Apple Tree Yard Read online

  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.

  ‘I like your boots,’ the woman guard said as she squeezed them lightly with both hands. ‘Bet they’ll be useful.’ She stood, turned, and handed me my pass on its string. I slipped it over my neck, then had to bend slightly to press it against the pass-reader that made the second set of glass doors swing open.

  I wasn’t up before the committee for another half hour – I had arrived early enough to buy a large cappuccino and seat myself beneath the fig trees in the atrium, at a small round table. I scattered a crust of brown sugar across the top of my coffee, then, while I read through the notes I had taken the previous day, ate the remaining crystals by licking my forefinger and sticking it in the small paper packet. On the tables around me were MPs and their guests, civil servants, catering staff on a break, journalists, researchers, secretarial and support staff… Here was the day-to-day business of government, the routines, the detail, the glue that holds it all together. I was there to help a committee pronounce on recommended limitations to cloning technology – most people still think that’s what genetics is, as if there is nothing more to it than breeding experiments, how many identical sheep we can make, or identical mice, or plants. Endless wheat crops; square tomatoes; pi
gs that will never get sick or make us sick either – it’s the same unsubtle debates we’ve been having for years. It was three years since my first presentation to a committee but I knew when I was asked to appear again this time I would be rehearsing exactly the same arguments.

  What I’m trying to say is, I was in a good mood that day but other than that, it was really ordinary.

  But it wasn’t ordinary, was it? I sat there, sipping my coffee, tucking my hair behind my ear when I looked down at my notes, and all that time, I was unaware that I was being watched by you.

  *

  Later, you described this moment in great detail, from your point of view. At one point, apparently, I looked up and gazed around, as if someone had spoken my name, before returning to my notes. You wondered why I did that. A few minutes later, I scratched my right leg. Then I rubbed at the underside of my nose with the back of my fingers, before picking up the paper napkin on the table next to my coffee and blowing my nose. All this you observed from your table a few feet away, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t recognise you if I looked your way, because I didn’t know you.

  At 10.48 a.m., I closed my folder but didn’t bother putting it back in my bag, so you knew I was on my way to a committee or meeting room nearby. Before I stood up, I folded my paper napkin and put it and the spoon into my coffee cup, a neat sort of person, you thought. I rose from my chair and smoothed my dress down, back and front, with a swift, brushing sort of gesture. I ran my fingers through my hair, either side of my face. I shouldered my bag and picked up the file. As I walked away from the table, I glanced back, just to check I hadn’t left anything behind. Later, you tell me that this is how you guessed I had children. Children are always leaving things behind and once you have developed the habit of checking a table before you walk away, it’s hard to break, even when yours have grown up and left home. You didn’t guess how old my children were, though, you got that wrong. You assumed I had had them late, once my career was established, as opposed to early, before it got under way.

  I strode away from the café table confidently, according to you, a woman who was on her way somewhere. You had the opportunity to watch me as I walked right the way across the wide, airy atrium and up the open staircase to the committee rooms. My stride was purposeful, my head up, I didn’t look about me as I walked. I seemed to have no sense I might be being observed and you found this attractive, you said, because it made me seem both confident and a little naive.

  Was there any inkling, for me, that day, as I sipped my coffee? You wanted to know that later, egged me on to say that I had sensed your presence, wanting me to have been aware of you. No, not in the café, I said, not a clue on my part. I was thinking about the easiest way to explain to a committee of lay people why so many of our genes are non-functioning as opposed to protein-coding. I was thinking about the best way to explain how little we know.

  Not a hint? None at all? You were a little hurt, or pretended to be. How could I not have sensed you? No, not there, I would say, but perhaps, maybe, I wasn’t sure, I felt something in the committee room.

  My presentation had gone according to plan and it was close to the end of my morning. I had just completed an answer to a question about the rapidity of developments in cloning technology – they are public, and reported, these enquiry committees, so they have to ask the questions that represent the public’s concerns. There was a brief hiatus while Madam Chair asked to check her papers to make sure she had got the question order right. One of the MPs to her right – his name was Christopher something, the plastic plaque in front of him said – had been gesturing in frustration. I waited patiently. I poured a little more water into my glass from the jug in front of me, took a sip. And as I did, I became aware of an odd sensation, a prickle of tension in my shoulders and neck. I felt as though there was someone extra in the room, behind me – as if, all at once, the air was full. When Madam Chair looked up at me again, I saw her glance past me, at the row of chairs behind me. Then she returned to her papers, looking up again to say, ‘I beg your pardon, Professor, I’ll be right with you.’ She leaned over to the clerk sitting on her left. I’ve never had a professorship in a British university – the only time I have ever had that title was when I was teaching in America for a year while my husband was part of the USCR Research Exchange Plan in Boston. She should have called me ‘Doctor’.

  I turned. In the seats behind me, in two rows, were the MPs’ researchers with their notebooks and clipboards, the helpers, those there to learn something that might help them up the career ladder. Then, out of the periphery of my vision, I saw that the entrance door in the corner of the room was – softly, noiselessly – closing. Someone had just left the room.

  ‘Thank you for your patience everyone,’ said Madam Chair, and I turned back to face the committee. ‘Christopher, I beg your pardon, you were listed number six but I have a hand-annotated early draft and mis-read my writing.’

  Christopher whoever-he-was sniffed, hunched forward in his chair and began to ask his question in a voice loud enough to betray his ignorance of basic genetics.

  *

  The committee broke for lunch about twenty minutes later. I had been asked to attend after the break, although we had covered the bulk of my territory. They were only playing safe so they didn’t run the risk of recalling me later in the week and paying for another day of my expenses. The clerks and researchers headed out of the door as I stood and put my papers away. Several of the MPs had made for the Members’ exit and the rest of the committee was conferring softly. The sole reporter on the press bench was making a few notes on her notepad.

  The corridor outside was busy – all the committees seemed to have broken early for lunch – and I stood for a moment wondering whether to go down to the atrium café or to leave the building altogether; fresh air would be good, I thought. Eating in the same café as Members and their guests had long since lost its novelty value. While I hesitated, the corridor cleared a little, and on one of the benches opposite, there was a man. He was seated and talking quietly into a mobile phone but looking at me. When he saw I had noticed him, he spoke briefly into the phone, then slipped it into his pocket. He kept looking at me as he rose to his feet. If we had met before, the look might have said, oh, it’s you. But we hadn’t met before and so it said something entirely other – but still with an element of recognition. I looked right back, and all was decided in that instant, although I didn’t understand that for a very long time.

  I half-smiled, turned to walk down the corridor, and the man fell in step beside me, saying, ‘You were very articulate in there. You’re good at explaining complex subjects. A lot of scientists can’t do that.’

  ‘I’ve done a lot of lecturing,’ I replied, ‘and I’ve had to give quite a few representations to funding bodies over the years. You can’t risk making them feel stupid.’

  ‘No I daresay that wouldn’t be a good idea…’

  I don’t know it yet, but the man is you.

  We were walking alongside each other, as if we were friends or colleagues, and the conversation between us was so easy, so natural – a passer-by would have assumed we had known each other for years – and at the same time, my breath was slightly short and I felt as if I had shed a layer of skin, as if something, simply the years perhaps, or normal reserve, had dropped away. Good lord, I thought, this hasn’t happened to me in years.

  ‘Do you get nervous before giving evidence?’ You continued to talk to me quite normally, and I followed your direction.

  We descended the stairs to the ground level and, without either of us particularly leading the way, or so I thought, we walked across the atrium, to the top of the escalator going down to the tunnel through to the main building of the Houses of Parliament. It was a narrow escalator, too narrow to allow us to stand side by side, and you gestured for me to step on to it first. I had the opportunity to look at you, to observe your large brown eyes and direct gaze, steel-rimmed glasses, retro-ish or perhaps jus
t old-fashioned, I couldn’t decide which, wiry brown hair with a slight wave, a little grey. I guessed you to be a few years younger than me but not much. You were a head taller than me but then most people are. As I was on the step below you on the escalator, you were a lot taller at that point. You smiled down at me as if you were acknowledging the essential silliness of this. When we reached the bottom, you fell into step next to me with one sure stride. You weren’t notably good-looking but there was something about the way you moved, a sleekness and confidence. You were wearing a dark suit that looked, to my inexpert eye, expensive. Yes, it was something about the way you held yourself that was attractive, a kind of male grace. Your movements were relaxed, you seemed at ease with yourself – I could imagine you holding your own on a tennis court. I was pretty sure you weren’t an MP.

  ‘So do you, get nervous I mean?’

  It was only as you repeated the question that I realised there had been a silence between us as we descended. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not with this lot. I know a lot more than they do.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you do.’ You acknowledged my expertise with a slight nod.

  We walked in silence along the tunnel, past the stone lion and unicorn on either side, until we reached the colonnade. It was the strangest thing. We were walking, people were passing, we were relaxed together in a quite familiar manner – still we had not introduced ourselves. No names, no normality – this was the way you knew, I see now. We were skipping stages, establishing that the usual rules did not and would not apply to us. All this I realised only in retrospect, of course.

  As we entered the part of the colonnade that is exposed to the open air of New Palace Yard, I shuddered and crossed my arms. It seemed natural to turn left and step through the Great North Door into the Great Hall. It was full, this lunch hour – school parties, students, milling tourists. We were in the public part of the Parliamentary estate. To our left as we walked across the vast stone hall were the queues of visitors behind ropes, waiting for access to the galleries of the Houses: a group of elderly women, two men in plastic macs, a young couple standing very close together facing each other with their hands tucked into the back pockets of each other’s jeans.