I Spy

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.

‘Please tell me you’re not doing Atwood,’ I said.

‘I am for sure going to do Atwood.’

‘You will make her cry.’ I clutched my heart in mock sorrow.

‘She doesn’t strike me as the crying type.’

I looked down at myself. ‘She for sure would if she had to wear this.’

‘True. Those white polka dots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Dr Hunter seems into them, though. He’d be perfect for you, except for the fact that he sleeps with everything that moves.’

‘If that’s true,’ Zac said, ‘then why haven’t I slept with you?’

Milly let out a squeak.

Zac’s face was a tight mask. How did he manage to sneak up on us? Normally the sound of his shoes gave him away. Did he change his gait, to avoid the usual noise of the taps on his soles? Or were Milly and I so absorbed in each other we didn’t notice? There was no doubting the clip-clop of his walk as he went off to continue his rounds.

Milly wasn’t finished, though she was no longer smiling. ‘It’s so fucking predictable, your falling for this powerful doctor. It’s pure fantasy. We’re not living in my mum’s collection of Disney films. Tell me you at least know that.’

‘I do know, yes. But I also know I’m not alone.’ I hummed a few lines of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, because Gaston was my nickname for Milly’s boyfriend.

‘You have got to stop calling him Gaston,’ she said. ‘Why do you?’

‘You know why. Because he’s so in love with himself. Like the character in the Disney film. They’re practically identical.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Remind me of his real name, Milly.’

‘You’ve known it since our first day of school.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me the truth about something.’

‘What?’

‘You know that love letter you got when we were in Reception? We thought it was from a boy in our class, but we never figured out who …’

‘We were four. It was twenty years ago, Milly!’

I’d actually written the letter myself. It said, ‘I love you, Holly’, and the words were surrounded by a heart. It was hardly a work of art, though I suppose it was evidence of how much I loved to write and make things up, even at that age. I’d wanted Milly to think I had a secret admirer. I’d experienced a small sense of triumph that I pulled off that bit of fiction and made someone think it was true. Even then, though, I knew that the fact I could fool her didn’t mean I should. I’d felt a twinge of guilt, too, that it had been so easy.

‘Was it Fergus?’ she said. ‘Do you think he wrote the letter?’

‘God. No. I mean, I don’t know, but I’m sure it wasn’t him.’ I still didn’t want to confess to Milly that I’d faked the letter. At the age of four, I was already practising my tradecraft as well as my writing. But my strongest motive for tricking Milly was my wish to impress her. I’d wanted my brand-new friend and neighbour to think that other people saw me as special.

I tried to joke. ‘Gaston probably wasn’t able to write then, so it couldn’t have been him. But you and I were very advanced.’

She laughed. ‘Again true.’

‘I get that you had a crush on him when we were four. I don’t get what you see in him now.’

‘What I see in Fergus is that he’s always been in my life. That kind of loyalty matters.’

‘Not to him. You shouldn’t hold on to someone because they’re a habit.’

‘Why not? I’ve held on to you.’

As a joke a couple of years ago, Milly bought a book that instructed women on all the right things they should do to get a man to fall madly in love with them, and all the wrong things they shouldn’t. She read out bits to me and the two of us hooted in derision.

On my first date with Zac, I did two of the biggest wrong things. The first was that I didn’t make him take me out to dinner. I went to the house he was renting, nestled in farmland and set a few hundred metres from the coastal path.

After weeks of flirting and brushing past each other, his hands were all over me the instant he closed his front door. I said, ‘All those women. Is it true?’

‘Not any more.’ He was unzipping my dress, sliding it off my shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.

The book put the second wrong thing in a different font, for emphasis. Do not sleep with a man on the first date. Never ever. No matter what. Just don’t.

Zac was pulling me towards a rug in the centre of his sitting room, pushing me onto my back, and we were making love almost in the same movement.

When we got up to go to make dinner, he asked how I liked my steak, and I said, ‘Well done, with horseradish sauce.’ He kissed me and sat me at his marble-topped table and told me he would be right back. I heard him climb the stairs, and a minute later, his footsteps drawing near. But instead of returning to the kitchen, there was what I guessed to be the rattle of keys and the creak of the front door opening and closing, then the roar of his car engine.

Half an hour later, I was reading an article that Zac had left the newspaper folded to, which he’d neatly arranged on the corner of the table. The article was about a huge leak of records from a Panama-based law firm, and how the prime minister’s own father was on the list of rich people who put their money in offshore tax havens.

When Zac walked into the kitchen he nodded approvingly at the article. ‘Impressive thing to pull off.’

I took his hand. ‘Whoever leaked that data is a hero.’

‘Doubtful that he’ll appear on the Honours List.’

I stood and pulled Zac against me. ‘I hope they don’t catch him.’

‘I’m glad you feel that way.’ One of his hands was on the small of my back. The other was taking a jar of horseradish sauce from the pocket of his blazer and putting it on the table. ‘I want you to have your dinner exactly how you like it.’ But we ended up not eating anything.

Zac slept with his body pressed against mine that night, and it was the first time I could remember feeling as if I belonged somewhere. When he went into the bathroom the next morning to get ready for work, I listened carefully for the sound of the water running in the shower, then sat up to peek in the drawer of his bedside table.

There was a photograph of a woman who looked like me, with hair the colour of maple leaves in autumn and eyes the colour of moss. She was on a cushiony reclining chair by a beach with palm trees, sipping from a cocktail glass with carefully arranged edible flowers around the rim. She was wearing a tasselled white cover-up, so filmy I could see her orange bikini beneath it. On her left ankle was an oval mark like a black star sapphire, so distinct I wondered if it was a tattoo. Perhaps it was a birthmark.

‘You found my first wife.’ Zac’s voice came as the quilt slipped from my shoulders, or rather, as he pulled it from me, so it was only when those two things, the words and the movement, happened at once, that I inhaled and looked up to see him standing there, though I could hear that the shower was still on.

‘You startled me.’

He sat on the edge of the bed, a towel round his hips. There were drops of water on his shoulders, and he was dripping on me. He drew a wet finger down the centre of my chest and to my belly button, where he left it.

There was no good story to defuse my being caught with the photograph, so I didn’t tell one. ‘She’s very pretty.’ It occurred to me that other than the incident of Peggy and the apple tree when I was four, I had never knowingly been caught snooping.

‘Not as pretty as you.’

‘That was the right thing to say. Was there a second one?’

‘A second what?’ He pressed one hand over my breast and the other over my throat, tilting me flat again.

‘Wife.’

‘The divorce of the first only came through at the start of this year, so not yet.’ His mouth was against mine. ‘The grounds were desertion. She left me.’

‘When?’

‘Three years ago.’

I thought, but didn’t say, that three years ago wasn’t a great time for me either, with Maxine and that glass table and the line I was stupidly ready to cross.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Jane.’ Zac went on. ‘The end of that marriage – it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. If you know that now, it will help you to understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Understand me. The way I am. The care I take, now, to cherish what I value, to make sure I don’t lose it.’

‘The way you are is perfect.’ I pulled him on top of me.

He laughed. ‘That was the right thing to say too. And to do.’

‘Except for the arrogance thing and the god complex thing.’

‘That not so much.’

‘I find it hard to imagine any woman wanting to leave you.’

‘Good recovery. Smoothly done.’ He kissed me into forgetting about his first wife. When I next opened his bedside drawer, the photograph was gone.

Now The Girl with the Two-Coloured Eye

Three years later

Bath, Monday, 1 April 2019

I am at work, based now in the paediatric unit of a hospital in Bath. This place is so different from my old job in Cornwall. I am concentrating hard on inputting patient details, when the sound of a crying child makes my attention waver.

A woman is in a deep knee bend beside a pushchair, fumbling with a manicured hand to pick up a stuffed kitty that the child must have thrown. One of those women who spends her morning in designer activewear, then transforms into a lady who lunches. Her expensively jewelled fingers are tipped with blue-black manicured nails that for most mothers would not be compatible with a toddler. Those fingers curl around a takeaway coffee cup that she is struggling not to spill.

The child’s small hand shoots out to grab the edge of the woman’s techno-fabric sleeve. Trying to protect the child from the hot drink, the woman loses her balance and falls. The cup lands beside her, the lid pops off, and the steaming coffee splashes onto the linoleum as well as the woman’s blossom-print leggings. The child stops screaming, arrested by the spectacle of her mother on the floor.

‘Can’t she read?’ Trudy, who is the ward manager’s assistant and senior to me, is hissing from behind her computer screen. ‘Tell her. Get out there now, Helen, and tell her about the sign.’

‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’

‘Go,’ Trudy says.

In my cardiology ward clerk job, I wore a dull-red smock with off-white polka dots. The spots on this paediatric smock are mint green. The background is strawberry-wafer pink. I will look like a walking cupcake as I approach the polished woman.

‘Okay, okay. I’m going.’ I grab the roll of blue paper towels we keep on a nearby shelf for such emergencies, then emerge from the shelter of the curved reception desk.