5/9/2023 0 Comments Sweet tooth ianHappy to let them think she's "in with the scene", Serena accepts an exciting mission. yes, awfully well read and quite in with the scene.'" She starts working for MI5 anyway but is disappointed to find herself doing mere grunt work as junior assistant officer in a "grubby little office" in Curzon Street.Ĭontinuing in her spare time to work her way through the cream of contemporary fiction (in paperback: she can't afford hardbacks) she's startled to find herself summoned upstairs to face a roomful of men: "'We understand… you're rather well up on modern writing – literature, novels, that sort of thing – bang up to date on, what's the word… contemporary literature. When the professor dumps her – literally in a layby off the A45 – she is devastated. At Cambridge she falls, in an equally dutiful, quasi-somnambulant way, into an affair with a much older, much married history professor and finds herself being groomed for an interview with MI5. A speed-reader of novels, she toys at first with an English degree but is persuaded by her mother that it's her "duty as a woman" to grapple instead with numbers. Serena Frome – blond, "rather gorgeous" and "rhymes with plume" – graduates with a third in maths.
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