A Delicate Truth A Novel - By John Le Carre Page 0,49
Kit was out shopping and spotted you across the street, it was a pound to a penny he’d be bounding towards you between the traffic with his arm up, needing to know how your daughter was enjoying her gap year or how your wife was doing after her dad passed away – warm-hearted to a fault, he was, no side to him either, and never forgets a name. As for Emily, their daughter, who’s a doctor up in London, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her: well, whenever she came down she brought the sunshine with her, ask John Treglowan, who goes into a swoon every time he sees her, dreaming up all the aches and pains he hasn’t got, just to have her cure them for him! Well, a cat may look at a queen, they do say.
So it came as no surprise to anybody, except possibly Kit himself, when Sir Christopher Probyn of the Manor was paid the unprecedented, the unique honour, of becoming the first non-Cornishman ever to be elected Official Opener and Lord of Misrule for Master Bailey’s Annual Fayre, held by ancient rite in Bailey’s Meadow in the village of St Pirran on the first Sunday after Easter.
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‘Funky but not over the top is Mrs Marlow’s advice,’ said Suzanna, busying herself in front of the cheval mirror and talking through the open doorway to Kit’s dressing room. ‘We’re to preserve our dignity, whatever that’s supposed to mean.’
‘So not my grass skirt,’ Kit called back in disappointment. ‘Still, Mrs Marlow knows best,’ he added resignedly, Mrs Marlow being their elderly, part-time housekeeper, inherited from the commander.
‘And remember you’re not just today’s Opener,’ Suzanna warned, giving a last affirmative tug at her stock. ‘You’re Master of Misrule too. They’ll expect you to be funny. But not too funny. And none of your blue jokes. There’ll be Methodists present.’
The dressing room was the one part of the Manor Kit had vowed never to lay his do-it-yourself fingers on. He loved its faded Victorian wallpaper, the clunky antique writing desk set in its own alcove, the worn sash window looking out over the orchard. And today, oh gladness, the aged pear and apple trees were in blossom, thanks to some timely pruning by Mrs Marlow’s husband, Albert.
Not that Kit had just stepped into the commander’s shoes. He had added bits of himself too. On the fruitwood tallboy stood a statuette of the victorious Duke of Wellington gloating over a crouching Napoleon in a sulk: bought in a Paris flea market on Kit’s first foreign tour. On the wall hung a print of a Cossack musketeer shoving a pike down the throat of an Ottoman janissary: Ankara, First Secretary, Commercial.
Yanking open his wardrobe in search of whatever was funky but not over the top, he let his eye wander over other relics of his diplomatic past.
My black morning coat and spongebag trousers? They’d think I was a bloody undertaker.
Dinner tails? Head waiter. And in this heat daft, for the day against all prediction had dawned cloudless and radiant. He gave an ecstatic bellow:
‘Eureka!’
‘You’re not in the bath, are you, Probyn?’
‘Drowning, waving, the lot!’
A yellowing straw boater from his Cambridge years has caught his eye and, hanging beneath it, a striped blazer of the same period: perfect for my Brideshead look. An ancient pair of white ducks will complete the ensemble. And for that touch of foppery, his antique walking stick with scrolled silver handle, a recent acquisition. With knighthood, he had discovered a harmless thing about walking sticks. No trip to London was complete without a visit to the emporium of Mr James Smith of New Oxford Street. And finally – whoopee! – the fluorescent socks that Emily had given him for Christmas.
‘Em? Where is that girl? Emily, I require your best teddy bear immediately!’
‘Out running with Sheba,’ Suzanna reminded him from the bedroom.
Sheba, their yellow Labrador. Shared their last posting with them.
He returned to the wardrobe. To set off the fluorescent socks he would risk the orange suede loafers he’d bought in Bodmin at a summer sale. He tried them on and let out a yip. What the hell? He’d be out of them by tea time. He selected an outrageous tie, squeezed himself into the blazer, clapped on the boater at a rakish angle and did his Brideshead voice:
‘I say, Suki, darling, do ya happen to remember where I put m’ bally speech notes?’ – posing hand on hip in the doorway like all the best