Apple Tree Yard

by Louise Doughty

  I make the appointment. In my head I run through the list of everything I should get checked, beginning with thrush, through syphilis, gonorrhoea etc. and ending with HIV, although the HIV test will only tell me whether I was HIV positive before yesterday and if I want to be sure I will have to be tested again in twelve weeks’ time. I know I won’t get myself tested again. In twelve weeks, it will be forgotten, done with. Chances are, even this first appointment is unnecessary. The only reason I am getting myself checked is so that I can congratulate myself on how rational I am. At least I don’t have to worry about pregnancy – three years ago I slid through the menopause, no hot flushes, no drama, my periods just got gradually lighter, then stopped. I don’t have to worry about my husband’s sexual health either. He and I have not had sex for nearly three years. I have made the appointment for ten days’ time in order to see if I have any symptoms developing before I go. There is every possibility I will cancel it.

  I pour away the dregs of tea, put the mug in the dishwasher, get a cup and the small cafetière out of the cupboard and go to the fridge for the coffee. While the kettle grumbles, I lean against the kitchen counter-top and send my husband a text reminding him to check the tax disc on his car as I’m going to get a new one for my car this morning anyway. We worry about each other’s cars since the children left home. At least we haven’t resorted to cats.

  It takes me three days to feel used. Not bad, I think to myself. Not bad at all. A certain degree of plaintiveness only kicks in because I have to go up to Westminster on the Friday, not to the Houses of Parliament but to meet a colleague from the Beaufort Institute for breakfast. I normally only do Mondays and Tuesdays in the office – I’m what’s called an Honorary Associate Principal, which, strange to think it, means they believe it improves the status of the Institute to have my name and photograph on the front inside page of their brochure. I have asked my colleague, a dull man called Marc, to meet me outside the premises. If I go into the office, I won’t get out for the rest of the day.

  Going back to the Westminster area reminds me that I have not been summoned back – by you I mean, not wanted or bidden, not even enquired after.

  Marc is a Human Resources Manager, which means he has had his sense of humour surgically removed. He wants to discuss the possibility of my covering a colleague’s maternity leave. I gave up working for the Beaufort full-time because I couldn’t stand the daily commute any more. The thought of doing it again for six months makes me want to thump my forehead on the edge of the restaurant table while he talks me through the terms and conditions.

  Emerging from my breakfast meeting, I think, I should go straight home and tackle the slithering pile of invoicing on the side of my desk. Instead, I decide that as there is a little weak, late-winter sun and it’s a Friday, I may as well wander up to the Houses of Parliament. When I get there, I skirt Parliament Square and take a walk over Westminster Bridge and pause to lean back against the stone balustrade and watch the tourists holding their iPads up to Big Ben. A man at the far end of the bridge is playing the bagpipes. Seagulls shriek accompaniment. When I am bored of watching the tourists, I turn my back on them and stare down at the river. I think of you kneeling at my feet, slipping my boot on. I remember placing my hand on your cheek and your smile at the tenderness of the gesture. I want it to happen again, even though I’m still not sure what it was, and I realise that all my rationales, my clinic appointment, my grown-upness about the whole thing, is a sham. I can’t stop thinking about you, about the pressure of your body against me, slowly squeezing the breath from me as we kissed against the back of that door. My head has been spinning all week.

  Fool, I think. You will never see him again, get used to the idea. Process it. If you had turned him down in the Chapel, he would have demanded your name and phone number and be pursuing you like a heat-seeking missile all week but you didn’t, did you? You went along with it. He will have hardly given you a passing thought.

  I’m only guessing, of course. I don’t know anything about casual sex. All my life, sex has been the start of something. Animals don’t have casual sex because they understand only the biological imperative – although arguably, this makes all their sex casual, if you’re going to be anthropomorphic about it. The human desire for casual sex is an interesting experiment in the collision between gratification and genetic self-interest. You think too much, my first boyfriend was fond of saying to me, that’s your problem. He was a sexist bastard – probably still is.

  I watch the grey water of the Thames slip below Westminster Bridge, flowing soundlessly, endlessly, to the sea. Animals no more think about the rationale behind mating than water does about its desire to flow downstream. A group of tourists next to me are shouting, gleefully, in Spanish. Daft git, speaks a small, amused voice in my head. You’ve been used, what did you expect? A bunch of flowers afterwards? Chalk it up to experience.

  I am being so grown-up about it, handling it so well, so rationally, that I leave the river to the tourists, cross Bridge Street and walk to the entrance of Portcullis House, even though I have no business there that day, and push through the first set of revolving glass doors and linger until I see a security guard I recognise – the large woman who frisked me on Tuesday. I am wearing the same boots. She smiles at me and I shake my head. ‘I’m not due in today, I’m just wondering, did anyone hand in a scarf on Tuesday?’

  She leans on the X-ray machine. She’s bored, there’s no queue, she’s happy to make conversation. ‘What does it look like?’

  I think of my new wool scarf, the one sitting neatly folded on the top shelf in our cloakroom. ‘It’s grey, with a white thread running through it.’ While I say this, I look through the glass screens at the atrium café and the curved staircase leading up to the committee rooms, as if there was the remotest chance you might be wandering past at that moment.

  She scratches her ear and wrinkles her nose. ‘If you’d left it here it would have gone to the office anyway but I don’t remember it. You can send them an email. I’d do a note but it would take about ten days to get through the internal system anyway.’

  ‘OK, thanks,’

  I go back out into the cold. The weak sun is no match for the icy breeze blowing off the river but I stand on the steps for several minutes, looking around as if I might be waiting for someone. God you’re pathetic, I think.

  It’s Friday. No self-employed person gets any work done on a Friday, although we pretend that we do. I decide to walk up to Piccadilly. Maybe I’ll go to a bookshop, or the Royal Academy. Maybe I will just go home to the suburbs, where I belong.

  I turn into Parliament Square from Bridge Street and walk past the front of the Houses of Parliament, where more tourists take it in turns to pose beside the unsmiling armed policemen at the Member’s entrance and the anti-war protestors stand in front of their tents on the other side of the road. A few steps from here is where I exited on Tuesday, my legs still trembling, to walk around for a few minutes in the cold air before going back to the Portcullis House entrance for the afternoon’s session. I am reliving the aftermath. I walk up past the ugly block of the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre and up Storey’s Gate. I decide to cross Birdcage Walk and skirt the edge of St James’s Park, a park that always looks different to me each time I walk through it. This time I notice the swans, the Hansel & Gretel house, the tumescent fountain – Lord, how obvious. I try not to feel wistful – I don’t deserve to, after all. I try to enjoy being a tourist in my own town. I think how seldom I do this, wander a bit: my life is normally a cacophony of deadlines. After crossing the Mall I mount the steps up to Carlton House Terrace and turn left down Pall Mall to cut through St James’s Square. I could sit in the Square for a while but it’s cold, and too close to my office. I walk up Duke of York Street, looking for a café – I’m quite close to Piccadilly. Now I am away from the immediate environs of the Houses of Parliament I can stop for a coffee without feeling as though I am stalking you, lingering somewhere close
to where you might be. I will sit somewhere and pretend I am checking my emails on my phone while I watch other people and assess their levels of purposefulness relevant to mine. I will do that until I can’t kid myself any more, then I will go home.

  Halfway up on the left, there is a small Italian place with waitress service and a round table in a bay window, perfect for my purposes. An old-fashioned bell gives a clunky ring as I push the door open. It is warm inside. There is no music playing. Someone has even left a folded newspaper on the table for me.

  I sit and wonder what I would do if I saw you stride past the window. I could hardly run out of the café and call your name. I don’t know your name.

  Why me? That is what I really want to know. Why me?

  While I am lost in this internal and enjoyably pointless dialogue – an undistressed dialogue, I must say, I’m still being very rational about the whole thing – a woman outside the café window has paused to have an altercation with the driver of a green van that is parked by the kerb. The woman is saying something sharp and the van driver is sitting back in his seat with his large, heavy arm hanging out of the window. He is smoking and looking straight ahead and, from the movement of his lips, swearing viciously at the woman.

  He must do this all the time, I think, and by him I mean you, of course, not the van driver. I am thinking of your quiet confidence, the slow prowl of your movements, the lack of anxiety or haste on your part. You knew exactly what you were doing. I wonder how often you do it. I wonder if it’s a game – do you try and nail one a week, perhaps? I think of all those MPs’ offices, the endless corridors, cloakrooms, toilets, cubbyholes. Perhaps – and this one, for all my attempts to be grown-up, makes me shudder – you are a member of some sort of website club, where you all compete to see who can lay claim to the most absurd or unlikely encounter: the middle of the day in the heart of the oldest democracy in the world, that must score quite highly. The thing is, and this is only vanity – or optimism – on my part, I do have a feeling that you operate with a certain degree of discrimination. I don’t think you go dogging in supermarket car parks in Essex. The slow grace, the politeness with which you operated, even as you opened up a woman you had never met before: there was nothing rough or sordid about what you did. You looked into my eyes, you kissed me afterwards, you knelt at my feet as you slipped on my boot. You are a promiscuous man who likes risky sex with strange women in unusual places – but you do have very good manners.

  I’m not suggesting that, morally, there is any difference between what we did and the actions of people who do go dogging in supermarket car parks in Essex. You couldn’t slip a paper between us. The stonework, the mosaics and marble – we just had a classier backdrop than a scrubby hedge and a row of large recycling bins, that’s all.

  As I am thinking all this, I notice that the woman pedestrian has gone and the green van is pulling away from the kerb, the driver still mouthing swear words. As the van moves away I see that across the road, on the opposite pavement, there is a man in a navy pinstripe suit standing facing me, looking at me through the café window. The man is you.

  *

  Six months later, after the car crash and our subsequent break-up, when we are reunited briefly and lying on the bed in the empty flat in Vauxhall, you will tell me about this encounter, that you saw me on the security cameras at the entrance to Portcullis House, that you came down to the entrance while I was standing outside, and decided to follow me. You noticed as soon as I descended the steps that I was walking with a lack of purpose. You were no more than a few metres behind me as I crossed Parliament Square. At one point, as I wandered through St James’s Park, I turned and looked round and you thought I might have spotted you, so you hung back a bit. When it was clear I hadn’t, you neared me again and took the risk of walking very close to me as I ambled up Duke of York Street. I didn’t turn again. You watched me go into the café and sit down, then decided to wait for a bit to see if I was meeting anyone. You stood the other side of the street, in a shop doorway, and although I looked out of the window – gazed out of it – for most of the time I was seated there, I didn’t notice you. People see what they expect to see, you say. You enjoyed watching me, you tell me. It aroused you to observe me when I didn’t know that you were there. And I told you that the main reason I didn’t see you, was because I was lost in my thoughts of you. This pleased you immensely. You had guessed as much. You could tell, you said, by the way my eyes stared, the thoughtful set of my mouth, that I was thinking about what we had done in the Chapel in the Crypt. The arrogance of this assumption annoyed me then and I rolled on my back on the bed, away from you, and tried to back-track, claiming I wasn’t thinking about you that day in the café after all, that I was thinking about the introduction I had to write to a new university textbook, a collection of essays taking a wide-ranging approach to molecular biology. You knew I was lying. You rolled on top of me, pinned my arms above my head with one hand and dug your fingers into the soft part of my waist with the other until I admitted I had been thinking about you, you, you …

  When I had conceded this, shrieking and begging for mercy, we embraced for a long while, until I lifted a finger and traced the curve of your shoulder and asked, ‘But how did you know I would be in Westminster that day?’

  ‘I just had a feeling, that’s all,’ you said, shrugging lightly. ‘Just had a feeling it might be worth turning up.’ I looked at you. ‘Or maybe,’ you added, turning, propping your head up with one hand, elbow bent and staring at me with studied casualness, ‘or maybe I had been watching the security cameras at that entrance every morning since Tuesday, hoping to bump into you…’ As I carried on looking at you, your face became hard. ‘Or maybe I got some friends of mine to alert me if you came through the security checks.’ I looked at you, and your eyes were still hard and held mine until you observed a shadow of genuine doubt cross my face, and then you broke into a smile and said, ‘I’m only joking! It was a coincidence…’

  We are semi-naked when this conversation takes place. It is six months and a whole world of happenings after the encounter we are discussing, when I see you standing on the other side of the street after the green van pulls away.

  I see you standing across the street, and all at once can feel the biggest, broadest smile coming to my features, and I see it mirrored in the smile you are giving me, even though the traffic criss-crosses between us. You break the smile only to check from side to side before you step into the road.

  And then you are there, in the café with me, relaxed in your navy-blue pinstripe (I have a moment to reflect that it doesn’t look as smart as the grey). You fill the small café, in fact. Your smile alone could fill it; teeth and eyes, this is what I notice about you today. ‘Well well,’ you say, as you pull out the chair and sit down opposite me at the small round table. ‘So, you are going to buy me a coffee after all.’

  I turn to summon the waitress.

  It will be during this meeting that I ask, the first of several occasions, ‘So, what is it you do, exactly?’

  On this occasion, you will shrug, ‘Civil service, all very boring, looking after the Parliamentary Estate, oiling the wheels for the people in charge…’

  It is a question to which I never get the same answer twice.

  We are in the small café for an hour and a half. We have a second coffee after the first, which would be enough to make me feel speedy and strange even without your company. You pester me with questions about myself. Where do I live? Do I like my job? How long have I been married? Have I ever been unfaithful before? You seem particularly interested in that one. When I say, not exactly, you accuse me of being evasive. Most people embarking on an affair meet, introduce themselves, find out a bit about each other and then proceed to wild sex. We appear to be doing it the other way around.

  I throw a pointed look at the broad gold ring on your wedding finger. ‘And what about you…?’ I parry. I don’t see why this should all be one-sided. We have already establish
ed that we have two children each, although mine are grown-up and yours aren’t, but I’m asking something a little more specific here.

  You smile, ‘Do you mean am I about to say my wife doesn’t understand me?’ You give a tight-lipped grimace. ‘No, I’m not. She understands me all too well.’

  I realise we are agreeing terms.

  ‘My husband and I probably married a bit young,’ I say, ‘but I don’t regret it, just when we did it maybe. When I married, not who I married.’

  We are, of course, establishing that neither of us is looking for a parachute. Inexperienced as I am, I recognise the importance of this negotiation, and the significance of the fact that we both think it important.

  ‘What’s your wife like?’ I ask, and know immediately that I have overstepped the mark. How fine is the line between making conversation and prying.

  You adopt a slightly distant look. ‘Tell me something you’ve never told your husband, just one thing.’ I hesitate and you say, ‘Something innocuous if you like.’

  ‘I hate his haircut,’ I say, ‘always have. The thing is, he’s not vain at all, and I like that about him. He doesn’t need petting and praising all the time, he just gets on with it, he’s quite unaware of himself in lots of ways. And although I think that’s sort of admirable, I do look at him and wish he’d get a proper haircut, but he’s always had it the same way, his hair is very straight and a bit too long so it just sort of flops. It seems a bit late to tell him after thirty years.’

  You beam unselfconsciously and run a hand through your own wiry, brownish hair, revealing some grey beneath, and it occurs to me that you probably are quite vain, maybe even dye your hair on top, and if my husband were vain I would dislike this but as he is not, your vanity is, if anything, just another one of your endearing qualities. That is why I have tried to ask about your wife – it has not escaped my notice that you deflected that question. It is not that I want to pry, on the contrary – I would really prefer it if we just pretended neither of our marriages existed. I am trying to find out what your wife is like because I need ammunition. I want to arm myself with counter-qualities. Whatever she is, I want to be the opposite. Tell me she likes blue and I will never wear blue again.