He smiled and gave her a light. “I started as an amateur. I was a university lecturer – Ph.D. in modern languages. A friend of mine had an elder sister who’d married a Czechoslovakian. After the war, her husband died. She wanted to return to England with her two children, but the Communists wouldn’t let her.”

“And you decided to get her out?”

He nodded. “The government couldn’t help, and as I speak the language, I decided to do something unofficially.”

“It must have been difficult,” Anna said.

He smiled. “How we managed it I’ll never know, but we did. I was in hospital in Vienna recuperating from a slight injury, when the man I work for now came to see me. He offered me a job.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why you took it.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t – not straightaway. I went back to my university for the following term.”

“And what happened?”

He got to his feet and walked across to the window. It was still raining, and he stared out into the night and tried to get it straight in his own mind. Finally, he said, “I found that I was spending my life teaching languages to people who in their turn would spend their lives teaching languages to other people. It suddenly seemed rather pointless.”

“But that isn’t a reason,” she said. “That’s the whole human story.”

“But don’t you see?” he said. “I’d discovered things about myself that I never knew before. That I liked taking a calculated risk and pitting my wits against the opposition. On looking back on the Czechoslovakian business, I realize that in some twisted kind of way I’d enjoyed it. Can you understand that?”

“I’m not really sure,” she said slowly. “Can anyone honestly say they enjoy staring death in the face each day?”

“I don’t think of that side of it,” he said, “any more than a Grand Prix racing driver does.”

“But you’re a scholar,” she said. “How can you waste all that?”