A Delicate Truth A Novel

to follow our disgraceful example. So resign away. You’re exactly what the Guardian needs: another lost voice bleating in the wilderness. If you don’t agree with government policy, don’t hang around trying to change it. Jump ship. Write the great novel you’re always dreaming about.’
    But Toby is not to be put down so easily:
    ‘So where the hell do you sit, Giles? You were as much against it as I was, you know you were. When fifty-two of our retired ambassadors signed a letter saying it was all a load of bollocks, you heaved a big sigh and told me you wished you were retired too. Do I have to wait till I’m sixty to speak out? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Till I’ve got my knighthood and my index-linked pension and I’m president of the local golf club? Is that loyalty or just funk, Giles?’
    Oakley’s Cheshire-cat smile softens as, fingertips together, he delicately formulates his reply:
    ‘Where do I sit, you ask. Why, at the conference table. Always at the table. I wheedle, I chip away, I argue, I reason, I cajole, I hope. But I do not expect. I adhere to the hallowed diplomatic doctrine of moderation in all things, and I apply it to the heinous crimes of every nation, including my own. I leave my feelings at the door before I go into the conference room and I never walk out in a huff unless I’ve been instructed to do so. I positively pride myself on doing everything by halves. Sometimes – this could well be such a time – I make a cautious démarche to our revered masters. But I never try to rebuild the Palace of Westminster in a day. Neither, at the risk of being pompous, should you.’
    And while Toby is fumbling for an answer:
    ‘Another thing, while I have you alone, if I may. My beloved wife Hermione tells me, in her capacity as the eyes and ears of Berlin’s diplomatic shenanigans, that you are conducting an inappropriate dalliance with the spouse of the Dutch military attaché, she being a notorious tart. True or false?’
    Toby’s posting to the British Embassy in Madrid, which has unexpectedly discovered a need for a junior attaché with Defence experience, follows a month later.
     
    *
     
    Madrid.
    Despite their disparity in age and seniority, Toby and Giles remain in close touch. How much this is due to Oakley’s string-pulling behind the scenes, how much to mere accident, Toby can only guess. Certain is that Oakley has taken to Toby in the way that some older diplomats consciously or otherwise foster their favoured young. Intelligence traffic between London and Madrid meanwhile was never brisker or more crucial. Its subject is not any more Saddam Hussein and his elusive weapons of mass destruction but the new generation of jihadists brought into being by the West’s assault on what was until then one of the more secular countries in the Middle East – a truth too raw to be admitted by its perpetrators.
    Thus the duo continues. In Madrid, Toby – like it or not, and mainly he likes it – becomes a leading player in the intelligence marketplace, commuting weekly to London, where Oakley flits in the middle air between the Queen’s spies on one side of the river and the Queen’s Foreign Office on the other.
    In coded discussions in Whitehall’s sealed basement rooms, new rules of engagement with suspected terrorist prisoners are cautiously thrashed out. Improbably, given Toby’s rank, he attends. Oakley presides. The word enhance , once used to convey spiritual exaltation, has entered the new American dictionary, but its meaning remains wilfully imprecise to the uninitiated, of whom Toby is one. All the same, he has his suspicions. Can these so-called new rules in reality be the old barbaric ones, dusted off and reinstated, he wonders? And if he is right, which increasingly he believes he is, what is the moral distinction, if any, between the man who applies the electrodes and the man who sits behind a desk and pretends he doesn’t know it’s happening, although he knows very well?
    But when Toby, nobly struggling to reconcile these questions with his conscience and upbringing, ventures to air them –purely academically, you understand – to Giles over a cosy dinner at Oakley’s club to celebrate Toby’s thrilling new appointment on promotion to the British Embassy in Cairo, Oakley, from whom no secrets are hidden, responds with one of his doting smiles and hides himself behind his beloved La Rochefoucauld:
    ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to