A Delicate Truth A Novel

at the pavement table of a humble Italian café in London’s Soho, steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording, illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability.
    His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider. Of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibraltar he knew nothing: rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass.
    Neither was he in appearance or by nature cut out to be a felon. Even now, premeditating his criminal design, he remained the decent, diligent, tousled, compulsively ambitious, intelligent-looking fellow that his colleagues and employers took him for. He was stocky in build, not particularly handsome, with a shock of unruly brown hair that went haywire as soon as it was brushed. That there was gravitas in him was undeniable. The gifted, state-educated only child of pious artisan parents from the south coast of England who knew no politics but Labour –the father an elder of his local tabernacle, the mother a chubby, happy woman who spoke constantly of Jesus – he had battled his way into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, first as a clerk, and thence by way of evening classes, language courses, internal examinations and two-day leadership tests, to his present, coveted position. As to the Toby , which might by the sound of it set him higher on the English social ladder than his provenance deserved, it derived from nothing more elevated than his father’s pride in the holy man Tobias, whose wondrous filial virtues are set down in the ancient scripts.
    What had driven Toby’s ambition – what drove it still – was something he barely questioned. His schoolfriends had wished only to make money. Let them. Toby, though modesty forbade him to say so in so many words, wished to make a difference – or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a post-imperial, post-Cold War world. Given his head, he would long ago have swept away Britain’s private education system, abolished all vestiges of entitlement and put the monarchy on a bicycle. Yet even while harbouring these seditious thoughts, the striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.
    And in speech, though he was speaking at this moment to no one but himself? As a natural-born linguist with his father’s love of cadence and an almost suffocating awareness of the brand-marks on the English tongue, it was inevitable that he should discreetly shed the last tinges of his Dorset burr in favour of the Middle English affected by those determined not to have their social origins defined for them.
    With the alteration in his voice had come an equally subtle change in his choice of clothing. Conscious that any moment now he would be sauntering through the gates of the Foreign Office with every show of being at his managerial ease, hewas wearing chinos and an open-necked shirt – and a shapeless black jacket for that bit of off-duty formality.
    What was also not apparent to any outward eye was that only two hours previously his live-in girlfriend of three months’ standing had walked out of his Islington flat vowing never to see him again. Yet somehow this tragic event had failed to cast him down. If there was a connection between Isabel’s departure and the crime he was about to commit, then perhaps it was to be found in his habit of lying awake at all hours brooding on his unshareable preoccupations. True, at intervals throughout the night, they had vaguely discussed the possibility of a separation, but then latterly they often had. He had assumed that when morning came she would as usual change her mind, but this time she stuck to her guns. There had been no screams, no tears. He phoned for a cab, she packed. The cab came, he helped her downstairs with her suitcases. She was worried about her silk suit at the