As she positioned the point on the surface, Ben said, ‘Don’t forget to make a wish.’
His tone was jokey, but when she glanced up, he was looking into her eyes and there was something intimate about it, as if they were alone. Her stomach flipped over.
She plunged the knife into the cake, all the way to the silver board, then brought the handle down and began cutting out the slices.
‘What did you wish for?’ Lauren asked.
‘If I told you it wouldn’t come true,’ she replied with a smile as she passed a piece of cake across on a paper napkin. And the truth was she wouldn’t have been able to put it into words. She’d wished with her heart, not her brain – a yearning prayer for the world to turn itself right-side up and for her to find her place in it.
Bella had many, many more questions about what she’d seen at the OAK meeting but as soon as the cake had been eaten it was time to get back to work. Back in their office the rest of the afternoon was taken up with Oscar showing her what their team did for OAK, and how her role would fit into it. Her temporary laptop was replaced with a shiny high spec one, and she was issued with a top-of-the-range phone which made her personal one look like it was from the 1980s. There was no point carrying two phones around, she thought, as she swapped her contacts over and slipped the old one into her drawer. And there was something quite appealing about having a new number that Mark didn’t have access to, it underlined her fresh start.
Ben had been elsewhere for most of the afternoon, but at four thirty he came back into the office. ‘Come on then, that’s enough for today. Let’s go and get a drink.’
Bella looked up from her screen. ‘Are we sharing cars or…’
‘You won’t need a car.’
They shut down their laptops. Where the hell can we get a drink around here without a car? Bella wondered. The AC house was surrounded by acres of parkland on all sides. She looked down at her new green suede heels.
‘Won’t need a car?’ she muttered, throwing a questioning look at Lauren.
‘We won’t be walking far either.’ Lauren gestured down at Bella’s feet. ‘You’ll be fine, don’t worry.’
They trooped out of the office but to Bella’s surprise turned right, rather than left towards the main exit.
Ben led the way, calling over his shoulder, ‘Oh and Bella, if you get the urge to start taking pictures of landmarks again,’ – his sudden smile disarmed her – ‘repress it.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
They came to a halt by one of the hidden vending machines.
Good Lord, she thought. I know I’m not in London anymore, but tell me this isn’t their idea of ‘going for a drink’?
Ben tapped a code into the vending machine and stepped back. The machine slid forward and to one side, revealing a lift. The doors opened and they all piled in, Bella fighting hard to keep her jaw from sagging open. When they’d descended and the doors slid aside, they were back in the ultra-modern underground surroundings of OAK. They passed through a lobby into one of the austere white corridors, Bella examining the panels of glass above her head through which the last rays of afternoon sun streamed.
‘But how—’ she began.
‘How come you can’t see the glass from above ground?’ Ben finished for her.
She nodded.
‘Technology. A lot of what you see in the gardens isn’t real. You remember the room where you had your interview?’ he asked.
She nodded again, transported back there with the help of a sudden waft of his citrusy aftershave as he walked beside her – the same one he’d been wearing that day.
‘It overlooks a walled garden,’ he said. ‘The plants and the soil look like the real thing, but they’re artificial. They’ve been engineered so that from above and side-on they appear solid, but from underneath they’re transparent. When you took the lift down to OAK with Isadora this morning you arrived in the main atrium. The glass ceiling of the atrium is beneath the walled garden.’
Bella’s brain tried to grapple with this, on top of everything else she’d learnt that day and then she gave a slight shake of the head. The only way to cope, she decided, was to go with the flow. Trying to make sense of it logically wasn’t an option.
They turned a corner and found themselves face to face with a red brick wall. In the centre of the wall was a sturdy wooden door with a stone surround and above it, a cream, painted square set into the bricks, upon which was painted ‘The Royal Oak’ in elegant script. Under the writing was a picture of an oak tree harbouring a ginger cat on one of its lower branches. A girl was depicted climbing up a ladder propped against the trunk, one hand held out towards the cat.
‘Kindnesses to animals too?’ queried Bella as Catherine stepped aside to let her go first.
‘Of course,’ the other woman replied, seeming surprised at the question.
Inside was what real ale aficionados would call a ‘proper’ pub. Horse-shoe shaped bar in the centre of the large room. High-backed wooden booths along one wall. Roaring fire. Brass fittings, low ceilings, flagstone floors.
The place was packed. People turned and smiled as they entered, one or two raising their glasses to Bella in congratulation. Other than the cosy authenticity of the place, the main thing that hit Bella as she entered was a great wave of goodwill. The pub was overflowing with it, it oozed out of the walls, gushed out of the pumps and hung like smoke in the air. She found she was smiling. It was hard not to. When she looked at the others, they were smiling too.
Oscar got the drinks in as the others found themselves a table by the fire. They all toasted Bella and then, after everyone had taken a sip, she asked, ‘What is this place?’
Ben raised an eyebrow at Catherine. ‘Catherine’s always the person to ask when it comes to OAK history.’
The firelight glinted off her hair as she spoke, sparking silver tones among the blonde. ‘This is a replica of a pub in the next village,’ Catherine explained. ‘Isadora told you this morning about Emma Faye. She was succeeded as head of OAK by her daughter, Beatrice, who expanded the remit of the Institute considerably. When she was preparing to step down, in favour of her daughter, she wanted to show her gratitude to the agents who had worked for her. The story goes that one day she had thanked an agent who had performed a difficult and demanding set of kindnesses. She tried to give him some money to buy himself a drink but he refused. When she asked why, he explained he would like nothing more than to go to the local inn for a drink or two but couldn’t. He was afraid he might get drunk and let something slip about OAK. The other agents felt the same, so she arranged for a replica of the pub to be built down here, where agents could drink together and share their experiences without fear of being overheard.’
Ben nodded and took a sip of his pint. ‘Now the Institute is much larger and there are people working in all kinds of job, it’s not just agents who come here. Any member of OAK is welcome.’
Bella scanned the room and spotted some familiar faces at nearby tables. She also saw a lot of highly-forgettable faces – an attribute which she was coming to recognise as the hallmark of an agent. If no one recognised you, you could keep on carrying out acts of kindness in the same area without being remarked upon.
‘We’ve got Royal Oaks all over the country.’ Oscar added. ‘All identical. They’ve got them in the US too now. Although they probably call them Ye Olde Royal Oak over there.’
‘And,’ Bella twiddled the cocktail stirrer in her gin and tonic, ‘the memorial prize that you mentioned earlier, Catherine. That’s in honour of Isadora’s mum, right?’
‘Yes. Elizabeth Faye is a very important person in the history of OAK,’ Catherine said. ‘Taken from us far too young.’
The atmosphere became serious, people sat up straighter in their chairs. She waited for Catherine to expand but she was looking down at the table, running a finger around the rim of her glass.
‘It’s an important part of OAK history and worth knowing,’ Ben said, picking up
the thread. ‘OAK is a hereditary organisation, as you probably know, Bella. As soon as Isadora Faye was old enough to understand what OAK was, she also realised that when she was older, she would take on the running of it. Which, if you think about it must be pretty tough. Whatever your hopes and dreams might be for your life, you have to set them to one side because your path has already been mapped out. Isadora struggled with that as she was growing up. There were times when she felt proud to be following in her mother’s footsteps. But in her teenage years, she began to feel stifled. Her father died when she was fourteen and according to Isadora that had a huge impact on her outlook. It brought home to her how valuable and short life is. And when she was eighteen years old, she rebelled and ran away from home.’
Bella tried to imagine a rebellious Isadora. Short skirts, tattoos, hanging out with ne’er-do-wells from the wrong side of the track. Her brain underwent a rebellion of its own in trying to picture it.
‘How do you know all this?’ she asked Ben.
‘She told me the story herself, a long time ago,’ Ben replied. ‘She ran away from home and went to Paris. She wanted to disappear, get away from her mother and OAK, be someone else for a while. A normal teenager, not the preordained head of a very unusual family business. She stayed in Paris for a few months – only her younger brother knew where she was. They were close, she trusted him to keep her secret.’
Oscar picked up his pint and the beer mat clattered from the bottom onto the table. Everyone jumped.
‘Sorry!’ he exclaimed.
‘One day,’ Ben said, ignoring the interruption, ‘she came home to her apartment in Paris to find the phone ringing. It was her brother calling to tell her that her mother had died of a heart attack. Isadora rushed home. Her mother was forty-five, no one had suspected she had heart problems. The doctors said it could have been brought on by stress. Imagine how you’d feel in that situation.’ He raised his eyebrows at Bella, who shook her head in sympathy. ‘Your father’s dead,’ he continued, ‘your mother’s been left to run the family as well as a huge organisation on her own. And then you – her grown-up daughter who should have been helping her – make things worse. All your mother’s worries build up to such a point that they kill her. That was Isadora’s thought process, anyway. Isadora blamed herself for her mother’s death.
‘After the initial shock, in the days following the funeral, she began to pull herself together. OAK had been temporarily without a leader but Isadora stepped into the breach. She took up the reins, promising herself that she would make up for everything in the way she ran OAK. Every waking hour would be dedicated not only to maintaining the status quo, but to carrying out her mother’s dearest wish – expansion. OAK at that time was operational in most of England but her mother had shared with Isadora her plans to recruit agents right across Britain and abroad. Of course, at forty-five, her mother had believed she would oversee these plans herself.’
‘So, in a way,’ Bella said, ‘Elizabeth’s death has made OAK what it is today? We wouldn’t be expanding into the US if Isadora hadn’t made that promise?’
‘We can’t know,’ Catherine cut in. ‘Perhaps Elizabeth would have achieved the same level of progress if she’d lived. But what we do know is that no one could have put more effort and love into this organisation than Isadora has.’
Ben excused himself, saying he’d seen someone he needed to speak to and Lauren got up to go to the loo.
‘Another drink, Bella?’ asked Catherine.
Bella looked down and realised she’d finished her first one already. ‘Better not – driving and everything.’
‘You don’t need to worry about that when you’re drinking at The Royal Oak,’ Catherine said matter-of-factly before squeezing her way to the bar.
Bella looked at Oscar. ‘Because… the local police are branch agents? Trained to turn a blind eye to a first offence?’
Oscar pulled a face. ‘You’ve just had the one, yeah?’
‘Well for God’s sake, I don’t bloody know anymore! If you’d told me about the kind of stuff that happens here a few months ago I’d have thought you were mental. Whereas now, if you told me there was a helicopter waiting to fly me home tonight, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.’
Oscar shook his head in amazement. ‘How did you guess…?’
‘What?’
‘No, okay, no that’s not true. I’m messing with you.’
Her hands crept up towards his neck and he feigned defending himself.
‘Christ! Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you. Anyone who drinks at The Oak gets delivered home afterwards, free of charge, along with their car. We’ve got a team with those foldaway scooters that go in your boot.’
‘Oh. Fair enough. I don’t suppose they also deliver you to the loo and back by any chance?’
Squeezing through the scrum she found the Ladies down a little passageway at the back. She caught herself humming a happy little tune as she pushed open the cubicle door and broke off mid-note. Here she was, hanging out with work colleagues in a secret underground faux pub, at the end of her first day’s indoctrination into a top-secret organisation which monitored and infiltrated the lives of ordinary people in two continents. Surely it was abnormal to be experiencing happiness? The correct emotion would be terror. Or panic. A bit of both maybe.
She flushed the authentic-looking chain and tried hard to feel a bit of either, but they weren’t forthcoming. Perhaps when she woke up tomorrow morning the complete unreality of this situation would hit her but until then she wasn’t going to worry about it. Humans as a species excelled at adapting, she’d read that somewhere. And if she did say so herself, she was adapting to this situation with remarkable grace and style. And indeed panache. Did she mean panache?
She leant on the large porcelain sink and stared at herself in the mirror. She might be tiddly.
‘Tiddly’? Where had that word come from? It was the kind of thing her gran would have said. She was still shaking her head at the marvels and mysteries of memory as she made her way back to the bar. She may have grace, style and – debatably – panache but what she didn’t possess, she remembered as she reached the end of the passage and pushed open the door, was a sense of direction. Instead of finding herself back in the crowded main part of the pub, she was in another, smaller room. She should have turned left out of the toilets, not right.
The three occupants of the room were Ben, Lauren and another man who had his back to the door. They were huddled around a small table, looking more serious than anyone else she’d seen that evening. When he heard the door open Ben’s head flew up and he looked around, hostile.
‘Oh! Sorry,’ Bella said. ‘I came the wrong way out of the toilets.’ It sounded lame, even to her ears.
Ben’s look hadn’t softened and there was nothing jovial in his tone as he said, ‘Forgot to take pictures of the landmarks this time?’
Lauren attempted a reassuring smile but Bella could see she was flustered. Bella glanced at the stranger – or what she could see of him from the back. He had short dark hair and wore a blue shirt that was pulled taut against the muscles of his arms and shoulders. A bomber jacket hung over the back of his chair. He was massaging his right shoulder, as if it were stiff, with his face turned a little to the left. Something about him was familiar. She apologised again and backed out of the room. As soon as the door closed, she heard Ben say something that sounded like ‘Thought you’d locked that?’
Back at the table, she found it hard to join in the conversation, her mind still whirring on the little tête-á-tête-á-tête she’d stumbled across. A few minutes later Ben and Lauren rejoined them.
Ben made a point of sitting next to her and murmuring, ‘Sorry about before. Bit of work that couldn’t wait until Monday.’
She nodded and made an understanding face. But she remembered the hostile look in his eyes and the anxious feeling lingered.
The party broke up soon after that. Everyone seemed to have caught Bella’s subdued mood and
soon they were all in their respective cars with their Royal Oak chauffeurs.
Bella was thinking about Lauren and whether she could be caught up in something sinister. It seemed unlikely; she was such a well-meaning person. And what kind of ‘sinister’ thing could it be, anyway? Ben and Lauren had needed to discuss a work issue with a colleague and they wanted somewhere quieter than the main bar to do it. But why had Ben seemed so angry at being discovered?
Something the driver said penetrated her thoughts and she started paying attention.
‘Been down this way plenty of times I ’ave. Fella named Teddy Thatcher used to live over your way.’
‘Oh, really? What happened to him?’
She saw the driver glance shiftily at her in the rear-view mirror.
‘Well, he… er…’ He put the indicators on as he prepared to turn off the main road. ‘This is the way I go, over the common and round that way, you know. Been in the village long, have you?’
He kept up a determined flow of chit-chat until he’d pulled up in front of her house and retrieved his scooter and helmet from the boot.
‘Night then. See you soon I ’spect.’
Bella jumped at a dog’s bark and saw David and Pauline taking their unmanageable whippet-cross out for his late evening walk.
David and Pauline who had hosted the drinks party. She gawped at them as she realised where she’d seen the unknown man in the pub before. He was no other than their son, demi-sex-god-and-bicycle-lover James.
Chapter Seven
‘A single act of kindness may change a day, a life, the world. Kindness is powerful. OAK is mighty.’
Bella found the Institute’s motto popping into her head as she turned into the drive and pulled up by her front wall, gravel crunching under her tyres. ‘A single act of kindness.’
What about a single act of unkindness, did that have the same power?
She delved into her memory for an example of either and it was an unkindness which surfaced first. Was that significant? Did unkindness leave more of a mark? Or was it a random quirk of the brain that spat that particular memory out? The incident that had popped out of the archives was from when she’d been at school, years before. She’d been going through what her mother would tell her was a phase; falling in and out of friendships. She must have been about fourteen, girls could be so bitchy at that age. At that point in her school career, there was a certain girls’ toilets on the second floor of the school that was the favoured place for their group to hang out. One break time, she’d headed up to the loos and found two ‘friends’ there. They were sitting side by side on the floor, backs against the tiled wall, knees drawn up under their grey A-line skirts, whispering. She’d hesitated, then gone over. They’d stopped talking and looked at her with cold, cruel stares.
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