by Ian Mcewan
‘Yes.’
‘But it mustn’t leave this room.’
‘No!’
‘I’m engaged to be married.’
I suspected that in the fraction of a second it took me to rearrange my expression, he glimpsed the heart of my confusion.
‘But that’s fantastic news. Who’s—’
‘She’s not in Five. Ruth’s a doctor at Guy’s. Our families have always been very close.’
My words were out before I could snatch them back. ‘An arranged marriage!’
But Max only laughed shyly and there may have been the hint of a blush, hard to detect in the yellowish light. So perhaps I was right, the parents who had chosen his studies, who wouldn’t let him work with his hands, had chosen his wife. Remembering that vulnerability in him I felt the first chill of sorrow. I had missed out. And there was self-pity too. People told me I was beautiful and I believed them. I should have been wafted through life with the special dispensation that beauty bestows, discarding men at every turn. Instead, they abandoned me, or died on me. Or married.
Max said, ‘I thought I should tell you.’
‘Yes. Thanks.’
‘We won’t be announcing it for another couple of months.’
‘Of course not.’
Max briskly squared his notes against the desk. The distasteful business was concluded and we could continue. He said, ‘What did you really think of the stories? That one about the twin brothers.’
‘I thought it was very good.’
‘I thought it was awful. I couldn’t believe that an atheist would know his Bible. Or dress up as a vicar to deliver a sermon.’
‘Brotherly love.’
‘But he’s not capable of any sort of love. He’s a cad, and he’s weak. I couldn’t see why we should care about him or what happens to him.’
My impression was that we were really talking about Haley, not Edmund Alfredus. There was something strained in Max’s tone. I thought I’d succeeded in making him jealous. I said, ‘I thought he was extremely attractive. Clever, brilliant public speaker, sense of mischief, took interesting risks. Just no match for – what’s her name? – Jean.’
‘I couldn’t believe in her at all. These destructive men-eating women are just fantasies of a certain kind of man.’
‘What kind of man is that?’
‘Oh I don’t know. Masochistic. Guilty. Or self-hating. Perhaps you can tell me when you get back.’
He stood to indicate the meeting was over. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry. I wondered whether in some perverse way he thought it was my fault he was getting married. Or perhaps he was angry with himself. Or my arranged marriage remark had offended him.
‘Do you really think Haley’s not right for us?’
‘That’s Nutting’s department. What’s odd is sending you down to Brighton. We don’t usually get our own involved like this. The usual way would be to get the Foundation to send someone, do it all at one remove. Besides, I think the whole thing’s, well, anyway, it’s not my, um …’
He was leaning forward on his fingertips which were splayed against the desk and he seemed to be indicating the door behind me by faintly inclining his head. Throwing me out with minimal effort. But I didn’t want the conversation to end.
‘There’s one other thing, Max. You’re the only one I could say this to. I think I’m being followed.’
‘Really? Quite an achievement at your level.’
I ignored this sneer. ‘I’m not talking about Moscow Centre. I mean the Watchers. Someone’s been in my room.’
Since my conversation with Shirley, I’d looked around carefully on the way home, but I’d seen nothing suspicious. But I didn’t know what to look for. It wasn’t part of our training. I had some vague notions derived from films and I’d doubled back on myself in the street, and I’d peered into hundreds of rush-hour faces. I’d tried getting on the Tube and straight off, and achieved nothing beyond a longer journey to Camden.
But I achieved my purpose now, for Max was sitting down and the conversation resumed. His face had gone hard, he looked older.
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, you know, things out of place in my room. I suppose the Watchers can be rather clumsy.’
He looked at me steadily. I was already beginning to feel foolish.
‘Serena, be careful. If you pretend to know more than you do, if you pretend to knowledge that hardly tallies with a few months in the Registry, you’ll give the wrong impression. After the Cambridge Three and George Blake, people are still nervous and a bit demoralised. They jump to conclusions rather too quickly. So stop acting as though you know more than you do. You end up getting followed. In fact, I think that’s your problem.’
‘Is this a guess or something you know?’
‘It’s a friendly warning.’
‘So I really am being followed.’
‘I’m a relatively lowly figure here. I’d be the last to know. People have seen us around together …’
‘Not any more, Max. Perhaps our friendship was harming your career prospects.’
It was shallow stuff. I couldn’t quite admit to myself how upset I was by the news of his engagement. His self-control irritated me. I wanted to provoke and punish him and here it was, I had my wish, he was on his feet, fairly quivering.
‘Are women really incapable of keeping their professional and private lives apart? I’m trying to help you, Serena. You’re not listening. Let me put it another way. In this work the line between what people imagine and what’s actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big grey space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things – and you can make them come true. The ghosts become real. Am I making sense?’
I didn’t think he was. I was on my feet with a clever retort ready, but he’d had enough of me. Before I could speak he said more quietly, ‘Best to go now. Just do your own work. Keep things simple.’
I was intending to make a stormy exit. But I had to slide my chair under his desk and squeeze round it to get out, and when I was out in the corridor I couldn’t slam the door behind me because it was warped in its frame.
11
This was a bureaucracy and delay followed as though by policy directive. My draft letter to Haley was submitted to Max, who made alterations to this as well as my second attempt, and, when at last a third was passed on to Peter Nutting and to Benjamin Trescott, I waited almost three weeks for their notes. They were incorporated, Max put in some final touches, and I posted the fifth and final version five weeks after my first. A month went by and we heard nothing. Enquiries were made on our behalf and eventually we learned that Haley was abroad for research. It was not until late September that we had his reply, scrawled at a slant on a lined sheet torn from a notepad. It looked deliberately insouciant. He wrote that he would be interested to know more. He was making ends meet by working as a postgraduate teacher, which meant he now had an office on the campus. Better to meet there, he said, because his flat was rather cramped.
I had a short final briefing with Max.
He said, ‘What about that Paris Review story, the one about the shop-window dummy?’
‘I thought it was interesting.’
‘Serena! It was completely implausible. Anyone that deluded would be in the secure wing of a psychiatric institution.’
‘How do you know he isn’t?’
‘Then Haley should have let the reader know.’
He told me as I was leaving his office that three Sweet Tooth writers had accepted the Freedom International stipend. I was not to let him or myself down by failing to nail down a fourth.
‘I thought I had to play hard to get.’
‘We’ve fallen behind everyone else. Peter’s getting impatient. Even if he’s no good, just sign him up.’
It was a pleasant break in routine to travel down to Brighton one unseasonably warm morning in mid-October, to cross the cavernous railway station and smell the salty air and hear the falling cri
es of herring gulls. I remembered the word from a summer Shakespeare production of Othello on the lawn at King’s. A gull. Was I looking for a gull? Certainly not. I took the dilapidated three-carriage Lewes train and got out at the Falmer stop to walk the quarter mile to the redbrick building site called the University of Sussex, or, as it was known in the press for a while, Balliol-by-the-Sea. I was wearing a red mini-skirt and black jacket with high collar, black high heels and a white patent leather shoulder bag on a short strap. Ignoring the pain in my feet, I swanked along the paved approach to the main entrance through the student crowds, disdainful of the boys – I regarded them as boys – shaggily dressed out of army surplus stores, and even more so of the girls with their long plain centre-parted hair, no make-up and cheesecloth skirts. Some students were barefoot, in sympathy, I assumed, with peasants of the undeveloped world. The very word ‘campus’ seemed to me a frivolous import from the USA. As I self-consciously strode towards Sir Basil Spence’s creation in a fold of the Sussex Downs, I felt dismissive of the idea of a new university. For the first time in my life I was proud of my Cambridge and Newnham connection. How could a serious university be new? And how could anyone resist me in my confection of red, white and black, intolerantly scissoring my way towards the porters’ desk, where I intended to ask directions?
I entered what was probably an architectural reference to a quad. It was flanked by shallow water features, rectangular ponds lined with smooth river-bed stones. But the water had been drained off to make way for beer cans and sandwich wrappers. From the brick, stone and glass structure ahead of me came the throb and wail of rock music. I recognised the rasping, heaving flute of Jethro Tull. Through the plate-glass windows on the first floor I could see figures, players and spectators, hunched over banks of table football. The students’ union, surely. The same everywhere, these places, reserved for the exclusive use of lunk-headed boys, mathematicians and chemists mostly. The girls and the aesthetes went elsewhere. As a portal to a university it made a poor impression. I quickened my pace, resenting the way my stride fell in with the pounding drums. It was like approaching a holiday camp.
The paved way passed under the students’ union and here I turned through glass doors to a reception area. At least the porters in their uniforms behind a long counter were familiar to me – that special breed of men with their air of weary tolerance, and gruff certainty of being wiser than any student had ever been. With the music fading behind me, I followed their directions, crossed a wide open space, went under giant concrete rugby posts to enter Arts Block A and came out the other side to approach Arts Block B. Couldn’t they name their buildings after artists or philosophers? Inside, I turned down a corridor, noting the items posted on the teachers’ doors. A tacked-up card that said, ‘The world is everything that is the case’, a Black Panthers poster, something in German by Hegel, something in French by Merleau-Ponty. Show-offs. Right at the end of a second corridor was Haley’s room. I hesitated outside it before knocking.
I was at the corridor’s dead-end, standing by a tall, narrow window that gave onto a square of lawn. The light was such that I had a watery reflection of myself, so I took out a comb and quickly tidied my hair and straightened my collar. If I was slightly nervous it was because in the past weeks I had become intimate with my own private version of Haley, I had read his thoughts on sex and deceit, pride and failure. We were on terms already and I knew they were about to be reformed or destroyed. Whatever he was in reality would be a surprise and probably a disappointment. As soon as we shook hands our intimacy would go into reverse. I had re-read all the journalism on the way down to Brighton. Unlike the fiction it was sensible, sceptical, rather schoolmasterish in tone, as if he’d supposed he was writing for ideological fools. The article on the East German uprising of 1953 began ‘Let no one think the Workers’ State loves its workers. It hates them’, and was scornful of the Brecht poem about the government dissolving the people and electing another. Brecht’s first impulse, in Haley’s account, was to ‘toady’ to the German State by giving public support to the brutal Soviet suppression of the strikes. Russian soldiers had fired directly into the crowds. Without knowing much about him, I’d always assumed that Brecht had sided with the angels. I didn’t know if Haley was right, or how to reconcile his plain-speaking journalism with the crafty intimacy of the fiction, and I assumed that when we met I would know even less.
A feistier piece excoriated West German novelists as weak-minded cowards for ignoring in their fiction the Berlin Wall. Of course they loathed its existence, but they feared that saying so would seem to align them with American foreign policy. And yet it was a brilliant and necessary subject, uniting the geo-political with personal tragedy. Surely, every British writer would have something to say about a London Wall. Would Norman Mailer ignore a wall that divided Washington? Would Philip Roth prefer not to notice if the houses of Newark were cut in two? Would John Updike’s characters not seize the opportunity of a marital affair across a divided New England? This pampered, over-subsidised literary culture, protected from Soviet repression by the pax Americana, preferred to hate the hand that kept it free. West German writers pretended the Wall didn’t exist and thereby lost all moral authority. The title of the essay, published in Index on Censorship, was ‘La Trahison des Clercs’.
With a pearly pink painted nail I tapped lightly on the door and, at the sound of an indistinct murmur or groan, pushed it open. I was right to have prepared myself for disappointment. It was a slight figure who rose from his desk, slightly stooped, though he made the effort to straighten his back as he stood. He was girlishly slender, with narrow wrists and his hand when I shook it seemed smaller and softer than mine. Skin very pale, eyes dark green, hair dark brown and long, and cut in a style that was almost a bob. In those first few seconds I wondered if I’d missed a transsexual element in the stories. But here he was, twin brother, smug vicar, smart and rising Labour MP, lonely millionaire in love with an inanimate object. He wore a collarless shirt made of flecked white flannel, tight jeans with a broad belt and scuffed leather boots. I was confused by him. The voice from such a delicate frame was deep, without regional accent, pure and classless.
‘Let me clear these things away so you can sit.’
He shifted some books from an armless soft chair. I thought, with a touch of annoyance, that he was letting me know that he had made no special preparations for my arrival.
‘Was your journey down all right? Would you like some coffee?’
The journey was pleasant, I told him, and I didn’t need coffee.
He sat down at his desk and swivelled his chair to face me, crossed an ankle over a knee and with a little smile opened out his palms in an interrogative manner. ‘So, Miss Frome …’
‘It rhymes with plume. But please call me Serena.’
He cocked his head to one side as he repeated my name. Then his eyes settled softly on mine and he waited. I noted the long eyelashes. I’d rehearsed this moment and it was easy enough to lay it all out for him. Truthfully. The work of Freedom International, its wide remit, its extensive global reach, its open-mindedness and lack of ideology. He listened to me, head still cocked, and with a look of amused scepticism, his lips quivering slightly as though at any moment he was ready to join in or take over and make my words his own, or improve upon them. He wore the expression of a man listening to an extended joke, anticipating an explosive punch-line with held-in delight that puffs and puckers his lips. As I named the writers and artists the Foundation had helped, I fantasised that he had already seen right through me and had no intention of letting me know. He was forcing me to make my pitch so he could observe a liar at close hand. Useful for a later fiction. Horrified, I pushed the idea away and forgot about it. I needed to concentrate. I moved on to talk about the source of the Foundation’s wealth. Max thought Haley should be told just how rich Freedom International was. The money came from an endowment by the artistic widow of a Bulgarian immigrant to the USA who had made his mone
y buying and exploiting patents in the twenties and thirties. In the years following his death, his wife bought up Impressionist paintings after the war from a ruined Europe at pre-war prices. In the last year of her life she had fallen for a culturally inclined politician who was setting up the Foundation. She left her and her husband’s fortune to his project.
Everything I had said so far had been the case, easily verified. Now I took my first tentative step into mendacity. ‘I’ll be quite frank with you,’ I said. ‘I sometimes feel Freedom International doesn’t have enough projects to throw its money at.’
‘How flattering then,’ Haley said. Perhaps he saw me blush because he added, ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’
‘You misunderstand me, Mr Haley …’
‘Tom.’
‘Tom. Sorry. I put that badly. What I meant was this. There are plenty of artists being imprisoned or oppressed by unsavoury governments. We do everything we can to help these people and get their work known. But, of course, being censored doesn’t necessarily mean a writer or sculptor is any good. For example, we’ve found ourselves supporting a terrible playwright in Poland simply because his work is banned. And we’ll go on supporting him. And we’ve bought up any amount of rubbish by an imprisoned Hungarian abstract impressionist. So the steering committee has decided to add another dimension to the portfolio. We want to encourage excellence wherever we can find it, oppressed or not. We’re especially interested in young people at the beginning of their careers …’
‘And how old are you, Serena?’ Tom Haley leaned forward solicitously, as if asking about a serious illness.
I told him. He was letting me know he was not to be patronised. And it was true, in my nervousness I had taken on a distant, official tone. I needed to relax, be less pompous, I needed to call him Tom. I realised I wasn’t much good at any of this. He asked me if I’d been at university. I told him, and said the name of my college.
‘What was your subject?’
I hesitated, I tripped over my words. I hadn’t expected to be asked, and suddenly mathematics sounded suspect and without knowing what I was doing I said, ‘English.’
