A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  In the five years Toby and Horst have known each other, Horst has risen swiftly through the ranks of the German Foreign Service to a position akin to Toby’s. Monika, despite the cares of motherhood, contrives to work three days a week for a human rights group that Toby rates highly. The evening sun is warm, the Berlin air crisp. Horst and Monika speak the north German that Toby is most comfortable with.

  ‘So, Toby’ – Horst, sounding not quite as casual as he means to. ‘Your Minister Quinn is Karl Marx in reverse, we hear. Who needs the state, when private enterprise will do the job for us? Under your new British socialism, we bureaucrats are redundant, you and I.’

  Unsure where Horst is coming from, Toby prevaricates:

  ‘I don’t remember putting that into his speech,’ he says, with a laugh.

  ‘But behind closed doors, that is what he is telling us, is it not?’ Horst insists, lowering his voice further. ‘And what I am asking you is, Toby, off the record, do you support your Mr Quinn’s proposition? It’s not improper to have an opinion, surely. As a private person, you are entitled to an off-the-record opinion about a private proposition.’

  Ella is crayoning a dinosaur. Monika is assisting her.

  ‘Horst, this is Greek to me,’ Toby protests, dropping his voice to match Horst’s. ‘What proposition? Made to whom? About what?’

  Horst seems undecided, then shrugs.

  ‘Okay. Then I may tell my boss that Minister Quinn’s Private Secretary knows nothing? You don’t know that your minister and his talented business associate are urging my boss to invest informally in a private corporation that specializes in a certain precious commodity? You don’t know that the commodity on offer is supposedly of higher quality than anything available on the open market? I may tell him this officially? Yes, Toby?’

  ‘Tell your boss whatever you like. Officially or otherwise. Then tell me what on earth the commodity is.’

  High-grade information, Horst replies.

  More commonly known as secret intelligence.

  Collected and disseminated in the private sphere only.

  Unadulterated.

  Untouched by government hands.

  And this talented business associate of his? Does he have a name? – Toby, incredulously.

  Crispin.

  Quite a persuasive fellow, says Horst.

  Very English.

  *

  ‘Tobe. A quickie, sir, if I may.’

  Since returning to London, Toby has found himself in an impossible quandary. Officially he knows nothing of his minister’s record of mixing private business with official duties, let alone of the scandal at Defence. If Toby goes to his regional director, who expressly forbade him to enquire into such matters, he will be betraying the confidences of Matti and Laura.

  And Toby as ever is conflicted. His own ambitions matter to him too. After almost three months as the minister’s Private Secretary, he has no desire to compromise whatever bond he has forged with him, tenuous though it is.

  He is wrestling with these abstractions when, at four o’clock one afternoon that same week, he receives the familiar summons over the ministerial phone. The mahogany door is for once ajar. He taps, shoves and enters.

  ‘Close it, please. Lock.’

  He closes, locks. The minister’s manner strikes him as a bit too affable for comfort: and the more so when he rises blithely from his desk and, with an air of schoolboyish conspiracy, steers him to the bay window. The newly installed music system, his pride, is playing Mozart. He lowers the volume but is careful not to dowse it.

  ‘All well with you, Tobe?’

  ‘All fine, thanks.’

  ‘Tobe, I very much fear I’m about to screw up yet another evening for you. Are you game for that?’

  ‘Of course, Minister. If it’s necessary’ – thinking, Oh Christ, Isabel, theatre, dinner, not another.

  ‘I’m receiving royalty tonight.’

  ‘Literally?’

  ‘Figuratively. But probably a damn sight richer.’ Chuckle. ‘You help out with the honours, make your mark, go home. How’s that?’

  ‘My mark, Minister?’

  ‘Circles within circles, Tobe. There’s a chance you may be invited aboard a certain very secret ship. I’ll say no more.’

  Aboard? Invited by whom? What ship? Under whose captaincy?

  ‘May I know the names of your royal visitors, Minister?’

  ‘Absolutely not’ – beaming smile of complicity – ‘I’ve spoken to the front gate. Two visitors for the minister at seven. No names, no pack drill. Out by eight thirty, nothing in the book.’

  Spoken to the front gate? The man’s got half a dozen underlings at his beck and call, all bursting to speak to the front gate for him.

  Returning to the anteroom, Toby rallies the reluctant staff. Judy, social secretary, is provided with a ministerial car and dispatched post-haste to Fortnum’s to buy two bottles of Dom Pérignon, one jar of foie gras, one smoked salmon pâté, a lemon and assorted crispbreads. She’s to use her own credit card and the minister will reimburse. Olivia, the diary secretary, phones the canteen and confirms that two bottles and two jars, contents unstated, can be kept on ice till seven provided it’s all right with Security. Grudgingly, it is. The canteen will supply an ice bucket and pepper. Only when all this is achieved may the remaining staff go home.

  Alone at his desk, Toby affects to work. At 6.35 he descends to the canteen. At 6.40 he is back in the anteroom spreading foie gras and smoked salmon pâté on crispbread. At 6.55 the minister emerges from his sanctum, inspects the display, approves it and places himself before the anteroom door. Toby stands behind him, on his left side, thus leaving the ministerial right hand free to greet.

  ‘He’ll be on the dot. Always is,’ Quinn promises. ‘So will she, the darling. She may be who she is, but she’s got his mindset.’

  Sure enough, as Big Ben strikes he hears footsteps approach down the corridor, two pairs, the one strong and slow, the other light and skittish. A man is outstriding a woman. Punctually at the last stroke, a peremptory rap resounds on the anteroom door. Toby starts forward but is too late. The door is thrust open and Jay Crispin enters.

  The identification is immediate and definite and so expected as to be anticlimactic. Jay Crispin, in the flesh at last, and high time too. Jay Crispin, who caused an unsung scandal at Defence and will never grace the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster again; who spirited Quinn from the lobby of his grand hotel in Brussels, sat in the front passenger seat of the Citroën sedan that took him to La Pomme du Paradis, breakfasted with him in the ministerial suite and orated from the lectern in Prague: not a ghost, but himself. Just a trim, regular-featured, rather obviously pretty man of no depth: a man, in short, to be seen through at a glance; so why on earth hasn’t Quinn seen through him?

  And halfway down Crispin’s left arm, clinging to it with one bejewelled claw, trips a tiny woman in a pink chiffon dress with matching hat and high-heeled shoes with diamanté buckles. Age? It depends which parts of the lady we are talking about, monsieur.

  Quinn reverently takes her hand and ducks his heavy boxer’s head over it in a crude half-bow. But Quinn and Crispin are old buddies reunited: see the rugged handshake, the manly shoulder-patting of the Jay-and-Fergus show.

  It’s Toby’s turn to be acknowledged. Quinn lavishly to the fore:

  ‘Maisie, allow me to present my invaluable Private Secretary, Toby Bell. Tobe, kindly pay your respects to Mrs Spencer Hardy of Houston, Texas, better known to the world’s elite as the one and only Miss Maisie.’

  A touch like gauze drawn across Toby’s palm. A Deep South murmur of ‘Why hullo there, Mr Bell!’ followed by a vampish cry of ‘Hey, now listen, Fergus, I’m the only belle around here!’ to gusts of sycophantic laughter in which Toby obligingly joins.

  ‘And Tobe, meet my old friend Jay Crispin. Old friend since – when, for God’s sake, Jay?’

  ‘Good to meet you, Toby,’ Crispin drawls in upper-end English
of the very best sort, taking Toby’s hand in a kinsman’s grasp and, without releasing it, vouchsafing him the sort of sturdy look that says: We’re the men who run the world.

  ‘And good to meet you’ – omitting the ‘sir’.

  ‘And we do what here, exactly?’ – Crispin, still gripping his hand.

  ‘He’s my Private Secretary, Jay! I told you. Bound to me body and soul and assiduous to a fault. Correct, Tobe?’

  ‘Pretty new to the job, aren’t we, Toby?’ – finally letting his hand go, but keeping the ‘we’ because they’re these two blokish chaps together.

  ‘Three months,’ the minister’s voice chimes in again excitedly. ‘We’re twins. Correct, Tobe?’

  ‘And where were we before, may one enquire?’ – Crispin, sleek as a cat and about as trustworthy.

  ‘Berlin. Madrid. Cairo,’ Toby replies with deliberate carelessness, fully aware that he’s supposed to be making his mark, and determined not to. ‘Wherever I’m sent, really’ – you’re too fucking close. Get out of my airspace.

  ‘Tobe was posted out of Egypt just when Mubarak’s little local difficulties started to appear on the horizon, weren’t you, Tobe?’

  ‘As it were.’

  ‘See much of the old boy?’ – Crispin enquires genially, his face puckering in earnest sympathy.

  ‘On a couple of occasions. From a distance’ – mainly I dealt with his torturers.

  ‘What do you reckon to his chances? Sits uneasy on his throne, from all one hears. Army a broken reed, Muslim Brotherhood rattling at the bars: I’m not sure I’d like to be in poor Hosni’s shoes right now.’

  Toby is still hunting for a suitably anodyne reply when Miss Maisie rides to his rescue:

  ‘Mr Bell. Colonel Hosni Mubarak is my friend. He is America’s friend, and he was put on earth by God to make peace with the Jews, to fight communism and jihadist terror. Anybody seeking the downfall of Hosni Mubarak in his hour of need is an Iscariot, a liberal and a surrender monkey, Mr Bell.’

  ‘So how about Berlin?’ Crispin suggests, as if this outburst has not taken place. ‘Toby was in Berlin, darling. Stationed there. Where we were just days ago. Remember?’ – back to Toby – ‘what dates are we talking here?’

  In a wooden voice, Toby recites for him the dates he was in Berlin.

  ‘What sort of work, actually, or aren’t you allowed to say?’ – innuendo.

  ‘Jack of all trades, really. Whatever came up,’ Toby replies, with assumed casualness.

  ‘But you’re straight – not one of them?’ – tipping Toby the insider’s smile. ‘You must be, or you wouldn’t be here, you’d be the other side of the river’ – knowing glance for the one and only Miss Maisie of Houston, Texas.

  ‘Political Section, actually. General duties,’ Toby replies in the same wooden voice.

  ‘Well, I’m damned’ – turning delightedly to Miss Maisie – ‘Darling, the cat’s out of the bag. Young Toby here was one of Giles Oakley’s bright boys in Berlin during the run-up to Iraqi Freedom.’

  Boys? Fuck you.

  ‘Do I know Mr Oakley?’ Miss Maisie enquires, coming closer to give Toby another look.

  ‘No, darling, but you’ve heard of him. Oakley was the brave chap who led the in-house Foreign Office revolt. Got up the round robin to our Foreign Secretary urging him not to go after Saddam. Did you draft it for him, Toby, or did Oakley and his chums cobble it together all by themselves?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t draft anything of the sort, and I’ve never heard of such a letter, if it ever existed, which I seriously doubt,’ the astonished Toby snaps in perfect truth as elsewhere in his mind he grapples, not for the first time, with the enigma that is Giles Oakley.

  ‘Well, jolly good luck to you, anyway,’ says Crispin dismissively and, turning to Quinn, leaves Toby to contemplate at his leisure the same straight, suspect back that he glimpsed through the frosted glass of his minister’s hotel suite in Brussels, and again through the castle window in Prague.

  *

  Urgently google Mrs Spencer Hardy of Houston, Texas, widow and sole heiress of the late Spencer K. Hardy III, founder of Spencer Hardy Incorporated, a Texas-based multinational corporation trading in pretty well everything. Under her preferred sobriquet of Miss Maisie voted Republican Benefactress of the Year; Chairperson, the Americans for Christ Legion; Honorary President of a cluster of not-for-profit pro-life and family-value organizations; Chair of the American Institute for Islamic Awareness. And, in what looked almost like a recent add-on: President and CEO of an otherwise undescribed body calling itself Ethical Outcomes Incorporated.

  Well, well, he thought: a red-hot evangelist and ethical to boot. Not a given. Not by any means.

  *

  For days and nights, Toby agonizes over the choices before him. Go running to Diana and tell all? – ‘I disobeyed you, Diana. I know what happened at Defence and now it’s happening all over again to us.’ But what happened at Defence is none of his business, as Diana forcefully informed him. And the Foreign Office has many hellholes earmarked for discontents and whistle-blowers.

  Meanwhile, the omens around him are daily multiplying. Whether this is Crispin’s work he can only guess, but how else to explain the ostentatious cooling of the minister’s attitude towards him? Entering or leaving his Private Office, Quinn now grants him barely a nod. It’s no longer Tobe but Toby, a change he would once have welcomed. Not now. Not since he failed to make his mark and be invited aboard a certain very secret ship. Incoming phone calls from Whitehall’s heavy hitters that were until now routinely passed through the Private Secretary are rerouted to the minister’s desk by way of one of several newly installed direct lines. In addition to the heavily flagged despatch boxes from Downing Street that Quinn alone may handle, there are the sealed black canisters from the US Embassy. One morning a super-strong safe mysteriously appears in the Private Office. The minister alone has the combination to it.

  And only last weekend, when Quinn is about to be driven to his country house in his official car, he does not require Toby to pack his briefcase for him with essential papers for his attention. He will do it himself, thank you, Toby, and behind locked doors. And no doubt, when Quinn arrives the other end, he will embrace the rich Canadian alcoholic wife whom his Party’s spin doctors have ruled unfit for public presentation, pat his dog and his daughter, and once more lock himself away, and read them.

  It therefore comes like an act of divine providence when Giles Oakley, now revealed as the closet author of a round-robin letter to the Foreign Secretary about the insanity of invading Iraq, calls Toby on his BlackBerry with an invitation to dine that same evening:

  ‘Schloss Oakley, 7.45. Wear what you like and stick around afterwards for a Calvados. Is that a yes?’

  It is a yes, Giles. It is a yes, even if it means cancelling another pair of theatre tickets.

  *

  Senior British diplomats who have been restored to their motherland have a way of turning their houses into overseas hirings. Giles and Hermione are no exception. Schloss Oakley, as Giles has determinedly christened it, is a sprawling twenties villa on the outer fringes of Highgate, but it could as well be their residence in Grunewald. Outside, the same imposing gates and immaculate gravel sweep, weed free; inside, the same scratched Chippendale-style furniture, close carpeting and contract Portuguese caterers.

  Toby’s fellow dinner guests include a counsellor at the German Embassy and his wife, a visiting Swedish ambassador to Ukraine, and a French woman pianist called Fifi and her lover Jacques. Fifi, who is fixated on alpacas, holds the table in thrall. Alpacas are the most considerate beasts on earth. They even produce their young with exquisite tact. She advises Hermione to get herself a pair. Hermione says she would only be jealous of them.

  Dinner over, Hermione commands Toby to the kitchen, ostensibly to give a hand with coffee. She is fey, willowy and Irish and speaks in hushed, revelatory gasps while her brown eyes spark to their rhythm.

  ‘This
Isabel you’re shagging’ – poking a forefinger inside his shirt front and tickling his chest hairs with the tip of her lacquered fingernail.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Is she married like that Dutch floozie you had in Berlin?’

  ‘Isabel and her husband split up months ago.’

  ‘Is she blonde like the other one?’

  ‘As it happens, yes, she is blonde.’

  ‘I’m blonde. Was your mother blonde at all?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Hermione.’

  ‘You know you only go with the married ones because you can give them back when you’ve finished with them, don’t you?’

  He knows nothing. Is she telling him he can borrow her too, and give her back to Oakley when he’s finished with her? God forbid.

  Or was she – a thought that only came to him now as he sipped his coffee at his pavement table in Soho and pursued his sightless contemplation of the passers-by – was she softening him up in advance of her husband’s grilling?

  *

  ‘Nice chat with Hermione?’ Giles asks sociably from his armchair, pouring Toby a generous shot of very old Calvados.

  The last guests have taken their leave. Hermione has gone to bed. For a moment they are back in Berlin, with Toby about to vent his callow personal opinions and Oakley about to shoot them down in flames.

  ‘Super, as always, thanks, Giles.’

  ‘Did she invite you to Mourne in the summer?’

  Mourne, her castle in Ireland, where she is reputed to take her lovers.

  ‘I don’t think she did, actually.’

  ‘Snap it up, is my advice. Unspoilt views, decent house, nice bit of water. Shooting, if you’re into it, which I’m not.’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘How’s love?’ – the eternal question, every time they meet.

  ‘Love’s fine, thanks.’

  ‘Still Isabel?’

  ‘Just.’

  It is Oakley’s pleasure to switch topics without warning and expect Toby to catch up. He does so now.