Tinker, Tailor, Schoolmum, Spy

by Faye Brann

  ‘No one’s disputing your work to date, Turnbull.’

  Vicky silently thanked her lucky stars Jonathan hadn’t seen her cowering down the side of a bed in a Dalek costume.

  ‘Surely there is something else I can do?’ She really, really wanted to stay on the case.

  Jonathan shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Victoria. I’m not putting you back on this operation. We can find you a suitable role, if you want one, something part time I assume. Maybe in Reports or Surveillance?’

  ‘If I’d wanted a part-time desk job I could have come back years ago.’

  ‘If you’d wanted a full-time ops job you could have come back years ago too. But you didn’t, because it wasn’t what you wanted.’

  Jonathan was right of course. Glimpses of a life beyond her current one taunted and daunted her in equal measures.

  ‘Is there no way to make something work part time?’

  ‘Possibly. But you and I both know hardened criminals don’t always work nine to five, three days a week.’

  ‘But you’d consider it?’

  ‘I think, given your circumstances, you need to tell your husband before I consider anything,’ Jonathan said. ‘It’s perfectly fine for him to know – he should know – and you’d be surprised how much difference it makes to share the burden with your significant other.’

  ‘I can’t. Not after all this time. Chris would never forgive me for lying to him all these years. Even when we met, how we met – I’d basically be erasing our whole lives together … and the kids … I can’t.’

  ‘Then what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Why was this so hard? If Jonathan hadn’t dragged her back into service in the first place she wouldn’t be feeling like this. Would telling Chris make a difference to anything? Would it make it easier? ‘Oh, darling, just off to the Middle East to assassinate a bunch of terrorists. Can you make dinner?’ No. It wouldn’t.

  Jonathan stood up and the dog pulled on the lead, happy to be off again. ‘Look, Victoria, the door’s always open. But, like I’ve said before, you have to decide if you really want to walk through it. Decide what you want. Then talk to me when you’re ready.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, your part in this operation was top-notch. Like you’d never been away.’

  Vicky watched Jonathan and the dog walk away down the path and back towards where his car would be waiting. She sat for another few minutes, replaying his words in her head, and then stood up and began walking in the opposite direction, back the way she came. She felt empty, suddenly, the sense of purpose she’d enjoyed the past few months ripped away from her like a Band-Aid. She understood Jonathan’s reasons, understood that she couldn’t have it all … but to be dismissed as suddenly as she’d been bought on board made her feel used, rather than valued. She wondered if Jonathan had ever really entertained the idea of her coming back full time, or if this had been his intention all along.

  As she walked towards the edge of the park her phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her pocket to see a message from Becky.

  Don’t forget the Christmas Fair meeting tomorrow 9 a.m.

  ‘Fuck it.’ Fuck PTA, fuck Jonathan, fuck everything. She began to run across the park again, her feet grinding into the cold, hard pathway. An aimless, pointless run that no one cared about, not even her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was Thursday, two days before the Christmas Fair. Keeping up with the frantic WhatsApp messages from PTA committee members had become a full-time job and, in the end, Vicky had stuck the conversation on to ‘mute’ so that she didn’t have to deal with the constant bleating of her phone every time someone had a comment to make about filling jam jars with teeth-rotting lollipops or the lack of crap unwanted birthday gifts donated for the raffle.

  The one ally she had when it came to the relentlessness of the PTA, surprisingly, was Matisse. Despite Vicky’s determination not to get too close, the more they got to know each other, the more she found they had in common. Well, not in common exactly – Vicky was never going to be ten years younger, a size eight, or French – but they shared a sense of humour and a love of art and the two things combined made the whole PTA thing just about bearable. Jonathan wasn’t happy about it, of course. She’d been sent a curt message reminding her that Matisse was still under suspicion and to curtail her social interactions. She’d replied back, offering him her spot on the Christmas Fair committee. Things had gone quiet after that.

  The operation hadn’t, though. She’d taken a pre-Christmas shopping trip to the King’s Road a few days back and was thinking about taking a break from buying precisely nothing when she spotted Sacha sitting outside a coffee shop, smoking and shouting into a phone in Russian. His lighter was on the table in front of him and Vicky knew that, thanks to her, JOPS would be triangulating the phone based on his current position in order to listen in. Well, she didn’t have to be left completely out in the cold. She pulled down her woolly hat and sailed right by him and into the shop to pick up a cappuccino to go. He didn’t even notice her; after all, this was the King’s Road at Christmastime, and for every skinny blonde thirty-something carrying a hundred overflowing shopping bags (who he would notice) there was a dumpy housewife from Putney hoping to treat herself to something in Peter Jones. She stood in the queue for her coffee and listened to his rant. Fortunately, Sacha appeared to have no volume control when he was speaking in Russian.

  ‘He wants more money? This bastard has been screwing around with me from the start.’ Sacha stubbed his cigarette out in anger while he listened to the person on the other end of the call. ‘I am not being blackmailed. We will find another buyer.’ He paused once more. ‘Oh, there is always another buyer, my friend. Prepare to divert the ship, we might need it to disappear for a while. Let’s see how much this bastard wants his little pay-off when his low-life clients are asking where their goods are.’

  He lit another cigarette and laughed. ‘No. Fuck that. There is a better way. Let’s see how much he wants it when he has to beg me for it face to face.’ Sacha ended the call and immediately dialled another number. ‘I need to book a flight,’ he said, in English. ‘Make it—’

  ‘Can I help you, love?’

  She’d reached the front of the queue. Vicky ordered and paid for her cappuccino and had to move to the far side to collect it. The coffee machine blasted and frothed, making it impossible to overhear the rest of the conversation, and, by the time she had her coffee in her hand, Sacha was gone. She cursed him, and then she cursed Jonathan. If she had still been on the case, they would be talking now, about what was happening and where that flight was going, and who was on the other end of the call in Russian … she swore again as it began to rain. Clearly, she wasn’t going to get any shopping done today. She hailed a cab and got in.

  ‘South Kensington, please. The V&A.’

  She needed to go somewhere to think.

  There was something soothing about the Victoria and Albert Museum. Vicky loved walking around the galleries there: the awed murmurs of hundreds of people echoing off the walls of the Sculpture Gallery contrasted with the muted sounds of the Fashion Gallery and the excited children in Silver, but somehow it all merged into an appreciative hum that snaked through the building like a trail of Bisto. Art students came to draw, old ladies came to lunch and tourists came to wonder at the plethora of goods inside this Victorian treasure trove. Vicky came to escape.

  She was marvelling at the green and yellow Chihuly glass cascading from the atrium ceiling and plotting her route through the galleries when she saw a familiar, rather well-dressed woman glide into view.

  ‘Matisse? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Victoria. Hi.’ She smiled and gave Victoria an air kiss.

  ‘I can’t believe you are here. What a coincidence!’ There was just a bit too much of it going around today and it made Vicky uncomfortable. If Jonathan knew she’d bumped into Sacha and Matisse, he’d probably add
her to the suspect list. Not that Matisse looked particularly thrilled to see her, either. Still, she needed to make the best of the situation. She noticed the ticket in Matisse’s hand and made a snap decision. ‘I see you’re here for the exhibition,’ she waved her own at Matisse. ‘Me too. Shall we go together?’

  ‘Oui, of course.’ Matisse didn’t sound overwhelmed by the idea.

  ‘Unless you’d rather be on your own,’ Vicky said. ‘To be honest, I came here for some quiet time.’

  ‘To be honest, so did I.’ They both laughed.

  ‘Well then, let’s be alone together,’ Vicky said. ‘I always come here by myself. It might be nice to have someone to share it with for once.’

  After they’d finished at the museum, Vicky had suggested they go to her old stomping ground for lunch. She had been talking most of the way around the exhibition, telling Matisse about her days working nearby and about how she met Chris, but it felt strange to be back in the same bar she’d met Anatoli, all those years ago, sipping champagne and laughing as if she’d simply slipped through time.

  ‘I like that you brought me here,’ Matisse said, as they perched on stools with their drinks. Her usual immaculate style blended in perfectly with the Rolex-dangling masses that congregated with them in the bar. ‘It shows me a different side of you that I did not know about until now.’

  ‘I suppose it does, although I haven’t been here in years,’ Vicky said, feeling like a fish out of water perched on a stool next to a bunch of Hooray Henrys and trying to remember a time when she could lose herself in this crowd with a mere toss of her hair. ‘I was pretty different before I had the kids.’

  ‘Me too.’ Matisse smiled, and this time Vicky watched it rise all the way to her eyes, before she suddenly burst out laughing. Vicky didn’t know whether to join in or be concerned that Matisse had voluntarily creased her face into a smile. Can Botox break?

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Oh, nothing … one day maybe I will take you to where I used to work before I had Dmitri, Victoria … then you will know why I laugh.’

  Vicky pursed her lips. She had some pretty good ideas already. She wondered if Matisse was ashamed of her past life. She doubted it; as proved by Halloween, Matisse didn’t seem the type to be embarrassed by her body.

  They took longer over lunch than they had planned and travelled back to school by cab. The late November sky was so dim it felt like night already, even though it was only three-thirty in the afternoon. A few miserable raindrops were leaking out of the sky as they stood waiting for school to finish. The conversation turned inevitably to the Christmas Fair.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ Vicky said. ‘I will be so glad when it’s over. Why did I ever volunteer?’

  ‘Why did you?’

  The question had caught her unawares. ‘Well, I … I—’ Matisse was staring at her rather intently. Vicky remembered herself and relaxed. ‘I was drunk,’ she said, shrugging.

  Matisse laughed. ‘Is as good an excuse as any, I suppose … Well, we are nearly there, Victoria. We have our job, to bake the cakes and run the stall. We do not need to worry about anything else.’

  ‘Yes, but I feel like people want me to worry. Those endless WhatsApp messages … James! James! Come back here please, Evie will be out in a minute.’

  ‘They just want someone to say they are doing a good job, Victoria. We have our husbands, our children, but maybe it’s not enough sometimes. I know it is not enough for me. I want to do something more with my life than just be Sacha’s wife, or Dmitri’s mother. All my life I have been nothing. For someone to say I am good at something, to say thank you, like you did when we baked the first cakes together, it means a lot.’

  Vicky didn’t know how to reply. To the outside world, Matisse seemed so self-satisfied, confident and so needless of the blessings of her peers. But she could see now, that it was really just a cry for attention, a way to compensate for her version of a disappointing life. There was a lot she still didn’t know being hidden behind the mask that Matisse had created, and some part of her – the spook part – wanted to dig deeper in case there was something important they had missed. Vicky ignored the urge. Not only was it dishonest, there was no point. Jonathan had made it clear to stand down.

  ‘Well that’s one thing you are good at, for sure,’ Vicky said. ‘Talking of which, are you still up for doing some more baking before the fair?’

  ‘Yes, yes of course I am. Thursday, yes? I will have everything ready for us.’

  ‘Maybe I can do some mince pies as well, they’re always popular.’

  ‘Some what?’

  ‘Mince pies?’

  ‘At a cake stall? With meat in them?’

  ‘No, no … it’s a sweet thing, with raisins and suet and stuff. I’ll bring some jars of it with me to your house, and some instant pastry. Christ, Matisse, where have you been that you don’t know what a mince pie is?’

  ‘Somewhere they don’t make things from a jar,’ Matisse said, pulling a face. ‘Or have this thing you call “instant pastry”. But maybe you can convince me they are better than they sound.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Vicky said. ‘And if you’re feeling really brave, maybe you can show me how to make my own pastry.’

  They’d ended up baking all morning, until there wasn’t a single inch of space left in the enormous kitchen to put any more cakes. Matisse buzzed around the finished products, humming, checking with wooden skewers to make sure they were done as they came out of the oven and turning them onto cooling racks with practiced expertise.

  Sacha had appeared, on cue, the second the first batches were out of the oven; the smell of the baking too much for him to resist. Vicky had made him try a mince pie, which Matisse said looked revolting in her opinion, but Sacha made sounds of satisfaction and went back for a second one before Matisse had time to stop him.

  ‘They are for the charity bake sale. Leave them alone!’ she said, placing a clean tea towel over them and patting his stomach, before slipping into Russian. ‘Besides, Christmas is coming, and you need to take it easy or you’ll never fit your trousers.’

  ‘I won’t need to worry about trousers,’ Sacha replied. ‘You can expect a call from the travel agent later. I decided we should get some winter sun.’

  The flights were for all of them? Vicky wondered where they might be going at such short notice. She had a pretty good idea. She smiled at them both. They carried on, masking their argument with light voices and polite faces, oblivious to the fact she could understand every word.

  ‘I thought we would be at home—’

  ‘Well we aren’t.’

  ‘But it’s better for Dmitri—’

  ‘Stop being so selfish and try showing a little gratitude. I’m booking us a holiday in Dubai, for fuck’s sake. I thought you would be pleased to show Dmitri where he comes from.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Matisse tried to hide the dull hatred in her eyes but Vicky could see it, plain as day. ‘I’m so sorry, Victoria,’ she said, in English, ‘we are being rude, talking in Russian.’

  ‘It’s okay. Carry on your conversation. I need to get off anyway.’ Vicky began gathering her things.

  ‘I’ll see you out.’

  ‘No need, I can let myself out.’

  ‘See her out, Matisse.’ Sacha sounded menacing now, and Vicky wondered if she should stay after all.

  ‘I’ll ice the cakes later when they’re cool,’ Matisse said, opening the door for her.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s better for me to be busy and out of Sacha’s way, the mood he is in.’

  ‘Matisse … is everything okay? You don’t need me to stick around, do you?’ She hoped Matisse was picking up on her cue.

  ‘I’ll be fine. Thank you, though.’ Matisse nodded her head back towards the stairs and smiled. ‘I can always garotte him with the cake slicer if he really annoys me.’

  Vicky couldn’t tell if she was joking, but it didn’t look like it. She nodded, sa
tisfied she would be okay without her. In another life, Matisse would have made a rather brilliant Bond girl.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Magda!’ Matisse called. Having seen Victoria out, she was back down in the kitchen. She stood face to face with Sacha, eyes not moving from his, like a pair of animals staring each other down before a fight.

  ‘Yes, madam?’

  She spoke English to the housekeeper, slowly and deliberately, so that Sacha was under no illusions about what she was saying. ‘Magda, can you tidy up this mess and make sure my fat husband doesn’t eat any more of the cakes, please?’

  Magda didn’t flinch. ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She spoke to Sacha now. ‘So why are we really going away? Is this about a deal?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’ Sacha said, clutching his hand around her chin and squeezing her cheeks hard. ‘It’s a family holiday where you get to sit on your arse and wear very little. Understood?’

  ‘Get off me.’ She pushed his hand away. ‘I understand completely.’

  ‘I cannot believe I am taking you and your son to Dubai and you’re pissed off with me? This must be a joke.’

  ‘He’s your son too, Sacha, and yes, I would have liked to be consulted.’

  ‘Oh, let’s not pretend, Matisse. We act like neither of us know the truth, but he is nothing like me. And never will be.’

  Matisse sighed. ‘Don’t go there,’ she said. ‘You know I don’t have anything to say on the matter.’

  ‘Even after all this time, you don’t want to admit it. But you know what I am talking about,’ he replied, pointing at her with a singular stubby jab to the collarbone.

  She wouldn’t be drawn. It was always the same when she had a difference of opinion, when she challenged his authority. Always the accusations. What an insecure little man he was beneath all of that ink and big talk. She admitted that the identity of Dmitri’s father was contestable, but that was hardly her fault. And what did it matter to him anyway? It wasn’t as if he was Father of the Year.