The Tailor of Panama byJ John le Carré

And a hand-delivered bill to Osnard in the morning.

Her own social life fascinates him almost as much as Delgado’s. The lame get-togethers with other Zonians, now exiles in their own land, her membership of a Radical Forum that till now has seemed to Pendel about as radical as warm beer, a Cooperative Christian Fellowship Group that she attends out of loyalty to her late mother, become subjects of vast interest to him and to his tailoring notebook, where they are recorded in an impenetrable code of his invention, a mixture of abbreviations, initials and deliberate bad writing comprehensive only to the trained eye. For unknown to Louisa, her life is now inseparably entwined with Mickie’s. In Pendel’s head if nowhere else, wife and friend link destinies as the Silent Opposition extends its secret frontiers to embrace dissident students, the Christian conscience and good-spirited Panamanians who live beyond the bridge. A lodge of former Zonians establishes itself in greatest secrecy, assembling by twos and threes in Balboa after dark.

Pendel has never been so close to her when they are apart, or so estranged from her when they are together. Sometimes he is shocked to feel himself superior to her, until he realises this is only natural since he knows so much more about her life than she does, is indeed the sole observer of her other, magical personsa as intrepid secret agent inside the enemy’s headquarters, targeted at the Monstrous Conspiracy to which the Silent Opposition with its network of devoted agents holds the key.

Sometimes, it is true, Pendel’s mask slips and artistic vanity gets the better of him. He tells himself he is performing her a favour by touching everything she does with the wand of his secret creativity. Saving her. Shouldering her burden. Protecting her physically and morally from deceit and all its dire consequences. Keeping her out of jail. Sparing her the daily grind of many-stranded thinking. Leaving her thoughts and actions free to connect in a combined and healthy life together, instead of toiling in separate locked-off chambers like his own, never talking to each other except in whispers. But when the mask is replaced, there she is: his intrepid agent, his comrade-in-arms, desperately committed to the preser-vation of civilisation as we know it, if necessary by unlawful, not to say bent, means.

Seized with an overwhelming sense of his indebtedness towards Louisa, Pendel prevails on her to ask Delgado for a weekday off and takes her on an early-morning picnic: alone, just us, Lou, one-to-one, like before we had the kids. He arranges for the Oakleys to do the school run in place of him and drives her to Gamboa, to a beloved hilltop called Plantation Loop that dates back to their days in Calidonia, up a metalled US Army snake-road through dense forest to a ridge that is part of the Continental Divide between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The symbolism of his choice does not escape him: the isthmus, ours to watch over, little Panama in our sacred care. It is an unearthly, changeful spot, buffeted by contrary winds and closer to the Garden of Eden than to the twenty-first century, despite the grimy sixty-foot-high cream-coloured golfball aerial that is the reason for the road in the first place: put there to listen to the Chinese or the Russians or the Japanese or the Nicaraguans or the Colombians, but now officially deaf – unless, that is, out of some surviving instinct for intrigue, it is able to recover its hearing in the presence of two English spies seeking solace from the tension of their daily sacrifice.

Above them, vultures and eagles swim in shoals through colourless, unmoving skies. Through a cleft in the trees, they can trace a valley of green hillsides all the way to the Bay of Panama. It is still only eight in the morning but the sweat pours off them as they return to the four-track for iced tea from a thermos and mince pies that Pendel has made the night before, her favourite.

‘It’s the best life, Lou,’ he assures her gallantly as they sit side by side holding hands in the front of the four-track with the engine running and the air-conditioning on full.