Apple Tree Yard (14 page)

It was still early in the morning, full light but with a heavy dew on the grass. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have time for breakfast, not even a cup of tea. All this time, the young woman had stood on the pavement. I couldn’t see her face and she didn’t appear to have a handbag of any sort. Her hands were shoved in her pockets, her shoulders turned inward as if she was cold. I guessed she was around the same age as our children.

My husband reversed his own car out of our garage. Once in the road, he opened the passenger door and the young woman, head still bent, leaned as if to climb in, then appeared to change her mind and stood up straight, shaking her head. She pointed back towards our house and said something in a small high voice, although I couldn’t make out her words. At that, Guy opened his door and jumped from the car, the engine still running, and as he stormed around the front of the car I saw, to my astonishment, that his face was enraged. Taking the woman by the upper arm, he pushed her unceremoniously into the passenger seat, slamming the door behind her, storming back round to his side. This pantomime shocked me more than anything. Guy has never had a temper.

The young woman sitting in the passenger seat still had her head bent and, I guessed, was still sobbing. Guy didn’t speak to her as he put the car in gear and reversed briefly before pulling sharply into the road. Leaving my car parked on the road and the garage door and gateway wide open, my husband and the young woman drove off.

Had this sequence of events been less extraordinary, I might have jumped to conclusions more quickly but it all seemed so odd that my normal thought processes were not quite functioning. The strongest emotion I felt as I stared after the car was concern for this young stranger who had turned up at our house so early, and clearly in some sort of distress. It was only when my gaze fell back to my own car that I saw the broken side window. It was the front window, on the passenger side. There was broken glass on the passenger seat – I could see that from where I stood, although I only discovered the other broken window on the driver’s side when I went down to investigate. Broken glass. I woke a little from my surprise and began to form a hypothesis.

This may sound strange to anyone who is not dedicated to their work, who is not used to being half of a couple equally dedicated to their work, but before I went downstairs, I put on my freshly ironed shirt and suit jacket and picked up my briefcase. Downstairs, all was normal as far as I could tell, apart from the fact that my car keys were missing from the hook beneath the mirror in the hallway. I slipped my feet into my black shoes. I found an umbrella from the wicker box in the cupboard where we keep umbrellas. I double-locked the door behind me. I closed the garage door and slipped the key in the gap at the bottom where one of the wooden planks is damaged, where we always keep it. I closed our little iron gates behind me. I looked at my damaged car. Guy had gone off in his own car but with my keys in his pocket. I had no idea where the spare set was and in any case did not have the time to wait for a mechanic to come and fix the window. I only had just enough time to walk to the station. I really couldn’t afford to be late that day.

While I waited for my train at our local station, I looked at my mobile phone, as if staring at it would produce an explanatory phone call from Guy. A picture came to me in my head, my husband driving, furious and silent. Silent is his default mode when he is angry, which was why I had been so surprised to watch him shoving the young woman into the passenger seat. Then I thought about that slight young woman in her red coat, sobbing as she sat in Guy’s car, and as my train pulled in and I joined the other commuters on the platform edging forward, my hypothesis took shape, using what little evidence I had from what I had observed, was tested by a counter-hypothesis, then became firm. I guessed everything.

Later, that evening, when we were both home, Guy told me the full story and I discovered that my guesses had been pleasingly accurate – I took refuge in that. I had been interviewing all day, so although he and I had exchanged a couple of texts while I was at work, we had not had a chance to speak and I think, in retrospect, that is what saved me from hysteria and possibly saved our marriage. I had time to think of a strategy.

This much I knew. I was capable of forgiving my husband an affair. I considered it beneath my powers of logic, my intelligence, to be vengeful or clinging. But I would not forgive him if he lied to me after the events of that morning. I would not forgive being treated like a fool.

One of his texts had said that he would be home by 6 p.m. and that we would ‘talk’. My interviews were finished by 3.30 p.m. and I should have stayed to discuss the candidates with my colleagues but I told them I had something to sort out urgently and left. I was the senior assessor that day and they relented without questioning me.

So I was able to ensure I was home first. I half-expected my car to have been towed away or to have a Police Aware sticker on the windscreen but it was just as I had left it that morning. Inside the house, I changed out of my suit immediately and then – bizarrely – did some housework. I would rather not think about the logic behind this. Perhaps there was part of me feeling more threatened than I was prepared to admit, part of me that wanted to make our home as tidy and welcoming as possible. Or maybe it was a simple desire to restore order, to have the walnut floor in the kitchen swept, the shoes tidied away, the stainless steel hob gleaming clean. Whatever it was, by the time I heard my husband’s key in the door, I was ready, seated at the kitchen table dressed in leggings and a long, stripy top, my hair piled on top of my head in a clip and my mouth brightened with a little lip gloss, nothing too obvious. There was a bowl of olives, an open bottle of red wine and two glasses all waiting on the table. I hadn’t cooked, I would like to point out. I hadn’t gone that far.

When he came into the kitchen, he looked like a man who needed to sleep more than he needed to talk. Unshaven, his features heavy and downward-drawn, his coat hanging unbuttoned. He stopped in the doorway and took in the scene – the open bottle of wine, me waiting, casually dressed and trying hard not to look expectant. He dropped the two sets of car keys down on the counter-top next to him and sighed but I knew that my strategy had been the right one.

‘Take your coat off,’ I said, as I lifted the bottle and poured.

He went back out into the hallway, returned, sat down and lifted his wine glass, trying not to seem too grateful for it, I thought.

I said, gently, ‘I think you had better tell me the whole story.’

‘Don’t patronise me,’ he replied as he lowered his glass.

I allowed a little iron to enter my voice. ‘Given that my car is sitting outside our house with two windows smashed in, now may not the best time for you to attempt the moral high ground.’

He looked at me for no more than a moment, then said, ‘She’s a PhD at the lab next to mine.’

The rest of it was very close to what I had guessed, bar the length of his affair. It had been going on for two years. That hurt, I have to admit. Two years during which I had not had one inkling, not one iota of suspicion. Things between them had been going badly for a while, though. She had become clingy, questioning him about his friendships with other PhDs and researchers.
Of course she had
, I thought when he mentioned this. The partners of the unfaithful, they are most suspicious and insecure of all, for they know their lovers to be capable of deceit of the most comprehensive sort. Why would she trust his assurances?

She had taken to ringing his mobile phone during the night and leaving messages on it while it was turned off, sometimes twenty or thirty messages at a time. Sometimes she would speak, sometimes she would play loud music down the phone. Sometimes she would be in a club and there would be shouting and laughter in the background. He told me this bit with some bemusement but it was obvious to me, she was trying to make him jealous. Then, last night, she had left a message at 3 a.m. saying, ‘I’m coming. I can’t stand it any more. I’m coming to you now.’ She had got a night bus part of the way from her flat share in Stroud Green, then trekked several miles through swathes of suburbs to get to us.

‘It must have taken her hours…’ I said.

He was picking up the message on his phone in the morning as he walked towards the front door to collect the milk – yes, unbelievably we still get deliveries in this backwater of ours – we have a pint a day. He opened the front door to see her curled up, a ball of wet-eyed misery, in our front porch. She had walked all that way and trashed my car in the driveway but been too scared to ring the bell.

That was the point at which he had come upstairs and told me to stay where I was. When he went back downstairs, she had stepped into the hall. They argued. He took her outside and extracted his car from the garage, then drove her home in total silence. Outside her flat, she had wept copiously while he had told her, quite coldly I imagine, that if she ever pulled a stunt like that again, he would never speak to her for as long as he lived.

At one point, some time after we had opened a second bottle, he looked at me and said, ‘Is there any point in me saying I’m sorry?’

‘I know you’re sorry,’ I said, and I did.

We achieved a kind of intimacy that night, a joint euphoria at having coped with the drama of his admission – but what followed, the weeks and months that followed, was far from euphoric. I knew he would end the affair but I also knew it would take a while. He was too nice a person to be brutal to a distraught young woman who cared for him and whom he had allowed himself to fall for, despite her vulnerability and youth. He was close friends with her supervisor – she could have made a case against him had she chosen to take it that way. But she was in love with him. She didn’t want his head on a plate, she wanted his heart. I am sure she had it, in the early days, but his affection for her would have waned as she became clinging, needy, child-like. After a while, he would have felt not passion but a strong and burdensome sense of responsibility. Even though he told me it was over, and I believed him, I knew there would have to be that painful, wretched period at the end of any relationship, where you stay together longer than you should in order to be horrible to each other, to make you both feel relieved when it’s finally over. And I knew this bit would be hard on all of us but particularly hard for me because there was nothing I could do but sit on the sidelines working on my saintly, understanding act and waiting for him to realise how saintly and understanding I was. Back off, that was all I could do.

There was one thing I did during that period that I shouldn’t have done. I told Carrie, our daughter. I didn’t plan it, but she happened to phone when I was at a low point. Guy was out, staying late at the department marking papers he said, but I knew he was seeing
her
, and it was three months after the incident with my car windows and I was still waiting for it to burn itself out. Carrie rang to confirm that she was coming home that weekend and as I said, ‘It will be so nice…’ my voice cracked and she said, ‘Mum, what is it?’ There was a pause while I gulped on the line, and she added, ‘Is Dad there?’

‘No…’ I said, before adding feebly, ‘He’s out.’

‘Have you been arguing again?’

‘Again?’ I said, a smile in my voice despite the fact that tears were flowing down my cheeks. My Carrie, so young, so wise. She was co-habiting and sort-of engaged to another young scientist called Sathnam. We adored him and wanted them to marry but they said they couldn’t until his devout grandmother had died. Guy and I just wanted them to get on with it, to give us grandchildren. We thought Carrie would come back to us then.

‘Ye-es…’ she said slowly. ‘When Sath and I came for the Bank Holiday, you bickered from Friday evening until Monday afternoon.’

‘Did we? Is that why you haven’t been back in a while?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘We’ve just been busy, but I was worried.’

‘You didn’t say anything to Adam did you?’

‘Mum, I’m not stupid.’

We have a silent agreement, Guy, Carrie and I. Adam must be protected at all costs.

I was surprised to hear my daughter thought her father and I had not been getting on well lately. I hadn’t noticed. It occurred to me that maybe that was the problem, that somehow Guy and I had slid into being not-nice to each other without even noticing.

We saw so little of our adult children at that time; Adam in Manchester, Carrie in Leeds. They are in their twenties, we used to say to each other, comforting ourselves with the recollection of how little attention we paid our own respective parents at that age. They will come round, we would say, when they have families of their own and realise the value of grandparents, or when they move back down south, or when we retire… But we missed them both, Guy and I. We had to make an effort not to call them too often, not to ask them every phone call when they were coming home.

And so I told Carrie that her father had been seeing someone else. Guy was furious with me later, and rightly so, and suddenly it was as if the wrong I had done in involving our daughter almost balanced out the wrong he had done in having an affair.

We confided in Carrie jointly, on her next visit home. She came without Sathnam. We sat at the kitchen table and held hands across it and explained to her that we had worked through it, that we wanted her to know it was OK, that she mustn’t feel she had to protect us by not telling us what she really thought, or about any problems she might be having of her own.

Then we asked her, as we always ended up asking her, if she had been in touch with Adam lately. Only on Facebook, she said. Then, unexpectedly, she added, ‘Do you remember what he used to do when you two argued, when we were little?’

‘Every couple argues,’ Guy said. ‘We’re only human.’

I placed my other hand on his arm, to quiet him.

Carrie glanced from him to me. ‘He used to go behind the sofa and crouch down and put his hands over his ears and scream…’