Apple Tree Yard Page 7

  I remind myself that you called me beautiful. In the disabled toilet, you told me to look in the mirror, and I smiled at our mutual dishevelment and how we looked, half-dressed and glued at the groin, sexy and ridiculous at the same time, and I turned my head away shyly and you held my face and turned my head back, gently, and whispered, ‘Isn’t it beautiful? You’re beautiful…’ Sitting on the Tube, I remind myself of that with an edge of desperation. I try to be calm and positive, to think of my good points – my hair is still thick, my neck unlined. Beautiful? I am fifty-two years old. You fool, I think then. You have two chief qualities in his eyes: your availability and your willingness.

  I walk home from the station, heavily: still no call or message from you. The house is empty, thank God. I avoid the mirror as I hang up my coat and kick my shoes into a corner. You fool. Your abdomen is soft and full, your breasts shrunken – you have a figure like a jelly baby. Do you think any man in his right mind, of any age, would actually choose you? Don’t be an idiot. He sees something in your eyes, that’s all, and it isn’t beauty. It’s acquiescence.

  I walk into the kitchen and graze the cupboards and fridge – a rice cake, a bit of hummus past its sell-by date, a few grapes and a yoghurt. I eat standing up, leaning against the granite counter-top. I put my phone on the kitchen table to stop me looking at it four times a minute. Eventually, I go to the cupboard we call the larder and find an old can of beer, room temperature, with dust around the rim. I pour it into a tumbler and add ice cubes, which make the contents of the glass foam like a lab experiment – still, a better idea than opening a bottle of wine that early in the day, I think. I take my warm, foamy beer, ice cubes clinking, and wander into the sitting room, still in my work suit, and slump on the sofa. I channel-hop from one rubbish daytime television programme to the next, something I never normally do.

  Eventually, I go upstairs and open up another letter to you, but only get as far as one line.

  Dear X,

  I don’t think I can do this any more.

  *

  I am cool with you the next day, when you call. You offer no explanation for your silence the previous day and I am determined not to ask. From the way you speak to me, light-heartedly, I can tell that yesterday was yesterday, you had been busy and you saw no reason to offer explanation or apology. What about today? You want to know. Where am I? I admit that I will be in town later and you say, great, we can meet for a coffee around three o’clock, in that patisserie on the corner of Piccadilly, just past Fortnum’s. If I am good, you say, you will let me buy you a cake.

  You are late. You come in, distracted, still clearly running through something in your head, sighing, smiling at me, saying, as you sit, ‘Hang on just a minute, I’ll be right with you.’ Then you get three phones out and check each in turn before slipping them, one by one, back into their pockets. I have never known anyone who seems to own as many electronic devices as you do. What is it you do, exactly, and why are you always so evasive?

  You stop and look at me. This is a habit of yours I find both exciting and disturbing. Just at the point where you seem distracted and I feel free to observe you, you will stop whatever you are doing and look back at me, catching me in the act, reversing our interaction. All at once, I am not watching you – it is you watching me watching you, which is a different matter altogether.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ I say, before you can ask, ‘that I’ve never known anyone who has as many mobile communication devices as you. What are they all for? What is it you do, exactly?’

  You give me a keen look, ‘You know what, it’s really quite strange you should ask me that right at this very minute.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ you say, ‘I have something for you.’ You raise a finger in a give-me-a-minute gesture, bend and pick up your briefcase. You flick the clips open with a twin gesture of both thumbs and despite my resolution to be cool, I feel a thrill of excitement thinking where else those thumbs have been recently, where else they have been flicking. You open the briefcase but the hinged side is towards me, so I can’t see inside. You lift something out, slam the lid shut and put the briefcase back on the floor.

  You put it on the table between us: a small, cheap mobile phone. I look at it and you push it across the table. ‘I got the same brand you have already so you don’t need a different charger.’

  I stare at it.

  ‘It’s for you,’ you say, ‘a present. I realise it’s not quite pearl earrings or a compilation CD of romantic hits of the eighties, but it’s all yours.’

  I pick it up. ‘What’s it for?’ I say, stupidly.

  ‘I believe it’s traditional to use them for making phone calls and sending texts but I suppose you could juggle with it, if you like, or use it to prop up a wobbly table leg or…’

  ‘Yeah all right, smart arse…’ I note, with delight, that we are at the stage of taking the mickey out of each other.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ you say, staring at me, ‘can you keep it safe?’

  I raise my eyebrows at him.

  ‘You’re a bit slow on the uptake today, aren’t you?’ you remark. ‘Look, it’s a pay-as-you-go phone. It works like any other phone, except this phone is for one purpose and one purpose only.’

  I pick the phone up and turn it over, as if it might suddenly turn into a small handgun.

  ‘It’s for calling me,’ you say, leaning forward in your seat. Your voice drops and you glance from side to side. I am in no doubt that the conversation has become serious. ‘You’ll find a number in the contacts list, a new number. I’ve got one just the same. From now on, you call me on that number and that number only, OK?’

  I look at you. ‘OK,’ I say softly.

  ‘There’s some money on it already, but you’ll need to top it up sooner or later, when you do, go to a shop in town, nowhere near your home or where you work. Never go to the same shop twice.’

  I want to make a joke, to return to the banter, but it is clear from your expression that would be inappropriate. You want me to understand you are in earnest.

  The phones were never discovered by the prosecution. You took mine back from me in the car, the day it happened, and you disposed of them both, I never found out where, down a drain somewhere, perhaps, in a rubbish bin. Perhaps you buried them. Perhaps even now, those phones lie nestling together beneath the earth in a garden or park somewhere. That’s what I would have done, if their disposal had been up to me.

  ‘What’s your email address?’ I ask. It seems an odd question, when you have just given me a pay-as-you-go phone, but the letters I write to you come to mind and I think how much human contact is via email these days and how odd it is we don’t do that. You must have a work email address, after all.

  You shake your head. ‘Email leaves a trail,’ you say.

  ‘Why would anyone bother?’ I ask, with a small scoff of scepticism. I’m enjoying the subterfuge but really, I am thinking, isn’t this all a little self-important? It’s flattering to our sense of ourselves, I suppose; it adds to the adrenaline of what we are doing, but it’s hardly necessary, is it?

  You lean back a little in your seat, glance around, lean forward again. You regard me seriously, then say, ‘Is your husband a suspicious man?’

  A sudden image of my husband comes to mind, as I found him last Sunday evening around nine o’clock, in his study, head bent over his desk. On far corner of the desk was the salad I had brought up to him two hours previously. I had come into his study silently to collect the plate. He indicated with a wave of his hand that I could take it for him, giving me a quick thumbs-up gesture to say, it was good, thanks, without noticing that he hadn’t actually eaten what was on it. Suspicious? My husband? If he was working on a new paper, I could invite a rugby team round for group sex in the hallway and he wouldn’t notice.

  ‘No, he’s not suspicious,’ I say.

  ‘What if he finds this in your handbag, what would your cover story be?’

  I
give a small snort. ‘He would never go through my handbag! Never in a million years!’

  ‘What would your cover story be?’ you insist.

  ‘Look,’ I say, smiling, ‘we just don’t have that kind of marriage, thank God. We don’t look in each other’s bags. We don’t go through each other’s credit card bills. We never have done. Even when – well, under any circumstances. I just wouldn’t do it and neither would he. It’s… it’s…’ I search for the right word. ‘Well, it’s undignified. If he found that phone in my handbag, the conversation would go, “What the hell were you doing looking in my bag?”’

  ‘Look,’ you say, with a small sigh of impatience. ‘The point of the question is not, how likely is it that this phone will be discovered, the point is, in the unlikely event of it being discovered, what’s your story? Your story has to trip off your tongue, immediately. If you make it up on the spot, there will be a pause, however momentary, and uncertainty in your voice, and in that pause your husband will be able to tell you are lying.’

  ‘You don’t know my husband.’

  You look at me much as a weary maths teacher might look at a bright but stubborn pupil who is wilfully refusing to understand calculus.

  ‘OK OK,’ I raise my hands. ‘I’ll say that one of my colleagues at work left it on my desk during a meeting and that I’ve been walking around with it in my handbag for ages and must remember to give it back to them.’

  ‘That’s good,’ you say, ‘because it would explain why you’ve had it in your bag for a while. Months ago would be even better. Tuck it in a compartment, a zipped compartment. Then say that you had the meeting months ago. Your colleague thought they had lost the phone and cancelled it so that’s why you haven’t rushed to return it. It must have been in your handbag for months. You just haven’t thought about it. That way, if he checks your bag regularly and has found it more than once, you’re covered.’

  I can’t help but smile at the idiocy of this – the idea of my husband checking my bag even once, let alone repeatedly, but I am distracted by the infinitely pleasing thought of… months. He said months. He’s thinking this may go on for months and months.

  At that point, appropriately enough, my phone rings, my normal phone that is. I was checking emails while I waited for you and it is on the table in front of us. The screen lights up and I glance down and, superimposed over a picture of my children standing next to each other at my daughter’s graduation is the word Blocked.

  I ignore it, take a sip of my coffee, and you look at me and say, with a tight smile. ‘Why don’t you answer it?’

  I shrug. ‘It’s a blocked call; it will be a work call, or spam.’

  My phone stops ringing. I glance down at it. Blocked missed call. After a second or two, the screen goes black.

  You lean back in your seat again, regarding me. ‘Don’t you want to know who it was?’

  I give a small laugh, ‘No, I’m talking to you. If it’s important, they will have left a message.’

  You pick up my phone and look at it. ‘No message as yet.’

  ‘Well maybe it will come through in a minute. If it doesn’t, then it wasn’t important. I get them all the time, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Blocked missed calls.’ This is true. I’ve had a lot more in the last few months, for some reason. If I answer, there is no one there, just the empty space of a failed connection. My phone number must have ended up on some sort of spam list, like email addresses do from time to time.

  You are frowning slightly. ‘How often do you get them?’

  I shrug again. ‘Several times a week. Sometimes a message from work pops up later, the next day sometimes, which is really annoying. Sometimes it’s just nothing. Couple of times there were five or six in a row then nothing for a fortnight. Why? It’s not that unusual is it?’ You listen to this intently, more intently than I mean you to, for it wasn’t something that had been bothering me. Like everyone, I get spam texts from insurance companies offering to help me win compensation for accidents I haven’t had, phone calls from people wanting to upgrade my phone just after I’ve upgraded, emails from US army generals who want to deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in my account or medical foundations offering me a penis extension. Clothing catalogues pour through my door, three leaflets a day from pizza parlours. How many pizza parlours can there be in west London? We are all of us stalked, every day, stalked by junk mail and email, stalked by non-specific, scattergun requests. The odd blocked missed call doesn’t seem a cause for alarm.

  You sit and listen to me with an expression of unwarranted seriousness I think. ‘When was the first call?’ you ask.

  ‘The first where there wasn’t a message, you mean, when I wondered if it was spam?’ I shrug, ‘After Christmas I think, the New Year... Look, it’s not a…’

  ‘Wasn’t me then,’ you say, with an unamused smile. ‘Must be a secret lover that pre-dates me.’

  Oh, I see… I think, suddenly understanding, and I give you a warm smile and shake my head a little and even though you don’t smile back I am happy right then because it is two-nil to me this afternoon. I am feeling the same glow of unexpected pleasure I felt when you said months. You are jealous. Because a blocked missed call is the kind of thing you would do, you are assuming that the blocked missed calls I am getting must be from someone like you. I love men, I think. I’m no biological determinist – but men, I love them. You give me an open-faced, slightly frowning look and in the face of your patent annoyance the insecurities I felt the previous day evaporate. Am I going to have to play games to keep you interested? It isn’t my style. But then, this whole thing isn’t my style.

  I pick up the pay-as-you-go phone and turn it over in my hand. It is much smaller than my usual phone. It will slip into a pocket without any difficulty at all.

  5

  For six weeks, it goes on, you and I, in a heady blur. We meet for sex. We meet for coffee. We never meet for lunch because you are too busy for lunch and we never meet for dinner because we can’t meet in the evenings. I have no idea what you like to eat. Perhaps you don’t eat anything. I don’t know what films you like or books you read or whether you have ever played a musical instrument. We have sex; we drink coffee; we talk. We don’t really talk about our home lives; we never use names for my husband or your wife. Occasionally, we talk about relationships in general or past lovers but mostly we have one topic of conversation and one only: us, ourselves, what we are doing, what we are thinking and feeling about each other.

  In between meetings, I am crazed with desire and I write letter after letter to you on my computer and I am grateful that you have banned email contact between us because within hours of writing them I feel sick with embarrassment at what I reveal about myself, at my paltry attempts to sound cool and analytical while revealing I am the opposite.

  I don’t always manage things well in my head.

  *

  One day, we arrange to meet outside Portcullis House, a building I now feel a certain affection for. It is past the end of the day – you are working late for some reason – but you still keep me waiting for half an hour and when you arrive you do so without apology, as normal, and I can tell that whatever has delayed you is still on your mind. You smile your half-smile and don’t speak. Fine, I think. Well I won’t make conversation either. Maybe I have things on my mind too.

  Descending the steps, we turn right, towards Westminster Tube station. There is a tiny coffee bar there that we have used before, with two stools in the window. It is dusk, chilly for the time of year – groups of shivering tourists dressed too optimistically are huddling together, blocking the pavement. We weave our way between them. The silver cube of the Tube entrance swallows and disgorges suits. We have nearly reached it when you take my arm and wheel me round to go back the way we have come. ‘Let’s walk along the river,’ you say. It is the first thing you have said to me.

  We go round the corner, back past the entrance to Portcullis House.
Across the river, the London Eye is lit at intervals by bright blue lights, a slowly turning fairy circle in the grey and purple sky. Still in silence, we walk down Embankment, unhurrying, past the rows of tourist coaches parked and empty. Beyond them, the crowds of visitors thin and the street becomes easier to negotiate. We walk past the back entrance of the squat, red-brick building that is the Head of Territorial Policing, with the lamp-post outside that always make me smile – the old-fashioned police lamp-post, Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars… Crime never paid back then, not when you had to fiddle with a dial to clear the fuzz from your mahogany-encased television screen, not in black and white. It’s all wafer-thin and brightly coloured now and unforgivably instant in its clarity – you can see the news presenters’ pores beneath their orange make-up. There is a lot more ambiguity around nowadays as well, I’ve noticed recently. Crime pays now, all right. Well, right now at this minute, walking next to a man I shouldn’t be with, I feel like it pays.

  We walk slowly past the rear entrance of the Savoy and beyond, out of tourist-land and into the land of government buildings. After a few minutes – we still have not spoken – we reach Victoria Embankment Gardens, set back from the road and the river, a thin strip of park with a single path that snakes through it, lined with benches. In the gathering dark, we have it to ourselves. On the road, still visible through shrubbery on which the spring growth seems decidedly bare, black cabs, lorries, cars thunder by in a haze of inner-city pollutants, and beyond the traffic, the river rushes to keep up. We pass a rectangular lily pond on our right. A sign behind it reads Danger: Deep Water. Bit late for that, I think.