by Ian Mcewan
On my way to work I blushed to remember how I’d thought my reasoning about feelings was superior to his. I blushed just before I started to cry. Passengers nearest me on the crowded Tube decently looked away. He must have known how much past I would have to rewrite when I heard the real story. There must have been some comfort in believing that I would forgive him then. That seemed very sad. But why had there been no posthumous letter, explaining, remembering something between us, saying goodbye, acknowledging me, giving me something to live with, anything to replace our last scene? For weeks afterwards I tormented myself with suspicions that such a letter would have been intercepted by the ‘housekeeper’ or Frieda.
Tony in exile, trudging the lonely beaches, without the playmate-brother who’d shared the carefree years – Terence Canning was killed in the D-Day landings – and without his college, his friends, his wife. Above all, without me. Tony could have been looked after by Frieda, he could have been in the cottage or in his bedroom at home, with his books, with visits from his friends and his son. Even I could have sneaked in somehow, disguised as a former student. Flowers, champagne, family and old friends, old photographs – wasn’t that how people try to organise their deaths, at least when they were not fighting for breath or writhing in pain or dumbly immobilised by terror?
In the weeks that followed, I replayed scores of small moments. Those afternoon naps that made me so impatient, that grey morning face I couldn’t bear to look at. At the time I’d thought it was simply how it had to be, when you were fifty-four. There was one exchange in particular I kept returning to – those few seconds in the bedroom by the laundry basket when he was telling me about Idi Amin and the expelled Ugandan Asians. It was a big story at the time. The vicious dictator was driving his countrymen out, they had British passports, and Ted Heath’s government, ignoring the outrage in the tabloids, was insisting, decently enough, that they must be allowed to settle here. That was Tony’s view too. He interrupted himself and without drawing breath said quickly, ‘Just drop it in there with mine. We’ll be back soon.’ Just that, a mundane domestic instruction, and then he continued with his line of thought. Now wasn’t that ingenious, when his body was already failing and his plans were taking shape? To orchestrate the moment, see a chance and take it on the wing. Or work something up afterwards. Perhaps less of a trick, more a habit of mind picked up in his time with the SOE. A trick of the trade. As a device, a deception, it was cleverly managed. He threw me off and I was too injured to pursue him. I don’t think I really loved him at the time, during those months out at the cottage, but when I heard of his death I soon convinced myself that I did. The trick, his deceit, was far more duplicitous than any married man’s love affair. Even then, I admired him for it, but I couldn’t quite forgive him.
I went to Holborn public library, where back issues of The Times were kept, and looked up the obituary. Idiotically, I skimmed it, scanning it for my name, and then I started again. A whole life in a few columns, and not even a photograph. The Dragon School in Oxford, Marlborough, then Balliol, the Guards, action in the Western Desert, an unexplained gap, and then SOE as Jeremy had described it, followed by four years in the Security Service from 1948. How uncurious I’d been about Tony’s war and post war, though I knew he had good connections in MI5. The piece briefly summarised the fifties onwards – journalism, books, public service, Cambridge, death.
And for me, nothing changed. I went on working in Curzon Street while I tended the little shrine of my secret grief. Tony had chosen my profession for me, lent me his woods, ceps, opinions, worldliness. But I had no proof, no tokens, no photograph of him, no letters, not even a scrap of a note because our meetings were arranged by phone. Diligently, I’d returned all the books he lent me as I read them, except one, R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. I looked for it everywhere, and went back many times to search forlornly in the same places again. It had sun-faded soft green boards with a cup stain that looped through the author’s initials, and a simple ‘Canning’ in imperious purple ink on the first endpaper, and throughout, on almost every page, his marginalia in hard pencil. So precious. But it had melted away, as only books can, perhaps when I moved out of my Jesus Green room. My surviving keepsakes were a carelessly donated bookmark, of which more later, and my job. He had dispatched me to this grubby office in Leconfield House. I didn’t like it, but it was the legacy and I could not have tolerated being anywhere else.
Working patiently, without complaint, humbly submitting to the disparagements of Miss Ling – this was how I kept the flame. If I failed to be efficient, if I arrived late or complained or thought about leaving MI5, I would have been letting him down. I persuaded myself of a great love in ruins, and so I racked up the pain. Akrasia! Whenever I took extra care in turning some desk officer’s scrawl into an error-free typed memo in triplicate, it was because it was my duty to honour the memory of the man I had loved.
There were twelve in our intake, including three men. Of these, two were married businessmen in their thirties and of no interest to anyone. There was a third, Greatorex, on whom ambitious parents had conferred the name Maximilian. He was about thirty, had jutting ears and was extremely reticent, whether from shyness or superiority none of us was certain. He’d been transferred across from MI6 and was already desk officer status, merely sitting in with us new-joiners to see how our systems worked. The other two men, the business types, were also not so far now from officer status. Whatever I’d felt at the interview, I no longer minded so much. As our chaotic training proceeded, I absorbed the general spirit of the place and, taking my cue from the other girls, began to accept that in this small part of the adult world, and unlike in the rest of the Civil Service, women were of a lower caste.
We were spending even more time now with the scores of other girls in the Registry, learning the strict rules of file retrieval and discovering, without being told, that there were concentric circles of security clearance and that we languished in outer darkness. The clattering temperamental trolleys on their tracks delivered files to the various departments around the building. Whenever one of them went wrong, Greatorex knew how to fix it with a set of miniature screwdrivers he kept on him. Among the more snobbish girls this earned him the nickname ‘Handyman’, confirming him as a ridiculous prospect. That was fortunate for me because, even in my condition of mourning, I was beginning to take an interest in Maximilian Greatorex.
Occasionally, in the late afternoon, we would be ‘invited’ to attend a lecture. It would have been unthinkable not to go. The subject never wandered far from communism, its theory and practice, the geo-political struggle, the naked intent of the Soviet Union to attain world dominance. I’m making these talks sound more interesting than they were. The theory and practice element was by far the largest, and most of that was theory. This was because the talks were given by an ex-RAF man, Archibald Jowell, who had gone into the whole thing, perhaps in an evening class, and was anxious to share what he knew of dialectics and related concepts. If you were to close your eyes, as many did, you could easily imagine that you were at a Communist Party meeting in somewhere like Stroud, for it was not Jowell’s intention or remit to demolish Marxist–Leninist thought, or even express scepticism. He wanted us to understand the mind of the enemy ‘from the inside’, and to know thoroughly the theoretical base from which it worked. Coming at the end of a day of typing and of trying to learn what constituted a file-worthy fact in the mind of the fearsome Miss Ling, Jowell’s earnest, haranguing delivery had a deadly, soporific effect on most of the intake. Everyone believed that to be caught out in a shameful moment when neck muscles relax and the head snaps forward might damage career prospects. But believing was not quite enough. Heavy eyelids in the late afternoon had their own logic, their own peculiar weight.
So what was wrong with me that I sat upright and alert for the entire hour on the edge of my chair, legs crossed, notebook pressed against my bare knee as I wrote my notes? I was a mathematician and a fo
rmer chess player, and I was a girl in need of comfort. Dialectical materialism was a safely enclosed system, like the vetting procedures, but more rigorous and intricate. More like an equation of Leibniz or Hilbert. Human aspirations, societies, history, and a method of analysis in an entanglement as expressive and inhumanly perfect as a Bach fugue. Who could sleep through it? The answer was everyone but myself and Greatorex. He would sit a knight’s move ahead of me and to my left, with the visible page of his notebook covered in dense loopy writing.
Once, my attention drifted from the lecture as I considered him. It was the case that his ears protruded from strange hillocks of bone at the sides of his skull and those ears were awfully pink. But the effect was much exaggerated by his old-fashioned haircut, the standard military short back and sides, a style which revealed a deep groove down his nape. He reminded me of Jeremy and, less comfortably, of some of the undergraduate mathematicians at Cambridge, the ones who had humiliated me in tutorials. But his facial appearance was misleading, for his body looked lean and strong. In my thoughts I restyled his hair, growing it out so that it filled the space between the tips of his ears and his head, and covered the top of his collar, perfectly permissible now even in Leconfield House. The mustard-coloured check tweed jacket should go. Even from my oblique angle I could see that his tie knot was too small. He needed to start calling himself Max and keep his screwdrivers in a drawer. He was writing in brown ink. That too would have to change.
‘And so I return to my starting point,’ ex-Flight Commander Jowell was saying in conclusion. ‘Ultimately the power and endurance of Marxism, as with any other theoretical scheme, rests with its capacity to seduce intelligent men and women. And this one most certainly can. Thank you.’
Our bleary group roused itself to stand respectfully as the lecturer left the room. When he was gone Max turned and looked right at me. It was as if the vertical groove at the base of his skull was telepathically sensitive. He knew I’d been rearranging his entire being.
I was the one who looked away.
He indicated the pen in my hand. ‘Taking lots of notes.’ I said, ‘It was fascinating.’
He started to say something, then changed his mind and with an impatient downward gesture with his hand he turned from me and left the room.
But we became friends. Because he reminded me of Jeremy, I lazily assumed that he preferred men, though I hoped I was wrong. I hardly expected him to speak of it, especially in these offices. The security world despised homosexuals, at least outwardly, which made them vulnerable to blackmail, which made them unemployable in the intelligence services and therefore despicable. But while I fantasised about Max I could at least tell myself that I must be getting over Tony. And Max, as I tried to make everyone call him, was a good addition. I thought at first we might make a threesome around town with Shirley, but she told me he was creepy and not to be trusted. And he didn’t like pubs or cigarette smoke, or loud music, so we often sat after work on a bench in Hyde Park or Berkeley Square. He couldn’t talk about it and I wouldn’t ask, but my impression was that he’d worked for a while at Cheltenham, in signals intelligence. He was thirty-two and lived alone in one part of the wing of a country house near Egham, on a bend in the Thames. He said more than once I should come and visit, but there was never a specific invitation. He came from a family of academics, was educated at Winchester and Harvard, where he did a law degree and then another in psychology, but he was haunted by the idea that he had made the wrong choices, that he should have been studying something practical like engineering. At one point he had thought of apprenticing himself to a watch designer in Geneva, but his parents talked him out of it. His father was a philosopher, his mother a social anthropologist, and Maximilian was their only child. They wanted him to have a life of the mind and thought he shouldn’t be fiddling about with his hands. After a short unhappy spell teaching at a crammer, some freelance journalism and travelling, he came into the Service through a business friend of an uncle.
It was a warm spring that year and our friendship blossomed with the trees and shrubs around our various benches. Early on, in my eagerness, I ran ahead of our intimacy and asked if pressure from academic parents bearing down on an only child might have caused him to be shy. The question offended him, as though I’d insulted his family. He had a typically English distaste for psychological explanation. His manner was stiff as he explained that he didn’t recognise himself in the term. If he held back with strangers it was because he believed that it was best to go carefully until he understood what he was dealing with. He was perfectly at ease with people he knew and liked. And so it turned out. Gently prompted, I told him everything – my family, my Cambridge, my poor maths degree, my column in ?Quis?.
‘I heard about your column,’ he said, to my surprise. Then he added something that pleased me. ‘The word around the place is that you’ve read everything worth reading. You’re up on modern literature and all that.’
It was a release to talk to someone at last about Tony. Max had even heard of him, and remembered a government commission, a history book and one or two other scraps, one of which was a public argument over funding for the arts.
‘What did you say his island was called?’
At that point, my mind emptied. I had known the name so well. It was synonymous with death. I said, ‘It’s suddenly gone from me.’
‘Finnish? Swedish?’
‘Finnish. In the Åland archipelago.’
‘Was it Lemland?’
‘Doesn’t sound right. It’ll come to me.’
‘Let me know when it does.’
I was surprised by his insistence. ‘Why does it matter?’
‘D’you know, I’ve been around the Baltic a bit. Tens of thousands of islands. One of the best-kept secrets of modern tourism. Thank God everybody flees south in summer. Clearly, your Canning was a man of taste.’
We left it at that. But a month or so later, we were sitting in Berkeley Square trying to reconstruct the lyrics of the famous song about a nightingale singing there. Max had told me he was a self-taught pianist who liked to play show tunes and soppy crooning songs from the forties and fifties, music as unfashionable then as his haircut. I happened to know this particular song from a school revue. We were partly singing, partly speaking the charming words, I may be right, I may be wrong/But I’m perfectly willing to swear/That when you turned and smiled at me/A nightingale … when Max broke off and said, ‘Was it Kumlinge?’
‘Yes, that’s it. How did you know?’
‘Well, I’ve heard it’s very beautiful.’
‘I think he liked the isolation.’
‘He must have.’
As the spring wore on I grew even fonder of Max, to the point of mild obsession. When I wasn’t with him, when I was out in the evening with Shirley, I felt incomplete and restless. It was a relief to be back at work, where I could see him across the desks, his head bent over his papers. But that was never enough and soon I would be trying to arrange our next encounter. It had to be faced, I had a taste for a certain ill-dressed, old-fashioned kind of man (Tony didn’t count), big-boned and thin and awkwardly intelligent. There was something remote and upright in Max’s manner. His automatic restraint made me feel clumsy and overemphatic. I worried that he didn’t actually like me and was too civil to say so. I imagined that he had all manner of private rules, hidden notions of correctness that I was constantly transgressing. My unease sharpened my interest in him. What animated him, the subject that breathed warmth into his manner, was Soviet communism. He was a Cold Warrior of a superior sort. Where others loathed and raged, Max believed that good intentions had combined with human nature to devise a tragedy of sullen entrapment. The happiness and fulfilment of hundreds of millions across the Russian empire had been fatally compromised. No one, not even its leaders, would have chosen what they now had. The trick was to offer escape by degrees, without loss of face, by patient coaxing and incentives, by building trust while standing firm against what h
e called a truly terrible idea.
He was certainly not the sort I could question about his love life. I wondered if he had a male lover living with him in Egham. I even formed an idea of going down there to take a look. That’s how bad things were getting. Wanting what I assumed I could not have heightened my feelings. But I also wondered if he might, like Jeremy, be able to give a woman pleasure without getting much for himself. Not ideal, not reciprocal, but it wouldn’t be so bad for me. Better than pointless longing.
We were walking in the park one early evening after work. The subject was the Provisional IRA – I suspected he had some insider knowledge. He was telling me about an article he’d read when, on an impulse, I took his arm and asked if he wanted to kiss me.
‘Not particularly.’
‘I’d like you to.’
We stopped in the centre of the path where it went between two trees, obliging people to squeeze around us. It was a deep, passionate kiss, or a good imitation of one. I thought he might be compensating for a lack of desire. When he drew away, I tried to pull him back towards me, but he resisted.
‘That’s it for now,’ he said, touching the tip of my nose with his forefinger, acting the firm parent talking down to a demanding child. So, playing along, I made a sulky moue and meekly put my hand in his and we walked on. I knew the kiss was going to make things harder for me, but at least we were holding hands for the first time. He disengaged a few minutes later.