Apple Tree Yard (2 page)

I nod, suddenly unable to speak. I know that in a few seconds, I will start to hyperventilate. I know this even though I have never done it before.

The barrister’s voice is low and sinuous, ‘You’re familiar with the shops, the cafés…’ Sweat prickles the nape of my neck. My scalp is shrinking. She pauses. She has noted my distress and wants me to know that I have guessed correctly: I know where she is going with this line of questioning, and she knows I know. ‘The small side streets…’ She pauses again. ‘The back alleyways…’

And that is the moment. That is the moment when it all comes crashing down, and I know, and you in the dock know too, for you put your head in your hands. We both know we are about to lose everything – our marriages are over, our careers are finished, I have lost my son’s and daughter’s good regard, and more than that, our freedom is at stake. Everything we have worked for, everything we have tried to protect: it is all about to tumble.

I am hyperventilating openly now, breathing in great deep gulps. My defence barrister – poor Robert – is staring at me, puzzled and alarmed. The prosecution disclosed its line of attack before the trial and there was nothing unexpected in its opening statement or from the witnesses it put on the stand. But I am facing your barrister now, part of the defence team, and your defence and my defence had an agreement. What is going on? I can see Robert thinking. He looks at me and I see it in his face: there is something she hasn’t told me. He has no idea what is coming, knows only that he doesn’t know. It must be every barrister’s nightmare, something that finds him or her unprepared.

Below the witness stand, sitting behind the tables nearest to me, the prosecution team is staring at me too, treasury counsel and the junior next to her, the woman from the Crown Prosecution Service on the table behind them, and on yet another row of tables behind that; the Senior Investigating Officer from the Metropolitan Police, the case officer, the exhibits officer. Then over by the door there is the victim’s father in his wheelchair and the Family Liaison Officer assigned to look after him. I am as familiar with the cast of this drama as I am with my own family. Everyone is fixed on me – everyone, my love, apart from you. You are not looking at me any more.

‘You are familiar, aren’t you?’ says Ms Bonnard in her satin, sinuous voice, ‘with a small back alleyway called Apple Tree Yard.’

I close my eyes, very slowly, as if I am bringing the shutters down on the whole of my life until this moment. There is not a sound from the court, then someone from the benches in front of me shuffles their feet. The barrister is pausing for effect. She knows that I will keep my eyes closed for a moment or two: to absorb all this, to attempt to calm my ragged breathing and buy myself a few more seconds, but time has slipped from us like water through our fingers and there is none of it left, not one moment: it’s over.

Part One 

X and Y

1

To begin where it began – really, it began twice. It began that cold March day in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster, beneath the drowned saints and the roasted saints and saints in every state of torture. It began that night, when I rose from my bed at four o’clock in the morning. I’m not a true insomniac. I have never tossed and turned night after night or spent weeks in a dreary fug of exhaustion, grey-faced and careful. Once in a while I find myself suddenly and inexplicably awake – and so it was that night. My eyes sprang open, my mind sprang into consciousness.
My God
, I thought,
it happened
… I went over what happened, and each time I went over it, it seemed more preposterous. I rolled beneath the duvet, the motion heavy, closed my eyes, then opened them immediately, knowing that sleep would not come again for at least an hour. Self-awareness: it is one of the chief bonuses of advancing age. It is our consolation prize.

There is no clarity or insight at that hour. There is only the endless turning and churning of our thoughts, each one more confused and circuitous than the last. And so I rose.

My husband was sleeping soundly, his breathing rasping, harsh. ‘Men can achieve a persistent vegetative state during the night,’ Susannah once said to me. ‘It’s a well-known medical condition.’

And so I rose and slipped from the bed, the cold of the room frosting my skin, and took my thick fleece dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door, remembered that my slippers were in the bathroom, and pulled the door to behind me, gently, because I didn’t want to wake my husband, the man I love.

There may be no clarity or insight at that hour but there is the computer. Mine is in an attic room, with sloping ceilings at one end and glass doors leading on to a tiny ornamental balcony at the other, overlooking the garden. My husband and I have a study each. We’re one of those couples. My study has a poster of the double helix on the wall and a Moroccan rug and a clay bowl for paperclips that our son made for me when he was six. In the corner is a stack of
Science
magazines as high as the top of my desk. I keep it in the corner so it won’t collapse. My husband’s study has a desk with a glass top and white built-in shelving and a single black and white photograph of a San Francisco trolley car,
circa
1936, framed in beech and hung on the wall behind the computer. His work has nothing to do with trolley cars – he’s an expert on genetic anomalies in mice – but he would no more have a picture of a mouse on his wall than he would have a fluffy toy on his easy chair. His computer is a blank, cordless rectangle. His pens and stationary are all kept in a small grey drawer unit beneath the desk. His reference books are in alphabetical order.

There is something satisfying about turning on a computer in the middle of the night; the low hum, the small blue light that glows in the dark, the action and atmosphere both replete with the sensation that other people are not-doing this right now and that I shouldn’t be doing it either. After I turned the computer on, I went over to the oil-filled radiator that stands against a wall – I’m usually the only one in the house during working hours and have my own radiator up here. I clicked the switch to
low
and the radiator made a clicking and pipping sound as the oil inside began to heat up. I went back to my desk and sat down on the black leather chair and opened a new document.

Dear X,

It is three o’clock in the morning, my husband is asleep downstairs, and I am in the attic room writing a letter to you – a man I have met only once and will almost certainly never meet again. I appreciate that it is a little strange to be writing a letter that will never be read, but the only person I will ever be able to talk to about you, is you.

X. It pleases me that it’s actually a genetic reversal – the X chromosome, as I’m sure you know, is what denotes the female. The Y is what gives you increased hair growth around the ears as you age and you may also have a tendency towards red-green colour-blindness as many men do. There’s something in that that is pleasing too, considering where we were earlier today. Tonight, right now, synergy is everywhere. Everything pleases me.

My field is protein sequencing, which is a habit hard to break. It spreads through the rest of your life – science is close to religion in that respect. When I began my post-Doc, I saw chromosomes everywhere, in the streaks of rain down a window, paired and drifting in the disintegrating vapour trails behind an aeroplane.

X has so many uses, my dear X – from a triple XXX film to the most innocent of kisses, the mark a child makes on a birthday card. When my son was six or so, he would cover cards with X’s for me, making them smaller and smaller towards the edge of the card, to squeeze them on, as if to show there could never be enough X’s on a card to represent how many X’s there were in the world.

You don’t know my name and I have no plans to tell you but it begins with a Y – which is another reason why I like denoting you X. I can’t help feeling it would be disappointing to discover your name. Graham, perhaps? Kevin? Jim? X is better. That way, we can do anything. 

At this point in the letter, I decided I needed the loo, so I stopped, left the room, returned two minutes later.

I had to break off there. I thought I heard something downstairs. My husband often gets up to use the toilet in the night – what man in his fifties doesn’t? But my caution was unnecessary. If he woke and found me missing it would not surprise him to discover me up here, at the computer. I have always been a poor sleeper. It is how I have managed to achieve so much. Some of my best papers were written at three in the morning.

He is a kindly man, my husband, large, balding. Our son and daughter are both in their late twenties. Our daughter lives in Leeds and is a scientist too, although not in my field, her speciality is haematology. My son lives in Manchester at the moment, for the music scene, he says. He writes his own songs. I think he’s quite gifted – of course, I’m his mother – but he hasn’t quite found his métier yet, perhaps. It’s possibly a little difficult for him having a very academic sister – she’s younger than him, although not by much. I managed to conceive her when he was only six months old.

But I suspect you are not interested in my domestic life, any more than I am interested in yours. I noticed the thick gold wedding ring on your finger, of course, and you noticed me noticing and at that point we exchanged a brief look in which the rules of what we were about to do were understood. I imagine you in a comfortable suburban home like mine, your wife one of those slender, attractive women who looks younger than her age, neat and efficient, probably blonde. Three children, at a guess, two boys and one girl, the apple of your eye? It’s all speculation but I’m a scientist, as I’ve explained, it’s my job to speculate. From my empirical knowledge of you I know one thing and one thing only. Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf. 

Although the heater was on low, the room had warmed up quickly and I was becoming drowsy in my padded leather chair. I had been typing for nearly an hour, editing as I went, and was heavy-headed, tired of sitting upright and tired of my sardonic tone. I scanned through the letter, tightening the odd phrase here and there, noting that there were two places when I had been less than frank. The first was a minor untruth, one of those small acts of self-mythologising, where you diminish or exaggerate some detail as a form of shorthand, in order to explain yourself to someone – the aim concision rather than deceit. It was the bit where I had claimed that I write my best papers at three in the morning. I don’t. It’s true that I sometimes get up and work in the night, but I have never done my best work then. My best work is done at around 10 a.m., just after my breakfast of bitter marmalade on toast and a very large black coffee. The other place where I had been less than truthful was more serious, of course. It was where I referred to my son.

I closed the letter, entitling the file
VATquery3
. Then I hid it in a folder called
LettAcc
. I spared a moment to observe myself in this act of artifice – as I had when I reapplied my lipstick in the Chapel. I slumped in my chair and shut my eyes. Although it was still dark outside, I could hear a light chirrup and tweeting – the optimistic overture of the birds that stretch and flutter in the trees as dawn breaks. It was one of the reasons we moved to the suburbs, that peeping little chorus, although within a few weeks I found it irritated as much as it had once pleased me.

A one-off, that’s all. No harm done. An episode. In science, we accept aberrations. It’s only when aberrations keep happening that we stop and try and look for a pattern. But science is all about uncertainty, accepting anomalies. Anomalies are what create us, viz. the axiom
the exception that proves the rule.
If there was no rule, there couldn’t be an exception. That’s what I was trying to explain to the Select Committee earlier that day.

*

There was snow in the air, that’s what I remember about that day, although it had yet to fall. That dense and particular chill the air seems to have just before –
the promise of snow
, I thought to myself as I walked towards the Houses of Parliament. It was a pleasing thought because I had new boots, half-boots, patent leather but with a small heel, the sort of boots a middle-aged woman wears because they make her feel less like a middle-aged woman. What else? What was it that caught your eye? I was wearing a grey jersey dress, pale and soft, with a collar. I had a fitted wool jacket on top of the dress, black with large silver buttons. My hair was freshly washed: maybe that helped. I had recently had a layered cut and put a few burnt-almond highlights in my otherwise unimpressive brown. I was feeling happy with myself, I suppose, in an ordinary kind of way.

If my description of myself at that time sounds a little smug, that’s because I am – I was, I mean, until I met you and all that followed. A few weeks before, I had been propositioned by a boy half my age – more of that later – and it had done my personal confidence no end of good. I had said no, but the fantasies I had for some while afterwards were still keeping me cheerful.

It was the third time I had appeared before a government committee and I knew the routine by then – I had been presenting to them the previous afternoon in fact. At the entrance to Portcullis House, I pushed through the revolving doors and slung my bag on to the conveyor belt of the X-ray machine with a nod and a smile at the security man, remarking that I had worn my chunky silver bracelet on my second day to make sure I would get the free massage. I turned to be photographed for my
Unescorted Day Pass.
As the previous day, I made the arch go beep-beep and raised my arms so that the large woman guard could come and pat me down. As a pathologically law-abiding woman, I’m thrilled by the idea that I need to be searched: either here or at an airport, I’m always disappointed if I don’t set off the alarm. The guard felt along each arm, brusquely, then turned her hands and placed them in a praying position so that she could pass the edges of them between my breasts. The male guards stood and watched, which for me made the body search more ambiguous than if they were doing it themselves.