A Delicate Truth (20 page)

‘Well, Paul. Quite a coincidence, I
will say. Not what either of us was led to expect, was it?’

But though the words came smashing into
Kit’s head like so many bullets, Jeb must in reality have spoken them quietly,
because Suzanna – either thanks to the imperfections of the little hearing aids she wore
under her hair, or to the persistent boom-boom of the fairground – failed to pick them
up, preferring to manifest an exaggerated interest in a large handbag with an adjustable
shoulder strap. She was peering at Jeb over her bunch of Bailey violets and she was
smiling a bit too hard at him and being a bit too sweet and condescending altogether for
Kit’s taste, which was actually her shyness at work, but didn’t look like
it.

‘Now you’re Jeb himself, are
you? The real thing.’

What the hell does she mean,
real
thing? thought Kit, suddenly outraged. Real as compared to
what
?

‘You’re not a substitute or a
stand-in or anything?’ she went on, exactly as if Kit had put her up to explaining
her interest in the fellow.

And Jeb for his part was taking her question
very seriously:

‘Well now, I wasn’t
christened
Jeb, I’ll admit that,’ he replied, directing his
gaze away from Kit at last and bestowing it on Suzanna with the same steadfastness.
Adding with a loquacity that cut straight to Kit’s heart: ‘But the name they
gave me was such a mouthful, frankly, that I decided to do some essential surgery on it.
Put it that way.’

But Suzanna was in her asking mode:

‘And where on
earth
did you
find such
marvellous
leather, Jeb? It’s perfectly
beautiful
.’

At which Kit, whose mind by now had switched
to diplomatic autopilot, announced that he too had been bursting to ask the same
question:

‘Yes, indeed, where
did
you
get your splendid leather from, Jeb?’

And there follows a moment where Jeb
considers his questioners in turn as if deciding which of them to favour. He settles on
Suzanna:

‘Yes, well now, it’s actually
Russian reindeer
hide, madam,’ he explains, with what to Kit is by
now an unbearable deference, as he takes down an animal skin from the wall and spreads
it lovingly on his lap. ‘Recovered from the wreck of a Danish brigantine that went
down in Plymouth Sound in 1786, they tell me. She was on her way from St Petersburg to
Genoa, you see, sheltering from the south-westerly gales. Well, we all know about
them
, don’t we, down these parts?’ – giving the skin a
consoling stroke with one tanned little hand – ‘not that the leather minded, did
you? Couple of hundred years of seawater were just what you liked,’ he went on
quaintly, as if to a pet. ‘The minerals in the wrapping may have helped too, I
dare say.’

But Kit knew that if Jeb was delivering his
homily to Suzanna, it was Kit he was talking to, Kit’s bewilderment and
frustration and anxiety he was playing on, and – yes, his fear too – galloping fear –
though of what precisely he had yet to work out.

‘And you do this for a
living
,
do you, Jeb?’ Suzanna was demanding, overtired and sounding dogmatic in
consequence. ‘Full time? You’re not just
moonlighting
or
two-jobbing
or studying on the side? This isn’t a
hobby
,
it’s your
life
. That’s what
I
want to know.’

Jeb needed to think deeply about these large
questions. His small brown eyes turned to Kit for help, dwelt on him, then turned away,
disappointed. Finally he heaved a sigh and shook his head like a man at odds with
himself.

‘Well, I
suppose
I did have a
couple of alternatives, now I come to think of it,’ he conceded. ‘Martial
arts? Well, these days they’re all at it, aren’t they? Close protection, I
suppose,’ he suggested after another long stare at Kit. ‘Walking rich kids
to school in the mornings. Walking them home evening time. Good money in it, they say.
But
leather
now’ – giving the hide another consoling caress –
‘I’ve always fancied a good-quality leather, same as my dad. Nothing like
it, I say. But is it my
life
? Well, life’s what you’re left with,
really’ – with yet another stare at Kit, a harder one.

Suddenly everything had speeded up,
everything was heading for disaster. Suzanna’s eyes had turned warning-bright.
Fierce dabs of colour had appeared on her cheeks. She was sifting through the
men’s wallets at an unhealthy speed on the specious grounds that Kit had a
birthday coming up. He had, but not till October. When he reminded her of this, she gave
an over-hearty laugh and promised that, if she decided to buy one, she would keep it
secret in her bottom drawer.

‘The
stitching
now, Jeb, is
it
hand
or is it
machine
?’ she blurted, forgetting all about
Kit’s birthday and grabbing impulsively at the shoulder bag that she had first
picked up.

‘Hand, ma’am.’

‘And that’s the
asking
price, is it, sixty pounds? It seems an
awful
lot.’

Jeb turned to Kit:

‘Best I can do, I’m afraid,
Paul,’ he said. ‘Quite a struggle for some of us, not having an index-linked
pension and similar.’

Was it hatred that Kit was seeing in
Jeb’s eyes? Anger? Despair? And what was Jeb seeing in Kit’s eyes?
Mystification? Or the mute appeal not to call him Paul again in Suzanna’s hearing?
But Suzanna, whatever she’d heard or hadn’t, had heard enough:

‘Well then, I’ll have it,’
she declared. ‘It’ll be just right for my shopping in Bodmin, won’t
it, Kit? It’s roomy and it’s got sensible compartments. Look, it’s
even got a little side pocket for my credit card. I think sixty pounds is actually jolly
reasonable. Don’t you, Kit? Of course you do!’

Saying which, she performed an act so
improbable, so provocative, that it momentarily banished all other preoccupations. She
placed her own perfectly serviceable handbag on the table and, as a prelude to digging
in it for her money, removed her top hat and shoved it at Jeb to hold. If she’d
untied the buttons on her blouse, she could not, in Kit’s inflamed perception,
have been more explicit.

‘Look here,
I’ll
pay
for this, don’t be bloody silly,’ he protested, startling not only Suzanna
but himself with his vehemence. And to Jeb, who alone appeared unperturbed:
‘
Cash
, I take it? You deal in cash only’ – like an accusation –
‘no cheques or cards or any of the aids to nature?’

Aids to nature?
– what the hell is
he blathering about? With fingers that seemed to have joined themselves together at the
tips, he picked three twenty-pound notes from his wallet and plonked them on the
table:

‘There you are, darling. Present for
you. Your Easter egg, one week late. Slot the old bag inside the new one. Of
course
it’ll go. Here’ – doing it for her, none too gently.
‘Thanks, Jeb. Terrific find. Terrific that you came. Make sure we see you here
next year, now.’

Why didn’t the bloody man pick up the
money? Why didn’t he smile, nod, say thanks or cheers –
do
something,
like any normal human being, instead of sitting down again and poking at the money with
his skinny index finger as if he thought it was fake, or not enough, or dishonourably
earned, or whatever the hell he was thinking, back out of sight again under his Puritan
hat? And why did Suzanna, by now feverish, stand there grinning idiotically down at him,
instead of responding to Kit’s sharp tug at her arm?

‘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?’