A Delicate Truth
A DELICATE TRUTH
John le Carré was born in 1931 and
attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in
British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last fifty years he has lived by his
pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.
Call for the Dead
A Murder of Quality
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
The Looking Glass War
A Small Town in Germany
The Naive and Sentimental Lover
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Honourable Schoolboy
Smiley’s People
The Little Drummer Girl
A Perfect Spy
The Russia House
The Secret Pilgrim
The Night Manager
Our Game
The Tailor of Panama
Single & Single
The Constant Gardener
Absolute Friends
The Mission Song
A Most Wanted Man
Our Kind of Traitor
For VJC
No winter shall abate the spring’s
increase
Donne
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later,
to be found out.
Oscar Wilde
On the second floor of a characterless
hotel in the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar, a lithe, agile man in his late fifties
restlessly paced his bedroom. His very British features, though pleasant and plainly
honourable, indicated a choleric nature brought to the limit of its endurance. A
distraught lecturer, you might have thought, observing the bookish forward lean and
loping stride and the errant forelock of salt-and-pepper hair that repeatedly had to be
disciplined with jerky back-handed shoves of the bony wrist. Certainly it would not have
occurred to many people, even in their most fanciful dreams, that he was a
middle-ranking British civil servant, hauled from his desk in one of the more prosaic
departments of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office to be dispatched on a
top-secret mission of acute sensitivity.
His assumed first name, as he insisted on
repeating to himself, sometimes half aloud, was Paul and his second – not exactly hard
to remember – was Anderson. If he turned on the television set it said
Welcome, Mr
Paul Anderson. Why not enjoy a complimentary pre-dinner aperitif in our Lord
Nelson’s Snug!
The exclamation mark in place of the more appropriate
question mark was a source of constant annoyance to the pedant in him. He was wearing
the hotel’s bathrobe of white towelling and he had been wearing it ever since his
incarceration, except when vainly trying to sleep or, once only, slinking upstairs at an
unsociable hour to eat alone in a rooftop brasserie washed with the fumes of chlorine
from a third-floor swimming pool across the road. Like much else in the room, the
bathrobe, too short
for his long legs, reeked of stale cigarette smoke
and lavender air freshener.
As he paced, he determinedly acted out his
feelings to himself without the restraints customary in his official life, his features
one moment cramped in honest perplexity, the next glowering in the full-length mirror
that was screwed to the tartan wallpaper. Here and there he spoke to himself by way of
relief or exhortation. Also half aloud? What was the difference when you were banged up
in an empty room with nobody to listen to you but a colour-tinted photograph of our dear
young Queen on a brown horse?
On a plastic-topped table lay the remnants
of a club sandwich that he had pronounced dead on arrival, and an abandoned bottle of
warm Coca-Cola. Though it came hard to him, he had permitted himself no alcohol since he
had taken possession of the room. The bed, which he had learned to detest as no other,
was large enough for six, but he had only to stretch out on it for his back to give him
hell. A radiant crimson counterpane of imitation silk lay over it, and on the
counterpane an innocent-looking cellphone which he had been assured was modified to the
highest state of encryption and, though he was of little faith in such matters, he could
only suppose it was. Each time he passed it, his gaze fixed on it with a mixture of
reproach, longing and frustration.
I regret to inform you, Paul, that you
will be totally incommunicado, save for operational purposes, throughout your
mission
, the laborious South African voice of Elliot, his self-designated field
commander, is warning him.
Should an unfortunate crisis afflict your fine family
during your absence they will pass their concerns to your office’s welfare
department, whereupon contact with you will be made. Do I make myself clear,
Paul?
You do, Elliot, little by little you do.
Reaching the overlarge picture window at the
further end of
the room, he scowled upward through the grimy net
curtains at Gibraltar’s legendary Rock which, sallow, wrinkled and remote, scowled
back at him like an angry dowager. Yet again, out of habit and impatience, he examined
his alien wristwatch and compared it with the green numerals on the radio clock beside
the bed. The watch was of battered steel with a black dial, a replacement for the gold
Cartier presented to him on their twenty-fifth by his beloved wife on the strength of an
inheritance from one of her many deceased aunts.
But hang on a minute!
Paul hasn’t
got a bloody wife!
Paul Anderson has no wife, no daughter. Paul
Anderson’s a bloody hermit!
‘Can’t have you wearing
that
, Paul darling, can we now?’ a motherly woman his own age is
saying to him a lifetime ago in the red-brick suburban villa near Heathrow airport where
she and her sisterly colleague are dressing him for the part. ‘Not with those nice
initials engraved on it, can we? You’d have to say you’d nicked it off of
somebody married, wouldn’t you, Paul?’
Sharing the joke, determined as ever to be a
good chap by his own lights, he looks on while she writes
Paul
on an adhesive
label and locks his gold watch away in a cash box with his wedding ring for what she
calls
the duration
.
How in God’s name did I ever get to end
up in this hellhole in the first place?
Did I jump or was I pushed? Or was it a bit
of both?
Describe, please, in a few well-chosen
circuits of the room, the precise circumstances of your unlikely journey from blessed
monotony to solitary confinement on a British colonial rock.
‘So how’s your poor dear
wife?’ asks the not-quite-superannuated ice queen of Personnel Department, now
grandly rechristened
Human Resources for no reason known to man, having
summoned him without a word of explanation to her lofty bower on a Friday evening when
all good citizens are hurrying home. The two are old adversaries. If they have anything
at all in common, it is the feeling that there are so few of them left.