Sweet Tooth (39 page)

I apologise too for not answering the phone. I’ve been avoiding journalists, and I’ve been avoiding you because it didn’t seem the right time for us to be talking. I think by now I know you well enough and I’m confident that you’ll be here tomorrow. Your clothes are all in one place, at the bottom of the wardrobe. I won’t tell you my state of mind as I folded
your things away, but I did linger over the job, as one might over an old photo album. I remembered you in so many guises. I found at the bottom of the wardrobe, screwed up in a ball, the black suede jacket you wore in Wheeler’s the night you tried to explain the Monty Hall problem to me. Before I folded it, I did up all the buttons with a sense of locking something down, or locking it away. I still don’t understand probability. Similarly, under the bed, the short pleated orange skirt you wore to our rendezvous at the National Portrait Gallery, the skirt that helped kick the whole thing off, as far as I was concerned. I’ve never folded a skirt before. This one wasn’t easy.

Typing ‘folded’ reminds me that at any point before I’ve finished you could put this letter back into its envelope, in sorrow or anger or guilt. Please don’t. This is not an extended accusation, and I promise you it will end well, at least in certain respects. Stay with me. I’ve left the heating on in order to tempt you to remain here. If you become weary, the bed is yours, the sheets are clean, all traces of our former selves lost to the launderette opposite the station. It was a service wash, and the kind lady there agreed for an extra pound to do the ironing. Ironed sheets, the uncelebrated privilege of childhood. But they remind me too of the blank page. The blank page writ large and sensual. And that page was certainly large in my thoughts before Christmas, when I was convinced that I would never write fiction again. I told you about my writing block after we went to deliver
The Levels
to Tom Maschler. You were sweetly (and ineffectually) encouraging, though I know now that you had good professional reasons. I spent most of December staring at that blank page. I thought I was falling in love, but I couldn’t summon a useful thought. And then something extraordinary happened. Someone came to see me.

It happened after Christmas, when I’d taken my sister back to her hostel in Bristol. I was feeling emptied out after all the emotional scenes with Laura and I wasn’t looking forward
to the dull drive back to Sevenoaks. I suppose I was a little more passive than I am usually. When a stranger approached me as I was getting into the car, my defences were down. I didn’t automatically assume he was a beggar or a con artist. He knew my name and he told me he had something important to tell me about you. Since he seemed harmless and I was curious, I let him buy me a coffee. You’ll have guessed by now that this was Max Greatorex. He must have tailed me all the way from Kent, and perhaps before that, from Brighton. I never asked. I own up to lying to you about my movements. I didn’t stay down in Bristol to spend time with Laura. I listened to your colleague for a couple of hours that afternoon, and I stayed in a hotel for two nights.

So we sat in this dim evil-smelling relic of the fifties, tiled like a public lavatory, drinking the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted. I’m sure Greatorex told me only a fraction of the story. First, he told me who you and he worked for. When I asked for proof he produced various internal documents, some of which referred to you, others were notes in your handwriting on headed paper, and two included photographs of you. He said he’d taken these papers from his office at great risk to himself. Then he laid out the Sweet Tooth operation for me, though he didn’t tell me the names of other writers. Having a novelist in the scheme was, he said, a whimsical afterthought. He told me he was passionate about literature, knew and liked my stories and articles and that his own principled opposition to the project hardened when he heard that I was on the list. He said he was concerned that if it ever came out that I was funded by an intelligence agency, I would never outlive the disgrace. I couldn’t know it at the time, but he was being less than honest about his motives.

Then he talked about you. Because you were beautiful as well as clever – actually, the word was cunning – you were considered ideal for the job of getting down to Brighton and signing me up. It wasn’t his style to use a vulgar locution like honeytrap but that was what I was hearing. I got angry
and had a shoot-the-messenger moment and almost popped him one on the nose. But I have to hand it to him – he took care not to appear to relish what he was telling me. His tone was sorrowful. He gently let me know that he would far rather be enjoying his short holiday break than discussing my squalid affairs. He was risking his prospects, his job, even his freedom in this breach of security. But he cared for openness and literature and decency. So he said.

He described your cover, the Foundation, the precise sums and all the rest – in part, I suppose, as corroboration for his story. And by this time I had no doubts. I was so worked up, so hot and agitated that I had to go outside. I walked up and down the street for a few minutes. I was beyond anger. This was a new dark place of hatred – for you, for myself, for Greatorex, for the Bristol Blitz and the grisly cheap horrors the post-war developers had heaped upon the bomb sites. I wondered if there was a single day when you hadn’t told me an outright or implicit lie. That was when I leaned into a doorway of a boarded-up shop and tried and failed to throw up. To get the taste of you out of my gut. Then I went back inside Kwik-Snax for more.

I felt calmer when I sat down and was able to take in my informant. Even though he was the same age as me, he had an assured, patrician manner, the touch of the smooth civil servant about him. He may have been talking down to me. I didn’t care. He had an extra-terrestrial look, the way his ears were mounted on mounds of flesh or bone. Since he’s a scrawny fellow, with a thin neck and a shirt collar a size too big for him, I was surprised to learn that you were once in love with him, to the point of obsession, to the point at which his fiancée walked out on him. I wouldn’t have thought he was your type at all. I asked him if bitterness was his motive for talking to me. He denied it. The marriage would have been a disaster, and in a way he was grateful to you.

We went over the Sweet Tooth stuff again. He told me that it wasn’t at all unusual for intelligence agencies to promote
culture and cultivate the right kind of intellectuals. The Russians did it, so why wouldn’t we? This was the soft Cold War. I said to him what I said to you on Saturday. Why not give the money openly, through some other government department? Why use a secret operation? Greatorex sighed and looked at me, shaking his head in pity. He said I had to understand, any institution, any organisation eventually becomes a dominion, self-contained, competitive, driven by its own logic and bent on survival and on extending its territory. It was as inexorable and blind as a chemical process. MI6 had gained control over a secret section of the Foreign Office and MI5 wanted its own project. Both wanted to impress the Americans, the CIA – which over the years had paid for more culture in Europe than anyone would ever realise.

He walked with me back to the car and by this time it was raining hard. We didn’t waste much time in parting. Before he shook my hand he gave me his home phone number. He said he was sorry to be the bearer of such news. Betrayal was an ugly matter and no one should have to deal with it. He hoped I would find a way through. When he was gone I sat in the car with the ignition key drooping from my hand. The rain was coming down like it was the end of the world. After what I’d heard I couldn’t face the drive or my parents or coming back to Clifton Street. I wasn’t going to see the New Year in with you. I couldn’t imagine doing anything but watch the rain clean the filthy street. After an hour I drove to a post office and sent you a telegram, then I found a hotel, a decent one. I thought I might as well use up the last of my suspect money on luxury. In a mood of self-pity, I ordered up to my room a bottle of Scotch. An inch of that with an equal amount of water was enough to persuade me that I didn’t want to get drunk, not at five in the afternoon. I didn’t want to be sober either. I didn’t want anything, even oblivion.

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.