When Personnel buried the hatchet, said the wits in the Third Room, he took compass-bearings on the grave.
Andrew Osnard, Stormont repeated to himself. Bird. A brace of osnards flew over. Gully’s just shot an osnard. Very funny. A Friend. One of those friends. A bachelor. A Spanish-speaker. A full-term sentence unless he gets remission for bad behaviour. Rank unknown, everything unknown. Our new Political Officer. Sponsored by a body that doesn’t exist. A done thing, arriving in one week with unsexed assistant. Arriving to do what? To whom? To replace whom? One Nigel Stormont? He was not being fanciful, he was being realistic, even if Paddy’s cough was stretching his nerves.
Five years ago it was unthinkable that some faceless upstart from the wrong side of the park, trained to hang around street corners and steam open mail, would be considered a suitable replacement for a pure-bred foreign servant of Stormont’s class. But that was before the days of Treasury streamlining and the trumpeted recruitment of outside managerial skills to drag the Foreign Service by the scruff of the neck into the twenty-first century.
God, how he loathed this government. Little England, plc. Directed by a team of lying tenth-raters not fit to run an amusement arcade in Clacton-on-Sea. Conservatives who would strip the country of its last lightbulb to conserve their power. Who thought the Civil Service a luxury as expendable as world survival or the nation’s health, and the Foreign Service the most expendable luxury of the lot. No. In the present climate of quack remedies and quick fixes, it was not at all unthinkable that the post of Head of Chancery, Panama, should be voted redundant, and Nigel Stormont with it.
Why should we duplicate? he could hear the quangos of Planning & Application squawking from their one-day-a-week, thirty-five-thousand-a-year thrones. Why have one chap doing the posh work and another chap doing the dirty work? Why not put both jobs under one hat? Fly the Osnard bird in. And as soon as he’s got the lie of the land, fly the Stormont bird out. Save a job! Rationalise a post! And we’ll all go out to lunch on the taxpayer.
Personnel would love it. So would Maltby.
Stormont drifted round his room, poking at shelves. Who’s Who contained not a single Osnard. Neither did Debrett’s. Neither, he assumed, did Birds of Britain. The London telephone directory passed from Osmotherly to Osner without drawing breath. But it was four years old. He flipped through a couple of old Foreign Office redbooks, searching the Spanish-speaking embassies for a sign of former Osnard incarnations. None spotted. Not settled, not in flight. He looked up Planning & Application in the Whitehall Directory. Maltby was right. No such body existed. He called Reg the administration officer to discuss the vexed issue of the leak in the roof of his hiring.
‘Poor Paddy’s having to chase round the spare bedroom with pudding basins every time it rains, Reg,’ he complained. ‘And it rains a hell of a lot.’
Reg was locally employed and lived with a Panamanian hairdresser called Gladys. Nobody had met Gladys, and Stormont suspected she was a boy. For the fifteenth time they went over the history of the bankrupt contractor, the pending law suit and the unhelpful attitude of the Panamanian Protocol department.
‘Reg, what are we doing about office space for Mr Osnard? Should we be discussing it?’
‘I don’t know what we should be discussing and what we shouldn’t, Nigel. I’ve been taking my orders from the Ambassador, haven’t I?’
‘And what orders has His Excellency been pleased to issue?’
‘It’s the east corridor, Nigel. All of it. It’s brand new locks for his steel door, they came by courier yesterday, Mr Osnard to bring his own keys. It’s steel cupboards in the old visitors’ waiting room for his papers, combinations to be set by Mr Osnard on arrival, no record to be taken, as if we would. And I’m to make sure he’s got lots and lots of points for his electronics. He’s not a cook, is he?’
‘I don’t know what he is, Reg, but I’ll bet you do.’
‘Well, he sounds very nice on the telephone, Nigel, I will say. Like the BBC but human.’