A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  Suzanna raises her topper to join his boater. The Builder You Wouldn’t Trust Further Than You Could Throw Him can’t raise his executioner’s mask, so punches the air with his clenched fist in an unintended communist salute. A long-delayed Hooray! tears through the loudspeakers like an electrical fault. To murmurs of ‘Good on you, my handsome!’ and ‘Proper job, my robin!’, Kit clambers gratefully down the ladder, lets his walking stick fall to the ground and reaches up to take hold of Suzanna by the hips.

  ‘Bloody wonderful, Dad!’ Emily declares, appearing at Kit’s side with the walking stick. ‘Want a sit-down, Mum, or flog on?’ – using a family expression.

  Suzanna, as ever, wants to flog on.

  *

  The royal tour of Our Opener and His Lady Wife begins. First, inspect shire horses. Suzanna the born country girl chats to them, strokes and pats their rumps without inhibition. Kit makes a show of admiring their brasses. Home-grown vegetables in their Sunday best. Cauliflowers that the locals call broccoli: bigger than footballs, washed clean as a pin. Home-made breads, cheeses and honey.

  Sample piccalilli: tasteless but keep grinning. Smoked salmon pâté excellent. Urge Suki to buy some. She does. Linger over Gardening Club’s floral celebration. Suzanna knows every flower by its first name. Bump into MacIntyres, two of life’s dissatisfied customers. Ex-tea-planter George keeps a loaded rifle at his bedside for the day the masses assemble at his gates. His wife, Lydia, bores for the village. Advance on them with outstretched arms:

  ‘George! Lydia! Darlings! Marvellous! Super dinner at your house the other night, really one of those evenings. Our turn next time!’

  Move gratefully to our bygone threshing machines and steam engines. Suzanna undaunted by stampede of children dressed as anything from Batman to Osama. Kit yells at Gerry Pertwee, village Romeo, squatting up on his tractor in Red Indian headdress:

  ‘For the umpteenth time, Gerry, when are you going to mow our bloody paddock?’ And to Suzanna, aside: ‘Damned if I’ll pay the bugger fifteen quid an hour when the going rate’s twelve.’

  Suzanna waylaid by Marjory, rich divorcee on the prowl. Marjory has set her sights on the dilapidated greenhouses in the walled garden of the Manor for her Orchid Club, but Suzanna suspects it’s Kit she’s set her sights on. Kit the diplomat rides to the rescue:

  ‘Suki darling, hate to interrupt – Marjory, you’re looking extremely dishy, if I may say so – small drama, darling. You alone have the power to solve.’

  Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodmin road, one son in rehab, wife in the bin. Kit greets them all lavishly, sets course for Arts and Crafts Expo, Suki’s brainchild.

  Marquee a haven of quiet. Admire amateur watercolours. Forget the quality, endeavour is all. Proceed to other end of marquee, descend grassy knoll.

  Straw boater cutting ridge in forehead. Suede loafers giving him hell as predicted. Emily at edge of frame, keeping a quiet eye on Suzanna.

  Enter roped-off enclosure of our Rustic Crafts section.

  *

  Does Kit feel a first chill on entering here, a presence, an intimation? Does he hell: he’s in Eden, and he intends to remain there. He’s experiencing one of those rare sensations of pure pleasure when everything seems to have come right. He’s gazing with unbounded love on his wife in her riding rig and topper. He’s thinking of Emily, and how even a month ago she was still inconsolable, and today she’s right back on her feet and ready to take on the world.

  And while his thoughts are contentedly drifting in this way, so is his gaze, which has fixed itself on the furthest limits of the enclosure and, seemingly of its own accord, on the figure of a man.

  A hunched man.

  A small hunched man.

  Whether permanently hunched or merely at that moment hunched is thus far unknown. The man is hunched, and he is either squatting or sitting on the tailgate of his traveller’s van. Oblivious to the midday heat, he is wearing a shiny, full-length, brown leather coat with the collar up. And for a hat, a broad-brimmed affair, also of leather, with a shallow crown and a bow at the front, less a cowboy’s hat than a Puritan’s.

  The features, what Kit can make of them in the shadow of the brim, are emphatically those of a small white male in middle life.

  Emphatically?

  Why the emphasis suddenly?

  What was so emphatic about him?

  Nothing.

  The fellow was exotic, true. And small. In burly company, the small stand out. That doesn’t make him special. It simply makes you notice him.

  A tinker was Kit’s first determinedly light-hearted thought: whenever did he last see a real tinker? Romania fifteen years back, when he was doing a stint in Bucharest. He may actually have turned to Suzanna to suggest this. Or perhaps he only thought of turning to her, because by now he had transferred his interest to the fellow’s utility van, which was not only his workplace but his humble home – witness the Primus stove, bunk bed and rows of pots and cooking implements mingling with the craftsman’s pliers, gimlets and hammers; and on one wall, desiccated animal skins that presumably served him as carpets when, his day’s work done, he gratefully closed his door on the world. But everything so orderly and shipshape that you felt its owner could put his hand to any part of it blindfold. He was that kind of little fellow. Adept. Foot-sure.

  But positive, irrevocable recognition at this stage? Certainly not.

  There was the creeping, insidious intimation.

  There was a coming together of certain fragments of recollection that shuffled themselves around like pieces in a kaleidoscope until they formed a pattern, vague at first, then – but only by degrees – disturbing.

  There was a belated acknowledgement, sounded deep down by the inner man – then gradually, fearfully, and with a sinking heart, accepted by the outer one.

  There was also a walking away, physically, though the details remained fuzzy in Kit’s later memory. Chubby Philip Peplow, hedge-fund manager and second-homer, seems to have barged into the picture, attended by his newest squeeze, a six-foot model clad in Pierrot tights. Even with a gale-force storm shaping in his head, Kit didn’t lose his eye for a pretty girl. And it was the six-foot girl in tights who did the talking. Would Kit and Suzanna like to swing by for drinks tonight? It would be fab, open house, seven onwards, come as you are, barbie if it doesn’t piss with rain. To which Kit, overdoing it a bit to compensate for his confused state of mind, heard himself say something like: we’d absolutely love to, six-foot girl, but we’ve got the entire Chain Gang coming to dinner, for our sins – ‘Chain Gang’ being Kit and Suzanna’s home-made term for local dignitaries with a weakness for aldermanic regalia.

  Peplow and squeeze then depart and Kit goes back to admiring the tinker’s wares, if that’s what he’s been doing, with the part of his head that still refuses to admit the inadmissible. Suzanna is standing right beside him, also admiring them. He suspects, but isn’t sure, that she’s been admiring them before he has. Admiring, after all, was what they were there to do: admire, move on before you get bogged down, then do some more admiring.

  Except that this time they weren’t moving on. They were standing side by side and admiring, but also recognizing – Kit recognizing, that is – that the man wasn’t a tinker at all, and never had been. And why the devil he had ever rushed to cast him as a tinker was anyone’s guess.

  The fellow was a bloody saddler, for Christ’s sake! What’s the matter with me? He makes saddles, blast him, bridles! Briefcases! Satchels! Purses, wallets, ladies’ handbags, coasters! Not pots and pans at all, he never had! Everything around the man was in leather. He was a leather man advertising his product. He was modelling it. The tailgate of his van was his catwalk.

  All of which Kit had until this moment failed to accept, just as he had failed to accept the totally obvious lettering, hand-daubed in go
ld print on the van’s side, proclaiming JEB’S LEATHERCRAFT to anyone who had eyes to see it, from fifty, more like a hundred, paces. And beneath it, in smaller letters admittedly but equally legible, the injunction Buy From Van. No phone number, no address, email or otherwise, no surname. Just Jeb and buy from his van. Terse, to the point, unambiguous.

  But why had Kit’s otherwise fairly well-regulated instincts gone into anarchic, totally irrational denial? And why did the name Jeb, now that he consented to acknowledge it, strike him as the most outrageous, the most irresponsible breach of the Official Secrets Act that had ever crossed his desk?

  *

  Yet it did. Kit’s whole body said it did. His feet said it did. They had gone numb inside his badly fitting loafers. His old Cambridge blazer said it did. It was clinging to his back. In the middle of a heatwave, cold sweat had soaked its way clean through his cotton shirt. Was he in present or past time? It was the same shirt, the same sweat, the same heat in both places: here and now on Bailey’s Meadow to the thump of the hurdy-gurdy, or on a Mediterranean hillside at dead of night to the throb of engines out to sea.

  And how do two confiding, darting, brown eyes manage to grow old and wrinkled and lose their lightness of being in the ridiculously short space of three years? For the head had lifted, and not just halfway but all the way back, till the brim of the leather hat cocked itself, leaving the harrowed, bony face beneath it in plain sight – a turn of phrase he suddenly couldn’t get rid of – gaunt cheekbones, resolute jaw, and the brow, too, which was etched by the same web of fine lines that had collected themselves at the corners of his eyes and mouth, drawing them downward in some kind of permanent dismay.

  And the eyes themselves, formerly so quick and knowing, seemed to have lost their mobility, because once they had settled on Kit, they showed no sign of shifting but stayed there, fixed on him, so that the only way either man was ever going to break free of the other was if Kit did the breaking; which he duly achieved, but only by turning his whole head to Suzanna and saying, Well, darling, here we are, what a day, eh, what a day! – or something equally fatuous, but also sufficiently untypical of him for a frown of puzzlement to pass across Suzanna’s flushed face.

  And this frown has not quite disappeared when he hears the soft Welsh voice he is praying uselessly not to hear:

  ‘Well, Paul. Quite a coincidence, I will say. Not what either of us was led to expect, was it?’

  But though the words came smashing into Kit’s head like so many bullets, Jeb must in reality have spoken them quietly, because Suzanna – either thanks to the imperfections of the little hearing aids she wore under her hair, or to the persistent boom-boom of the fairground – failed to pick them up, preferring to manifest an exaggerated interest in a large handbag with an adjustable shoulder strap. She was peering at Jeb over her bunch of Bailey violets and she was smiling a bit too hard at him and being a bit too sweet and condescending altogether for Kit’s taste, which was actually her shyness at work, but didn’t look like it.

  ‘Now you’re Jeb himself, are you? The real thing.’

  What the hell does she mean, real thing? thought Kit, suddenly outraged. Real as compared to what?

  ‘You’re not a substitute or a stand-in or anything?’ she went on, exactly as if Kit had put her up to explaining her interest in the fellow.

  And Jeb for his part was taking her question very seriously:

  ‘Well now, I wasn’t christened Jeb, I’ll admit that,’ he replied, directing his gaze away from Kit at last and bestowing it on Suzanna with the same steadfastness. Adding with a loquacity that cut straight to Kit’s heart: ‘But the name they gave me was such a mouthful, frankly, that I decided to do some essential surgery on it. Put it that way.’

  But Suzanna was in her asking mode:

  ‘And where on earth did you find such marvellous leather, Jeb? It’s perfectly beautiful.’

  At which Kit, whose mind by now had switched to diplomatic autopilot, announced that he too had been bursting to ask the same question:

  ‘Yes, indeed, where did you get your splendid leather from, Jeb?’

  And there follows a moment where Jeb considers his questioners in turn as if deciding which of them to favour. He settles on Suzanna:

  ‘Yes, well now, it’s actually Russian reindeer hide, madam,’ he explains, with what to Kit is by now an unbearable deference, as he takes down an animal skin from the wall and spreads it lovingly on his lap. ‘Recovered from the wreck of a Danish brigantine that went down in Plymouth Sound in 1786, they tell me. She was on her way from St Petersburg to Genoa, you see, sheltering from the south-westerly gales. Well, we all know about them, don’t we, down these parts?’ – giving the skin a consoling stroke with one tanned little hand – ‘not that the leather minded, did you? Couple of hundred years of seawater were just what you liked,’ he went on quaintly, as if to a pet. ‘The minerals in the wrapping may have helped too, I dare say.’

  But Kit knew that if Jeb was delivering his homily to Suzanna, it was Kit he was talking to, Kit’s bewilderment and frustration and anxiety he was playing on, and – yes, his fear too – galloping fear – though of what precisely he had yet to work out.

  ‘And you do this for a living, do you, Jeb?’ Suzanna was demanding, overtired and sounding dogmatic in consequence. ‘Full time? You’re not just moonlighting or two-jobbing or studying on the side? This isn’t a hobby, it’s your life. That’s what I want to know.’

  Jeb needed to think deeply about these large questions. His small brown eyes turned to Kit for help, dwelt on him, then turned away, disappointed. Finally he heaved a sigh and shook his head like a man at odds with himself.

  ‘Well, I suppose I did have a couple of alternatives, now I come to think of it,’ he conceded. ‘Martial arts? Well, these days they’re all at it, aren’t they? Close protection, I suppose,’ he suggested after another long stare at Kit. ‘Walking rich kids to school in the mornings. Walking them home evening time. Good money in it, they say. But leather now’ – giving the hide another consoling caress – ‘I’ve always fancied a good-quality leather, same as my dad. Nothing like it, I say. But is it my life? Well, life’s what you’re left with, really’ – with yet another stare at Kit, a harder one.

  *

  Suddenly everything had speeded up, everything was heading for disaster. Suzanna’s eyes had turned warning-bright. Fierce dabs of colour had appeared on her cheeks. She was sifting through the men’s wallets at an unhealthy speed on the specious grounds that Kit had a birthday coming up. He had, but not till October. When he reminded her of this, she gave an over-hearty laugh and promised that, if she decided to buy one, she would keep it secret in her bottom drawer.

  ‘The stitching now, Jeb, is it hand or is it machine?’ she blurted, forgetting all about Kit’s birthday and grabbing impulsively at the shoulder bag that she had first picked up.

  ‘Hand, ma’am.’

  ‘And that’s the asking price, is it, sixty pounds? It seems an awful lot.’

  Jeb turned to Kit:

  ‘Best I can do, I’m afraid, Paul,’ he said. ‘Quite a struggle for some of us, not having an index-linked pension and similar.’

  Was it hatred that Kit was seeing in Jeb’s eyes? Anger? Despair? And what was Jeb seeing in Kit’s eyes? Mystification? Or the mute appeal not to call him Paul again in Suzanna’s hearing? But Suzanna, whatever she’d heard or hadn’t, had heard enough:

  ‘Well then, I’ll have it,’ she declared. ‘It’ll be just right for my shopping in Bodmin, won’t it, Kit? It’s roomy and it’s got sensible compartments. Look, it’s even got a little side pocket for my credit card. I think sixty pounds is actually jolly reasonable. Don’t you, Kit? Of course you do!’

  Saying which, she performed an act so improbable, so provocative, that it momentarily banished all other preoccupations. She placed her own perfectly serviceable handbag on the table and, as a prelude to digging in it for her money, removed her top hat and shoved it at Jeb to hol
d. If she’d untied the buttons on her blouse, she could not, in Kit’s inflamed perception, have been more explicit.

  ‘Look here, I’ll pay for this, don’t be bloody silly,’ he protested, startling not only Suzanna but himself with his vehemence. And to Jeb, who alone appeared unperturbed: ‘Cash, I take it? You deal in cash only’ – like an accusation – ‘no cheques or cards or any of the aids to nature?’

  Aids to nature? – what the hell is he blathering about? With fingers that seemed to have joined themselves together at the tips, he picked three twenty-pound notes from his wallet and plonked them on the table:

  ‘There you are, darling. Present for you. Your Easter egg, one week late. Slot the old bag inside the new one. Of course it’ll go. Here’ – doing it for her, none too gently. ‘Thanks, Jeb. Terrific find. Terrific that you came. Make sure we see you here next year, now.’

  Why didn’t the bloody man pick up the money? Why didn’t he smile, nod, say thanks or cheers – do something, like any normal human being, instead of sitting down again and poking at the money with his skinny index finger as if he thought it was fake, or not enough, or dishonourably earned, or whatever the hell he was thinking, back out of sight again under his Puritan hat? And why did Suzanna, by now feverish, stand there grinning idiotically down at him, instead of responding to Kit’s sharp tug at her arm?

  ‘That’s your other name then, is it, Paul?’ Jeb was enquiring in his calm Welsh voice. ‘Probyn? The one they blasted over the loudspeaker, then. That’s you?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But it’s my dear wife here who’s the driving force in these things. I just tag along,’ Kit added, reaching out to retrieve her topper and finding it was still rigid in Jeb’s hand.