by Ian Mcewan
He put his hand on my shoulder but I shook him off. I didn’t like to be pitied. And I thought I saw traces of amusement around his mouth.
I said, ‘It was obvious, Tom. How dare you!’
‘She’s written a soppy romantic novel. But I like her. That’s all there is to it. Her dad owned a furniture store and she was close to him, she worked for him. I felt truly sorry for her. Honestly, darling.’
At first I was simply confused, suspended between believing and hating him. Then, as I began to doubt myself, I felt a delicious sulky obstinacy, a perverse refusal to let go of the obliterating idea that he had made love to Shirley.
‘I can’t bear it, my poor darling, you’ve been suffering all afternoon. That’s why you were so quiet. And of course! You must have seen me holding her hand. Oh my sweetheart, I’m so sorry. I love you, only you, and I’m so sorry …’
I kept a closed face as he went on protesting, and comforting me. Believing him didn’t make me less angry with him. I was angry that he was making me feel foolish, that he might be secretly laughing at me, that he would work this up into a funny story. I was determined to make him try all the harder to win me back. I was coming to the point where I knew very well I was only pretending to doubt him. Perhaps that was better than appearing such a dolt, and besides, I didn’t know how to get out of it, how to change my entrenched position and look plausible. So I remained silent, but when he took my hand, I didn’t refuse him, and when he drew me towards him I complied reluctantly and let him kiss the top of my head.
‘You’re drenched, you’re shivering,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘We need to get you indoors.’
I nodded, signalling the end of my truculence, the end of my disbelief. Even though the Pillars of Hercules was only a hundred yards away along Greek Street, I knew that indoors meant my room.
He pulled me closer towards him. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We said it on the beach. We love each other. It’s meant to be simple.’
I nodded again. All I could think of now was how cold I was, and how drunk. I heard a taxi’s engine behind us and felt him turn and stretch to wave it down. When we were installed and heading north, Tom turned on the heater. It produced a roar and a trickle of cool air. On the screen that divided us from the cabbie was an advertisement for a taxi like this one, and as the lettering was drifting upwards and sideways, I worried that I would be sick. At my place I was relieved to find that my housemates were out. Tom ran a bath for me. The scalding water sent up clouds of steam that condensed on the icy walls and ran down to puddle on the floral lino. We got in the bath together, topped and tailed, and massaged each other’s feet and sang old Beatles songs. He got out long before me, dried himself and went off to find more towels. He was drunk too, but he was tender as he helped me out of the bath, and dried me like a child, and led me to the bed. He went downstairs and came back with mugs of tea and got in beside me. Then he took very special care of me.
Months, and then years later, after all that happened, whenever I woke in the night and needed comfort, I’d summon that early winter evening when I lay in his arms and he kissed my face, and told me over and over again how silly I’d been, how sorry he was, and how he loved me.
20
At the end of February, not long before election day, the Austen Prize judges announced their shortlist and on it, tucked among the familiar giants – Burgess, Murdoch, Farrell, Spark and Drabble – was a complete unknown, one T.H. Haley. But no one took much notice. The press release was badly timed because that day everyone was talking about Enoch Powell’s attack on the Prime Minister, his own party leader. Poor fat Ted! People had stopped worrying about the miners and ‘Who governs?’ and had started worrying about 20 per cent inflation and economic collapse and whether we should listen to Powell, vote Labour and get out of Europe. This was not a good moment to ask the country to contemplate contemporary fiction. Because the three-day week had successfully prevented blackouts, the whole affair was now regarded as a fraud. Coal stocks were not so low after all, industrial production was not much affected and there was a general impression that we’d been frightened for nothing, or for political purposes, and that none of it should have happened.
And so, against all the predictions, Edward Heath, his piano, sheet music and seascapes were moved out of Downing Street and Harold and Mary Wilson were installed for a second spell. On a TV at work I saw the new Prime Minister standing outside Number Ten in early March looking stooped and frail, almost as weary as Heath. Everyone was weary, and at Leconfield House they were depressed as well as weary because the country had chosen the wrong man.
I’d voted for Wilson a second time, for that wily survivor of the left, and I should have been more cheerful than most but I was exhausted from insomnia. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shortlist. Of course, I wanted Tom to win, I wanted it more than he did. But I’d heard from Peter Nutting that he and others had read From the Somerset Levels in a proof copy and considered it ‘flimsy and pathetic’ as well as ‘fashionably negative and boring’ – Nutting told me this when he stopped me one lunchtime in Curzon Street. He strode on, striking the pavement with his rolled umbrella, leaving me to understand that if my choice was suspect, then so was I.
Gradually, press interest in the Austen Prize picked up and attention fixed on the only new name on the list. No first-time novelist had ever won the Austen. The shortest novel to be honoured in its one-hundred-year history was twice the length of The Levels. A lot of coverage seemed to suggest there was something unmanly or dishonest about a short novel. Tom was profiled in the Sunday Times, photographed in front of the Palace Pier looking nakedly happy and vulnerable. A couple of articles mentioned that he had a grant from the Foundation. We were reminded of how Tom’s book was rushed into print to make the Prize deadline. Journalists had not yet read his novel because Tom Maschler was tactically holding back review copies. An unusually benign diary piece in the Daily Telegraph said that it was generally agreed Tom Haley was handsome and girls went ‘wobbly’ when he smiled, at which I felt a vertiginous moment of jealousy and possession. What girls? Tom now had a phone in the flat and I was able to speak to him from an odorous phone box on the Camden Road.
‘There are no girls,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They must be in the newspaper office, wobbling in front of my photograph.’
He was amazed to be on the list, but Maschler had phoned to say that he would have been furious if Tom had been left off. ‘It’s too obvious,’ he’d apparently said. ‘You’re a genius and it’s a masterpiece. They wouldn’t dare ignore it.’
But the newly discovered writer was able to remain detached from the Austen fuss, even though he was bemused by the press. The Levels was already behind him, it was a ‘five-finger exercise’. I warned him not to say so to any journalist while the judges were still making up their minds. He said he didn’t care, he had a novel to write and it was growing at a pace that only obsession and a new electric typewriter could deliver. His output was all I knew of the book. Three or four thousand words most days, sometimes six, and once, in an afternoon and all-night frenzy, ten. The numbers meant little to me, though I took my cue from the croaky excitement down the phone.
‘Ten thousand words, Serena. Do that every day for a month and I’d have an Anna Karenina!’
Even I knew that he wouldn’t. I felt protective of him and worried that when they came, the reviews would turn against him and he’d be surprised at his own disappointment. For now his only anxiety was that a trip he’d just taken to Scotland for research had interrupted his concentration.
‘You need a rest,’ I said from the Camden Road. ‘Let me come at the weekend.’
‘OK. But I’ll have to go on writing.’
‘Tom, please tell me just a little bit about it.’
‘You’ll see it before anyone else, I promise.’
The day after the shortlist was announced I received, in place of the usual summons, a visit from Max. He went first to stand by Chas Mount’s de
sk for a chat. As it happened we were frantic that morning. Mount had written the first draft of an internal report, a retrospective in which the RUC and the army also had a hand. The issue was what Mount bitterly referred to as ‘the running sore’, by which he meant internment without trial. Back in 1971 scores of the wrong people had been rounded up because the RUC Special Branch suspect lists were out of date and useless. And no killers from the loyalist side had been arrested, no members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. The detainees were kept in inadequate accommodation without being properly separated. And all due process, all legality abandoned – a propaganda gift to our enemies. Chas Mount had served in Aden and had always been sceptical of the interrogation techniques the army and RUC were using during internment – black hoods, isolation, restricted diet, white noise, hours of standing. He was keen to demonstrate that the Service’s hands were relatively clean. We girls in the office took it on trust that they were. The whole sorry affair was heading towards the European Court of Human Rights. The RUC, at least as he explained it, wanted to drag us down with them, and the army was on their side. They weren’t pleased at all by his version of events. Someone on our side higher up than Mount had sent his draft report back and told him to rewrite it to keep all factions happy. It was after all ‘only’ an internal report and would soon be filed and forgotten.
So he was calling for more files, and we were in and out of the Registry, and busy typing up inserts. Max chose a bad time to hover by Chas Mount and try to engage him in small talk. In strict security terms, with these dossiers open he shouldn’t have stepped into our office at all. But Chas was too polite and good-natured to say so. Still, his responses were brief, and soon Max came over to me. In his hand was a small brown envelope which he placed ostentatiously on my desk and said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Take a look as soon as you have a moment.’ Then he left.
For a good while, perhaps as long as an hour, I decided that I didn’t have a moment. What I dreaded most was a heartfelt declaration on office stationery. What I eventually read was a properly typed memo headed ‘Restricted’ and ‘Sweet Tooth’ and ‘From MG to SF’ and a circulation list that included the initials of Nutting, Tapp and two others I didn’t recognise. The note, obviously written by Max for the record, began ‘Dear Miss Frome’. It advised me of what I had ‘likely already considered’. One of the Sweet Tooth subjects was receiving publicity and might well receive yet more. ‘Staff are expected to avoid being photographed or written about in the press. You may well consider it to be in the line of duty to attend the Austen Prize reception, but you are best advised to avoid it.’
Very sensible, however much I resented it. I had in fact planned to be there with Tom. Win or lose, he needed me. But why this circulated letter rather than a word in my ear? Was it too painful for Max to talk to me alone? I rather suspected some form of bureaucratic trap was being set for me. The question then was whether I should defy Max or stay away. Doing the latter seemed safer since it was procedurally correct, but I felt cross about it and on the way home that evening I felt indignant, and angry with Max and his schemes – whatever they were. I was annoyed too at having to invent for Tom a good explanation for my absence. Illness in the family, a bout of flu for myself, an emergency at work? I decided on a morbidly mouldy snack – rapid onset, total incapacity, quick recovery – and this deceit naturally brought me back to the old problem. There had never been a right moment to tell him. Perhaps if I’d turned him down for Sweet Tooth and then had the affair, or started the affair and left the Service, or told him on first meeting … but no, none of it made sense. I couldn’t have known at the beginning where we were heading, and as soon as I did know, it became too precious to threaten. I could tell him and resign, or resign then tell him, but I would still risk losing him. All I could think of was never telling him. Could I live with myself? Well, I already was.
Unlike its boisterous infant cousin, the Booker, the Austen didn’t go in for banquets, or for having the great and good on its judging panel. As Tom described it to me, there was going to be a sober drinks reception at the Dorchester, with a short speech by an eminent literary figure. The judges were mostly literary types, academics, critics, with an occasional philosopher or historian drafted in. The Prize money had once been considerable – in 1875 two thousand pounds took you a long way. Now it was no match for the Booker. The Austen was valued for prestige alone. There had been talk of televising the Dorchester proceedings, but the elderly trustees were said to be wary and, according to Tom, the Booker was more likely to make it onto television one day.
The reception was at six the following evening. At five I sent a telegram from the Mayfair post office to Tom, care of the Dorchester. Am sick. Bad sandwich. Thoughts with you. Come to Camden after. Love you. S. I slouched back to the office, loathing myself and the situation I was in. Once I would have asked myself what Tony would have done. No use now. It was easy enough to pass off my black mood as illness and Mount let me leave early. I arrived home at six, just when I should have been passing through the Dorchester entrance on Tom’s arm. Towards eight I thought I should play my part in case he turned up early. It was easy enough to persuade myself that I was unwell. In pyjamas and dressing gown, I lay on my bed in a haze of sulkiness and self-pity, then I read for a while, then I dozed off for an hour or two and didn’t hear the doorbell.
One of the girls must have let Tom in because when I opened my eyes he was standing by my bed, holding up by a corner his cheque and in the other hand a finished copy of his novel. He was grinning like a fool. Forgetting my poisonous sandwich, I leapt up to embrace him, we whooped and hollered and made such a din that Tricia tapped on the door and asked if we needed help. We reassured her, then we made love (he seemed so hungry for it), and straight afterwards took a taxi to the White Tower.
We hadn’t been back there since our first date, so that was an anniversary of a sort. I’d insisted on bringing with me From the Somerset Levels and we passed it back and forth across the table, flipped through its one hundred and forty-one pages to admire the typeface, rejoiced in the author photograph and the cover, which showed in grainy black and white a ruined city that may have been Berlin or Dresden in 1945. Suppressing thoughts about the security implications, I exclaimed over the dedication, ‘To Serena’, got up from my seat to kiss him, and listened to his account of the evening, of William Golding’s droll speech and an incomprehensible one by the chairman of the judges, a professor from Cardiff. When his name was announced, Tom in his nervousness had tripped on the edge of a carpet as he went forward and hurt his wrist on the back of a chair. Tenderly, I kissed that wrist. After the Prize ceremony he gave four short interviews, but no one had read his book, it didn’t matter what he said and the experience made him feel fraudulent. I asked for two glasses of champagne and we toasted the only first-time novelist to take the Austen Prize. It was such a wonderful occasion that we didn’t even bother to get drunk. I remembered to eat carefully, like the invalid I was supposed to be.
Tom Maschler had planned publication with the precision of a moon landing. Or as if the Austen was in his gift. The shortlist, the profiles, the announcement helped build the impatient expectation, which was fulfilled towards the end of the week when the book appeared in the shops just as the first notices appeared. Our weekend plan was simple. Tom would carry on writing, I would read his press on the train down. I travelled to Brighton on Friday evening with seven reviews on my lap. The world mostly approved of my lover. In the Telegraph: ‘The only thread of hope is that which binds father to daughter (a love as tenderly achieved as anything in modern fiction) but the reader knows soon enough that this bleak masterpiece cannot tolerate the thread uncut. The heart-piercing finale is almost more than one can bear.’ In the TLS: ‘A strange glow, an eerie subterranean light, suffuses Mr Haley’s prose and the hallucinogenic effect on the reader’s inner eye is such as to transform a catastrophic end-time world into a realm of harsh and irresistible beauty.’ I
n the Listener: ‘His prose gives no quarter. He has the drained, level stare of the psychopath and his characters, morally decent, physically lovely, must share their fates with the worst in a godless world.’ In The Times: ‘When Mr Haley sets on his dogs to tear out the viscera of a starving beggar, we know we are being tossed into the crucible of a modern aesthetic and challenged to object, or at least to blink. In the hands of most writers the scene would be a careless dabbling in suffering, and unforgivable, but Haley’s spirit is both tough and transcendent. From the very first paragraph you are in his hands, you know he knows what he is doing, and you can trust him. This small book bears the promise and burden of genius.’
We had already passed through Haywards Heath. I took the book, my book, from my bag and read random pages and, of course, began to see them through different eyes. Such was the power of this assured consensus that The Levels did look different, more confident of its terms, its destination, and rhythmically hypnotic. And so knowing. It read like a majestic poem as precise and suspended as ‘Adlestrop’. Above the train’s iambic racket (and who taught me that word?) I could hear Tom intone his own lines. What did I know, a humble operative who had once, only two or three years ago, made the case for Jacqueline Susann against Jane Austen? But could I trust a consensus? I picked up the New Statesman. It’s ‘back half’, as explained to me by Tom, was important in the literary world. As the contents list announced, the arts editor herself presented a verdict in the lead review: ‘Admittedly, there are moments of poise, a clinical descriptive power capable of generating occasional surges of disgust at humankind, but overall the impression is of something forced, a touch formulaic, emotionally manipulative and altogether slight. He deludes himself (but not the reader) that he is saying something profound about our common plight. What is lacking is scale, ambition and naked intelligence. However, he may do something yet.’ Then a tiny item in the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary: ‘One of the worst decisions ever taken by a committee … this year’s Austen judges, perhaps with a collective eye to a role in the Treasury, decided to devalue the currency of their prize. They opted for an adolescent dystopia, a pimply celebration of disorder and beastliness, thankfully not much longer than a short story.’
