Apple Tree Yard Page 14

  There is a text from Guy. It arrived at 11.58 p.m. the previous night. Talk went well. Hope the big party good. Text me you’re home OK. Will be back around 6 p.m. The kitchen clock says 7.20 a.m. I text back. Sorry just saw your text. Party heaving, bit boring. Glad talk went well. See you later.

  Afterwards, I sit for a moment with the phone in my hand. I imagine calling my husband. He will probably still be asleep in his hotel room in Newcastle. My call would wake him. I imagine the slight frown he would give as he picked up his phone, wondering what it was that I could be calling about this early. I imagine telling him. I imagine him calling the police. I imagine them coming to this house, two officers in uniform, radios crackling fiercely on their chests. I imagine them taking me somewhere. I imagine me in a room at the back of a police station, lying on my back, naked from the waist down, my knees raised. Perhaps my feet would be in stirrups. There would be chilly metal objects and a man, or maybe woman, who doesn’t smile because his or her sole objective is to hunt around, probing for evidence. And what would that person find there, my love, my dear X, when he delved and scraped with the tools of his profession? What would be found amongst the traces of my assailant, the DNA ducking and diving but unable to hide? You: he would find you. Apple Tree Yard, that’s what he would find. I put my mobile phone back in my handbag.

  9

  I stay in my kitchen for two hours, wrapped in my fluffy dressing gown, sitting with my legs up on the neighbouring chair, one laid there as if it is broken, the other bent, drinking coffee and staring at the wall, shuddering and sore, unable to move. Every now and then I have to shift a little because I am getting stiff. It makes me wince.

  At 9.30 a.m., my phone rings: I lift it from my bag, see it is Guy and screen the call. He leaves a cheery message repeating the information from his text the night before. The talk went really well. He hopes the party was good. He looks forward to hearing all about it. He thinks he might have to go straight to the office and get some work done when he gets back, will I mind? He might as well, because he had forgotten he was due to meet Paul for a drink at eight. I leave it twenty minutes and then text him, Sorry was in shower. No problem. Think have virus, so at home today, don’t worry about this evening, might get early night.

  After I have sent this, I remember that I am supposed to be meeting Susannah that afternoon. Susannah will be sure to ask me about the party. Susannah knows me better than any person on earth. I can’t see her without telling, so I can’t see her. I send her a text too.

  After I have sent this text I sit with my phone in my hand for a few minutes, staring at it, as if I expect that, stared at for long enough, it will transform itself into another object – a pearl, perhaps, or a mouse that will jump from my palm. Once you have not-told, you have to keep on not-telling. That’s how easy it is, I think. That’s how easy it is for your life to become a lie.

  Around mid-morning, I go upstairs, slowly, like an invalid, taking the stairs one at a time, grimacing as I do, gripping the banister and noticing the whiteness of my fingers, the veins on the back of my hand. I take my handbag with me and I drop it on to the bed. Beside the bed is the crumpled heap of party clothing that I was wearing the night before, my best dress, the hold-ups, the thong knickers – easy access – and matching bra. I go to the wardrobe and pull out a plastic bag and push all the items into it. I tie the handles tightly, then hide the bag at the back of my wardrobe. Later, some weeks later, I will secrete the bag into another bag and then deposit it into a rubbish bin on a shopping trip to Harrow. It will disappear into the bin; my favourite dress, the best underwear I hardly ever wore, my party persona, gone for good.

  I lie down on the bed, on top of the duvet. I curl myself into a ball. I lie there for a very long time watching the still, silent room – the lamp on the bedside table with the crust of dust on the rim of the shade; the rug, which is new; the heavy chest of drawers Guy keeps his underwear and T-shirts in – it’s slightly too large for the space between the two windows where we keep it. This is the fabric of my life, these objects. I take them for granted. I am shivering as if I have the flu. It won’t be permanent, I think, a few days, that is all. I don’t mean the shivering. I want to fall asleep but can’t.

  *

  Some time around noon, I haul myself up, raise some pillows behind me and lean back against the headboard. My stomach is empty and hollow and I feel sick, but I know there is no point in trying to eat. I pull my handbag toward me and check both of my phones this time – I keep the pay-as-you-go one in a zip pocket inside the bag. There are four work messages on my usual phone. On the pay-as-you-go one, there is a missed call from you but no voicemail message – there is also a text.

  Hungover? Had a good night? Missing me?

  I am so raw and needy, tears spring to my eyes at the sight of your words – to know you are thinking of me, wondering how my party went, a little jealous, perhaps, because I have not rung you yet this morning to give you an account of my evening.

  I text back. Hungover. Had a bad night. Missing you loads.

  After I have pressed send I sit for some time with the phone in my hand, staring at it, willing it to ring. If you suspect something has happened, you will be on the phone immediately, pressing me. I pray, weakly, childishly, that you will call. ‘What do you mean, a bad night?’ you will ask.

  You don’t call. You have taken the word bad to mean no more than the opposite of good: bad in the sense of boring, tiring, too drunken… I am disappointed. I was hoping for more from you. You are an expert interpreter, after all, and it’s not usual for me to report something was bad. We are still exhilarated by each other – we are normally on a high every time we speak. But maybe there is something nagging at you now, as you get on with whatever you need to be doing, some small sense that all is not well with me? I think about this, try and imagine where you may be, who you are with, what you are doing. I think of you in some sort of strategy meeting, discussing agent deployment (this is how little I know of what you do) around a square table with some mugs of instant coffee and a half-eaten plate of biscuits. No, I conclude, you haven’t guessed that anything is wrong. I know you well enough by now to know that any hint of withheld information on my part would have you on the phone at once. My text has been sufficiently humorous to deflect you and I am disappointed beyond belief at the success of my strategy.

  I put both phones back in my handbag, lie down and curl on my side again.

  It begins inside as a dry sobbing, like a series of tiny depth charges that jolt my stomach. After a few moments the tears start to flow and they do not stop.

  *

  I manage to doze a little. I go downstairs, wandering from room to room. I check that the chain is still on the front door. Not that far, as the crow flies. I can’t face eating but I have a cup of tea.

  *

  It is mid-afternoon when you call. I stare at the phone in my hand as it rings and my heart is in pieces, for I want you so badly that I think I will die, literally, lay down and die, if I don’t speak to you. But I know that as soon as I answer the phone and have a normal, flirty conversation with you, then we will be acres apart, as far apart as I am from Guy or you from your wife. I am weak, though, and wounded, so instead of doing what I should do – screen your call and send a cheery text like I did before – I answer. It’s the middle of the working day. You’ll be busy. If I keep it short and chirpy and pretend I am busy too, you’ll never know. Then I’ll have the weekend to recover myself, to summon my strength.

  Do you remember this conversation, my love? It is burned into my memory as if it had been branded there with a soldering iron.

  ‘Hey, Hangover,’ you say brightly, ‘how are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine.’ That’s all I say, one word, devoid of intonation.

  There is a second’s pause on the line, then you say, your voice low and serious. ‘What’s wrong?’

  *

  When I have finished telling you, there is another pause on the l
ine, then you say. ‘Do you have any marks on your face?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘he used the flat of his hand.’

  ‘Anywhere else?’

  ‘There’s some bruises on my thighs, finger bruises.’ I pause. ‘And I’m bruised inside, internally I think… and I think I have an anal tear.’

  You do not pause or draw breath. ‘The bruising on the thighs is good, anal tears are very common with consensual anal sex. Any restraint injuries, any bruising on the wrists?’

  I wonder how you know to ask all this. ‘No,’ I say. ‘He didn’t restrain me. He didn’t need to. He hit me instead. I didn’t fight back I didn’t…’ I break down.

  ‘Yvonne…’ you say then, and your voice has a depth, a softness I’ve never heard before. ‘Yvonne… you’re doing so well… You’ve done really well, now listen. Do you want me to send some people round, to take a statement? I can have them with you in an hour.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Police officers. There’ll be two of them, either a man and woman or two women. They have specialist units now. It’s not like it used to be.’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  You pause. ‘Are you sure?’

  For the first time since what happened, I feel capable of thinking. ‘You know as well as I do, this can’t go to court.’

  There is a long silence between us then, while we wordlessly acknowledge the truth of this, the consequences for both of us. The silence is so long it is like a warm bath. I feel so close to you.

  Eventually you say, simply, truthfully, ‘Oh dear…’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say, sniffing bravely. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘No,’ you say, ‘it’s not OK, and you’re not OK either.’

  ‘I will be.’

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  ‘Guy’s on his way back from Newcastle. He’ll be late tonight. He’s meeting an old friend. I’ve told him I’m ill. I’ll probably sleep in the guest room, that will be fine, we do that when one of us is ill.’

  ‘Will you be able to be normal for him tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll just be ill.’

  We actually have a busy weekend, busier than usual, socially: the theatre with friends on Saturday, a Sunday lunch with Guy’s sister who lives in Pinner. I can’t imagine how I am going to get through it, but it will keep me distracted, or maybe I’ll be ill enough to just stay in bed.

  ‘You know that if I could come to you now, I would,’ you say.

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I can tell by your tone that you are preparing to end the conversation. I try to think what might delay you. ‘What are you doing, this weekend?’ This is breaking one of our unspoken rules. You and I have never asked each other about what we do when we are at home with our spouses, as though that drawing of a line, that loyalty, somehow makes what we are doing acceptable, as if all we have to do to justify ourselves to ourselves is to compartmentalise.

  ‘We’ve got some people coming round for dinner tonight.’ It’s the first time I’ve heard you use the plural pronoun: ‘we’ as in, me and my wife. ‘The kids have drama club on Saturday morning, maybe take them to see a film later. It will be all right I suppose, but I’ll just want to talk to you.’

  That was enough. There is another pause, then I manage a small, ironic sound, to tell you I am smiling a little. ‘This isn’t exactly what you signed up for, is it?’ What I mean is, things are suddenly serious now and that was never in the plan. I can’t imagine having sex with you at the moment. I can’t imagine ever having sex again. Will it have occurred to you yet, the consequences of this for us?

  ‘I signed up for you.’

  10

  On Monday, you and I meet for a walk near King’s Cross. We meet there because you have something you have to do nearby, you don’t say exactly where, or what. You only have a half-hour window, you tell me. I am waiting by the news-stand in front of the main station and I see you first, emerging from the crowds on the concourse. In front of me, a teenage boy is doing a strange, whirling dance, wheeling his arms slowly like an aeroplane. Through the wheeling arms, our gazes meet. We give each other a long look, as you approach. You take hold of my upper arm, gently, and draw me toward you, then kiss the top of my head.

  We turn and walk in front of the station, heading away from it with no discussion of our direction, cross the busy intersection and begin to walk slowly up Caledonian Road. For a few minutes, there is a comfortable silence between us as we walk. I wish we were able to hold hands, then, at the very moment I am wishing this, you take my arm and tuck it around yours, drawing me close, and we walk like that for a hundred yards or so. We are away from the main business of the station but this stretch of the road is still unmistakably the King’s Cross area – cafés, bars, porn shops. We pass the Bangladeshi Centre and, on the other side of the road, a large hostel with youngsters smoking outside and bunk beds backed up against the windows, their bundled duvets pressed against the window panes like clouds on the wrong side of the glass. A few yards down, a brown-skinned young man in a grey hoodie sits on the step of a terraced house with crumbling pink paintwork. He is smoking and has a baby on his lap, sitting perched on one knee, with a mop of thick dark hair and a gold earring. As we pass, the baby gives me a beautiful, gummy smile and I smile back. The young father sees his baby smiling, then looks at me, beaming with pride.

  We are promenading, like a couple in a costume drama, Jane Eyre and Rochester perhaps, or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. Didn’t they disagree a lot? You and I have never had a disagreement. We haven’t had the chance. I feel a perverse sorrow that we have never had a row. That happens, presumably, with any affair that lasts for any length of time. There must be a point where you allow yourselves to be irritated with each other occasionally, in the same way you do with your spouses, a point where any affair stops being adultery and becomes bigamy. It is a point we will never reach.

  We turn left as the street bends and end up walking along Wharfdale Road and then, still without any discussion about our direction, up York Way, until we reach the canal. We pause and look down over it. The water is black but the wind ruffles it into wavelets that are crested by tiny flashes of neon blue. Amongst the reeds that line the bank, a thin, solitary duck is pecking hopefully. Three narrowboats are moored in a row just beyond the reeds. One of them has an armchair screwed to the top, facing the weak sun.

  You indicate an empty bench on the towpath and we descend the steps, slowly, still arm in arm. As we sit, I let my hand fall from your arm, and you do not reclaim it although we sit close enough for our hips to touch through our coats.

  ‘What time’s your meeting?’ I say, pointlessly. It just seems odd not to be making conversation when there is so much we won’t have time to say.

  ‘Soon,’ you reply. A cyclist idles by along the towpath, ringing his bell as he disappears into the blackness beneath the bridge.

  We talk a little bit about our weekends, and our schedules for the week ahead. We don’t discuss what has happened – I thought we might, would have liked to in fact, as you are the only person I can talk to about it, but I’m also frightened of where such a discussion might lead, so I don’t raise it. Half an hour is nothing, and because it isn’t time to discuss anything in depth, we don’t seem to be discussing anything at all. Thirty minutes. We must have used up half of those minutes already, just meeting and walking a bit and finding a place to stop. I’m afraid of the time, this afternoon. A lorry thunders down York Way, its roar a sudden blare, and I flinch. I’m afraid of everything.

  It is good to see you but later, for reasons I won’t be able to be precise about, I will feel that this meeting was not a success. You seem distracted – maybe it is just how little time we have. You have an intriguing habit when you are thinking hard. It makes me smile, sometimes. Your look becomes concentrated but somehow vacant – I can almost see the cogs turning in your brain. It reminds me of how, when my children were three or four, they often talked to themselves when they were thinki
ng something through, whispering their thoughts out loud. I am not claiming you are that transparent, of course – the opposite, in fact, as that vacancy in your eyes makes you quite opaque – simply that, although I cannot tell what is happening in your thoughts, I know that something is. Something is going on.

  It is quite hard, this look of yours. It is not affectionate or knowing. You are not thinking of me.

  You lean forward on the bench and rest your elbows on your knees, staring thoughtfully ahead, then you turn and stare at me for a bit, and then say, ‘Have you told anyone about us?’

  ‘No!’ There is indignation in my exclamation. Is that what you have been thinking about?

  You continue to stare. ‘No one? You sure? Not a late-night confidence with your friend Susannah, a talk over a bottle of wine?’

  ‘I haven’t told a soul.’ The only blurting I have done is to my computer – it’s all there, disguised, buried, and nobody uses that computer but me. And I realise that is why I started writing that account, to prevent myself from telling Susannah. What has happened between you and I has been so extraordinary, so out of character for me, that I would have burst with it if I had not written it down.

  I want to parry this line of questioning. I don’t like it. ‘Have you?’ I ask, and you give me a glance.

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Who would you tell if you were going to tell, just if?’ The slight note of merriment in my voice is edged with desperation. I know there is no chance you have a confidante. I am asking because it has come to me that I have no idea who your friends are or even if you have any. Is someone like you allowed friends or do you merely have associates? If you compartmentalise, then that means that I am, and will always be, trapped in my own compartment in your head. I will never be general or ubiquitous. I will never be truly present for you.