Sweet Tooth (30 page)

It was now.

‘Serena!’ He said my name with a kindly, falling tone, with just a hint of mock surprise, and put his arms about me. I dropped my bag at my feet and let myself be enfolded, and as I pressed my face into his shirt and caught the familiar scent of Imperial Leather soap, and of church – of lavender wax – I started to cry. I don’t know why, it just came from nowhere and I turned to water. I don’t cry easily and I was as surprised as he was. But there was nothing I could do
about it. This was the copious hopeless sort of crying you might hear from a tired child. I think it was his voice, the way he said my name, that set me off.

Instantly, I felt his body tense, even though he continued to hold me. He murmured, ‘Shall I fetch your mother?’

I thought I knew what he was thinking – that now it was the turn of his older daughter to be pregnant or lost to some other modern disaster, and that whatever womanly mess was now soaking his freshly ironed purple shirt was better managed by a woman. He needed to hand the matter over and continue to his study to look over his Christmas Day sermon before dinner.

But I didn’t want him to let go of me. I clung to him. If only I could have thought of a crime, I would have begged him to summon down the magic cathedral powers to forgive me.

I said, ‘No, no. It’s all right, Daddy. It’s just, I’m so happy to be back, to be … here.’

I felt him relax. But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t happiness at all. I couldn’t have said precisely what it was. It had something to do with my walk from the station, and with coming away from my London life. Relief perhaps, but with a harsher element, something like remorse, or even despair. Later I persuaded myself that drinking at lunchtime had softened me up.

This moment on the doorstep could not have lasted more than thirty seconds. I got a grip of myself, picked up my bag and stepped inside, apologised to the Bishop, who was still regarding me warily. Then he patted my shoulder and resumed his route across the hall to his study and I went into the cloakroom – easily the size of my Camden bedsit – to douse my red and swollen eyes with cold water. I didn’t want an interrogation by my mother. As I went to find her I was aware of all that used to suffocate me and now seemed comforting – the smell of roasting meat, the carpeted warmth, the gleam of oak, mahogany, silver and glass, and my
mother’s spare, tasteful arrangements in vases of bare hazel and dogwood branches, minimally sprayed with silver paint to denote a light frost. When Lucy was fifteen and trying, like me, to be a sophisticated adult she came in one Christmas evening and gestured at the branches and exclaimed, ‘How positively Protestant!’

She earned herself the sourest look I ever saw the Bishop give. He rarely stooped to reprimands but this time he said coldly, ‘You’ll rephrase that, young lady, or go to your room.’

Listening to Lucy intone contritely something like, ‘Mummy, the decorations are truly wonderful,’ gave me the giggles and I decided that I had better be the one who left the room. ‘Positively Protestant’ became an insurrectionary catchphrase for us two, but always muttered well out of the Bishop’s hearing.

There were five of us at dinner. Lucy had come across town with her long-haired Irish boyfriend, six-foot-six Luke, who worked for the city council as a parks gardener and was an active member of the recently formed Troops Out movement. As soon as I knew this I made a quick decision not to be drawn into argument. It was easy enough because he was pleasant and funny, despite a phoney American drawl, and later, after dinner, we found common ground in a discussion, almost an outraged celebration, of loyalist atrocities, of which I knew almost as many as he did. At one point during the meal the Bishop, who had no interest in politics, leaned across and enquired mildly whether Luke would be expecting a massacre of the Catholic minority if he had his way and the army was to withdraw. Luke replied that he thought the British army had never done much for the Catholics in the north, who would be able to take care of themselves.

‘Ah,’ my father replied, pretending to be reassured. ‘A bloodbath all round then.’

Luke was confused. He didn’t know if he was being mocked. In fact he wasn’t. The Bishop was merely being polite
and now was moving the conversation on. The reason he wouldn’t be drawn into political or even theological debate was because he was indifferent to other people’s opinions and felt no urge to engage with or oppose them.

It turned out to have suited my mother’s schedule to serve up a roast dinner at ten o’ clock and she was pleased to have me home. She still took pride in my job and the independent existence she had always wanted for me. I had boned up once more on my supposed department in order to be able to answer her questions. A good while back I’d discovered that nearly all the girls at work had told their parents exactly who they worked for, on the understanding that they wouldn’t press for details. In my case my cover story had been elaborate and well researched and I had told too many unnecessary white lies. It was too late to go back. If my mother had known the truth, she would have told Lucy, who might never speak to me again. And I wouldn’t have wanted Luke to know what I did. So I bored myself for a few minutes while I described departmental views on reforming the social-security system, wishing that my mother would find it as dull as the Bishop and Lucy did and would stop prompting me with bright new questions.

It was one of the blessings of our family life, and perhaps of Anglicanism in general, that we were never expected to go to church to hear or see our father officiate. It was of no interest to him whether we were there or not. I hadn’t been since I was seventeen. I don’t think Lucy had been since she was twelve. Because this was his busy time of year, he stood abruptly just before dessert and wished us all a happy Christmas and excused himself. From where I sat, it looked like my tears had left no stain on the ecclesiastical shirt. Five minutes later we heard the familiar swish of his cassock as he passed the dining room on his way to the front door. I had grown up with the ordinariness of his daily business, but now, returning home after an absence, from my London preoccupations, it seemed exotic to have a father who
dabbled routinely in the supernatural, who went out to work in a beautiful stone temple late at night, house keys in his pocket, to thank or praise or beseech a god on our behalf.

My mother went upstairs to a small spare bedroom known as the wrapping room to see to the last of her presents while Lucy, Luke and I cleared away and washed the dishes. Lucy tuned the kitchen radio to John Peel’s show and we toiled away to the kind of progressive rock I hadn’t heard since Cambridge. It no longer moved me. Where once it had been the call sign of a freemasonry of the liberated young and promised a new world, now it had shrunk into mere songs, mostly about lost love, sometimes about the open road. These were striving musicians like any others, keen for advancement in a crowded scene. Peel’s informed ramblings between the tracks suggested as much. Even a couple of pub rock songs failed to stir me. It must be, I thought as I scrubbed at my mother’s baking dishes, that I was getting old. Twenty-three next birthday. Then my sister asked if I wanted to go for a stroll round the close with her and Luke. They wanted to smoke and the Bishop wouldn’t tolerate it in the house, at least, not from family – an eccentric position in those days, and an oppressive one, we thought.

The moon was higher now and the touch of frost on the grass was light, even more tasteful than our mother’s efforts with the spray can. The cathedral, lit from the inside, looked isolated and displaced, like a stranded ocean liner. From a distance we heard a ponderous organ introducing ‘Hark! The herald angels sing’ and then the congregation gamely belting it out. It sounded like a good crowd, and I was glad for my father’s sake. But grown-ups singing in ragged unironic unison about
angels
 … I experienced a sudden lurch in my heart, as though I’d looked over a cliff edge into emptiness. I believed in nothing much – not carols, not even rock music. We strolled three abreast along the narrow road that ran past the other fine houses in the close. Some
were solicitors’ offices, one or two were cosmetic dentists. It was a worldly place, the cathedral precinct, and the Church imposed high rents.

It turned out that it wasn’t only tobacco my companions were wanting. Luke produced from his coat a joint the size and shape of a small Christmas cracker, which he lit as we walked along. He went in for a good deal of solemn ritual, inserting the thing between his knuckles and cupping his hands in order to suck between his thumbs with loud hissing intakes of air, and showy retention of breath and smoke while continuing to talk, making himself sound like a ventriloquist’s dummy – a fuss and nonsense I’d completely forgotten about. How provincial it seemed. The sixties were over! But when Luke presented his cracker to me – in a rather menacing way, I thought – I took a couple of polite puffs in order not to come across like Lucy’s uptight older sister. Which was exactly what I was.

I was uneasy on two counts. I was still in the aftermath of my moment at the front door. Was it overwork rather than a hangover? I knew that my father would never refer to the matter again, never ask me what was up. I should have felt resentful, but I was relieved. I wouldn’t have known what to tell him anyway. And secondly, I had on a coat I hadn’t worn in a while, and as we began our walk around the close I felt in the pocket a piece of paper. I ran a finger along its edge and knew exactly what it was. I’d forgotten about it, the scrap I’d picked up in the safe house. It reminded me of much else that was messily unfinished, a scattering of mental litter – Tony’s disgrace, Shirley’s disappearance, the possibility that I was only taken on because Tony was exposed, the Watchers going through my room and, messiest of all, the row with Max. We’d avoided each other since his visit to my place. I hadn’t been to see him with my Sweet Tooth report. Whenever I thought of him I felt guilt, immediately displaced by indignant reflection. He dumped me for his fiancée, then, too late, his fiancée for me. He was looking out
for himself. Where was my share of blame? But next time I thought of him I had the same guilty turn, and had to explain it away to myself all over again.

All this, streaming behind one piece of paper like the tail of a misshapen kite. We walked round to the cathedral’s west end and stood in the deep shadow of the high stone portal that led through to the town while my sister and her boyfriend passed the joint between them. I strained to hear my father’s voice above Luke’s transatlantic drone, but there was silence from the cathedral. They were praying, surely. In the other pan of the scales of my fortunes, apart from the minor fact of my promotion, was Tom. I wanted to tell Lucy about him, I would have loved a sisterly session. We occasionally managed one, but set between us now was Luke’s giant form and he was doing that inexcusable thing that men who liked cannabis tended to do, which was to go on about it – some famous stuff from a special village in Thailand, the terrifying near-bust one night, the view across a certain holy lake at sunset under the influence, a hilarious misunderstanding in a bus station and other stultifying anecdotes. What was wrong with our generation? Our parents had the war to be boring about. We had this.

After a while we girls fell completely silent while Luke, in elated urgent terms, plunged deeper into the misapprehension that he was interesting, that we were enthralled. And almost immediately I had a contrary insight. I saw it clearly. Of course. Lucy and Luke were waiting for me to leave so they could be alone. That’s what I would have wanted, if it had been Tom and me. Luke was deliberately and systematically boring me to drive me away. It was insensitive of me not to have noticed. Poor fellow, he was having to overreach himself and it was not a good performance, hopelessly overdone. No one in real life could be as boring as this. But in his roundabout way he was only trying to be kind.

So I stretched and yawned noisily in the shadows and cut across him to say irrelevantly, ‘You’re dead right, I
should go,’ and I walked off, and within seconds felt better, easily able to ignore Lucy calling after me. Freed from Luke’s anecdotes, I went quickly, retracing the route we had come by, and then I cut across the grass, feeling the frost crunch pleasantly underfoot, until I was right by the cloisters, well out of the half-moon’s light, and found in the near darkness a stone protrusion to sit on and turned up the collar of my coat.

I could hear a voice from inside, faintly intoning, but I couldn’t tell if it was the Bishop. He had a large team working for him on occasions like this. In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing. I wanted to be with Tom, in bed with him, across a table from him, holding his hand in the street. Failing that, I wanted to think about him. So that is what I did for half an hour on Christmas Eve, I worshipped him, I thought about our times together, his strong yet childlike body, our growing fondness, his work, and how I might help. I pushed away any consideration of the secret I was keeping from him. Instead, I thought about the freedom I’d brought into his life, how I’d helped him with ‘Probable Adultery’ and would help with much more. All so rich. I decided to write down these thoughts in a letter to him, a lyrical, passionate letter. I’d tell him how I came apart at my own front door and wept on my father’s chest.

It wasn’t a good idea to be sitting motionless on stone in sub-zero temperatures. I was beginning to shiver. Then I heard my sister calling me again from somewhere in the close. She sounded concerned, and that was when I began to come to my senses and realise that my behaviour must have seemed unfriendly. It had been influenced by a puff on the Christmas cracker. How unlikely it now seemed, for Luke to have been wilfully dull in order to secure a few moments alone with Lucy. It was difficult to understand one’s own errors of judgement when the entity, the mind, that was attempting the
understanding was befuddled. Now I was thinking clearly. I stepped out onto the moonlit grass and saw my sister and her boyfriend on the path a hundred yards away, and I hurried towards them, keen to apologise.