Sweet Tooth (40 page)

I walked to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, where, it was said, you could sometimes spot a prospective suicide casing the joint, calculating the fall. I crossed and stopped halfway to stare down into the blackness of the gorge. I was thinking again about the second time we ever made love. In your room, the morning after the White Tower. Remember? I lay back on the pillows – what luxury – and you swayed above me. A dance of bliss. As I read it then, your face as you looked down showed nothing but pleasure and the beginnings of real affection. Now I knew what you knew, what you had to conceal, I tried to imagine being you, being in two places at once, loving and … 
reporting back
. How could I get in there and report back too? And that was it. I saw it. So simple. This story wasn’t for me to tell. It was for you. Your job was to report back to me. I had to get out of my skin and into yours. I needed to be translated, to be a transvestite, to shoehorn myself into your skirts and high heels, into your knickers, and carry your white glossy handbag on its shoulder strap. On my shoulder. Then start talking, as you. Did I know you well enough? Clearly not. Was I a good enough ventriloquist? Only one way to find out. I had to begin. I took from a pocket my letter to you and tore it up, and let the bits drift down into the darkness of the Avon Gorge. Then I hurried back across the bridge, eventually waved down a taxi and spent that New Year’s Eve and part of the next day in my hotel room filling another exercise book, trying your voice. Then I checked out late and drove the car home to my anxious parents.

Do you remember our first meeting after Christmas? It must have been January 3rd or 4th, another of our Friday
evenings. You must have noticed how I made a point of coming to meet your train. Perhaps it crossed your mind that it was unusual. I’m a hopeless actor and I was worried that it would be impossible to behave naturally in your company, that you’d see through me. You’d know that I knew. Easier to greet you on a crowded platform than in the silence of the flat. But when your train came in and I saw the carriage containing you slide by, with you reaching so prettily above your seat for your bag, and seconds later, when we went into that powerful embrace, I felt such desire for you that I didn’t need to fake a thing. We kissed and I knew it was going to be easy. I could want you and watch you. The two weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they fed each other. When we made love an hour later, you were so sweetly and inventively possessive, even as you carried on with your usual pretence – I put this at its simplest: it thrilled me. I almost passed out. So it began, what you kindly termed my ‘pig-in-a-trough mode’. And it multiplied my pleasures, to know that I could retreat to the typewriter to describe the moment, from your point of view. Your duplicitous point of view, which would have to include your understanding, your version, of me, lover and Sweet Tooth item. My task was to reconstruct myself through the prism of your consciousness. If I gave myself a good press, it was because of those nice things you said about me. With this recursive refinement, my mission was even more interesting than yours. Your masters did not require you to investigate how you yourself appeared through my eyes. I was learning to do what you do, then better it with one extra fold in the fabric of deception. And how well I took to it.

Then, a few hours later, Brighton beach – strictly, Hove, which doesn’t chime romantically, despite the half-rhyme with love. For only the second time in our affair I was on my back, now with damp shingle cooling my coccyx. A passing policeman on the promenade would have done us for public indecency. How could we have explained to him those parallel
worlds that we spun around us? In one orbit, our mutual deceit, a novelty in my case, habitual in yours, possibly addictive, probably fatal. In the other, our affection bursting through ecstasy to love. We reached the glorious summit at last and traded our ‘I love you’s even as we each reserved our secrets. I saw how we could do it, live with these sealed compartments side by side, never letting the dank stench of one invade the sweetness of the other. If I mention again how exquisite our lovemaking became after my rendezvous with Greatorex, I know you’ll be thinking of ‘Pawnography’. (How I regret now that punning title.) The foolish husband lusting after the wife who stole his stuff, his pleasure sharpened by his secret knowledge of her deceit. All right, she was a rehearsal for you before I knew of your existence. And I don’t deny the common root is me. But I have in mind my other story, the one about the vicar’s brother who ends up loving the woman who’ll destroy him. You always liked that one. Or how about the writer driven to her second novel by the spectre of her apish lover? Or the fool who believes his lover is real when in fact he’s dreamed her up and she’s only a counterfeit, a copy, a fake?

But don’t leave the kitchen. Stay with me. Let me exorcise this bitterness. And let’s talk about research. By the time you came to Brighton that Friday, I’d had a second meeting with Max Greatorex, at his place in Egham, Surrey. Even at the time, I was surprised how open he was, filling me in on the Sweet Tooth meetings, your various encounters in the park and in his office, his late-night visit to St Augustine’s Road and, generally, the workplace. As I learned more, I wondered if he was longing, in a self-destructive way, to become the Fourth Man, or if he was in sexual competition with your Tony Canning. Max assured me that Sweet Tooth was so low level that it hardly mattered. I also got the impression that he’d already decided to leave the Security Service and go into something else. Now I know from Shirley Shilling that his purpose in meeting me in Bristol was to break up our affair.
He was indiscreet because all he cared about was destroying you. When I asked to see him again, he thought I was driven by angry obsession, which he was happy to feed. Later, he was surprised to discover that I was still seeing you. He was furious when he heard you intended to come to the Austen event at the Dorchester. So he called his press contacts and threw us to the dogs. In all, I’ve met him three times this year. He gave me so much, he was so helpful. It’s a pity I detest him. He told me Canning’s story, how he was interviewed one last time in a safe house before he went off to the Baltic to die, how he had a nosebleed, which ruined a mattress and nourished some lurid fantasies of yours. Greatorex was much entertained by all that.

At our last meeting he gave me an address for your old friend Shirley Shilling. I’d read about her in the papers, how a clever agent had lined up five publishers to bid for her first novel, how they were queuing up for the movie rights in LA. She was on Martin Amis’s arm when we were reading together in Cambridge. I liked her, and she adores you. She told me about your pub-rock crawls around London. After I said I knew about your work she told me about your time together as cleaning ladies, and how she was asked to snoop on you. She also mentioned your old friend Jeremy, so while I was in Cambridge I went to his college and got a forwarding address for him in Edinburgh. I also visited Mrs Canning. I told her that I’d been a student of her husband. She was polite enough, but I didn’t learn much. You’ll be pleased to hear that she knows nothing about you. Shirley had offered to drive me to the Canning cottage in Suffolk. (She drives like a maniac.) We peered into the garden and went for a stroll in the woods. By the time we left I felt I had enough to reconstruct the scene of your secret affair, your apprenticeship in secrecy.

From Cambridge, remember, I went on to see your sister and her boyfriend Luke. As you know, I dislike getting stoned. It’s such a mental constriction. That prickly, electric
self-consciousness just doesn’t suit me and nor does a joyless chemical appetite for sweet things. But it was the only way Lucy and I could really get along and talk. The three of us sat in low light on cushions on the floor of their flat, incense smouldering from homemade clay pots, a sitar raga leaking onto our heads from unseen speakers. We drank purifying tea. She’s in awe of you, poor girl, desperate for her big sister’s good opinion, which I think she rarely gets. At one point she said forlornly that it wasn’t fair that you were cleverer
and
prettier. I got what I had come for – your childhood and teenage years, though I might have forgotten most of it in a haze of hash. I do remember that we ate cauliflower cheese and brown rice for supper.

I stayed the night in order to go on Sunday to the cathedral to hear your father. I was curious, because you’d described to me in a letter how you collapsed into his arms on your front doorstep. And there he was, in distant splendour, saying nothing at all on that particular day. Underlings, grand enough in their own right, undeterred by the feeble turn-out, conducted the service with all the brio of unshaken faith. One fellow with a nasal voice preached the sermon, a sure-footed exegesis of the Good Samaritan parable. I shook your father’s hand on my way out. He looked at me with interest and asked in a friendly way if I’d be coming back. How could I tell him the truth?

I wrote to Jeremy to present myself as your good friend who was passing through Edinburgh. I told him that you’d suggested I get in touch. I knew you wouldn’t mind a lie, and I also knew I was taking a chance. If he mentioned me to you my cover would be blown. This time, I had to get drunk to make real progress. How else would I have got the story of how you came to write for
?Quis?
? It was you who told me about his elusive orgasm, his peculiar pubic bone and the folded towel. Jeremy and I had the sixteenth century, its history and literature, in common too, and I was able to bring him up to date on Tony Canning as traitor, and then
your affair, which shocked him. And so our evening sped along beautifully and I thought it was money well spent when I picked up the bill at the Old Waverley Hotel.

But why trouble you with details of my research? First, to let you know I took this matter seriously. Second, to be clear, that above all it was you who were my principal source. There was, of course, everything that I saw for myself. And then the small cast among whom I wandered in January. That leaves an island of experience, an important fraction of the whole, that was you alone, you with your thoughts, and sometimes you invisible to yourself. On this terrain, I’ve been obliged to extrapolate or invent.

Here’s an example. Neither of us will forget our first meeting in my office. From where I sat, when you stepped through the door and I took in your old-fashioned peaches-and-cream look, and your summer-blue eyes, I thought it was just possible that my life was about to change. I’ve imagined you minutes before that moment, making your way from Falmer station, approaching the Sussex campus filled with the snobbish distaste you’ve expressed to me since for the idea of a new university. Sleek and fair, you strode through the crowds of long-haired bare-foot kids. Your scorn was barely fading from your face by the time you introduced yourself and started telling me your untruths. You’ve complained to me about your time at Cambridge, you’ve told me it was intellectually stultifying, but you defend your place to the hilt and look down on mine. Well, for what it’s worth, think again. Don’t be fooled by loud music. I reckon my place was more ambitious, more serious, more enjoyable than yours. I speak as a product, an explorer, of Asa Briggs’s new map of learning. The tutorials were demanding. Two essays a week for three years, no let-up. All the usual literary studies, but on top compulsory historiography for all newcomers, and then for me, by choice, cosmology, fine art, international relations, Virgil, Dante, Darwin, Ortega y Gasset … Sussex would never have allowed you to stagnate the way you did, would
never have permitted you to do nothing else but mathematics. Why am I bothering you with this? I can hear you say to yourself, He’s jealous, he’s chippy about his plate-glass learning emporium, about not having been at my place with the snooker-table lawns and honey limestone. But you’re wrong. I only wanted to remind you why I painted a curl on your lips as you passed under the sound of Jethro Tull, a sneer I wasn’t there to see. It was an informed guess, an extrapolation.

So much for research. I had my material, the wafer of gold, and the motivation to hammer it out. I went at it in a frenzy, more than a hundred thousand words in just over three months. The Austen Prize, for all the excitement and recognition, seemed like a monstrous distraction. I set myself a target of fifteen hundred words a day, seven days a week. Sometimes, when my invention ran out, it was near impossible, and at others it was a breeze because I was able to transcribe our conversation minutes after we’d had it. Sometimes events wrote whole sections for me.

A recent example was last Saturday, when you came back to the flat from shopping to show me the
Guardian
story. I knew then that Greatorex had upped his game and things were going to move fast. I had a ringside seat for the deception, yours and mine. I could see you thought you were about to be exposed and accused. I pretended to love you too much to suspect you – it was easy to do that. When you suggested making a statement to the Press Association, I knew it was pointless, but why not? The story was writing itself. Besides, it was time to renounce the Foundation’s money. It touched me when you tried to dissuade me from claiming to know no one from the intelligence service. You knew how vulnerable I was, how vulnerable you’d rendered me, and you were in agonies as you tried to protect me. So why did I make the claim anyway? More story! I couldn’t resist it. And I wanted to seem like an innocent in your hearing. I knew I was about to do myself a lot of harm. But I didn’t care, I was reckless
and obsessed, I wanted to see what happened. I thought, correctly as it turned out, that this was the endgame. When you went to lie on the bed to brood on your dilemma, I set about describing you reading the newspapers in your cafe near the market, and then, while it was still fresh, our entire exchange. After our Wheeler’s lunch we made love. You fell asleep and I worked on, typing and revising the recent hours. When I came into the bedroom in the early evening to wake you and make love to you again, you whispered as you took my cock in your hand and brought me into you, ‘You’re amazing.’ I hope you won’t mind. I’ve included that.