Apple Tree Yard

by Louise Doughty

  I do find out what your wife looks like eventually but in what I think we can call somewhat unfortunate circumstances. Even if I had been inclined to be reasonable about her at the beginning of our affair then what came later put paid to rationality on either side. As it was, my first sight of her came when I was standing in the witness box at the Old Bailey, giving evidence at our joint trial.

  It is later on, after I have broken down and told the truth to the court. I am mid-sentence, but speaking hesitantly, answering a question about the flat in Vauxhall, explaining how innocuous our discussions were on the only occasion we were able to spend a few hours together there.

  When the interruption comes, it is so unexpected, it electrifies the court.

  ‘You bitch… filthy fucking bitch!’ At first, the exclamation seems to come from nowhere, from the heavens perhaps, and as I register the shock on the faces of the jury in front of me and the judge’s indignant alarm, I look around. The shout has come from the public gallery, which is to my right but behind me, raised up in the ceiling. I turn to see that, at the front of the gallery, there is a blonde woman in large glasses who is sitting in the front row, not far from Susannah. The woman’s face is a mask of hatred. She is staring at me with the palpable venom of someone who has been restraining herself for far too long.

  ‘You filthy, filthy, fucking, fucking…’ It is as though she thinks she is muttering to herself but can’t help vocalising.

  The judge leans forward and speaks sharply to the clerk of the court, who already has a phone to his ear and is nodding. The door to the public gallery opens and two security guards, an attractive young black woman with a ponytail and a thick-set white man, enter. While the man waits at the top of the short flight of stairs that leads down to the front row, the young woman descends, leans across Susannah and hisses, ‘Madam! Madam!’ gesturing at the blonde woman, who says nothing, rises, clomps heavily up the steps and is ushered out.

  And that, as you know, will be the first and only encounter I ever have with your wife.

  *

  We are still in conversation in the café on Duke of York Street, deep into our mutual exchange of confidences, when you sit back in your chair and say, abruptly, ‘I have to go now.’

  If you have checked your watch you have done it surreptitiously. I feel deflated because I have had no warning, or perhaps because I sense this is the way it will always be.

  You extract a phone from your pocket. ‘Give me your number.’

  You punch it in as I say it out loud, then you press dial. Inside my jacket pocket, my phone shudders twice.

  ‘Now you have mine too,’ you say, efficiently, job done.

  You slip your phone back in your pocket and look at me. It is a long look, a look that asks a question and gets the answer it wants.

  I look back at you and say, softly, seriously, ‘Is this really going to happen?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ you say immediately, looking down at me as you stand. ‘I’ll call you later,’ you add. You bend slightly, glancing outside the café window as you do, grab the hair at the back of my neck and tip my head back in a quick, possessive gesture that makes some part of my insides melt, swiftly and sweetly, raspberry sorbet I think. You plant a firm, damp kiss on my lips, turn, leave.

  You are taking the phone out of your pocket to make a call before you are even out of my sight down the street. While I am still looking out of the window, the waitress approaches silently, as though she has been waiting, and places the bill in a saucer on the table in front of me. I glance around and see that the café has filled up with people ordering lunch and that a couple is queuing by the door. I have outstayed my welcome.

  Even as I rise, placing the money for our coffees on the saucer and reflexively pocketing the receipt, lifting my coat from the back of the chair, even as I button the coat, tie the belt, shake out my hair, I am writing another letter to you in my head.

  3

  Dear X,

  You asked me if I have ever been unfaithful to my husband before and the honest answer, in the terms in which you meant the question, was no, but when I said, ‘Not exactly…’ I wasn’t being evasive. Although the brief incident I am thinking of came nowhere near sex, it did have significance for me. Its significance came in relation to you.

  It is not the middle of the night. It is the middle of the day, the following Monday, to be precise. It is the Monday after our Friday coffee, but the first opportunity I have had to write down my thoughts. We have only met twice but apparently, we are having an affair. I am working from home today – I’ll be in the office Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I have a thousand things to do but instead I am writing another letter to you. We have just talked on the phone for over half an hour. And the minute we stopped talking on the phone – you actually asked me what I was wearing – I came upstairs, opened up VATquery3, and began another letter, but letters are long, and writing is slower than talking and talking slower than thinking, and I’ve stopped writing almost immediately. I sit back in my chair. Through my study window, fat clouds are moving with improbable speed across a pale sky, like clouds in a time-lapse film. There is a flutter against the window and a bird, a starling, comes to land on the sill, sees me looking out and freezes for an instant, its head turned and one round eye regarding me with what seems like scepticism. It bats itself away. I have a feeling that all my letters to you are destined to remain unfinished, but I still need to articulate the things in my head and so I am thinking the rest of this, and I know that later I will be confused; have I thought it, or told you, or written it down? They are becoming one and the same, all blending in my head.

  *

  Until I met you, I was not the sort of woman to throw caution to the wind, on the basis that things thrown into the wind have a habit of blowing back in your face, as anyone who has ever tried to scatter a parent’s ashes on a cliff-top has probably discovered (as I found out at the age of eight, but that’s a whole other story). So no, I had not had an affair before I met you, but there was a small incident, about three months ago. Why do I need to tell you this story? I need you to know that when I said, ‘Well, not exactly…’ I wasn’t being evasive, although you read it as such. I need you to know about it for reasons of ego. It is worrying me, how easy you found it to have sex with me. I could have said, how easy you found it to seduce me… but seduction suggests a process of persuasion over the passage of time. You just went right ahead and I went right along with it – there wasn’t any persuading necessary. I need you to know this was not normal for me, and that if you had tried a year before or a year later, or simply when I was in a different mood, it would never have happened. You caught me at the precise moment I was ripe for it. On another occasion, it wasn’t so much that I might have said no. I wouldn’t even have realised you were asking the question.

  And I need you to know the beginning of the other story, of course, and how Ms Bonnard was able to make me look so bad in court. Was it the beginning, that day? I don’t know – the sharp focus of hindsight, the endless questions, was what happened to me later inevitable, back then? When you are a rational human being, with free will and agency, is there any such thing as a point of no return?

  I am fifty-two. I have status and gravitas – when I don’t have my tights around my ankles in a secluded chapel beneath the Houses of Parliament, that is. I have reached the stage of my career where my opinion is valued, paid for, and so it was that, on a rainy December day, three months before you and I met, I was running along a slick street lined by large square buildings, slightly late, on my way to sit in on a three-hour presentation seminar by MSc students at City University. It was my second year as an external examiner on two of their postgraduate programmes, which in this case meant that at the end of the winter term I had to observe as a group of prospective scientists presented live abstracts of their dissertations-in-progress. This particular morning, a Monday, was the first occasion I had met this group and the first time I had been to the department�
��s new premises, although I knew the two lecturers who were looking after me from the previous year, George Craddock and Sandra Doyle. They met me in the foyer of the new main building. I was late but had nearly made myself later by stopping for a takeaway coffee on the way – I had a vague memory from the previous year that I hadn’t been offered coffee. This is always one of the tricky issues of being asked to a morning event. Will you get offered coffee, or do you arrive styrofoam cup in hand, having forked out £2.60 unnecessarily, to be greeted with a disappointed look from a host or hostess who has the cafetière and biscuits all ready, neatly arranged? It is an implicit criticism to turn up with a styrofoam cup, after all.

  On this occasion, I ran up the steps wet and flustered and hadn’t stopped for a coffee after all and knew as soon as I entered the new building that was a mistake. Straight ahead of me was a vending machine. It’s never a good sign when there’s a vending machine in the foyer. George and Sandra were both sitting on a bench just inside the door, talking quietly. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Sandra, as they rose to their feet. ‘This lot are party people, they’ll all be late.’

  ‘Hi, sorry, nice to see you both again…’ I shook their hands.

  ‘Want to risk it?’ said George, apologetically, indicating the machine with one hand.

  I pulled a face. I meant it as ‘no’ but he took it as ‘yes’, thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and began to jangle it up and down amongst the loose change in its depths.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Sandra, moving over to the machine, money already in her hand. She didn’t ask if I wanted milk or sugar.

  While she got my drink, George turned to his left and pressed the lift button. Sandra brought the coffee over in a plastic cup so thin it was hard to believe the hot liquid didn’t melt it. I took a sip and winced.

  ‘Sorry about the coffee!’ George declared, as if he had cracked a tremendous joke. ‘Bet you’re a latte girl, eh?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, glancing down at the cup, ‘I like to pretend I’m classy but in fact I’m really easy.’ Sandra and George smiled in the way that people do when someone with seniority makes a joke about themselves. ‘Cheap and easy, that’s me.’

  The door to the lift opened and we stepped inside – it was tiny and mirror-panelled from waist-level up. It seemed an inappropriate lift to be carting gaggles of students but maybe they just bounded up the stairs. I was sweating in my business suit, with a mac on top, unable to lift my plastic coffee because Sandra and George had to stand so close to me, close enough for me to observe that George had nicked himself shaving his neck that morning, just beneath the border of his artfully scrubby beard. In eighteen months’ time, I would discover that his blood group was O positive.

  I wanted to ask them what the students were like but they weren’t supposed to influence me before I heard the abstracts. In any case, Sandra was wrong about them all being late. As we entered the lecture room, twenty-five expectant faces turned towards us. They watched us as we walked towards the desks laid out for us to one side, three chairs, three bottles of water on the table. George took the chair on the left and gestured for me to sit next to him, in the middle, a position that confirmed my status. Sandra broke the tension by raising her hand to the students and saying, ‘Heavens, everyone here on time for once, just because we have a rock star with us today.’

  A good-humoured murmur went around the room and I threw Sandra a smile. I remained standing for a moment, so they could all get a good look at me. I put the coffee down on the desk next to my bottle of water and removed my mac, all slowly – George leapt to his feet to take the coat from me and hang it from a hook on the back of the door. I looked at the students.

  There were fewer women than the other MSc programme I examined. The other one was called Genetics of Human Disease and the majority of the students on it were female – because it was about saving the human race, I suppose. When it came to this one, Bioinformatics, the gender proportion was reversed. The young men due to present that morning sat in a row at the front. Two of them were looking down at their papers. The other three – and I knew instinctively that they were all friends – were staring at me. Directly behind them was a group of young men in a cluster, lounging back in their chairs, relaxed. It wasn’t their morning. They hadn’t got the short straws. They were here to watch their buddies and gather material for the piss-taking session that would take place, loudly, in the corridor afterwards. The seven women on the course were all grouped together at the back of the room.

  The young man nearest to me was sitting at the very end of the tables with nothing in front of him and one hand resting casually on the edge of the table, leaning back in his chair, legs splayed and crotch on full display, in a gesture so obvious it made me want to laugh. I met his gaze briefly, in order to demonstrate that I wasn’t intimidated by him, and he met my gaze right back. He had thick dark hair, solid wrists, hands that were large and meaty. I had encountered this scenario or similar several times before but as I sat down, smoothing my skirt, and took my folder from my bag, I realised I was particularly alive to it that morning. These young men, so full of testosterone they bounced with it, they were like puppies. They couldn’t help themselves. What amused me as put down my notepad and wrote the place, time and date at the top of it, was the thought that if anyone, let alone me, suggested to these young males that they were responding to me on a sexual level, they would be horrified – I was old enough to be their mother, after all. But even so, they could not stop themselves from rising to the challenge. Here was I, an unknown female in their midst, in a situation in which they were potentially on show. Perhaps some of them, on top of that, were nursing a lurking Mrs Robinson fantasy or maybe some of them were intimidated by young women of their own age and preferred the idea of someone more motherly – but even if neither of these factors came into play, there was something in them that responded to me on a very elemental level, even if all they wanted was the thought of being able to brag about it afterwards: that examiner, thinks she going to fuck me over with her marking pen, well, I’ll fuck her. It was simple aggression on their part – that’s all really, chimpanzee behaviour. It amused me. I was safe, after all, and in a position of power.

  The large boy stared me out for the whole of the morning, so obviously that I began to wonder if Sandra or George would take him to one side afterwards and reprimand him. Once in a while, he leaned to one side and whispered something to the boy sitting next to him, a smaller lad with sandy hair and keen grey eyes. Listen, Junior, I felt like saying, I’m far too old to be offended by this stuff. Have you any idea how used to it you are by my age? Those boys thought I was unsettled by their big firm bodies – but when push came to shove, so to speak, I would be reading their papers and marking them on the basis of whether they had a firm grasp of sequence analysis. Lads, lads, I wanted to say, technique is more important than stamina.

  The presentations began. First up was a very short boy who coughed his way to the lectern. He took several nervous sips from a water bottle before he began, fiddling anxiously with the mouse pad on the laptop. Eventually, the title of his Powerpoint presentation was displayed on the board behind him: Combined Use of Restriction Enzymes in Isolating Cosmids and Plasmids: a new approach?

  After the third presentation, there was a break. Most of the students stayed in their seats. Two of the girls went out and came back with Diet Cokes. I excused myself and went to the Ladies so that I wouldn’t have to make small talk with Sandra and George – there would be enough of that by the end of the week. In the chilly, grey toilet, after I had washed my hands, I leaned forward into the speckled mirror and passed the tip of my forefinger under each eye, where there was the barely detectable smudge of eyeliner after my walk in the rain. I reapplied my lipstick. It was pathetic and I laughed at myself while I did it but I could not resist these small acts of vanity. How obvious and silly we all are, us humans, I thought to myself. Even me. Especially me.

  Back in the room, as
I approached our table, George smiled at me and patted my chair for me to sit down. Sandra said, ‘Hey ho, another day, another dollar.’

  ‘Not yet,’ muttered George.

  We wrapped up just before one o’clock. George and Sandra would take me out for lunch on Friday so I knew I could escape without causing offence. As it happened, it was a busy week, that week. My VAT return was due and it was my first year of annual accounting. Filling in the nonsensical form made me want chew the arm of my office chair. And I had some dry-cleaning to pick up on the way home.

  As I came down the steps outside the building, having said goodbye to Sandra and George in the foyer, I saw that the sandy-haired boy was waiting for me, leaning against the railings to the right of the steps with his arms folded and a cycle helmet looped over one finger. I slowed down my pace and he gazed at me with his grey eyes. He made no pretence that the encounter was accidental, giving me a half-smile of acknowledgement and propelling himself away from the railings without using his hands, just the momentum of his body. He had sunglasses on his head, even though it was December, on the pretext that a little thin winter sun was shining. I wondered if he would remember that before he put his cycle helmet on.

  I nodded in acknowledgement as I passed him and walked off down the street. He followed me, doing a quickstep to catch up.

  ‘So what did you make of the presentations?’

  I gave him a look that was meant to be stern but I suspect seemed merely ironic. ‘You wouldn’t really expect me to say, would you?’