So he was calling for more files, and we were in and out of the Registry, and busy typing up inserts. Max chose a bad time to hover by Chas Mount and try to engage him in small talk. In strict security terms, with these dossiers open he shouldn’t have stepped into our office at all. But Chas was too polite and good-natured to say so. Still, his responses were brief, and soon Max came over to me. In his hand was a small brown envelope which he placed ostentatiously on my desk and said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Take a look as soon as you have a moment.’ Then he left.
For a good while, perhaps as long as an hour, I decided that I didn’t have a moment. What I dreaded most was a heartfelt declaration on office stationery. What I eventually read was a properly typed memo headed ‘Restricted’ and ‘Sweet Tooth’ and ‘From MG to SF’ and a circulation list that
included the initials of Nutting, Tapp and two others I didn’t recognise. The note, obviously written by Max for the record, began ‘Dear Miss Frome’. It advised me of what I had ‘likely already considered’. One of the Sweet Tooth subjects was receiving publicity and might well receive yet more. ‘Staff are expected to avoid being photographed or written about in the press. You may well consider it to be in the line of duty to attend the Austen Prize reception, but you are best advised to avoid it.’
Very sensible, however much I resented it. I had in fact planned to be there with Tom. Win or lose, he needed me. But why this circulated letter rather than a word in my ear? Was it too painful for Max to talk to me alone? I rather suspected some form of bureaucratic trap was being set for me. The question then was whether I should defy Max or stay away. Doing the latter seemed safer since it was procedurally correct, but I felt cross about it and on the way home that evening I felt indignant, and angry with Max and his schemes – whatever they were. I was annoyed too at having to invent for Tom a good explanation for my absence. Illness in the family, a bout of flu for myself, an emergency at work? I decided on a morbidly mouldy snack – rapid onset, total incapacity, quick recovery – and this deceit naturally brought me back to the old problem. There had never been a right moment to tell him. Perhaps if I’d turned him down for Sweet Tooth and then had the affair, or started the affair and left the Service, or told him on first meeting … but no, none of it made sense. I couldn’t have known at the beginning where we were heading, and as soon as I did know, it became too precious to threaten. I could tell him and resign, or resign then tell him, but I would still risk losing him. All I could think of was never telling him. Could I live with myself? Well, I already was.
Unlike its boisterous infant cousin, the Booker, the Austen didn’t go in for banquets, or for having the great and good on its judging panel. As Tom described it to me, there was
going to be a sober drinks reception at the Dorchester, with a short speech by an eminent literary figure. The judges were mostly literary types, academics, critics, with an occasional philosopher or historian drafted in. The Prize money had once been considerable – in 1875 two thousand pounds took you a long way. Now it was no match for the Booker. The Austen was valued for prestige alone. There had been talk of televising the Dorchester proceedings, but the elderly trustees were said to be wary and, according to Tom, the Booker was more likely to make it onto television one day.
The reception was at six the following evening. At five I sent a telegram from the Mayfair post office to Tom, care of the Dorchester.
Am sick. Bad sandwich. Thoughts with you. Come to Camden after. Love you. S
. I slouched back to the office, loathing myself and the situation I was in. Once I would have asked myself what Tony would have done. No use now. It was easy enough to pass off my black mood as illness and Mount let me leave early. I arrived home at six, just when I should have been passing through the Dorchester entrance on Tom’s arm. Towards eight I thought I should play my part in case he turned up early. It was easy enough to persuade myself that I was unwell. In pyjamas and dressing gown, I lay on my bed in a haze of sulkiness and self-pity, then I read for a while, then I dozed off for an hour or two and didn’t hear the doorbell.
One of the girls must have let Tom in because when I opened my eyes he was standing by my bed, holding up by a corner his cheque and in the other hand a finished copy of his novel. He was grinning like a fool. Forgetting my poisonous sandwich, I leapt up to embrace him, we whooped and hollered and made such a din that Tricia tapped on the door and asked if we needed help. We reassured her, then we made love (he seemed so hungry for it), and straight afterwards took a taxi to the White Tower.
We hadn’t been back there since our first date, so that was an anniversary of a sort. I’d insisted on bringing with me
From the Somerset Levels
and we passed it back and forth across the table, flipped through its one hundred and forty-one pages to admire the typeface, rejoiced in the author photograph and the cover, which showed in grainy black and white a ruined city that may have been Berlin or Dresden in 1945. Suppressing thoughts about the security implications, I exclaimed over the dedication, ‘To Serena’, got up from my seat to kiss him, and listened to his account of the evening, of William Golding’s droll speech and an incomprehensible one by the chairman of the judges, a professor from Cardiff. When his name was announced, Tom in his nervousness had tripped on the edge of a carpet as he went forward and hurt his wrist on the back of a chair. Tenderly, I kissed that wrist. After the Prize ceremony he gave four short interviews, but no one had read his book, it didn’t matter what he said and the experience made him feel fraudulent. I asked for two glasses of champagne and we toasted the only first-time novelist to take the Austen Prize. It was such a wonderful occasion that we didn’t even bother to get drunk. I remembered to eat carefully, like the invalid I was supposed to be.
Tom Maschler had planned publication with the precision of a moon landing. Or as if the Austen was in his gift. The shortlist, the profiles, the announcement helped build the impatient expectation, which was fulfilled towards the end of the week when the book appeared in the shops just as the first notices appeared. Our weekend plan was simple. Tom would carry on writing, I would read his press on the train down. I travelled to Brighton on Friday evening with seven reviews on my lap. The world mostly approved of my lover. In the
Telegraph
: ‘The only thread of hope is that which binds father to daughter (a love as tenderly achieved as anything in modern fiction) but the reader knows soon enough that this bleak masterpiece cannot tolerate the thread uncut. The heart-piercing finale is almost more than one can bear.’ In the
TLS
: ‘A strange glow, an eerie subterranean light, suffuses
Mr Haley’s prose and the hallucinogenic effect on the reader’s inner eye is such as to transform a catastrophic end-time world into a realm of harsh and irresistible beauty.’ In the
Listener
: ‘His prose gives no quarter. He has the drained, level stare of the psychopath and his characters, morally decent, physically lovely, must share their fates with the worst in a godless world.’ In
The Times
: ‘When Mr Haley sets on his dogs to tear out the viscera of a starving beggar, we know we are being tossed into the crucible of a modern aesthetic and challenged to object, or at least to blink. In the hands of most writers the scene would be a careless dabbling in suffering, and unforgivable, but Haley’s spirit is both tough and transcendent. From the very first paragraph you are in his hands, you know he knows what he is doing, and you can trust him. This small book bears the promise and burden of genius.’
We had already passed through Haywards Heath. I took the book,
my
book, from my bag and read random pages and, of course, began to see them through different eyes. Such was the power of this assured consensus that
The Levels
did look different, more confident of its terms, its destination, and rhythmically hypnotic. And so knowing. It read like a majestic poem as precise and suspended as ‘Adlestrop’. Above the train’s iambic racket (and who taught me
that
word?) I could hear Tom intone his own lines. What did I know, a humble operative who had once, only two or three years ago, made the case for Jacqueline Susann against Jane Austen? But could I trust a consensus? I picked up the
New Statesman
. It’s ‘back half’, as explained to me by Tom, was important in the literary world. As the contents list announced, the arts editor herself presented a verdict in the lead review: ‘Admittedly, there are moments of poise, a clinical descriptive power capable of generating occasional surges of disgust at humankind, but overall the impression is of something forced, a touch formulaic, emotionally manipulative and altogether slight. He deludes himself (but not the reader) that he is saying
something profound about our common plight. What is lacking is scale, ambition and naked intelligence. However, he may do something yet.’ Then a tiny item in the
Evening Standard’s
Londoner’s Diary: ‘One of the worst decisions ever taken by a committee … this year’s Austen judges, perhaps with a collective eye to a role in the Treasury, decided to devalue the currency of their prize. They opted for an adolescent dystopia, a pimply celebration of disorder and beastliness, thankfully not much longer than a short story.’
Tom had said he didn’t want to see the reviews, so in the flat that evening I read out the choicest parts of the good ones and summarised the negative articles in the blandest terms. He was pleased by the praise, of course, but it was obvious that he had moved on. He was glancing at one of his typed pages even as I was reading out the passage that included the word ‘masterpiece’. He was typing again as soon as I’d finished, and he wanted to go on working through the evening. I went out for fish and chips and he ate his at the typewriter, straight off the page of yesterday’s
Evening Argus
, which contained one of his best notices.
I read and we barely spoke a word until I went to bed. I was still awake an hour later when he got in beside me, and again, he made love to me in this new, hungry way of his, as if he’d lived without sex for a year. He made far more noise than I ever did. I teased him by calling this his pig-in-a-trough mode.
The next morning I woke to the muted sound of his new typewriter. I kissed the top of his head as I passed him on the way out to the Saturday market. I did the shopping there, collected up the newspapers and took them to my usual coffee shop. A table by the window, a cappuccino, an almond croissant. Perfect. And here was a brilliant review in the
Financial Times
. ‘Reading T.H. Haley is like being driven too fast round tight corners. But be assured, this sleek vehicle never leaves the road.’ I looked forward to reading that to him. Next on the heap was the
Guardian
, with Tom’s
name and a photograph of him at the Dorchester on the front page. Good. A whole article about him. I turned to it, saw the headline – and froze. ‘Austen Prize-winning Author Funded by MI5’.
I was almost sick right there. My first stupid thought was that perhaps he would never see it. A ‘reliable source’ had confirmed to the paper that the Freedom International Foundation, perhaps unknowingly, ‘had received funds from another body that was partly financed by an organisation indirectly funded by the Security Service’. I scanned the piece at the speed of panic. No mention of Sweet Tooth or of other writers. There was an accurate summary of monthly payments, of how Tom had given up his post-grad teaching post on receiving the first, and then, less harmfully, a mention of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its connection to the CIA. The old
Encounter
story was warmed up, then, back to the scoop. It was noted that T.H. Haley had written
passionate anti-communist articles on the East German Uprising, on the silence of West German writers about the Berlin Wall and, most recently, on the State persecution of Romanian poets. This is perhaps just the sort of kindred spirit our intelligence services would like to see flourish on these shores, a right-wing author who is eloquently sceptical of the general left-leaning tendencies of his colleagues. But with this level of secret meddling in culture, questions are bound to be raised about openness and artistic freedom in our Cold War environment. No one yet doubts the integrity of the Austen Prize judges, but the trustees might be wondering just what kind of winner their learned committee has chosen, and whether champagne corks flew in certain secret London offices when Haley’s name was announced.
I read the piece again and sat immobilised for twenty minutes while my untouched coffee cooled. Now it seemed obvious.
It was bound to happen: if I wouldn’t tell him, someone else would. My punishment for cowardice. How loathsome and ridiculous I’d appear now, forced into the open, trying to sound honest, trying to explain myself. I didn’t tell you dearest because I love you. I was frightened of losing you. Oh yes, a perfect arrangement. My silence, his disgrace. I thought of going straight to the station to get the next London train, fading from his life. Yes, let him face the storm alone. More cowardice. But he wouldn’t want me near him anyway. And so it went round, even though I knew there was no escape, I would have to confront him, I would have to go to the flat and show him the article.
I gathered up the chicken, vegetables and newspapers, paid for my uneaten breakfast, and walked slowly up the hill to his street. I heard him typing as I came up the stairs. Well, that was about to stop. I let myself in and waited for him to look up.
He was aware of me and faintly smiled in greeting and was about to continue when I said, ‘You’d better look at this. It isn’t a review.’
The
Guardian
was folded at the page. He took it and turned his back on me to read it. I was numbly wondering, when it came to it, whether I should pack, or just leave. I had a small suitcase under the bed. I would need to remember my hairdryer. But there might not be time. He might simply throw me out.