On Loyalty, Deception, and the Rooms Between

We met in a house that belonged to none of us — a borrowed flat in Bloomsbury with high ceilings and a faulty radiator that clicked like a metronome counting down to nothing. Waters arrived first, which surprised me. She had her coat still on, standing at the window, looking down at the street with the expression of someone cataloguing details she might need later. Nguyen came ten minutes after, apologizing for the bus, carrying a paper bag with two bottles of wine that turned out to be Vietnamese coffee from a shop on Kingsland Road. “I couldn’t find wine I trusted at this hour,” he said. “And I’ve learned not to bring alcohol to a planning meeting. It makes everyone think they’re being brave.”

I’d set out notebooks and printed the combination spec. Neither of them looked at it.

“So,” Waters said, still at the window. “A woman in a colonial household. Serving two masters and loving a third. The reader can’t tell which loyalties are genuine.” She paused. “That’s a confidence trick. That’s a fingersmith story.”

“It’s also a spy story,” Nguyen said, pouring coffee into mugs he’d found in the kitchen. “The confidence trick and the spy story are the same architecture. Someone pretends to be who they are not. They gain access. They extract something. The question is whether they enjoy the pretending.”

“The question,” Waters said, turning from the window, “is whether the pretending becomes the thing itself. Whether the cover becomes the life. I’ve written that — Sue Trinder walks into Briar and she’s meant to be working a con, and instead she falls in love with the mark. The con doesn’t fail because she’s discovered. It fails because she stops wanting it to succeed.”

“Yes, but.” Nguyen sat down and wrapped both hands around his mug. “Your version is romantic. And I don’t mean that dismissively. I mean the engine of the reversal is desire — specifically erotic desire. My version is political. The Sympathizer doesn’t stop wanting his mission to succeed. He succeeds at it. He delivers intelligence, he betrays his general, and then he discovers that success feels exactly like failure because he genuinely cares about the people he’s betrayed. He’s not caught between two women. He’s caught between two countries that are also the same country split in half. The intimacy in my book is ideological.”

“I’d push back on the distinction,” Waters said. She’d finally taken off her coat and sat across from him at the table. “Erotic desire in a context of constraint is always political. When two women touch in a Victorian madhouse, or in a colonial household watched by servants and administrators — that touch is an act of resistance whether or not either of them intends it as such. The personal and the political aren’t in tension. They’re the same gesture.”

I thought about this. “The combination spec says colonial-era household,” I said. “It says the narrator serves two masters and loves a third. What if the serving and the loving are entangled in a way that neither of you is quite describing? Not romantic in Waters’s sense — not a con-artist falling for a mark. And not purely ideological in Nguyen’s sense — not a spy who realizes he sympathizes. What if the narrator’s intimacy with someone in the household is itself the intelligence? Not a distraction from the mission, but the mission’s instrument?”

Waters looked at me sharply. “You’re describing something uglier than either of our books.”

“I’m describing something more honest,” I said, then immediately regretted the word. “Not honest. More — tangled. The narrator gathers intelligence through intimacy. But the intimacy is real. Both things are true at the same time, and neither cancels the other.”

Nguyen nodded slowly. “That’s the double consciousness. Not choosing between the two truths. Holding them simultaneously and being destroyed by the holding.”

“Where?” Waters asked. “Where and when?”

“French Indochina,” I said. “The 1940s. The Japanese occupation, the Vichy administration still technically in place, the Viet Minh organizing in the countryside. It’s a moment where everyone is serving two masters already. The French administrators answer to Vichy and also to the Japanese. The Vietnamese servants answer to their French employers and also to — whoever is promising independence.”

“And the household,” Nguyen said. “You want a French colonial household. The administrator, his wife, and a Vietnamese woman who works there.”

“A woman who is placed there,” I said. “By the Viet Minh, or by some local resistance network. She’s not a servant who becomes radicalized. She arrives already serving the revolution. Her assignment is the house.”

“Good,” Waters said. “Because the opposite — the servant who awakens to politics through contact with the masters — is patronizing. She arrives with her own agenda. The house is her workplace in both senses.”

“But what does she actually do in the house?” Nguyen asked. “What’s her cover role?”

“She manages the household,” I said. “She runs the staff, handles the marketing, oversees the kitchen. She’s indispensable. The wife relies on her completely.”

“And the wife,” Waters said, leaning forward now. “Tell me about the wife.”

I hadn’t worked this out yet. “I think — she’s isolated. Her husband is absorbed in the administration, which under the Japanese is increasingly futile. She doesn’t speak Vietnamese well. She’s been in Indochina for years but she’s never quite arrived.”

“She’s a prisoner,” Waters said. “Not literally, but she’s in the asylum. The colonial household as a kind of Briar — beautiful grounds, locked gates, a woman who reads books all day because there’s nothing else. The servants see everything. The husband controls the money. And into this comes another woman who is both her keeper and her — ” She stopped.

“Her what?” Nguyen asked.

“Her reader. In Fingersmith, Maud is kept by her uncle to read pornography aloud. She is simultaneously a prisoner and a performer. The person who liberates her is also, initially, her jailer’s instrument. I want this Vietnamese woman to be the wife’s access to the country she lives in. The wife can’t navigate Hanoi or Saigon or wherever this is without her. She’s the translator, the guide, the interpreter. And that role gives her power, which she uses for the revolution. But it also creates genuine closeness.”

“Hanoi,” Nguyen said. “Set it in Hanoi, not Saigon. Hanoi in 1943 or 1944. The French still governing under the Japanese. The famine beginning in the countryside. The tension between the French who want to maintain the fiction of sovereignty and the Japanese who allow the fiction because it’s useful. Everyone performing a role they know is already over.”

“I like that,” I said. “The whole colony is a confidence trick. The French pretend they still govern. The Japanese pretend they’re merely allies. The Vietnamese pretend they’re servants. Everyone is performing, and the performance is the only thing preventing violence.”

“Until it doesn’t,” Nguyen said.

Waters was quiet for a moment. “The confession form,” she said. “From The Sympathizer. The narrator writing under duress. I think our narrator should be writing something too. Not a confession, necessarily. But the story should have a frame — some occasion for telling. Otherwise it’s just a historical narrative, and I don’t trust historical narratives that don’t account for who’s speaking and why.”

“Letters,” I said. “What if she’s writing letters? To someone she’s been separated from.”

“Too cozy,” Nguyen said. “Letters imply a recipient who cares. A confession is addressed to power. The person you’re confessing to holds your life. That’s what gives the Sympathizer its tension — every word is an attempt to survive.”

“A deposition, then,” I said. “After the war. After the French leave. She’s being questioned by someone — her own side, the Viet Minh, now in power. They want to know what happened in the house. Not because they doubt her loyalty but because they need to understand the intelligence she gathered and how she gathered it. And the how is the problem. The how involves the wife.”

Waters smiled for the first time. “Yes. That’s the engine. She’s confessing to comrades who will judge her not for betraying the French but for the form the betrayal took. The intimacy. The — ”

“The pleasure,” Nguyen said flatly. “You can say it. They’ll judge her for taking pleasure in the enemy’s household. For living well while others starved. For becoming close to a French woman in a way that exceeds operational necessity. That’s the double bind: she served the revolution perfectly, and the way she served it is the thing they can’t forgive.”

I felt the story assembling itself. Not a plot — not yet — but a pressure system. The narrator caught between what she did (served the revolution) and how she did it (through an intimacy that was genuine). The confession not as a form of guilt but as a form of survival: she must convince her interrogators that the closeness was tactical without entirely believing it herself.

“I want the house to be specific,” Waters said. “I want to know the tiles, the shutters, the mosquito nets, the way the light falls on the veranda at four in the afternoon. Colonial houses in Hanoi had a particular architecture — French villas adapted to the climate. I want the reader inside those rooms.”

“And I want the politics to be inside those rooms too,” Nguyen said. “Not outside, not in the countryside where the famine is happening. The famine is there, but it arrives in the house through rice shortages, through servants who disappear, through the administrator’s reports that he reads at dinner. The political is domestic. The domestic is political.”

“We agree on that, at least,” Waters said.

“We agree on more than you think,” Nguyen said. “We both write about people trapped in systems that offer them two choices, both of which are compromises. Your characters compromise through desire. Mine compromise through ideology. This narrator does both.”

“What about the husband?” I asked. “The French administrator. Is he a villain?”

“God, no,” Nguyen said. “He’s a bureaucrat. He believes in the mission civilisatrice the way a mid-level manager believes in the company — not with passion, but with the conviction that someone above him has a plan. He’s not cruel. He’s adequate. Which is worse.”

“He should be kind,” Waters said. “Specifically. He should be kind to the Vietnamese woman. He should treat her well, pay her fairly, ask after her family. Because the kindness of the colonizer is the hardest thing to write about. It doesn’t excuse anything, but it complicates the narrator’s hatred, which is what we need.”

“She doesn’t hate him,” I said.

“Exactly,” Nguyen said. “That’s the problem. She should hate him and she doesn’t, because he’s an individual and individuals are almost always more bearable than the systems they serve. The Sympathizer doesn’t hate the General. He even likes him. And the liking doesn’t stop him from betraying him. The liking makes the betrayal worse.”

We sat with that for a while. The radiator clicked. Nguyen poured more coffee. I noticed Waters writing something on the margin of the combination spec, which she’d finally picked up — a single word I couldn’t read.

“One more thing,” she said. “The ending. I don’t want redemption. I don’t want her to be forgiven by the revolution or to forgive herself. I don’t want the wife to appear at the end and say something meaningful. I want the last thing the reader feels to be the impossibility of reconciling what she did with why she did it.”

“The confession that doesn’t confess,” Nguyen said. “It reveals everything and resolves nothing.”

“Can I ask,” I said, “whether either of you thinks the narrator loved the wife? Actually loved her?”

Waters looked at Nguyen. Nguyen looked at the table.

“I think the narrator doesn’t know,” he said. “And I think the story should have the same problem.”

Waters nodded once. “Write that,” she said. “Write the not-knowing.”

I opened a notebook and began, but neither of them had gotten up to leave, and when I looked at the page ten minutes later I’d written nothing useful — only a sketch of a house I’d never seen, with its shutters drawn against an afternoon heat I’d never felt, and a woman moving through rooms whose doors all opened onto other rooms.