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I squat in front of the woman. ‘You’re not burnt, I hope?’
She shakes her head no.
I offer her some paper towels and she begins to dab at her clothes while I wipe the floor. Trudy has marched across to direct this little scene and glower at the woman. I wouldn’t have imagined that somebody with curlicue hair like Shirley Temple’s could be intimidating, but Trudy is, despite being a mere one and a half metres tall. I know about Shirley Temple because my grandmother loves her, and endlessly watched her films.
‘No hot drinks allowed in Paediatric Outpatients,’ Trudy says. ‘Did you not see the signs?’
The woman stands, elegant and willowy beside Trudy. ‘I’m sorry. I was desperate for caffeine.’
The child is watching all of this with quiet fascination.
‘Children can be scalded by hot drinks. That is why there is a bin by the entrance,’ Trudy says.
‘I was tired,’ the woman says, ‘but that’s no excuse.’
Trudy softens, but to detect the softening you would need to be accustomed to monitoring every gradient of the human anger scale.
‘Come with me,’ Trudy says to the woman. ‘You need to book your daughter in and have her details checked.’
‘Let me grab her first.’ The woman moves towards the front of the pushchair to unfasten the child, who immediately begins to squirm.
‘Helen will watch her for a minute,’ Trudy says.
I am on my knees, mopping coffee. I straighten up, so my shins are resting on linoleum that is printed to resemble a giant jigsaw puzzle, and my bottom is on my heels. The little girl is staring at me, pursing her lips as if she is about to blow out birthday candles. Her hair is the colour of copper, the same shade mine used to be before I soaked it in black dye. It is baby fine, and her mother has arranged the front in a ponytail-spout above her forehead, to keep it out of her eyes. The spout is a white jet, and adorable on this child, though I wonder if her hair colour is a symptom of whatever medical condition has brought her to the paediatric unit today. Her skin is ivory perfect, though perhaps a bit too pale.
I glance at the mum, whose own hair is dark and artfully highlighted. It reaches the bottom of her neck. She pushes it behind her ears and says to me, ‘Is that okay?
‘Absolutely,’ I say, and she follows Trudy.
The child is frowning, uncertain as she scans for her mother, who is now out of her sightline. I expect her to start to cry again, or scream, or kick. But she doesn’t do any of these things. She blinks her eyes several times, so I look more closely at them. They are surrounded by long, red-gold lashes that match my own, though I wear mascara to hide the colour. One eye is four-leaf clover green, again like mine. The other is blue as a dark sky in the top half-circle, and brown as the earth at the bottom. The only other person I have seen with such an eye is Zac. It is one of the most beautiful things about him. Again, though, I wonder if the child’s eye is a symptom of something medical, the same as her white forelock.
I fantasise about picking her up and holding her close, pretending that she is mine.
To others, I must appear to be a normal woman. I alone know that I am a creature stitched out of pieces that don’t fit and never will, with some of them missing and others stretched too thin and in the wrong shape. My seams show vivid and red like those of Frankenstein’s monster.
I say to the child. ‘You are very pretty. What’s your name?’
She opens her mouth, then smacks her lips together.
I laugh. ‘I bet your name is pretty too. Can you tell me how old you are?’
She shakes her head.
‘Let me try to guess. Are you two?’
She holds up one finger.
Her mother speaks over her shoulder to me while Trudy enters more details into the system. ‘Alice will be two next month.’
‘Ah.’ I throw a smile of thanks over my own shoulder. ‘So you are one right now, but nearly two. That is very big. And you’re so clever to count like that.’
She gives me a slow, serious nod of agreement.
‘So you are Alice. I knew you’d have an extra-pretty name. Do you come from Wonderland?’
Alice nods yes to this question and holds out the stuffed kitty, stretching both arms in front of her in one decisive move.
‘For me?’
Another nod.
I take the kitty and jiggle it until she laughs and snatches it back.
‘I love your dress, Alice.’ It is sunburst orange with pink and purple daisies.
Alice points to my head, and I remember that I took the white pom-pom from the Christmas hat Katarina gave me last December and tied it around my ponytail this morning. I touch the ball of fluffy yarn. ‘Do you like it?’
Alice nods, her eyes wide.
Alice’s mum returns, and I show her where she can wait with Alice. It’s the nicest part of the paediatric unit, with PVC-upholstered benches for parents and boxes of toys for children. As soon as she is freed from her buggy, Alice toddles off in her bright play dress to the toy oven, to make pretend cups of tea and bake pretend cakes, helped by her mum, who kneels beside her.
Trudy is preoccupied at the other end of the desk. The buzzer goes, signalling the arrival of a new patient. The last thing on Trudy’s mind is me – she has way too much to do, hitting the button to release the door lock, then signing in a little boy and answering his parents’ anxious questions.
I shouldn’t do it. I know it is irrational. But that eye. I have to check. A few keystrokes, and I have Alice’s computerised records on the screen. The address is on a very expensive street. When I see that her mother’s name is Eliza Wilmot I get an electric shock and my heart starts to beat faster.
Eliza was the name of a woman I glimpsed with Zac in a hotel bar on a horrible night two years ago. I never learned her surname. Is this the same Eliza? And the child. Could she be Zac’s? I shake my head at the possibility, then stop myself, self-conscious, though when I look around nobody is paying attention.
When I see that Alice was born on May eighteenth, just a few days after my own baby, I take a short, sharp breath. My throat tightens, and I am in the grip of grief and panic. There is a real risk I will cry. Last year, on May fourteenth, I pulled the comforter over my head and didn’t get out of bed at all. I think of my grandmother’s photo in the paper. Has Zac managed to find me, and dragged along a child I never knew about? The coincidences are too strong for me to imagine anything else.
I press on through Alice’s referral letter and medical notes. She has type 1 Waardenburg syndrome, which is a rare genetic condition that can cause hearing loss as well as changes to the pigmentation of the skin, hair, and eyes. So far, the medical notes say, Alice has three manifestations of the condition. The white forelock, the iris that is segmented into two different colours, and eyes that appear widely spaced, though in Alice the latter manifestation is so subtle I hadn’t noticed it. She is new to the area, and today is her initial appointment with the paediatrician who will be monitoring her. Tomorrow, I see, she is going to audiology for a hearing test.
For the first time, it occurs to me that Zac might have this condition, too. Could that be why he shaves his head, morning and night, to hide the white forelock? He led me to think the shaving was an aesthetic choice. That he preferred no hair at all to a bald spot. When I asked him about his eye, he said he was made that way. I try to picture his face. I think, though I am not certain, that perhaps his eyes, too, are a little widely spaced. But why would he keep the condition a secret, and try to cover it up, if he did have it? As soon as I silently pose the question, I know the answer. Zac hates anything that makes him appear vulnerable.
A sudden influx of newly arrived parents and children overwhelms me and Trudy. I catch sight of Alice’s mother, hovering nearby, handing Alice a biscuit and a sippy cup, then checking her phone. When the queue has finally cleared, she comes over to me. ‘Thank you so much for your help earlier.’
I give her an it-was-nothing shrug. Does she know who I am? Did Zac send her here? I can’t decide. The appointment is certainly genuine – Alice clearly needs it. I am praying my face isn’t drained of colour when I say, ‘Your daughter is gorgeous.’
‘She is, isn’t she?!’ Without looking at it, she grabs a flyer about MMR from a pile stacked on the counter, rummages in her bag for a pen, scribbles something on the flyer. ‘I’m Eliza. And this is Alice.’
It’s as if I have a hot sword running through the centre of my chest to the bottom of my stomach.
‘And you’re Helen, aren’t you?’ I nearly jump at her knowing my name, but then she lowers her voice and says, ‘The scary woman called you that.’
I manage a laugh. ‘Ah. Yes.’ I lift the flap in the reception counter to let myself through. I crouch in front of Alice. ‘Goodbye, Alice.’ I put out my hand, which she takes and shakes, imitating grown-ups. She holds her arms out, so that I lean closer in, and she giggles and tries to slide my glasses from my nose, then giggles some more. This child looks so like Zac, but his strong features are delicate and beautiful in her face.
‘I don’t normally do this.’ Eliza lifts her shoulders in pretend embarrassment. ‘I mean, pick up new friends in hospital clinics. But we’ve not long moved here, and I barely know anyone. Would you like to meet for coffee? I wrote down my name and number.’ She offers me the MMR sheet.
I take the sheet. ‘Coffee would be lovely.’ It is quiet here, a brief lull, and Trudy has gone on a break. Nobody will notice that I do not dutifully tell my would-be friend Eliza that I am not supposed to do this sort of thing with the parents of patients. I smile with what I think is perfect composure, though the fizzing electrical noises that are a constant in this place seem to be bleeping and pinging from inside my own body.
That night, I cannot sleep. I squirm beneath sheets that are sticky with my own sweat, feeling as alone as a lighthouse keeper trapped on a rock island in a storm so terrible no relief boat can get to him. I grab the phone from the floor by my bed and dial Peggy, with my number blocked and the mute button engaged, my heart beating so much faster than the ringtone.
Peggy is still half-asleep, sounding scared, thinking something has happened to Milly, repeating the word ‘Hello’ over and over, and Milly’s name as if it were a question. I can hear James in the background, asking who it is and what has happened. I disconnect, telling myself it was worth it just to hear their voices after almost two years. I feel dreadful that I’ve frightened them, but tell myself they will soon discover that Milly is fine.
I pull off the quilt and drag myself from the single bed beneath the crypt-like brick archway I’d painted bright yellow. I sit in a rocking chair I’d stained deep teal, and I sew the tiniest of tiny baby clothes for the most premature of premature babies. I am one of a handful of volunteers who make these so that hospitals can keep a few on hand. And though I hope they will never be worn, I know all too well that they will be. I prick my finger with the needle and feel certain that somewhere out in the world a bad thing is happening.
Then Human Asset
Two and a half years earlier
Cornwall, 14 October 2016
It was the Mermaid of Zennor who prompted my move into Zac’s rented farmhouse two months after we first slept together. We made the decision when I took him to see her in the village church.
The Mermaid is six centuries old, and carved into the side of a little bench, holding her looking glass and comb. The dark wood is scarred and scratched and discoloured. Some of it is peeling away. She has a rounded belly and breasts that you can’t help but want to touch, though countless hands have smoothed her features away through the years.
Zac and I knelt side by side and trailed our fingers over the Mermaid as I told him her story.
What happens to her is nothing like Hans Christian Andersen’s version or the Disney film. She is enchanted by the beautiful voice of a local man, drifting out of the church towards the waves. And it is the man who then goes to live with her in the kingdom of the Merpeople. She doesn’t need to give up her tail and grow legs to have a life with him on land.
Milly and I had always planned to write a book about her, with my words and her illustrations.
‘You’re my mermaid,’ Zac said, as soon as I finished the story. ‘That is what I want to do for you.’ He knew I would never want to leave Cornwall, though before he met me he’d viewed his job there as a brief stop on his starry route to someplace else. ‘We’ll stay here,’ he said, ‘in your world.’ I was moved by that. And in his debt.
That was four months ago. Since then, we’d spent just three nights apart, when he attended a medical congress in Moldova towards the end of the summer. I’d missed him during that trip, despite the fact that living with a man for the first time wasn’t entirely easy for me. My grandmother brought me up with a strange mixture of regulation that I didn’t miss and freedom that I did. I felt so visible, so watched and accountable, when before I could disappear for what seemed endless stretches of time. But none of that was Zac’s fault.
I’d come to my special place to consider all this. It was where I liked to read and think and scribble hospital stories in my secret journal, which I kept hidden from Zac. I was wearing his parka, hugging it around myself, and sipping from the thermos of coffee I brought with me. The bench that I was sitting on was erected by the town soon after my parents died. The tarnished plaque behind my back was engraved with the words, In Remembrance of Squadron Leader Edward Lawrence and His Wife, Matilda Lawrence.
The bench sat on a section of the coastal path my parents had often walked together, above a gorge in the cliff that made a kind of waterfall down to the rocks below. Usually the waterfall sounded like thunder, and the sea churned and heaved its foam. On that October day, though, the waterfall was a trickle of gentle music, and the sea was so calm I could see the rocks below its glassy surface. Already it was past the high season. There were few other walkers despite the unseasonally mild autumn morning.
It was a short walk to that isolated stretch of the coastal path and I made it whenever I could, as if in my parents’ footsteps. Zac’s rented house was a few hundred metres inland. I thought of my bright charity shop clothes, stuffed in his drawers and wardrobe, mixed with the sleek designer wear he organised with military precision. The tall, narrow house I grew up in next door to Milly and James and Peggy was virtually abandoned, but I understood Zac’s reluctance to live so close to them.
I pictured my childhood bed in the attic, and its bright pink quilt dotted with red poppies. That bed seemed to fade. Instead, I saw the new one I shared with Zac, the white sheets thrown on the floor, and the two of us in it the night before.
My clothes were off, and Zac’s hands seemed to be everywhere, and I reached towards the drawer in the bedside table where I kept my diaphragm, and he caught my arm before I could get to it and pinned my wrists above my head and held me down and kissed any words away, and it was impossible to make him wait any longer, though I was uncertain about whether I wanted him to, and in a haze of confusion over what had just happened, my head foggy from too much wine, and my body seeming not to be my own.
There was a noise, coming from the coastal path, and my replay of the night before blew away. A figure was striding towards me, dressed in baggy walking trousers and a sweatshirt, wearing a small backpack. Her hair was hidden beneath a khaki bush hat, her eyes shielded by dark sunglasses.
I aimed a polite ‘Morning’ vaguely in her direction, hoping that she would walk on and leave me with my thoughts. Instead, she lowered herself onto the bench beside me. Because I had arranged myself in the middle, she seemed too close. I slid over, until my right side was pressed against the wooden arm. I studied the copy of Jane Eyre in my lap, trying to signal that I wasn’t interested in talking.
‘Good book?’ The voice was familiar. I looked up to see the woman remove her sunglasses. There was the same indigo eyeliner, the same thick mascara, the same crimson lipstick. Her hands were gloved, but I was betting the nails were scarlet.
‘Yes.’ It was a present from Zac, a beautiful old edition, given because he knew how much the novel meant to me.
Maxine perched her sunglasses back on her nose, then extracted a clear plastic bag from her backpack, which contained pastries. ‘Croissant?’
I squinted at her. ‘No. Thank you.’
‘Bottle of water?’
‘Again, no. Thank you.’
It had been three and a half years since I crashed out of my final interview for MI5, and her appearance was so unexpected I wondered if I was dreaming. Why on earth was she seeking me out after all that time, and offering me breakfast?
‘I’d like to talk to you.’ She seemed to be answering my unspoken question. She looked out at the sea with her usual indifference and took a bite of a croissant. ‘Stale,’ she said, tossing it behind her without looking.
I stifled a laugh. ‘We had to do a role-play exercise, during that residential assessment. We pretended to be agent handlers making an approach to a potential informant. “Always provide amenities.” That was part of your script for how to recruit an agent. Are you trying to recruit me, Maxine?’
To my astonishment, she said, ‘Yes. I am.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m completely serious. You’re in a position to help us. I’ve come to ask if you will.’
I had fantasised about Maxine seeking me out, Maxine telling me she’d got it wrong, Maxine saying that getting rid of me was the great misjudgement of her career, Maxine confessing that she – that they – needed me.
‘Are you offering me a proper job with the Security Service?’
‘You have access to intelligence that we need, and we know you’re skilful enough to get it for us.’
‘No you don’t. You don’t think that about me at all. I seem to remember that flattery is part of that script for recruiting informants, too.’
‘It is, as a matter of fact. But I do think you’re skilful – there was only that one critical flaw that ended the possibility of your joining us.’
‘Please spare me the flattery. I’d have thought that if you wanted a lab report or a patient’s medical record you could reach right in and grab them.’
‘That isn’t what this is about. But technically speaking, yes, you would be a Covert Human Intelligence Source, or agent – what the cousins call a human asset. I much prefer their term. You already know, Holly, that a human asset collects information for us, then passes it on.’
Her words stabbed away the mad bit of hope I’d somehow conjured. What Maxine wanted – what they wanted – was to use me. I was little more than a drone to them, and would never be properly inside MI5.
‘And you would be my handler?’
‘Yes. I would have responsibility for your security and welfare. Something we take very seriously.’
‘I bet. So you see me the same way you see a drug dealer who gets to stay out of jail if he reports on the bad guys who are above him in the chain. Or a prostitute who you’ll pay if she gives you information about her pimp. Or someone working for a company with trade secrets you’re after.’
‘Those aren’t the only kinds of agents we recruit.’
‘Nice of you to say. I’d be a rubbish informant, and I don’t have access to any intelligence you could possibly be interested in.’ I concentrated on the soft slap of the water as it gently rolled in and out.
‘You have integrity – the qualities that made you want to join us in the first place.’
‘I meant it about skipping the flattery section of your script. You don’t think I have a single atom of integrity. You remember why I bombed my MI5 interview.’
She ignored this unseemly reminder with the tact of a hostess managing an awkward guest. ‘We are authorised to make arrangements of this nature, Holly, in order to detect or prevent a crime, protect national security, or in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK.’
‘Is that some kind of legal document they made you memorise?’
‘Again, you are correct.’
‘What is this really about, Maxine?’
‘Your new boyfriend is Zachary Hunter.’
I was trailing my index finger over the gold lettering on Jane Eyre’s cover, then tracing the edge of the oval portrait of Charlotte between the title and the author’s name. ‘You obviously know that he is.’
‘So you know about his ex-wife?’
‘I know she left him.’ I followed a fishing boat with my eyes, a speck whose ghost-shape outline I could still see, imprinted from when it had been closer to land.
‘Does he know where she is?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘It’s been tried. The experiment was not successful.’
I shrugged. ‘Well why should he know? The fact that she’s not in his life is pretty normal, given the circumstances. That’s how it is with most people after a relationship ends. Not to mention the fact he divorced her on the grounds of desertion.’
If Maxine were given to expressiveness, I couldn’t help but feel that she would be rolling her eyes. ‘She’s classified as a missing person. Did he tell you that the police questioned him about her disappearance?’
There was a trickle of sweat down my spine. ‘The police always question previous partners. There can’t have been any evidence against him or they’d have charged and tried him.’ Then, the obvious thing, the thing I should have asked first, came to me. ‘Why do you care about this?’
‘I care about a missing woman.’
‘No you don’t. Even if you did, it’s not the kind of thing MI5 gets involved in.’
‘Believe what you like. You know it isn’t protocol for us to explain the reasons for what we do to potential informants with no security clearance. Do you know her name?’
‘Jane.’ I didn’t elaborate on my failure to discover her surname. I’d tried a few Internet searches for her under Zac’s but found nothing. I hadn’t wanted to press him to talk about her, when I could see how painful he found it.
‘Jane Miller,’ Maxine said, as if she guessed that my knowledge was limited. ‘Let me give you some facts.’
‘I don’t want your facts.’
‘Hear me out. Okay?’
I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t stop her, either.
‘Born August fourth, 1980, in London. Raised there by a single mother. Father was American – died in 2008 – Jane never knew him, unless seeing him as a baby counts. The father moved back to the US after Jane’s mother divorced him – their relationship ended before Jane’s first birthday. The mother’s been dead since 1998.’
I couldn’t quell my own curiosity, though I tried to sound bored. ‘What was – is – Jane’s profession?’
‘Social worker.’
‘Maybe she pissed somebody off. Maybe you should be looking at that.’
‘She stopped working a few years before she disappeared.’
‘What was her area?’
‘The elderly – not a speciality where she’d be likely to attract a lot of hate.’
‘You didn’t tell me the names of her parents.’ I pulled Jane Eyre closer, across my tummy, as if to shield myself.
‘Jane’s mother was Isabelle Miller. Her father was Philip Veliko. Philip remarried soon after he returned to the US and had a son with his new wife. Frederick.’
‘Would the father’s new family have reason to resent Jane?’
‘Jane inherited some money from her father, but the second wife predeceased him and Frederick didn’t dispute Jane’s inheritance – everything was split equally between Frederick and Jane. No known grievances or hostile behaviour from any of them.’
‘Was Jane in contact with her brother?’ Jane Eyre rose and fell as I breathed.