A Delicate Truth (18 page)

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 the
family 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, according to John
Treglowan, who’d looked him up on the Internet, had been some sort of ambassador
or commissioner, was it, to a bunch of islands in the Caribbean that was still supposed
to be British, and had a medal to show for it too.

And from that day on, Kit and Suzanna, as
they insisted on being called, could do no wrong, even if the levellers in the village
would have wished it different. Where the commander in his later years was remembered as
a lonely, misanthropic drunk, the Manor’s new incumbents threw themselves on
village life with such zest and goodwill as even the sourest couldn’t deny. It
didn’t matter that Kit was practically rebuilding the Manor single-handed: come
Fridays, he’d be down at Community House with an apron round his waist, serving
suppers at Seniors’ Stake-Nite and staying for the washing-up. And Suzanna, who
they say is ill but you wouldn’t know it, like as not helping out with the Busy
Bees or sorting church accounts with Vicar after the treasurer went and died, or down
Primary School for the Sure
Starters’ concert, or up Church Hall
to help set up for Farmers’ Market, or delivering deprived city kids to their
country hosts for a week’s holiday away from the Smoke, or running
somebody’s wife to the Treliske in Truro to see her sick husband. And stuck-up? –
forget it, she was just like you and me, ladyship or not.

Or if Kit was out shopping and spotted you
across the street, it was a pound to a penny he’d be bounding towards you between
the traffic with his arm up, needing to know how your daughter was enjoying her gap year
or how your wife was doing after her dad passed away – warm-hearted to a fault, he was,
no side to him either, and never forgets a name. As for Emily, their daughter,
who’s a doctor up in London, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her:
well
, whenever
she
came down she brought the sunshine with her,
ask John Treglowan, who goes into a swoon every time he sees her, dreaming up all the
aches and pains he hasn’t got, just to have her cure them for him! Well, a cat may
look at a queen, they do say.

So it came as no surprise to anybody, except
possibly Kit himself, when Sir Christopher Probyn of the Manor was paid the
unprecedented, the unique honour, of becoming the first non-Cornishman ever to be
elected Official Opener and Lord of Misrule for Master Bailey’s Annual Fayre, held
by ancient rite in Bailey’s Meadow in the village of St Pirran on the first Sunday
after Easter.

‘Funky but not over the top is Mrs
Marlow’s advice,’ said Suzanna, busying herself in front of the cheval
mirror and talking through the open doorway to Kit’s dressing room.
‘We’re to preserve our dignity, whatever
that
’s supposed to
mean.’

‘So not my grass skirt,’ Kit
called back in disappointment. ‘Still, Mrs Marlow knows best,’ he added
resignedly, Mrs Marlow
being their elderly, part-time housekeeper,
inherited from the commander.

‘And remember you’re not just
today’s
Opener
,’ Suzanna warned, giving a last affirmative tug at
her stock. ‘You’re Master of Misrule too. They’ll expect you to be
funny. But not
too
funny. And none of your blue jokes. There’ll be
Methodists present.’

The dressing room was the one part of the
Manor Kit had vowed never to lay his do-it-yourself fingers on. He loved its faded
Victorian wallpaper, the clunky antique writing desk set in its own alcove, the worn
sash window looking out over the orchard. And today, oh gladness, the aged pear and
apple trees were in blossom, thanks to some timely pruning by Mrs Marlow’s
husband, Albert.

Not that Kit had just stepped into the
commander’s shoes. He had added bits of himself too. On the fruitwood tallboy
stood a statuette of the victorious Duke of Wellington gloating over a crouching
Napoleon in a sulk: bought in a Paris flea market on Kit’s first foreign tour. On
the wall hung a print of a Cossack musketeer shoving a pike down the throat of an
Ottoman janissary: Ankara, First Secretary, Commercial.

Yanking open his wardrobe in search of
whatever was funky but not over the top, he let his eye wander over other relics of his
diplomatic past.

My black morning coat and spongebag
trousers? They’d think I was a bloody undertaker.

Dinner tails? Head waiter. And in this heat
daft, for the day against all prediction had dawned cloudless and radiant. He gave an
ecstatic bellow:

‘Eureka!’

‘You’re not in the
bath
, are you, Probyn?’

‘Drowning, waving, the lot!’

A yellowing straw boater from his Cambridge
years has
caught his eye and, hanging beneath it, a striped blazer of
the same period: perfect for my Brideshead look. An ancient pair of white ducks will
complete the ensemble. And for that touch of foppery, his antique walking stick with
scrolled silver handle, a recent acquisition. With knighthood, he had discovered a
harmless thing about walking sticks. No trip to London was complete without a visit to
the emporium of Mr James Smith of New Oxford Street. And finally – whoopee! – the
fluorescent socks that Emily had given him for Christmas.

‘Em? Where is that girl? Emily, I
require your best teddy bear immediately!’

‘Out running with Sheba,’
Suzanna reminded him from the bedroom.

Sheba, their yellow Labrador. Shared their
last posting with them.

He returned to the wardrobe. To set off the
fluorescent socks he would risk the orange suede loafers he’d bought in Bodmin at
a summer sale. He tried them on and let out a yip. What the hell? He’d be out of
them by tea time. He selected an outrageous tie, squeezed himself into the blazer,
clapped on the boater at a rakish angle and did his Brideshead voice:

‘I say, Suki, darling, do ya happen to
remember where I put m’ bally speech notes?’ – posing hand on hip in the
doorway like all the best dandies. Then stopped, and lowered his arms to his sides in
awe. ‘Mother of pearl. Suki, darling. Hallelujah!’

Suzanna was standing before the cheval
mirror, scrutinizing herself over her shoulder. She was wearing her late aunt’s
black riding habit and boots, and the white lace blouse with its stock for a collar. She
had pulled her strict grey hair into a bun and fixed it with a silver comb. On top of it
she had set a shiny black topper that should have been ridiculous but to Kit was utterly
disarming. The clothes fitted her, the period fitted her, the topper fitted her. She was
a handsome, sixty-year-old
Cornishwoman of her time, and the time was
a hundred years ago. Best of all, you’d think she’d never had a day’s
illness in her life.

Pretending to be unsure whether it was
permitted to advance further, Kit made a show of hovering in the doorway.

‘You
are
going to enjoy it,
aren’t you, Kit?’ Suzanna said severely into the mirror. ‘I
don’t want to think of you going through the motions just to please me.’

‘Of
course
I’m going to
enjoy it, darling. It’ll be a hoot.’

And he meant it. If it would have made old
Suki happy, he’d have put on a tutu and jumped out of a cake. They’d lived
his
life and now they would live hers, if it killed him. Taking her hand,
he raised it reverently to his lips, then lifted it aloft as if he were about to dance a
minuet with her before escorting her across the dust sheets, down the staircase to the
hall, where Mrs Marlow stood clutching two posies of fresh violets, Master
Bailey’s flower of choice, one each.

And standing tall beside her, dressed in
Chaplinesque rags, safety pins and battered bowler hat, their peerless daughter, Emily,
recently returned to life after a disastrous love affair.

‘You all right there, Mum?’ she
asked briskly. ‘Got your make-me-betters?’

Sparing Suzanna a reply, Kit gives a
reassuring pat to his blazer pocket.

‘And the squeezer, for in
case?’

Pats the other pocket.

‘Nervous, Dad?’

‘Terrified.’

‘So you should be.’

The Manor gates stand open. Kit has
pressure-washed the stone lions on the gateposts for the occasion. Costumed
pleasure-seekers are already drifting up Market Street. Emily spots the local doctor and
his wife, and nimbly attaches herself to them, leaving
her parents to
process alone, Kit comically doffing his straw boater to left and right and Suzanna
managing a sporting shot at the royal wave as they confer their praises in their
separate ways:

‘Gosh, Peggy darling, that’s so
absolutely
charming
! Wherever did you get such lovely satin from?’
Suzanna exclaims to the postmistress.

‘Well fuck me, Billy. Who else have
you got under there?’ murmurs Kit,
sotto voce
, into the ear of portly Mr
Olds, the butcher, who has come as a turbanned Arab prince.

In the gardens of the cottages, daffodils,
tulips, forsythia and peach blossom raise their heads to the blue sky. From the church
tower flies the black-and-white flag of Cornwall. A bevy of equestrian children in hard
hats comes trotting down the street, escorted by the redoubtable Polly from the Granary
Riding School. The festivities are too much for the lead pony and it shies, but Polly is
on hand to grab the bridle. Suzanna consoles the pony, then its rider. Kit takes
Suzanna’s arm and feels her heart beating as she presses his hand lovingly against
her ribs.

It’s here and now, Kit thinks, as the
elation rises in him. The jostling crowds, the palominos cavorting in the meadows, the
sheep safely grazing on the hillside, even the new bungalows that deface the lower
slopes of Bailey’s Hill: if this isn’t the land they have loved and served
for so long, where is? And all right, it’s Merrie bloody England, it’s Laura
bloody Ashley, it’s ale and pasties and yo-ho for Cornwall, and tomorrow morning
all these nice, sweet people will be back at each other’s throats, screwing each
other’s wives and doing all the stuff the rest of the world does. But right now
it’s their National Day, and who’s an ex-diplomat of all people to complain
if the wrapping is prettier than what’s inside?

At a trestle table stands Jack Painter,
red-headed son of Ben from the garage, in braces and a Stetson. Beside him sits a girl
in a fairy dress with wings, selling tickets at four pounds a shot.