Apple Tree Yard (11 page)

To your credit, you take the question seriously. You shrug. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, I don’t think. It’s just what I like, like some people like it in the mornings and some people want to dress up and others like it best in the shower. Some people like chocolate sauce, I don’t know. It doesn’t mean anything.’ A group of women in high heels, tripping out somewhere, shove past us so close that you have to take my elbow and pull me gently to the side, but still no one looks at us. We are just a man and a woman having a conversation before they part.

I am in something of a fix. What I really want to know is, have you taken another woman down that little lane, like you did with me just now, and I’m guessing the answer is yes and that last time it was more successful because it was later in the evening. But I can’t ask that without sounding insecure, and in a minute you’re going to guess I’m feeling insecure anyway and suddenly I can’t stand the humiliation of that and there is only one way to deflect your attention so I say, ‘Want to know what I fantasise about?’

‘Of course.’

‘Alien abduction.’

Your stare turns into
What?

I smile and nod. ‘I do, I fantasise that I’ve been kidnapped by aliens, and I’m on a round white bed, completely naked of course, and there’s a sort of balcony around the bed, all the way round, and on the balcony are aliens, and they are all looking down at me, at me being naked – small men with pointy heads.’

‘You’re making this up.’

I laugh at him. ‘Er, yes, it’s a fantasy.’

‘No, I mean you’re making this up on the spot. You’re taking the mickey.’

I shake my head. ‘I’m not, I promise, honestly, it’s what I think about quite often, in the middle, you know, I’m on the round white bed, and it’s warm.’

‘
Pointy
heads
?’

‘I know, pretty obvious, eh?’

You raise a hand and scratch the back of your head. ‘I don’t know, for some reason I thought the sexual fantasy of one of the nation’s top analytical scientists would be something a little more sophisticated.’

‘Sophisticated as in doing it down back alleys during rush hour?’

A brief pause. ‘One-nil.’ We are smiling at each other, the tension broken. I have convinced you I am your equal in this sort of banter. I have managed to swerve away from a moment of humiliation.

Pride is a terrible thing. It is what makes me turn away from you at that point, when all I really want to do is walk along the river hand in hand, then go down to the South Bank and sit in the bar at the Royal Festival Hall and listen to some jazz if someone is playing, then have dinner in a restaurant somewhere, our knees brushing against each other beneath the table. Pride is what makes me leave you without even asking if such a scenario is possible. I want to do it so much I can’t stand the thought of being turned down. My husband is at a concert tonight. I could be out all night, if I wanted. Maybe you could too. Maybe you headed towards the Tube because you were just assuming I had to be home. Maybe we are about to miss out on the rare opportunity of a whole evening together because neither of us will raise it as an option, neither of us wanting to be the one who is available.

‘I’d better go,’ I say, as I turn.

You don’t even try to give me a chaste, public embrace but raise your hand in farewell, let me go. I pause in the Tube hall to renew my Oyster card in the hope you might follow me in but you don’t, of course. It’s all I can do to steel myself not to run down the road after you even though I don’t even know which direction you were going in, whether you were going home or back to your office, to a late meeting elsewhere, or a leaving do or an evening with friends or… to meet another woman, perhaps, now darkness has fallen and the alleyways are emptying. I have no idea, and no right to ask.

As I go through the barrier, the phone you gave me buzzes in my pocket and I lift it out. You have texted:
When get home, send me pic of what you do when you think about the men with pointy heads. Please!
And despite myself I smile, for I know I have to take this for what it is and to try and feel that life is a boon – confusing sometimes, and frustrating often, but a boon.

*

That night, I wake up about an hour after my husband and I have gone to sleep. He is turned away from me, on his side, snoring softly. I can just see his form from the green glow given out by the clock that throws the time in large digits on our ceiling. We both like a little electric light while we sleep, the legacy of all those years we left a landing light on and our door open in case one of the children woke in the night. The duvet has slipped down and his large, speckled back is exposed. The thinning patch of hair on the back of his head makes me feel protective towards him. I smile to myself as I think of how hard he is to stir sometimes, particularly in the first hour of sleep. My husband goes down into unconsciousness as surely and as swiftly as a deep-sea diver goes into the sea.

I’m fucking a spook.

That explains everything: the ease with which you move around the Palace of Westminster; the way in which you are mostly the master of your own timetable but then are suddenly called away on urgent business; your periods of silence. It explains why you are an adrenaline junkie, why when you want me you are capable of pestering me with calls or texts and want me absolutely
now
but at other times you seem almost indifferent. It explains your extreme secretiveness, the intensity of which has always struck me as beyond that required by simple adultery – the business with the pay-as-you-go phone, your banning email contact, the melodrama of our arrangements. Maybe that’s just how one conducts an affair when you are used to being involved with matters of national security.

Now I know why you want to know so much about me but reveal so little about yourself; why you often seem convinced to the point of arrogance that you can persuade me to do anything you want, in the nicest possible way of course; why you know so much about CCTV cameras and camouflaging yourself on the street. With all these thoughts comes a thrill – is it excitement or fear or some weird combination of the two? If you are a spook, then what happens if you think I am holding out on you? Can you trace the location of that phone you gave me? Have you banned any written contact between us to protect me because your association with me could put me at risk? What happens if – and this thought feels new, fresh, damp from the egg –
what happens if I want out?

My husband murmurs in his sleep, turns over to face me, murmurs again, turns back. I think of the seriousness of the expression on your face when you gave me the pay-as-you-go phone. Have I completely misjudged you, what we are doing I mean, who or what you are? Is there any chance you could be vengeful or dangerous, that my husband could be at risk, maybe even my children? This thought makes my heart pound and I have to breathe deeply and say to myself,
Don’t be stupid… no one is at risk…
It’s the middle of the night. Everything is disproportionate in the middle of the night. It’s a well-known fact.

Rationalise this, I think then. It’s just sex. It will peter out once this man loses interest and, once you’ve worked through his repertoire of favourite locations, he almost certainly will. That’s the kind of man he is. It will last three months at most. Your pride will be wounded and you’ll get your heart a little bit broken and you’ll think you deserve it, and you’ll moon around for a bit, then shake yourself down and everything will get back to normal. That’s all that’s going to happen.

Should I feel more guilty or less because you work for the security services? I ask myself. But then I realise that guilt is not something that needs to be talked away in my head, not really; it is simply absent. The truth is – and it is not something I am proud of – I feel I am owed this. I am owed you. For twenty-eight years, I have done everything asked of me, worked hard and supported my family, loved my husband, raised my children. I have made my contribution to society. I recycle the newspapers every week. Doesn’t that buy me something? I am rationalising like a man, I think to myself. This is exactly what a man would say to himself the night after he has seduced his secretary. No one will ever know; no one will get hurt. But I have not seduced my secretary. I have chosen carefully, even though I didn’t know I was choosing at the time. I am doing this with a man who has the means and motivation to ensure we will never be exposed. I have not pursued a young and vulnerable woman over whom I have authority of some sort. I have not taken advantage of my position and allowed myself to become involved with someone who adores me, or fallen in love and had a wretched, two-year love affair involving comprehensive deceit of the person I live with. I have made my bargain. I’m fucking a spook. He’s a risk-taker. He likes pursuit, and novelty. It may sound dangerous but actually, it couldn’t be safer.

Outside, in the garden, comes the short, harsh yelp of one of the urban foxes that live around here, then silence.

6

It’s difficult for me to talk about what happened next, my love. That won’t surprise you, I know. At this point in my story, I am pausing, in my head, my heart too – I feel myself slow and shudder, tense, the way that someone who is terrified of spiders would as they hover at the threshold of a room they know might contain them. There are places I don’t want to go – or, to be accurate, one place I don’t want to go – but I am trying to be honest, however painful it is. I am trying to say to myself that if I can face this, if I can tell it, as if it were just a car crash that once happened to me, it will be OK. Yes, that’s it, tell it like it was a car crash, tell how I was driving along the middle lane of a motorway, and looking in my right-hand rear-view mirror because there was some scary silver car approaching fast in the overtaking lane and I thought it might be dangerous. I was scared that, as it overtook me, it would stray into my lane, and just as I had my eye on the scary silver car wondering how dangerous it could be, some innocuous-seeming family saloon came at me from the left, from the slow lane, and slammed into me.

Car accidents happen all the time, everyone knows that, common as muck, so common we take them for granted. Yet however frequent car accidents may be, nobody believes it will ever happen to them. If you’ve been driving safely for years, you have the illusion that car accidents are other people’s tragedies, perhaps even that it’s more likely to happen to some people than others, that somehow they must have been just that little bit careless or incompetent, if not downright stupid. It won’t happen to you, though. You just can’t imagine yourself being a victim.

I go up in the air, spinning helplessly in the lump of metal in which I am trapped, and don’t even have the time to acknowledge that the likely outcome, when my somersaulting car hits the ground, is that it, and I, and everything, will burst into flames.

*

As soon as you came into the café, that night – the night it happened – I saw that you were in a dangerous mood.

The light in the café is brown and dim but even before you see me, I recognise the expression on your face. Your moods are always endearingly obvious, I think. I watch you approach the table where I wait. As usual, you are late. You glance around as you walk into the centre of the café. You see me but your look is unseeing: you are annoyed with someone else, not me, but you can’t help it spilling over. This has happened before and I know our conversation will be tinged with aggression on your part and a kind of defensive banter on mine. I am determined to hold my own on these occasions. Sometimes you make a derogatory remark, brief and off-hand, about your wife. It is the only time you are disloyal toward her. ‘I had better not be long,’ you might say, ‘or I’ll be in trouble
again
…’ On such occasions, I am torn. It would be wrong of me to encourage this disloyalty – and given the long hours you work, I am sure you deserve every ounce of trouble you are in. You have said very little about her but I am quite certain she is not an unreasonable woman. At such moments, even though I am crazy about you and have never met her, a certain degree of female solidarity kicks in. At the same time, there is a small, mean part of me that is glad, that wants to say to you,
Confide in me, be disloyal with me, I won’t betray your trust and it will bind us
. That would be a short-term strategy, though; I know that instinctively, new as I may be to the infidelity game. Whatever minor advantage I might gain by encouraging you to be disloyal to your wife will come to rebound on me eventually. It’s a bit late for me to try and claim the moral high ground, given what we are doing, but I feel I should at least do my best not to compound my status as, as what? The easy one? The cheap date? How does it work in your head, my sweet? Are you really that traditional? Are there wife-type women and mistress-type women, in your head? If so, aren’t you a little confused? I couldn’t be more traditional or wife-type, in so many ways. If we had met and married when we were young, I would be at home now, and when you were back two hours later than you said you would be, I have no doubt that with me, too, you would have been
in trouble
.

We are meeting in a café behind St James’s Church, one of those cafés that likes to masquerade as a sitting room. You slump down in the armchair opposite mine, take one of your phones out of the pocket of your bulky wool coat and check it, put it back. You look at me, and smile, but I can tell you’re not with me. It’s a work thing then, I think, not the wife at home this time. You’ve left the office to meet me with something important unresolved.

I am on my way to a faculty party at the university. The Head of Sciences is retiring and is throwing a huge bash, all his staff, selected external examiners like me and various scientists from private institutions and funding bodies. The Head of Sciences is married to a French wine merchant and caterer and expectations of this party are unusually high for a faculty do. I haven’t been to a party for a while and am looking forward to it. I have suggested this coffee because you haven’t yet seen me dressed up, only in my work clothes. I was hoping to impress you with my glamour but even though I had warned you by text that I was in party gear, you have yet to notice.