Apple Tree Yard Page 9

  Outside, in the garden, comes the short, harsh yelp of one of the urban foxes that live around here, then silence.

  6

  It’s difficult for me to talk about what happened next, my love. That won’t surprise you, I know. At this point in my story, I am pausing, in my head, my heart too – I feel myself slow and shudder, tense, the way that someone who is terrified of spiders would as they hover at the threshold of a room they know might contain them. There are places I don’t want to go – or, to be accurate, one place I don’t want to go – but I am trying to be honest, however painful it is. I am trying to say to myself that if I can face this, if I can tell it, as if it were just a car crash that once happened to me, it will be OK. Yes, that’s it, tell it like it was a car crash, tell how I was driving along the middle lane of a motorway, and looking in my right-hand rear-view mirror because there was some scary silver car approaching fast in the overtaking lane and I thought it might be dangerous. I was scared that, as it overtook me, it would stray into my lane, and just as I had my eye on the scary silver car wondering how dangerous it could be, some innocuous-seeming family saloon came at me from the left, from the slow lane, and slammed into me.

  Car accidents happen all the time, everyone knows that, common as muck, so common we take them for granted. Yet however frequent car accidents may be, nobody believes it will ever happen to them. If you’ve been driving safely for years, you have the illusion that car accidents are other people’s tragedies, perhaps even that it’s more likely to happen to some people than others, that somehow they must have been just that little bit careless or incompetent, if not downright stupid. It won’t happen to you, though. You just can’t imagine yourself being a victim.

  I go up in the air, spinning helplessly in the lump of metal in which I am trapped, and don’t even have the time to acknowledge that the likely outcome, when my somersaulting car hits the ground, is that it, and I, and everything, will burst into flames.

  *

  As soon as you came into the café, that night – the night it happened – I saw that you were in a dangerous mood.

  The light in the café is brown and dim but even before you see me, I recognise the expression on your face. Your moods are always endearingly obvious, I think. I watch you approach the table where I wait. As usual, you are late. You glance around as you walk into the centre of the café. You see me but your look is unseeing: you are annoyed with someone else, not me, but you can’t help it spilling over. This has happened before and I know our conversation will be tinged with aggression on your part and a kind of defensive banter on mine. I am determined to hold my own on these occasions. Sometimes you make a derogatory remark, brief and off-hand, about your wife. It is the only time you are disloyal toward her. ‘I had better not be long,’ you might say, ‘or I’ll be in trouble again…’ On such occasions, I am torn. It would be wrong of me to encourage this disloyalty – and given the long hours you work, I am sure you deserve every ounce of trouble you are in. You have said very little about her but I am quite certain she is not an unreasonable woman. At such moments, even though I am crazy about you and have never met her, a certain degree of female solidarity kicks in. At the same time, there is a small, mean part of me that is glad, that wants to say to you, Confide in me, be disloyal with me, I won’t betray your trust and it will bind us. That would be a short-term strategy, though; I know that instinctively, new as I may be to the infidelity game. Whatever minor advantage I might gain by encouraging you to be disloyal to your wife will come to rebound on me eventually. It’s a bit late for me to try and claim the moral high ground, given what we are doing, but I feel I should at least do my best not to compound my status as, as what? The easy one? The cheap date? How does it work in your head, my sweet? Are you really that traditional? Are there wife-type women and mistress-type women, in your head? If so, aren’t you a little confused? I couldn’t be more traditional or wife-type, in so many ways. If we had met and married when we were young, I would be at home now, and when you were back two hours later than you said you would be, I have no doubt that with me, too, you would have been in trouble.

  We are meeting in a café behind St James’s Church, one of those cafés that likes to masquerade as a sitting room. You slump down in the armchair opposite mine, take one of your phones out of the pocket of your bulky wool coat and check it, put it back. You look at me, and smile, but I can tell you’re not with me. It’s a work thing then, I think, not the wife at home this time. You’ve left the office to meet me with something important unresolved.

  I am on my way to a faculty party at the university. The Head of Sciences is retiring and is throwing a huge bash, all his staff, selected external examiners like me and various scientists from private institutions and funding bodies. The Head of Sciences is married to a French wine merchant and caterer and expectations of this party are unusually high for a faculty do. I haven’t been to a party for a while and am looking forward to it. I have suggested this coffee because you haven’t yet seen me dressed up, only in my work clothes. I was hoping to impress you with my glamour but even though I had warned you by text that I was in party gear, you have yet to notice.

  ‘Shall I get you a coffee?’ I say, in a voice I mean to be kindly and understanding but to my ears sounds patronising.

  You don’t seem to notice that you’re being patronised, or if you do, you’re too distracted to care. ‘White americano,’ you reply, no thanks or acknowledgement, and you get one of the phones out of your pocket again and immediately start checking emails. It’s hard to know what to do at such moments. It is human nature, faced with such behaviour to become annoyed and demanding but of the many roles I would like in your life, petulant mistress is the last, so I rise and go to the counter. When I have ordered, I look back at you – you are tapping something into the phone. I pay for the coffee and glance back again, still standing waiting at the counter. You are tucking the phone into an inside pocket – and, then, that done, all at once, you look at me and see me watching you from where I stand, and there it is: that coruscating smile. And I know that whatever was bothering you has been resolved and that for the next few minutes or however long we have, you are mine.

  I turn back to the counter as the barista places the coffee in front of me, pick it up, and then make my way back to you, weaving between the crowded tables. I do not look at you, but know that you are looking at me. Now, I have your attention. I ease my way through the tight spaces between chairs with a sideways sway of my hips. I know that the dress I am wearing flatters me, the fine black material gathered and ruched in the right places. I know it makes me seem voluptuous rather than plump, and that this is something you are observing. It is an odd and arbitrary business, getting you to notice me. I was wearing exactly the same dress when you entered the café but your mind was elsewhere. Now, suddenly, I am receiving the full beam of your attention, and the more you stare the more I sway and the more I sway the more you stare and by the time I reach our table, I am wet already, just from being observed by you, and your lips are parted slightly as I place the coffee down in front of you.

  ‘You know it’s really quite demure…’ you say, nodding toward the dress. Still no thank you.

  ‘Think so?’ I smile.

  ‘Well, your text said party frock. It’s longer than I expected, long sleeves, but that bit…’ Your gaze lingers on the wide space above my cleavage. This part of me has not aged, for some reason. I have yet to grow the brown spots and lizard lines that some women do, although I am sure it won’t be long.

  I raise my own coffee to my lips and take a sip, looking at you over the cup as I do. You watch me carefully. I put down my cup and wait for you to speak.

  You lean forward in your chair. ‘Go to the Ladies and take your knickers off.’

  I stare at you. You move your head in a small gesture: go on.

  I rise from the chair again with the same disbelieving mixture of irritation and compliance I felt when I got you your coffee
while you checked your emails. What am I? What do you think I am?

  In the Ladies toilet, I pee, then do as I am bid.

  What am I? I look in the mirror as I wash my hands afterwards. My knickers are balled up in my handbag.

  As I emerge from the Ladies, you are watching me, and you continue to watch me as I make my way through the tables. You glance at the length of my body and raise your eyebrows. I sit and open my handbag. You peer in, then without even looking round to see if we are being observed, reach in for the balled-up pair of knickers and enclose them in your fist. You lift your hand and look at the knickers briefly before tucking them into your coat pocket. ‘A thong. Easy access eh? Demure dress but a thong underneath. Nice.’

  I affect outrage, although I knew that was what you would do. ‘Give them back,’ I hiss, looking around. The other tables are close to ours but we are slightly lower because we are sitting on the easy chairs and the murmur of conversation is loud enough for us not to be overheard.

  ‘No,’ you say, staring into my eyes.

  ‘Give them back,’ I repeat, achieving an easy mix of laughter and insistence.

  ‘You’re wearing hold-ups, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s warm tonight…’ I laugh, but awkwardly because the truth is, I wore hold-ups for you in anticipation of exactly this scenario.

  ‘Go to the party with no knickers on. Wander around and only you and I will know. But the men will all be like dogs. They will be able to tell even though they don’t know what it is about you.’

  ‘You won’t even be there.’

  ‘I’ll still know.’

  ‘Give them back.’

  ‘OK, in a bit. I’m just keeping them hostage for a while… OK?’

  You reach into a pocket for your phone and for a minute I think you are going to check your emails again but you press a few buttons then hold it out to me. ‘This is what I did in my lunch hour this morning, thinking of you.’

  My sweet, I never owned up to you then because I didn’t want to deflate you but the videos never did it for me. They say men are turned on by images, women by words. I don’t know if that’s true. I liked some of the visuals. I liked the photo of you that you sent me once where you rested your phone on the dashboard of your car and took a picture of yourself, cross-looking, stuck in a traffic jam. I don’t know why I liked that one so much, but I did. It was the combination of you looking cross and sexy with the fact that you wanted to share this with me, that you were annoyed about being stuck in a traffic jam. Extraordinary what can be arousing. Your simpleness, that was what turned me on that evening in the café. It wasn’t the video – it was your plain belief that what did it for you did it for me and that that was all we needed. Your straightforward and profound arousal: your bossiness combined with your need; you were like a toddler sometimes. You wanted it when you wanted it, right there and then. Did I desire you so much that day because I was enjoying being wanton or enjoying indulging your desires? Truly, there are some things that scientific research has yet to explain.

  About half an hour later, I say to you, ‘I should go. I should be there for the speeches.’

  ‘Are you going to have a good time?’ you ask, suddenly sulky.

  ‘You bet,’ I say. I’m in an upbeat mood and it shows, drunk on your desire for me even before I get to the party and have any alcohol. I haven’t quite worked out how to get my knickers back.

  ‘Come on,’ you say, and rise from your chair. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  We leave the café and I turn towards Piccadilly but you turn in the opposite direction, heading south, and begin to walk down Duke of York Street. I catch up with you and look at you but you seem distracted again. Halfway down, you stop, quite close to the café where we had our first coffee and I wonder if you are about to remark on it. Then you start walking again, striding off without even looking to see if I am behind. I catch up with you, a little out of breath. You glance around, then stand on the kerb for a moment, leaning forward, about to cross the road. A taxi comes swinging round the corner and you put out a hand to bar my way. As it sweeps past, you step out and I follow.

  On the other side of the street, you walk down a small street that forms a dead end. Although this is a busy area, with early evening drinkers carousing behind the leaded windows of a pub on the corner, there is nothing down this side street – no pedestrians and no cars as it is restricted parking. There are no entrances to the buildings either – both sets of buildings show us their backs, their blank double-doors for loading and unloading. There are no handles to the doors. People open them from the inside to receive goods, that’s all.

  I know what you want – it was obvious as soon as we turned into this small dead end. There is a doorway, halfway down on the left. You hustle me into it, with my back against the door, tucking yourself in against me so that we are sheltered us from sight of anyone walking down the main road. We are overlooked only by the back of the building behind you, which you assess for a moment and decide is safe, before turning to press your mouth down on mine. As you do, you raise the skirt of my dress and your hand is hard and warm and, well, how can I put this? You always did know which button to press.

  And then you are inside me, and I don’t believe we are doing it, in Piccadilly, in the rush hour, with a thousand people hurrying by a few metres away.

  Afterwards, you press your mouth against mine again, briefly, and return my knickers to me, then step back, scanning from left to right as you do, as I pull them on over my hold-ups and boots. No one has walked down the street during that time but we have been only a matter of minutes. Before we step out of the doorway, you look at me, smile, then lift your forefinger and stroke it down the length of my nose. ‘OK?’ you ask softly. I nod.

  We walk back down the street together, toward the bright lights and the bustle of commuters, me a little unsteady in my heeled boots. As we reach the end of the alley, I glance up and see its name on a high plaque: Apple Tree Yard.

  Part Two

  A, T, G and C

  7

  Being in the dock at the Old Bailey is like being a member of the royal family – or a president or pope, perhaps. Sitting there, surrounded by guards and bullet-proof glass, is probably the closest an ordinary mortal can get to replicating the state of constant protection that such people live under. People are not horrible to you when you are a defendant in a criminal trial: people are kind, in an infantilising kind of way. You are the centre of everyone’s concern. It is all about you.

  Although the dock is at the back of the court, the court is shallow and wide, so you can see everything before you. The only person whose view is as good as yours is the judge, directly opposite. You and the judge are the North and South pole of the judicial process. You are escorted to and from the court, so is he. You are fed, catered for – so is he. You and he both have the power to stop proceedings, object to jurors, challenge witnesses – although you must do it via your advocate. There is only one difference between you. He is North and you are South – you are each other’s inverse but there is no doubt who sits on high. He might send you to prison for the rest of your life. You have to try not to think about that bit, though, because if you do, you will go insane.

  The best way of not thinking about that bit is to think about your rights. Your rights matter here, and part of the judge’s job is to have due regard for your rights. Robert, my barrister, told me the only thing a crown court judge fears is a successful appeal. They don’t even like unsuccessful ones. It is the only time their judgement is called into question. For that reason alone, the judge, however powerful, must be vigilant. Your rights and needs must not be traduced or ignored in any way. This gives you a sense of power – fragile, illusory perhaps, but power nonetheless. And so, for the duration of the trial, you and the judge feel not so much opposites as partners locked in a kind of arranged marriage. You spend a lot of time staring at him, wondering who the hell you have been landed with. He spends a lot of time staring back,
no doubt wondering the same.

  *

  During the opening days of the trial I followed the evidence closely, of course; every remark from the prosecution barrister, the demeanour of each witness. There was a sharp difference between the professional witnesses – the forensic experts, the police officers, Witness G – and the amateurs, the bystanders: the young man from the grocer’s shop who saw you getting into my car, the landlady, the taxi driver. The professionals often remained on their feet in the witness box, addressing the judge with sharp deference, reading the oath clearly and loudly. The amateurs gave a little bow of gratitude when the judge said to them, ‘Behind you, you will see a drop-down seat, please feel free to use it…’ and then sat with alacrity, eager not so much to get off their feet as to do anything the judge suggested might be a good idea. They looked frightened but brave, determined to do their duty.