Sweet Tooth Read online

  I also had reservations. He could be hasty, impatient to get on to the next thing – the passions of his life were drinking and talking. Later, I sometimes thought he was selfish, definitely old school, racing towards his own moment, which he always gained with a wheezy shout. And too obsessed by my breasts, which were lovely then, I’m sure, but it didn’t feel right to have a man the Bishop’s age fixated in a near infantile way, virtually nursing there with a strange whimpering sound. He was one of those Englishmen wrenched aged seven from Mummy and driven into numbing boarding-school exile. They never acknowledge the damage, these poor fellows, they just live it. But these were minor complaints. It was all new, an adventure that proved my own maturity. A knowing, older man doted on me. I forgave him everything. And I loved those soft-cushioned lips. He kissed beautifully.

  Still, I liked him most when he was back in his clothes, with his fine parting restored (he used hair oil and a steel comb), when he was great and good once more, settling me in an armchair, deftly drawing the cork from a Pinot Grigio, directing my reading. And there was something I’ve since noticed over the years – the mountain range that separates the naked from the clothed man. Two men on one passport. Again, it hardly mattered, it was all one – sex and cooking, wine and short walks, talking. And we were also studious. In the early days, in the spring and early summer of that year, I was working for my finals. Tony could give me no help there. He sat across from me, writing a monograph about John Dee.

  He had scores of friends but, of course, he never invited anyone round when I was there. Only once did we have visitors. They came one afternoon in a car with a driver, two men in dark suits, in their forties, I guessed. Rather too curtly, Tony asked me if I would go for a longish walk in the woods. When I came back an hour and a half later, the men had gone. Tony gave no explanation and that night we went back to Cambridge.

  The cottage was the only place where we saw each other. Cambridge was too much of a village; Tony was too well known there. I had to hike with my holdall to a remote corner of town on the edge of a housing estate and wait in a bus shelter for him to come by in his ailing sports car. It was supposed to be a convertible but the concertina metal bits that supported the canvas top were too rusted to fold back. This old MGA had a map light on a chrome stem, and quivering dials. It smelled of engine oil and friction heat, the way a 1940s Spitfire might. You felt the warm tin floor vibrate beneath your feet. It was a thrill to step out of the bus queue, resentfully observed by ordinary passengers, while I turned from frog to princess and stooped to crawl in beside the professor. It was like getting into bed, in public. I shoved my bag into the tiny space behind me, and felt the seat’s cracked leather snag faintly against the silk of my blouse – one he had bought me in Liberty’s – as I leaned across to receive my kiss.

  When exams were over Tony said he was taking charge of my reading. Enough novels! He was appalled by my ignorance of what he called ‘our island story’. He was right to be. I’d studied no history at school beyond the age of fourteen. Now I was twenty-one, blessed with a privileged education, but Agincourt, the Divine Right of Kings, the Hundred Years War were mere phrases to me. The very word ‘history’ conjured a dull succession of thrones and murderous clerical wrangling. But I submitted to the tutelage. The material was more interesting than maths and my reading list was short – Winston Churchill and G.M. Trevelyan. The rest my professor would talk me through.

  My first tutorial was conducted in the garden under the cotoneaster. I learned that since the sixteenth century the foundation of English then British policy in Europe was the pursuit of the balance of power. I was required to read up on the Congress of Vienna of 1815. Tony was insistent that an equilibrium between nations was the foundation of a lawful international system of peaceful diplomacy. It was vital that nations held one another in check.

  I often did my reading alone after lunch while Tony took his nap – these sleeps became longer as the summer wore on and I should have taken notice. Initially, I impressed him with my speed-reading. Two hundred pages in a couple of hours! Then I disappointed him. I couldn’t answer his questions clearly, I wasn’t retaining information. He made me go back through Churchill’s version of the Glorious Revolution, tested me, groaned theatrically – You bloody sieve! – made me read again, asked more questions. These oral exams happened during walks in the woods, and over glasses of wine after the suppers he cooked. I resented his persistence. I wanted us to be lovers, not teacher and pupil. I was annoyed with him as well as myself when I didn’t know the answers. And then, a few querulous sessions later, I began to feel some pride, and not simply in my improved performance. I started to take note of the story itself. Here was something precious and it seemed as if I’d discovered it on my own, like Soviet oppression. Wasn’t England at the end of the seventeenth century the freest and most inquisitive society the world had ever known? Wasn’t the English Enlightenment of more consequence than the French? Wasn’t it right that England should have set itself apart to struggle against the Catholic despotisms on the Continent? And surely, we were the inheritors of that freedom.

  I was easily led. I was being groomed for my first interview, which was to take place in September. He had an idea of the kind of Englishwoman they would want to take on, or that he would want, and he worried that my narrow education would let me down. He believed, wrongly as it turned out, that one of his old students would be among my interviewers. He insisted I read a newspaper every day, by which of course he meant The Times, which in those days was still the august paper of record. I hadn’t bothered much with the press before, and I had never even heard of a leader. Apparently, this was the ‘living heart’ of a newspaper. At first glance, the prose resembled a chess problem. So I was hooked. I admired those orotund and lordly pronouncements on matters of public concern. The judgements were somewhat opaque and never above a reference to Tacitus or Virgil. So mature! I thought any of these anonymous writers was fit to be World President.

  And what were the concerns of the day? In the leaders, grand subordinate clauses orbited elliptically about their starry main verbs, but in the letters pages no one was in any doubt. The planets were out of kilter and the letter writers knew in their anxious hearts that the country was sinking into despair and rage and desperate self-harm. The United Kingdom had succumbed, one letter announced, to a frenzy of akrasia – which was, Tony reminded me, the Greek word for acting against one’s better judgement. (Had I not read Plato’s Protagoras?) A useful word. I stored it away. But there was no better judgement, nothing to act against. Everyone had gone mad, so everyone said. The archaic word ‘strife’ was in heavy use in those rackety days, with inflation provoking strikes, pay settlements driving inflation, thickheaded, two-bottle-lunch management, bloody-minded unions with insurrectionary ambitions, weak government, energy crises and power cuts, skinheads, filthy streets, the Troubles, nukes. Decadence, decay, decline, dull inefficiency and apocalypse …

  Among the favoured topics in letters to The Times were the miners, ‘a workers’ state’, the bipolar world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, flying pickets, and the Battle for Saltley. A letter from a retired rear admiral said the country resembled a rusting battleship holed below the waterline. Tony read the letter over breakfast and shook his copy noisily at me – newsprint was crinkly and loud back then.

  ‘Battleship?’ he fumed. ‘It isn’t even a corvette. This is a bloody rowing boat going down!’

  That year, 1972, was just the beginning. When I started reading the paper the three-day week, the next power cuts, the government’s fifth state of emergency were not so far ahead of us. I believed what I read, but it seemed remote. Cambridge looked much the same, and so did the woods around the Cannings’ cottage. Despite my history lessons I felt I had no stake in the nation’s fate. I owned one suitcase of clothes, fewer than fifty books, some childhood things in my bedroom at home. I had a lover who adored me and cooked for me and never threatened to leave his wife. I had one obligatio
n, a job interview – weeks away. I was free. So what was I doing, applying to the Security Service to help maintain this ailing state, this sick man of Europe? Nothing, I was doing nothing. I didn’t know. A chance had come my way and I was taking it. Tony wanted it so I wanted it and I had little else going on. So why not?

  Besides, I still regarded myself as accountable to my parents and they were pleased to hear that I was considering a respectable wing of the Civil Service, the Department of Health and Social Security. It may not have been the atom-smashing my mother had in mind, but its solidity in turbulent times must have soothed her. She wanted to know why I had not come to live at home after finals, and I was able to tell her that a kindly older tutor was preparing me for my ‘board’. It made sense, surely, to take a tiny cheap room by Jesus Green and ‘work my socks off’, even at weekends.

  My mother might have expressed some scepticism, if my sister Lucy hadn’t created a diversion by getting herself into such trouble that summer. She was always louder, feistier, a bigger risk-taker, and had been far more convinced than I was by the liberating sixties as they limped into the next decade. She was also two inches taller now and was the first person I ever saw wearing ‘cut-off’ jeans. Loosen up, Serena, be free! Let’s go travelling! She caught hippiedom just as it was going out of fashion, but that’s how it was in provincial market towns. She was also telling the world that her sole aim in life was to be a doctor, a general practitioner or perhaps a paediatrician.

  She pursued her ambitions by a roundabout route. That July she was a foot passenger off the Calais to Dover ferry and was interrupted by a customs official, or rather, by his dog, a barking bloodhound suddenly excited by the aroma of her backpack. Inside, wrapped in unlaundered T-shirts and dog-proof layers of plastic, was half a pound of Turkish hashish. And inside Lucy, though this was also not declared, was a developing embryo. The identity of the father was uncertain.

  My mother had to devote a good portion of every day for the next few months to a quadruple mission. The first was to save Lucy from prison, the second, to keep her story out of the newspapers, the third, to prevent her being sent down from Manchester, where she was a second-year medical student, and the fourth, after not much agonising, was to arrange the termination. As far as I could tell from my crisis visit home (Lucy smelling of patchouli and sobbing as she crushed me in her sun-tanned arms), the Bishop was prepared to bow his head and take whatever the heavens had prepared for him. But my mother was already at the controls, fiercely activating the networks that extend locally and nationally from any twelfth-century cathedral. For example, the Chief Constable for our county was a regular lay preacher and knew of old his counterpart, the Chief Constable of Kent. A Conservative Association friend was acquainted with the Dover magistrate before whom Lucy made her first appearance. The editor of our local paper was wanting to get his tone-deaf twin sons into the cathedral choir. Pitch of course was relative, but nothing could be taken for granted, and it was, my mother assured me, all jolly hard work, and none of it more so than the abortion, medically routine but, to Lucy’s surprise, deeply upsetting. Eventually she received a six-month suspended sentence, nothing appeared in the press, and a Mancunian university rector or some such eminence was assured of my father’s support on an arcane matter at the upcoming Synod. My sister returned to her studies in September. Two months later she dropped out.

  So I was left in peace during July and August to loll about Jesus Green, reading Churchill, bored, waiting for the weekend and the hike to the bus stop on the city boundary. It would not be long before I enshrined the summer of ’72 as a golden age, a precious idyll, but it was only Friday to Sunday evening that held the pleasures. Those weekends were an extended tutorial in how to live, how and what to eat and drink, how to read newspapers and hold up my end of an argument and how to ‘gut’ a book. I knew I had an interview coming up, but it never crossed my mind to ask why Tony took such trouble over me. If I had I would have probably thought that such attentions were part of what it meant to have an affair with an older man.

  Of course, the situation couldn’t last and it all came apart during a stormy half-hour by a busy main road, two days before I was due at my interview in London. The precise sequence of events is worth recording. There was a silk blouse, the one I’ve already mentioned, bought for me by Tony in early July. It was well chosen. I liked the expensive feel of it on a warm evening and Tony told me more than once how he liked the plain loose cut of it on me. I was touched. He was the first man in my life to buy me an article of clothing. A sugar daddy. (I don’t think the Bishop had ever been in a shop.) It was an old-fashioned thing, this present, with a touch of kitsch about it, and awfully girlish, but I loved it. When I wore it I was in his embrace. The pale blue copperplate words on the label appeared distinctly erotic – ‘wild silk hand wash’. Round the neck and cuffs were bands of broderie anglaise, and two pleats on the shoulder were matched by two little tucks at the back. This gift was an emblem, I suppose. When it was time to come away, I would bring it back to my bedsit, wash it in the basin, and iron and fold it so that it would be ready for the next visit. Like me.

  But on this occasion in September we were in the bedroom and I was packing my things away when Tony interrupted what he was saying – he was talking about Idi Amin of Uganda – to tell me to chuck the blouse in the laundry basket along with one of his shirts. It made sense. We would be back soon and the housekeeper, Mrs Travers, would be in the following day to take care of everything. Mrs Canning was in Vienna for ten days. I remembered the moment well because it gave me such pleasure. That our love was routine, taken for granted, with an immediate future measured in three or four days was comforting. I was often lonely in Cambridge, waiting for Tony’s call to the payphone in the hallway. In a passing moment of something like wifely entitlement, I lifted the wicker lid and dropped my blouse on top of his shirt and thought no more about it. Sarah Travers came in three times a week from the nearest village. We once spent a pleasant half-hour shelling peas together at the kitchen table and she told me about her son, gone off to be a hippie in Afghanistan. She said it with pride, as though he’d joined the army for a necessary and dangerous war. I didn’t like to think about it too closely, but I assumed she had seen a succession of Tony’s women friends pass through the cottage. I don’t think she cared, as long as she was paid.

  Back on Jesus Green four days went by and I heard nothing. Obediently, I read up on the Factory Acts and the Corn Laws and studied the newspaper. I saw some friends who were passing through, but never wandered far from the phone. On the fifth day I went to Tony’s college, left a note with the porter and hurried home, worried that I might have missed his call. I couldn’t ring him – my lover had taken care not to give me his home phone number. He rang that evening. His voice was flat. Without greeting, he instructed me to be at the bus stop the following morning at ten. I was halfway through asking him a plaintive question when he hung up. Naturally, I didn’t sleep much that night. Amazing to think that I lay awake worrying about him, when I should have known in my silly heart that I was for the chop.

  At dawn I took a bath and made myself fragrant. By seven I was ready. What a hopeful fool, to have packed a bag with the underwear he liked (black of course, and purple) and plimsolls for walking in the woods. I was at the bus stop by nine twenty-five, worried that he’d be early and disappointed not to find me there. He came around ten fifteen. He pushed open the passenger door and I crawled in, but there was no kiss. Instead he kept both hands on the wheel and pulled away hard from the kerb. We drove ten miles or so and he wouldn’t speak to me. His knuckles were white from his grip and he would only look ahead. What was the matter? He wouldn’t tell me. And I was frantic, intimidated by the way he swung his little car out across the lanes, overtaking recklessly on rises and bends, as if to warn me of the storm to come.

  He doubled back towards Cambridge on a roundabout and pulled into a lay-by off the A45, a place of oily, littered grass with a kios
k on worn bare ground that sold hot dogs and burgers to lorry drivers. At this time in the morning the stall was shuttered and padlocked and no one else was parked there. We got out. It was the worst kind of day at the end of summer – sunny, windy, dusty. To our right was a widely spaced row of parched sycamore saplings and on the other side of it the traffic was whining and roaring. It was like being on the edge of a race track. The lay-by was a couple of hundred yards long. He set off along it and I kept by his side. To talk we almost had to shout.

  The first thing he said was, ‘So your little trick didn’t work.’