Free Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré

Instead,I get his big bony hand, reached towards me across the table.
    ‘Then we’re all right, aren’t we?’ he says.
    And I shake his hand in return and say, yes we are, and only then does he fetch us another lager.
    *
    For the next dozen-odd Monday-evening games I made not the smallest effort to deny or water down anything he said to me, which meant that from our second encounter onwards – Match No. 2in my diary – no post-badminton session at our
Stammtisch
was complete without Ed launching himself on a political soliloquy concerning some burning matter of the day.
    And he got better over time. Forget his raw opening salvo. Ed was not raw. He was just deeply involved. And – easy to say it now – by being so deeply involved, obsessive. He had also, by Match No. 4 at the latest, revealed himselfas a well-informed news junkie with every twist and turn on the world political stage – be it Brexit, Trump, Syria or some other long-running disaster – such a matter of personal concern to him that it wouldhave been downright inconsiderate on my part not to allow him his head. The biggest gift you can give the young is time, and it was always in my mind that I hadn’t given Steff enough of it,and perhaps Ed’s parents hadn’t been any too generous in that respect either.
    My
chers collègues
wanted dearly to believe that, by granting him the time of day at all, I led him on. They pointed to our age difference and what they were pleased to call my ‘professional charm’. Sheer drivel. Once Ed had established that in his simple bestiary I was broadly a sympathetic ear, I could have been astranger sitting next to him on the bus. Even now I don’t recall a single occasion when my own opinions, even at their most sympathetic, made the least impression on him. He was just grateful to have found himself an audience that didn’t do shock, didn’t oppose him or simply walk away from him and talk to someone else, because I’m not sure how long he would have sustained an ideological or politicalargument without losing his rag. The fact that his opinions on any given topic were predictable before he opened his mouth did not disturb me. All right, he was a single-issue man. I knew the breed. I’d recruited a few. He was geopolitically alert. He was young, highly intelligent within the margins of his fixed opinions, and – though I never had occasion to put it to the test – quick to angerwhen they were opposed.
    What did I personally get out of the relationship, apart from our gritty duels on the badminton court? – another question to which my
chers collègues
persistently returned. At the time of my inquisition, I had no formed answer at my fingertips. Only in its aftermath did I recall the sense of moral commitment that Ed imparted, how it acted on me like an appeal to my conscience– followed by the broad, slightly hangdog grin that washed it all away. Added together, they gave me a sense of providing some sort of refuge for an imperilled species. AndI must have said something of this kind to Prue when I suggested I bring him home for a drink, or invite him to Sunday lunch. But Prue in her wisdom was unpersuaded:
    ‘It sounds to me as if you’re doing each other a power,darling. Keep him to yourself and don’t let me get in the way.’
    So I gladly took her advice, and kept him to myself. Our routine never varied, even at the end. We would play our hearts out on the court, collect our jackets, maybe fling a scarf round our necks and set course for our
Stammtisch
, loser makes straight for the bar. We’d exchange a few pleasantries – maybe relive a point or two. He’dask vaguely after my family, I’d ask him whether he’d had a good weekend, and we’d both give bland answers. Then there’d be a kind of expectant silence on his part which I quickly learned not to fill, and he’d launch on his dissertation of the day. And I’d be agreeing with him, part-agreeing with him or at the most saying woah, Ed,