From Fitzroy's Private Diary (Extract 45)

I find it enormously hard to say goodbye. I don’t like finality and ends set in stone. I’ve always been one to wander off the beaten track and not rule things out. So, the finality of a goodbye is an anathema to me. Goodbyes make me feel nauseous.

Of course, there are people I’m only too happy to see the backs of. Down the years I have killed people in the line of duty, but in truth, I mostly avoid killing, even when it would make me feel very much better. To those whose lives I am not permitted to foreshorten, but who deserve it, I wish the heartiest of goodbyes in the hope that fate takes them. It is a small balm to my soul.

I am perfectly content with my own mortality. I admit, I am rather amused by the thought of being shot dead by an aggrieved young husband when I am discovered, at the age of one hundred years or so, in flagrante delicto with his wife. However, it is the potential death of colleagues, associates, and friends, that troubles me the most. The thought that I might not be around to prevent misadventure to their persons fills me with guilt. Thus, I adopted the habit of never saying goodbye to anyone I even vaguely like.

I do not like to acknowledge that some partings will be final. When I say goodbye to a colleague, I always feel that I am admitting the possibility that one or other of us might die. It feels like the word is a curse. I much prefer ‘till later’, or even, if I am showing my more poetic side, ‘Adieu’. I find women at the end of a love affair find it tearfully titillating to be ‘adieu’ed. And who am I to deny them than final pleasure as I trot off over the horizon to pastures new?

I don’t say goodbye to Euphemia. I walk out, or disappear, or even storm away. I prefer to leave her with an exit that she might remember, if I can, but I don’t say goodbye. If I looked her in the face and thought I was saying goodbye because she might die on a mission, I couldn’t let her go. I probably couldn’t do it with half the young spies I send out into the field. I don’t want either of us to admit the possibility of defeat that the word goodbye raises in my mind.

Of course, I did the same with Hope, which confused her mightily. She has been brought up to be almost intolerably polite. Euphemia once told me, when I left White Orchards one Easter without seeing the child, she spent the rest of the day searching the house for me, convinced I was ‘only hiding’. Apparently, she cried herself to sleep. Since then I have had to alter my modus operandi with young children. Fortunately, apart from Hope, I rarely encounter any. Anyway, for her, I have condescended to say goodbye to her bear, ‘Fitzy’, a stuffed toy I bought her, and which she is hopelessly attached to. I say goodbye to the bear, not only because it helps her understand I am about to depart, but because, quite frankly, I would be delighted if I never saw my disgusting drool-soaked namesake again.