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the landlord had left on the counter. He helped himself. There was an intimacy to such a liberty.
    â€˜Can I buy a bottle?’ asked Ferdy.
    â€˜You can not,’ said MacGregor.
    I sipped it. It was a soft smoky flavour of the sort that one smelled as much as tasted.
    Frazer poured his whisky into the beer and drank it down. ‘You damned heathen,’ said the landlord. ‘And I’m giving you the twelve-year-old malt too.’
    â€˜It all ends up in the same place, Mr MacGregor.’
    â€˜You damned barbarian,’ he growled, relishing the r’s rasp. ‘You’ve ruined my ale and my whisky too.’
    I realized it was a joke between them, one that they had shared before. I knew that Lieutenant Frazer was from RN security. I wondered if the landlord was a part of it too. It would be a fine place from which to keep an eye on strangers who came to look at the atomic submarines at the anchorage.
    And then I was sure that this was so, for Frazer picked up the packet of cigarettes from which he’d been helping himself. The change of ownership had been a gradual one but I was sure that something more than cigarettes was changing hands.

2
    In games where the random chance programme is not used, and in the event of two opposing units, of exactly equal strength and identical qualities, occupying same hex (or unit of space), the first unit to occupy the space will predominate.
    RULES . ‘ TACWARGAME ’. STUDIES CENTRE . LONDON
    The London flight was delayed.
    Ferdy bought a newspaper and I read the departures board four times. Then we drifted through that perfumed limbo of stale air that is ruled by yawning girls with Cartier watches, and naval officers with plastic briefcases. We tried to recognize melodies amongst the rhythms that are specially designed to be without melody, and we tried to recognize words among the announcements, until finally the miracle of heavier-than-air flight was once again mastered.
    As we climbed into the grey cotton wool, we had this big brother voice saying he was our captain and on account of how late we were there was no catering aboard but we could buy cigarette lighters with the name of the airline on them, and if we looked down to our left side we could have seen Birmingham, if it hadn’t been covered in cloud.
    It was early evening by the time I got to London. The sky looked bruised and the cloud no higher than the high-rise offices where all the lights burned. The drivers were ill-tempered and the rain unceasing.
    We arrived at the Studies Centre in Hampstead just as the day staff were due to leave. The tapes had come on a military flight and were waiting for me. There is a security seal when tapes are due, so we unloaded to the disapproving stares of the clock-watchers in the Evaluation Block. It was tempting to use the overnight facilities at the Centre: the bathwater always ran and the kitchen could always find a hot meal, but Marjorie was waiting. I signed out directly.
    I should have had more sense than to expect my car to sit in the open through six weeks of London winter and be ready to start when I needed it. It groaned miserably as it heaved at the thick cold oil and coughed at the puny spark. I pummelled the starter until the air was choked with fumes, and then counted to one hundred in an attempt to keep my hands off her long enough to dry the points. At the third bout she fired. I hit the pedal and there was a staccato of backfire and judder of one-sided torque from the oldest plugs. Finally they too joined the song and I nudged her slowly out into the evening traffic of Frognal.
    If the traffic had been moving faster I would probably have reached home without difficulty, but the sort of jams you get on a wet winter’s evening in London gives the
coup de grâce
to old bangers like mine. I was just a block away from my old place in Earl’s Court when she died. I opened her up and tried to decide where to put the Band-aid, but