Apple Tree Yard (16 page)

I have crossed Oxford Street and am zigzagging north and east through the backstreets when something unusual happens. A woman is walking towards me, a small woman, even shorter than myself, Japanese, expensively dressed in a green silk dress and short leather jacket. She is answering a call on her phone, opening the conversation quite happily. She has several large shopping bags on the other shoulder. After a couple of sentences, while she is still a few feet away from me, she stops dead in the street. Her face becomes a mask. The shopping bags drop from her shoulder. Her knees buckle and she collapses on to the pavement, letting out a cry as she falls but still clutching the phone to her ear.

I stop where I am for a moment, then approach. She is sobbing and shouting into the phone in Japanese. Clearly she has just been given some terrible news. One minute she was walking along with her shopping, the next, she gets a phone call and she is on her knees, in the rain, crying and shouting.

I hesitate in front of her. After a minute I say, ‘I’m sorry, can I help you?’

She looks up at me, her expression both bewildered and dismissive, as if she can’t understand why I am standing in front of her or what I might be saying, baffled and angry through her mist of tears. Then she returns to shouting and crying into the phone.

It seems prurient to stand there, so I step past her and continue up the street. When I glance back, she is still on her knees, still crying.

*

The party is in full swing by the time I reach the group of buildings known as the Dawson Complex – the main hub of the University’s administrative offices and the home of several lecture theatres. The Head of Science made it very clear in the invitation email that although the University is providing the venue, the food and wine are on him. A gang of students has been pressed into service as catering staff and as I stride into the foyer, my heels clicking sharply, I am greeted by a line of undergraduates with clipboards waiting to tick off guests’ names. This is not typical of university parties, which don’t normally involve anything as fancy as a guest list – usually it’s plastic cups and white wine at room temperature – but this party is different, a bit of a show. The Head of Science has dedicated three decades to education and is now heading inexorably into the private sector. A tall man with large glasses, he is standing in the foyer next to the students with clipboards, waiting to greet people, a humourless grin on his face.

‘
Yvonne…’
he says as I enter, and steps forward to kiss me on both cheeks.

 After a few pleasantries with the Head of Science, I walk down the corridor that leads to the Events Hall, the centre of the Dawson Complex. On the left, there is a row of newly assembled metal racks for people to hang up their coats. The racks are already full, just a few metal hangers left, squeezed together at the end with raffle tickets Sellotaped to them. I am standing on the edge of a group of people, waiting to hang up my coat, when a tall woman student dressed in a black shirt and black jeans comes along, holding a tray of wine glasses. ‘Dr Carmichael…’ she says, pausing to offer me the tray. I don’t recognise her and haven’t put on my name badge yet but she must be a former examinee of mine so I smile, take a glass, and say, ‘Oh, thanks, how are you doing?’

‘Great, I’m starting at the Vicenzi Centre in the fall.’

Now I remember, a clever American, her PhD was on distinguishable personality traits resulting from conditional susceptibility due to the SERT gene variant. ‘That’s great, good luck.’

‘Thank you. I can’t wait.’

Behind her, walking down the corridor, I see two bald men, one tall, one short. ‘Is that Professor Rochester?’ I ask, staring at the short one. The question is rhetorical as I’m sure it is. I take a sip of wine. It hits my empty stomach. Eli Rochester runs Glasgow. In my field, he is God. I glance at her. ‘
Rochester
is here…’

The student leans in, raising an immaculately shaped eyebrow. I still can’t remember her name but recall now that I liked her a great deal, her sardonic intelligence. ‘
Everyone
is here, Dr Carmichael,’ she murmurs as she turns away.

I edge towards the coat rack, unbuttoning my coat with my free hand as I do, and the man in front of me says in a familiar manner, as he turns, ‘Here, you’d better let me take that.’

For a moment, I’m not sure what he means, then see he is looking at my wine glass. ‘Thanks,’ I say.

‘Yvonne,’ he says, a note of admonition in his voice as he takes my glass from me and stands waiting while I shrug off my coat and find a free wire hanger. ‘I edited your essay.’ Oh yes, he’s a science publisher. I’ve actually done quite a lot of work with him but it’s been mostly by email.

 ‘Harry!’ I say, ‘How are you?’

‘Good, good…’

As Harry and I walk down the corridor together, I realise that something in me is alight this evening. It is strange the way this sort of narcissism attracts people. I wonder if it is down to the wine glass in my hand, or the number of people who have greeted me enthusiastically before I’m even in the door, or the presence of so many illustrious colleagues in my field – which, of course, flatters my decision to attend the party myself – yes, it is all those things. But it is also you. I have just done something that most people at this party would never dream of doing, that I myself would never have dreamt of doing before I met you. And I have done it without being caught, I have pulled it off. Later, I will be going home to the nice house I share with my husband and here I am at a party full of high-achievers in my field and, guess what,
I’m one of them
. This is my life. Five minutes ago, it seems to me, I was one of the students with a trayful of wine glasses, eager to exchange a few words with a professor in my field. And now here I am, as if by magic, and people are coming up to me and it’s taking me a minute or two to recall their names.

I have finished my first glass of wine by the time I have got to the end of the corridor. I detach myself from Harry as I reach the Events Hall, which is heaving. It’s early but already there is an edgy feel to the event, people on their second or third glass, the laughter and chatter reaching to the high ceiling. Maybe it is the combination of the mundane setting with the volume of alcohol and attendees – it’s like an office Christmas party, everyone drunk or getting drunk, everyone networking. Scientists may not let their hair down often but when they do, they do it to the power of
n
.

I spot a group of people I know, researchers from Guy’s old institute but I hang back for a minute, surveying the room. They will ask why Guy isn’t here – he’s giving a talk in Newcastle – and then they will ask how my job is going. I don’t want to get stuck with people I know too early.

I edge my way around the room, depositing my empty glass and picking up a full one as I go, and suddenly find myself beside the illustrious Professor Rochester but he is surrounded by acolytes and looks deep in conversation with one of them. I move away, raising my glass to safety above people’s elbows, sliding sideways through bodies as I negotiate the room.

‘Yvonne!’ It’s Frances, a technician I’ve worked with at the Beaufort. I like her a lot. She’s in her sixties and there’s nothing she hasn’t seen.

We embrace briefly. She leans in to hiss loudly in my ear, ‘
How
much do you reckon this has cost him?’

I shout back in hers. ‘
Thousands
…’ In the current climate, the Head of Science would not have dared used a penny of University money.

‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘Let’s do a circuit of the room. Let’s see if we can track down the lesser-spotted canapé…’

Two more glasses of wine go down my throat while we hunt. Surely there should be hordes of students with snacks? None are in sight, although occasionally, frustratingly, we glimpse people with something pinched between their fingers, raising it to their mouths. I have had nothing to eat since a sandwich at lunchtime and am already fuzzy-headed but, what the hell, everyone else in the room is clearly going that way too. It’s that kind of party. If necessary, I’ll drop forty quid on a cab to get home. I don’t have anything urgent tomorrow morning and I don’t mind paying for an expensive black cab if it’s been a free night out.

‘Have you heard, there’s
dancing
later…?’ shouts Frances above the hubbub as we ease past a cluster of bacteriologists from Sweden. I know they are bacteriologists because they are shouting to each other furiously about the Meselson and Stahl experiments. Those experiments took place in 1958 and bacteriologists still argue about them. I think one of them might be someone I had a short-lived feud with on the letters page of
Nature
magazine a couple of years ago.

‘You have to be kidding…’ I murmur, but Frances doesn’t hear me as my words are drowned by the shrieking of a sound system from the side of the room. We grimace and turn. Then there is a
phup-phup
sound as someone on the raised dais at the end taps a microphone. God, the speeches, I think, tossing back my glass and looking around for a refill before they begin. The Head of Science rarely uses one word when twenty-eight will do.

*

Some time around 10 p.m., the evening becomes hazy. I look at my watch and think, I should call Guy and tell him I am going to be later than I said, then I remember he is in Newcastle. The party invitation said until midnight but I hadn’t imagined I would stay for the duration – now it’s looking as though I will be here till the bitter end. I feel bewildered with drink, sick and unsure – too drunk to drink but too drunk to stop. It’s ages since I’ve been this drunk. Years. I have fraternised with the research scientists and lost Frances somewhere along the way and even said a brief hello to Eli Rochester who, to my astonishment, remembered meeting me at the Advanced Bioinformatics Symposium in Chicago six years ago – and it comes to me with a sticky kind of suddenness as I stand there that my heels are higher than I am used to and I should really take my glass of wine outside, right now.

I peer through the long windows at the courtyard at the back of the main hall, which is full of smokers. As I stand, looking at them, thinking about joining them, my elbow is nudged from behind and I turn to see George Craddock beaming at me.

‘Oh hello,’ I say brightly, relieved to see a friendly face. ‘Is Sandra here?’ I don’t know why I assume they always come as a pair, just because they work together.

‘She left a while back,’ he says. He lifts his glass towards the courtyard. ‘I saw you earlier but I couldn’t get to you, going outside?’

I really, really need to sit down. ‘Good idea…’ I say, and lead the way.

George and I get outside and sit down on a low brick wall. He is wearing a long-sleeved shirt with a pattern of tiny flowers – a designer-type shirt. It suits him. He has a packet of cigarettes in his hand. He takes one out and gives it to me and, stupidly, drunkenly, I put it to my lips and then lean forward into the lighter that he holds up to my face. It’s something of a flame-thrower and I inhale deeply then sit up straight before I singe my eyebrows. I break into a fit of coughing.

‘I knew you’d be a secret smoker!’ he says.

I shake my head, laughing a little. ‘I’m not, I promise!’

‘Yes you are,’ he says, ‘you’re one of these people who thinks it isn’t smoking gives you cancer, it’s going into the newsagent and buying them.’

George is definitely more witty when he’s had a drink or two, I think.

‘God weren’t the speeches awful…’ he says.

We launch into a tirade against the University authorities and those who fund them, starting with the Dean and ending with our current Minister for Education. George has always struck me as somewhat conservative and I’m surprised to find out he agrees with me about the current problems in higher education funding. Much as lecturers like him moan, though, our field remains well-funded in comparison to the arts – I think of how much easier my daughter’s career path has been than my son’s – and we discuss how the Head of Science probably has some fairly romantic delusions about the private sector. Yes, there’s a lot more money sloshing around but it’s a lot more brutal as well. Those paymasters expect results.

We are outside for a long time. Even without my coat, I don’t feel cold. At one point, a group of people join us and they talk for a bit, then melt away. The wine servers don’t bring the bottles around the courtyard but George goes in and refills our glasses a couple of times. Inside the building, the lights are dimmed and music begins to boom. Unfortunately, the lights are not dim enough for me to avoid seeing the Swedish bacteriologists letting their hair down. Frances comes over to me while George is getting me another drink and says, ‘I’ve got to go, darling, I’m completely plastered.’

‘Me too,’ I say, ‘I’m going soon too.’

‘See you next week,’ she says. ‘Don’t end up dancing, will you?’

‘No chance.’

George returns from refilling my glass and as he hands it down to me, I stand, staggering a little, and say, ‘You know, I really shouldn’t drink any more of this I don’t think.’

‘You’re probably right,’ he says. ‘Shall we go? I’ll walk to the Tube with you.’

‘Yeah, definitely…’ I say, opening my handbag and realising that my chances of locating the ticket I had torn from the metal coathanger as I hung up my coat are zero.

There are blank bits, then. I remember being in the corridor. I remember struggling to get the coat from the hanger. I remember George holding my bag as I put my coat on, shrugging it on to my shoulders but not bothering to do it up. I remember the sound of my heels as we crossed the foyer and I remember George saying, ‘I’ve just got to get my briefcase from my office.’

I remember leaning back against the wall of the lift and closing my eyes.

Then, George and I are walking along a darkened corridor. The Dawson Complex was built in the sixties and above the main, high-ceilinged ground-floor rooms is a warren of offices, ill-lit. At one point, my shoulder scrapes along the breeze block wall. George catches hold of my arm, ‘Come along,’ he says, in a friendly, amused kind of way. ‘You need to sit down for a bit.’