A Delicate Truth A Novel - By John Le Carre Page 0,53

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:

‘Well, Paul. Quite a coincidence, I will say. Not what