A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts. A man of conscience.

Meg Williams is ‘a bankrupt accountant — two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV’. She’s 45 and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill, where she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety.

Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a mobile phone and a letter-writing habit he can’t break. He’s a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection as he runs for his life.

Set in 2014, this is a novel of our times. Poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written, Serious Sweet is about two decent, damaged people trying to make moral choices in an immoral world: ready to sacrifice what’s left of themselves for honesty, and for a chance at tenderness. As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London — passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever — they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story.

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards — including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day . She lives in London and is a part-time lecturer in creative writing at Warwick University.

A family sits on a Tube train. They are all in a row and taking the Piccadilly Line. They have significant amounts of luggage. They seem tired and a little dishevelled, are clearly arriving from somewhere far away: a grandmother, a father, a mother and a daughter of about twelve months. The adults talk quietly in Arabic. The grandmother wears a headscarf, the wife does not.

Although her adult companions are quite dowdy, the girl is immaculately flamboyant. She has spangles on her perfectly white shoes and wears hairclips adorned with the shapes of butterflies. She shows colours upon colours. There is a complicated pattern of embroidery across her cardigan, like flowers and like stars. She sits on her father’s lap, with her back to windows full of autumn and declining light and she faces out at the rest of the carriage, and is self-assured, interested, genuinely charismatic. She fixes passengers with a quietly adult gaze and grins.

The girl has extraordinarily lovely eyes.

On her hands, her plump knuckles, the side of her throat and on her cheek and forehead there are recent injuries. Some are just scabbed abrasions, while others are more significant. Nothing has finished healing. It seems clear that something dreadful, perhaps explosive, has caught her — not badly, but badly enough. Some of the damage will make scars inevitable. The rest of her skin is as silk and downy and remarkable as any young child’s would be, but she has this persistence of wounds.

She practises waves — sometimes shares them with her grandmother and mother, sometimes with strangers who cannot resist waving back. Her force of personality is considerable. And she plainly assumes she is special and a focus of attention for only good reasons. And it ought to be possible that she is right in her assumption, that she always will be right. It will take repeated outside interventions to remove her self-assurance and happiness.

But this morning she is authoritative and waving, delighted. Whenever a passenger smiles or waves back, her relatives seem both proud and on the verge of dense emotions which could overwhelm. The adults’ obvious tensions and their sense of things unexpressed have rendered them mysterious to other occupants of the carriage — both mysterious and a source of quietly intimate concern.

The mother, the father, the grandmother — they keep themselves busy, offer their daughter healthy titbits and drinks from a variety of bags and packages. They have games also. They have tiny cloth books and a nice toy animal a little like a horse. They are as prepared as anybody can be.

THIS WAS — OH dear God — this was not what he’d — nonononono .

Shit .

Jon could feel his shirt dampening with a panic sweat, his jacket heavy and encumbering. He wasn’t dressed for this, for this problem, this level of problem.

‘I’m doing my best. Really. Come on now … Please …’

He was holding a bird.

Although he didn’t want to.

He had a bird in his hand.

And it would be better in the bush. Ha ha ha.

Although it couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the sole currently available bush — that bush was the problem.

The innuendo is a problem, too. But I’m ignoring it. If you ignore an innuendo it may go away. Unlike a problem.

‘Just … Just let me. I can fix this.’ Actually, he wasn’t remotely sure if he could fix this.

He was quite possibly lying. To a bird.

It was very young, the avian equivalent of a fattish toddler, or chip-fed adolescent maybe, and was fighting inside the curve of his left hand while Jon tried what he could with his right to make it happier. It wasn’t happy now, of course. It was biting him, clenching his left forefinger with its beak in a display of determined impotence, small bravery.

He didn’t want to upset it.

But he really couldn’t leave it alone — not in its current condition.

But not leaving it — rescuing it — was already making him late. The creature was sapping his morning, draining his schedule to dregs before it had started. And he could have done without this, to be frank, when his day was already arranged to be challenging, punishing, fatally flawed, to be easily toppled by an incautious sodding breath. So to speak.

Today is the day when I get what I deserve.

I think. Possibly …

As if anybody human, any human body could stand that.

So to speak.

But, even so, one would have to do one’s best with today, whatever happened. One always had to do the best one could — one being the only one available.

But then again one might be failing already to do any good at all — birds were sensitive, animals generally were sensitive and birds in particular could be overtaxed and flat-out murdered by simple shock. He might be killing it.

But he didn’t want or intend that … Which was a point in his favour.

But probably his lack of expertise would guarantee he screwed this up …

Too many buts — which isn’t like me. I’m the man who takes away the buts. I’m known for it — slightly. I can remove them from any public statement, press release, precis, report, discussion document, Green Paper, White Paper, any note on the back of an envelope, if you insist that you need me to help you and are having a delicate day, well, I’ll do what I can … I can, in theory, make having cancer be, well … still having cancer, but also, somehow, a favourable outcome if I’m given enough time. I do have that skill. I don’t want that skill, but it does seem to be required that Jon Corwynn Sigurdsson should hook out any sense of obstacles in the world and paint over any action’s possible consequences. If you feel that you can’t quite like some part of reality, I’ll step in and rephrase it for you.

But I would rather not.