So the three of us stood at the bar for a long time drinking. The men talked books and gossiped about writers, particularly the poet Robert Lowell, a friend of Hamilton and possibly going mad; and football, on which Tom was weak, but adept at making good use of the two or three things he knew. It didn’t occur to anyone to sit down. Tom ordered pork pies with a round of drinks but Hamilton didn’t touch his, and later used his plate and then the pie itself as an ashtray. I assumed that Tom, like me, dreaded leaving the conversation, for then we would have to have a row. After my second glass I chipped in occasionally, but mostly I pretended to listen while I thought about Shirley. So much change! She had made it as a writer, so no real coincidence in her meeting Tom in the Pillars of Hercules – he had told me it was already established as the
New Review
’s office extension, anteroom and canteen, and in preparation for the launch dozens of writers came through. She had shed her
decency along with the fat. She’d shown no surprise at finding me here, so she must have known my connection to Tom. When the time came for me to be angry she’d get more than her share. I’d give her hell.
But I felt nothing now. The pub closed and we followed Hamilton through the afternoon gloom to Muriel’s, a tiny dark drinking club where men of a certain age with jowly ruined faces were perched on stools at the bar, pronouncing loudly on international affairs.
As we came in one said loudly, ‘China? Fuck off. China!’
We made a huddle on three velvet armchairs in a corner. Tom and Ian had reached that point in a drinking session when the conversation patrols endlessly the tiny perimeters of a minor detail. They were talking about Larkin, about some lines at the end of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, one of the poems Tom had made me read. They were disagreeing, though without much passion, about an ‘arrow shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain’. Hamilton thought the lines were perfectly clear. The train journey was over, the just-married couples were released to go their ways, into London, into their separate fates. Tom less laconically said the lines were dark, touched with foreboding, the elements were negative – a sense of falling, wet, lost, somewhere. He used the word ‘liquescence’ and Hamilton said drily, ‘Liquescence, eh?’ Then they went around again, finding clever ways to make the same points, though I sensed that the older man may have merely been sounding Tom out for his judgement or agility in argument. I don’t think Hamilton cared either way.
I wasn’t listening all the time. The men ignored me and I was beginning to feel a bit of a writer’s moll as well as a fool. I made a mental list of my possessions in the Brighton flat – I might not be going there again. A hairdryer, underwear, a couple of summer frocks and a swimsuit, nothing I’d seriously miss. I was persuading myself that leaving Tom would lift from me the burden of honesty. I could go with my secret
intact. We were drinking brandy with coffee at this point. I didn’t mind parting from Tom. I’d forget him quickly and find someone else, someone better. It was all just fine, I could take care of myself, I’d spend my time well, dedicate myself to work, read Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, which I had lined up by my bed, use the Bishop’s twenty-pound note to take a week’s holiday in spring and be an interesting single woman in a small Mediterranean hotel.
We stopped drinking at six and went down into the street and walked in freezing rain towards Soho Square. Hamilton was due to give a reading at the Poetry Society in Earls Court that evening. He shook Tom’s hand, embraced me, and then we watched him hurry away, nothing in his gait to suggest the kind of afternoon he’d had. And then Tom and I were alone, not sure which direction to walk in. Now it begins, I thought, and at that moment, revived by the cold rain in my face, and understanding the true measure of my loss and Tom’s treachery, I was overcome with sudden desolation and couldn’t move. A great black weight was on me and my feet were heavy and numb. I stood looking across the square towards Oxford Street. Some chanting Hare Krishna types, shaven-head dupes with tambourines, were filing back into their headquarters. Dodging their god’s rain. I detested every last one of them.
‘Serena, darling, what’s the matter?’
He stood unsteadily before me, pissed, but no less good an actor for that, his face puckered with theatrical concern.
I could see us clearly, as though from a window two flights up, with the view distorted by black-edged raindrops. A couple of Soho drunks about to have a row on the filthy slick pavement. I would have preferred to walk away, for the outcome was obvious. But I still couldn’t move.
Instead, I started off the scene, and spoke through a weary sigh. ‘You’re having an affair with my friend.’
I sounded so plaintive and childish, and stupid too, as though an affair with a stranger would have been just fine.
He was looking at me in amazement, and a fine show of being baffled. I could have hit him.
‘What are you …?’ Then, a clumsy imitation of a man struck by a brilliant idea.
‘Shirley Shilling! Oh God, Serena. Do you really think that? I should have explained. I met her at the Cambridge reading. She was with Martin Amis. I didn’t know until today that you once worked in the same office somewhere. Then you and I started talking with Ian and I forgot all about it. Her father’s just died and she’s devastated. She would have come over but she was too upset …’
He put his hand on my shoulder but I shook him off. I didn’t like to be pitied. And I thought I saw traces of amusement around his mouth.
I said, ‘It was obvious, Tom. How dare you!’
‘She’s written a soppy romantic novel. But I like her. That’s all there is to it. Her dad owned a furniture store and she was close to him, she worked for him. I felt truly sorry for her. Honestly, darling.’
At first I was simply confused, suspended between believing and hating him. Then, as I began to doubt myself, I felt a delicious sulky obstinacy, a perverse refusal to let go of the obliterating idea that he had made love to Shirley.
‘I can’t bear it, my poor darling, you’ve been suffering all afternoon. That’s why you were so quiet. And of course! You must have seen me holding her hand. Oh my sweetheart, I’m so sorry. I love you, only you, and I’m so sorry …’
I kept a closed face as he went on protesting, and comforting me. Believing him didn’t make me less angry with him. I was angry that he was making me feel foolish, that he might be secretly laughing at me, that he would work this up into a funny story. I was determined to make him try all the harder to win me back. I was coming to the point where I knew very well I was only pretending to doubt him. Perhaps that was
better than appearing such a dolt, and besides, I didn’t know how to get out of it, how to change my entrenched position and look plausible. So I remained silent, but when he took my hand, I didn’t refuse him, and when he drew me towards him I complied reluctantly and let him kiss the top of my head.
‘You’re drenched, you’re shivering,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘We need to get you indoors.’
I nodded, signalling the end of my truculence, the end of my disbelief. Even though the Pillars of Hercules was only a hundred yards away along Greek Street, I knew that indoors meant my room.
He pulled me closer towards him. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We said it on the beach. We love each other. It’s meant to be simple.’
I nodded again. All I could think of now was how cold I was, and how drunk. I heard a taxi’s engine behind us and felt him turn and stretch to wave it down. When we were installed and heading north, Tom turned on the heater. It produced a roar and a trickle of cool air. On the screen that divided us from the cabbie was an advertisement for a taxi like this one, and as the lettering was drifting upwards and sideways, I worried that I would be sick. At my place I was relieved to find that my housemates were out. Tom ran a bath for me. The scalding water sent up clouds of steam that condensed on the icy walls and ran down to puddle on the floral lino. We got in the bath together, topped and tailed, and massaged each other’s feet and sang old Beatles songs. He got out long before me, dried himself and went off to find more towels. He was drunk too, but he was tender as he helped me out of the bath, and dried me like a child, and led me to the bed. He went downstairs and came back with mugs of tea and got in beside me. Then he took very special care of me.
Months, and then years later, after all that happened,
whenever I woke in the night and needed comfort, I’d summon that early winter evening when I lay in his arms and he kissed my face, and told me over and over again how silly I’d been, how sorry he was, and how he loved me.
20
A
t the end of February, not long before election day, the Austen Prize judges announced their shortlist and on it, tucked among the familiar giants – Burgess, Murdoch, Farrell, Spark and Drabble – was a complete unknown, one T.H. Haley. But no one took much notice. The press release was badly timed because that day everyone was talking about Enoch Powell’s attack on the Prime Minister, his own party leader. Poor fat Ted! People had stopped worrying about the miners and ‘Who governs?’ and had started worrying about 20 per cent inflation and economic collapse and whether we should listen to Powell, vote Labour and get out of Europe. This was not a good moment to ask the country to contemplate contemporary fiction. Because the three-day week had successfully prevented blackouts, the whole affair was now regarded as a fraud. Coal stocks were not so low after all, industrial production was not much affected and there was a general impression that we’d been frightened for nothing, or for political purposes, and that none of it should have happened.
And so, against all the predictions, Edward Heath, his piano, sheet music and seascapes were moved out of Downing Street and Harold and Mary Wilson were installed for a second spell. On a TV at work I saw the new Prime Minister
standing outside Number Ten in early March looking stooped and frail, almost as weary as Heath. Everyone was weary, and at Leconfield House they were depressed as well as weary because the country had chosen the wrong man.
I’d voted for Wilson a second time, for that wily survivor of the left, and I should have been more cheerful than most but I was exhausted from insomnia. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shortlist. Of course, I wanted Tom to win, I wanted it more than he did. But I’d heard from Peter Nutting that he and others had read
From the Somerset Levels
in a proof copy and considered it ‘flimsy and pathetic’ as well as ‘fashionably negative and boring’ – Nutting told me this when he stopped me one lunchtime in Curzon Street. He strode on, striking the pavement with his rolled umbrella, leaving me to understand that if my choice was suspect, then so was I.
Gradually, press interest in the Austen Prize picked up and attention fixed on the only new name on the list. No first-time novelist had ever won the Austen. The shortest novel to be honoured in its one-hundred-year history was twice the length of
The Levels
. A lot of coverage seemed to suggest there was something unmanly or dishonest about a short novel. Tom was profiled in the
Sunday Times
, photographed in front of the Palace Pier looking nakedly happy and vulnerable. A couple of articles mentioned that he had a grant from the Foundation. We were reminded of how Tom’s book was rushed into print to make the Prize deadline. Journalists had not yet read his novel because Tom Maschler was tactically holding back review copies. An unusually benign diary piece in the
Daily Telegraph
said that it was generally agreed Tom Haley was handsome and girls went ‘wobbly’ when he smiled, at which I felt a vertiginous moment of jealousy and possession. What girls? Tom now had a phone in the flat and I was able to speak to him from an odorous phone box on the Camden Road.
‘There are no girls,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They must be in the newspaper office, wobbling in front of my photograph.’
He was amazed to be on the list, but Maschler had phoned to say that he would have been furious if Tom had been left off. ‘It’s too obvious,’ he’d apparently said. ‘You’re a genius and it’s a masterpiece. They wouldn’t dare ignore it.’
But the newly discovered writer was able to remain detached from the Austen fuss, even though he was bemused by the press.
The Levels
was already behind him, it was a ‘five-finger exercise’. I warned him not to say so to any journalist while the judges were still making up their minds. He said he didn’t care, he had a novel to write and it was growing at a pace that only obsession and a new electric typewriter could deliver. His output was all I knew of the book. Three or four thousand words most days, sometimes six, and once, in an afternoon and all-night frenzy, ten. The numbers meant little to me, though I took my cue from the croaky excitement down the phone.
‘Ten thousand words, Serena. Do that every day for a month and I’d have an
Anna Karenina
!’
Even I knew that he wouldn’t. I felt protective of him and worried that when they came, the reviews would turn against him and he’d be surprised at his own disappointment. For now his only anxiety was that a trip he’d just taken to Scotland for research had interrupted his concentration.
‘You need a rest,’ I said from the Camden Road. ‘Let me come at the weekend.’
‘OK. But I’ll have to go on writing.’
‘Tom, please tell me just a little bit about it.’
‘You’ll see it before anyone else, I promise.’
The day after the shortlist was announced I received, in place of the usual summons, a visit from Max. He went first to stand by Chas Mount’s desk for a chat. As it happened we were frantic that morning. Mount had written the first draft of an internal report, a retrospective in which the RUC and the army also had a hand. The issue was what Mount bitterly referred to as ‘the running sore’, by which he meant internment without trial. Back in 1971 scores of the wrong people
had been rounded up because the RUC Special Branch suspect lists were out of date and useless. And no killers from the loyalist side had been arrested, no members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. The detainees were kept in inadequate accommodation without being properly separated. And all due process, all legality abandoned – a propaganda gift to our enemies. Chas Mount had served in Aden and had always been sceptical of the interrogation techniques the army and RUC were using during internment – black hoods, isolation, restricted diet, white noise, hours of standing. He was keen to demonstrate that the Service’s hands were relatively clean. We girls in the office took it on trust that they were. The whole sorry affair was heading towards the European Court of Human Rights. The RUC, at least as he explained it, wanted to drag us down with them, and the army was on their side. They weren’t pleased at all by his version of events. Someone on our side higher up than Mount had sent his draft report back and told him to rewrite it to keep all factions happy. It was after all ‘only’ an internal report and would soon be filed and forgotten.