Sweet Tooth

  Terry hears the maid coming up the stairs. He’s a decent amateur mathematician and realises he has a fantastic opportunity. He needs to think quickly. If he goes and stands close to any of the doors, and 401 will do, he will force the maid to go into one of the other two rooms. She knows where the couple are. She’ll think he’s either a new guest about to enter his room, or a friend of the couple, waiting outside their door. Whatever room she chooses, Terry will transfer to the other and double his chances. And that’s exactly what happens. The maid, who has inherited the harelip, glances at Terry, gives him a nod, and goes into 403. Terry makes his decisive switch, runs and leaps at 402 and there they are, Sally and her man, in flagrante.

  While I was in full flow I thought I’d suggest to Tom that he tidy up some other loose ends. Why doesn’t Terry break down all the doors, especially now that he knows two are empty? Because the couple will hear him and he wants to preserve the element of surprise. Why not wait to see if the maid will clean a second room, at which point he’ll know for certain where his wife is? Because it’s established early on that he has an important site meeting at the end of the day and he has to get back to London.

  I’d been typing for forty minutes and had three pages of notes to send. I scribbled a covering letter explaining in the simplest terms why the Indian couple would not do, found a blank envelope without an HMSO insignia, located a stamp at the bottom of my handbag and just had time to get to the letterbox on Park Lane and back before starting work again. How dull it was after Tom’s story, to go through the Claudia’s illegal manifest, five tons of explosives, arms and ammunition, a relatively disappointing haul. One memo suggested that Qaddafi didn’t trust the Provisionals, another reiterated that ‘Six has overstepped the mark’. I couldn’t care less.

  That night in Camden I went to bed happier than I’d been all week. On the floor was my little suitcase, ready to be packed tomorrow night for my Friday-evening journey to Brighton. Just two days of work to get through. By the time I saw Tom he would have read my letter. I’d tell him again how good his story was, I’d explain the probability once more, and make a better job. We’d be together with our routines and rituals.

  Finally, the calculations of probability were mere technical details. The strength of the story was elsewhere. As I lay in the dark, waiting for sleep, I thought I was beginning to grasp something about invention. As a reader, a speedreader, I took it for granted, it was a process I never troubled myself with. You pulled a book from the shelf and there was an invented, peopled world, as obvious as the one you lived in. But now, like Tom in the restaurant grappling with Monty Hall, I thought I had the measure of the artifice, or I almost had it. Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there’s pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of the parts. I tried to list them: Tom had donated my grasp of probability to Terry, as well as consigning to him his own secret arousal at the idea of being a cuckold. But not before turning it into something more acceptable – jealous anger. Something of the mess of Tom’s sister’s life had found its way into Sally’s. Then, the familiar train journey, the streets of Brighton, those impossibly tiny hotels. The Indian couple and their baby with the harelip were enlisted to fill a role in Room 403. Their pleasantness and vulnerability contrasted with the rutting couple in the room next door. Tom had taken control of a subject (‘only a fool would stay with his first choice’!) which he barely understood, and tried to make it his own. If he incorporated my suggestions, then it would surely be his own. By a sleight of hand he made Terry far better at maths than his creator. At one level it was obvious enough how these separate parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into something cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted towards the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.

  Sometime later, when I heard the doorbell, it featured in my dream as the culmination of an elaborate sequence of coincidences. But as the dream evaporated I heard the bell again. I didn’t move because I was hoping one of the others would go down. They were nearer the front door, after all. On the third ring I turned on the light and looked at my alarm clock. Ten to midnight. I’d been asleep for an hour. The bell rang again, more insistently. I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went down the stairs, too sleepy to question why I should be hurrying. My guess was that one of the other girls had forgotten her key. It had happened before. In the hallway I felt the chill of the lino penetrate the soles of my slippers. I put on the security chain before opening the door. Peering through a three-inch gap I could make out a man on the step but I couldn’t see his face. He was wearing a gangsterish fedora and a belted raincoat on whose shoulders raindrops glistened from the street light behind him. Alarmed, I pushed the door shut. I heard a familiar voice say quietly, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I need to talk to Serena Frome.’

  I lifted the chain and opened the door. ‘Max. What are you doing?’

  He’d been drinking. He swayed a little and his tightly controlled features were slack. When he spoke I smelled whisky.

  He said, ‘You know why I’m here.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘I have to talk to you.’

  ‘Tomorrow, Max, please.’

  ‘It’s urgent.’

  I was fully awake now and knew that if I sent him away I wouldn’t sleep, so I let him in and took him into the kitchen. I lit a couple of rings on the gas stove. It was the only source of heat. He sat down at the table and took off his hat. There was mud on his trousers below the knee. I guessed he’d walked across town. He had a faintly deranged look, loose about the mouth, and under his eyes the skin was blue-ish black. I thought about making him a hot drink and decided not to. I felt some resentment that he was pulling rank on me, entitled to wake me because I was the junior. I sat down opposite him and watched while he carefully brushed the rain off his hat with the back of his hand. He seemed anxious not to appear drunk. I felt shivery and tense, and not just from the cold. I suspected Max had come to tell me more bad news about Tony. But what could be worse than being a dead traitor?

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t know why I’m here,’ he said.

  I shook my head. He smiled at what he took to be a forgivable little lie.

  ‘When we met in the corridor today I knew you were thinking exactly the same thing as me.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Come on, Serena. We both knew it.’

  He was looking at me earnestly, pleading, and at that point I thought I knew what was coming, and something inside me sagged with weariness at the prospect of hearing it, denying it, sorting it all out. And having to accommodate it somehow into the future.

  Despite that I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ve had to break off my engagement.’

  ‘Had to?’

  ‘You made your own feelings clear when I told you about it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Your disappointment was obvious. I was sorry about it, but I had to ignore it. I couldn’t let feelings get in the way of work.’

  ‘I don’t want that either, Max.’

  ‘But each time we meet I know we’re both thinking about what might have been.’

  ‘Look …’

  ‘As for all the, you know …’

  He took up his hat again and examined it closely.

  ‘… wedding preparations. Our two families have been busy with it all. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you … I thought I was going mad. When I saw you this morning, it hit us both. You looked like you were going to pass out. I’m sure I looked the same. Serena, this pretence … this madness of saying nothing. I spoke to Ruth this evening and told her the truth. She’s very upset. But this has been coming towards us, you and me, it’s inevitable. We can’t go on ignoring it!’

  I couldn’t bear to look at him. I was irritated
by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore … it’s in the stars! What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult? I looked along the line of my shoulder towards the hissing gas rings. The kitchen was warming up at last and I loosened my dressing gown at the neck. I pushed my dishevelled hair clear of my face to help me think clearly. He was waiting for me to make the correct confession, to align my desires with his, to confirm him in his solipsism and join him in it. But perhaps I was being too hard on him. This was a simple misunderstanding. At least, that was how I intended to treat it.

  ‘It’s true your engagement came out of nowhere. You’d never mentioned Ruth before and I did get a bit upset. But I got over it, Max. I was hoping for a wedding invitation.’

  ‘That’s all over. We can start again.’

  ‘No, we can’t.’

  He looked up sharply. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean we can’t start again.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You’ve met someone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The effect was frightening. He stood up quickly, tipping over the kitchen chair behind him. I thought the din it made as it smacked against the floor was bound to wake the others. He stood in front of me unsteadily, looking ghastly, greenish in the yellow light of a single bare bulb, lips glistening. I was waiting to hear for the second time in a week a man tell me he was about to be sick.

  However, he stood his ground, or swayed on it, and said, ‘But you’ve been giving the impression that … that you wanted, well, to be with me.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Every time you came to my office. You flirted with me.’

  There was some truth in this. I thought for a moment and said, ‘But not since I started seeing Tom.’

  ‘Tom? Not Haley, I hope?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Oh God. So you meant it. You idiot!’ He picked up the chair and sat heavily. ‘Is this to punish me?’

  ‘I like him.’

  ‘So unprofessional.’

  ‘Oh, come on. We all know what goes on.’

  Actually, I didn’t. All I knew was the gossip, which may have been fantasy, about desk officers taking up with female agents. What with the intimacy and stress and all, why wouldn’t they?

  ‘He’ll find out who you are. Bound to happen.’

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  He was hunkered down with his head propped on his hands. He blew noisily through his cheeks. It was hard to tell just how drunk he was.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I thought we didn’t want feelings getting in the way of work.’

  ‘Serena! This is Sweet Tooth. Haley’s ours. And so are you.’

  I was beginning to wonder if I was in the wrong, and it was for that reason that I went on the attack. ‘You encouraged me to get close to you, Max. And all the while you were getting ready to announce your engagement. Why should I put up with you telling me who I can see?’

  He wasn’t listening. He groaned and pushed the heel of his hand into his forehead. ‘Oh God,’ he murmured to himself. ‘What have I done?’

  I waited. My guilt was an amorphous black shape in the mind, growing larger, threatening to suck me in. I had flirted with him, teased him, caused him to dump his fiancée, ruined his life. It would take an effort to resist.

  He said abruptly, ‘Have you got a drink here?’

  ‘No.’ Wedged behind the toaster was a miniature of sherry. It would make him sick, and I wanted him to go.

  ‘Tell me one thing. What happened in the corridor this morning?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing.’

  ‘You were playing games, weren’t you, Serena. That’s what you really like.’

  It wasn’t worth responding to. I just stared at him. There was a thread of saliva attached to the skin at the corner of his mouth. He caught the direction of my gaze and wiped it with the back of his hand.

  ‘You’re going to wreck Sweet Tooth with this.’

  ‘Don’t pretend that’s your objection. You hate the whole thing anyway.’

  To my surprise he said, ‘Bloody right I do.’ It was the kind of rough frankness that a drink brings on and now he wanted to inflict some damage. ‘The women in your section, Belinda, Anne, Hilary, Wendy and the rest. Ever ask them what kind of degrees they got?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity. Firsts, starred firsts, double firsts, you name it. Classics, History, English.’

  ‘Clever them.’

  ‘Even your friend Shirley got one.’

  ‘Even?’

  ‘Ever wonder why they let you in with a third. In maths?’

  He waited but I didn’t reply.

  ‘Canning recruited you. So they thought, better to have you on the inside, see if you had someone to report to. You never know. They followed you for a bit, took a look at your room. Usual stuff. They gave you Sweet Tooth because it’s low level and harmless. Put you in there with Chas Mount because he’s a dud. But you were a disappointment, Serena. No one was running you. Just an ordinary girl, averagely stupid, glad to have a job. Canning must have been doing you a favour. My theory is he was making amends.’

  I said, ‘I think he loved me.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. He just wanted to make you happy.’

  ‘Has anyone ever loved you, Max?’

  ‘You little bitch.’

  The insult made things easier. It was time for him to go. The kitchen was tolerable now but the warmth off the gas rings felt clammy. I stood up, drew my dressing gown firmly around me and turned them off.

  ‘So why leave your fiancée for me?’

  But we hadn’t quite reached the end, for his mood was taking another turn. He was crying. Or at least tearful. His lips were stretched tight in a hideous smile.

  ‘Oh God,’ he cried out in a squeezed high-pitched voice, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That’s the last thing you are. You never heard it, I never said it. Serena, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s forgotten. But I think you should leave.’

  He stood and groped in his trouser pocket for a handkerchief. When he was done blowing on it he was still crying. ‘I’ve messed everything up. I’m a fucking fool.’

  I led him back along the hall to the front door and opened it.

  We had a final exchange on the steps. He said, ‘Promise me one thing, Serena.’

  He was trying to take my hands. I felt sorry for him but I stepped back. It wasn’t the moment to be holding hands.

  ‘Promise me you’ll think about this. Please. Just this. If I can change my mind, so can you.’

  ‘I’m awfully tired, Max.’

  He seemed to be getting a hold of himself. He took a deep breath. ‘Listen. It’s possible that you’re making a very serious mistake with Tom Haley.’

  ‘Walk that way and you’ll pick up a cab on the Camden Road.’

  He was standing on a lower step, looking up at me, imploring and accusing me as I closed the door. I hesitated behind it, and then, even though I heard his retreating steps, I fixed the security chain before going back to bed.

  17

  One Brighton weekend in December, Tom asked me to read From the Somerset Levels. I took it into the bedroom and went through it carefully. I noted various minor alterations but, by the time I’d finished, my opinion was unchanged. I dreaded the conversation he was waiting to have because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pretend. That afternoon we went for a walk on the Downs. I spoke of the novel’s indifference to the fate of the father and little girl, of the assured depravity of its minor characters, the desolation of the crushed urban masses, the raw squalor of rural poverty, the air of general hopelessness, the cruel and joyless narrative, the depressing effect on the reader.

  Tom’s eyes shone. I couldn’t have said anything kinder. ‘Exactly!’ he kept saying. ‘That’s it. That’s right. You’ve got it!’

>   I’d picked up a few typos and repetitions for which he was disproportionately grateful. Over the following week or so he completed another draft of light revisions – and he was done. He asked me if I would go with him when he delivered it to his editor and I told him it would be an honour. He came up to London on the morning of Christmas Eve, the beginning of my three-day break. We met at Tottenham Court Road Tube station and walked together to Bedford Square. He gave me the package to carry to bring him luck. One hundred and thirty-six pages, he told me proudly, of double-spaced typing on old-fashioned foolscap. As we walked along I kept thinking of the little girl in the final scene, dying in agony on the wet floor of a burned-out cellar. If I was really to do my duty I should have posted the whole thing in its envelope down the nearest drain. But I was excited for him and held the grim chronicle securely against my chest as I would my – our – baby.

  I’d wanted to spend Christmas with Tom holed up in the Brighton flat, but I’d received a summons home and was due to take the train up that afternoon. I hadn’t been back in many months. My mother was firm on the phone and even the Bishop had taken a view. I wasn’t enough of a rebel to refuse, though I felt ashamed when I explained myself to Tom. In my early twenties the last threads of childhood still bound me. He, however, a free adult in his late twenties, was sympathetic to my parents’ view. Of course they needed to see me, of course I should go. It was my grown-up duty to spend Christmas with them. He himself would be with his family in Sevenoaks on the twenty-fifth, and he was determined to get his sister Laura out of the Bristol hostel and unite her with her children around the festive table, and try to keep her off the drink.

  So I hauled his package towards Bloomsbury, conscious that we only had a few hours together, and then we’d be apart for over a week, for I’d be going straight back to work on the twenty-seventh. As we walked he told me his latest news. He had just heard back from Ian Hamilton at the New Review. Tom had recast the climax of ‘Probable Adultery’ as I’d suggested in my notes and submitted it along with his talking-ape story. Hamilton had written to say that ‘Probable Adultery’ was not for him, he had no patience for the ins and outs of the ‘logic stuff’ and he doubted that ‘anyone but a Senior Wrangler would’. On the other hand, he thought the garrulous monkey was ‘not bad’. Tom wasn’t sure if that was an acceptance. He was going to meet Hamilton in the New Year and find out.