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