Others, given such a cosmopolitan perspective upon life, might have headed for new pastures or at least the Spanish sun. But young Andrew had determined from an early age that he was for England and, more specifically, England was for him. A childhood of deprival and the odious boarding schools that had seared their imprint on him for all time had left him feeling at the age of twenty that he had paid more dues to England than any reasonable country was entitled to exact from him, and that from now on he would cease paying and collect.
The question was how. He had no craft or qualification, no proven skills outside the golf course and the bedroom. What he understood best was English rot, and what he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away. His first thought was Fleet Street. He was semi-literate and unfettered by principle. He had scores to settle. On the face of it he was perfectly cut out to join the new rich media class. But after two promising years as a cub reporter with the Loughborough Evening Messenger his career ended with a snap when a steamy article entitled ‘Sex Antics of our City Elders’ turned out to be based on the pillowtalk of the managing editor’s wife.
A great animal charity had him and for a while he believed he had found his true vocation. In splendid premises handy for theatres and restaurants the needs of Britain’s animals were thrashed out with passionate commitment. No gala premiere, white-tie banquet or foreign journey to observe the animals of other nations was too onerous for the charity’s highly paid officers to undertake. And everything might have come to fruition. The Instant Response Donkey Fund (Organiser: A. Osnard), the Veteran Greyhound Country Holiday Scheme (Finance Officer: A. Osnard) had been widely applauded when two of his superiors were invited to account for themselves to the Serious Fraud Office.
After that, for a giddy week he contemplated the Anglican Church, which traditionally offered swift promotion to glib, sexually active agnostics on the make. His piety evaporated when his researches revealed to him that catastrophic investment had reduced the Church to unwelcome Christian poverty. Desperate, he embarked on a succession of ill-planned adventures in life’s fast lane. Each was shortlived, each ended in failure. More than ever, he needed a profession.
‘How about the BBC?’ he asked the Secretary, back at his university appointments board for the fifth or fifteenth occasion.
The Secretary, who was grey-haired and old before his time, flinched.
‘That one’s over,’ he said.
Osnard proposed the National Trust.
‘Do you like old buildings?’ the Secretary asked, as if he feared that Osnard might blow them up.
‘Adore them. Total addict.’
‘Quite so.’
With trembling fingertips the Secretary lifted a corner of a file and peered inside.
‘I suppose they might just take you. You’re disreputable. Charm of a sort. Bilingual, if they like Spanish. Nothing lost by giving them a try, I dare say.’
‘The National Trust?’
‘No, no. The spies. Here. Take this to a dark corner and fill it in with invisible ink.’
Osnard had found his Grail. Here at last was his true Church of England, his rotten borough with a handsome budget. Here were the nation’s most private prayers, preserved as if in a museum. Here were sceptics, dreamers, zealots and mad abbots. And the cash to make them real.
Not that his enlistment was a foregone conclusion. This was the new slimline Service, free of the shackles of the past, classless in the great Tory tradition, with men and women democratically hand-picked from all walks of the white, privately-educated, suburban classes. And Osnard was as hand-picked as the rest of them:
‘This sad thing with your brother Lindsay – taking his own life – how do you think it affected you?’ a hollow-eyed espiocrat asked him with a frightful writhe from across the polished table.
Osnard had always detested Lindsay. He pulled a brave face.
‘It hurt a hell of a lot,’ he said.
‘In what way?’ Another writhe.
‘Makes you ask yourself what’s valuable. What you care about. What you’re put on earth to get on with.’