A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  ‘We met, didn’t we, Paul?’ Jeb said, gazing up at him with an expression that seemed to combine pain and accusation in equal measure. ‘Three years back. Between a rock and a hard place, as they say.’ And when Kit’s gaze darted downward to escape his unflinching stare, there was Jeb’s iron little hand holding the top hat by its brim, so tightly that the nail of his thumb was white. ‘Yes, Paul? You were my red telephone.’

  Moved to near-desperation by the sight of Emily, appearing out of nowhere as usual to hover at her mother’s side, Kit summoned the last of the fake conviction left to him:

  ‘Got the wrong chap there, Jeb. Happens to us all. I look at you, and I don’t recognize you from Adam’ – meeting Jeb’s unrelenting stare. ‘Red telephone not a concept to me, I’m afraid. Paul? – total mystery. But there we are.’

  And still somehow keeping up the smile, and even contriving an apologetic laugh as he turned to Suzanna:

  ‘Darling, we mustn’t linger. Your weavers and potters will never forgive you. Jeb, good to meet you. Very instructive listening. Just sorry about the misunderstanding. My wife’s topper, Jeb. Not for sale, old boy. Antique value.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Jeb’s hand had relinquished the topper and risen to the parting of his leather overcoat. Kit moved to place himself in front of Suzanna. But the only deadly weapon that emerged in Jeb’s hand was a blue-backed notebook.

  ‘Forgot to give you your receipt, didn’t I?’ he explained, tut-tutting at his own stupidity. ‘That VAT man would shoot me dead, he would.’

  Spreading the notebook on his knee, he selected a page, made sure the carbon was in place and wrote between the lines with a brown military pencil. And when he had finished – and it must have been quite an exhaustive receipt, reckoned by the time it took to write it – he tore off the page, folded it and placed it carefully inside Suzanna’s new shoulder bag.

  *

  In the diplomatic world that had until recently claimed Kit and Suzanna as its loyal citizens, a social duty was a social duty.

  The weavers had clubbed together to build themselves an old-world handloom? Suzanna must have the loom demonstrated to her, and Kit must buy a square of handwoven cloth, insisting it would be just the thing to keep his computer from wandering all over his desk: never mind this asinine comment made no sense to anyone, least of all to Emily who, never far away, was chatting to a trio of small children. At the pottery stall, Kit takes a turn at the wheel and makes a hash of it, while Suzanna smiles benignly on his endeavours.

  Only when these last rites have been performed do Our Opener and His Lady Wife bid their farewells and by silent consent take the footpath that leads under the old railway bridge, along the stream and up to the side entrance to the Manor.

  Suzanna had removed her topper. Kit needed to carry it for her. Then he remembered his boater and took that off too, laying the hats brim to brim and carrying them awkwardly at his side, together with his dandy’s silver-handled walking stick. With his other hand he was holding Suzanna’s arm. Emily started to come after them, then thought better of it, calling through cupped hands that she’d see them back at the Manor. It wasn’t till they had entered the seclusion of the railway bridge that Suzanna swung round to face her husband.

  ‘Who on earth was that man? The one you said you didn’t know. Jeb. The leather man.’

  ‘Absolutely nobody I know,’ Kit replied firmly, in answer to the question he had been dreading. ‘He’s a total no-go area, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

  ‘He called you Paul.’

  ‘He did, and he should be prosecuted for it. I hope he bloody well will be.’

  ‘Are you Paul? Were you Paul? Why won’t you answer me, Kit?’

  ‘I can’t, that’s why. Darling, you’ve got to drop this. It’s not going to lead anywhere. It can’t.’

  ‘For security reasons?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You told him you’d never been anyone’s red telephone.’

  ‘Yes. I did.’

  ‘But you have. That time you went away on a hush-hush mission, somewhere warm, and came back with scratches all over your legs. Emily was staying with us while she studied for her tropical-diseases qualification. She wanted you to have a tetanus injection. You refused.’

  ‘I wasn’t supposed to tell you even that much.’

  ‘But you did. So it’s no good trying to untell it now. You were going off to be the Office’s red telephone, and you wouldn’t say how long or where it was, except it was warm. We were impressed. We drank to you: “Here’s to our red telephone.” That happened, didn’t it? You’re not going to deny that? And you came back scratched and said you’d fallen into a bush.’

  ‘I had. I did. A bush. It was true.’

  And when this failed to appease her:

  ‘All right, Suki. All right. Listen. I was Paul. I was his red telephone. Yes, I was. Three years ago. And we were comrades-in-arms. It was the best thing I ever did in my entire career, and that’s all I’m going to tell you ever. The poor chap’s gone completely to pieces. I hardly recognized him.’

  ‘He looked a good man, Kit.’

  ‘He’s more than that. He’s a thoroughly decent, brave chap. Or was. I’d no quarrel with him. Quite the reverse. He was my – keeper,’ he said, in a moment of unwelcome honesty.

  ‘But you denied him all the same.’

  ‘I had to. No choice. Man was out of court. Whole operation was – well, beyond top secret.’

  He had thought the worst was over, but that was to reckon without Suzanna’s grip.

  ‘What I don’t understand at all, Kit, is this. If Jeb knew you were lying, and you knew you were lying, why did you have to lie to him at all? Or were you just lying for me and Emily?’

  She had done it, whatever it was. Seizing upon anger as his excuse, he emitted a gruff ‘I think I’ll just go and have it out with him, if you don’t mind’ and the next thing he knew, he had thrust the hats into her arms and was storming back along the towpath with his walking stick and, ignoring the ancient DANGER notice, clattering over the rickety footbridge and through a spinney of birches to the lower end of Bailey’s Meadow; then over a stile into a pool of mud and fast up the hillside, only to see below him the Arts and Crafts marquee half collapsed and the exhibitors, with more energy than they’d shown all day, dismantling tents, stands and trestle tables and slinging them into their vans: and there among the vans, the space, the very space, which only half an hour earlier Jeb’s van had occupied and now occupied no more.

  Which didn’t for a second prevent Kit from loping down the slope with his arms waving in false jocularity:

  ‘Jeb! Jeb! Where the hell’s Jeb? Anyone seen Jeb at all, the leather chap? Gone off before I could pay him, silly ass – bunch of his money in my pocket! Well, do you know where Jeb’s gone? And you don’t either?’ – in a string of vain appeals as he scoured the line of vans and trucks.

  But all he got for an answer were kindly smiles and shakes of the head: no, Kit, sorry, nobody knows where Jeb’s gone, or where he lives for that matter, or what his other name is, come to think of it, Jeb’s a loner, civil enough but not by any means what you’d call chatty – laughter. One exhibitor thought she’d seen him over to Coverack Fair a couple of weeks back; another said she remembered him from St Austell last year. But nobody had a surname for him, nobody had a phone number, or even a number plate. Most likely he’d done what other traders do, they said: spotted the ad, bought his trading ticket at the gate, parked, traded and moved on.

  ‘Lost someone, have you, Dad?’

  Emily, right beside him – girl’s a bloody genie. Must have been gossiping with the stable girls behind the horseboxes.

  ‘Yes. I have actually, darling. Jeb, the leather-maker chap. The one your mum bought a bag from.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘Nothing. I do’ – confusion overcoming him – ‘I owe him money.’

  ‘You paid him. Sixty quid. In twenties.’

/>   ‘Yes, well, this was for something else’ – shiftily, avoiding her eye. ‘Settlement of an old debt. Different thing entirely’ – then, babbling something about needing to ‘have a word with Mum’, barged his way back along the path and through the walled garden to the kitchen, where Suzanna, with Mrs Marlow’s help, was chopping vegetables in preparation for this evening’s dinner for the Chain Gang. She ignored him, so he sought sanctuary in the dining room.

  ‘Think I’ll just buff up the silver,’ he announced, loud enough for her to hear and do something about him if she wanted.

  But she didn’t, so never mind. Yesterday he had done a great job of polishing the commander’s collection of antique silver – the Paul Storr candlesticks, the Hester Bateman salts, and the silver corvette complete with decommissioning pennant presented by the officers and crew of his last command. Bestowing a cheerless flap of the silver cloth on each, he poured himselfa large Scotch, stomped upstairs and sat at the desk in his dressing room as a preliminary to performing his next chore of the evening: seating cards.

  In the normal way, these cards were a source of quiet gratification to him, since they were his official calling cards left over from his last foreign posting. It was his little habit to look on surreptitiously as one or other of his dinner guests turned over the card, ran a finger across the embossed lettering and read the magic words: Sir Christopher Probyn, High Commissioner of Her Majesty the Queen. Tonight he anticipated no such pleasure. Nevertheless, with the guest list before him and a whisky at his elbow, he went diligently – perhaps too diligently – to work.

  ‘That chap Jeb’s gone, by the way,’ he announced in a deliberately offhand voice, sensing Suzanna’s presence behind him in the doorway. ‘Upped sticks. Nobody knows who he is or what he is or anything else about him, poor man. All very painful. Very upsetting.’

  Expecting a conciliatory touch or kindly word, he paused in his labours, only to have Jeb’s shoulder bag land with a thump on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Look inside, Kit.’

  Tilting the open bag irritably towards him, he groped around until he felt the tightly folded page of lined notepaper on which Jeb had written his receipt. Clumsily, he opened it, and with the same shaky hand held it under the desk lamp:

  To one innocent dead woman .............................nothing.

  To one innocent dead child .............................nothing.

  To one soldier who did his duty .............................disgrace.

  To Paul .............................one knighthood.

  Kit read it, then stared at it – no longer as a document but as an object of disgust. Then he flattened it on the desk among the place cards, and studied it again in case he had missed something, but he hadn’t.

  ‘Simply not true,’ he pronounced firmly. ‘The man’s obviously sick.’

  Then he put his face in his hands and rolled it about, and after a while whispered, ‘Dear God.’

  *

  And who was Master Bailey when he was at home, if he ever was?

  An honest Cornish son of our village, if you listened to the believers, a farmer’s boy unjustly hanged for stealing sheep on Easter Day for the pleasure of a wicked Assize judge over to Bodmin.

  Except Master Bailey, he was never really hanged, or not to death he wasn’t, not according to the famous Bailey Parchment in the church vestry. The villagers were so incensed by the unjust verdict that they cut him down at dead of night, they did, and resuscitated him with best applejack. And seven days on, young Master Bailey, he did take his father’s horse and rode over to Bodmin, and with one sweep of his scythe he did chop the head clean off of that same wicked judge, and good luck to him, my dove – or so they do tell you.

  All drivel, according to Kit the amateur historian who, in a few idle hours, had amused himself by researching the story: sentimental Victorian hogwash of the worst sort, not a scrap of supporting evidence in local archives.

  The fact remained that for the last however many years, come rain or shine, peace or war, the good people of St Pirran had joined together to celebrate an act of extrajudicial killing.

  *

  The same night, lying in wakeful estrangement beside his sleeping wife and assailed by feelings of indignation, self-doubt and honest concern for an erstwhile companion-at-arms who, for whatever reason, had fallen so low, Kit deliberated his next move.

  The night had not ended with the dinner party: how could it? After their spat in the dressing room, Kit and Suzanna barely had time to change before the Chain Gang’s cars were rolling punctually up the drive. But Suzanna had left him in no doubt that hostilities would be resumed later.

  Emily, no friend of formal functions at the best of times, had bowed out for the evening: some shindig in the church hall she thought she might look in on, and anyway, she didn’t have to be back in London till tomorrow evening.

  At the dinner table, sharpened by the knowledge that his world was falling round his ears, Kit had performed superbly if erratically, dazzling the Lady Mayor to his right and the Lady Alderman to his left with set pieces about the life and travails of a Queen’s representative in a Caribbean paradise:

  ‘My accolade? Absolute fluke! Nothing whatever to do with merit. Parade-horse job. Her Maj was in the region and took it into her head to drop in on our local premier. It was my parish, so bingo, I get a K for being in the right place at the right time. And you, darling’ – grabbing his water glass by mistake and raising it to Suzanna down the line of the commander’s Paul Storr candlesticks – ‘became the lovely Lady P, which is how I’ve always thought of you anyway.’

  But even while he makes this desperate protestation, it’s Suzanna’s voice, not his own, that he is hearing:

  All I want to know is, Kit: did an innocent woman and child die, and were we packed off to the Caribbean to shut you up, and is that poor soldier right?

  And sure enough, no sooner has Mrs Marlow gone home and the last of the Chain Gang’s cars departed, there Suzanna is, standing stock-still in the hall waiting for his answer.

  And Kit must have been unconsciously composing it all through dinner, because out it pours like a Foreign Office spokesman’s official statement – and probably, to Suzanna’s ear, about as believable:

  ‘Here is my final word on the subject, Suki. It’s as much as I’m allowed to tell you, and probably a great deal more.’ Has he used this line before? ‘The top-secret operation in which I was privileged to be involved was afterwards described to me by its planners – at the highest level – as a certified, bloodless victory over some very bad men.’ A note of misplaced irony enters his voice which he tries in vain to stop: ‘And for all I know, yes, maybe my modest role in the operation was what secured our posting, since the same people were kind enough to say I had done a pretty decent job, but unfortunately a medal would be too conspicuous. However, that was not the reason given to me by Personnel when the posting was offered to me – a reward for lifelong service was how they sold it to me, not that I needed much selling – any more than you did, as I recall’ – pardonable dig. ‘Were the Personnel people – or Human Resources or whatever the hell they call themselves these days – aware of my role in a certain enormously delicate operation? I very much doubt it. My guess is, they didn’t even know the very little you know.’

  Has he persuaded her? When Suzanna looks like this, anything can be going on. He becomes strident – always a mistake:

  ‘Look, darling, at the end of the day, who are you actually going to believe? Me and the top brass at the Foreign Office? Or some very sad ex-soldier down on his luck?’

  She takes his question seriously. Weighs it. Her face locked against him, yes; but also blotchy, resolute, breaking his heart with its unbending rectitude, the face of a woman who got the best law degree of her year and never used it, but is using it now; the face of a woman who has looked death in the eye through a string of medical ordeals, and her only outward concern: how will Kit manage without her?r />
  ‘Did you ask them – these planners – whether it was bloodless?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because with people like that you don’t challenge their integrity.’

  ‘So they volunteered it. In as many words? “The operation was bloodless” – just like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To reassure me, I assume.’

  ‘Or to deceive you.’

  ‘Suzanna, that is not worthy of you!’

  Or not worthy of me? he wonders abjectly, first storming off to his dressing room in a huff, then sneaking unnoticed into his side of the bed where hour after hour he peers miserably into the half-darkness while Suzanna sleeps her motionless, medicated sleep: until at some point in the interminable dawn, he discovers that an unconscious mental process has delivered him a seemingly spontaneous decision.

  *

  Rolling silently off the bed and creeping across the corridor, Kit threw on a pair of flannels and a sports jacket, detached his cellphone from its charger and dropped it into his jacket pocket. Pausing at the door to Emily’s bedroom for sounds of waking, and hearing none, he tiptoed down the back staircase to the kitchen to make himself a pot of coffee, an essential prerequisite for putting his master plan into effect: only to hear his daughter’s voice addressing him from the open doorway leading to the orchard.

  ‘Got a spare mug on you, Dad?’

  Emily, back from her morning run with Sheba.

  At any other time, Kit would have relished a cosy chat with her: just not on this particular morning, though he was quick to sit himself opposite her at the pine table. As he did so, he caught sight of the purpose in her face and knew she had turned back from her run when she spotted the kitchen lights on her way up Bailey’s Hill.

  ‘Mind telling me what’s going on exactly, Dad?’ she enquired crisply, every bit her mother’s child.

  ‘Going on?’ – lame smile. ‘Why should anything be going on? Your mum’s asleep. I’m having a coffee.’