John Carré - A Delicate Truth

‘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.

‘So, dear man, where in God’s name is your nice new master? We seek him here, we seek him there. We tried to get him to come and talk to us the other day. The swine stood us up.’

By us , Toby assumes the Joint Intelligence Committee, of which Oakley is some sort of ex-officio member. How this should be is not something Toby asks. Does the man who ran up a seditious joint letter to the Foreign Secretary urging him not to go after Saddam, thereafter earn himself a seat at the Office’s most secret councils? – or is he treated, as other rumours have it, as some kind of licensed contrarian, now cautiously admitted, now shut out? Toby has ceased to marvel at the paradoxes of Oakley’s life, perhaps because he has ceased to marvel at his own.

‘I understand my minister had to go to Washington at short notice,’ he replies guardedly.

Guarded because, whatever Foreign Office ethic says, he is still, somehow, the minister’s Private Secretary.