A Delicate Truth A Novel

buggers, see if we don’t.’
    They duly waited.
    And come the following evening were still waiting. A dog had been spotted, but not a gyppo dog, or not to look at, it being a plump yellow Labrador accompanied by a big-striding bloke ina broad mackintosh hat and one of those Driza-Bone raincoats down to his ankles. And the bloke didn’t look any more gyppo than the dog did – with the result that John Treglowan and his two brothers, who had been spoiling to go up there and have a quiet word with them, same as last time, were restrained.
    Which was as well, because next morning the camper with its curtains and upcountry registration and yellow Labrador in the back rolled up at the post-office mini-market, and a nicer spoken pair of retired foreigners you couldn’t wish to ask for, according to the postmistress – foreigner being anyone who had the ill taste to come from east of the Tamar river. She didn’t go as far as to declare they were ‘gentry’ but there was a clear hint of quality in her description.
    But that don’t solve the question, do it?
    Not by a long way, it don’t.
    Don’t begin to.
    Because what right has anyone to go camping up the Manor in the first place? Who’s given them permission then? The commander’s bone-headed trustees over to Bodmin? Or those shark lawyers up in London? And how about if they’re paying rent then? What would that mean? It would mean another bloody caravan site, and us with two already and can’t fill them, not even when ’tis season.
    But as to asking the trespassers themselves: well, that wouldn’t be proper now, would it?
    It wasn’t till the camper appeared at Ben Painter’s garage, which does a line in do-it-yourself hardware, and a tall, angular, cheery fellow in his sixties jumped out, that speculation came to an abrupt halt:
    ‘Now, sir. Would you be Ben, by any chance?’ he begins, leaning forward and downward, Ben being eighty years old and five feet tall on a good day.
    ‘I’m Ben,’ Ben concedes.
    ‘Well, I’m Kit . And what I need, Ben, is a pair of man-sized metal-cutters. Sort of chaps that’ll snip through an iron bar this size ,’ he explained, making a ring of his finger and thumb.
    ‘You off to prison then?’ Ben enquires.
    ‘Well, not just at this moment , Ben, thank you,’ replies the same Kit, with a raucous hah! of a laugh. ‘There’s this giant padlock on the stable door, you see. A real thug of a chap, all rusted up and no key in sight. There’s a place on the key board where it used to hang, but it’s not hanging there any more. And believe you me, there’s nothing more stupid than an empty key-hook,’ he asserts heartily.
    ‘The stable door down the Manor , you was talking about then, was it?’ says Ben, after prolonged reflection.
    ‘The very one,’ Kit agrees.
    ‘Should be full of empty bottles, that stable should, knowing the commander.’
    ‘Highly likely. And I hope very shortly to be picking up the deposit on them.’
    Ben reflects on this too. ‘Deposit’s not allowed no more, deposit isn’t.’
    ‘Well now, I suppose it isn’t. So what I’ll really be doing is running them down to the bottle bank for recycling, won’t I?’ says Kit patiently.
    But this doesn’t satisfy Ben either:
    ‘Only I don’t think I should be doing that, should I?’ he objects, after another age. ‘Not now you’ve told me what it’s for . Not the Manor. I’d be aiding and abetting. Not unless you own the bloody place.’
    To which Kit, with evident reluctance because he doesn’t want to make old Ben look silly, explains that while he personally doesn’t own the Manor, his dear wife Suzanna does.
    ‘She’s the late commander’s niece , you see, Ben. Spent her absolute happiest childhood years here. Nobody else in thefamily wanted to take the place on, so the trustees decided to let us have a go.’
    Ben absorbs this.
    ‘She a Cardew, then, is she? Your wife?’
    ‘Well, she was , Ben. She’s a Probyn now. Been a Probyn for thirty-three glorious years, I’m proud to say.’
    ‘She Suzanna, then? Suzanna Cardew as rode the hunt when she were nine year old? Got out in front of the Master, had to have her horse hauled back by the Field Master.’
    ‘That sounds like Suzanna.’
    ‘Well I’m buggered,’ says Ben.
    A couple of days later an official letter arrived at the post office that put paid to any lingering suspicions. It was addressed not to any old Probyn but to Sir Christopher Probyn , who,