by Ian Mcewan
But beyond existence and oblivion there’s no third place to be. So I lay on this silky bed and thought about you, and replayed the scenes that would make me feel worse. Our earnest and inept first fuck, our brilliant second, all the poetry, fish, ice buckets, stories, politics, the Friday evening reunions, playfulness, shared baths, shared sleep, all the kissing and stroking and touching tongues – how accomplished you were at appearing to be no more than you seemed to be, no more than yourself. Bitterly, sardonically, I wished meteoric promotion on you. Then I wished for more. I should tell you that in that hour, if your lovely pale throat had appeared upturned on my lap and a knife had been pushed into my hand, I would have done the job without thinking. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Unlike me, Othello didn’t want to shed blood. He was a softie.
Don’t walk away now, Serena. Keep reading. This moment doesn’t last. I hated you all right, and loathed myself for being the dupe, the conceited dupe who easily convinced himself that a cash fountain was his due, as was the beautiful woman on his arm as we promenaded on the Brighton seafront. As was the Austen Prize, which I took without much surprise as my rightful possession.
Yes, I sprawled on my four-poster king-sized bed, on a silk counterpane with medieval hunting motifs, and I pursued all the pain and insult that memory could flush from the thickets. Those long dinners in Wheeler’s, the raised glasses chinked, literature, childhood, probability – all of it congealed into a single fleshy carcass, turning over slowly like a good spit-roast. I was thinking back before Christmas. Weren’t we permitting into our conversation the first hints of a future together? But what future could we have had when you hadn’t told me who you were? Where did you think it would end up? Surely you didn’t intend to keep this secret from me for the rest of your life. The Scotch I drank at eight that night tasted better than the Scotch at five. I had a third without water, and phoned down for a bottle of Bordeaux and a ham sandwich. In the forty minutes that it took for room service to arrive, I continued with the Scotch. But I didn’t get roaring drunk, didn’t trash the room or make animal noises or raise curses against you. Instead, I wrote you a savage letter on hotel stationery, found a stamp, addressed the envelope and put it in my coat pocket. I drank one glass of wine, ordered up a second sandwich, had no more coherent thoughts and was meekly asleep by ten.
I woke some hours later into total darkness – the curtains in that room were thick – and entered one of those moments of untroubled but total amnesia. I could feel a comfortable bed around me, but who and where I was lay beyond my grasp. It lasted only a few seconds, this episode of pure existence, the mental equivalent of the blank page. Inevitably, the narrative seeped back, with the near details arriving first – the room, the hotel, the city, Greatorex, you; next, the larger facts of my life – my name, my general circumstances. It was then, as I sat up and groped for the bedside light switch, that I saw the whole Sweet Tooth affair in utterly different terms. This brief, cleansing amnesia had delivered me into common sense. This wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a calamitous betrayal and personal disaster. I’d been too busy being insulted by it to see it for what it was – an opportunity, a gift. I was a novelist without a novel, and now luck had tossed my way a tasty bone, the bare outline of a useful story. There was a spy in my bed, her head was on my pillow, her lips were pressed to my ear. She concealed her real purpose, and crucially, she didn’t know that I knew. And I wouldn’t tell her. So I wouldn’t confront you, there’d be no accusations or terminal row and parting of ways, not yet. Instead, silence, discretion, patient watching, and writing. Events would decide the plot. The characters were ready-made. I would invent nothing, only record. I’d watch you at work. I too could be a spy.
I was sitting upright in bed, mouth open, staring across the room, like a man watching his father’s ghost step through the wall. I’d seen the novel I was going to write. I had also seen the dangers. I would go on receiving the money in the full knowledge of its source. Greatorex knew that I knew. That made me vulnerable, and gave him power over me. Was this novel conceived in the spirit of revenge? Well, no, but you did set me free. You didn’t ask me if I wanted to be part of Sweet Tooth, I wouldn’t ask you if you wanted to be in my story. Ian Hamilton once told me of a writer friend who’d put intimate details of his marriage into a novel. His wife was outraged to read their sex lives and pillow talk minutely reproduced. She divorced him and he regretted it forever, not least because she was very rich. No such problem here. I could do as I pleased. But I couldn’t sit here for long with my mouth agape. I dressed hurriedly, found my notebook and filled it in two hours. I merely had to tell the story as I saw it, from the moment you came to my office at the university, to my rendezvous with Greatorex – and beyond.
The next morning, buzzing with purpose, I went out before breakfast and bought three exercise books from a friendly newsagent. Bristol, I decided, was a decent place after all. Back in my room I ordered coffee and set to work, making notes, setting out the sequences, trying out a paragraph or two for taste. I wrote almost half of an opening chapter. By mid-afternoon I was feeling uneasy. Two hours later, after a read-through, I threw down my pen with a shout and stood up suddenly, knocking over the chair behind me. Fuck! It was dull, it was dead. I’d covered forty pages, as easily as counting. No resistance or difficulty or spring, no surprises, nothing rich or strange. No hum, no torque. Instead, everything I saw and heard and said and did was lined up like beans in a row. It wasn’t mere clumsy surface ineptitude. Buried deep in the concept was a flaw, and even that word sounded too good for what it was trying to name. It simply wasn’t interesting.
I was spoiling a precious gift and I was disgusted. I took a walk through the city in the early evening darkness, and wondered whether I should post that letter to you after all. The problem, I decided, was me. Without thinking, I was presenting myself in the guise of the typical hero of an English comic novel – inept and almost clever, passive, earnest, over-explained, urgently unfunny. There I was, minding my own business, thinking about sixteenth-century poetry, when, would you believe it, this beautiful girl walks into my office and offers me a pension. What was I protecting with this veneer of farce? All the heartache, I supposed, that I hadn’t yet touched on.
I walked to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, where, it was said, you could sometimes spot a prospective suicide casing the joint, calculating the fall. I crossed and stopped halfway to stare down into the blackness of the gorge. I was thinking again about the second time we ever made love. In your room, the morning after the White Tower. Remember? I lay back on the pillows – what luxury – and you swayed above me. A dance of bliss. As I read it then, your face as you looked down showed nothing but pleasure and the beginnings of real affection. Now I knew what you knew, what you had to conceal, I tried to imagine being you, being in two places at once, loving and … reporting back. How could I get in there and report back too? And that was it. I saw it. So simple. This story wasn’t for me to tell. It was for you. Your job was to report back to me. I had to get out of my skin and into yours. I needed to be translated, to be a transvestite, to shoehorn myself into your skirts and high heels, into your knickers, and carry your white glossy handbag on its shoulder strap. On my shoulder. Then start talking, as you. Did I know you well enough? Clearly not. Was I a good enough ventriloquist? Only one way to find out. I had to begin. I took from a pocket my letter to you and tore it up, and let the bits drift down into the darkness of the Avon Gorge. Then I hurried back across the bridge, eventually waved down a taxi and spent that New Year’s Eve and part of the next day in my hotel room filling another exercise book, trying your voice. Then I checked out late and drove the car home to my anxious parents.
Do you remember our first meeting after Christmas? It must have been January 3rd or 4th, another of our Friday evenings. You must have noticed how I made a point of coming to meet your train. Perhaps it crossed your mind that it was unusual. I’m a hopeless actor and I was worried that it would be imp
ossible to behave naturally in your company, that you’d see through me. You’d know that I knew. Easier to greet you on a crowded platform than in the silence of the flat. But when your train came in and I saw the carriage containing you slide by, with you reaching so prettily above your seat for your bag, and seconds later, when we went into that powerful embrace, I felt such desire for you that I didn’t need to fake a thing. We kissed and I knew it was going to be easy. I could want you and watch you. The two weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they fed each other. When we made love an hour later, you were so sweetly and inventively possessive, even as you carried on with your usual pretence – I put this at its simplest: it thrilled me. I almost passed out. So it began, what you kindly termed my ‘pig-in-a-trough mode’. And it multiplied my pleasures, to know that I could retreat to the typewriter to describe the moment, from your point of view. Your duplicitous point of view, which would have to include your understanding, your version, of me, lover and Sweet Tooth item. My task was to reconstruct myself through the prism of your consciousness. If I gave myself a good press, it was because of those nice things you said about me. With this recursive refinement, my mission was even more interesting than yours. Your masters did not require you to investigate how you yourself appeared through my eyes. I was learning to do what you do, then better it with one extra fold in the fabric of deception. And how well I took to it.
Then, a few hours later, Brighton beach – strictly, Hove, which doesn’t chime romantically, despite the half-rhyme with love. For only the second time in our affair I was on my back, now with damp shingle cooling my coccyx. A passing policeman on the promenade would have done us for public indecency. How could we have explained to him those parallel worlds that we spun around us? In one orbit, our mutual deceit, a novelty in my case, habitual in yours, possibly addictive, probably fatal. In the other, our affection bursting through ecstasy to love. We reached the glorious summit at last and traded our ‘I love you’s even as we each reserved our secrets. I saw how we could do it, live with these sealed compartments side by side, never letting the dank stench of one invade the sweetness of the other. If I mention again how exquisite our lovemaking became after my rendezvous with Greatorex, I know you’ll be thinking of ‘Pawnography’. (How I regret now that punning title.) The foolish husband lusting after the wife who stole his stuff, his pleasure sharpened by his secret knowledge of her deceit. All right, she was a rehearsal for you before I knew of your existence. And I don’t deny the common root is me. But I have in mind my other story, the one about the vicar’s brother who ends up loving the woman who’ll destroy him. You always liked that one. Or how about the writer driven to her second novel by the spectre of her apish lover? Or the fool who believes his lover is real when in fact he’s dreamed her up and she’s only a counterfeit, a copy, a fake?
But don’t leave the kitchen. Stay with me. Let me exorcise this bitterness. And let’s talk about research. By the time you came to Brighton that Friday, I’d had a second meeting with Max Greatorex, at his place in Egham, Surrey. Even at the time, I was surprised how open he was, filling me in on the Sweet Tooth meetings, your various encounters in the park and in his office, his late-night visit to St Augustine’s Road and, generally, the workplace. As I learned more, I wondered if he was longing, in a self-destructive way, to become the Fourth Man, or if he was in sexual competition with your Tony Canning. Max assured me that Sweet Tooth was so low level that it hardly mattered. I also got the impression that he’d already decided to leave the Security Service and go into something else. Now I know from Shirley Shilling that his purpose in meeting me in Bristol was to break up our affair. He was indiscreet because all he cared about was destroying you. When I asked to see him again, he thought I was driven by angry obsession, which he was happy to feed. Later, he was surprised to discover that I was still seeing you. He was furious when he heard you intended to come to the Austen event at the Dorchester. So he called his press contacts and threw us to the dogs. In all, I’ve met him three times this year. He gave me so much, he was so helpful. It’s a pity I detest him. He told me Canning’s story, how he was interviewed one last time in a safe house before he went off to the Baltic to die, how he had a nosebleed, which ruined a mattress and nourished some lurid fantasies of yours. Greatorex was much entertained by all that.
At our last meeting he gave me an address for your old friend Shirley Shilling. I’d read about her in the papers, how a clever agent had lined up five publishers to bid for her first novel, how they were queuing up for the movie rights in LA. She was on Martin Amis’s arm when we were reading together in Cambridge. I liked her, and she adores you. She told me about your pub-rock crawls around London. After I said I knew about your work she told me about your time together as cleaning ladies, and how she was asked to snoop on you. She also mentioned your old friend Jeremy, so while I was in Cambridge I went to his college and got a forwarding address for him in Edinburgh. I also visited Mrs Canning. I told her that I’d been a student of her husband. She was polite enough, but I didn’t learn much. You’ll be pleased to hear that she knows nothing about you. Shirley had offered to drive me to the Canning cottage in Suffolk. (She drives like a maniac.) We peered into the garden and went for a stroll in the woods. By the time we left I felt I had enough to reconstruct the scene of your secret affair, your apprenticeship in secrecy.
From Cambridge, remember, I went on to see your sister and her boyfriend Luke. As you know, I dislike getting stoned. It’s such a mental constriction. That prickly, electric self-consciousness just doesn’t suit me and nor does a joyless chemical appetite for sweet things. But it was the only way Lucy and I could really get along and talk. The three of us sat in low light on cushions on the floor of their flat, incense smouldering from homemade clay pots, a sitar raga leaking onto our heads from unseen speakers. We drank purifying tea. She’s in awe of you, poor girl, desperate for her big sister’s good opinion, which I think she rarely gets. At one point she said forlornly that it wasn’t fair that you were cleverer and prettier. I got what I had come for – your childhood and teenage years, though I might have forgotten most of it in a haze of hash. I do remember that we ate cauliflower cheese and brown rice for supper.
I stayed the night in order to go on Sunday to the cathedral to hear your father. I was curious, because you’d described to me in a letter how you collapsed into his arms on your front doorstep. And there he was, in distant splendour, saying nothing at all on that particular day. Underlings, grand enough in their own right, undeterred by the feeble turn-out, conducted the service with all the brio of unshaken faith. One fellow with a nasal voice preached the sermon, a sure-footed exegesis of the Good Samaritan parable. I shook your father’s hand on my way out. He looked at me with interest and asked in a friendly way if I’d be coming back. How could I tell him the truth?
I wrote to Jeremy to present myself as your good friend who was passing through Edinburgh. I told him that you’d suggested I get in touch. I knew you wouldn’t mind a lie, and I also knew I was taking a chance. If he mentioned me to you my cover would be blown. This time, I had to get drunk to make real progress. How else would I have got the story of how you came to write for ?Quis?? It was you who told me about his elusive orgasm, his peculiar pubic bone and the folded towel. Jeremy and I had the sixteenth century, its history and literature, in common too, and I was able to bring him up to date on Tony Canning as traitor, and then your affair, which shocked him. And so our evening sped along beautifully and I thought it was money well spent when I picked up the bill at the Old Waverley Hotel.
But why trouble you with details of my research? First, to let you know I took this matter seriously. Second, to be clear, that above all it was you who were my principal source. There was, of course, everything that I saw for myself. And then the small cast among whom I wandered in January. That leaves an island of experience, an important fraction of the whole, that was you alone, you with your thoughts, and sometimes you invisible to yourself.
On this terrain, I’ve been obliged to extrapolate or invent.
Here’s an example. Neither of us will forget our first meeting in my office. From where I sat, when you stepped through the door and I took in your old-fashioned peaches-and-cream look, and your summer-blue eyes, I thought it was just possible that my life was about to change. I’ve imagined you minutes before that moment, making your way from Falmer station, approaching the Sussex campus filled with the snobbish distaste you’ve expressed to me since for the idea of a new university. Sleek and fair, you strode through the crowds of long-haired bare-foot kids. Your scorn was barely fading from your face by the time you introduced yourself and started telling me your untruths. You’ve complained to me about your time at Cambridge, you’ve told me it was intellectually stultifying, but you defend your place to the hilt and look down on mine. Well, for what it’s worth, think again. Don’t be fooled by loud music. I reckon my place was more ambitious, more serious, more enjoyable than yours. I speak as a product, an explorer, of Asa Briggs’s new map of learning. The tutorials were demanding. Two essays a week for three years, no let-up. All the usual literary studies, but on top compulsory historiography for all newcomers, and then for me, by choice, cosmology, fine art, international relations, Virgil, Dante, Darwin, Ortega y Gasset … Sussex would never have allowed you to stagnate the way you did, would never have permitted you to do nothing else but mathematics. Why am I bothering you with this? I can hear you say to yourself, He’s jealous, he’s chippy about his plate-glass learning emporium, about not having been at my place with the snooker-table lawns and honey limestone. But you’re wrong. I only wanted to remind you why I painted a curl on your lips as you passed under the sound of Jethro Tull, a sneer I wasn’t there to see. It was an informed guess, an extrapolation.
