by Ian Mcewan
That evening, no one saw her arrive in the arms of the driver.
At this point I got myself out of my reading chair and went downstairs to make tea. I was still a little drunk, still troubled by my conversation with Shirley. I felt that I would doubt my own sanity if I started looking for a hidden microphone in my room. I also felt vulnerable to Neil Carder’s loose grip on reality. It could loosen my own. And was he yet another character to be ground under Haley’s narrative heel for getting everything wrong? With some reluctance, I carried my tea upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed, willing myself to pick up another of Haley’s pages. Clearly, the reader was intended to have no relief from the millionaire’s madness, no chance to stand outside it and see it for what it was. There was no possibility of this clammy tale ending well.
At last I returned to the chair and learned that the mannequin’s name was Hermione, which happened to be the name of Carder’s ex-wife. She had walked out on him one morning after less than a year. That evening, while Hermione lay naked on the bed, he cleared a wardrobe for her in the dressing room and hung her clothes and stowed her shoes. He took a shower, then they dressed for dinner. He went downstairs to arrange on two plates the meal Abeje had prepared for him. It only needed reheating. Then he went back to the bedroom to fetch her down to the splendid dining room. They ate in silence. In fact, she didn’t touch her food and wouldn’t meet his eye. He understood why. The tension between them was almost unbearable – one reason why he drank two bottles of wine. He was so drunk he had to carry her up the stairs.
What a night! He was one of those men for whom passivity in a woman was a goad, a piercing enticement. Even in rapture he saw the boredom in her eyes that brought him to fresh heights of ecstasy. Finally, not long before dawn, they rolled apart, sated, immobilised by a profound exhaustion. Hours later, aroused by sunlight through the curtains, he managed to turn onto his side. It touched him profoundly that she had slept the night through on her back. He delighted in her stillness. Her inwardness was so intense that it rolled back upon itself to become its opposite, a force that overwhelmed and consumed him and drove his love onwards to constant sensuous obsession. What had started as an idle fantasy outside a shop window was now an intact inner world, a vertiginous reality he preserved with the fervour of a religious fanatic. He couldn’t allow himself to consider her inanimate because his pleasure in love depended on a masochistic understanding that she was ignoring him, she disdained him and thought he was not worthy of her kisses, of her caresses, or even of her conversation.
When Abeje came in to tidy and clean the bedroom, she was surprised to find Hermione in a corner staring out of the window, wearing a dress of torn silk. But the housekeeper was pleased to discover in one of the wardrobes a rack of fine dresses. She was an intelligent woman of the world and she had been aware of, and somewhat oppressed by, her employer’s lingering, ineffectual gaze as she went about her work. Now he had a lover. What a relief. If his woman imported a dummy to hang her clothes on, who cared? As the extreme disorder of the bedlinen suggested, and as she relayed it in her native Yoruba that night to embolden her muscular husband, They are truly singing.
Even in the most richly communicative and reciprocal love affairs, it is nearly impossible to sustain that initial state of rapture beyond a few weeks. Historically, a resourceful few may have managed months. But when the sexual terrain is tended by one mind alone, one lonely figure tilling the frontiers of a wilderness, the fall must come in days. What nourished Carder’s love – Hermione’s silence – was bound to destroy it. She had been living with him less than a week when he observed a shift in her mood, a near imperceptible recalibration of her silence that contained the faint but constant note, almost beyond hearing, of dissatisfaction. Driven by this tinnitus of doubt, he strove harder to please her. That night, when they were upstairs, a suspicion passed through his mind and he experienced a thrill – it really was a thrill – of horror. She was thinking about someone else. She had that same look he had observed through the store window as she stood apart from the guests and gazed into the corner. She wanted to be elsewhere. When he made love to her, the agony of this realisation was inseparable from the pleasure, sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, that seemed to slice his heart in two. But it was only a suspicion after all, he thought as he retreated to his side of the bed. He slept deeply that night.
What revived his doubts the next morning was a parallel shift in Abeje’s attitude as she served him his breakfast (Hermione always stayed in bed until noon). His housekeeper was both brisk and evasive. She wouldn’t meet his eye. The coffee was lukewarm and weak and when he complained, he thought she was surly. When she brought in another pot, hot and strong, so she said as she put it down, it came to him. It was simple. The truth was always simple. They were lovers, Hermione and Abeje. Furtive and fleeting. Whenever he was out of the house. For who else had Hermione seen since she arrived? Hence that look of distracted longing. Hence Abeje’s abrupt performance this morning. Hence everything. He was a fool, an innocent fool.
The unravelling was swift. That night the surgeon’s knife was sharper, cut deeper, with a twist. And he knew Hermione knew. He saw it in the blankness of her terror. Her crime was his reckless empowerment. He tore into her with all the savagery of disappointed love, and his fingers were round her throat as she came, as they both came. And when he was done, her arms and legs and head had parted company with her torso, which he dashed against the bedroom wall. She lay in all corners, a ruined woman. This time there was no consoling sleep. In the morning he concealed her body parts in a plastic sack and carried her and all her belongings to the dustbins. In a daze he wrote a note (he was in no mood for further confrontation) to Abeje to inform her of her dismissal ‘forthwith’ and left on the kitchen table her wages to the end of the month. He went for a long and purging walk across the Heath. That night, Abeje opened up the plastic bags she had retrieved from the bins and modelled the outfits for her husband – the jewels and shoes as well as the silky frocks. She told him haltingly in his native Kanuri (they had married out of their tribes), She left him and it broke him up.
Thereafter, Carder lived alone and ‘did’ for himself and shrank into middle age with minimal dignity. The whole experience bequeathed him nothing. There were no lessons for him, no reckoning, for though he, an ordinary fellow, had discovered for himself the awesome power of the imagination, he tried not to think of what had happened. He decided to banish the affair utterly, and such is the efficiency of the compartmentalised mind, he succeeded. He forgot all about her. And he never lived so intensely again.
10
Max had told me his new office was smaller than a broom cupboard, but it was slightly larger. More than a dozen brooms could have been stored vertically between the desk and the door, and a few more between his chair and the walls. However, there was no space for a window. The room formed a narrow triangle, with Max squeezed in at the apex while I sat with my back to the base. The door wouldn’t close properly, so there was no real privacy. Since it opened inwards, I would have had to stand and push my chair under the desk if someone had wanted to come in. On the desk was a pile of headed paper with Freedom International Foundation’s address in Upper Regent Street, and a Picassoesque ascending dove holding an open book in its beak. We each had in front of us a copy of the Foundation’s brochure, whose cover bore the single word ‘freedom’ at a slant in uneven red lettering that suggested a rubber stamp. Freedom International, a registered charity, promoted ‘excellence and freedom of expression in the arts everywhere in the world’. It was not easily dismissed. It had subsidised or supported by translation or roundabout means writers in Yugoslavia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Syria, Romania and Hungary, a dance troupe in Paraguay, journalists in Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal and poets in the Soviet Union. It had given money to an actors’ collective in Harlem, New York, a baroque orchestra in Alabama, and successfully campaigned for the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s power over the Briti
sh theatre.
‘It’s a decent outfit,’ Max said. ‘I hope you’ll agree. They take their stands everywhere. No one’s going to confuse them with those IRD apparatchiks. Altogether more subtle.’
He was wearing a dark blue suit. Far better than the mustard jacket he’d been wearing every other day. And because he was growing his hair, his ears looked less protuberant. The only light source in the room, a high single bulb under a tin shade, picked out his cheekbones and the bow of his lips. He looked sleek and beautiful and quite incongruous in the narrow room, like an animal trapped in an undersized cage.
I said, ‘Why was Shirley Shilling sacked?’
He didn’t blink at the change of subject. ‘I was hoping you might know.’
‘Something to do with me?’
‘Look, the thing about working in places like this … you have all these colleagues, they’re pleasant, charming, good backgrounds and all that. Unless you do operations together you don’t know what they’re up to, what their work is and whether they’re any good at it. You don’t know whether they’re beaming idiots or friendly geniuses. Suddenly they’re promoted or sacked and you’ve no idea why. That’s how it is.’
I didn’t believe he knew nothing. There was a silence as we let the matter rest. Since Max told me by the gates of Hyde Park that he was becoming attached to me we had spent very little time together. I sensed he was moving up the hierarchy, out of my reach.
He said, ‘I got the impression at the meeting the other day that you don’t know much about IRD. Information Research Department. It doesn’t officially exist. Set up in ’forty-eight, part of the Foreign Office, works out of Carlton Terrace, the idea being to feed information about the Soviet Union into the public domain through friendly journalists, news agencies, put out fact sheets, issue rebuttals, encourage certain publications. So – labour camps, no rule of law, rotten standards of living, repression of dissent, usual stuff. Generally helping out the NCL, the non-communist left, and anything to puncture fantasies here about life in the East. But IRD is drifting. Last year it was trying to persuade the left that we need to join Europe. Ridiculous. And thank God we’re taking Northern Ireland off them. It did good work in its day. Now it’s too bloated and crude. And rather irrelevant. The word is that it’s going to be cut soon. But what matters in this building is that IRD’s become the creature of MI6, got itself sucked into black propaganda, deception exercises that deceive no one. Their reports come out of dodgy sources. IRD and its so-called Action Desk have been helping Six to relive the last war. It’s Boy Scout nonsense they go in for. That’s why everyone in Five likes that “faces to the wall” story Peter Nutting told.’
I said, ‘Is it true?’
‘I doubt it. But it makes Six look idiotic and pompous, so it goes down well here. Anyway, the idea with Sweet Tooth is to strike out on our own, independently of Six or the Americans. Having a novelist was an afterthought, Peter’s whim. Personally, I think it’s a mistake – too unpredictable. But this is what we’re doing. The writer doesn’t have to be a Cold War fanatic. Just be sceptical about utopias in the East or looming catastrophe in the West – you know the sort of thing.’
‘What happens when the writer discovers we’ve been paying his rent? He’s going to be furious.’
Max looked away. I thought I’d asked a stupid question. But after a moment’s silence he said, ‘The link between us and Freedom International works at several removes. Even if you knew exactly where to look, you’d have your work cut out. The calculation is that, if anything comes out, writers will prefer to avoid the embarrassment. They’ll stay quiet. And if they don’t, we’ll explain there are ways of proving that they always knew where the money was coming from. And the money will keep on flowing. A fellow can get used to a certain way of living and be reluctant to lose it.’
‘Blackmail then.’
He shrugged. ‘Look, the IRD in its heyday never told Orwell or Koestler what to put in their books. But it did what it could to make sure their ideas got the best circulation around the world. We’re dealing with free spirits. We don’t tell them what to think. We enable them to do their work. Over there free spirits used to be marched to the gulags. Now Soviet psychiatry’s the new State terror. To oppose the system is to be criminally insane. Here we’ve got some Labour Party and union people and university profs and students and so-called intellectuals who’ll tell you the US is no better—’
‘Bombing Vietnam.’
‘Well, all right. But across the Third World there are whole populations who think the Soviet Union has something to teach them about liberty. The fight isn’t over yet. We want to encourage the right good thing. As Peter sees it, Serena, you love literature, you love your country. He thinks this is perfect for you.’
‘But you don’t.’
‘I think we should stick to non-fiction.’
I couldn’t work him out. There was something impersonal in his manner. He didn’t like Sweet Tooth, or my bit of it, but he was calm about it, even bland. He was like a bored shop assistant encouraging me to buy a dress he knew wasn’t right. I wanted to throw him off balance, bring him closer. He was taking me through the details. I was to use my real name. I was to go to Upper Regent Street and meet the Foundation staff. As they understood it, I worked for the organisation called Word Unpenned, which was donating funds to Freedom International to distribute to recommended writers. When I eventually travelled to Brighton I was to make sure that I took nothing with me that would connect me to Leconfield House.
I wondered if Max thought I was stupid. I interrupted him and said, ‘What if I like Haley?’
‘Fine. We’ll sign him up.’
‘I mean, really like him.’
He looked up sharply from his check list. ‘If you think you’d rather not take this on …’ His tone was cold and I was pleased.
‘Max,’ I said, ‘it was a joke.’
‘Let’s talk about your letter to him. I’ll need to see a draft.’
So we discussed that and other arrangements and I realised that as far as he was concerned, we were no longer close friends. I could no longer ask him to kiss me. But I wasn’t prepared to accept that. I picked up my handbag from the floor and opened it and took out a packet of paper tissues. It was only the year before that I’d stopped using cotton handkerchiefs with broderie anglaise edging and my initials monogrammed in pink in one corner – a Christmas present from my mother. Paper tissues were becoming ubiquitous, like supermarket trolleys. The world was starting to become seriously disposable. I dabbed at a corner of my eye, trying to make my decision. Resting curled in my bag was the triangle of paper with the pencil marks. I’d changed my mind. It was exactly the right thing to do, to show it to Max. Or it was exactly the wrong thing. There was nothing in between.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Touch of hayfever.’
Finally I thought what I had thought many times before, that it was better, or at least more interesting, to have Max lie to me, than to know nothing at all. I took out the fragment of newsprint and slid it across the desk towards him. He glanced at it, turned it over, turned it back, set it down and looked fixedly at me.
‘Well?’
I said, ‘Canning and the island whose name you so cleverly guessed.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘If I tell you, are you going to be straight with me?’
He said nothing, so I told him anyway, about the Fulham safe house and the single bed and its mattress.
‘Who was with you?’
I told him and he said ‘Ah’ quietly into his hands. Then he said, ‘So they sacked her.’
‘Meaning?’
He pulled his hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. I wasn’t cleared to know.
‘May I hold on to this?’
‘Certainly not.’ I snatched it off the desk before he could move his hand and stowed it in my bag.
He softly cleared his throat. ‘Then we should move to the next item.
The stories. What are you going to say to him?’
‘Very excited, brilliant new talent, extraordinary range, lovely sinuous prose, deeply sensitive, especially about women, seems to know and understand them from the inside, unlike most men, dying to know him better and—’
‘Serena, enough!’
‘And sure that he has a great future, one that the Foundation would like to be a part of. Especially if he’ll consider writing a novel. Prepared to pay – how much?’
‘Two thousand a year.’
‘For how many—’
‘Two years. Renewable.’
‘My God. How’s he going to refuse?’
‘Because a complete stranger will be sitting on his lap licking his face. Be cooler. Make him come to you. The Foundation is interested, considering his case, lots of other candidates, what are his future plans, etc?’
‘Fine. I play hard to get. Then I’ll give him everything.’
Max sat back, folded his arms, glanced at the ceiling and said, ‘Serena, I’m sorry you’re upset. I honestly don’t know why Shilling was sacked, I don’t know about your piece of paper. That’s it. But look, it’s only fair that I tell you something about myself.’
He was about to tell me what I already suspected, that he was a homosexual. Now I was ashamed. I hadn’t wanted to force a confession out of him.
‘I’m telling you because we’ve been good friends.’
