lines and count bivouacs like you did. Well, they do, but that side of things is much less important this time. Nowadays we just listen to the wireless.”

“Don’t they broadcast in code?”

Terry shrugged. “Codes can be broken. Candidly, we get to know just about everything we need these days.”

Godliman glanced around, but there was no one within earshot, and it was hardly for him to tell Terry that careless talk costs lives.

Terry went on, “In fact my job is to make sure they don’t have the information they need about us.”

They both had chicken pie to follow. There was no beef on the menu. Godliman fell silent, but Terry talked on.

“Canaris is a funny chap, you know. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. I met him before this lot started. Likes England. My guess is he’s none too fond of Hitler. Anyway, we know he’s been told to mount a major intelligence operation against us, in preparation for the invasion—but he’s not doing much. We arrested their best man in England the day after war broke out. He’s in Wandsworth prison now. Useless people, Canaris’s spies. Old ladies in boarding-houses, mad Fascists, petty criminals—”

Godliman said, “Look, here, old boy, this is too much.” He trembled slightly with a mixture of anger and incomprehension. “All this stuff is secret. I don’t want to know!”

Terry was unperturbed. “Would you like something else?” he offered. “I’m having chocolate ice cream.”

Godliman stood up. “I don’t think so. I’m going to go back to my work, if you don’t mind.”

Terry looked up at him coolly. “The world can wait for your reappraisal of the Plantagenets, Percy. There’s a war on, dear boy. I want you to work for me.”

Godliman stared down at him for a long moment. “What on earth would I do?”

Terry smiled wolfishly. “Catch spies.”

Walking back to the college, Godliman felt depressed despite the weather. He would accept Colonel Terry’s offer, no doubt about that. His country was at war; it was a just war; and if he was too old to fight, he was still young enough to help.

But the thought of leaving his work—and for how many years?—depressed him. He loved history and he had been totally absorbed in medieval England since the death of his wife ten years ago. He liked the unraveling of mysteries, the discovery of faint clues, the resolution of contradictions, the unmasking of lies and propaganda and myth. His new book would be the best on its subject written in the last hundred years, and there would not be one to equal it for another century. It had ruled his life for so long that the thought of abandoning it was almost unreal, as difficult to digest as the discovery that one is an orphan and no relation at all to the people one has always called Mother and Father.

An air raid warning stridently interrupted his thoughts. He contemplated ignoring it—so many people did now, and he was only ten minutes’ walk from the college. But he had no real reason to return to his study—he knew he would do no more work today. So he hurried into a tube station and joined the solid mass of Londoners crowding down the staircases and on to the grimy platform. He stood close to the wall, staring at a Bovril poster, and thought, But it’s not just the things I’m leaving behind.

Going back into the game depressed him, too. There were some things he liked about it: the importance of little things, the value of simply being clever, the meticulousness, the guesswork. But he hated the blackmail, the deceit, the desperation, and the way one always stabbed the enemy in the back.

The platform was becoming more crowded. Godliman sat down while there was still room, and found himself leaning against a man in a bus driver’s uniform. The man smiled and said, “Oh to be in England, now that summer’s here. Know who said that?”

“Now that April’s there,” Godliman corrected him. “It was Browning.”

“I heard it was Adolf Hitler,” the driver said. A woman next to him squealed with laughter and he turned his attention to her. “Did you hear what the evacuee said to the farmer’s wife?”

Godliman tuned out and remembered an April when he had longed for England, crouching on a high branch of a plane tree, peering through a cold mist across a French valley behind the German lines. He could see nothing but vague dark shapes, even through his telescope, and he was about to slide down and walk a mile or so farther when three German soldiers came from nowhere to sit around the base of the tree and smoke. After a while they took out cards and began to play, and young Percival Godliman realized they had found a way of stealing off and were here for the day. He stayed in the tree, hardly moving, until he began to shiver and his muscles knotted with cramp and his bladder felt as if it would burst. Then he took out his revolver and shot the three of them, one after the another, through the tops of their close-cropped heads. And three people, laughing and cursing and gambling their pay, had simply ceased to exist. It was the first time he killed, and all he could think was, Just because I had to pee.

Godliman shifted on the cold concrete of the station platform and let the memory fade away. There was a warm wind from the tunnel and a train came in. The people who got off found spaces and settled to wait. Godliman listened to the voices.

“Did you hear Churchill on the wireless? We was listening-in at the Duke of Wellington. Old Jack Thornton cried. Silly old bugger…”

“Haven’t had fillet steak on the menu for so long I’ve forgotten the bally taste…wine committee saw the war coming and brought in twenty thousand dozen, thank God…”

“Yes, a quiet wedding, but what’s the point in waiting when you don’t know what the next day’s going to bring?”

“No, Peter never came back from Dunkirk…”

The bus driver offered him a cigarette. Godliman refused, and took out his pipe. Someone started to sing.

A blackout warden passing yelled,

“Ma, pull down that blind—

Just look at what you’re showing,” and we

Shouted, “Never mind.” Oh!

Knees up Mother Brown…

The song spread through the crowd until everyone was singing. Godliman joined in, knowing that this was a nation losing a war and singing to hide to its fear, as a man will whistle past the graveyard at night; knowing that the sudden affection he felt for London and Londoners was an ephemeral sentiment, akin to mob hysteria; mistrusting the voice inside him that said “This, this is what the war is about, this is what makes it worth fighting”; knowing but not caring, because for the first time in so many years he was feeling the sheer physical thrill of comradeship and he liked it.