I Spy

by Claire Kendal

  All in all, the effect of my grandmother’s cautionary tales was not what she intended. They just gave me ideas about the interesting things I could do, and alerted me to potential disasters so I could try to figure out how to avoid them, though I didn’t always succeed.

  My grandmother was forever muttering about listeners at keyholes being vexed, and eavesdroppers never hearing good of themselves. ‘That is what you must reflect upon, Holly,’ she would say.

  The best response to this, like most of the things my grandmother said, was the word, ‘Yes’, usually accompanied by a solemn nod. But in truth, the only thing I reflected upon was how to avoid detection.

  Soon after they moved into the house next door, Peggy discovered me lying like a tiger along a high branch of my grandmother’s apple tree. It was the end of summer, and I was watching Peggy play with Milly on the other side of the fence that ran between our houses, while James manned the barbeque.

  Peggy thought that this incident was an aberration. She saw me as a sweet little girl whose loneliness and longing for family had put her in danger, though it was Peggy’s own startled screech at seeing me in the tree that almost made me fall out of it. But my spying was no aberration. I simply made sure Peggy never caught me at it again.

  Peggy was in the habit of leaving the laundry room window open so she could dangle out the hose that vented the hot air from her tumble dryer. The laundry room was Peggy’s favourite place for private conversations. I could peek from my father’s dusty first-floor study and see right into that laundry room.

  I loved my father’s study, where I often hunted for clues about my parents, though I only ever found one thing. A photograph of them on their wedding day, hidden in his copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I liked to sit and read in my father’s old armchair, which was covered in green leather. I’d dragged it near the window. From there, I could monitor what was happening at Peggy’s. If her washing machine and tumble dryer were off, then listening in was no challenge. In fact, I regarded such a circumstance as an invitation.

  And that is how I came to hear Peggy and Milly talking together when I was back home in St Ives, two months after my disastrous final MI5 interview. As soon as I saw that the laundry room light was on and Peggy and Milly had gone in, I ran downstairs, slipped into the garden, squeezed through the rip in the fence Milly and I always used as a not-very-secret passage, and flattened myself against a tangle of Peggy’s honeysuckle.

  ‘She’s so deflated,’ Peggy was saying, ‘since she’s come home. I think she’s embarrassed about the reason – she can’t bear to look your father in the eye.’

  I’d had to say something about why MI5 didn’t give me the job, because Peggy and James and Milly knew I’d got to the final stage of the recruitment process. There was no disguising the outcome.

  ‘She was brave to tell us, Mum,’ Milly said. ‘And fucking stupid.’

  ‘You don’t need to use that language, Milly.’

  But Milly was right. I had been stupid to reveal the truth about the way I’d messed up. What had possessed me to give them the details? Perhaps I did it because it was the most un-spy-like action I could take, a kind of embracing of my failure. It was an act of self-sabotage I decided never to repeat.

  ‘Sorry.’ Milly didn’t sound at all sorry. ‘People say all sorts of shit.’

  ‘Honestly, Milly,’ Peggy said.

  ‘She wanted us to see her real self,’ said Milly. ‘To see her at her worst and still love her. She knows she’s not going to save the world by fucking someone.’

  I imagined Peggy rolling her eyes in weariness at Milly’s continued swearing. ‘She’d never have actually done it,’ Peggy said. ‘Those recruiters were fools to believe she would.’

  The scent of honeysuckle was choking me, mixed with the nearby roses I had been trying not to stab myself with. Somehow, though, a thorn caught my finger and my eyes welled up as I sucked away the blood and hoped that Peggy was right.

  Now A Discovery

  Five and a half years later

  * * *

  Bath, Tuesday, 25 December 2018

  I know the day is going to be bad as soon as I see the kingfisher. He is so perfect, captured beneath the surface of the ice. He stops me in my run as if I have slammed into an invisible wall. Just like him.

  I peer over the railings of the small bridge at the frozen water below, for a closer look. He must have been fishing, when the water thickened and trapped him. The vivid blue of his tail, and the dots on the top of his head, are clear beneath the thin layer above him. He is beautifully preserved in his ice cube. There is no sign he fought it, with those wings cupping his body so peacefully, his beak closed and pointed straight ahead.

  I cannot bear to look any more, and if I don’t get going I will be late for my visit to my grandmother at the nursing home. So I tear my eyes away and resume my run, trying to tell myself it isn’t a bad omen, but knowing deep down that it must be.

  My grandmother has refused to get out of bed today, so Katarina takes me upstairs to her room. The door is open a crack, but not wide enough for me to see in. The sharp scent of lemon disinfectant makes the inside of my nose prickle.

  ‘Who’s that!’ my grandmother says.

  I push the door wide open. ‘It’s me, Grandma.’

  ‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’ My grandmother rattles the safety rails of her bed like an angry child. ‘You’re not Princess Anne.’

  ‘No. Sorry. It’s just me. Just Holly.’ It isn’t possible for my grandmother to call me anything else. I moved her from the nursing home in St Ives to this one in Bath twenty months ago, and I told Katarina and the others who look after her here that Holly has always been my grandmother’s nickname for me, but that my actual name is Helen.

  ‘Go away. Go get Princess Anne.’

  ‘After I’ve spent a little time with you.’ I bend to kiss my grandmother’s cheek. She is wearing the lilac nightdress and matching bed jacket that I asked Katarina to put under the tree for her. Katarina has arranged the pillows so that my grandmother is sitting up.

  I move a slippery vinyl chair closer to the bed. I lift one of her hands. The skin is loose, and so thin it tears when she bruises. The surface is a jungle of liver spots and protruding green veins. Her fingers are bent as the gnarled branches of a weathered tree. ‘Happy Christmas, Grandma.’

  ‘Is it Christmas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that why you’re wearing that ridiculous red hat?’

  ‘Yes. Katarina gave it to me. There’s going to be a lovely party downstairs. Will you let me help you dress? We can go together.’

  ‘I had a feeling something was happening today.’ She grimaces.

  ‘It’s also my birthday, Grandma.’

  ‘How old are you then?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  ‘Have you seen my Christmas present?’

  ‘You’re wearing it. It’s a pretty colour on you.’

  She examines her sleeve as if it were covered in bird poo. ‘Not this.’ She stresses this to make her disgust clear. ‘My new photograph.’

  The frame sits on her bedside table, beside a plastic jug of water with a matching tumbler in an unfortunate shade of urine-yellow. Almost immediately, my grandmother blocks it from my view, lurching her upper body to the side to try to grab at the photograph with her arthritic fingers. There is a crash, and a cry. ‘Blast! Oh, oh oh!’ She is screaming in frustration.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’ I am out of my chair and rushing to the other side of the bed. Water has sloshed everywhere. The jug has bounced onto the linoleum floor.

  ‘Don’t be upset.’ I am already in her efficient wet room with its accessible shower and toilet and sink, grabbing a vinegar-smelling towel. I retrieve the frame from beneath the bed where it landed, and wrap it in the towel.

  ‘Is Princess Anne all right?’ my grandmother says.

  I can feel my face creasing in puzzlement as I sweep the towel over the floor wit
h a foot. I study the image inside the frame. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Don’t talk that way. You’re a heathen – you cannot be my granddaughter.’

  ‘But it really is Princess Anne.’

  ‘Of course it is. Kindly answer my question, please.’ My grandmother makes the words kindly and please sound like insults. ‘I asked if Princess Anne is all right.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  Her ears are still as sharp as the wolf’s, but I repeat the word. ‘Yes.’

  ‘No cracks?’

  ‘Not even a hairline fracture.’ I cannot tear my eyes from the picture, which has been cut from an article that appeared in a local newspaper last September. Three whole months ago. All that time, I was living my poor imitation of a normal life, not knowing this was out there.

  Princess Anne’s skirt and jacket are sewn from maroon and navy tartan. My grandmother is wearing her favourite dress. A background of dried earth, sprinkled with flowers the shade of wet mud. This is an adventurous pattern and pallet for my grandmother. Her white wisps of hair look lit from within.

  My grandmother is standing, a wooden walking stick shaped like a candy cane in each hand, and care workers on both sides, ready to catch her if she crumbles. I think of my grandmother as tall, but she is stooped and tiny in front of Princess Anne, and looking up at her with a slant eye. My grandmother is not trying to please. My grandmother is never trying to please. Princess Anne bends towards her. The princess’s back is straight and perfect and in line with her neck and head. Only the hinge of her waist moves. The impression is that she is paying homage to my grandmother, rather than the reverse, as you would expect. This is exactly how my grandmother thinks things should be.

  My grandmother says, ‘Will Princess Anne be coming to see me again soon, Holly?’ Despite my shock, and my fear, a small part of me registers that at least my grandmother has remembered my name. ‘As soon as she gets a chance, Grandma.’

  I am not much of a royal follower. But staring at the photograph, I recall Princess Anne’s visit, and the excitement it occasioned in the residents and staff at the care home. I was working that day, and happy to miss it.

  Katarina hurries in, wearing a red Santa hat with a white pom-pom that matches the one she put on my head when I arrived. She has on a tinsel bracelet and necklace, too. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Just a water spill. All dry now.’ I hold out the photograph. ‘How thoughtful,’ I say to Katarina. ‘Is this from you?’

  She nods. ‘I think Mrs Lawrence likes it.’

  ‘She does. That was so kind of you.’ I am trying to seem pleased when I am anything but. But the damage is done. However I seem, it will make no difference now.

  There is a tagline beneath the photograph. The Princess Royal talks to Oaks resident Beatrice Lawrence, 93.

  It is the sight of my grandmother’s name in print that makes my breath catch in a blend of fear and nausea. All the things I have done. All the measures I have taken. Except for this photograph. This is what I missed. What I didn’t foresee. A tiny thing that might make all the difference. The chance is small, but I know better than anybody that I must prepare for the possibility that this will lead him straight to me.

  Then Black Star Sapphire

  Two years and eight months earlier

  * * *

  Cornwall, April 2016

  The three years since I failed to join MI5 passed slowly, with little to show for them. I spent the time taking care of my grandmother, moving her into a nursing home, and working behind the counter of the town pharmacy that Milly’s father owned.

  Everything changed when Milly helped me to get a new job as a ward clerk in the hospital where she worked as a nurse. On my first day, when there was a telephone call for Dr Zachary Hunter, I knew exactly where to find him. The click-clack of his shoes let me track him like the crocodile in Peter Pan.

  I hovered in the doorway of a side room, watching Dr Hunter examine a patient whose eyes were closed. The woman’s arm fell from the bed and dangled as he manoeuvred her.

  ‘Dr Hunter?’ Those were the first words I ever said to him. ‘GP on the phone.’

  I felt professional. I felt as if I were starring in a television drama set in a hospital. I felt proud that I was being so helpful. I was extra-diligent. I paid attention to absolutely everything and everyone. Already, I was on top of it all.

  Dr Hunter’s back was towards me. Otherwise, I might have seen that he was rolling his eyes in irritation. If he hadn’t been pulling the red triangle above the patient’s bed, so that the siren went off and the lights flashed, I might have heard him swearing under his breath at the idiot new girl.

  What I saw, though, when he turned his head, was a calm face, filled with energy and intelligence. What I heard, as he gave me clear, succinct instructions, was an authoritative voice. ‘Dial 2222. Say, “Adult cardiac arrest on the cardiac unit”. Go. Now, Holly. And call me Zac.’

  What I thought, as he began chest compressions, was how does he know my name? What I noticed, unable to look away, was that the compressions were a kind of violence. The patient’s white belly flopped from side to side each time he plunged down on her.

  ‘Go,’ he said again. And, at last, I did.

  Afterwards, I said, ‘Sorry about earlier. I’m still learning how it all works.’

  He looked at me carefully. ‘It can be overwhelming when you’re new. You’ll learn quickly. And thank you for passing on the message from the GP.’

  It was only then that I properly registered that he was entirely bald, though from his face I’d guessed he wasn’t more than forty. I blushed, not simply out of embarrassment for my blundering, but because he had already won me over with his life-saving heroics, his composure under pressure, and his courtesy, which I did not think I deserved.

  Although I didn’t get to learn the secrets that working for MI5 would have revealed, I soon understood that the hospital had its secrets too, even if they weren’t of national importance.

  There was a young woman, a few years younger than me, waiting for a heart transplant. Over coffee, Zac spoke to me about the case in a hushed voice. ‘I shouldn’t tell you, but I trust you.’ Even as my eyes filled with tears to hear that the young woman would almost certainly die, I was imagining how I would write about her in my journal. Zac touched my hand. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. There was a tender side to him, despite the swaggering.

  When Zac walked through the ward, the eyes of the patients and their families followed him like a flower follows the sun. Zac was a god there, and he knew it. He didn’t bother to hide the fact that he revelled in his power. Zac saw everything. When he saw that my eyes followed him too, he strutted even more.

  My grandmother had told me again and again that my long-dead father was a hero, and I did not doubt it. He was a pilot, flying search and rescue for the Royal Air Force, so he saved many lives. It wasn’t rocket science to see why I would be attracted to a charismatic and commanding older man like Zac, who also saved lives. But self-awareness and self-control are not the same thing. The fact that you know you are acting like a cliché doesn’t necessarily stop you from doing it.

  I was sitting behind the reception desk. Zac brushed his shoulder against mine as he looked with me at the computer screen. I was working on the notes for an eighteen-year-old male with a heart infection that his mother knew everything about, but a sexually transmitted disease that she knew nothing about. Zac was making sure that both were being taken care of.

  ‘Have dinner with me tonight. I’ll cook for you.’ He was so full of pent-up energy he seemed ready to vibrate, but he kept himself still, in control. He was like that whatever he said or did, though he displayed an unflappable cool in all of his interactions with patients.

  ‘Your glasses are steamed up.’ I noticed because I wanted to sneak a glance at his extraordinary eyes. One was violent blue. The other was the real wonder. It was a half circle of cobalt in the top of the iris,
and a half circle of brown in the bottom.

  He took the glasses off and handed them to me, an intimacy. ‘Is that a yes to dinner?’

  ‘I think so.’ I fiddled with his glasses. ‘I don’t have anything to clean them with.’

  He looked at his jacket pocket. I fumbled my hand inside, meeting those bright eyes of his as I did, and found a square of grey microfibre covered in tiny stethoscopes. I wiped the lenses. When I handed them back, he let his skin touch mine and gave me an electric shock.

  ‘You’d better watch for Mr Rowntree’s girlfriend. If she turns up during visiting hours while his wife is here, he may arrest again.’ Zac was smart enough to make sure nobody heard him say this – it was the kind of talk that could get even a doctor in trouble. A piece of my hair had slipped out of my ponytail. He slid it between his fingers as he walked off to do his ward rounds.

  Milly came over. ‘You’re looking hot.’

  ‘It’s extra warm in here.’ I tried to tuck my hair into the elastic.

  ‘Not that kind of hot.’ She eyed Zac, who was disappearing into the doctors’ office. ‘Nothing says, I’m a very important cardiologist doing super-cool interventional things like a scrub top and smart-casual trousers.’

  I laughed so hard I almost snorted, which encouraged Milly to keep going.

  ‘That I’m looking beautiful but heroics were needed so I threw this top on outfit is definitely for you. I wish I could dress for impact.’ Milly frowned at the purple dress the staff nurses had to wear. ‘It’s like The Handmaid’s fucking Tale around here, with all this fucked-up colour coding.’

  Milly and I kept an incognito blog. We called it Angel’s and Devil’s Book Reviews. Devil found the novels that everyone loved and gave them one star. Angel found the ones everyone hated and gave them five. We had two thousand followers and the most beautiful review blog in the world, because Milly was an artist, so everything about it was visually arresting. She was the most creative person I’d ever met. There was a photo on our ‘About Us’ page, with both of us wearing superhero eye masks. Mine was white, Milly’s red. She had scarlet horns pinned to her blonde hair. I had a white halo. Milly’s hatchet job reviews got twenty times more Likes than my attempts at justice for the unfairly spurned.