A Delicate Truth

by John le Carré

  At first, having supplied him with pillow and eiderdown, she had withdrawn to her bedroom. But quite soon she was back, dressed as before, and he was more awake and even less comfortable than he had been when she left him.

  Seating herself out of striking distance, she invited him to describe his journey to Wales in greater detail. All too willingly, he obliged. She needed the grim details, and he provided them: the travelled blood that couldn’t possibly have travelled there and turned out to be red lead, or didn’t; Harry’s concern to get the highest price for Jeb’s van; Brigid’s unsparing adjectival use of ‘fucking’ and her cryptic account of Jeb’s last joyful phone call to her following his encounter with Kit at the club, urging her to dump Harry and prepare for his return.

  Emily listened patiently, mostly with her large brown eyes, which in the half-light of early morning had acquired a disconcerting immobility.

  He then told her about Jeb’s fight with Shorty over the photographs, and how Jeb had afterwards hidden them, and how Brigid had discovered them, and how she had let Toby copy them into his BlackBerry.

  On her insistence, he showed them to her, and watched her face freeze the way it had frozen in the hospital.

  ‘Why do you think Brigid trusted you?’ she asked, to which he could only reply that Brigid was desperate and had presumably come to the conclusion that he was trustworthy, but this didn’t seem to satisfy her.

  Next she needed to know how he had wangled Jeb’s name and address out of the authorities, to which Toby, while not identifying Charlie by name, beyond saying that he and his wife were old friends, explained that he had once done a favour for their musical daughter.

  ‘And apparently she really is a very promising cellist,’ he added inconsequentially.

  Emily’s next question therefore struck him as totally unreasonable:

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’

  ‘God, no! That’s bloody outrageous!’ he said, genuinely shocked. ‘What the hell made you think that?’

  ‘My mother says you’ve had masses of women. She checked you out with her Foreign Office wives.’

  ‘Your mother?’ Toby protested indignantly. ‘Well, what do the wives say about you, for Christ’s sake?’

  At which they both laughed, if awkwardly, and the moment passed. And after that, all Emily wanted to know was who had murdered Jeb, assuming he was murdered, which in turn led Toby into a rather inarticulate condemnation of the Deep State, and thence into a denunciation of the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.

  And as he concluded this cumbersome monologue, he heard six striking, and was by now sitting on the sofa and no longer lying on it, which allowed Emily to sit primly beside him with the burners on the table in front of them.

  Her next question has a schoolmistressy ring:

  ‘So what do you hope to get out of Shorty when you meet him?’ she demands, and waits while he thinks of an answer, which is the more difficult since he hasn’t got one; and anyway he hasn’t told her, for fear of alarming her, that he will be meeting Shorty in the first instance under the slender guise of a journalist, before declaring himself in his true colours.

  ‘I’ll just have to see which way he jumps,’ he says nonchalantly. ‘If Shorty’s as cut up about Jeb’s death as he says he is, maybe he’ll be willing to step into Jeb’s shoes and testify for us.’

  ‘And if he isn’t willing?’

  ‘Well, I suppose we just shake hands and part.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Shorty, from what you’ve told me,’ she replies severely.

  And at this point, a drought overcomes their conversation, during which Emily lowers her eyes and lays her fingertips together beneath her chin in contemplation, and he supposes she is preparing herself for the phone call she is about to make to her father, by way of Mrs Marlow.

  And when she reaches out her hand, he assumes that it’s to pick up the black burner. But instead, it’s his own hand she picks up, and holds gravely in both of hers as if she’s taking his pulse, but not quite; then without comment or explanation lays it carefully back on his lap.

  ‘Actually, never mind,’ she mutters impatiently to herself – or to him; he’s not quite sure.

  Does she want his comfort in this moment of crisis, and is too proud to ask for it?

  Is she telling him she has thought about him and decided she isn’t interested, so have his hand back?

  Or was it the imaginary hand of a present or former lover that she was reaching for in her anxiety? – which was the interpretation he was still favouring as he sat diligently at his new desk on the first floor of the Foreign Office, and the silver burner in his jacket pocket announced in a raucous burp that it had a text message for him.

  Toby was not at this point wearing his jacket. It was slung over the back of his chair. So he had to swing round and fish for the burner with rather more enthusiasm than he would have deployed had he known that Hilary, his formidable second-in-command, was standing in the doorway needing his urgent attention. Nevertheless he persisted in the movement and, with a smile that asked her forbearance, extracted the burner from his pocket, searched for the unfamiliar button to press, pressed it and, still smiling, read the message:

  Dad has written a mad letter to Mum and is on the train to London.

  *

  The Foreign Office waiting room was a windowless dungeon of prickly chairs, glass tables and unreadable magazines about Britain’s industrial skills. At the door lurked a burly black man in a brown uniform with yellow epaulettes, and at a desk an expressionless Asian matron in the same uniform. Kit’s fellow detainees included a bearded Greek prelate and two indignant ladies of an age who had come to complain about their treatment at the hands of the British Consulate in Naples. It was of course a crying outrage that a ranking former member of the Service – and a Head of Mission at that – should be required to wait here, and in due season he would make his feelings known in the right quarter. However, alighting at Paddington, he had vowed to remain courteous but purposeful, keep his wits about him at all times and, in the interests of the greater cause, ignore whatever slings and arrows came his way.

  ‘My name’s Probyn,’ he had told them cheerfully at the front gate, volunteering his driving licence in case they needed verification. ‘Sir Christopher Probyn, former High Commissioner. Do I still regard myself as staff? Apparently, I don’t. Well, never mind. How are you?’

  ‘To see?’

  ‘The Permanent Under-Secretary – better known these days, I understand, as the Executive Director,’ he added indulgently, careful to conceal his visceral distaste at the Office’s rush towards corporatization. ‘I know it’s a big call and I’m afraid I haven’t a date. But I do have a very sensitive document for him. Failing that, his Private Secretary. Rather confidential, I’m afraid, and rather urgent’ – all delivered merrily through a six-inch hole in a wall of armoured glass, while on the other side of it an unsmiling youth in a blue shirt and chevrons tapped details into a computer.

  ‘Kit, they’ll probably know me as in his Private Office. Kit Probyn. You’re quite sure I’m not staff? Probyn with a Y.’

  Even when they patted him down with an electric ping-pong bat, took his cellphone off him and fed it into a cabinet of glass-fronted lockers with numbered keys, he had continued to remain totally calm.

  ‘You chaps full time here, or do you look after other government buildings as well?’

  No answer, but still he hadn’t bridled. Even when they tried to get their hands on his precious draft document, he had remained courteous, if implacable.

  ‘No go, I’m afraid, old boy, with all due respect. You have your duty to do, I have mine. I came here all the way from Cornwall to hand-deliver this envelope, and hand-deliver it I shall.’

  ‘We only want to run it through X-ray, sir,’ the man said, after a glance at h
is colleague. So Kit looked on benignly while they operated their laborious machine, then grabbed back the envelope.

  ‘And it was the Executive Director in person you were wishing to see, was it, sir?’ the colleague enquired, with what Kit might easily have mistaken for irony.

  ‘Indeed it was,’ he replied jauntily. ‘And still is. The big chief himself. And if you’d pass that message upstairs rather sharply, I’d be obliged.’

  One of the men left the cubicle. The other stayed and smiled.

  ‘Come by train then, did you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Nice trip, was it?’

  ‘Very, thank you. Most enjoyable.’

  ‘That’s the way then. My wife comes from Lostwithiel, actually.’

  ‘Splendid. A proper Cornish girl. What a coincidence.’

  The first man had returned: but only to escort Kit to the featureless room where he now sat, and had sat for the last half-hour, inwardly fulminating but resolved not to show it.

  And now at last his patience was rewarded, for who should come bustling up to him grinning like a schoolgirl but Molly Cranmore herself, his long-time buddy from Logistical Contingencies, wearing a name tag and a bunch of electronic keys round her neck and holding out her hands and saying, ‘Kit Probyn, what a lovely, lovely surprise!’ while Kit in return was saying, ‘Molly, my God, of all people, I thought you’d retired aeons ago, what on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Alumni, darling,’ she confided in a happy voice. ‘I get to meet all our old boys and girls whenever they need a helping hand or fall by the wayside, which isn’t you at all, you lucky man, you’re here on business, I know. Now then. What kind of business? You’ve got a document and you want to hand it personally to God. But you can’t because he’s on a swan to Africa – well deserved, I may add. A great pity because I’m sure he’ll be furious when he hears he missed you. What’s it about?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s something I can’t tell even you, Molly.’

  ‘So can I take your document up to his Private Office and find the right minion for it? – I can’t? – not even if I promise not to let it out of my sight in the meantime? – not even then. Oh dear,’ she confirmed, as Kit continued to shake his head. ‘So does it have a name, your envelope? Something that will set bells ringing on the first floor?’

  Kit debated the question with himself. A cover name, after all, was what it said it was. It was there to cover things up. Ah, but was a cover name of itself something to be covered up? If so, then there would have to be cover names for cover names, ad infinitum. All the same, the idea of blurting out the hallowed word Wildlife in the presence of a Greek prelate and two irate ladies was more than he could stomach.

  ‘Then kindly tell them that I need to speak to his highest authorized representative,’ he said, hugging the envelope to his chest.

  Getting there, he thought.

  *

  Toby, meanwhile, has sought instinctive refuge in St James’s Park. With the silver burner pressed to his ear, he is hunched under the very same plane tree from which, just three years earlier, he dispatched his futile appeal to Giles Oakley, informing him that a fictitious Louisa had walked out on him and begging his advice. Now he is listening to Emily, and noting that her voice is as calm as his own.

  ‘How was he dressed?’ he asks.

  ‘The full monty. Dark suit, best black shoes, favourite tie and a navy raincoat. And no walking stick, which Mother takes as an omen.’

  ‘Has Kit told your mother that Jeb’s dead?’

  ‘No, but I did. She’s distraught and very scared. Not for herself, for Kit. And, as always, practical. She’s checked with Bodmin station. The Land Rover’s in the car park and they think he bought a senior citizen’s day return, first class. The train was on time out of Bodmin, and arrived on time in Paddington. And she’s rung his club. If he shows up, would they please get him to ring her? I told her that wasn’t good enough. If he shows up, they should ring her. She said she’d call them again. Then she’ll call me.’

  ‘And Kit hasn’t been in touch since he left the house?’

  ‘No, and he’s not answering his cellphone.’

  ‘Has he done this kind of thing before?’

  ‘Refused to speak to us?’

  ‘Thrown a tantrum – gone AWOL – taken matters into his own hands – whatever.’

  ‘When my beloved ex-partner waltzed off with a new girlfriend and half my mortgage, Dad went and laid siege to their flat.’

  ‘Then what did he do?’

  ‘It was the wrong flat.’

  Resigned to returning to his desk, Toby glances up with apprehension at the great bowed windows of his own Foreign Office. Joining the unsmiling throng of black-suited civil servants passing up and down Clive Steps, he succumbs to the same wave of nervous nausea that afflicted him on that gorgeous spring Sunday morning three years ago when he came here to filch his illicit tape recording.

  At the front gate, he takes a calculated risk:

  ‘Tell me, please’ – displaying his pass to the security guard – ‘has a retired member called Sir Christopher Probyn checked in today, by any chance?’ And to be helpful: ‘P–R–O–B–Y–N.’

  Wait while guard consults computer.

  ‘Not here. Could have checked in elsewhere. Did he have an appointment, at all?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Toby and, back at his post, resumes his department’s deliberations about which way to look in Libya.

  *

  ‘Sir Christopher?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘I’m Asif Lancaster from the Executive Director’s department. How d’you do, sir?’

  Lancaster was a black man, spoke with a Mancunian accent and looked about eighteen years old, but to Kit’s eye most people seemed to these days. Nevertheless he warmed to the fellow at once. If the Office had finally opened its gates to the Lancasters of the world, he reasoned vaguely, then surely he could expect a more receptive ear when he told them a few home truths about their handling of Operation Wildlife and its aftermath.

  They had reached a conference room. Easy chairs. A long table. Watercolours of the Lake District. Lancaster holding out his hand.

  ‘Look here, there’s one thing I have to ask you,’ said Kit, even now not quite willing to part with his document. ‘Are you and your people cleared for Wildlife?’

  Lancaster looked at him, then at the envelope, then allowed himself a wry smile.

  ‘I think I can safely say we are,’ he replied and, gently removing it from Kit’s unresisting grasp, disappeared to an adjoining room.

  *

  It was another ninety minutes by the gold Cartier watch presented to him by Suzanna on their twenty-fifth before Lancaster opened the door to admit the promised senior legal advisor and his sidekick. In that period, Lancaster had appeared no fewer than four times, once to offer Kit coffee, once to bring it, and twice to assure him that Lionel was on the case and would be heading this way ‘just as soon as he and Frances have got their heads round the paperwork’.

  ‘Lionel?’

  ‘Our deputy legal advisor. Spends half his week in the Cabinet Office, and the other half with us. He tells me he was assistant legal attaché in Paris when you were commercial counsellor there.’

  ‘Well, well, Lionel,’ Kit says, brightening as he recalls a worthy, rather tongue-tied young man with fair hair and freckles who made it a point of honour to dance with the plainest women in the room.

  ‘And Frances?’ he enquires hopefully.

  ‘Frances is our new Director in Charge of Security, which comes under the Executive Director’s umbrella. Also a lawyer, I’m afraid.’ Smile. ‘Used to be in private practice, till she saw the light, and is now happily with us.’

  Kit was glad of this information since it would not otherwise have occurred to him that Frances was happy. Her demeanour on sitting herself opposite him across the table struck him as positively mournful: thanks not least to her black business su
it, short-cropped hair and apparent refusal to look him in the eye.

  Lionel, on the other hand, though it was twenty years on, had remained his decent, rather prissy self. True, the freckles had given way to liver spots, and the fair hair had faded to an uneasy grey. But the blameless smile was undimmed and the handshake as vigorous as ever. Kit remembered that Lionel used to smoke a pipe and supposed he’d given it up.

  ‘Kit, super to see you,’ he declared, bringing his face a little closer than Kit had bargained for in his enthusiasm. ‘How’s well-earned retirement? God knows, I’m looking forward to mine! And marvellous things we hear about your Caribbean tour, by the way.’ Drop of the voice: ‘And Suzanna? How’s all that going? Things looking up a bit?’

  ‘Very much so. Yes, fine, thank you, great improvement,’ Kit replied. And gruffly, as an afterthought: ‘A bit keen to get this over, frankly, Lionel. We both are. Been a bit of an ordeal. ’Specially for Suki.’

  ‘Yes, well, of course we’re absolutely aware of that, and more than grateful to you for your extremely helpful, not to say timely, document, and for bringing the whole thing to our attention without – well – rocking the boat,’ said Lionel, no longer so tongue-tied, settling himself at the table. ‘Aren’t we, Frances? And of course’ – briskly opening a file and revealing a photocopy of Kit’s handwritten draft – ‘we’re immensely sympathetic. I mean, one can only imagine what you’ve been through. And Suzanna too, poor girl. Frances, I think I’m speaking for both of us?’

  If he was, Frances, our Director in Charge of Security, gave no sign of it. She too was leafing through a photocopy of Kit’s document, but so intently and slowly that he began to wonder whether she was learning it by heart.

  ‘Did Suzanna ever sign a declaration, Sir Christopher?’ she enquired, without raising her head.

  ‘Declaration of what?’ Kit demanded, for once not appreciating the Sir Christopher. ‘Sign what?’