A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  His posting to Beirut followed five days later.

  3

  The sensational arrival of Kit and Suzanna Probyn in the remote North Cornish village of St Pirran did not at first receive the ecstatic welcome that it merited. The weather was foul and the village of a mood to match: a dank February day of dripping sea-mist, and every footstep clanking down the village street like a judgement. Then at evening around pub time, the disturbing news: the gyppos were back. A camper – new, most likely stolen – with an upcountry registration and curtains in the side windows had been sighted by young John Treglowan from his father’s tractor as he drove his cows to milking:

  ‘They was up there, bold as brass, on Manor parkland, the exact same spot they was last time, proud of that clump of old pines.’

  Any brightly coloured washing on the line then, John?

  ‘In this weather? Not even gyppos.’

  Children at all, John?

  ‘None as I did see, but most likely they was hid away till they knowed the coast was clear.’

  Horses then?

  ‘No horses,’ John Treglowan conceded. ‘Not yet.’

  And still only the one camper, then?

  ‘You wait till tomorrow, and we’ll have half a dozen of the buggers, see if we don’t.’

  They duly waited.

  And come the following evening were still waiting. A dog had been spotted, but not a gyppo dog, or not to look at, it being a plump yellow Labrador accompanied by a big-striding bloke in a broad mackintosh hat and one of those Driza-Bone raincoats down to his ankles. And the bloke didn’t look any more gyppo than the dog did – with the result that John Treglowan and his two brothers, who had been spoiling to go up there and have a quiet word with them, same as last time, were restrained.

  Which was as well, because next morning the camper with its curtains and upcountry registration and yellow Labrador in the back rolled up at the post-office mini-market, and a nicer spoken pair of retired foreigners you couldn’t wish to ask for, according to the postmistress – foreigner being anyone who had the ill taste to come from east of the Tamar river. She didn’t go as far as to declare they were ‘gentry’ but there was a clear hint of quality in her description.

  But that don’t solve the question, do it?

  Not by a long way, it don’t.

  Don’t begin to.

  Because what right has anyone to go camping up the Manor in the first place? Who’s given them permission then? The commander’s bone-headed trustees over to Bodmin? Or those shark lawyers up in London? And how about if they’re paying rent then? What would that mean? It would mean another bloody caravan site, and us with two already and can’t fill them, not even when ’tis season.

  But as to asking the trespassers themselves: well, that wouldn’t be proper now, would it?

  It wasn’t till the camper appeared at Ben Painter’s garage, which does a line in do-it-yourself hardware, and a tall, angular, cheery fellow in his sixties jumped out, that speculation came to an abrupt halt:

  ‘Now, sir. Would you be Ben, by any chance?’ he begins, leaning forward and downward, Ben being eighty years old and five feet tall on a good day.

  ‘I’m Ben,’ Ben concedes.

  ‘Well, I’m Kit. And what I need, Ben, is a pair of man-sized metal-cutters. Sort of chaps that’ll snip through an iron bar this size,’ he explained, making a ring of his finger and thumb.

  ‘You off to prison then?’ Ben enquires.

  ‘Well, not just at this moment, Ben, thank you,’ replies the same Kit, with a raucous hah! of a laugh. ‘There’s this giant padlock on the stable door, you see. A real thug of a chap, all rusted up and no key in sight. There’s a place on the key board where it used to hang, but it’s not hanging there any more. And believe you me, there’s nothing more stupid than an empty key-hook,’ he asserts heartily.

  ‘The stable door down the Manor, you was talking about then, was it?’ says Ben, after prolonged reflection.

  ‘The very one,’ Kit agrees.

  ‘Should be full of empty bottles, that stable should, knowing the commander.’

  ‘Highly likely. And I hope very shortly to be picking up the deposit on them.’

  Ben reflects on this too. ‘Deposit’s not allowed no more, deposit isn’t.’

  ‘Well now, I suppose it isn’t. So what I’ll really be doing is running them down to the bottle bank for recycling, won’t I?’ says Kit patiently.

  But this doesn’t satisfy Ben either:

  ‘Only I don’t think I should be doing that, should I?’ he objects, after another age. ‘Not now you’ve told me what it’s for. Not the Manor. I’d be aiding and abetting. Not unless you own the bloody place.’

  To which Kit, with evident reluctance because he doesn’t want to make old Ben look silly, explains that while he personally doesn’t own the Manor, his dear wife Suzanna does.

  ‘She’s the late commander’s niece, you see, Ben. Spent her absolute happiest childhood years here. Nobody else in the family wanted to take the place on, so the trustees decided to let us have a go.’

  Ben absorbs this.

  ‘She a Cardew, then, is she? Your wife?’

  ‘Well, she was, Ben. She’s a Probyn now. Been a Probyn for thirty-three glorious years, I’m proud to say.’

  ‘She Suzanna, then? Suzanna Cardew as rode the hunt when she were nine year old? Got out in front of the Master, had to have her horse hauled back by the Field Master.’

  ‘That sounds like Suzanna.’

  ‘Well I’m buggered,’ says Ben.

  A couple of days later an official letter arrived at the post office that put paid to any lingering suspicions. It was addressed not to any old Probyn but to Sir Christopher Probyn, who, according to John Treglowan, who’d looked him up on the Internet, had been some sort of ambassador or commissioner, was it, to a bunch of islands in the Caribbean that was still supposed to be British, and had a medal to show for it too.

  *

  And from that day on, Kit and Suzanna, as they insisted on being called, could do no wrong, even if the levellers in the village would have wished it different. Where the commander in his later years was remembered as a lonely, misanthropic drunk, the Manor’s new incumbents threw themselves on village life with such zest and goodwill as even the sourest couldn’t deny. It didn’t matter that Kit was practically rebuilding the Manor single-handed: come Fridays, he’d be down at Community House with an apron round his waist, serving suppers at Seniors’ Stake-Nite and staying for the washing-up. And Suzanna, who they say is ill but you wouldn’t know it, like as not helping out with the Busy Bees or sorting church accounts with Vicar after the treasurer went and died, or down Primary School for the Sure Starters’ concert, or up Church Hall to help set up for Farmers’ Market, or delivering deprived city kids to their country hosts for a week’s holiday away from the Smoke, or running somebody’s wife to the Treliske in Truro to see her sick husband. And stuck-up? – forget it, she was just like you and me, ladyship or not.

  Or if Kit was out shopping and spotted you across the street, it was a pound to a penny he’d be bounding towards you between the traffic with his arm up, needing to know how your daughter was enjoying her gap year or how your wife was doing after her dad passed away – warm-hearted to a fault, he was, no side to him either, and never forgets a name. As for Emily, their daughter, who’s a doctor up in London, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her: well, whenever she came down she brought the sunshine with her, ask John Treglowan, who goes into a swoon every time he sees her, dreaming up all the aches and pains he hasn’t got, just to have her cure them for him! Well, a cat may look at a queen, they do say.

  So it came as no surprise to anybody, except possibly Kit himself, when Sir Christopher Probyn of the Manor was paid the unprecedented, the unique honour, of becoming the first non-Cornishman ever to be elected Official Opener and Lord of Misrule for Master Bailey’s Annual Fayre, held by ancient rite in Bailey’s Meadow in the village o
f St Pirran on the first Sunday after Easter.

  *

  ‘Funky but not over the top is Mrs Marlow’s advice,’ said Suzanna, busying herself in front of the cheval mirror and talking through the open doorway to Kit’s dressing room. ‘We’re to preserve our dignity, whatever that’s supposed to mean.’

  ‘So not my grass skirt,’ Kit called back in disappointment. ‘Still, Mrs Marlow knows best,’ he added resignedly, Mrs Marlow being their elderly, part-time housekeeper, inherited from the commander.

  ‘And remember you’re not just today’s Opener,’ Suzanna warned, giving a last affirmative tug at her stock. ‘You’re Master of Misrule too. They’ll expect you to be funny. But not too funny. And none of your blue jokes. There’ll be Methodists present.’

  The dressing room was the one part of the Manor Kit had vowed never to lay his do-it-yourself fingers on. He loved its faded Victorian wallpaper, the clunky antique writing desk set in its own alcove, the worn sash window looking out over the orchard. And today, oh gladness, the aged pear and apple trees were in blossom, thanks to some timely pruning by Mrs Marlow’s husband, Albert.

  Not that Kit had just stepped into the commander’s shoes. He had added bits of himself too. On the fruitwood tallboy stood a statuette of the victorious Duke of Wellington gloating over a crouching Napoleon in a sulk: bought in a Paris flea market on Kit’s first foreign tour. On the wall hung a print of a Cossack musketeer shoving a pike down the throat of an Ottoman janissary: Ankara, First Secretary, Commercial.

  Yanking open his wardrobe in search of whatever was funky but not over the top, he let his eye wander over other relics of his diplomatic past.

  My black morning coat and spongebag trousers? They’d think I was a bloody undertaker.

  Dinner tails? Head waiter. And in this heat daft, for the day against all prediction had dawned cloudless and radiant. He gave an ecstatic bellow:

  ‘Eureka!’

  ‘You’re not in the bath, are you, Probyn?’

  ‘Drowning, waving, the lot!’

  A yellowing straw boater from his Cambridge years has caught his eye and, hanging beneath it, a striped blazer of the same period: perfect for my Brideshead look. An ancient pair of white ducks will complete the ensemble. And for that touch of foppery, his antique walking stick with scrolled silver handle, a recent acquisition. With knighthood, he had discovered a harmless thing about walking sticks. No trip to London was complete without a visit to the emporium of Mr James Smith of New Oxford Street. And finally – whoopee! – the fluorescent socks that Emily had given him for Christmas.

  ‘Em? Where is that girl? Emily, I require your best teddy bear immediately!’

  ‘Out running with Sheba,’ Suzanna reminded him from the bedroom.

  Sheba, their yellow Labrador. Shared their last posting with them.

  He returned to the wardrobe. To set off the fluorescent socks he would risk the orange suede loafers he’d bought in Bodmin at a summer sale. He tried them on and let out a yip. What the hell? He’d be out of them by tea time. He selected an outrageous tie, squeezed himself into the blazer, clapped on the boater at a rakish angle and did his Brideshead voice:

  ‘I say, Suki, darling, do ya happen to remember where I put m’ bally speech notes?’ – posing hand on hip in the doorway like all the best dandies. Then stopped, and lowered his arms to his sides in awe. ‘Mother of pearl. Suki, darling. Hallelujah!’

  Suzanna was standing before the cheval mirror, scrutinizing herself over her shoulder. She was wearing her late aunt’s black riding habit and boots, and the white lace blouse with its stock for a collar. She had pulled her strict grey hair into a bun and fixed it with a silver comb. On top of it she had set a shiny black topper that should have been ridiculous but to Kit was utterly disarming. The clothes fitted her, the period fitted her, the topper fitted her. She was a handsome, sixty-year-old Cornishwoman of her time, and the time was a hundred years ago. Best of all, you’d think she’d never had a day’s illness in her life.

  Pretending to be unsure whether it was permitted to advance further, Kit made a show of hovering in the doorway.

  ‘You are going to enjoy it, aren’t you, Kit?’ Suzanna said severely into the mirror. ‘I don’t want to think of you going through the motions just to please me.’

  ‘Of course I’m going to enjoy it, darling. It’ll be a hoot.’

  And he meant it. If it would have made old Suki happy, he’d have put on a tutu and jumped out of a cake. They’d lived his life and now they would live hers, if it killed him. Taking her hand, he raised it reverently to his lips, then lifted it aloft as if he were about to dance a minuet with her before escorting her across the dust sheets, down the staircase to the hall, where Mrs Marlow stood clutching two posies of fresh violets, Master Bailey’s flower of choice, one each.

  And standing tall beside her, dressed in Chaplinesque rags, safety pins and battered bowler hat, their peerless daughter, Emily, recently returned to life after a disastrous love affair.

  ‘You all right there, Mum?’ she asked briskly. ‘Got your make-me-betters?’

  Sparing Suzanna a reply, Kit gives a reassuring pat to his blazer pocket.

  ‘And the squeezer, for in case?’

  Pats the other pocket.

  ‘Nervous, Dad?’

  ‘Terrified.’

  ‘So you should be.’

  The Manor gates stand open. Kit has pressure-washed the stone lions on the gateposts for the occasion. Costumed pleasure-seekers are already drifting up Market Street. Emily spots the local doctor and his wife, and nimbly attaches herself to them, leaving her parents to process alone, Kit comically doffing his straw boater to left and right and Suzanna managing a sporting shot at the royal wave as they confer their praises in their separate ways:

  ‘Gosh, Peggy darling, that’s so absolutely charming! Wherever did you get such lovely satin from?’ Suzanna exclaims to the postmistress.

  ‘Well fuck me, Billy. Who else have you got under there?’ murmurs Kit, sotto voce, into the ear of portly Mr Olds, the butcher, who has come as a turbanned Arab prince.

  In the gardens of the cottages, daffodils, tulips, forsythia and peach blossom raise their heads to the blue sky. From the church tower flies the black-and-white flag of Cornwall. A bevy of equestrian children in hard hats comes trotting down the street, escorted by the redoubtable Polly from the Granary Riding School. The festivities are too much for the lead pony and it shies, but Polly is on hand to grab the bridle. Suzanna consoles the pony, then its rider. Kit takes Suzanna’s arm and feels her heart beating as she presses his hand lovingly against her ribs.

  It’s here and now, Kit thinks, as the elation rises in him. The jostling crowds, the palominos cavorting in the meadows, the sheep safely grazing on the hillside, even the new bungalows that deface the lower slopes of Bailey’s Hill: if this isn’t the land they have loved and served for so long, where is? And all right, it’s Merrie bloody England, it’s Laura bloody Ashley, it’s ale and pasties and yo-ho for Cornwall, and tomorrow morning all these nice, sweet people will be back at each other’s throats, screwing each other’s wives and doing all the stuff the rest of the world does. But right now it’s their National Day, and who’s an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what’s inside?

  At a trestle table stands Jack Painter, red-headed son of Ben from the garage, in braces and a Stetson. Beside him sits a girl in a fairy dress with wings, selling tickets at four pounds a shot.

  ‘You’re free, Kit, dammit!’ Jack cries boisterously. ‘You’re the bloody Opener, man, same as Suzanna!’

  But Kit in his exultation will have none of it:

  ‘I am not free, thank you, Jack Painter! I am extremely expensive. And so is my dear wife,’ he retorts and, happy man that he is, slaps down a ten-pound note and drops the two pounds change into the animal-welfare box.

  A hay cart awaits them. A beribboned ladder is lashed against it. Suzanna grips it with one hand, h
er riding skirts in the other, and with Kit’s help ascends. Willing arms reach out to receive her. She waits for her breathing to calm down. It does. She smiles. Harry Tregenza, The Builder You Can Trust and celebrated rogue, wears an executioner’s mask and brandishes a silver-painted wooden scythe. He is flanked by his wife wearing bunny ears. Next to them stands this year’s Bailey Queen, bursting out of her corsage. Tipping his boater, Kit plants chivalrous kisses on the cheeks of both women and inhales from each the same waft of jasmine scent.

  An ancient hurdy-gurdy is playing ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’. Smiling energetically, he waits for the din to subside. It doesn’t. He flaps an arm for silence, smiles harder. In vain. From an inside pocket of his blazer he extracts the speech notes that Suzanna has nobly typed for him, and waves them. A steam engine emits a truculent shriek. He mimes a theatrical sigh, appeals to the heavens for sympathy, then to the crowd beneath him, but the din refuses to let up.

  He goes for it.

  First he must bawl out what he amusingly calls the Church Notices, though they concern such non-ecclesiastical matters as toilets, parking and baby-changing. Does anyone hear him? Judging by the faces of the listeners hanging around the foot of the hay cart, they don’t. He names our selfless volunteers who have laboured night and day to make the miracle happen, and invites them to identify themselves. He might as well be reading out the names of the Glorious Dead. The hurdy-gurdy has gone back to the beginning. You’re Master of Misrule too. They’ll expect you to be funny. A quick check of Suki: no bad signs. And Emily, his beloved Em: tall and watchful, standing, as ever, a little apart from the pack.

  ‘And lastly, my friends, before I step down – though I’d better be jolly careful when I do!’ – zero response – ‘it’s my pleasure, and my very happy duty, to urge you to spend your hard-earned money unwisely, flirt recklessly with one another’s wives’ – wished he hadn’t said that – ‘drink, eat and revel the day away. So hip hip’ – tearing off his boater and thrusting it in the air – ‘hip hip!’