by Ian Mcewan
We sat on the grass, well away from other people, and returned to the Provos. There had been bombs in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard the previous month. The Service was continuing to reorganise itself. A handful, the more promising handful, Shirley included, of our intake had been moved on from nursery-level Registry work, and had probably been absorbed into the new concern. Rooms had been taken over, meetings went on late behind closed doors. I had been left behind. I displaced my frustration by complaining, as I had before, about being stuck with the old battle. The lectures were fascinating in the way a dead language was. The world was securely settled into its two camps, I argued. Soviet communism had as much evangelical fervour for expansion as you’d find in the Church of England. The Russian empire was repressive and corrupt, but comatose. The new threat was terrorism. I’d read an article in Time magazine and regarded myself as well informed. It wasn’t just the Provisional IRA, or the various Palestinian groups. Underground anarchist and far-left factions across mainland Europe were already setting off bombs and kidnapping politicians and industrialists. The Red Brigades, the Baader–Meinhof Group, and in South America the Tupamaros and scores like them, in the United States the Symbionese Liberation Army – these blood-thirsty nihilists and narcissists were well connected across borders and soon they’d represent an internal threat here. We’d had the Angry Brigade, others far worse would follow. What were we doing, still piling most of our resources into cat-and-mouse business with irrelevant time-servers in Soviet trade delegations?
Most of our resources? What could a mere trainee know about allocations within the Service? But I tried to make myself sound confident. I was stirred up by a kiss, I wanted to impress Max. He was watching me closely, tolerantly amused.
‘I’m glad you’re up on your grisly factions. But, Serena, the year before last we threw out a hundred and five Soviet agents. They were crawling all over us. Educating Whitehall to do the right thing was a big moment for the Service. The gossip was that it was awfully difficult to bring the Home Secretary on board.’
‘He was Tony’s friend until they …’
‘It all came out of Oleg Lyalin’s defection. He was supposed to be responsible for organising sabotage in the UK in the event of a crisis. There was a statement in the Commons. You must have read about it at the time.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
Of course I didn’t. The expulsions had failed to make it into my ?Quis? columns. I didn’t then have Tony around to make me read newspapers.
‘My point is,’ Max said, ‘that comatose isn’t quite right, is it?’
He was still regarding me in a particular way, as if he expected the conversation to lead somewhere significant.
I said, ‘I suppose not.’ I was feeling uneasy, all the more so because I sensed that he intended me to be. Our friendship was so recent and sudden. I knew nothing about him and now he looked like a stranger to me, his outsized ears cupped in my direction like radar dishes to catch my softest, least honest whisper, his thin, intense face tightly concentrated on mine. I worried that he wanted something from me and that, even if he got it, I wouldn’t know what it was.
‘Would you like me to kiss you again?’
It was as long as the first, this stranger’s kiss, and because it broke the tension between us, all the more pleasurable. I felt myself relaxing, even dissolving, the way people do in romantic novels. I could no longer bear to think that he was pretending.
He drew back and said quietly, ‘Did Canning ever mention Lyalin to you?’ Before I could reply, he kissed me again, just a glancing touch of lips and tongues. I was tempted to say yes because it was what he wanted.
‘No, he didn’t. Why are you asking?’
‘Just curious. Did he introduce you to Maudling?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I would have been interested to hear your impressions, that’s all.’
We kissed again. We were reclining on the grass. My hand was on his thigh and I let it slip towards his groin. I wanted to know if he was genuinely aroused by me. I didn’t want him to be a brilliant pretender. But just as my fingertips were inches from the hard proof, he twisted away, extracted himself and stood, then stooped to brush dried grass from his trousers. The gesture looked fussy. He offered a hand to pull me up.
‘I should get my train. I’m cooking dinner for a friend.’
‘Oh, really.’
We walked on. He had caught the hostility in my voice and his touch on my arm was tentative, or apologetic. He said, ‘Did you ever go to Kumlinge to visit his grave?’
‘No.’
‘Did you read the obituary?’
Because of this ‘friend’ our evening was going nowhere.
‘Yes.’
‘Was it The Times or Telegraph?’
‘Max, are you interrogating me?’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m just terribly nosy. Please forgive me.’
‘Then leave me alone.’
We walked in silence. He didn’t know what to say. An only child, a boys’ boarding school – he didn’t know how to talk to a woman when things went awry. And I said nothing. I was angry, but I didn’t want to drive him away. I was calmer by the time we stopped to say our goodbyes on the pavement just beyond the park railings.
‘Serena, you do realise that I’m becoming very attached to you.’
I was pleased, I was very pleased, but I didn’t show it and said nothing, waiting for him to say more. He seemed about to, then he changed the subject.
‘By the way. Don’t be impatient about the work. I happen to know there’s a really interesting project coming through. Sweet Tooth. Right up your street. I’ve put in a good word for you.’
He didn’t wait for a response. He pursed his lips and shrugged, then set off along Park Lane in the direction of Marble Arch, while I stood there watching him, wondering whether he was telling the truth.
5
My room in St Augustine’s Road faced north over the street with a view into the branches of a horse chestnut tree. As it came into leaf that spring the room grew darker by the day. My bed, which was about half the size of the room, was a rickety affair with walnut veneer headboard and mattress of boggy softness. With the bed came a musty yellow candlewick bedcover. I took it to the launderette a couple of times but never completely purged it of a clammy intimate scent, of dog perhaps, or very unhappy human. The only other furniture was a chest of drawers with a tilting bevelled mirror on top. The whole piece stood in front of a miniature fireplace, which exuded a sour, sooty smell on warm days. With the tree in full blossom there wasn’t enough natural light to read by when it was cloudy, so I bought an art deco lamp for 30p from a junk shop on the Camden Road. A day later I went back and paid £1.20 for a compact boxy armchair to read in without having to sink into the bed. The shop owner carried the chair home for me on his back, half a mile and up two flights of stairs for what we agreed was the price of a pint – 13p. But I gave him 15p.
Most of the houses in the street were subdivided and unmodernised, though I don’t remember anyone using that word then or thinking in those terms. Heating was by electric fire, the floors were covered in ancient brown lino in the corridors and kitchen, and elsewhere with floral carpeting that was sticky underfoot. Small improvements probably dated from the twenties or thirties – the wiring was contained in dusty pipes screwed to the walls, the telephone confined to the draughty hallway, the electric immersion heater, fed by a hungry meter, delivered water at near boiling point to a tiny cold bathroom with no shower, shared by four women. These houses had not yet escaped their inheritance of Victorian gloom, but I never heard anyone complain. As I remember it, even in the seventies ordinary people who happened to live in these old places were only just beginning to wake up to the idea that they could be more comfortable further out of town if prices here kept on rising. The houses in the back streets of Camden Town awaited a new and vigorous class of people to move in and get to work, installing radiators and, for reasons no one could explain, strip
ping the pine skirting and floorboards and every last door of all vestiges of paintwork or covering.
I was lucky in my housemates – Pauline, Bridget, Tricia – three working-class girls from Stoke-on-Trent, who knew each other from childhood, passed all their school exams and somehow remained together during their legal training, which was almost complete. They were boring, ambitious, ferociously tidy. The house ran smoothly, the kitchen was always clean, the tiny fridge was full. If there were boyfriends, I never saw them. No drunkenness, no drugs, no loud music. In those days, a more likely household would have had people like my sister in it. Tricia was studying for the bar, Pauline was specialising in company law and Bridget was going into property. They each told me in their different defiant ways that they were never going back. And they weren’t speaking of Stoke in purely geographical terms. But I didn’t enquire too closely. I was adapting to my new job and wasn’t much interested in their class struggle or upward mobility. They thought I was a dull civil servant, I thought they were dull trainee solicitors. Perfect. We had different schedules and we rarely ate together. No one bothered much with the sitting room – the only comfortable communal space. Even the TV was mostly silent. They studied in their rooms in the evening, I read in mine, or I went out with Shirley.
I kept up the reading in the same old style, three or four books a week. That year it was mostly modern stuff in paperbacks I bought from charity and second-hand shops in the High Street or, when I thought I could afford it, from Compendium near Camden Lock. I went at things in my usual hungry way, and there was an element of boredom too, which I was trying to keep at bay, and not succeeding. Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite old shoes. Or a wild silk blouse. For it was my best self I wanted, not the girl hunched in the evenings in her junk-shop chair over a cracked-spine paperback, but a fast young woman pulling open the passenger door of a sports car, leaning over to receive her lover’s kiss, speeding towards a rural hideout. I would not admit to myself that I should have been reading a lower grade of fiction, like a mass-market romance. I had finally managed to absorb a degree of taste or snobbery from Cambridge, or from Tony. I no longer promoted Jacqueline Susann over Jane Austen. Sometimes my alter ego shimmered fleetingly between the lines, she floated towards me like a friendly ghost from the pages of Doris Lessing, or Margaret Drabble or Iris Murdoch. Then she was gone – their versions were too educated or too clever, or not quite lonely enough in the world to be me. I suppose I would not have been satisfied until I had in my hands a novel about a girl in a Camden bedsit who occupied a lowly position in MI5 and was without a man.
I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could gauge the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn’t impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and that there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up. So, no tricksy haggling over the limits of their art, no showing disloyalty to the reader by appearing to cross and recross in disguise the borders of the imaginary. No room in the books I liked for the double agent. That year I tried and discarded the authors that sophisticated friends in Cambridge had pressed on me – Borges and Barth, Pynchon and Cortázar and Gaddis. Not an Englishman among them, I noted, and no women of any race. I was rather like people of my parents’ generation who not only disliked the taste and smell of garlic, but distrusted all those who consumed it.
During our summer of love Tony Canning used to tell me off for leaving books lying around open and face down. It ruined the spine, causing a book to spring open at a certain page, which was a random and irrelevant intrusion on a writer’s intentions and another reader’s judgement. And so he presented me with a bookmark. It wasn’t much of a gift. He must have pulled it out of the bottom of a drawer. It was a strip of green leather with crenellated ends and embossed in gold with the name of some Welsh castle or ramparts. It was holiday gift-shop kitsch from the days when he and his wife were happy, or happy enough to take excursions together. I only faintly resented it, this tongue of leather that spoke so insidiously of another life elsewhere, without me. I don’t think I ever used it then. I memorised my page number and stopped damaging spines. Months after the affair I found the bookmark lying curled and sticky with a chocolate wrapper at the bottom of a duffel bag.
I’ve said that after his death I had no love tokens. But I had this. I cleaned it up, straightened it out, and started to treasure and use it. Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too. Mine was to hold my bookmark curled between my fingers and stroke it with my thumb as I read. Late at night, when the time came to put my book away, my ritual was to touch the bookmark to my lips, and set it between the pages before closing the book and putting it on the floor by my chair, where I could reach for it easily next time. Tony would have approved.
One evening in early May, more than a week after our first kisses, I stayed later than usual talking with Max in Berkeley Square. He’d been in a particularly communicative mood, telling me about an eighteenth-century clock he thought he might write about one day. By the time I got back to St Augustine’s Road the house was dark. I remembered that this was the second day of some obscure legal holiday. Pauline, Bridget and Tricia, for all their disavowals, had gone back to Stoke for a long weekend. I put on the lights in the hall and in the passage to the kitchen. I bolted the front door and went up towards my room. I suddenly missed that trio of sensible girls from the north and the wedge of light under the doors of their rooms, and I was uneasy. But I was sensible too. I had no supernatural fears, and I scoffed at reverential talk of intuitional knowledge and a sixth sense. My raised pulse, I reassured myself, was due to my exertions on the stairs. But when I reached my own door, I paused on the threshold before turning on the overhead light, restrained by the faintest of anxieties at being alone in a large old house. There had been a pavement knifing in Camden Square a month before, a motiveless attack by a thirty-year-old schizophrenic man. I was sure there was no intruder in the house, but news of a terrible event like that acts on you viscerally, in ways you’re hardly aware of. It sharpens the senses. I stood still and listened and heard, beyond the tinnitus hiss of silence, the city’s hum and, nearer, creaks and clicks as the shell of the building cooled and contracted in the night air.
I reached out and pushed down the Bakelite switch and saw immediately that the room was undisturbed. Or so I thought. I stepped in, put down my bag. The book I’d been reading the night before – Eating People is Wrong, by Malcolm Bradbury – was in its proper position, on the floor by the chair. But the bookmark was lying on the seat of my armchair. And no one had been in the house since I’d left that morning.
Naturally, my first assumption was that I had broken with my ritual the night before. Easy enough when you’re tired. I could have stood and let the bookmark fall as I crossed to the basin to wash. My memory, however, was distinct. The novel was short enough for me to read in two sittings. But my eyes were heavy. I was less than halfway when I kissed the scrap of leather and placed it between pages ninety-eight and ninety-nine.
I even recalled the last phrase I read because I glanced at it again before I closed the book. It was a line of dialogue. ‘Intelligentsias are by no means always liberal in outlook.’
I went about the room looking for other signs of disturbance. Since I had no bookshelves, my books were in piles against the wall, divided between the read and the unread. On top of the latter, next in line, was A.S. Byatt’s The Game. All was in order. I went through the chest of drawers, through my wash bag, I looked at the bed and under it – nothing had been moved or stolen. I came back to the chair and stared down a good while, as if that would solve the mystery. I knew I should go downstairs and look for signs of a break-in, but I didn’t want to. The title of Bradbury’s novel stared up at me and seemed now an ineffective protest against a prevailing ethic. I picked up the book and riffled through the pages and found the place where I had left off. Out on the landing I leaned over the banister and heard nothing unusual, but I still did not dare go down.
There was no lock or bolt on my door. I dragged the chest of drawers across it and went to bed with the light on. For most of the night I lay on my back with the covers pulled up to my chin, listening, thinking in circles, waiting for the dawn to come like a soothing mother and make things better. And when it did, they were. At first light I was persuaded that tiredness had fogged my memory, that I was confusing the intention with the act, that I had put the book down without the bookmark. I’d been frightening myself with my own shadow. Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense. I needed some rest because the next day I had an important lecture to attend. Enough ambiguity had gathered around the bookmark to let me sleep the two and half hours before the alarm went off.
The next day I earned a black mark from MI5, or rather, Shirley Shilling earned it for me. I was the sort of girl who could occasionally speak her mind, but my stronger impulse was for advancement and for approval from my seniors. Shirley had something combative, even reckless, about her that was alien to my nature. But we were a duo, after all, Laurel and Hardy, and perhaps it was inevitable that I would be drawn into the general ambience of her cockiness and be cast as the sidekick who was bound to take the blame.
