A Delicate Truth A Novel

letter, if it ever existed, which I seriously doubt,’ the astonished Toby snaps in perfect truth as elsewhere in his mind he grapples, not for the first time, with the enigma that is Giles Oakley.
    ‘Well, jolly good luck to you, anyway,’ says Crispin dismissively and, turning to Quinn, leaves Toby to contemplate at his leisure the same straight, suspect back that he glimpsed through the frosted glass of his minister’s hotel suite in Brussels, and again through the castle window in Prague.
     
    *
     
    Urgently google Mrs Spencer Hardy of Houston, Texas, widow and sole heiress of the late Spencer K. Hardy III, founder of Spencer Hardy Incorporated, a Texas-based multinational corporation trading in pretty well everything. Under her preferred sobriquet of Miss Maisie voted Republican Benefactress of the Year; Chairperson, the Americans for Christ Legion; Honorary President of a cluster of not-for-profit pro-life and family-value organizations; Chair of the American Institute for Islamic Awareness. And, in what looked almost like a recent add-on: President and CEO of an otherwise undescribed body calling itself Ethical Outcomes Incorporated.
    Well, well, he thought: a red-hot evangelist and ethical to boot. Not a given. Not by any means.
     
    *
     
    For days and nights, Toby agonizes over the choices before him. Go running to Diana and tell all? – ‘I disobeyed you, Diana. I know what happened at Defence and now it’s happening all over again to us.’ But what happened at Defence is none of his business, as Diana forcefully informed him. And the Foreign Office has many hellholes earmarked for discontents and whistle-blowers.
    Meanwhile, the omens around him are daily multiplying. Whether this is Crispin’s work he can only guess, but how else to explain the ostentatious cooling of the minister’s attitude towards him? Entering or leaving his Private Office, Quinn now grants him barely a nod. It’s no longer Tobe but Toby , a change he would once have welcomed. Not now. Not since he failed to make his mark and be invited aboard a certain very secret ship. Incoming phone calls from Whitehall’s heavy hitters that were until now routinely passed through the Private Secretary are rerouted to the minister’s desk by way of one of several newly installed direct lines. In addition to the heavily flagged despatchboxes from Downing Street that Quinn alone may handle, there are the sealed black canisters from the US Embassy. One morning a super-strong safe mysteriously appears in the Private Office. The minister alone has the combination to it.
    And only last weekend, when Quinn is about to be driven to his country house in his official car, he does not require Toby to pack his briefcase for him with essential papers for his attention. He will do it himself, thank you, Toby, and behind locked doors. And no doubt, when Quinn arrives the other end, he will embrace the rich Canadian alcoholic wife whom his Party’s spin doctors have ruled unfit for public presentation, pat his dog and his daughter, and once more lock himself away, and read them.
    It therefore comes like an act of divine providence when Giles Oakley, now revealed as the closet author of a round-robin letter to the Foreign Secretary about the insanity of invading Iraq, calls Toby on his BlackBerry with an invitation to dine that same evening:
    ‘Schloss Oakley, 7.45. Wear what you like and stick around afterwards for a Calvados. Is that a yes?’
    It is a yes, Giles. It is a yes, even if it means cancelling another pair of theatre tickets.
     
    *
     
    Senior British diplomats who have been restored to their motherland have a way of turning their houses into overseas hirings. Giles and Hermione are no exception. Schloss Oakley, as Giles has determinedly christened it, is a sprawling twenties villa on the outer fringes of Highgate, but it could as well be their residence in Grunewald. Outside, the same imposing gates and immaculate gravel sweep, weed free; inside, the same scratched Chippendale-style furniture, close carpeting and contract Portuguese caterers.
    Toby’s fellow dinner guests include a counsellor at the German Embassy and his wife, a visiting Swedish ambassador to Ukraine, and a French woman pianist called Fifi and her lover Jacques. Fifi, who is fixated on alpacas, holds the table in thrall. Alpacas are the most considerate beasts on earth. They even produce their young with exquisite tact. She advises Hermione to get herself a pair.