A Delicate Truth A Novel

cleaner’s. He took the ticket from her and promised to send it on. She was pale. She did not look back, even if she could not resist the final word:
    ‘Let’s face it, Toby, you’re a bit of a cold fish, aren’t you?’ – with which she rode away, ostensibly to her sister in Suffolk, though he suspected she might have other irons in the fire, including her recently abandoned husband.
    And Toby, equally firm of purpose, had set out on foot for his coffee and croissant in Soho as a prelude to grand larceny. Which is where he now sat, sipping his cappuccino in the morning sunshine and staring blankly at the passers-by. If I’m such a cold fish, how did I talk myself into this God-awful situation?
    For answers to this and allied questions, his mind turned as of habit to Giles Oakley, his enigmatic mentor and self-appointed patron.
     
    *
     
    Berlin.
    The neophyte diplomat Bell, Second Secretary (Political), has just arrived at the British Embassy on his first overseas posting. The Iraq War looms. Britain has signed up to it, but denies it has done so. Germany is dithering on the brink. Giles Oakley, the embassy’s éminence grise – darting, impish Oakley, dyed in all the oceans, as the Germans say – is Toby’s section chief. Oakley’s job, amid a myriad others less defined: to supervise the flow of British intelligence to German liaison. Toby’s: to be his spear-carrier. His German is already good. As ever, he’s a fast learner. Oakley takes him under his wing, marches him round the ministries and opens doors for him that would otherwise have remained locked against one of his lowly status. Are Toby and Giles spies? Not at all! They are blue-chip British career diplomats who have found themselves, like many others, at the trading tables of the free world’s vast intelligence marketplace.
    The only problem is that the further Toby is admitted into these inner councils, the greater his abhorrence of the war about to happen. He rates it illegal, immoral and doomed. His discomfort is compounded by the knowledge that even the most supine of his schoolfriends are out on the street protesting their outrage. So are his parents who, in their Christian socialist decency, believe that the purpose of diplomacy should be to prevent war rather than to promote it. His mother emails him in despair: Tony Blair – once her idol – has betrayed us all. His father, adding his stern Methodist voice, accuses Bush and Blair jointly of the sin of pride and intends to compose a parable about a pair of peacocks who, bewitched by their own reflections, turn into vultures.
    Little wonder then that with such voices dinning in his ear beside his own, Toby resents having to sing the war’s praises to, of all people, the Germans, even urging them to join the dance. He too voted heart and soul for Tony Blair, and now finds hisprime minister’s public postures truthless and emetic. And with the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom , he boils over:
    The scene is the Oakleys’ diplomatic villa in Grunewald. It is midnight as another ball-breaking Herrenabend – power dinner for male bores – drags to its close. Toby has acquired a decent crop of German friends in Berlin, but tonight’s guests are not among them. A tedious federal minister, a terminally vain titan of Ruhr industry, a Hohenzollern pretender and a quartet of free-loading parliamentarians have finally called for their limousines. Oakley’s diplomatic Ur -wife, Hermione, having supervised proceedings from the kitchen over a generous gin, has taken herself to bed. In the sitting room, Toby and Giles Oakley rake over the night’s takings for any odd scrap of indiscretion.
    Abruptly, Toby’s self-control hits the buffers:
    ‘So actually screw, sod and fuck the whole bloody thing,’ he declares, slamming down his glass of Oakley’s very old Calvados.
    ‘The whole bloody thing being what exactly?’ Oakley, the fifty-five-year-old leprechaun enquires, stretching out his little legs in luxurious ease, which is a thing he does in crisis.
    With unshakable urbanity, Oakley hears Toby out, and as impassively delivers himself of his acid, if affectionate, response:
    ‘Go ahead, Toby. Resign. I share your callow personal opinions. No sovereign nation such as ours should be taken to war under false pretences, least of all by a couple of egomaniac zealots without an ounce of history between them. And certainly we should not have attempted to persuade other sovereign nations