Sweet Tooth Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 hehad 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 feelsome 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