Sweet Tooth

Serena has an affair with Tony Canning which lasts a few months. They meet on weekends in an isolated cottage in Suffolk, a second home which Tony’s wife Freida does not like. They spend long summer days together, though Serena does most of the physical labor because Tony complains of a sore back. They eat picnics, listen to opera recordings, and Tony talks at length about his childhood. For the young Serena, the mature Tony seems like a sophisticated “man of the world” (16). However, Tony’s naked body reminds 21-year-old Serena that her lover is 54 years old, and he seems almost an entirely different person from the erudite history professor whom she first met. He tries to guide her reading away from fiction toward history and provides her with impromptu lectures on his field of expertise. He teaches Serena about the history of Europe and British foreign policy in the cottage garden, though she begins to resent that their relationship is becoming more academic than romantic.

Tony’s attempts to teach Serena are preparation for her first interview with MI5, scheduled to take place in the coming September. He encourages her to study newspapers and current affairs, from which she learns about contemporary battles between right- and left-wing politicians. Serena is not particularly invested in the idea of British success, but she has no other real prospects in her life. Her parents might be more concerned about her ambitions, but her younger sister Lucy has fully embraced the hippie lifestyle of the late-1960s and drawn all their attention. Lucy is arrested with marijuana while catching a ferry to France and reveals that she is pregnant but does not know the identity of the baby’s father. Serena’s mother successfully covers up the scandal to preserve her husband’s reputation, though Lucy abandons her medical degree two months later. Throughout this tumultuous period, Serena is left in peace.

Two days before Serena’s interview, while Tony’s wife is supposedly away on vacation, he casually tells Serena to leave her blouse in the laundry basket in the cottage. He assumes his house cleaner will deal with the item, but Frieda discovers it. Serena discovers the issue when Tony collects her for their normal trip, only to be cold and distant. They stop in a deserted truck stop and Tony accuses Serena of deliberately causing problems in his marriage. He denies ever telling her to leave the blouse behind and Serena is almost too overwhelmed to defend herself. She knows that Tony will never admit to his mistake as he wants to view himself as the victim. Serena thinks of ways in which she can convince Tony of the error of his ways and attempts to throw his car keys into a nearby field. Tony catches her arm, takes the keys, and drives away. Serena is left alone by the side of the road and the relationship is over.

Serena refuses to cancel the interview, despite her breakup with Tony. She arrives in London and waits in a nondescript “depressing building” (25) near Soho. The first interview consists of filling out forms and answering biographical questions. The next stage involves a stern man named Harry Tapp who asks about her profile and her academic career. Serena stretches the truth of her answers slightly and recalls Tony’s advice, hoping to impress her interviewer. Serena hardly recognizes the intellectual, informed version of herself which she projects in the meeting. She is offered a job as a junior assistant officer, a low-ranking job which involves filing, indexing, and library work. This job is not the officer role which Tony had suggested that Serena might be offered, but she accepts anyway. As she leaves, Serena realizes that she does not want the job. She has lost her career prospects, her direction, and her lover in the space of 48 hours. Serena walks along the streets of London, thinking about her predicament. She passes adult stores and strip clubs, thinking about how the cultural upheaval of the 1960s does not appeal to her. By the time she reaches Charing Cross Road, she has decided to accept the job to have a purpose in life and a degree of independence.

Serena begins her job three weeks later. She follows in the same career path as Millie Trimingham, a single mother who eventually becomes the Director General of MI5. By the time Serena joins MI5, Trimingham is “already a legend among the new girls” (28) for her ability to rise rapidly through the ranks in a male dominated organization. Most of the women work on the Registry, a vast filing system of intelligence reports. Serena organizes lists of suspected communists in Gloucestershire and, under her own initiative, decides to start a file on a school headmaster named Harold Templeman who once attended a meeting of the Communist Party. Even though she is one of the lowest ranking people in MI5, Serena is thrilled by the idea that she works in intelligence. She cannot tell anyone the real nature of her job, so claims to work in a dull government department. She befriends Shirley Shilling, a working-class woman who types twice as fast as her middle-class colleagues and holds a dismissive attitude to authority. Shirley is well-travelled and more sexually liberal than her co-workers, traits which earn her scorn from some people but endear her to others. Shirley and Serena go out to loud, busy pubs in the evenings. They talk about men and their ambitions, but never their work as office gossip is strictly forbidden.

In 1973, Serena receives a letter from her ex-boyfriend Jeremy. He reveals that Tony Canning left his wife several months ago due to terminal cancer and then died on a small island in the Baltic Sea. Serena wonders whether Tony orchestrated their break-up so that she would not worry about him. She spends the next few weeks mourning Tony’s death and wondering whether she might have been able to see him one last time. All the while, she continues to work. She has few mementos of Tony, only a missing book, a bookmark, and her job. The more she works at MI5, the more Serena comes to accept that—in the intelligence agency—“women were of a lower caste” (35). One of the men in Serena’s intake catches her eye, a 32-year-old shy officer named Maximilian Greatorex. They attend dull MI5 lectures on communist ideology together and are the only two attendees who take an active interest in the subject matter. As she sits in the lecture, Serena studies him and imagines the ways in which she might make him more attractive with a change of clothes, hairstyle, and name. These fantasies allow her to believe that she is “getting over Tony” (37).

Serena and Max spend more time together, though Shirley does not like him. They sit on park benches in the spring and talk about their lives. Serena even talks to Max about Tony, who Max has heard of and even manages to guess the Finnish island where Tony spent his final days. Serena grows increasingly fond of Max as the months pass. Between Jeremy and Max, she realizes that she is attracted to “ill-dressed, old-fashioned” (38) men. She discovers that the Soviet Union fascinates him and that he does not regard communists as evil and vindictive, as so many others in the intelligence service do, though he regards the ideology as a well-intentioned but terrible idea. During one walk in the park, Serena asks Max to kiss her. Though he is not enthusiastic, they share a passionate first kiss. Afterwards, they sit dispassionately on a bench to discuss work and politics. Serena admits to her frustrations that she is being left behind at MI5 to work on the Soviet issue, while the new and exciting agenda is terrorism in Northern Ireland. When Max pushes back on her idea that the battle against communism is old and stale, she feels as though she hardly knows him. He kisses her again and then, between kisses, asks Serena about people Tony might have mentioned. She becomes annoyed at his interrogation, and they leave the park. Just as they part ways, Max admits that he is “becoming very attached” (40) to Serena and assures her that an interesting work project named Sweet Tooth may arrive very soon.