Sweet Tooth (17 page)

10

M
ax had told me his new office was smaller than a broom cupboard, but it was slightly larger. More than a dozen brooms could have been stored vertically between the desk and the door, and a few more between his chair and the walls. However, there was no space for a window. The room formed a narrow triangle, with Max squeezed in at the apex while I sat with my back to the base. The door wouldn’t close properly, so there was no real privacy. Since it opened inwards, I would have had to stand and push my chair under the desk if someone had wanted to come in. On the desk was a pile of headed paper with Freedom International Foundation’s address in Upper Regent Street, and a Picassoesque ascending dove holding an open book in its beak. We each had in front of us a copy of the Foundation’s brochure, whose cover bore the single word ‘freedom’ at a slant in uneven red lettering that suggested a rubber stamp. Freedom International, a registered charity, promoted ‘excellence and freedom of expression in the arts everywhere in the world’. It was not easily dismissed. It had subsidised or supported by translation or roundabout means writers in Yugoslavia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Syria, Romania and Hungary, a dance troupe in Paraguay, journalists in Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal and poets in the Soviet Union. It had given money to an actors’
collective in Harlem, New York, a baroque orchestra in Alabama, and successfully campaigned for the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s power over the British theatre.

‘It’s a decent outfit,’ Max said. ‘I hope you’ll agree. They take their stands everywhere. No one’s going to confuse them with those IRD apparatchiks. Altogether more subtle.’

He was wearing a dark blue suit. Far better than the mustard jacket he’d been wearing every other day. And because he was growing his hair, his ears looked less protuberant. The only light source in the room, a high single bulb under a tin shade, picked out his cheekbones and the bow of his lips. He looked sleek and beautiful and quite incongruous in the narrow room, like an animal trapped in an undersized cage.

I said, ‘Why was Shirley Shilling sacked?’

He didn’t blink at the change of subject. ‘I was hoping you might know.’

‘Something to do with me?’

‘Look, the thing about working in places like this … you have all these colleagues, they’re pleasant, charming, good backgrounds and all that. Unless you do operations together you don’t know what they’re up to, what their work is and whether they’re any good at it. You don’t know whether they’re beaming idiots or friendly geniuses. Suddenly they’re promoted or sacked and you’ve no idea why. That’s how it is.’

I didn’t believe he knew nothing. There was a silence as we let the matter rest. Since Max told me by the gates of Hyde Park that he was becoming attached to me we had spent very little time together. I sensed he was moving up the hierarchy, out of my reach.

He said, ‘I got the impression at the meeting the other day that you don’t know much about IRD. Information Research Department. It doesn’t officially exist. Set up in ’forty-eight, part of the Foreign Office, works out of Carlton Terrace, the idea being to feed information about the Soviet Union into the public domain through friendly journalists, news agencies, put out fact sheets, issue rebuttals, encourage
certain publications. So – labour camps, no rule of law, rotten standards of living, repression of dissent, usual stuff. Generally helping out the NCL, the non-communist left, and anything to puncture fantasies here about life in the East. But IRD is drifting. Last year it was trying to persuade the left that we need to join Europe. Ridiculous. And thank God we’re taking Northern Ireland off them. It did good work in its day. Now it’s too bloated and crude. And rather irrelevant. The word is that it’s going to be cut soon. But what matters in this building is that IRD’s become the creature of MI6, got itself sucked into black propaganda, deception exercises that deceive no one. Their reports come out of dodgy sources. IRD and its so-called Action Desk have been helping Six to relive the last war. It’s Boy Scout nonsense they go in for. That’s why everyone in Five likes that “faces to the wall” story Peter Nutting told.’

I said, ‘Is it true?’

‘I doubt it. But it makes Six look idiotic and pompous, so it goes down well here. Anyway, the idea with Sweet Tooth is to strike out on our own, independently of Six or the Americans. Having a novelist was an afterthought, Peter’s whim. Personally, I think it’s a mistake – too unpredictable. But this is what we’re doing. The writer doesn’t have to be a Cold War fanatic. Just be sceptical about utopias in the East or looming catastrophe in the West – you know the sort of thing.’

‘What happens when the writer discovers we’ve been paying his rent? He’s going to be furious.’

Max looked away. I thought I’d asked a stupid question. But after a moment’s silence he said, ‘The link between us and Freedom International works at several removes. Even if you knew exactly where to look, you’d have your work cut out. The calculation is that, if anything comes out, writers will prefer to avoid the embarrassment. They’ll stay quiet. And if they don’t, we’ll explain there are ways of proving that they always knew where the money was coming from.
And the money will keep on flowing. A fellow can get used to a certain way of living and be reluctant to lose it.’

‘Blackmail then.’

He shrugged. ‘Look, the IRD in its heyday never told Orwell or Koestler what to put in their books. But it did what it could to make sure their ideas got the best circulation around the world. We’re dealing with free spirits. We don’t tell them what to think. We enable them to do their work. Over there free spirits used to be marched to the gulags. Now Soviet psychiatry’s the new State terror. To oppose the system is to be criminally insane. Here we’ve got some Labour Party and union people and university profs and students and so-called intellectuals who’ll tell you the US is no better—’

‘Bombing Vietnam.’

‘Well, all right. But across the Third World there are whole populations who think the Soviet Union has something to teach them about liberty. The fight isn’t over yet. We want to encourage the right good thing. As Peter sees it, Serena, you love literature, you love your country. He thinks this is perfect for you.’

‘But you don’t.’

‘I think we should stick to non-fiction.’

I couldn’t work him out. There was something impersonal in his manner. He didn’t like Sweet Tooth, or my bit of it, but he was calm about it, even bland. He was like a bored shop assistant encouraging me to buy a dress he knew wasn’t right. I wanted to throw him off balance, bring him closer. He was taking me through the details. I was to use my real name. I was to go to Upper Regent Street and meet the Foundation staff. As they understood it, I worked for the organisation called Word Unpenned, which was donating funds to Freedom International to distribute to recommended writers. When I eventually travelled to Brighton I was to make sure that I took nothing with me that would connect me to Leconfield House.

I wondered if Max thought I was stupid. I interrupted him and said, ‘What if I like Haley?’

‘Fine. We’ll sign him up.’

‘I mean, really like him.’

He looked up sharply from his check list. ‘If you think you’d rather not take this on …’ His tone was cold and I was pleased.

‘Max,’ I said, ‘it was a joke.’

‘Let’s talk about your letter to him. I’ll need to see a draft.’

So we discussed that and other arrangements and I realised that as far as he was concerned, we were no longer close friends. I could no longer ask him to kiss me. But I wasn’t prepared to accept that. I picked up my handbag from the floor and opened it and took out a packet of paper tissues. It was only the year before that I’d stopped using cotton handkerchiefs with broderie anglaise edging and my initials monogrammed in pink in one corner – a Christmas present from my mother. Paper tissues were becoming ubiquitous, like supermarket trolleys. The world was starting to become seriously disposable. I dabbed at a corner of my eye, trying to make my decision. Resting curled in my bag was the triangle of paper with the pencil marks. I’d changed my mind. It was exactly the right thing to do, to show it to Max. Or it was exactly the wrong thing. There was nothing in between.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Touch of hayfever.’

Finally I thought what I had thought many times before, that it was better, or at least more interesting, to have Max lie to me, than to know nothing at all. I took out the fragment of newsprint and slid it across the desk towards him. He glanced at it, turned it over, turned it back, set it down and looked fixedly at me.

‘Well?’

I said, ‘Canning and the island whose name you so cleverly guessed.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘If I tell you, are you going to be straight with me?’

He said nothing, so I told him anyway, about the Fulham safe house and the single bed and its mattress.

‘Who was with you?’

I told him and he said ‘Ah’ quietly into his hands. Then he said, ‘So they sacked her.’

‘Meaning?’

He pulled his hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. I wasn’t cleared to know.

‘May I hold on to this?’

‘Certainly not.’ I snatched it off the desk before he could move his hand and stowed it in my bag.

He softly cleared his throat. ‘Then we should move to the next item. The stories. What are you going to say to him?’

‘Very excited, brilliant new talent, extraordinary range, lovely sinuous prose, deeply sensitive, especially about women, seems to know and understand them from the inside, unlike most men, dying to know him better and—’

‘Serena, enough!’

‘And sure that he has a great future, one that the Foundation would like to be a part of. Especially if he’ll consider writing a novel. Prepared to pay – how much?’

‘Two thousand a year.’

‘For how many—’

‘Two years. Renewable.’

‘My God. How’s he going to refuse?’

‘Because a complete stranger will be sitting on his lap licking his face. Be cooler. Make him come to you. The Foundation is interested, considering his case, lots of other candidates, what are his future plans, etc?’

‘Fine. I play hard to get. Then I’ll give him everything.’

Max sat back, folded his arms, glanced at the ceiling and said, ‘Serena, I’m sorry you’re upset. I honestly don’t know why Shilling was sacked, I don’t know about your piece of paper. That’s it. But look, it’s only fair that I tell you something about myself.’

He was about to tell me what I already suspected, that he was a homosexual. Now I was ashamed. I hadn’t wanted to force a confession out of him.

‘I’m telling you because we’ve been good friends.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it mustn’t leave this room.’

‘No!’

‘I’m engaged to be married.’

I suspected that in the fraction of a second it took me to rearrange my expression, he glimpsed the heart of my confusion.

‘But that’s fantastic news. Who’s—’

‘She’s not in Five. Ruth’s a doctor at Guy’s. Our families have always been very close.’

My words were out before I could snatch them back. ‘An arranged marriage!’

But Max only laughed shyly and there may have been the hint of a blush, hard to detect in the yellowish light. So perhaps I was right, the parents who had chosen his studies, who wouldn’t let him work with his hands, had chosen his wife. Remembering that vulnerability in him I felt the first chill of sorrow. I had missed out. And there was self-pity too. People told me I was beautiful and I believed them. I should have been wafted through life with the special dispensation that beauty bestows, discarding men at every turn. Instead, they abandoned me, or died on me. Or married.

Max said, ‘I thought I should tell you.’

‘Yes. Thanks.’

‘We won’t be announcing it for another couple of months.’

‘Of course not.’

Max briskly squared his notes against the desk. The distasteful business was concluded and we could continue. He said, ‘What did you really think of the stories? That one about the twin brothers.’

‘I thought it was very good.’

‘I thought it was awful. I couldn’t believe that an atheist
would know his Bible. Or dress up as a vicar to deliver a sermon.’

‘Brotherly love.’

‘But he’s not capable of any sort of love. He’s a cad, and he’s weak. I couldn’t see why we should care about him or what happens to him.’

My impression was that we were really talking about Haley, not Edmund Alfredus. There was something strained in Max’s tone. I thought I’d succeeded in making him jealous. I said, ‘I thought he was extremely attractive. Clever, brilliant public speaker, sense of mischief, took interesting risks. Just no match for – what’s her name? – Jean.’

‘I couldn’t believe in her at all. These destructive men-eating women are just fantasies of a certain kind of man.’

‘What kind of man is that?’

‘Oh I don’t know. Masochistic. Guilty. Or self-hating. Perhaps you can tell me when you get back.’

He stood to indicate the meeting was over. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry. I wondered whether in some perverse way he thought it was my fault he was getting married. Or perhaps he was angry with himself. Or my arranged marriage remark had offended him.

‘Do you really think Haley’s not right for us?’

‘That’s Nutting’s department. What’s odd is sending you down to Brighton. We don’t usually get our own involved like this. The usual way would be to get the Foundation to send someone, do it all at one remove. Besides, I think the whole thing’s, well, anyway, it’s not my, um …’

He was leaning forward on his fingertips which were splayed against the desk and he seemed to be indicating the door behind me by faintly inclining his head. Throwing me out with minimal effort. But I didn’t want the conversation to end.

‘There’s one other thing, Max. You’re the only one I could say this to. I think I’m being followed.’

‘Really? Quite an achievement at your level.’

I ignored this sneer. ‘I’m not talking about Moscow Centre. I mean the Watchers. Someone’s been in my room.’