A Delicate Truth (21 page)

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?

‘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.’

But nobody fobs off Emily. Not these days.
Not after that scoundrel Bernard two-timed her.

‘What happened at Bailey’s
yesterday?’ she demanded. ‘At the leather stall. You knew the man but you
wouldn’t acknowledge him. He called you Paul and left some foul note in
Mum’s handbag.’

Kit had long abandoned his attempts to
penetrate the near-telepathic communications between his wife and daughter.

‘Yes, well, I’m afraid
that’s not something you and I are able to discuss,’ he replied loftily,
avoiding her eye.

‘And you’re not able to discuss
it with Mum either. Right?’

‘Yes, it
is
right, Em, as it
happens. And I’m not enjoying it any more than she is. Unfortunately, it’s a
matter of considerable official secrecy. As your mother is aware. And accepts. As
perhaps you should.’