Alec Milius Spy Series Books 1 and 2: A Spy By Nature, The Spanish Game

My first instinct here should have been defensive. Nobody ever asks Alec about Kate; it’s a taboo subject. And yet I quickly find that I want to talk about her.

‘Could you tell me a little bit about the two of you?’

‘We broke up over six months ago.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she says, and then, with sudden horror, I remember the lie to Liddiard. ‘I was led to believe that she was your girlfriend.’ She looks down at her file, staring at it in plain disbelief. Mistakes of this kind do not happen. She moves awkwardly in her seat and mutters something inaudible.

It was a throwaway deceit. I only did it to make myself appear more solid and dependable, a rounded man in a long-term relationship. He asked for her full name, for a date and place of birth, so that SIS could run a check on her. And now that the vetting process is over they want to square their deep background with mine. They want to know whether Kate will make a decent diplomatic wife, a spy’s accomplice. They want to hear me talk about her.

My left hand is suddenly up around my mouth, squeezing the ridge of skin under my nose. It is almost funny to have been caught out by something so crass, so needless, but this feeling quickly evaporates. The humiliation is soon total.

Out of it, I knit together a shoddy retraction.

‘I’m sorry. No, no, it’s my fault. I’m sorry. We just…we just got back together again, about three months ago. Secretly. We don’t want anybody to know. We prefer things to be private. I’m just so used to telling people that we’re not back together that it’s become like a reflex.’

‘So you are together?’

‘Very much so, yes.’

‘But no one else knows?’

‘That’s correct. Yes. Except for a friend of mine. Saul. Otherwise, nobody.’

‘I see.’

There is disappointment in the tone of this last remark, as if I have let her down. I feel ten again, a scolded child in the head-teacher’s study.

‘Perhaps we should talk about something else,’ she says, turning a page in my file.

I have to rescue this situation or the game is up.

‘No, no. I’m happy to talk about it. I should explain. Sorry. It’s just that after we broke up I never spoke about it to anyone. No one would have understood. They might have tried to, but they would never have understood. They would have put things in boxes and I didn’t want that. It would have trivialized it. And now that we are back together, both of us have made a decision to keep things between ourselves. So we’re used to lying about it. Nobody else knows.’ An uneasy pause. ‘This must sound childish to you.’

‘Not at all.’ I may have got away with it. ‘But can I ask why you broke up in the first place?’

This is expressed in such a way that it would be easy for me not to answer the question. But my embarrassment at having been caught out by Stevenson is substantial, and I do not want to refuse her request.

‘Largely on account of my selfishness. I think Kate grew tired of the fact that I was always withholding things from her. I had this insistence on privacy, a reluctance to let her in. She called it my separate-ness.’

There is suddenly a look of deep satisfaction in the lined wise eyes of Hilary Stevenson. Separateness. Yes. A good word for it.

‘But you don’t have a problem with that anymore?’

‘With privacy? No. Not with Kate at least. I’m still an intensely private person, but I’ve become far more open with her since we got back together.’

This emphasis on privacy could even work in my favour. It is surely in the nature of intelligence work.

‘And why did you want to give the relationship a second chance? Do stop me if you think I’m being unduly intrusive.’

‘No, no. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. I wanted to try again because I started thinking about the future. It was that simple. I looked around and thought about where I wanted to be in ten years’ time. The sort of life I wanted to lead. And I realized I’d thrown away the best chance I had of a kind of happiness.’

Stevenson nods encouragingly, as if this makes absolute sense to her. So I continue.

‘It’s one of the clichés of breaking up, but you simply don’t know how much you love something until it’s taken away from you. I’m sure you come across this all the time in your profession.’

‘All the time.’

‘That’s the dangerous thing about being in a serious relationship with someone. In a very worrying sense, love guarantees you.’

‘And then all that was taken away from you?’

‘Yes.’

A first gathering of pain here. Don’t show it to her. Tell her what you know she wants to hear.

‘So I set myself a task. I tried to get it back. And luckily we hadn’t killed too much of it off.’

‘I’m glad,’ Stevenson says, and I believe that she is. Everything I have told her is the truth about me, save for the plain fact that Kate has refused to come back. I had killed off too much of it, and she has now moved on.

Stevenson writes something in my file, at least three lines of notes, and for some time the room is quiet save for the whisper of her pen. I wonder if the others were as open with her as I have been.

‘I was interested by what you said about not knowing how much you love somebody until they are taken away from you. Is that how you felt about your father?’

This comes out of the silence, spoken into her lap, and it takes me by surprise. I don’t recall mentioning my father’s death either to Liddiard or to Lucas. Hawkes must have told them.

‘In a way, yes, though it’s more complicated than that.’

‘Could you say why?’

‘Well, I was only seventeen at the time. There’s a toughness in you then. An unwillingness to feel. What do Americans call it–’denial’?’

A lovely amused laugh. Making out that she is charmed by me.

‘But more recently?’

‘Yes. Recently his death has affected me more.’

‘Could you say why?’

‘On a basic level because I saw the relationships my male friends were having with their fathers in that transitional period from their late teens into early twenties. That was obviously a key period for some of them, and I missed out on that.’

‘So the two of you weren’t particularly close when you were a child? You felt that your father kept you at a distance?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. He was away from home a lot.’

Oddly, to speak about Dad in this way feels more deceptive than what I have told Stevenson about Kate. It is not a true account of him, nor of the way we were together, and I want to explain some of this to her.

‘This is difficult for me,’ I tell her. ‘I am rationalizing complex emotions even as I am talking to you.’