William nodded. Eddie did not deserve his good fortune, he felt; if Fate was going to allocate either of them a place in the Windward Islands, surely it should be to him, rather than to Eddie? But he knew that this was not the way Fate operated; she handed out her benefits according to a scheme that was beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Perhaps the Greeks, he decided, had a better understanding of the world in predicating the existence of entirely arbitrary, capricious gods; such gods would take no account of hard work or public service when allocating places in the Windward Islands.

William switched on the kettle and took two cups out of the cupboard above the sink. “And you?” he asked. “What are you up to these days?”

He hoped that the answer to the question might reveal the reason for this unexpected, though welcome, call. She could hardly just have dropped in, particularly after fifteen years; people rarely did that in London - not any more.

“I'm working for the government,” said Angelica. “After I closed the bookshop, I answered an advertisement in the papers. A job in information processing.”

William wondered what information processing was. The trouble with job descriptions like that was that they frequently disguised something much more mundane. There used to be clerks, until they were abolished and became … what had clerks become? Perhaps they had disappeared altogether.

“It was at GCHQ,” Angelica continued. “You must know the place.”

William did. Government Communications Headquarters was a vast building outside Cheltenham, a place that bristled with aerials, even if mainly metaphorical ones, and hummed with electronic activity. So information processing in ordinary English was eavesdropping.

“How interesting,” he said. “Monitoring radio traffic.”

Angelica smiled. “Yes. Or the equivalent. I hadn't intended to get into that line of things, but it was a regular job and I wanted to get out of London for a while. And I found I really enjoyed it.”