John Carré - A Delicate Truth

‘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.

‘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.