Anyway, you can't rest on your laurels.  These successes with computer software and communications — lucky guesses if you wanted to be uncharitable — were all in the past, and I still had a job to do.  And so it was that at that moment I had high hopes for our recently taken-up stakes in fuel cell technology and had been lobbying hard for more investment in private space concerns.  We would see.

The Lexus hummed its way through the mirror-wet streets of Glasgow, heading east.  People hunched against the buffeting wind-rush of rain; some carried umbrellas, others held folded tabloids or flapping carrier-bags over their heads as they waited at pedestrian crossings.  I checked my lap-top for e-mail then read the newspapers.  My chauffeur was called Raymond.  Raymond was about half my age, tall and athletic, with short blond hair.  He and I had developed what they used to call an understanding over the week or so I had been in Glasgow.  Raymond was perfectly good behind the wheel, though I confess I preferred him between the sheets, which was where he had been the night before when Mike Daniels had called.

If Mrs Todd knew from the start that we were involved, she was able to pretend that she didn't because Raymond had so far always succeeded in waking up in time to slip away before she arrived in the morning.

An able if occasionally overly energetic lover at night, Raymond was the soul of driving professionalism and formal politeness during the day.  When I was Raymond's age this sort of compartmentalisation of roles and relationships would have struck me as hypocritical, even deceitful.  Now, however, it seemed quite the most convenient, even honest way to behave.  Raymond and I could be prim and correct with each other while he performed his driverly duties, and as carnally abandoned as we desired when he took off his peaked cap and set his grey uniform aside.  In fact I rather enjoyed the contrast: it lent a certain anticipatory frisson to the mundane condition of being taken from one place to another.