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gravy.”
    “I think we have some quaggas here already.” Teddy flipped the top of a cigarette pack and began to write the word inside it.
    “En, gee, oh,” George said.
    “We will miss you here, George,” said Teddy. His voice had lost its usual overlay of cab driver Milwaukee.
    “I’ll miss you too.” George picked up his glass of Chivas Regal and shielded his eyes with it.
    “Perhaps you will not be happy there, I think. You will come back. Aristide will leave the door open on that job, I know—”
    “It’d be nice to think so.”
    “When I am President, you can be Minister of Defence. Peres I will post as ambassador to Youkay. The cold weather isgood for that man, I think; maybe his nuts freeze off.”
    Outside the club, the night was warm and palpable as steam. At the opening of the courtyard on to the street, the two men embraced for a moment. Teddy smelled strongly of Sun Top and more faintly of—
Vera?
    “I’ve got the Humber. You want a ride?”
    “No,” George said, “I’ll walk, thanks.”
    “Ciao, George. Next time, I knock you for a loop, okay?”
    “If you say so. Goodnight, Teddy—”
    The minister crossed the street to the waterfront where his car was parked on the cinders under a lone acacia.
    “Hey-George?”
    “Yes?”
    “Come back and be a quango!”

    The Rua Kwame Nkruma was homesick for Lisbon. Portuguese merchants had built it as the Rua Alcantara, a pretty daydream of steep terraced houses with front yards full of flowers, displaced by twenty-eight degrees of latitude. Gardens had burned dry, pastel stucco fronts were cracking up like icing on a mouldy cake, orange pantiles had tumbled into the street and wooden balconies were peeling away from their parent walls.
    A few of the houses had been recolonized as government offices. Others had been used by the army as convenient hoardings on which to paint Party messages. In letters that were six feet high, the front of Number 12 said:
    NO TO LAZINESS!
    NO TO OPPORTUNISM!
    YES TO LABOUR!
    YES TO STUDY!
    At night the street was dark and empty, the moonlit slogan as lonely as a film playing on the screen of a deserted cinema.
    One jumpy electric light showed on the street, from behindthe first-floor shutters of Number 28. The house was in rather better shape than its neighbours. The grizzled banana palm in the front garden was as tall as the house itself, whose bleached wooden columns held up a flirtatious structure of narrow balconies, carved trellises and fretwork screens. It looked like a place designed to keep secrets in. All the house now contained was George.
    Stooping under the low ceiling, he put a pan of water to boil on the calor gas ring and punctured the top of a tin of steak and kidney pudding to stop it from exploding as it warmed. A small lizard was spreadeagled on the whitewashed wall over the sink. As George dropped the steak and kidney pudding into the saucepan, it skeetered up the wall and hid in a crack, its lidless eye a wary needlepoint of light.
    George was rattled. He needed time to think. He poured himself a tumblerful of Dão and sank it like beer.
    He could recite the words of his daughter’s letter by heart. What
was
her game? The tone was imperious. It had the clear ring of Admiral’s Orders.
Signal your intentions
…
Report immediately upon arrival
… George was evidently supposed to snap his heels and salute. Did the girl think he’d entered on his dotage? The giveaway, of course, was the word
we
. It had stood out on the page like an atoll in an ocean. So Sheila was in the plural now. George guessed that the house in Clapham must be some sort of commune for women. The bold instructions didn’t come from Sheila; they must issue from the entire sisterhood. When she wrote of “habitable rooms”, George saw a cloister of bare guest chambers, with books of meditation stacked neatly by each narrow single bed, and heard the swish of the sisters’ long gowns as they patrolled the corridor outside. It