Claire Kendal - I Spy

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.

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.

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.