The tide is out, and I search for sea-life as I head to the water. Yesterday morning a seal had watched me from the rocks. But this morning I am alone, and I need the solitude. My eyes burn and my thoughts are fuzzy. That is what lack of sleep will do to you, as I know only too well. However a swim will refresh me. It’s one of the things I love most about being at Boskenna. The beach is forever available for swimming or walking or simply staring.

Ever since I can remember, this stretch of sand has loomed large in my thoughts. When we were in India and Indonesia I looked forward to the cool easterly breeze and the cold water of the Cornish sea. Much to my mother’s despair, I would swim on all days of the year unless the sea was unsafe. It mattered not if the heavens were pouring down or the air had more than a nip in it. The practice had become ingrained during the war years when I was here and they were in India. I’d been sent home to be safe, but I’d been free, free from the formal life. Boskenna gave me freedom and my mother was never able to take it away again. She had been jealous until her dying day, but by then all types of jealousy and, of course, all types of gin cocktails had taken their toll. I was not like her in any way. I’d made sure of that.

The water circles around my ankles. I run in until I am up to my waist and I dive, holding my breath, trying not to gasp as the cold water wraps around me. I open my eyes as my chest tightens further. Holding still, I let my body numb before surfacing with my lungs begging for air, then I float. Every atom of flesh is alive and tingling. A bit like this morning when Allan touched me. We are coming out of the darkness of grief. Things are beginning to feel good, to feel right again.

The sky is blue, Cornish blue. Not the murky colour of a Moscow sky that seems permanently washed out to me. Slowly, I rotate my arms over my head and backstroke across the bay. My ears beneath the water hear the deep rumble of a distant engine. Maybe a fishing boat heading out. It doesn’t matter. All that is important is today going to plan. I can do everything asked of me, even with the lack of sleep. The social side is automatic. I have learned that almost from birth. Deception is surprisingly easy, too. I have taken to it like I had to water. One moment simply a secretary then the next, a minor operative. I know my advantages. People think I’m too beautiful to have a brain. That I’ve been to finishing school rather than university tells the world my worth.

My father believed that university would be wasted on me. I tense as the anger runs through me. I should be thankful now. He doesn’t know what I do. I made that a condition of doing the work. He would stop it, even now when he has no right to say anything about my life, he would try. He lives to control. He would be horrified that the life he provided for me has made me into a suitable spy. Foreign languages surrounded me during my childhood and I learn them with ease. And, of course, the whole culture of being seen not heard. For him that included women as well as children.