Apple Tree Yard (13 page)

No one came for you, my love, as far as I know – with the exception of your wife on that one day when she caused a disturbance and found herself banned thereafter. It made me wonder about your life, even more than I had already, that is. Many of the questions I had were answered during our trial, including many things I had chosen to find mysterious for my own purposes. You became named and concrete, during our trial: that was one of its many ironies.

Sometimes, I would look up at Susannah and notice the empty seats beside her. I imagined my family there; my husband, my son, my daughter – Guy, Adam, Carrie. I missed them so much; I was hollow with missing them. The fact that I had pleaded with them to stay away from the trial did not make me miss them less, rather more. They are not the viscera of this story, those three – they are not the drama, the life or death business of it, but they are its beating heart. They are my day-in day-out people; I inhale and exhale them with each breath. When the hours are added up at the end of it, they will win.

*

You asked me once how Guy and I met, and I said with a shrug, ‘At university,’ as if that explained everything. Later, I felt guilty about that shrug. It’s an easy line, after all. The university boyfriend and girlfriend, sometimes they stay together and get married, sometimes they don’t – it makes it sound as though they have no daring or imagination.

It was only two weeks into my fresher term at university, when I first set eyes on Guy, in the café in the science block. There was a group of ten of us crammed around one small table, nursing instant coffee in plastic cups. Girls were unusual on science courses back then and there were only three around the table that day. The other two had become firm friends already, sensing a shared enjoyment in their minority status.

‘So, who are you?’ one of the confident girls said to me, across the table, in front of everyone. We had met before but my name hadn’t registered. The boys were all lounging in their seats, some swinging their chairs back, arms wide. Opposite me around the table was a broad-shouldered, rangy boy with long straight hair and a slight frown, flicking through his folder of notes. I had noticed him as soon as we sat down and felt, without knowing why, that the other girls had noticed him too. It was partly his size but mostly his indifference. The other boys were all showing off slightly for our benefit, talking in that loud, shouty-boy way, popping biscuits in their mouths whole, picking their noses.

‘Yvonne,’ I said to the confident girls, who were sitting next to each other, to the right of the large silent boy. ‘Yvonne Carmichael.’

‘Yvonne.’ The girl who had asked the question tipped her head on one side. She lifted her left hand and pulled a thick strand of shiny dark hair over her shoulder, twizzled it round one finger, then tossed it back. ‘I’ve got an aunty called Yvonne.’

Two of the boys grinned oafishly.

‘Yvonne Carmichael?’ The large boy had looked up from his notes.

I nodded.

‘You’re the one who got the Jennifer Tyrell Prize.’

I nodded again.

‘What’s that?’ said the other girl, loudly, leaning forward in her seat and looking hard at the large boy.

The large boy looked at me and raised his eyebrows, inviting me to answer.

‘It’s a science essay prize for sixth-formers. Her parents set it up.’ Jennifer Tyrell had been a particularly brilliant science undergraduate in Glasgow who had been killed in a road accident in her first year. Her parents had set up a nationwide essay prize in her name in order to encourage girls to go into science. It was a fairly obscure prize, run by some educational institute in London, and known only to the Heads of Sciences for sixth-formers around the country. When I won it, for an essay entitled, ‘Of Mice and Molecules’, I got two paragraphs in the
Surrey and Sutton Advertiser
.

‘Gets hundreds of entries,’ the large boy said. ‘Open only to girls. Yvonne Carmichael.’

‘That’s just so sexist,’ said one of the confident girls.

The boys around the table were nodding enthusiastically but I wasn’t paying them any attention. I was looking at the large boy and noting the emphasis he put on my name.

By the end of that first term I found myself in an established position within our social group: implausibly, I was Alpha Male’s Girlfriend. Guy was hardly Alpha in the traditional sense – he was bulky but utterly uninterested in most forms of sport – and yet his absorption in his work and air of genuine indifference affected the other boys as much as it affected me. They were all much in his thrall. Often, I would be the only girl at their shared house over a weekend, and one of them would get me on my own and confide in me about which girl he fancied and ask my advice. When Guy and I split up for two terms during the second year, no fewer than three of them propositioned me, but that was all to do with Guy’s status, I knew that: they didn’t want to fuck me, they wanted to fuck him. It’s one of the things that women find hard to grasp – the role of male competitiveness in sexual attraction towards them. It’s hard for us to think of ourselves as a prize: just as hard, in its own way, as it is for us to think of ourselves as prey.

Guy and I married the summer after we graduated and I was pregnant by the autumn. Most people assumed the pregnancy was an accident, or even our reason for getting married in the first place, but Adam was a very planned baby, as was Carrie shortly after. We had discussed it at some length. The best thing, we decided, was to have our two children in quick succession while we were both working on our PhDs. That way, we could combine writing our theses with the full-on bit of childrearing and they would both be in school during our post-Docs.

Guy completed his PhD in three years and mine took seven. Funny that.

*

I remember the day he rang me, all excited, thrilled to bits in fact, unable to keep the news to himself until he got home. He had something to tell me: he had just been made Head of Lab.

Adam and Carrie were nine and eight at the time. I had picked them up from school a couple of hours before but then taken them to the shops, so we had only just got in. Carrie was in floods of tears because her best friend had told her she wasn’t any more. This seemed to be an existential question: ‘I’m
not
any more…’ she was crying. Adam was hunched over a saucepan on the floor of the kitchen, slopping eggs around with a wooden spoon – I had told him he could beat them for me while I talked to Dad on the phone. We were having scrambled egg on toast. That’s what we did for supper when Guy wouldn’t be home in time – reprised breakfast.

I looked down at the floor. Well, we were having however much scrambled egg would be left in the pan after Adam had spread half of it over the linoleum. We were living in a two-bedroom first-floor flat with no carpet in the hallway. The couple in the flat above us were newly-weds who rowed incessantly, the screeching of a couple whose mutual loathing spilled outside their arguments and into every aspect of their lives. Sometimes, lying awake at night listening to them tramping around and sniping at each other, I felt as though the unhappiness in their flat was seeping down through the ceiling into ours, like damp.

 Carrie was sitting on a chair, still wailing with a cat-like rise and fall, well past the stage of acute distress but wanting my attention nonetheless. Adam was trying to scoop up an egg yolk from the floor with the wooden spoon, to get it back in the pan. He had the temper of a much younger child. I knew he was seconds away from hurling the spoon across the room, where it would somersault in the air before crashing against the wall above his sister’s head. I was watching this about to occur with the phone to my ear, as Guy told me that he had just been offered his dream job. Principal Investigator: the grant had come through that morning. He had funding to hire a post-Doc and two PhDs, all working to his direction. He was captain of his own ship. The lab was his. I inhaled silently and told him that was brilliant news and amazing and so exactly what he deserved.

The weekend after, I threw a fit as screechy as the couple in the flat above us and told Guy that I would never be able to finish the project proposal I was working on unless he took the kids out for the afternoon on the Sunday; and he did, without demur. This was the thing he never understood: yes, he would give me time to work when I demanded it, but my time was considered to belong to our family unit unless I signalled that I wanted out. His time was considered to belong to himself and his work unless I demanded that he opt in.

Even the nice ones don’t understand what this is like.
What’s the problem
? They say it sadly, trying to do the right thing.
All you have to do is ask…

Guy’s jollity at that time, that’s what I remember – and what an effort it was to hide my sourness. He had everything he had ever wanted. Head of Lab, and access to the Mouse Library at the most prestigious cancer research institute in the country. ‘You wouldn’t believe how well they are stocked,’ he said. ‘They have every single strain, every combination. You should see the index.’ The Mouse Librarian had taken him through it with pride – cancer research was always the most well-funded area for bioinformaticians, still is. ‘The mice are on tap.’

And he had me and two beautiful children, and was away enough to think my concerns about Adam’s behaviour were down to maternal anxiety. Guy was an optimist, in those days, and the seriousness of his enthusiasm infused our everyday life. It was only after we had named Adam and Carrie that he put their initials together with his and nicknamed me Timmy – the name of a cat he had had as a child. ‘The nucleotides are re-united!’ he would declare as he came home. The first time he said it, I thought it was quite witty.

But here is what you can never quite grasp about children at that age – even though you know it to be true you are so absorbed with them that you can’t get your tired head around it: they grow up. They stop throwing eggy spoons across the kitchen or wailing about their best friends. They start hiding themselves from you, getting ready to sneak out of the house without you noticing, sneak out permanently, I mean, when they – and only they – deem the moment is right. One day, you are sobbing with self-pity as you scramble eggs and pretending to the children that you have a fly in your eye. The next, you find yourself standing in your son’s bedroom holding the swimming towel he was so fond of when he was four, which you have just dug out from a cupboard, and you press your face into it and weep because he and his sister are grown up and have left home and you can’t believe you weren’t more patient, more kind, more prescient in realising how quickly this moment would come.

*

Guy and I were on our own again a lot younger than our peer group. You would think that we would have used that time to get reacquainted as a couple, the way some retired people do, but of course we were far from retired. Our careers were at their peak. This is possibly why the first I knew of my husband’s lover was when she came round to our family home in the middle of the night and trashed my car. She probably wanted to trash his car, but his was in the garage, mine parked in our short gravel drive, right outside the bay window to our sitting room. She let herself in through the little wrought-iron gates, ripped off the aerial and the windscreen wipers and smashed two side windows – I think she was too timid, despite her wrath, to go for the windscreen, or maybe she was afraid of the noise it would make. As it was, we heard nothing – our bedroom looks out over the back garden – although some of the neighbours must have been disturbed; it would have been nice if one of them had called the police.

The first I knew about it was at breakfast time. I was in the bedroom. I was still working full-time at the Beaufort and that day was interviewing for a research assistant. I was ironing a shirt that I thought made me look crisp and authoritative. Guy had dressed already and gone downstairs to make us tea. He came back upstairs carrying nothing, grey-faced. He stood in our bedroom doorway. I looked at him and our gazes locked in the way that gazes do when there is some important information to be exchanged. My first thought was,
Adam
.

He saw my eyes widen in alarm and shook his head,
no, not that
. Then he raised both hands, as if to ward off blows, although all I was doing was standing with the ironing board between us, in my underwear and tights and skirt.

‘Look,’ he said, patting the air gently, ‘look, just stay upstairs, OK?’

I could not imagine what he was on about.

‘Look,’ he repeated, ‘you’re going to have to trust me. Just… stay upstairs.’

He turned and left, closing the door very softly.

I was still holding the iron. I glanced at the clock beside the bed as if it might be displaying answers but all it said was 7.10 a.m. I have to leave the house in twenty minutes, I thought. For want of imagination, I continued ironing my shirt.

I had just clicked off the switch at the power point when I heard voices downstairs. I went to the bedroom door and opened it a crack. The first voice was Guy’s, low, placatory, the second was female, high, distressed. Our front door slammed.

I left the bedroom and stepped softly out onto the landing; the landing stretches to the front of the house and has a small square window overlooking the drive – I was still obeying the injunction to stay upstairs, after all. Guy was standing next to my car, waving his arms. In front of him was a young woman in a red coat and jeans. Her form was slight. She had a lot of dark hair that fell in front of her face and from the movement of her shoulders she appeared to be crying.

Guy disappeared from sight, towards the house. I heard the front door open again, the jangle of keys, the door slam. Back outside, he opened the little gates and gestured towards the pavement. The young woman went meekly and stood there, watching while he got into my car, slamming the driver’s door behind him, reversing it out and on to the street. Once it was parked on the road, he strode back across the gravel and opened the door to our garage.