Apple Tree Yard (10 page)

In between meetings, I am crazed with desire and I write letter after letter to you on my computer and I am grateful that you have banned email contact between us because within hours of writing them I feel sick with embarrassment at what I reveal about myself, at my paltry attempts to sound cool and analytical while revealing I am the opposite.

I don’t always manage things well in my head.

*

One day, we arrange to meet outside Portcullis House, a building I now feel a certain affection for. It is past the end of the day – you are working late for some reason – but you still keep me waiting for half an hour and when you arrive you do so without apology, as normal, and I can tell that whatever has delayed you is still on your mind. You smile your half-smile and don’t speak. Fine, I think. Well I won’t make conversation either. Maybe I have things on my mind too.

Descending the steps, we turn right, towards Westminster Tube station. There is a tiny coffee bar there that we have used before, with two stools in the window. It is dusk, chilly for the time of year – groups of shivering tourists dressed too optimistically are huddling together, blocking the pavement. We weave our way between them. The silver cube of the Tube entrance swallows and disgorges suits. We have nearly reached it when you take my arm and wheel me round to go back the way we have come. ‘Let’s walk along the river,’ you say. It is the first thing you have said to me.

We go round the corner, back past the entrance to Portcullis House. Across the river, the London Eye is lit at intervals by bright blue lights, a slowly turning fairy circle in the grey and purple sky. Still in silence, we walk down Embankment, unhurrying, past the rows of tourist coaches parked and empty. Beyond them, the crowds of visitors thin and the street becomes easier to negotiate. We walk past the back entrance of the squat, red-brick building that is the Head of Territorial Policing, with the lamp-post outside that always make me smile – the old-fashioned police lamp-post,
Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars
… Crime never paid back then, not when you had to fiddle with a dial to clear the fuzz from your mahogany-encased television screen, not in black and white. It’s all wafer-thin and brightly coloured now and unforgivably instant in its clarity – you can see the news presenters’ pores beneath their orange make-up. There is a lot more ambiguity around nowadays as well, I’ve noticed recently. Crime pays now, all right. Well, right now at this minute, walking next to a man I shouldn’t be with, I feel like it pays.

We walk slowly past the rear entrance of the Savoy and beyond, out of tourist-land and into the land of government buildings. After a few minutes – we still have not spoken – we reach Victoria Embankment Gardens, set back from the road and the river, a thin strip of park with a single path that snakes through it, lined with benches. In the gathering dark, we have it to ourselves. On the road, still visible through shrubbery on which the spring growth seems decidedly bare, black cabs, lorries, cars thunder by in a haze of inner-city pollutants, and beyond the traffic, the river rushes to keep up. We pass a rectangular lily pond on our right. A sign behind it reads
Danger: Deep Water
. Bit late for that, I think.

A few yards further on, there is the statue of the weeping woman. I have passed it before: it’s a noticeable sort of statue. There is an ordinary stone plinth with a bronze bust on top: Arthur Sullivan, 1842–1900, the kind of thing you see in parks all over London, the forgotten philanthropists, or composers or writers, the generals and explorers and educationalists, those Victorians who built us. But this one is different, for leaning against the stone is the life-size form of a young woman, also cast in bronze. She is turned away from passers-by, weeping against the pillar, one arm above her head, stretching upwards, and the other bent so that she can bury her face in it. Her perfect, lithe body is resting in an attitude of utter despair.

I pause. You pause too and, still without speaking, we look at the young bronze woman, the curve of her firm, high breasts – she is topless in the classical mode, of course – the robes gathered around her hips, the half-dressed hair that flows in tendrils down her back. Her despair is the despair of youth, I think. She is every first-year student who has woken on a Sunday morning and remembered that last night, at that party, the young man she loved left with his arm round someone else. She is someone who thinks that despair is a country she has entered, like a desert where she will die of thirst. I remember heartbreak at that age, how all-consuming it was. Is heartbreak even possible now, I wonder? I’m fifty-two. Anyone my age knows that all things pass. If the transitory nature of our feelings means that true heartbreak is impossible then where does that leave happiness?

Something about her has made us stop and look. We still have barely spoken to each other. You take a few steps round the side of the plinth and read the inscription. I come and stand by you and look at it while you read aloud.

IS LIFE A BOON?

IF SO, IT MVST BEFAL

THAT DEATH WHENE’ER HE CALL

MVST CALL TOO SOON 

Through the middle of the poem, running from the top of the plinth to almost halfway down, there is a long streak of green mould.

‘It’s death she’s upset about,’ I murmur. ‘I always thought it was love.’

‘It’s a bit of a no-win situation, really, according to the poem,’ you say. ‘Either life is a boon, in which case we should all be weeping because death is going to come and spoil everything, and soon. Or else, well, or else life isn’t a boon after all, just a grim old business.’

I look at you. ‘Which side of the argument do you fall on?’ I try not to sound too serious when I ask this question.

You look at me, unfooled by my facetiousness. Then you reach out a hand and touch a heavy lock of hair that hangs to one side of my chin, twisting it between your fingers. ‘Me?’ you say, staring at me. ‘Me? I think life is a boon.’

We move towards each other. Your hands go to either side of my face, your warm rough palms against my cold soft cheeks. I tip my face up to you and close my eyes.

Without speaking, we leave the weeping girl behind and within a moment have reached the edge of the gardens. Temple Tube station is brightly lit, the coffee and flower stalls outside are not particularly busy – it is past the peak of the rush hour, almost dark. Just past the Tube, we turn left down a narrow road called Temple Place that leads away from the river. Temple Place narrows further and becomes Milford Lane, which ends in a tiny yard with a brick entrance through which I can just see a row of stone steps.

‘Can you get up to the Strand through there?’ I ask. I haven’t been this way before.

‘Yes,’ you say, ‘It comes out just below the Royal Courts of Justice.’

But it isn’t justice or the bright lights of the Strand you have in mind. You turn on me. One hand goes behind my head, fingers entwined in my hair, the other to my shoulder. You pull my mouth towards yours. At the same time, you press forward, forcing me to stumble backwards against the wall, just to the right of the entranceway to the steps. I let out an involuntary gasp.

You stop and look around, with the intent glance I now know means you are doing what you have previously referred to as
a risk assessment
. To your right – my left – there is a building but no windows look down on us. On the other side – I follow your gaze upwards – there is a CCTV camera but it is turned away from us, pointing up another alleyway. You kiss me, briefly, firmly, then move your head back a little so you can continue to glance from side to side while slipping your hand inside my coat, pushing my thighs apart. ‘
Oh
…’ I say, but this time it is more a groan than a gasp, deeper, more resonant, within.

At that point, there comes the scrape of shoes on stone, a hasty approach. We spring apart, my coat falls back, I let out a snort of amused alarm and a young man in a business suit rushes down the stone steps and out into the yard, hurrying past us without a glance, heading for the Tube. You are facing away from me now and the yard is unlit so it is only as you turn back, a smile on your face, that I see you are holding a cigarette between two fingers.

‘I didn’t know you smoked!’ My voice is breathy from our near discovery.

‘I don’t’ you say, dropping the cigarette back into your pocket. ‘I keep one in my left pocket – explains all sorts of things, why you’re outside, why you’re loitering, and you can approach people for a light if you need to. Newspapers are good too. No one ever looks at someone reading the
Evening Standard
on the street and wonders why they are standing there. They are just someone reading the paper.’

More footsteps on the stone, heels this time, two young women in smart skirts and jackets come down the steps together, talking to each other. One of them gives me a look as she passes, a dismissive sort of look, as though she might think ill of me if she could be bothered to think of me at all.

You take my arm, ‘Come on,’ you say. ‘I was planning on coming inside you but it’s still too busy round here.’

*

Back at the Tube, you turn to me and say, ‘Right then,’ and I realise you are planning on leaving me here to get the Underground while you go on elsewhere. I experience a moment of confusion – suddenly, you seem to be in a hurry to depart. But if we had achieved solitude in the little yard back then, you wouldn’t have been thinking about rushing off at this particular moment. You would be focused on me.

‘Yeah, sure,’ I say, ‘I’ll get it from here. See you then, talk tomorrow,’ and turn quickly. I am determined to be the one walking away.

I am no more than a step or two away before you catch up with me and take my arm, ‘Hey…’ you say.

We stop, facing each other. I look down at your shoes. What sort of stupid game are we playing anyway? We’re both middle-aged. It’s ridiculous. We are ridiculous.

‘You’ve been there before, haven’t you?’ I mumble, and it is only as I say it that I realise that that is what is bothering me. I had thought we were ambling along Victoria Embankment but you knew exactly where we were going. You had a plan. Perhaps you were even deliberately late to meet me because you thought there was a better chance of us using that alleyway the darker it got.

You sigh. It is a sigh that makes me feel childish. ‘Look…’ you say, and I wait. I am not going to help you out this time by pretending I am as casual about this as you are. All at once, I refuse to let you off the hook. ‘You know, you know me by now…’ you say. You lift a hand and run it through your hair. Your expression is a little pleading. Around us, people hurry to and fro, people who are late getting home. No one looks at us as they rush past.

‘Is it, is it what you do?’ I ask, and I keep my tone deliberately light. I don’t want to panic you into lying to me.

‘Well, yes,’ you say. ‘It’s what I do, it’s what I’ve always…’

‘What, kind of, your thing?’

‘Yes, that’s it, it’s my thing. It’s just what turns me on, I suppose. Car parks, toilets, out of doors, I don’t know. I suppose...’ You lift your hands helplessly.

There are a million questions in my head, starting with, does your wife know? Do you do this with her, or have you ever done? And continuing with, so just how many affairs have you had before me?

You shrug, boyishly, look at me and grimace. ‘I just find it, I don’t know, it’s the naughtiness of it, I suppose, the risk factor, I don’t know. Look, I guess it’s a sort of addiction, a kind of adrenaline. Loads of people do it or other things like it. Everybody wants to take risks sometimes, don’t they? I look at the people I work with and it’s just a question of what form their risk-taking takes. One of my colleagues goes paragliding at the weekends. He breaks his collarbone every time he lands. He has four children. At least I don’t jump off cliffs.’

No,
I think, a little bitterly,
you just ask other people to
. We are standing outside Temple Tube in the mid-evening dark and it’s colder than it should be this time of year. It occurs to me that I am not turned on by the possibility of discovery – the opposite in fact. What turns me on is the thought of a hotel room, crisp white sheets and plump soft furnishings, low lighting, mirrors only we can see, anonymity and privacy, being somewhere where no one can find me, but all I say is, ‘Well I guess this is a conversation we will have to have another time.’

‘Let’s have it now,’ you say, and I smile inwardly for the one thing I am sure of is that there is nothing more likely to keep you with me than the thought that I might be withholding information. I am reminded of what Susannah said to me once
: There’s a certain sort of man whose very charm lies in his predictability
. I would repeat this remark to you but suspect you would find it offensive.

‘Go on,’ you lean in towards me.

I shake my head a little, but smilingly.

You lift a finger and give a gentle but decisive stab at my forehead. ‘What’s going on in there, then? Right now, what’s going on in there?’

I look around. ‘We’re pretty close.’ I mean to the area where you work, and that there’s a chance someone who knows you might go past. But I’m prevaricating. I wasn’t worried about that when we kissed in Victoria Embankment Gardens, and we were closer then.

You fold your arms and glower at me, playing interrogator, ‘Well you’d better tell me what’s on your mind then, or we could be here a while.’

‘What does it
mean
?’ I ask, and even to my own ears, it sounds a feeble question. ‘The risky sex, what does it mean?’