Sweet Tooth (6 page)

Desolate, I went slowly along Great Marlborough Street. The job and Tony were twin aspects of one thing, a summer’s sentimental education, and it had disintegrated around me in forty-eight hours. He was back with his wife and his college, and I had nothing. No love, no job. Only the chill of loneliness. And the sorrow was compounded by the memory of the way he’d turned on me. So unfair! I glanced across the road and by a nasty coincidence found myself approaching the mock Tudor facade of Liberty’s, where Tony had bought the blouse.

Trying not to feel crushed, I quickly turned down Carnaby Street and picked my way through the crowds. Whining guitar music and the scent of patchouli from a basement shop made me think of my sister and all the trouble at home. Ranks of ‘psychedelic’ shirts and Sergeant Pepper-ish tasselled military suits hung on long racks on the pavement. Available for like-minded hordes desperate to express their individuality. Well, my mood was sour. I went down Regent Street, then turned left, penetrating deeper into Soho, and walked along streets filthy with litter and abandoned snacks, ketchup-streaked burgers and hotdogs and cartons squelched into the pavement and gutter, and rubbish sacks heaped around lamp posts. The word ‘adult’ was everywhere in red neon. In windows, items on mock-velvet plinths, whips, dildoes, erotic ointments, a studded mask. A fat guy in a leather jacket, some kind of strip-joint barker, called out to me from a doorway a single indistinct word that sounded like Toy! Perhaps it was Oi! Someone whistled at me. I hurried on, careful to look no one in the eye. I was still thinking of Lucy. Unfair to associate this quarter with her, but the new spirit of liberation that had got my sister arrested and pregnant had also permitted these shops (and, I might have added, my own affair with an older man). Lucy had told me more than once that the past was a burden, that it was time to tear everything down. A lot of people were thinking that way. A seedy, careless insurrection was in the air. But thanks to Tony I now knew with what trouble it had been assembled, Western civilisation, imperfect as it was. We suffered from faulty governance, our freedoms were incomplete. But in this part of the world our rulers no longer had absolute power, savagery was mostly a private affair. Whatever was under my feet in the streets of Soho, we had raised ourselves above filth. The cathedrals, the parliaments, the paintings, the courts of law, the libraries and the labs – far too precious to pull down.

Perhaps it was Cambridge and the cumulative effect of so many ancient buildings and lawns, of seeing how kind time
was to stone, or perhaps I simply lacked youthful courage and was cautious and prim. But this inglorious revolution wasn’t for me. I didn’t want a sex shop in every town, I didn’t want my sister’s kind of life, I didn’t want history put to the torch. Come travelling? I wanted to travel with civilised men like Tony Canning, who took for granted the importance of laws and institutions and thought constantly of how to improve them. If only he wanted to travel with
me
. If only he wasn’t such a bastard.

The half-hour it took me to wander from Regent Street to the Charing Cross Road arranged my fate for me. I changed my mind, I decided to take the job after all and have order and purpose in my life and some independence. There may have been a passing touch of masochism in my decision – as a rejected lover I deserved no more than to be an office skivvy. And nothing else was on offer. I could leave behind Cambridge and its association with Tony, and I could lose myself in London’s crowds – there was something pleasingly tragic about that. I would tell my parents I had a proper Civil Service job in the Department of Health and Social Security. It turned out that I needn’t have been so secretive, but at the time it rather thrilled me to mislead them.

I returned to my bedsit that afternoon, gave notice to my landlord and began to pack up my room. The following day I arrived home in the cathedral close with all my belongings. My mother was delighted for me and embraced me lovingly. To my astonishment, the Bishop gave me a twenty-pound note. Three weeks later I started my new life in London.

Did I know Millie Trimingham, the single mother who would one day become Director General? When, in later years, it became permissible to tell everyone that you once worked for MI5, I was often asked this question. If it irritated me it was because I suspected it concealed another: with my Cambridge connections why didn’t I rise nearly as high? I joined three years after she did, and, it’s true, I started out
following her path, the one she describes in her memoir – same grim building in Mayfair, same training section in a long, thin, ill-lit room, same tasks, both meaningless and intriguing. But when I joined in 1972 Trimingham was already a legend among the new girls. Remember, we were in our early twenties, she was in her mid-thirties. My new friend Shirley Shilling pointed her out to me. Trimingham was at the end of a corridor, back-lit by a grubby window, a wedge of files under one arm, in urgent conference with an anonymous man who looked to be from the cloudy summits of authority. She seemed at ease, almost an equal, clearly empowered to make a joke, causing him to give out a shout of a laugh and place his hand on her forearm briefly, as if to say, restrain that wit of yours or you’ll make my life impossible.

She was admired by us new-joiners because we’d heard that she’d mastered the filing system and the intricacies of the Registry so quickly that she was moved on in less than two months. Some said it was weeks, even days. We believed there was a hint of rebellion in the clothes she wore, bright prints and scarves, authentic, bought in Pakistan, where she’d worked for the Service in some lawless outpost. This was what we told ourselves. We should have asked her. A lifetime later I read in her memoir that she did clerical work in the Islamabad office. I still don’t know if she took part in the Women’s Revolt of that year, when female graduates in MI5 started campaigning for better prospects. They wanted to be allowed to run agents themselves, like male desk officers. My guess is that Trimingham would have been sympathetic to the aims, but wary of collective action, speeches and resolutions. I’ve never understood why word of the Revolt never reached our intake. Perhaps we were considered too junior. Above all, it was the spirit of the age that slowly changed the Service, but she was the first to break out, first to dig the hole in the ceiling of the women’s block. She did it quietly, with tact. The rest of us scrambled up noisily behind her. I
was one of the last. And when she had been transferred out of the training section, it was to confront the hard new future – IRA terrorism – whereas many of us who followed lingered a while, fighting the old battles with the Soviet Union.

Most of the ground floor was taken up by the Registry, that vast memory bank where more than three hundred wellborn secretaries toiled like slaves on the pyramids, processing file requests, returning or distributing files to desk case officers round the building and sorting incoming material. The system was thought to work so well that it held out far too long against the computer age. This was the last redoubt, the ultimate tyranny of paper. Just as an army recruit is made to embrace his new life by peeling spuds and scouring the parade ground with a toothbrush, so I passed my first few months compiling members’ lists of provincial branches of the Communist Party of Great Britain and opening files on all those not already accounted for. My special concern was Gloucestershire. (In her time, Trimingham had Yorkshire.) In my first month I opened a file on the headmaster of a grammar school in Stroud who had attended an open meeting of his local branch one Saturday evening in July 1972. He wrote his name on a sheet of paper that was circulated by the comrades, but then he must have decided not to join. He was on none of the subscription lists that had been procured for us. But I chose to start a file on him because he was in a position to influence young minds. This was on my own initiative, my very first, and that’s why I remember his name, Harold Templeman, and his year of birth. If Templeman had decided to get out of schoolmastering (he was only forty-three) and apply for a Civil Service job that brought him into contact with classified information, the vetting procedure would have led someone to his file. Templeman would have been questioned about that evening in July (surely he would have been impressed) or his application would have been dismissed and he would never have known why. Perfect. In theory, at least. We were still learning the demanding protocols that
determined what was acceptable material for a file. During the early months of 1973 such a closed, functioning system, however pointless, was a comfort to me. All twelve of us working in that room knew well enough that any agent run by the Soviet Centre was never going to announce himself to us by joining the Communist Party of Great Britain. I didn’t care.

On my way to work I used to reflect on the immensity that separated my job description from the reality. I could say to myself – since I could say it to no one else – that I worked for MI5. That had a certain ring. Even now it stirs me a little, to think of that pale little thing wanting to do her bit for the country. But I was just one more office girl in a mini-skirt, jammed in with the rest, thousands of us pouring down the filthy connecting Tube tunnels at the change for Green Park, where the litter and grit and stinking subterranean gales that we took as our due slapped our faces and restyled our hair. (London is so much cleaner now.) And when I got to work, I was still an office girl, typing straight-backed on a giant Remington in a smoky room like hundreds of thousands across the capital, fetching files, deciphering male handwriting, hurrying back from my lunch break. I even earned less than most. And just like the working girl in a Betjeman poem Tony once read to me, I too washed my smalls in the hand basin of my bedsit.

As a clerical officer of the lowest grade my first week’s pay after deductions was fourteen pounds thirty pence, in the novel decimal currency, which had not yet lost its unserious, half-baked, fraudulent air. I paid four pounds a week for my room, and an extra pound for electricity. My travel cost just over a pound, leaving me eight pounds for food and all else. I present these details not to complain, but in the spirit of Jane Austen, whose novels I had once raced through at Cambridge. How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?
Miss Frome, newly installed in diminutive lodgings at number seventy St Augustine’s Road, London North West One, had less than one thousand a year and a heavy heart
. I managed week to week, but I did not feel part of a glamorous clandestine world.

Still, I was young, and maintaining a heavy heart all moments of the day was beyond me. My chum, at lunch breaks and evenings out, was Shirley Shilling, whose alliterative name in the dependable old currency caught something of her plump lop-sided smile and old-fashioned taste for fun. She was in trouble with our chain-smoking supervisor, Miss Ling, in the very first week for ‘taking too long in the lavatory’. Actually, Shirley had hurried out of the building at ten o’clock to buy herself a frock for a party that night, had run all the way to Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street, found the very thing, tried it on, tried the next size up, paid and got a bus back – in twenty minutes. There would have been no time at lunch because she planned to try on shoes. None of the rest of us new girls would have dared so much.

So what did we make of her? The cultural changes of the past several years may have seemed profound but they had clipped no one’s social antennae. Within a minute, no, less, by the time Shirley had uttered three words, we would have known that she was of humble origins. Her father owned a bed and sofa shop in Ilford called Bedworld, her school was a giant local comprehensive, her university was Nottingham. She was the first in her family to stay on at school past the age of sixteen. MI5 may have been wanting to demonstrate a more open recruitment policy, but Shirley happened to be exceptional. She typed at twice the speed of the best of us, her memory – for faces, files, conversations, procedures – was sharper than ours, she asked fearless, interesting questions. It was a sign of the times that a large minority of the girls admired her – her mild Cockney had a touch of modern glamour, her voice and manner reminded us of Twiggy or Keith Richards or Bobby Moore. In fact her brother was a professional footballer who played for the Wolverhampton
Wanderers reserves. This club, so we were obliged to learn, had reached the final of the new-fangled UEFA Cup that year. Shirley was exotic, she represented a confident new world.

Some girls were snobbish about Shirley, but none of us was as worldly and cool. Many of our intake would have been presentable at court to Queen Elizabeth as debutantes if the practice hadn’t been terminated fifteen years earlier. A few were the daughters or nieces of serving or retired officers. Two-thirds of us had degrees from the older universities. We spoke in identical tones, we were socially confident and could have passed muster at a country house weekend. But there was always a trace of an apology in our style, a polite impulse to defer, especially when one of the senior officers, one of the ex-colonial types, came through our crepuscular room. Then most of us (I exclude myself, of course) were the mistresses of the lowered gaze and the compliant near-smile. Among the new-joiners a low-level unacknowledged search was on for a decent husband from the right sort of background.

Shirley, however, was unapologetically loud and, being in no mood to marry, looked everyone in the eye. She had a knack or weakness for laughing boisterously at her own anecdotes – not, I thought, because she found herself funny, but because she thought that life needed celebrating and wanted others to join in. Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies and Shirley had one or two who despised her heartily, but in general she breezed her way into our affections, mine especially. It may have helped her, not to have been threateningly beautiful. She was large, at least thirty pounds overweight, size sixteen to my ten, and she actually told us that the word we must use of her was ‘willowy’. Then she laughed. Her round, somewhat pudgy face was rescued, even blessed, by being rarely at rest, she was so animated. Her best feature was the slightly unusual combination of black hair, naturally curled, with pale freckles across the bridge of her nose, and greyish-blue eyes. And her
smile tilted downwards to the right, giving her a look I can’t quite find the word for. Somewhere between
rakish
and
game
. Despite her limited circumstances, she had been around more than most of us. In the year after university she hitchhiked alone to Istanbul, sold her blood, bought a motorbike, broke her leg, shoulder and elbow, fell in love with a Syrian doctor, had an abortion, and was brought home to England from Anatolia on a private yacht in return for a little on-board cooking.