A Delicate Truth A Novel

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 rechristenedHuman 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.
    ‘Thank you, Audrey, not poor at all, I am pleased to say,’ he replies, with the determined levity he affects for such life-threatening encounters. ‘Dear but not poor. She remains in full remission. And you? In the pink of health, I trust?’
    ‘So she’s leavable,’ Audrey suggests, ignoring this kindly enquiry.
    ‘My hat no! In what sense?’ – determinedly keeping up the jolly banter.
    ‘In this sense: would four super-secret days abroad in a salubrious climate, just possibly running to five, be of any interest to you?’
    ‘They could be of considerable possible interest, thank you, Audrey, as it happens. Our grown-up daughter is living with us at the moment, so the timing could scarcely be better, given that she happens to be a medical doctor ,’ he can’t resist adding in his pride, but Audrey remains unimpressed by his daughter’s accomplishment.
    ‘I don’t know what it’s about and I don’t have to,’ she says, answering a question that he hasn’t put to her. ‘There’s a dynamic young junior minister called Quinn upstairs whom you may have heard of. He’d like to see you immediately. He’s a new broom, in case word hasn’t reached you in the far wastes of Logistical Contingencies, recently acquired from Defence – hardly a recommendation but there you are.’
    What on earth’s she on about? Of course such news has reached him. He reads his newspapers, doesn’t he? He watches Newsnight . Fergus Quinn, MP, Fergie to the world, is a Scottish brawler, a self-styled bête intellectuelle of the New Labourstable. On television he is vocal, belligerent and alarming. Moreover, he prides himself on being the people’s scourge of Whitehall’s bureaucracy – a commendable virtue viewed from afar, but scarcely reassuring if you happen to be a Whitehall bureaucrat.
    ‘You mean now , this minute, Audrey?’
    ‘That is what I understand him to mean by immediately .’
    The ministerial anteroom is empty, its staff long departed. The ministerial mahogany door, solid as iron, stands ajar. Knock and wait? Or knock and push? He does a little of both, hears: ‘Don’t just stand there. Come on in, and close the door behind you.’ He enters.
    The dynamic young minister’s bulk is squeezed into amidnight-blue dinner jacket. He is poised with a cellphone to his ear before a marble fireplace stuffed with red paper foil for flames. As on television, so in the flesh, he is stocky and thick-necked with close-cropped ginger hair and quick, greedy eyes set in a pugilist’s face.
    Behind him rises a twelve-foot portrait of an eighteenth-century Empire-builder in tights. For a mischievous moment brought on by tension, the comparison between the two such different men is irresistible. Though Quinn strenuously purports to be a man of the people, both have the pout of privileged discontent. Both have their body weight on one leg and the other knee cocked. Is the dynamic young minister about to launch a punitive raid on the hated French? Will he, in the name of New Labour, berate the folly of the howling mob? He does neither, but with a gritty ‘Call you later, Brad’ for his cellphone, stomps to the door, locks it and swings round.
    ‘They tell me you’re a seasoned member of the Service , that right?’ he says accusingly, in his carefully nurtured Glaswegian accent, after a head-to-toe inspection that