by Ian Mcewan
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.
Face it, Serena, the sun is setting on this decaying affair, and the moon and stars are too. This afternoon – your yesterday, I expect – the doorbell rang. I went down to find standing on the pavement a woman from the Daily Express. She was pleasant and frank as she told me what was going to be in the next day’s paper, how I would be presented as a mendacious, greedy fraud. She even read me passages she’d written. She also described the photographs and asked politely if I’d care to give her a quote. I had nothing to say. As soon as she’d gone I took notes. I won’t be in a position to buy a copy of the Express tomorrow but it won’t matter because this afternoon I’ll incorporate what she told me, and have you read the story on the train. Yes, it’s over. The reporter told me her paper already had quotes from Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins. I’m headed for public ignominy. We all are. I’ll be accused, and rightly, of lying in my statement to the Press Association, of taking money from an inappropriate source, of selling my independence of thought. Your employers foolishly meddled where they don’t belong and they’ve embarrassed their political masters. It can’t be long before the list of other Sweet Tooth beneficiaries comes out. There’ll be derision and blushes and a sacking or two. As for you, you have no chance of surviving tomorrow’s press. You appear stunning in the photographs, I was told. But you’ll be looking for a job.
Soon I’m going to ask you to make an important decision, but before I do, let me tell you my favourite spy story. MI5 had a hand in it, as well as Six. 1943. The struggle was starker and more consequential than it is now. In April that year the decomposing body of an officer of the Royal Marines washed up on the coast of Andalucia. Attached to the dead man’s wrist by a chain was a briefcase containing documents referring to plans for the invasion of southern Europe through Greece and Sardinia. The local authorities contacted the British attaché, who at first seemed to take little interest in the corpse or its luggage. Then he appeared to change his mind and worked frantically to get both returned. Too late. The Spanish were neutral in the war, but generally more favourable to the Nazi cause. The German intelligence community was on to the matter, the documents in the briefcase found their way to Berlin. German High Command studied the contents of the briefcase, learned of the Allies’ intentions and altered their defences accordingly. But as you probably know from The Man Who Never Was, the body and the plans were fake, a plant devised by British intelligence. The officer was actually a Welsh tramp, retrieved from a morgue and, with thorough attention to detail, dressed up in a fictional identity, complete with love letters and tickets to a London show. The Allied invasion of southern Europe came through the more obvious route, Sicily, which was poorly defended. At least some of Hitler’s divisions were guarding the wrong portals.
Operation Mincemeat was one of scores of wartime deception exercises, but my theory is that what produced its particular brilliance and success was the manner of its inception. The original idea came from a novel published in 1937 called The Milliner’s Hat Mystery. The young naval commander who spotted the episode would one day be a famous novelist himself. He was Ian Fleming, and he included the idea along with other ruses in a memo which appeared before a secret committee chaired by an Oxford don, who wrote detective novels. Providing an identity, a background and a plausible life to a cadaver was done with novelistic flair. The naval attaché who orchestrated the reception of the drowned officer in Spain was also a novelist. Who says that poetry makes nothing happen? Mincemeat succeeded because invention, the imagination, drove the intelligence. By miserable comparison, Sweet Tooth, that precursor of decay, reversed the process and failed because intelligence tried to interfere with invention. Our moment was thirty years ago. In our decline we live in the shadow of giants. You and your colleagues must have known the project was rotten, and doomed from the start, but your motives were bureaucratic, you kept going because the order came down from on high. Your Peter Nutting should have listened to the chairman of the Arts Council, Angus Wilson, another novelist with connections to wartime intelligence.
I told you that it wasn’t anger that set me writing the pages in the parcel in front of you. But there was always an element of tit for tat. We both reported back. You lied to me, I spied on you. It was delicious, and I thought you had it coming. I really believed that I could wrap the matter up between the covers of a book and write you out of my system and say goodbye. But I reckoned without the logic of the process. I had to go to Cambridge to get your terrible degree, make love in a Suffolk cottage to a kind old toad, live in your Camden bedsit, suffer a bereavement, wash your hair and iron your skirts for work and suffer the morning Tube journey, experience your urge for independence as well as the bonds that held you to your parents and made you cry against your father’s chest. I had to taste your loneliness, inhabit your insecurity, your longing for praise from superiors, your unsisterliness, your minor impulses of snobbery, ignorance and vanity, your minimal social conscience, moments of self-pity, and orthodoxy in most matters. And do all this without ignoring your cleverness, beauty and tenderness, your love of sex and fun, your wry humour and sweet protective instincts. To recreate you on the page I had to become you and understand you (this is what novels demand), and in doing that, well, the inevitable happened. When I poured myself into your skin I should have guessed at the consequences. I still love you. No, that’s not it. I love you more.
You may think we’re too mired in deceit, that we’ve told each other enough lies to outlast a lifetime, that our deception and humiliation have doubled the reasons for going our separate ways. I prefer to think they’ve cancelled out and that we’re too entwined in mutual surveillance to let each other go. I’m in the business now of watching over you. Wouldn’t you like to do the same for me? What I’m working my way towards is a declaration of love and a marriage proposal. Didn’t you once confide to me your old-fashioned view that this was how a novel should end, with a ‘Marry me’? With your permission I’d like to publish one day this book on
the kitchen table. It’s hardly an apologia, more an indictment of us both, which would surely bind us further. But there are obstacles. We wouldn’t want you or Shirley or even Mr Greatorex to languish behind bars at Her Majesty’s leisure, so we’ll have to wait until well into the twenty-first century to be clear of the Official Secrets Act. A few decades is time enough for you to correct my presumptions on your solitude, to tell me about the rest of your secret work and what really happened between you and Max, and time to insert those paddings of the backward glance: in those days, back then, these were the years of … Or how about, ‘Now that the mirror tells a different story, I can say it and get it out of the way. I really was pretty.’ Too cruel? No need to worry, I’ll add nothing without your say-so. We won’t be rushing into print.
I’m sure I won’t always be an object of public contempt, but it may take a while. At least the world and I are now in agreement – I need an independent source of income. There’s a job coming up at University College London. They want a Spenser specialist and I’m told I have a decent chance. I’m feeling a little more confident that teaching needn’t prevent me writing. And Shirley told me she may have something for you in London, if you’re interested.
Tonight I’ll be on a plane to Paris to stay with an old school friend who says he can give me a room for a few days. When things have quietened down, when I’ve faded from the headlines, I’ll come straight back. If your answer is a fatal no, well, I’ve made no carbon, this is the only copy and you can throw it to the flames. If you still love me and your answer is yes, then our collaboration begins and this letter, with your consent, will be Sweet Tooth’s final chapter.
Dearest Serena, it’s up to you.
Acknowledgements
I owe particular thanks to Frances Stonor Saunders for her book, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War; and also to Paul Lashmar and Oliver James’s Britain’s Secret Propaganda War: 1948–1977, and to Hugh Wilford’s The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? The following were also extremely helpful: Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her World by Carol Brightman; The Theory & Practice of Communism by R.N. Carew Hunt; Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre; Reluctant Judas by Geoffrey Robertson; Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5 by Stella Rimington; The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew; Spooks: The Unofficial History of MI5 by Thomas Hennessey and Claire Thomas; Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer by Peter Wright; State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 by Dominic Sandbrook; When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies by Andy Beckett; Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s by Alwyn W. Turner; Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen.
I am grateful to Tim Garton Ash for his thoughtful comments; to David Cornwell for irresistible reminiscences; to Graeme Mitchison and Karl Friston for stripping out the Monty Hall problem; to Alex Bowler, and, as always, to Annalena McAfee.