A Delicate Truth (19 page)

‘You’re
free
, Kit,
dammit!’ Jack cries boisterously. ‘You’re the bloody Opener, man, same
as Suzanna!’

But Kit in his exultation will have none of
it:

‘I am
not
free, thank you,
Jack Painter! I am
extremely
expensive. And so is my dear wife,’ he
retorts and, happy man that he is, slaps down a ten-pound note and drops the two pounds
change into the animal-welfare box.

A hay cart awaits them. A beribboned ladder
is lashed against it. Suzanna grips it with one hand, her riding skirts in the other,
and with Kit’s help ascends. Willing arms reach out to receive her. She waits for
her breathing to calm down. It does. She smiles. Harry Tregenza, The Builder You Can
Trust and celebrated rogue, wears an executioner’s mask and brandishes a
silver-painted wooden scythe. He is flanked by his wife wearing bunny ears. Next to them
stands this year’s Bailey Queen, bursting out of her corsage. Tipping his boater,
Kit plants chivalrous kisses on the cheeks of both women and inhales from each the same
waft of jasmine scent.

An ancient hurdy-gurdy is playing
‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’. Smiling energetically, he waits for
the din to subside. It doesn’t. He flaps an arm for silence, smiles harder. In
vain. From an inside pocket of his blazer he extracts the speech notes that Suzanna has
nobly typed for him, and waves them. A steam engine emits a truculent shriek. He mimes a
theatrical sigh, appeals to the heavens for sympathy, then to the crowd beneath him, but
the din refuses to let up.

He goes for it.

First he must bawl out what he amusingly
calls the Church Notices, though they concern such non-ecclesiastical matters as
toilets, parking and baby-changing. Does anyone hear him? Judging by the faces of the
listeners hanging around the foot of the hay cart, they don’t. He names our
selfless volunteers who have laboured night and day to make the miracle happen, and
invites them to identify themselves. He might as well be reading out
the names of the Glorious Dead. The hurdy-gurdy has gone back to the beginning.
You’re Master of Misrule too. They’ll expect you to be funny
. A
quick check of Suki: no bad signs. And Emily, his beloved Em: tall and watchful,
standing, as ever, a little apart from the pack.

‘And lastly, my friends, before I step
down – though I’d better be jolly careful when I do!’ – zero response –
‘it’s my pleasure, and my very happy duty, to urge you to spend your
hard-earned money
unwisely
, flirt
recklessly
with one another’s
wives’ – wished he hadn’t said that – ‘drink, eat and revel the day
away. So
hip hip
’ – tearing off his boater and thrusting it in the air –
‘
hip hip!
’

Suzanna raises her topper to join his
boater. The Builder You Wouldn’t Trust Further Than You Could Throw Him
can’t raise his executioner’s mask, so punches the air with his clenched
fist in an unintended communist salute. A long-delayed
Hooray!
tears through
the loudspeakers like an electrical fault. To murmurs of ‘Good on you, my
handsome!’ and ‘Proper job, my robin!’, Kit clambers gratefully down
the ladder, lets his walking stick fall to the ground and reaches up to take hold of
Suzanna by the hips.

‘Bloody wonderful, Dad!’ Emily
declares, appearing at Kit’s side with the walking stick. ‘Want a sit-down,
Mum, or
flog on
?’ – using a family expression.

Suzanna, as ever, wants to flog on.

The royal tour of Our Opener and His Lady
Wife begins. First, inspect shire horses. Suzanna the born country girl chats to them,
strokes and pats their rumps without inhibition. Kit makes a show of admiring their
brasses. Home-grown vegetables in their Sunday best. Cauliflowers that the locals call
broccoli: bigger than footballs, washed clean as a pin. Home-made
breads, cheeses and honey.

Sample piccalilli: tasteless but keep
grinning. Smoked salmon pâté excellent. Urge Suki to buy some. She does.
Linger over Gardening Club’s floral celebration. Suzanna knows every flower by its
first name. Bump into MacIntyres, two of life’s dissatisfied customers.
Ex-tea-planter George keeps a loaded rifle at his bedside for the day the masses
assemble at his gates. His wife, Lydia, bores for the village. Advance on them with
outstretched arms:

‘George! Lydia! Darlings!
Marvellous!
Super dinner at your house the other night, really one of those
evenings. Our turn next time!’

Move gratefully to our bygone threshing
machines and steam engines. Suzanna undaunted by stampede of children dressed as
anything from Batman to Osama. Kit yells at Gerry Pertwee, village Romeo, squatting up
on his tractor in Red Indian headdress:

‘For the umpteenth time, Gerry, when
are you going to mow our bloody paddock?’ And to Suzanna, aside: ‘Damned if
I’ll pay the bugger fifteen quid an hour when the going rate’s
twelve.’

Suzanna waylaid by Marjory, rich divorcee on
the prowl. Marjory has set her sights on the dilapidated greenhouses in the walled
garden of the Manor for her Orchid Club, but Suzanna suspects it’s Kit she’s
set her sights on. Kit the diplomat rides to the rescue:

‘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.

And the eyes themselves, formerly so quick
and knowing, seemed to have lost their mobility, because once they had settled on Kit,
they showed no sign of shifting but stayed there, fixed on him, so that the only way
either man was ever going to break free of the other was if Kit did the breaking; which
he duly achieved, but only by turning his whole head to Suzanna and saying,
Well,
darling, here we are, what a day, eh, what a day!
– or something equally
fatuous, but also sufficiently untypical of him for a frown of puzzlement to pass across
Suzanna’s flushed face.

And this frown has not quite disappeared
when he hears the soft Welsh voice he is praying uselessly not to hear: