I enter the second tunnel, leaving the sunshine behind me again. When I come out the other end, I think of a baby’s first breaths, gasped in the midst of all that new brightness and noise. I try to envisage a baby’s birth as it should be, because the bad outcomes are the exceptions and it is important to keep that in mind.
‘Helen.’
I halt as if somebody has jerked me backwards. I know that voice, but I blink several times, as if to be sure of what I am seeing.
There is no doubt. The woman standing before me has stepped straight out of my nightmares.
It’s not the right time yet. Getting you out the right way will take time. We need to set things up properly.
It has been almost two years since I’ve seen her, and Zac is a better candidate for the starring role in my bad dreams. But Maxine is the one who comes to me in the night, just as she did on my last night in hospital, the sheets clinging, cold and damp from my sweat.
Maxine has this way of never seeming to look at anyone or anything, her eyes downcast, her shoulders rounded. She is droopy. That is the word I often think of when I observe her. Your eyes would slide over her as if she were the most uninteresting piece of grey furniture ever made. And that is exactly what she wants your eyes to do.
‘It’s good,’ she says, ‘how readily you respond to Helen. Presumably Graham is natural to you too, now?’
‘Yes.’ I hadn’t been out of breath, but now I am.
Maxine’s blouse is elegant in midnight-blue silk, but untucked and sloppy. Her loose black trousers disguise how slim and dangerously fit she is. She is slouchy, as ever. Only the unfortunate know what it means when she straightens her back, something she does rarely. I am one of that select group.
‘You look different.’ That flat flat flatness of her voice. The pretence of indifference, as if I am a neighbour she sees every day, walking up and down the path to the next-door house.
‘That’s hardly surprising.’
Time seems to spool backwards, speeding past her twilight swoop on me in the hospital almost two years ago – it’s too painful to freeze time there. It rushes further back, past her ambush on the cliffs two and a half years ago. Time stops six years ago, on the day I flunked out, sitting in that white-light room with the exposing glass table between us.
You’re like that puppy who was too friendly to be a police dog, she’d said. We don’t recruit good-looking people. You need to look like Jane Average, but you’re too vain to let yourself look that way.
She has left the rear door of the car open, the engine purring but the driver invisible behind dark windows and hidden by the partition that keeps his section of the car separate. We both know it is no accident that she has crossed my path. Nothing is ever an accident with Maxine.
‘Why are you here?’ I channel her flat indifference, though I am pretty sure I can guess. As repellent as she is to me, it is looking as though I am going to need her help.
‘Have you done anything to give yourself away?’
The question is a confirmation more than a surprise, but the air still puffs out of my stomach. ‘My grandmother …’ My voice trails off. ‘It’s possible, yes.’
She starts towards the car, parked where the road ends and the tunnel opens. ‘Come with me.’ It is as if I’d seen her yesterday, to hear her boss me around.
‘Are you having me watched? Is that how you found me this morning?’
‘Not necessary. You seem to have forgotten that I already knew where you were.’ Do I imagine that there is a flash of something behind her eyes? Maxine opens the car door. ‘There’s something I need you to see. It’s for your protection.’
‘Excuse me if my confidence in your ability to protect me isn’t great.’
‘It’s not as if you have anywhere important to go. Or anyone to go to.’
I say nothing. I keep my face indifferent, channelling Maxine herself. But she is right. Other than my grandmother, there is nobody.
‘Trust me,’ Maxine says.
‘I’ve tried that before. It didn’t work out great.’
‘As far as I can tell, it still hasn’t.’
‘Do you have children, Maxine?’
She pretends not to hear.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘If I answer, will you come?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have children.’
‘How many?’
‘I agreed to answer your first question, not a series of them.’
‘How many?’ I say again.
‘Two.’ She looks so sorry for me. ‘I have two.’
Two years and five months earlier
Cornwall, 13 November 2016
Since Maxine’s failed attempt to recruit me four weeks ago, I’d plugged Jane’s name, and her mother’s and father’s and brother’s, into every Internet search engine I could think of. There was no social media for any of them, though I found a record of Jane’s birth in London on 4 August 1980 and her marriage to Zac in September 2006.
I also found her father’s obituary, which confirmed what Maxine said about his wife pre-deceasing him and his son Frederick surviving him. Two other things struck me when I read it. First, that Philip Veliko had been a property developer, and second, that the obituary didn’t mention Jane at all.
The Remembrance Sunday ceremony always started at the outdoor war memorial in the square, then moved into the church. I was getting ready to leave for this, twisting up the front of my hair and fastening it with a jade comb, when Zac slipped his hands beneath my knitted dress. Before I knew it, he was tipping me back onto the bed and I was pulling him on top of me and there was a pile of sea-green wool on the floor.
Afterwards, when I stood in front of the looking glass to try again with my hair, he pressed against me from behind, wrapped his arms around me, and rested his hands on my belly. He whispered that he knew my period was two weeks late and my breasts were bigger, which he loved. I wondered that he could know these things, that he could be watching my body that carefully.
I had loved my brief time of hugging the secret of a pregnancy close and just for me. My breasts had been tingling for the past few days. Little electric sparks shot through them. I’d planned to share the news with him tomorrow, on his birthday.
So I said my period had a tendency to skip around, and my breasts were the same as ever, and it was too early to tell, and he smiled at our reflections and said, ‘Then we will see.’
When Zac and I arrived at the war memorial, we found Peggy and James waiting for us close to the Cross of Sacrifice. Peggy invariably got there early on Remembrance Sunday, because she liked to have a good view of the ceremony. She was resplendent in a white fur Cossack hat and scarlet coat.
Zac put his mouth by my ear. ‘She looks like a giant poppy,’ he said, and I nearly sprayed the mouthful of the takeaway coffee I’d just sipped.
James stood beside Peggy, his silver hair sticking up, straight-backed as ever in his black greatcoat and red scarf. He was his usual quiet self, and gave me his usual kiss on the cheek with his usual near-smile, and made his usual half-joke that he was still waiting for me to come back to