by Ian Mcewan
Tom had said he didn’t want to see the reviews, so in the flat that evening I read out the choicest parts of the good ones and summarised the negative articles in the blandest terms. He was pleased by the praise, of course, but it was obvious that he had moved on. He was glancing at one of his typed pages even as I was reading out the passage that included the word ‘masterpiece’. He was typing again as soon as I’d finished, and he wanted to go on working through the evening. I went out for fish and chips and he ate his at the typewriter, straight off the page of yesterday’s Evening Argus, which contained one of his best notices.
I read and we barely spoke a word until I went to bed. I was still awake an hour later when he got in beside me, and again, he made love to me in this new, hungry way of his, as if he’d lived without sex for a year. He made far more noise than I ever did. I teased him by calling this his pig-in-a-trough mode.
The next morning I woke to the muted sound of his new typewriter. I kissed the top of his head as I passed him on the way out to the Saturday market. I did the shopping there, collected up the newspapers and took them to my usual coffee shop. A table by the window, a cappuccino, an almond croissant. Perfect. And here was a brilliant review in the Financial Times. ‘Reading T.H. Haley is like being driven too fast round tight corners. But be assured, this sleek vehicle never leaves the road.’ I looked forward to reading that to him. Next on the heap was the Guardian, with Tom’s name and a photograph of him at the Dorchester on the front page. Good. A whole article about him. I turned to it, saw the headline – and froze. ‘Austen Prize-winning Author Funded by MI5’.
I was almost sick right there. My first stupid thought was that perhaps he would never see it. A ‘reliable source’ had confirmed to the paper that the Freedom International Foundation, perhaps unknowingly, ‘had received funds from another body that was partly financed by an organisation indirectly funded by the Security Service’. I scanned the piece at the speed of panic. No mention of Sweet Tooth or of other writers. There was an accurate summary of monthly payments, of how Tom had given up his post-grad teaching post on receiving the first, and then, less harmfully, a mention of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its connection to the CIA. The old Encounter story was warmed up, then, back to the scoop. It was noted that T.H. Haley had written
passionate anti-communist articles on the East German Uprising, on the silence of West German writers about the Berlin Wall and, most recently, on the State persecution of Romanian poets. This is perhaps just the sort of kindred spirit our intelligence services would like to see flourish on these shores, a right-wing author who is eloquently sceptical of the general left-leaning tendencies of his colleagues. But with this level of secret meddling in culture, questions are bound to be raised about openness and artistic freedom in our Cold War environment. No one yet doubts the integrity of the Austen Prize judges, but the trustees might be wondering just what kind of winner their learned committee has chosen, and whether champagne corks flew in certain secret London offices when Haley’s name was announced.
I read the piece again and sat immobilised for twenty minutes while my untouched coffee cooled. Now it seemed obvious. It was bound to happen: if I wouldn’t tell him, someone else would. My punishment for cowardice. How loathsome and ridiculous I’d appear now, forced into the open, trying to sound honest, trying to explain myself. I didn’t tell you dearest because I love you. I was frightened of losing you. Oh yes, a perfect arrangement. My silence, his disgrace. I thought of going straight to the station to get the next London train, fading from his life. Yes, let him face the storm alone. More cowardice. But he wouldn’t want me near him anyway. And so it went round, even though I knew there was no escape, I would have to confront him, I would have to go to the flat and show him the article.
I gathered up the chicken, vegetables and newspapers, paid for my uneaten breakfast, and walked slowly up the hill to his street. I heard him typing as I came up the stairs. Well, that was about to stop. I let myself in and waited for him to look up.
He was aware of me and faintly smiled in greeting and was about to continue when I said, ‘You’d better look at this. It isn’t a review.’
The Guardian was folded at the page. He took it and turned his back on me to read it. I was numbly wondering, when it came to it, whether I should pack, or just leave. I had a small suitcase under the bed. I would need to remember my hairdryer. But there might not be time. He might simply throw me out.
At last he looked at me and said neutrally, ‘It’s terrible.’
‘Yes.’
‘What am I supposed to say?’
‘Tom, I don’t …’
‘I mean, these money trails. Listen to this. Foundation blah blah, “had received funds from another body that was partly financed by an organisation indirectly funded by the Security Service”.’
‘I’m sorry, Tom.’
‘Partly? Indirectly? Three organisations back? How are we meant to know about that?’
‘I don’t know.’ I heard the ‘we’ but I didn’t really take it in.
He said, ‘I went to their office, I’ve seen all their stuff. It’s completely above board.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘I suppose I should have asked to audit the books. Like a fucking accountant!’
He was indignant now. ‘I just don’t understand it. If the government wants to put over certain views, why do it in secret?’
‘Exactly.’
‘They’ve got friendly journalists, Arts Council, scholarships, BBC, information departments, royal institutions. I don’t know what the fuck they’ve got. They run a whole education system! Why use MI5?’
‘It’s insane, Tom.’
‘It’s madness. This is how these secret bureaucracies perpetuate themselves. Some squirt of an underling dreams up a scheme to please his masters. But no one knows what it’s for, what the point is. No one even asks. It’s right out of Kafka.’
He stood up suddenly and came over to me.
‘Listen. Serena. No one has ever told me what to write. Speaking up for a Romanian poet in jail doesn’t make me right wing. Calling the Berlin Wall a pile of shit doesn’t make me a dupe of MI5. Nor does calling West German writers cowards for ignoring it.’
‘Of course it doesn’t.’
‘But that’s what they’re implying. Fucking kindred spirit! That’s what everyone’s going to think.’
Was it really that simple, that he loved me so much, felt so loved by me, that he couldn’t begin to suspect me? Was he that simple? I watched as he began to pace up and down the small attic room. The floor creaked noisily, the lamp suspended from the rafters stirred a little. This surely would be the time, when we were halfway there, to tell him the truth. But I knew I couldn’t deny myself this reprieve.
He was in a frenzy of indignation again. Why him? It was unfair. It was vindictive. Just when his career had made a decent start.
Then he stopped and said, ‘On Monday I’ll go to the bank and tell them to refuse any more payments.’
‘Good idea.’
‘I can live on the Prize money for a while.’
‘Yes.’
‘But Serena …’ He came over to me again and took my hands in his. We looked into each other’s eyes, then we kissed.
‘Serena, what am I going to do?’
My voice, when I found it, was flatly inexpressive. ‘I think you’re going to have to put out a statement. Write something and phone it through to the Press Association.’
‘I need you to help me draft it.’
‘Of course. You need to say that you knew nothing, you’re outraged and you’re stopping the money.’
‘You’re brilliant. I love you.’
He put away the loose pages of his new book in a drawer and locked it. Then I sat at the typewriter and put in a clean sheet and we worked on a draft. It took me some minutes to adjust to the sensitive keys of an electric machine. When it was done I read it back to him and he said, ‘You can als
o put, “I wish to make it clear that at no point have I ever had any communication from or contact with any member of MI5.” ’
I felt my knees go weak. ‘You don’t need that. It’s clear from what you’ve already said. It sounds like you’re protesting too much.’
‘I’m not sure you’re right. Isn’t it good to make it clear?’
‘It is clear, Tom. Honestly. You don’t need it.’
Our eyes met again. His were red-rimmed from exhaustion. Otherwise, I saw nothing but trust.
‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’
I handed him the page and went next door to lie on the bed while he got the PA’s number from the operator and phoned his statement through. To my amazement, I heard him dictate the sentence, or a version of it, that we had just agreed to drop.
‘And let me make this clear. I have never in my life had contact with any member of MI5.’
I sat up, and was about to call out to him, but there was nothing to be done and I sank back into the pillows. I felt weary of thinking about the same thing all the time. Tell him. Get it over with. No! Don’t you dare. Events were moving out of my control and I had no idea what I should be doing. I heard him put the phone down and go to his desk. Within minutes he was typing again. How extraordinary, how wonderful, to have such power of concentration, to be able to push on now into an imagined world. I continued to lie there on the unmade bed, devoid of motive, oppressed by the certainty that the week ahead would be disastrous. I would be in deep trouble at work, even if the Guardian story wasn’t followed up. But it was bound to be. It could only get worse. I should have listened to Max. It was possible that the journalist who wrote the piece knew no more than he had written. But if there was more, and I was exposed, then … then I should tell Tom before the newspapers did. That again. I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
After forty minutes the typewriter stopped. Five minutes later I heard the boards creak, and Tom came in wearing his jacket and sat by me and kissed me. He was restless, he said. He hadn’t been out of the flat for three days. Would I walk to the seafront with him, and would I let him buy me lunch in Wheeler’s? It was balm, instant forgetfulness. We were out of the house in the time it took me to put on my coat, and walking arm in arm down the hill towards the English Channel as if it was just another carefree weekend. As long as I could lose myself in the present with him, I felt protected. I was helped by Tom’s lively mood. He seemed to think that his statement to the press had solved the problem. On the front we walked east, with a fretful frothy grey-green sea on our right whipped up by a fresh north wind. We went past Kemp Town, and then through a knot of demonstrators with placards protesting against plans to build a marina. We agreed we didn’t care either way. When we came back past the same place twenty minutes later the demonstration had dispersed.
That was when Tom said, ‘I think we’re being followed.’
If I felt a brief dip of horror in my stomach it was because I thought he was implying he knew everything and was mocking me. But he was serious. I looked back. The cold blowy day had deterred promenaders. There was only one figure in sight, perhaps two hundred yards away or even more.
‘That one?’
‘He’s got a leather coat. I’m sure I saw him when we left the flat.’
So we stopped and waited for this man to catch up with us, but within a minute he was crossing the road and turning up a side street away from the seafront. And at that point we became more concerned about getting to the restaurant before they stopped serving lunch, so we hurried back towards the Lanes and our table, and our ‘usual’, then Chablis with our grilled skate wings and, finally, a pot of sickly syllabub.
As we were leaving Wheeler’s Tom said, ‘There he is,’ and pointed, but I saw nothing but an empty street corner. He broke away and jogged over to it, and it was clear from the way he stood there with his hands on his hips that he could see no one.
This time our priority, even more urgent, was to get back to the flat and make love. He was more frenetic, or ecstatic, than ever, so much so that I didn’t dare tease him about it. I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. I could feel the chill of the coming week. Tomorrow I would take the afternoon train home, wash my hair, prepare my clothes, and on Monday I would have to account for myself at work to my superiors, face the morning newspapers and, sooner or later, face Tom. I didn’t know which one of us was doomed, or more doomed, if that made any sense. Which of us would be disgraced? Please let it just be me, not both of us, I thought as I watched Tom leave the bed, pick up his clothes from a chair and go naked across the room to the bathroom. He didn’t know what was coming and he deserved none of it. Just bad luck, to have met me. With this thought I fell asleep, as so often before to the sound of his typing. Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option. I slept deeply, without dreams. At some point in the early evening he came back quietly into the bedroom, slipped in beside me and made love to me again. He was amazing.
21
Back at St Augustine’s Road on Sunday I had another sleepless night. I was too agitated to read. Through the branches of the chestnut tree and a gap in the curtains, a street lamp threw a crooked stick of light across the ceiling, and I lay on my back, staring at it. For all the mess I was in, I didn’t know how I could have done things differently. If I hadn’t joined MI5, I wouldn’t have met Tom. If I’d told him who I worked for at our very first meeting – and why would I tell a stranger that? – he would’ve shown me the door. At every point along the way, as I grew fonder of him, then loved him, it became harder, riskier to tell him the truth even as it became more important to do so. I was trapped and I always had been. I fantasised at length of how it might be, to have enough money and single-mindedness to leave suddenly without explaining myself, go somewhere simple and clean, far from here, like the island of Kumlinge in the Baltic. I saw myself in watery sunlight, divested of all obligations and connections, walking without luggage along a narrow road by a sandy bay, with sea thrift and gorse and a solitary pine, a road that rose to a promontory and a plain white country church in whose tiny cemetery was a fresh stone, and a jam jar of harebells left by the housekeeper. I would sit on the grass by the mound of his grave and think about Tony, remember how we were fond lovers one whole summer, and I’d forgive him for betraying his country. It was a passing moment of stupidity, hatched from good intentions and it caused no real harm. I could forgive him because everything could be resolved in Kumlinge, where the air and light were pure. Was my life ever better and simpler than those weekends in a woodsman’s cottage near Bury St Edmunds, where an older man adored me, cooked for me, guided me?
Even now, at four thirty, right across the country, bundled newspapers bearing Tom’s picture were being hurled from trains and vans onto platforms and pavements. All would carry his Press Association denial. Then he would be at the mercy of Tuesday’s press. I turned on the light, put on my dressing gown and sat in my chair. T.H. Haley, lackey of the security state, his integrity blown before he’d even got started, and I was the one, no, it was us, Serena Frome and her employers, who brought him down. Who could trust what a man wrote on Romanian censorship when his words were paid for out of the Secret Vote? Our Sweet Tooth darling spoiled. There were another nine writers, perhaps more important, more useful, and not in the frame. I could hear the fourth floor saying it – the project will survive. I thought of what Ian Hamilton would say. My feverish insomnia was making my fantasies active on my retina. I saw in the dark a ghostly smile and shrug as he turned away. Well, we’ll have to find someone else. Too bad. The kid was bright. Perhaps I was exaggerating. Spender survived the Encounter scandal, and so did Encounter itself. But Spender had not been as vulnerable. Tom would be taken for a liar.
I slept for an hour before the alarm rang. I washed and dressed in a fog, too exhausted to think about the day ahead. I could feel it though, a numbing dread. The house was damp as well as cold this time in the morning, but the kitchen was cheerful. Bridget had a big exam at nine, an
d Tricia and Pauline were sending her off with a fried breakfast. One of the girls passed me a mug of tea and I sat to one side, warming my hands on it, listening to the banter and wishing that I too was about to qualify as a conveyancing solicitor. When Pauline asked me why I looked so glum I answered honestly that I’d had a sleepless night. For that I received a pat on the shoulder and a fried egg and bacon sandwich. Such kindness almost made me tearful. I volunteered to do the washing-up while the others got ready, and it was comforting, the domestic order of hot water, froth and steaming clean wet plates.
I was the last to leave the house. As I approached the front door, I saw among the junk mail scattered across the lino a postcard for me. The picture showed a beach in Antigua and a woman with a basket of flowers balanced on her head. It was from Jeremy Mott.
Hello, Serena. Escaping the long Edinburgh winter. What a joy to get out of my overcoat at last. Nice mystery rendezvous the other week and much talk of you! Come up and see me some time. xxx Jeremy.
Rendezvous? I was in no mood for puzzles. I put the card in my bag and left the house. I was feeling a little better once I was walking quickly towards Camden Tube station. I was trying to be brave and fatalistic. It was a local storm, a funding story, there was nothing I could do anyway. I could lose my lover and my job, but no one was actually going to die.
I’d already decided to look through the press in Camden because I didn’t want to be seen with a pile by somebody from work. So I stood in the icy gale that swept through the twin-entrance booking hall, trying to manage the flapping sheets of several newspapers. Tom’s story was not on any front page, but it was inside all the broadsheets, the Daily Mail and the Express, with different photographs. All versions were repetitions of the original piece, with the addition of parts of his Press Association statement. All carried his insistence that he knew no one from MI5. Not good, but it could have been worse. Without fresh information the story might die. So twenty minutes later there was something like a spring in my step as I walked down Curzon Street. Five minutes later, when I reached the office, my pulse hardly varied as I picked up an internal mail envelope from my desk. It was as I’d expected, a summons to a meeting in Tapp’s office at 9.00 a.m. I hung up my coat and took the lift up.
