*
Then, finally, it happens, and when it happens the worst thing about it is its inevitability, as if I had been waiting for it, not wondering if but merely how and when.
Ten minutes’ walk from where we live, just before the main shopping precinct, there is a hairdressing salon run by a very small, very beautiful Italian man. It is more of a street-style salon than you would expect a woman of my age to patronise but, that, of course, is why I go. I have my highlights, lowlights, whatever they are, re-done about once every two or three months. The Italian, Bernardo, talks to me about Italy while he gives me a scalp massage. He tells me how in Italy, all the women want to look the same. That’s why he came to London, because every woman is different. He employs Japanese and Polish and Korean stylists, and another Italian man who makes eyes at every customer, male or female, whose open gaze demands to be loved. I think he might be going out with one of the Korean women but I’m not sure. I enjoy the soap opera of this place; I like observing the intricacies of the relationships the staff have with their customers and with each other. I like listening in on other haircuts. I look at my fellow customers’ reflections as I sit with folded foil in my hair – their reflections in the mirrors in front of them reflected in the mirror in front of me. I am never sure whether they can see me watching them or not.
I am sitting in the chair being finished off. Bernardo has done the blow-dry – he is snipping at the odd millimetre, here and there, taking his time, just to make me feel a bit more special than his other customers. He is asking me whether or not he should have a coffee machine in his shop and I am telling him not to bother. He has just stood back to admire his work and I am turning my head slightly, with a little shake to see how the layers fall, when I glance out of the window of the salon and I see that, standing in the street on the other side of the glass panel, looking in, is George Craddock. He is watching me through the glass panel. He smiles.
I hide in the toilet of the hairdressing salon for nearly fifteen minutes. Outside, Bernardo must be wondering if something is wrong. Maybe I don’t like the cut after all, or I am ill. I could call Guy and ask him to come and get me but I would have to pretend I was ill, and then keep that pretence up, and my behaviour recently has been odd enough as it is. And if I call Guy and he comes and George Craddock is still out there, then he will see Guy, know what he looks like, if he doesn’t already, be close to him, close to enough to say, perhaps, ‘Hello there, George Craddock, I work with Yvonne. I don’t believe we’ve met.’
I can’t call you. It’s a Saturday. And anyway, I can’t call you.
Eventually, I know that my only option is to leave, to hold my head up, however sick I feel inside, and walk out of the salon.
*
When I get outside, I glance up and down the road, but there is no sign of Craddock. He could be watching me, of course, but somehow I feel that, if he was still around, he would have approached me immediately – it’s an ugly coincidence, I say to myself, that is all. The chain stores are close by: he could just be out shopping. I will have to use a different hairdressing salon from now on. Bernardo will wonder, when I don’t come back.
I turn left and stride down the street, away from home, towards the big shops, vigorously, not looking around. If he is following me, then I need to know for sure. As I pass the entrance to Marks & Spencer, I turn suddenly and stride through the automatic door. Without looking behind me, I go straight to the escalator up to the first floor – it’s one of those escalators that speeds up when you step on it, which is something I normally find disconcerting but at this particular moment feels helpful. On the first floor, I weave amongst the Saturday shoppers through to the ladies’ lingerie department. He can’t follow me in here without it being obvious. Partially hidden behind a row of sports underwear and minimising bras, I turn to watch the top of the escalator. For several minutes, my heart crashes against my chest as I wait for the top of his head, then his face – the face that was in my face – to sail upwards into view.
It doesn’t happen. After ten minutes or so, I turn away, and begin a slow trail around the department, picking things up, putting them down. I will browse for a bit before I leave, I think, just to be sure. I have just turned to go when I feel the phone in my pocket buzz. I consider ignoring it but still extract it from the inside pocket of my jacket. There is a text from number I don’t recognise. It says, Great haircut. I delete it.
*
After that, there is a flurry of incidents. I begin to get blocked missed calls on my regular phone almost every day – sometimes a dozen in a row, sometimes at intervals, sometimes nothing for hours. Then it all goes quiet for a week. Then it starts again. At work, I get another email from him, a casual one copied into five other people, including Sandra, suggesting we all meet for a night in the pub to brainstorm about the future of the MA programme. At first, I am baffled because I have blocked Craddock’s work email address, but then I check and see that he has sent it from a home account. Everyone hits ‘reply to all’ and two out of the five people think it’s a great idea, two will come if they can. Sandra’s reply reminds George and everyone else that I’m not doing the external examining any more but says she hopes I’ll come anyway to give everyone the benefit of my wisdom. I don’t respond. I block his home email too.
*
A week later, I get a text while I’m walking back to my house from the Tube. It’s from my cousin Marion who lives in Bournemouth. I’m only in touch with her occasionally. The text says, ‘You’d better check your email, you’re spamming everyone! Hope you’re well. Love Marion x’ I get home and find that I am locked out of the Hotmail account I set up when I first went freelance because it has been hacked and is sending everyone in my address book links to pornographic websites. My Google account is more recent, and there are several emails in it from people who have both addresses, letting me know it is happening. Some of them are understanding, some indignant, as if I have deliberately, stupidly, sent everyone a corrupt link. It takes me three days to clear up the mess.
Then it stops.
The maternity cover post keeps me busy: not the work itself, which I know well, but reacquainting myself with the processes of being full-time, the different rhythm of my week, the different sort of tiredness I feel – this all provides distraction. A month into the post, Sandra sends me a confirmation of the time and date of the pub get-together. I imagine George Craddock standing in her office and saying, ‘By the way, why don’t you give Yvonne a nudge about the pub? Even if she’s not examining for us it would be great to have her input.’ I send her a quick one back. Sorry, up to my eyeballs! Talk soon. Yx Under normal circumstances, I would have added, Say hi to everyone from me. I imagine how guilelessly George Craddock might say to Sandra, ‘That’s a shame, we’ll have to get her out for a drink another time.’ There are a hundred different innocent ways he might make try to make contact with me. I must have a strategy prepared for each.
How I feel, during this time, swings wildly from rank fear and paranoia to a kind of determined pragmatism. Sometimes I think I am in danger – he knows by now that I’m not going to the police, for reasons of my own, and if I’m not prepared to report one attack, what’s to prevent him from assuming I won’t report another? At other times, I say to myself, he’s a functioning member of society, with things to lose, presumably, a home, a family. He isn’t interested in me. He is just trying to prove to himself that he didn’t do anything really wrong, that he can contact me and I will go along with it and then that will reinforce his conviction that his behaviour was acceptable. Perhaps he said to himself the next day, Might have gone a bit far last night but she was up for it. Perhaps he thought, when he emailed or texted me, that it was a bit of joke. This will give her a shock! He’s a university lecturer. He holds down a job, operates on a day-to-day basis, presumably doesn’t have a criminal record. He would never dream of following a woman down a dark alley at night and dragging her into the bushes – well he might dre
am of it, fantasise about it, but he would never actually do it. I think about his students. I wonder if they are at risk, but somehow I doubt it. Harassing students gets picked up on pretty quickly these days, in most institutions at least. He’s not stupid. And anyway, I think what he likes best is humiliating a woman who regards herself as above him. It comes to me, this thought, as I am at my desk – that I did regard myself as above him, that that was probably obvious to him.
But surely, if I just give it a bit more time, he will give up, lose interest. It’s a game to him. If I don’t respond, just carry on going about my normal life, it will stop. It hasn’t been consistent, or immediate – some bits of it, like the hacking of my Hotmail account, I’m not even sure was him.
*
It happens on a Sunday. Guy is away at a weekend conference in Northampton but has just called me to say he is finishing early. I decide to go out to the deli that I know stays open till four on a Sunday and buy some bits to eat, welcome-home bits, olives and fresh anchovies in oil and over-priced focaccia. I want to greet him, my husband. I have missed him over the weekend. I’m not feeling particularly anxious or low, that day. I think I am doing quite well.
It might have happened quite differently, if Guy hadn’t called when he did, if I hadn’t gone out to the shops. It was thanks to that trip to the deli that I saw him but he didn’t see me.
I am on my way back, and as I turn the corner into our road, a thin film of September drizzle begins to fall. It is the end of the month and today, although it has been sunny, the curve towards October has begun, a change in the air quality. The weather people are predicting an Indian summer next month, October will be hot and glorious, according to them, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that today. I stop, put down my shopping bag, and lift the hood of my raincoat over my head, smoothing my hair away from my face and tucking it into the hood. And then, as I bring my head up, I see that walking towards our house, not more than a hundred yards ahead of me, is George Craddock. My stomach folds in upon itself, over and over – I can think of no other way of describing it. As I watch, he walks past our house and as he does, he slows his pace and glances at it, although he does not stop.
I turn immediately and stride back down the path. What will he do when he reaches the end of the cul-de-sac – do a circuit, or walk back the way he came? If he does a circuit, I will have time to reach the main road before he makes his way back and sees me. If he turns on his heel as soon as he passes our house, then he will see me, hurrying away.
I walk swiftly but do not run. When I reach the main road, I walk down it, and go straight to the station, passing through the wide, high-ceilinged entrance hall, slapping my Oyster card down and moving through the barriers in one swift motion, my handbag bumping against my hip and my shopping swinging in my hand. A Piccadilly Line train is right there, waiting for me, doors open. The Piccadilly Line takes a lot longer than the Metropolitan Line to get into town and usually I take the purple one and change at King’s Cross but right now, the blue one will do just fine. As I step on to it, the beeping noise begins, the doors slide shut. Only when they are shut and the train is pulling out of the station do I turn in my seat to look back and see if he has followed me into the Tube station. I can’t see him anywhere.
I take the train to Green Park. I get off and walk down into the park and, without even thinking about it, I unzip the compartment in my handbag where the pay-as-you-go phone that you gave me has been hiding all this time like a lucky charm and I turn it on and I dial the only number I have on it, your number. To my surprise, it rings. I would have expected it to go straight to voicemail. My heart leaps at the thought that you leave that phone on, although, of course, there could be any number of reasons why you do.
I am standing beneath a tree in Green Park, a large, spreading one, the leaves beginning, very faintly, to yellow, and when your phone eventually goes to voicemail I stand and listen to the silence that follows the beep and then say, stupidly, redundantly, ‘It’s me.’ I hang up.
A couple of droplets of water fall from the tree, one neatly finding a small space of bare neck between my coat collar and my hair. I go and sit on a bench, the phone in my lap. Twenty minutes later, you call. It seems completely natural that you do. I have not doubted it.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ you say back. ‘Has something happened?’
I am glad we are skipping the small talk, the how-are-yous and how-was-your-summers. I could not have tolerated those. ‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘I think so. I think I’ve got a problem. I’m sorry. Where are you?’
‘I’ve come to get cigarettes for my wife’s brother,’ you say. ‘Officially that is, I mean, that’s officially what I’m doing. I was sitting trying to think of an excuse to leave the house but luckily my brother-in-law ran out of cigarettes just as we needed milk too so that’s how come – otherwise it might have been an hour or two. Where are you?’
‘Green Park.’
‘You’re working today?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I had to leave home in a hurry. I mean, I was out anyway, but I had a visitor. I can’t go home.’ And I tell you everything, everything that’s been happening. I keep it to the facts. I don’t need to tell you what it’s been like, the last few weeks – you of all people don’t need that explained. I suppose that if this had been an ordinary call, I might have berated you for the long silence your end, but that seems immaterial right now. Now, I need you; and now, you are here. After I have finished, there is a long pause and when your voice eventually comes, it is low and warm. ‘Are you OK?’ you say.
‘I will be. I’ll give Guy a call in a bit. I’ll make up some excuse why I came into town and then go and meet him off his train at St Pancras. We can go home together then.’ I give a sniff. ‘All he did was walk past the house. It’s perfectly legal, isn’t it, walking past my house?’
You have not asked if I was sure it was him. I am grateful for that.
‘Even the hairdresser’s, it’s the main road; he could have just been passing.’
‘Hmmm…’ you say, ‘where are you tomorrow morning?’
‘I don’t know, work I suppose. I don’t want to be in work but then I can’t be at home, I don’t know. I’m easy to find.’
‘OK,’ you say, ‘this is what you’re going to do. Don’t go home, like you said. Go somewhere nice now or shop or see a film, call your husband now and arrange to meet him at St Pancras, but be really normal, don’t let him guess. It’s important to act normally, when you meet him and when you go back home together, can you manage that?’
‘Oh God…’ I say, looking up at the sky. Act normally? What else have I been doing these last few weeks?
‘You can do it. You’re stronger than you think.’
‘I know, I know,’
‘Now listen, tomorrow morning, can you take the day off work, ring in sick or something, can you get to Vauxhall by noon?’
‘Yes, of course, well, I’ll go in at the usual time and then when I get there I’ll feel unwell and leave mid-morning.’
‘OK, take the Tube to Vauxhall, be there by noon, when you get off, check your phone. I’ll call or text instructions.’
‘Am I going to see you?’
‘Oh, Yvonne, of course, of course you are.’
‘Say my name again.’
‘Yvonne. You’re going to see me tomorrow. We are going to be together tomorrow morning.’
I exhale very slowly, as if I have been holding my breath for twelve weeks. There is a silence between us while we listen to each other breathe.
After a long time you say softly, ‘I have to go now. Take care today, just be out and about, and at home with your husband this evening, and tomorrow you’re going to meet me, OK?’
‘It’s good to hear your voice,’ I say.
You pause briefly, then say, ‘It’s good to hear your voice too.’ You hang up.
I sit on the bench, the phone still in my hand. After a while, I look up at the
sky.
14
I am at Vauxhall well before noon, emerging from the Tube to the clamour of the inner-city motorway that leads up to Vauxhall Bridge. A vast shopping and office complex looms to one side, with a café with seats outside overlooking the wide intersection. I sit on one of the seats although I don’t buy a coffee; I’m jumpy enough as it is. In front of me, lanes of traffic – cars, buses, lorries – branch in all directions. The blare of so many vehicles is somehow insulting; it’s hard not to take it personally. At ten past twelve, you text me: Where you? I text back, Vauxhall, by the bridge. You reply. Wrong side, go through arch, Kennington Road.
Across the vast intersection is the red-brick railway arch of the mainline station, fronted by the peculiar steel structure that houses the ticket office and which once won some sort of architectural award. I have to wait for three different sets of pedestrian lights to change in my favour, trotting from the safety of one traffic island to another, before I can reach the arch. When I’ve passed through it, I negotiate two more busy intersections before I reach the beginning of Kennington Road. I take my phone out to text you for further directions, but you have already sent me a message. New coat? Collar suits you. I look around and although I would never have imagined myself to be up for games, I can’t help smiling as I do. I check across the street, up and down it, and am lifting my phone to text Where are you? when I turn and see you there, only a few feet away, in a doorway, watching me with a smile, and I feel a slight sense of anticlimax, surprisingly, for you are just a man, after all, a man standing in a shop doorway, in a suit and glasses; average height, wiry build, coarse brownish hair, and this is all so public, this reunion, and so unexpected, and I don’t know what our relationship is now or how I feel after the long silence between us – and all of this adds up to me having no idea what to do.
Apple Tree Yard Page 19
