The Madness of July by James Naughtie

understood the effect of his manner on his colleagues, he said, and Francesca remembered his relief when he realized that she found nothing embarrassing in his decision to speak to her intimately.
    Flemyng made his call, and Brieve answered the phone himself in Downing Street. ‘I’d like to see you if I can, Will. Away from the office, now. Do you have a few minutes?’
    Briskly, Flemyng agreed without asking why he was making such an unusual request, and suggested that they went to a subterranean bar near Charing Cross, a dingy, dusty place where they both knew it was easy to hide. There were corners where the shadows were deep. Half-burned candles, almost always unlit, stuck out of green bottles on each table, and the air reeked of the sherry dispensed from four great barrels lying end-on behind the bar, their bulging wooden ribs shining as if they sweated alcohol. Flemyng knew of a few affairs that had started in these premises, and some that had ended there. It wasn’t natural Brieve territory; so much the better. They’d meet in fifteen minutes.
    Before leaving, he made one careful rearrangement in his office. Making sure that the door was closed, he took a plain envelope from his briefcase. It had no name on the outside and the flap was open. He checked the sheet of paper inside, read the words again, and placed it in the drawer of his desk, putting the key back in his pocket after he had unlocked it. He pushed the drawer carefully so that it was nearly closed, but not quite.
    He walked across Whitehall, stopping to buy late-afternoon editions of the Standard and Evening News from the wooden shack at the Ministry of Defence corner – the water workers’ strike was still hogging the front pages – and was soon on the precipitous stairway to the cellar bar. Brieve was already established in one of the brick alcoves, seated at a rickety wooden table with two schooners of pale sherry in front of him. Flemyng shook hands and sat down. ‘Tom.’
    Brieve was carrot-haired, freckled and pale. He was taller and thinner than Flemyng as well as a year or two younger, but the gawky façade was misleading. When he opened his mouth Brieve was smooth as silk, speaking in mellifluous tones. From the Foreign Office fast stream, he’d swum off to life at Harvard when he was barely out of his twenties, returning in triumph to the diplomatic whirl. With a speed that his contemporaries thought indecent as well as infuriating, he abandoned the department that once commanded all his loyalty in favour of his new ante-chamber adjacent to the seat of power. In Whitehall, his tracks were visible everywhere.
    ‘Will, I wanted to pick your brains.’ Flemyng drank some sherry and thanked him.
    His curiosity rose as Brieve began a ramble that seemed to have no destination, without any of the discipline that was his hallmark. Flemyng had never heard him speak so aimlessly. ‘I wonder what you think,’ he said more than once in the course of his Middle East tour, but never paused to allow a reply. The coming Paris conference was thrown in, although it had little connection with Flemyng’s territory, and he told a long anecdote which he described as the only funny thing to come out of the latest session of disarmament talks in Vienna, which had stalled again. This was the excuse for some further musing about the Russians, and the scelerotic Kremlin succession that must surely come. Finally Flemyng interrupted him.
    ‘Tom, what’s this all about?’
    Brieve flinched. ‘Why d’you ask?’
    ‘Because you’re all over the place, and that’s not like you. What’s up? You can tell me.’
    Brieve’s natural pallor was touched by a flush of pink at Flemyng’s interruption. ‘The first time I met Francesca, I realized she was somebody that I could talk to more frankly than is often the case with me – this job, and so forth. I’ve often hoped that the same might be true of you, although we tend not to speak to each other in that way,