London, a few years ago
Felicity’s approach, when it came, had been seamless. Had they been watching her and Athena in Greece for years, and overheard their conversations about Clive? Had they been listening in when she rang home from the house when David and Anna were at work, and inferred Maria’s feelings about David’s father, when her mother asked after him? Maria could never be sure, but what was certain was that the offer when it came felt like a chance for atonement. The opportunity she had been waiting for, for years.
David and Anna had taken the girls to visit their grandfather, leaving Maria to head off to the British Library for the day, the clouds hanging low overhead as she made her way from King’s Cross tube station along the Euston Road. She had been living at the house for a month by now, since deferring her course in order to work and save up money as a nanny to babies Stella and Rose. If she was ever going to go back to her degree in Political Science and International Relations, she would need to keep up with her studies.
Without a valid student card, she couldn’t access the readers’ rooms and instead was sitting on one of the single tables lining the wall in the coffee shop of the library, her notes spread in front of her, when a woman approached.
‘Do you mind? Don’t worry, I won’t be long,’ she had said with that insincerely apologetic manner British women would often affect before doing exactly what they pleased.
Maria had smiled that it was no problem and the woman had gestured towards a particularly dense textbook on the political economy of good government, brimming with Post-it notes, which she had bought with her first pay cheque from David.
‘Gosh, that looks intense,’ the woman said.
‘Intense is one word for it,’ Maria replied, the conversation then moving back and forth so easily that by the time Felicity showed up again, a few weeks later, and again, before finally making her intentions known, Maria had already been drawn in. It wasn’t David who MI6 was interested in, Felicity made that clear – it was Clive. Spying on David, and subsequently Anna, was merely a means to an end – an end that none of them, including Maria, could ever have foreseen.
In the initial weeks after Maria’s arrival at the house in London, Anna barely left her room other than occasional trips to the bathroom where Artemis’ old perfume bottles were laid out like artefacts in a mausoleum. The lingering smell of David’s mother, which had caused Maria to jolt when she first noticed it, became a bolstering presence, reminding Maria of what Clive had done.
Despite Anna’s coolness towards everyone and everything, including the girls, it was hard not to feel sorry for her, Maria found as the weeks rolled on. What at first appeared as an aloof uninterest in the world around her revealed itself as a kind of absence, as if her spirit was somewhere else, her body left behind, useless to the young daughters it should have been able to nurture. To call it postpartum depression, as the health visitors had, conferring as they left the house, out of earshot of Anna, seemed too simplistic. At first Maria couldn’t recognise what she was seeing, but eventually it came to her: it was fear.
Some days, Maria would sense a pair of eyes on her as she rocked the girls to sleep in the nursery and she would look up to find Anna hovering in the doorway, as if scared to step inside. With time, though, Anna grew more confident, taking the girls out by herself for periods in the double buggy. It was on one of these days, as she performed her usual sweep of the house, armed with a bottle of multi-purpose spray and a cloth in case anyone should find her and ask what she was doing, that Maria found Anna’s second phone at the back of the cupboard in the bathroom. At first she wondered if it was a trap. It had almost been too easy. Was Anna really so stupid as to hide it there, barely encrypted and logging every piece of correspondence she and Harry shared – information Maria had been able to take right back to Felicity at MI6? But time and again, Maria’s suspicions were confirmed. Anna wasn’t terrible, she was something far more dangerous. Anna was vulnerable, and she was careless.
It was only a matter of time until she was found out.
That October, the family travelled to Provence. Maria tended to wake early with the girls, the soft autumn light drifting through the shutters. Anna seemed to be up half the night – Maria could hear her padding along the hallway to the bathroom, as she often did at home in those early days after the twins were born. But unlike the hallway there, which felt hemmed in despite the elaborate work that had been done on the house the Christmas after the girls were born – the interiors transformed into the sort of place they featured in the luxury magazine where Anna worked – the house in France was light and airy, the horizon from every window reminding Maria of home.
It was an old farmhouse renovated in soft pale stone, surrounded by lavender fields. Maria was sitting at the edge of the pool, her bare feet skimming the surface of the water as she watched the girls teeter on the grass on unsteady legs, when David emerged from the entrance of the house. She could feel his eyes on her as he made his way down the grass bank. He smiled as he approached, standing for a while, both of them watching Stella and Rose, who were building a tower out of blocks. After a moment, Stella watched Rose add a brick, and then, waiting for her sister’s back to turn, pushed the whole tower over.
Rose turned and burst into tears and Maria frowned, holding open her arms. Rose bustled towards her, seeking comfort in her arms while David gently chastised Stella who cried out furiously.
Maria laughed, winking reassuringly at David. ‘Don’t take it personally. It’s just their age – the terrible twos, you say in England?’
Holding Rose gently against her chest, she called out, ‘Stella, be kind,’ in her mother tongue.
‘You’re teaching them Greek?’ David said and Maria flushed, releasing Rose and encouraging her to go and play with her sister.
‘Sorry, I thought it would be …’
‘Don’t apologise,’ David said. ‘It’s excellent for them to have the basis of another language when they’re so young. If you stay around long enough, hopefully they will learn it thoroughly.’
He held her eye until she looked away.
‘Do you remember the pool at the house in Greece, when we were kids?’ he said after a moment once the girls were happily playing again, their fracas already forgotten.
Maria paused, something inside her shifting. ‘Of course.’
‘They were happy days, weren’t they?’ David said, more of a question than a statement of fact.
‘They were.’ She nodded and when she looked up, his eyes moved away from hers. She swallowed, the silence between them throbbing, and then David spoke again, wiping his face with his sleeve sharply, as if dabbing at invisible tears, his voice like that of a different person.
Maria looked up and from the corner of her eye saw Clive standing on the terrace, looking down at them, though she couldn’t make out his expression.
‘So, I wondered if you could take the girls out for the day?’ David said, composed now.
‘Really? But I thought Anna wanted to spend time with them—’
‘Perhaps you could take them into town?’ he continued, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘Anna’s sleeping in late again, and Jeff and May will be over soon.’
‘Of course.’ Feeling the dynamics between them adjust back to the role of employer and hired help, Maria lifted her feet out of the pool, her jaw clenched.
She stood without looking at him. ‘Come on, girls,’ she said, tidying away the blocks. As she turned back towards the house, David’s hand brushed against hers. ‘Thank you for being here,’ he said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper.
Maria woke the girls, who had napped in the buggy, as they returned to the house later that afternoon. There were no cars parked in the front drive and from the silence she assumed everyone was out. She put nursery rhymes on the television in the main living room and kept an eye on the twins through the glass door as she moved through into the connecting kitchen. She had been frustrated not to be here while Jeff and May were around, their lips loosened by the inevitable drink, so that she might have had a chance of overhearing something she could take back to Felicity.
She filled the kettle, allowing her eyes to move freely around the room. There were no bags or coats left discarded downstairs and she could hardly go searching upstairs while the girls were awake. Pulling a cup from the cupboard, she searched for a cafetière. Clive always insisted on being in charge of coffee-making while they were in France, making a show of this rare act of generosity, and her hands moved between the cupboards until she felt her fingers run over a box tucked in the far back corner.
Pulling it out, she looked at the box of sleeping pills, turning it over and reading David’s name stuck on the front. What was David doing with sleeping pills? If there was one thing she knew, from the nights when she lay awake listening to Anna rustling through the house, David’s light snoring emanating from the open bedroom door, it was that he had no problem with insomnia. Of course, the heavy sleeping could have been the result of taking the pills, and yet the flash of memory was so immediate, so instinctive, it was as if her brain had intentionally held it there within easy reach, waiting for her to connect the dots: David, at the kitchen counter the night before, having insisted on serving up dinner, despite Maria’s insistence that she could do it. He had flinched when she came in again a moment later, turning and holding something behind his back, his expression as if he had been caught in the middle of some illicit act.
But this was David, she reminded herself. He couldn’t have been lacing Anna’s food. And yet the more she let the possibility sink in, the more it made dreadful sense.
Anna had drunk wine over the course of the afternoon, but still it was unsettling how woozy she had seemed before excusing herself from the table and heading up to bed early, the previous evening. Unusually, there had been no sound of her in the night, and she had still been out cold when Maria went out this morning with the twins.
Maria’s fingers trembled slightly as she replaced the packet of pills, gently closing the cupboard door as if suddenly aware that she might be being watched. She turned slowly so that her back was against the counter, jumping as she spotted the outline of Anna’s body sprawled across the middle of the garden, through the glass doors.
Heartbeat rising, Maria moved towards the closed back door. As she approached, the image became clearer – Anna was not injured or collapsed but simply dozing under a tree. Hurrying back to the living room, she turned off the television, her chest straining with the possible implications of the stash of pills.
Stella wriggled off the sofa, Rose following more cautiously, and Maria took her hand as they moved through the house. ‘Look, Mummy’s outside,’ she said, opening the back door and leading the twins towards their mother, an empty glass of wine on the grass beside her.
Maria cleared her throat and slowed down, letting Anna come to as the girls moved ahead of her, Stella calling out, ‘Mama!’
‘Hello, darling … Have you had a lovely day?’ Anna pulled herself up into a sitting position as Stella sat on her knee.
‘Maria?’ She turned and Anna continued. ‘I’d rather you didn’t take the girls out for the day without asking me.’
Maria smarted. ‘I’m sorry. David asked me to, and I—’
‘He what?’ Something in Anna’s voice made her backpedal.
‘I mean, he … Or maybe it was me. I’m sorry if it wasn’t what you were hoping for today.’
‘David asked you to take them out?’
‘I’m sorry, I really can’t remember whose idea it was, maybe it was mine. But I will ask next time. I won’t do it again.’
Maria tried to smile reassuringly, while her mind worked it out: David was drugging his wife and lying to her. He wanted her to think she was losing it. Was that really what was happening? Instantly, her mind moved to Artemis, her words to Athena the night of the storm: ‘You have to believe me, Athena, I know too much! I can see it in his eyes when he looks at me. The way he talks about me, as if I’m mad or … Please just promise me that if anything happens to me you will remember what I told you.’
Anna was working late at the office one evening, not long after they returned from Provence. Maria tucked the girls in their beds, lingering in the doorway, watching their tiny bodies rise and fall beneath the sheets. It was hard to look at the twins and not feel a burning resentment towards Anna for what she was putting them through, even if Stella and Rose were, for now, oblivious to the cradle of lies.
How could she do it to her children? Maria understood why she herself was in this: Clive had been responsible for the death of Artemis, and it had turned out that was far from all he was guilty of. How could Maria not have relished the chance to finally make him and his men pay? At the risk of being melodramatic, it was possible to believe this was her raison d’être, as if a higher force had brought her to London for this single purpose: a chance to avenge and atone in one fell swoop. And Maria wasn’t betraying David – or at least not without just cause.
She moved away from the door and across the landing. She didn’t feel guilty. But Anna? She had consciously made a family with a man she couldn’t have loved, with the specific purpose of betraying him. David had no idea, Maria was certain of that. How could he? And yet, he had been feeding her sleeping pills, hadn’t he? He had been intentionally telling her lies, presumably with the intention of making her question herself.
She stopped dead in the doorway to the kitchen, at the sight of him there, a rush of fear as she imagined him tapping into her thoughts. But he hardly moved, let alone reacted to her presence.
For a moment she felt like she was intruding. She hadn’t known anyone was home and it was unnerving to find him here, alone, a whisky bottle hanging from one hand, a letter unfolded in front of him. There was a strange energy to the way he held himself, something about the scene that made her want to back away. But she knew he must have already heard her and so she stepped into the room, moving behind him and casting a glance at the words on the page. All she could make out was the girls’ names printed in a column under official-looking text.
‘Is everything OK?’ she asked, praying the trepidation didn’t show in her voice.
‘No, it’s not. I’ve just … Never mind …’ He closed his eyes. ‘Maria, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me. That night, in Greece, I …’
Instantly she knew what he was referring to. It was the first time he had mentioned the incident with the gun in all these years, and the reference to their shared childhood caught her off-guard. She could still picture the night perfectly, feeling the breath catching in her lungs as she ran from the house, past Clive’s car returning from the port.
Maria shook her head now, pulling a chair next to him and taking his hand. She was so moved by this flash of the old David, her friend – so reassured by the reminder of their shared history – that she momentarily forgot herself. It was impossible to reconcile the scared, bereaved boy she had observed that night with the image of the calculating, gaslighting husband that had been building in her mind moments earlier.
‘Stop,’ she said, comforting him. ‘It’s OK. I know, you had lost your mother. You were a child. I shouldn’t have reacted so …’
He pulled away from her. ‘Don’t do that, Maria.’
She stood hurriedly, moving to the sink. ‘Do what?’
‘Don’t be disingenuous. Don’t lie to me. I’ve had enough of people lying.’
He took another swig from the bottle of whisky and Maria felt herself freeze.
‘I wouldn’t have done it.’ He stood, crossing the room in silence, the tension loosening a little as she realised what he was referring to. There was something in his voice, though, that made her wary and she kept her eyes on the floor as she felt him move towards her. He paused, their faces a breath apart, and for a moment she was transported back to the house on the island, the thrill of the faint smell of cigarette smoke on his lips as he moved in to kiss her.
And then she felt it again, his lips, this time touching her mouth. For a second she leaned into it, parting her mouth, feeling for his tongue, and then, as keenly as he had moved forward she pulled back.
‘I …’ She was about to speak when the space between them was shattered by the jingle of keys in the lock. Pushing her hair away from her face, Maria moved quickly out of the room, seconds before Anna appeared at the door.