A Delicate Truth by John le Carré Page B

design, he remained the
     decent, diligent, tousled, compulsively ambitious, intelligent-looking fellow that his
     colleagues and employers took him for. He was stocky in build, not particularly
     handsome, with a shock of unruly brown hair that went haywire as soon as it was brushed.
     That there was gravitas in him was undeniable. The gifted, state-educated only child of
     pious artisan parents from the south coast of England who knew no politics but Labour –the father an elder of his local tabernacle, the mother a chubby,
     happy woman who spoke constantly of Jesus – he had battled his way into the Foreign and
     Commonwealth Office, first as a clerk, and thence by way of evening classes, language
     courses, internal examinations and two-day leadership tests, to his present, coveted
     position. As to the
Toby
, which might by the sound of it set him higher on the
     English social ladder than his provenance deserved, it derived from nothing more
     elevated than his father’s pride in the holy man Tobias, whose wondrous filial
     virtues are set down in the ancient scripts.
    What had driven Toby’s ambition – what
     drove it still – was something he barely questioned. His schoolfriends had wished only
     to make money. Let them. Toby, though modesty forbade him to say so in so many words,
     wished to make a difference – or, as he had put it a little shamefacedly to his
     examiners, take part in his country’s discovery of its true identity in a
     post-imperial, post-Cold War world. Given his head, he would long ago have swept away
     Britain’s private education system, abolished all vestiges of entitlement and put
     the monarchy on a bicycle. Yet even while harbouring these seditious thoughts, the
     striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of
     liberating.
    And in speech, though he was speaking at
     this moment to no one but himself? As a natural-born linguist with his father’s
     love of cadence and an almost suffocating awareness of the brand-marks on the English
     tongue, it was inevitable that he should discreetly shed the last tinges of his Dorset
     burr in favour of the Middle English affected by those determined not to have their
     social origins defined for them.
    With the alteration in his voice had come an
     equally subtle change in his choice of clothing. Conscious that any moment now he would
     be sauntering through the gates of the Foreign Office with every show of being at his
     managerial ease, hewas wearing chinos and an open-necked shirt – and a
     shapeless black jacket for that bit of off-duty formality.
    What was also not apparent to any outward
     eye was that only two hours previously his live-in girlfriend of three months’
     standing had walked out of his Islington flat vowing never to see him again. Yet somehow
     this tragic event had failed to cast him down. If there was a connection between
     Isabel’s departure and the crime he was about to commit, then perhaps it was to be
     found in his habit of lying awake at all hours brooding on his unshareable
     preoccupations. True, at intervals throughout the night, they had vaguely discussed the
     possibility of a separation, but then latterly they often had. He had assumed that when
     morning came she would as usual change her mind, but this time she stuck to her guns.
     There had been no screams, no tears. He phoned for a cab, she packed. The cab came, he
     helped her downstairs with her suitcases. She was worried about her silk suit at the
     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