by Ian Mcewan
He smiled pleasantly, appearing pleased at finding common ground. ‘I suppose you got a brilliant first?’
‘A two one actually.’ I didn’t know what I was saying. A third sounded shameful, a first would have set me on dangerous ground. I had told two unnecessary lies. Bad form. For all I knew, a phone call to Newnham would establish there had been no Serena Frome doing English. I hadn’t expected to be interrogated. Such basic preparatory work, and I’d failed to do it. Why hadn’t Max thought of helping me towards a decent watertight personal story? I felt flustered and sweaty, I imagined myself jumping up without a word, snatching up my bag, fleeing from the room.
Tom was looking at me in that way he had, both kindly and ironic. ‘My guess is that you were expecting a first. But listen, there’s nothing wrong with a two one.’
‘I was disappointed,’ I said, recovering a little. ‘There was this, um, general, um …’
‘Weight of expectation?’
Our eyes met for a little more than two or three seconds, and then I looked away. Having read him, knowing too well one corner of his mind, I found it hard to look him in the eye for long. I let my gaze drop below his chin and noticed a fine silver chain around his neck.
‘So you were saying, writers at the beginning of their careers.’ He was self-consciously playing the part of the friendly don, coaxing a nervous applicant through her entrance interview. I knew I had to get back on top.
I said, ‘Look, Mr Haley …’
‘Tom.’
‘I don’t want to waste your time. We take advice from very good, very expert people. They’ve given a lot of thought to this. They like your journalism, and they love your stories. Really love them. The hope is …’
‘And you. Have you read them?’
‘Of course.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘I’m really just the messenger. It’s not relevant what I think.’
‘It’s relevant to me. What did you make of them?’
The room appeared to darken. I looked past him, out of the window. There was a grass strip, and the corner of another building. I could see into a room like the one we were in, where a tutorial was in progress. A girl not much younger than me was reading aloud her essay. At her side was a boy in a bomber jacket, bearded chin resting in his hand, nodding sagely. The tutor had her back to me. I turned my gaze back into our room, wondering if I was not overdoing this significant pause. Our eyes met again and I forced myself to hold on. Such a strange dark green, such long child-like lashes, and thick black eyebrows. But there was hesitancy in his gaze, he was about to look away, and this time the power had passed to me.
I said very quietly, ‘I think they’re utterly brilliant.’
He flinched as though someone had poked him in the chest, in the heart, and he gave a little gasp, not quite a laugh. He went to speak but was stuck for words. He stared at me, waiting, wanting me to go on, tell him more about himself and his talent, but I held back. I thought my words would have more power for being undiluted. And I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to say anything profound. Between us a certain formality had been peeled away to expose an embarrassing secret. I’d revealed his hunger for affirmation, praise, anything I might give. I guessed that nothing mattered more to him. His stories in the various reviews had probably gone unremarked, beyond a routine thanks and pat on the head from an editor. It was likely that no one, no stranger at least, had ever told him that his fiction was brilliant. Now he was hearing it and realising that he had always suspected it was so. I had delivered stupendous news. How could he have known if he was any good until someone confirmed it? And now he knew it was true and he was grateful.
As soon as he spoke, the moment was broken and the room resumed its normal tone. ‘Did you have a favourite?’
It was such a stupid, sheepish excuse of a question that I warmed to him for his vulnerability. ‘They’re all remarkable,’ I said. ‘But the one about the twin brothers, “This Is Love”, is the most ambitious. I thought it had the scale of a novel. A novel about belief and emotion. And what a wonderful character Jean is, so insecure and destructive and alluring. It’s a magnificent piece of work. Did you ever think of expanding it into a novel, you know, filling it out a bit?’
He looked at me curiously. ‘No, I didn’t think of filling it out a bit.’ The deadpan reiteration of my words alarmed me.
‘I’m sorry, it was a stupid …’
‘It’s the length I wanted. About fifteen thousand words. But I’m glad you liked it.’
Sardonic and teasing, he smiled and I was forgiven, but my advantage had dimmed. I had never heard fiction quantified in this technical way. My ignorance felt like a weight on my tongue.
I said, ‘And “Lovers”, the man with the shop-window mannequin, was so strange and completely convincing, it swept everyone away.’ It was now liberating to be telling outright lies. ‘We have two professors and two well-known reviewers on our board. They see a lot of new writing. But you should have heard the excitement at the last meeting. Honestly, Tom, they couldn’t stop talking about your stories. For the first time ever the vote was unanimous.’
The little smile had faded. His eyes had a glazed look, as though I was hypnotising him. This was going deep.
‘Well,’ he said, shaking his head to bring himself out of the trance. ‘This is all very pleasing. What else can I say?’ Then he added, ‘Who are the two critics?’
‘We have to respect their anonymity, I’m afraid.’
‘I see.’
He turned away from me for a moment and seemed lost in some private thought. Then he said, ‘So, what is it you’re offering, and what do you want from me?’
‘Can I answer that by asking you a question? What will you do when you’ve finished your doctorate?’
‘I’m applying for various teaching jobs, including one here.’
‘Full time?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’d like to make it possible for you to stay out of a job. In return you’d concentrate on your writing, including journalism if you want.’
He asked me how much money was on offer and I told him. He asked for how long and I said, ‘Let’s say two or three years.’
‘And if I produce nothing?’
‘We’d be disappointed and we’d move on. We won’t be asking for our money back.’
He took this in and then said, ‘And you’d want the rights in what I do?’
‘No. And we don’t ask you to show us your work. You don’t even have to acknowledge us. The Foundation thinks you’re a unique and extraordinary talent. If your fiction and journalism get written, published and read, then we’ll be happy. When your career is launched and you can support yourself we’ll fade out of your life. We’ll have met the terms of our remit.’
He stood up and went round the far side of his desk and stood at the window with his back to me. He ran his hand through his hair and muttered something sibilant under his breath that may have been ‘Ridiculous’, or perhaps, ‘Enough of this’. He was looking into the same room across the lawn. Now the bearded boy was reading his essay while his tutorial partner stared ahead of her without expression. Oddly, the tutor was speaking on the phone.
Tom returned to his chair and crossed his arms. His gaze was directed across my shoulder and his lips were pressed shut. I sensed he was about to make a serious objection.
I said, ‘Think it over for a day or two, talk to a friend … Think it through.’
He said, ‘The thing is …’ and he trailed away. He looked down at his lap and he continued. ‘It’s this. Every day I think about this problem. I don’t have anything bigger to think about. It keeps me awake at night. Always the same four steps. One, I want to write a novel. Two, I’m broke. Three, I’ve got to get a job. Four, the job will kill the writing. I can’t see a way round it. There isn’t one. Then a nice young woman knocks on my door and offers me a fat pension for nothing. It’s too good to be true. I’m suspicious.’
The ironic smile, the cocked head – progress.
He said, ‘I like it when you say brilliant.’
‘Good. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.’ I reached into my bag on the floor and took out the Foundation’s brochure. ‘This is the work we do. You can come to the office in Upper Regent Street and talk to the people there. You’ll like them.’
‘You’ll be there too?’
‘My immediate employer is Word Unpenned. We work closely with Freedom International and are putting money their way. They help us find the artists. I travel a lot or work from home. But messages to the Foundation office will find me.’
He glanced at his watch and stood, so I did too. I was a dutiful young woman, determined to achieve what was expected of me. I wanted Haley to agree now, before lunch, to be kept by us. I would break the news by phone to Max in the afternoon and by tomorrow morning I hoped to have a routine note of congratulation from Peter Nutting, unemphatic, unsigned, typed by someone else, but important to me.
‘I’m not asking you to commit to anything now,’ I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I was pleading. ‘You’re not bound to anything at all. Just give me the say-so and I’ll arrange a monthly payment. All I need is your bank details.’
The say-so? I’d never used that word in my life. He blinked in assent, but not to the money so much as to my general drift. We were standing less than six feet apart. His waist was slender and through some disorder in his shirt I caught a glimpse below a button of skin and downy hair above his navel.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it very carefully. I’ve got to be in London on Friday. I could look in at your office.’
‘Well then,’ I said and put out my hand. He took it, but it wasn’t a handshake. He took my fingers in his palm and stroked them with his thumb, just one slow pass. Exactly that, a pass, and he was looking at me steadily. As I took my hand away, I let my own thumb brush along the length of his forefinger. I think we may have been about to move closer when there was a hearty, ridiculously loud knock on the door. He stepped back from me as he called, ‘Come in.’ The door swung open and there stood two girls, centre-parted blonde hair, fading suntans, sandals and painted toenails, bare arms, sweet expectant smiles, unbearably pretty. The books and papers under their arms didn’t look at all plausible to me.
‘Aha,’ Tom said. ‘Our Faerie Queene tutorial.’
I was edging round him towards the door. ‘I haven’t read that one,’ I said.
He laughed, and the two girls joined in, as if I’d made a wonderful joke. They probably didn’t believe me.
12
I was the only passenger in my carriage on the early afternoon train back to London. As we left the South Downs behind and sped across the Sussex Weald, I tried to work off my agitation by walking up and down the aisle. I sat for a couple of minutes, then I was back on my feet. I blamed myself for a lack of persistence. I should have waited out the hour until his teaching was over, forced him to have lunch with me, gone through it all again, got his consent. But that wasn’t it really. I’d come away without his home address. Nor that. Something may or may not have started between us, but it was just a touch – almost nothing at all. I should have stayed and built on it, left with a little more, a bridge to our next meeting. One deep kiss on that mouth that wanted to do my talking for me. I was bothered by the memory of the skin between the shirt buttons, the pale hair in a whorl around the edges of the navel, and the light and slender childlike body. I took up one of his stories to re-read but my attention soon slipped. I thought of getting off at Haywards Heath and going back. Would I have been so troubled if he hadn’t caressed my fingers? I thought I would. Might the touch of his thumb have been entirely accidental? Impossible. He meant it, he was telling me. Stay. But when the train stopped, I didn’t move, I didn’t trust myself. Look what happened, I thought, when I threw myself at Max.
Sebastian Morel is a teacher of French at a large comprehensive school near Tufnell Park, north London. He is married to Monica and they have two children, a girl and a boy aged seven and four, and they live in a rented terraced house near Finsbury Park. Sebastian’s work is tough, pointless and ill-paid, the pupils are insolent and unruly. Sometimes he spends his entire day trying to keep order in class and handing out punishments he doesn’t believe in. He marvels at how irrelevant knowledge of rudimentary French is to the lives of these kids. He wanted to like them, but he was repelled by their ignorance and aggression and the way they jeered at and bullied any of their number who dared to show an interest in learning. In this way they kept themselves down. Nearly all of them will leave school as soon as they can and get unskilled jobs or get pregnant or make do with unemployment benefit. He wants to help them. Sometimes he pities them, sometimes he struggles to suppress his contempt.
He is in his early thirties, a wiry man of exceptional strength. At university in Manchester, Sebastian was a keen mountaineer and led expeditions in Norway, Chile and Austria. But these days he no longer gets out onto the heights because his life is too constrained, there is never enough money or time and his spirits are low. His climbing gear was stowed in canvas bags in a cupboard under the stairs, well behind the Hoover and mops and buckets. Money is always a problem. Monica trained as a primary school teacher. Now she stays at home to look after the children and the house. She does it well, she is a loving mother, the children are adorable, but she suffers from bouts of restlessness and frustration that mirror Sebastian’s. Their rent is outrageous for such a small house in a dingy street and their marriage of nine years is dull, flattened by worries and hard work, marred by the occasional row – usually about money.
One dark late afternoon in December, three days before the end of term, he is mugged in the street. Monica has asked him to go to the bank at lunchtime to draw out seventy pounds from the joint account so that she can buy presents and Christmas treats. It is almost all they have by way of savings. He has turned into his own road, which is narrow and poorly lit, and is a hundred yards from his front door when he hears steps behind him and feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns and standing before him was a kid of sixteen or so, West Indian, holding a kitchen knife, a big one with a serrated blade. For a few seconds the two stood close, less than three feet apart, staring at each other in silence. What troubles Sebastian is the boy’s agitation, the way the knife trembles in his hands, the terror in his face. Things could easily get out of control. In a quiet shaky voice the boy asks for his wallet. Sebastian raises his hand slowly to the inside pocket of his coat. He is about to give away his children’s Christmas. He knows he is stronger than the kid and he calculates that as he holds out his wallet he could strike out, hit him hard on the nose and snatch the knife off him.
But it is more than the kid’s agitation that restrains Sebastian. There was a general view, strongly held in the staffroom, that crime, especially burglary and mugging, was caused by social injustice. Robbers are poor, they’ve never had the right chances in life and can hardly be blamed for taking what isn’t theirs. This is Sebastian’s view too, though he’s never given the matter much thought. In fact, it isn’t even a view, it’s a general atmosphere of tolerance that surrounds decent educated people. Those who complain about crime are likely to complain also about graffiti and litter in the streets and hold a whole set of distasteful views on immigration and the unions, tax, war and hanging. It was important therefore, for the sake of one’s self-respect, not to mind too much about being mugged.
So he hands over his wallet and the thief runs away. Instead of going straight home Sebastian walks back towards the High Street and goes to the police station to report the incident. As he speaks to the desk sergeant, he feels a bit of a cad or a snitch, for
the police are clearly agents of the system that forces people to steal. His discomfort increases in the face of the sergeant’s grave concern, and the way he keeps asking about the knife, the length of the blade, and whether Sebastian was able to see anything of the handle. Of course, armed robbery is a very serious offence. That kid could go to jail for years. Even when the sergeant tells him that there was a fatal stabbing only the month before of an old lady who tried to hang on to her purse, Sebastian’s unease is not dispelled. He shouldn’t have mentioned the knife. As he walks back along the street, he regrets his automatic impulse to report the matter. He’s becoming middle-aged and bourgeois. He should have taken responsibility for himself. He is no longer the sort of guy who puts his life on the line and climbs up sheer faces of granite, trusting his agility, strength and skill.
Because he is beginning to feel weakness and trembling in his legs he goes into a pub and with the loose change in his pocket is just about able to afford a large scotch. He downs it in one, and then he goes home.
The mugging marks a decline in his marriage. Though Monica never says so, it is clear she doesn’t believe him. It’s the old story. He’s come home stinking of drink, protesting that someone has run off with the holiday money. The Christmas is wretched. They have to borrow from her haughty brother. Her distrust kindles his resentment, they are distant with each other, they have to pretend to be jolly on Christmas Day for the sake of their children, and that seems to heighten the bleakness that comes down to trap them into silence. The idea that she thought he was a liar was like a poison in his heart. He works hard, he is loyal and faithful and keeps no secrets from her. How dare she doubt him! One evening when Naomi and Jake are in bed, he challenges her to tell him that she believes him about the mugging. She is immediately angry, and won’t say whether she does or not. Instead, she changes the subject, a trick in argument, he thinks bitterly, she is supremely good at and one he should learn himself. She is sick of her life, she tells him, sick of being financially dependent on him, of being stuck at home all day while he is out advancing his career. Why have they never considered the possibility of him doing the housework and looking after the children while she resumes her career?