Apple Tree Yard (22 page)

‘Tough call,’ you say.

‘It’s a long time ago.’ It is a long time ago. I think of my aunt, who was kindly and brisk and there every day to make me and my brother oven chips and baked beans after school until my father got home from work. She was a good mother to me and lived to see my children when they were small. I think of how the way to get my father’s attention was to show him an A in a circle at the bottom of an essay, of how he would only demonstrate physical affection when I was asleep, tiptoeing into my room at night to stroke my hair in the dark, and how I would struggle to stay awake after lights out, in order to catch him at it. He remarried when I was seventeen and moved to Scotland as soon as I left home to go to university – my brother was five years older than me and had already left home to work on sheep farm in New Zealand. I always knew he would leave as soon as he could. Crawley had never been quite outdoorsy enough for him and Gatwick Airport was temptingly close. My upbringing was not particularly hard, under the circumstances, and I refuse to be defined by it. I felt loved as a child, cared for. I have married the right man and raised two children. I have made a good life for myself. I am nobody’s victim.

The weight of your hand resting on mine – I like that. I turn my hand beneath yours, palm upwards, so that our fingers can intertwine and clutch. How little we know of each other, I think, nothing in fact: only this, only now. The lives we have led before we met, the children born and brought up, the jobs held, the traumas and upsets and joys, extended families, friends, acquaintances – the webs of our lives: we know nothing. I don’t even know if your parents are alive or dead. You and I have the opposite of what Guy and I have. Guy and I have acres of knowledge but no intimacy – you and I have an intense relationship that exists in a vacuum.

I move my thumb against yours; the friction is comforting. Your nails are always neatly filed and clean – that touch of vanity again. Clean, how clean and simple are our desires, how straightforward, yet how open to misinterpretation by others.

Eventually, I say softly, ‘Apple Tree Yard.’

You lean in slightly, tightening your grip around my hand. ‘There was no CCTV, I’m sure, I checked. If you don’t tell them they don’t have to disclose it to the defence. Don’t tell them about Apple Tree Yard, don’t tell them about us. No one has any way of knowing. Nothing is written down anywhere. There’s no paper trail and I can dispose of the phones. Nobody can prove anything between us other than an acquaintance.’

‘I’d have to lie in court,’ I say, ‘when they go through my movements earlier that day, I’d have to describe my whereabouts. If I told the truth about what you and I were doing, nobody would ever believe me about the other thing. Or even if they did, they would think I was a slut who deserved everything she got.’

Opposite where we are sitting is a large, wooden-framed mirror, hung in order to make the café appear larger, I suppose. Reflected in it is the side of the counter with its rows of cakes. In front of the cakes, there is us, seated at our small round table, a middle-aged man and woman, not looking at each other, clutching hands. We are framed perfectly by the mirror, the row of cakes behind us, the soft lighting above that matches the soft music playing and the gentle talk of the other customers. Our demeanours are unmistakably sombre despite our physical affection. We look like a couple that has just agreed to divorce.

I think that if I could climb into that mirror, experience the whole world the wrong way round, from the wrong side of the glass, everything in opposite, it would seem no stranger to me than what is happening now. 

12

For the rest of that week, I am very low, I don’t know why: I should be feeling better, relieved. It’s not going to go anywhere so now all I have to do is get over it. It wasn’t as if Kevin told me anything I didn’t already know. I wake a lot in the night. I stare at the ceiling for a couple of hours before falling back to sleep. In the mornings, I feel drugged, and have to push myself up into a sitting position and even then, remain for a long time on the edge of the bed before I can stand. I sit slumped with my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands. I have to be careful not to let Guy catch me doing this.

Guy is busy at work. You are busy too. You call occasionally, doing your best, but sometimes, in your voice, I hear the strain of you doing the right thing, hear it in the way you ask how I am. I am different now. I start screening your calls until I feel strong enough to pretend. On the occasions where I sound all right, I can hear the relief in your voice. I am careful to end the call first and after we hang up, I cry. I cancel all the work appointments I can. I take a few days’ leave from the Beaufort, which I am due, staying in email contact, making a phone call now and then. But even phone calls are effortful. I don’t want to talk to anyone.

*

That weekend, Guy and I go to dinner. Guy and I are not really dinner party people – he hates chit-chat and will sit there with his head hanging until someone says something interesting. When they do, he will perk up, like a labrador about to be taken on a walk. Dinner is the last thing I feel like but I’m working at being normal.

As we are getting ready to go, Guy says to me, ‘Aren’t you showering?’

I am pulling a stretchy blue dress over my head, made of a synthetic fabric that gives an electric crackle as I work it down my body. ‘Trying to tell me something?’ I murmur, going over to my vanity unit and picking up the expensive perfume he bought me last birthday.
Mist… mist…
it goes as I press the gold button and draw lines of vapour across my wrists.

‘No, it’s just you’re showering all the time these days.’

*

We arrive at our friends’ house in Harrow-on-the-Hill. Harry and Marcia’s house is huge: one of them has family money. People we don’t know will be at this party and as we approach their door I hope there will be no barristers or lawyers. Since meeting Kevin, I’ve been looking at the people sitting opposite me on the Tube, the smartly dressed ones who might work in the legal profession, and wondering if they are the sort of person who would be happy to try and get a not guilty verdict for George Craddock.

*

It’s a big dinner party, twelve people around a long oval table in a yellow kitchen with a conservatory extension and a glass roof. We get to the pudding without incident, although Guy tells me later I was quiet all evening. Then it happens. The big news story that week is of a politician who has been accused of sexual assault by a hotel maid in New York.

‘It’s the wife I feel sorry for,’ says our friend Harry, who owns the house we are sitting in, whose teenage children trail in and out of the kitchen, going to the double fridge and extracting two litre-bottles of fizzy drinks, before trailing out again. They have friends upstairs. There’s a small child too, a late baby, but she’s asleep somewhere.

Next to Harry is a man with a fine white goatee beard, a line like an upward-pointing arrow on his chin. ‘Well, I saw the maid on television…’ he says, dismissively, as if that settles it. He trails off, then when he sees we are looking at him, he adds, ‘She lied to the grand jury.’

I don’t know you, I think, staring at him.

The wife of the man with the goatee beard, who I also don’t know, bristles. She is sitting directly opposite her husband. ‘She lied about her immigration status. Don’t you think most people would do the same if they were desperate for a job in New York?’

Goatee beard is drunk. He reaches for the wine bottle in the middle of the table and upends it over his glass. ‘My wife knows what she’s talking about,’ he says to the glass. ‘She’s an immigration lawyer. If we get a minicab home, she’ll have another client by the end of the journey.’

‘Whereas my husband…’ the wife begins, looking around at us and smiling – but before she can get any further, our hostess Marcia cuts in. She doesn’t want the evening to sour and I don’t blame her. There’s nothing worse than a married couple sniping at each other across the table as the evening wears on, not when you’ve put all that effort into dinner. I like Harry and Marcia. They threw large dinner parties even when their children were small, at the stage when most of us could scarcely be bothered to boil an egg for guests. The food is always good, the wine good – they like mixing up their friends, people who don’t know each other, they are innately hospitable, generous people.

‘The thing I think is so ridiculous…’ says Marcia, keen to lighten the atmosphere, ‘is, honestly, how could anyone
force
anyone else to have oral sex? Wouldn’t you just bite it off!’ She slaps the table lightly as she says this and looks round at us all, inviting us to laugh. She has blonde hair that flicks upwards at the ends, gravity-defying little flicks. She is wearing a plain black dress, the knot of a silver necklace at her throat. Her husband adores her.

I feel my breath hot inside me. Why is this kitchen so hot? And something very odd begins to happen. In my head, I turn on her, and give her the speech I would like to give, about how stupid and ignorant a comment it is, about how unless you have experienced fear, you have no idea how paralysing fear can be, about how depressing and infuriating it is – unbearable, in fact – that women peddle this ignorant crap as well as men. And, in my head, I rattle through this argument at great speed and with great articulacy, culminating with… but I say this last bit out loud: it pops out, not as an angry climax to an angry speech, oh no, it comes out cool and clean.

‘Well I suppose you would, wouldn’t you, Marcia, with your perfect home and your perfect husband and your perfect fucking kids? You’d probably enjoy it.’

There is an ugly and baffled silence. Everyone looks at me.

I am holding my desert spoon. I fiddle with it. Marcia served a lemon pudding of some sort, my favourite. What a yellowish evening this is; sunflower-coloured walls, my blonde hostess, the lemon pudding.

‘Well…’ Marcia says, still smiling, looking around, a little helplessly, ‘Well, I didn’t…’

I sit back in my chair, affecting casualness, and toss the spoon on to the dining table, where it lands with a metallic clatter. ‘You know what the really scary thing is, as far as I’m concerned. What it is, is, you’re a perfectly intelligent woman but nothing really bad has happened to you, and despite your intelligence, you simply don’t have the imagination to understand what it’s like when bad things happen to other people. But the scariest thing of all…’ I lean across the table towards her and the venom in my voice is unmistakable. She is looking down now, her perfect complexion going pink. ‘They let people like you sit on juries.’

The silence that follows is thick, in the yellow room. We are all staring at Marcia, until she is released by one of the teenagers calling down from the stairwell, ‘Mum! Mu-um!’

*

In the car going home, there is a long silence, then Guy says, ‘Was it really necessary to go in that hard?’

‘Oh for Pete’s sake…’ I mutter. I think of reminding him of the number of times he has offended people at parties.

‘She’s a nice woman…’ Guy sighs gently, ‘we like her, remember? She’s not stupid, she just said a stupid thing. She’s a nice woman.’

‘That makes it worse, not better.’

He has the sense to give up.

*

We arrive back at our house. Our little gate is open and he reverses carefully into our drive; the familiar crunch of gravel. He lets the engine idle for a bit, then turns it off. We sit in silence, in the dark. Neither of us moves.

Guy is staring straight ahead. Please, please don’t ask me what is wrong, I think.

‘Yvonne…’ he says.

I open my door, clamber out with some haste, slam it behind me. When I get to our front door, I remember that he has the house key, not me. I have to stand waiting for him while he gets out of the car, slowly, locks it carefully, checks it is locked.

*

It takes me another two weeks to work out what I have to do and there are some dark moments along the way. I can’t get hold of you, and I begin to suspect you are screening my calls. I don’t blame you. You are screening until you have time for a long conversation because you don’t feel able to have brief ones with me any more. I am avoiding everyone else in my life. You are all I have. I am sorry.

On Radio 4 one morning, a Home Office official taking part in a debate about sexual assault says that of course he believes sentencing should be toughened up when it’s a
serious
assault. At such moments, it is hard to find my way around my own kitchen.

*

The inevitable happens. I haven’t seen you for a week, we have spoken once, briefly. You are scared, I think, and why wouldn’t you be? I’m scared too. I wait until Guy is out of the house one afternoon and even take a glass of wine up to my study in the hope that it might help.

I open the familiar document. My heart is like lead. I know that I still can’t send a letter or email to you, now more than ever, and that if I am to do this in writing, it will have to be in the ridiculously condensed form of a text, but if I am ever to work out what to say in that condensed form, then first I have to try and communicate it to myself.

Dear X,

Before I began this letter, I attempted to re-read the early ones I wrote, the ones where I was so sure of myself. I had to stop. It was painful for me to see the full stretch of my delusions laid out in words, the way I was so certain I could handle whatever you, or anyone, threw at me. None of what I have previously believed about myself is true.

How can I ever begin to list the many ironies of my situation now? Chief among them is that if I had described your behaviour to a friend, they might have been concerned for me. The unpredictability, the risky sex, the possessiveness – all these would have rung alarm bells to anyone who cared for me, as I would have been alarmed if a friend of mine had detailed her involvement with a man like you. And yet all the time, while I was wondering if you might, possibly, be dangerous, while I was wondering if my excitement over you was merely thrilling or downright foolhardy – all that time, someone as seemingly harmless as him was waiting for me, waiting for his opportunity.