I Spy. Claire Kendal

table, then stirred them into the moisturising cream she rubbed onto her face each night. My fantasy was that the serum would force my grandmother into revealing the secrets I was certain she was keeping about my parents.

      When I was ready to begin the interrogation, I noticed that she had a bright-red and extremely bumpy rash on her cheeks. She never imagined the cause, and I crept back into her room to steal the cream away and dispose of it at the bottom of the kitchen rubbish so she would never use it again. I was frightened that I’d mortally injured her, but she seemed to recover quickly.

      On my eighth birthday, Harriet the Spy appeared in my Christmas stocking, and Harriet became my absolute hero. She carried her spy notebook everywhere, so I did too, writing little observations about everything I saw. I made things up as well. It was only later that I learned that spies were supposed to keep to what was true, and were trained to be cautious about what they put on paper – two principles I wasn’t very good at heeding.

      ‘I can see that you have been commendably strategic and goal-driven in wanting to join us.’ Maxine gave me another of those intimate nods. ‘But in this line of work, how far would you push it? You’re very attractive.’ Despite the appeasing gestures, Maxine shifted the subject with the suddenness of a window exploding in a storm. ‘You know that.’

      I blinked at this new Maxine. She was being kind but firm, friendly but still clearly the one with the power.

      She pushed at me again. ‘Where does the line come, Holly?’

      I realised I was biting the side of my lower lip, a sign of the anxiety I wanted to hide. ‘Emotional. Emotional involvement. That’s the line I wouldn’t cross.’

      Maxine was in full-friend mode, pretending that the two of us were just ordinary women exchanging confidences. ‘So as long as it isn’t emotional …’ her voice was gentle, understanding ‘… physical involvement is okay – to – a – point.’ She tapped the table’s bevelled edge with her index finger, picking it up and setting it down again a few centimetres further along with her last three words, as if counting.

      ‘Are you asking – if I would sleep with someone for the role?’ I imagined Martin on the other side of the one-way glass, controlling any impulse to sit up straighter or open his mouth wide. He wouldn’t react at all.

      ‘Now that you mention it.’

      I thought I was saying the right thing, but I pictured Martin, no longer able to disguise his interest, sticking his feet out and crossing them at the ankles, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. Because he could see that I was a fish being reeled in. ‘No, No I wouldn’t.’

      ‘Are you sure?’ Maxine said this as if she were trying to help me, trying to tell me I had given the wrong answer and should flip it.

      ‘That would be like prostituting myself for the country. So no.’ My shoe was tapping wildly against the white-tiled floor. I froze, and the absence of noise from it was too noticeable.

      ‘Even if it was the only way to save your life and the lives of hundreds of others?’

      I was flailing, trying to guess what she wanted to hear rather than saying what I thought. Which was the worst thing I could do. ‘If it was for the role. I would be happy to – to go as far as I needed to for the role.’

      Maxine’s usual un-reactiveness was gone. She tilted her head, a questioning gesture of moral disgust, as if in disbelief that she’d heard me right. ‘What if you had a boyfriend?’

      ‘I would go – ahead – and tell him afterwards.’ I was bobbing my head up and down, trying to signal that I meant what I said, that I was trustworthy.

      Maxine’s girlfriend pretence had vanished. ‘So you’d cheat to get information.’

      I had wanted the job with MI5 more than I ever wanted anything, and I had got so far and so close after multiple tests of my situational judgement and core skills. But it was rushing away from me faster than water down a drain.

      Maxine shook her head. She said the most important thing she ever said to me. The thing I would replay all the time.

      ‘You know, a physical relationship is not acceptable. You are making yourself vulnerable. It’s all about using this.’ She almost smiled. She placed a hand on each side of her head without actually touching it. ‘Rather than that’ – she lowered her hands from her breasts to her hips, again without touching herself – ‘to get what you need.’

      There was nothing left for me to do. I knew the implications of what I had said, and that there was no recovering from it.

      ‘I think,’ said Maxine, ‘that this brings your interview to an end.’

      When I was very little, my grandmother often chose my bedtime stories from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Her favourite had a huge mouthful of a title. ‘MATILDA Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death.’ This was probably because my grandmother hated my mother, and my mother’s name was Matilda. It didn’t occur to my grandmother that having a heroine who was my mother’s namesake would only make me love her more.

      Plus, my grandmother could never convince me that Matilda was really dead. ‘It was a trick,’ I would say. ‘Matilda hid in a fireproof cellar but the story forgot to tell us.’ I didn’t confess to my grandmother that I often dreamed my parents were still alive, and it had all been a mistake. I never believed in the words ‘The End’ when my grandmother finished and snapped the book closed. I was convinced the characters continued on somewhere, and I would try to imagine the next phase of their lives for myself.

      All in all, the effect of my grandmother’s cautionary tales was not what she intended. They just gave me ideas about the interesting things I could do, and alerted me to potential disasters so I could try to figure out how to avoid them, though I didn’t always succeed.

      My grandmother was forever muttering about listeners at keyholes being vexed, and eavesdroppers never hearing good of themselves. ‘That is what you must reflect upon, Holly,’ she would say.

      The best response to this, like most of the things my grandmother said, was the word, ‘Yes’, usually accompanied by a solemn nod. But in truth, the only thing I reflected upon was how to avoid detection.

      Soon after they moved into the house next door, Peggy discovered me lying like a tiger along a high branch of my grandmother’s apple tree. It was the end of summer, and I was watching Peggy play with Milly on the other side of the fence that ran between our houses, while James manned the barbeque.

      Peggy thought that this incident was an aberration. She saw me as a sweet little girl whose loneliness and longing for family had put her in danger, though it was Peggy’s own startled screech at seeing me in the tree that almost made me fall out of it. But my spying was no aberration. I simply made sure Peggy never caught me at it again.

      Peggy was in the habit of leaving the laundry room window open so she could dangle out the hose that vented the hot air from her tumble dryer. The laundry room was Peggy’s favourite place for private conversations. I could peek from my father’s dusty first-floor study and see right into that laundry room.

      I loved my father’s study, where I often hunted for clues about my parents, though I only ever found one thing. A photograph of them on their wedding day, hidden in his copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I liked to sit and read in my father’s old armchair, which was covered in green leather. I’d dragged it near the window. From there, I could monitor what was happening at Peggy’s. If her washing machine and tumble dryer were off, then listening in was no challenge. In fact, I regarded such a circumstance as an invitation.

      And that is how I came to hear Peggy and Milly talking together when I was back home in St Ives, two months after my disastrous final MI5 interview. As soon as I saw that the laundry room light was on and Peggy and Milly had gone in, I ran downstairs, slipped into the garden, squeezed through the rip in the fence Milly and I always used as a not-very-secret passage, and flattened myself against a tangle of Peggy’s