John Carré - A Delicate Truth

‘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 gold 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.