She laughed, and the movement of it stretched her out until she was lying back, resting on her elbows.

‘On Dad’s fiftieth birthday, Michael gave him a black queen, in a little wooden box. He cried. Weird, seeing your dad cry. But I think it just gave him so much pleasure to see us learn, and get strong, that he never wanted to lose the feeling of it. He wanted us to win.’

And then, suddenly, the tears arrived in a huge wave, crashing over her and shaking her thin body until she could hardly breathe. I lay down and put my arms around her, squeezing her tight to shield her from everything.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Everything is all right.’ But of course it wasn’t all right. Not by miles.

Sixteen

With skill she vibrates her eternal tongue, For ever most divinely in the wrong.

EDWARD YOUNG

There was a bomb scare on the flight out toPrague. No bomb, but lots of scare.

We were just settling ourselves into our seats when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, telling us to deplane with all possible speed. No ‘ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of British Airways,’ or anything like that. Just get off the plane now.

We hung around in a lilac-painted room, with ten fewer chairs than there were passengers and no music to play by, and you weren’t allowed to smoke. I was, though. A uniformed woman with a lot of make-up told me to put it out, but I explained that I was asthmatic and the cigarette was a herbal dilation remedy I had to take whenever I was under stress. Everybody hated me for that, the smokers even more than the non-smokers.

When we finally shuffled back on to the aircraft, we all looked under our seats, worried that the sniffer dog might have had a cold that day, and that somewhere there was a little black hold-all that all the searchers had missed.

There once was a man who went to see a psychiatrist, crippled by a fear of flying. His phobia was based on the belief that there would be a bomb on any plane he boarded. The psychiatrist tried to shift the phobia but couldn’t, so he sent his patient to a statistician. The statistician prodded a calculator and informed the man that the odds against there being a bomb on board the next flight he took were half a million to one. The man still wasn’t happy, and sat there convinced that he’d be on that one plane out of half a million. So the statistician prodded the calculator again and said ‘all right, would you feel safer if the odds were ten million to one against?’ The man said, yes, of course he would. So the statistician said ‘the odds against there being two, separate, unrelated bombs on board your next flight are exactly ten million to one against.’ The man looked puzzled, and said ‘that’s all well and good, but how does it help me?’ The statistician replied: ‘It’s very simple. You take a bomb on board with you.’

I told this to a grey-suited businessman fromLeicester, sitting in the seat next to me, but he didn’t laugh at all. Instead, he called a stewardess and said he thought I had a bomb in my luggage. I had to tell the story again to the stewardess, and a third time to the co-pilot who came back and squatted at my feet with a scowl on his face. I’m never going to make polite conversation ever again.

Perhaps I’d misjudged how people feel about bombs on aeroplanes. That’s possible. A more likely explanation is that I was the only person on the flight who knew where the hoax bomb call had come from, and what it meant.

It was the first, lumbering, scene-setting move of Operation Dead Wood.

Pragueairport is slightly smaller than the sign which says ‘PragueAirport’, at the front of the terminal building. The thumping Stalinist scale of it made me wonder whether the sign had been built before radio navigation, so that pilots could read it while still only half-way across the Atlantic.

Inside, well, an airport is an airport is an airport. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you have to have stone floors for the luggage trolleys, you have to have luggage trolleys, and you have to have glass cases displaying crocodile skin belts that no one will ever want to buy in a thousand years of civilisation.

News of Czecho’s escape from the Soviet maw hadn’t reached the immigration officials, who sat in their glass boxes and re-fought the Cold War with every disgusted flick of their eyes from passport photograph to decadent imperialist standing before them. I was that imperialist, and I’d made the mistake of wearing a Hawaiian shirt, which, I suppose, emphasised my decadence. I’ll know better next time. Except that maybe by next time, someone will have found the key to the glass boxes and told these poor buggers that they’re now sharing cultural and economic floor space with Euro-Disney. I decided to try and learn the Czech for ‘missing you already’.

I changed some money and went outside to hail a taxi. It was a cool evening, and the broad, Stalinist puddles in the car-park, splashing blue and grey reflections of the newly built neon advertisements around the sky, made it seem even cooler. I rounded the corner of the terminal building and the wind bounded up to greet me, licking at my face with diesel flavoured rain and then skipping, playfully around my shins, tugging at my trousers. I stood there for a moment, soaking up the strangeness of the place, heavily conscious that I had, in all kinds of ways, gone from one state to another.

I found a cab eventually, and told the driver in fluent English that I wantedWenceslas Square. This request, I now know, is phonically identical to the Czech phrase for ‘I am an air-brained tourist, please take everything I have’. The car was a Tatra, and the driver was a bastard; he drove fast and well, humming happily to himself, like a man who’s just won the pools.

It was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen in any city.Wenceslas Square is not a square at all, but a double avenue, running down a slope from the massiveNationalMuseum which overlooks it. Even if I’d known nothing of the place, I would have felt that this was important. History ancient and modern had happened in large dollops over this half-mile of grey and yellow stone, and it had left a smell. L’AirDu Temps de Praha.Prague Springs, Summers, Winters and Autumns had come and gone, and would probably come again.

When the driver told me how much money he wanted, I had to spend a few minutes explaining that I didn’t actually want to buy the cab, I just wanted to settle up for the fifteen minutes I’d spent in it. He told me that it was a limousine service, or at least he said ‘limousine’ and shrugged a lot, and after a while agreed to reduce his demands to the merely astronomical. I hefted my bag and started to walk.

The Americans had told me to find my own digs, and the only sure way to look like a man who’s spent a long time looking for somewhere to stay is to spend a long time looking for somewhere to stay. So I settled into a comfortable march and did Prague One, which is the central district of the old city, in about two hours. Twenty-six churches, fourteen galleries and museums, an opera house - where the boy Mozart had staged his first-ever performance ofDon Giovanni -eight theatres, and a McDonald’s. One of the above had a fifty-yard queue outside it.