Another note in the handwritten scrawl of his predecessor. The ambassador intended to lay a wreath at any British military cemetery that was still fit to visit.

"Stormed at with shot and shell, While horse and hero fell, They that had fought so well Came thro' the jaws of Death, Back from the mouth of Hell." Good for Sir Sylvester if he was going to remember Cardigan's heroes with a poppy wreath, but there was no sign of the cemetery yet. That he would have to do himself.

Holt worked late that first day, and he didn't see Jane.

Only a cryptic message on his internal phone to state that she was going straight from the office to the Oklahoma rehearsal, that he should get his beauty sleep.

For young Holt the first week flew. He would have sworn he had learned more from life in the capital of the Soviet Union in that one week than he had gathered togetherin two years shuttling paper, and calling it analysis, on the Soviet Desk at FCO.

He went with the ambassador to the Foreign Ministry and was present at a preliminary planning meeting with the Secretariat of the Deputy Foreign Minister for the arrival in Moscow the following month of the Inter-Parliamentary Union from London. He attended a reception thrown by the Foreign Trade crowd for a Scots firm working on the natural gas pipeline across Siberia. He explored the Metro. He was taken out to dinner with Jane, by the Second Secretary Commercial andhis wife. He was invited to supper, with Jane, by the first Secretary Political and his wife. He went to the disco, with Jane, at the British Club. He drove out of the city, with Jane, in the British Leyland Maestro that he had been allocated, to the embassy's dacha for aweekend picnic with her boss, the military attache, and his wife. That he was determined to be circumspect, and that Jane had the curse, were the only drawbacks.