Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan Page B

crime I had not committed. I fiddled with my notebook – those notes I had hoped would earn me respect – and lowered my eyes, stared at my knees and so provided yet more evidence of my guilt.
    The Director General brought the occasion back to its formal proprieties by thanking the brigadier. There was applause, the brigadier and the DG left the room and people stood to go, and turned to look at me again.
    Suddenly Max was right in front of me. He said quietly, ‘Serena, that wasn’t a good idea.’
    I turned to appeal to Shirley but she was in the crowd going out through the door. I don’t know how I came bysuch a masochistic code of honour that prevented me from insisting I wasn’t the one who had called out. And yet I was sure that by now the DG would be asking for my name, and someone like Harry Tapp would be telling him.
    Later, when I caught up with Shirley and confronted her, she told me the whole thing was trivial and hilarious. I shouldn’t worry, she told me. It would do me no harm for people to think I had a mind of my own. But I knew that the opposite was true. It would do me a lot of harm. People at our level were not supposed to have minds of their own. This was my first black mark, and it was not the last.

6
    I was expecting a reprimand, but instead my moment came – I was sent out of the building on a secret mission, and Shirley went with me. We received our instructions one morning from a desk officer called Tim Le Prevost. I’d seen him about the place but he’d never spoken to us before. We were summoned to his office and invited to listen carefully. He was a small-lipped tightly buttoned chap with narrow shoulders and a rigid expression, almost certainly ex-army. A van was parked in a locked garage off a Mayfair street half a mile away. We were to drive to an address in Fulham. It was a safe house, of course, and in the brown envelope he tossed across his desk were various keys. In the back of the van we would find cleaning materials, a Hoover and vinyl aprons, which we were to put on before we set off. Our cover was that we worked for a firm called Springklene.
    When we arrived at our destination we were to give the place ‘a damned good going over’, which would include changing the sheets on all the beds and cleaning the windows. Clean linen had already been delivered. One of the mattresses on a single bed needed to be turned. It should have been replaced long ago. The lavatories and bath needed particular attention. The rotten food in the fridge was to be disposed of. All ashtrays were to be emptied. Le Prevost enunciatedthese homely details with much distaste. Before the day was out, we were to go to a small supermarket on the Fulham Road and buy basic provisions and three meals a day for two persons for three days. A separate trip was to be made to an off-licence, where we should buy four bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label. We were to settle for nothing else. Here was another envelope with fifty pounds in fivers. He wanted receipts and change. We were to remember to triple lock the front door on our way out with the three Banhams. Above all, we should never in our lives mention this address, not even to colleagues in this building.
    ‘Or,’ Le Prevost said, with a twist of his little mouth, ‘do I mean especially ?’
    We were dismissed and when were out of the building, heading along Curzon Street, it was Shirley, not me, who was scathing.
    ‘Our cover ,’ she kept saying in a loud whisper. ‘Our bloody cover. Cleaning ladies pretending to be cleaning ladies !’
    It was an insult, of course, though less of one then than it would be now. I didn’t say the obvious, that the Service could hardly bring in outside cleaners to a safe house, any more than it could call on our male colleagues – they were not only too grand, but they would have made a terrible job. I surprised myself with my stoicism. I think I must have absorbed the general spirit of camaraderie and cheerful devotion