My master, Peter Smith, is Welsh. This may or may not explain a lot. However that is what he is. He is about sixty years old, slightly overweight and slightly bad tempered. He also knows exactly what he wants. He now lives a fairly solitary life with me in a little house very close to the Amphitheatre in Arles. Both of us enjoy eating, sleeping and drinking and doing very little. He reads a lot and I watch television. He also cooks and I eat what he cooks. A perfect relationship, I would have thought.

 

His main characteristic is that he has some very singular ideas about friendship and loyalty as do I. We both have very few friends but those we have are very important to us and they command our complete loyalty.

 

Neither of us has much time for others and we expect much of those who we let into our trust.

 

Smith has spent most of his life being both a teacher of art history and a spy, usually at the same time. His work for the Special Intelligence Service in the UK (the SIS) was, at best, part time, but over nearly forty years he gained the reputation of being an extremely effective, if occasionally rather violent, member of the Service. He was a killer of a rather intellectual sort. That is perhaps why we get on so well together. Us greyhounds are the same sort of creatures. We are either killing something or asleep.

 

Neither of us suffers fools very gladly and we don’t, when awake, have much to do with the world unless we have to. Both of us have now retired and live in the hope that nothing of our pasts comes back to haunt us.

 

Unfortunately we are both wrong.