But neither of these fault lines is true in the case of Finn and myself. We have, or is it had? other troubles. Whatever the truth of our love, we allowed too much to come between us. And the past sneaked into any available crack and fissure in our relationship as frost enters the cement courses of a house.

We had the malevolence of others, with their huge forces arrayed against us, but it was we, ultimately, who allowed their hostility to disrupt the peace we might have found.

We had microphones, watchers, tails, people in every corner. We had two of the world’s most experienced intelligence services tracking our every movement. We had shining slivers of time to snatch for last minute walk-ins in hotel rooms across the city. At reception desks, Finn would call me his wife.

‘I’m not your wife,’ I told him at the beginning. ‘I’m a colonel in the SVR. Doing a job, that’s all.’

‘OK. Colonel,’ he might say. ‘Allow me to undo the buttons of your shirt.’

“Please.”

‘Please, then,’ he’d say.

Do I mean that we had the malevolence of others, or do we still have it? Where is Finn? What has happened to him? Is Finn now the past or is he still in the present?

2

I MET FINN for the first time back in January 1999. Our meeting had been at the Baltschug Hotel, across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. The hotel was to remain a place of good memories for us throughout Finn’s residency in Moscow. As he put it, rather unnecessarily, ‘It was the venue for our first official fuck, Rabbit, endorsed by Her Majesty and the KGB.’