Apple Tree Yard (15 page)

‘I know,’ I said, ‘I remember.’

‘He used to do it much older than was normal, I mean not when he was a toddler but ten or twelve, didn’t he?’

Guy and I looked at each other. We all fell silent.

‘Older than that,’ I admitted, eventually, ‘quite a lot older.’

*

It took us a reprehensible amount of time to acknowledge that something was wrong with Adam. Teenagers. All the literature tells you one thing and one thing only – that whatever they are doing, give them a break, cut them some slack, it’s normal. And of course, it started slowly, his inability to get out of bed in the mornings, refusing to do homework, cutting classes at school… There was the time he shaved his head in strange diagonals and then locked himself in the bathroom and shouted at the mirror and kicked the back of the door. There was another time he came home from a visit to the high street and threw his headphones across the hallway at me and told me that people had been listening to the music he was listening to when they walked past him and smiling at him because they thought it was such stupid music. There was no point when we admitted to ourselves just how worried we were. It all began in dribs and drabs and with each new drib and drab we convinced ourselves it was par for the course and of course, it was. When he started spending all day in bed, refusing to leave his room or open the curtains, our first thought was,
it’s drugs, he’s taking drugs
. I remember the day Guy and I searched his bedroom. It was a summer evening and, unusually, he had made the effort to go out with friends. We almost tiptoed in, glancing at each other. It was like any teenage boy’s bedroom, T-shirts scattered over the floor, a mixture of clean and dirty; two drawers on the chest of drawers hanging open to reveal a tangle of socks and boxers that appeared to have been balled before they had been shoved in there and from which rose a smell familiar to any parent. The space above his bed was plastered with photographs of friends or pictures of young women he had cut out of lad mags, a couple of them with corners hanging loose where the Blu-tack had failed to adhere. His old guitar, the one with the broken string, was on one side against a wall. I thought it was too close to the radiator and moved it, then remembered we were doing a secret search of his room and put it back where it had been.

He had taken his current guitar out with him for the evening. We knew he smoked roll-ups, of course, and he would have taken his tobacco tin and packet of papers out with him as well. His dressing gown was hanging on the back of his bedroom door. We had allowed him to graffiti the door with seductive-smelling spray paint, congratulating ourselves on the idea that if it was something we allowed him to do at home, this would reduce the possibility of him doing it on a railway arch while a friend dopey on Ketamine held him dangling from the bridge by his ankles – we were not the only parents at his school whose child had come home with his jeans smeared with the chalky-grey giveaway of anti-climb paint. We lifted the dressing gown down and pulled the pockets inside out and found another packet of papers there and a few shreds of tobacco, along with some shredded tissue, that was it. I pulled one of the pockets inside out. Its interior was coated with a fine white fur, where the tissue inside had dissolved during the wash. I bent and lifted the pocket to my nose, sniffed. Nothing. I pushed the pocket right way out again, turned to Guy, shrugged and smiled.

I look back to that evening now, and how relieved we were when our search proved fruitless, how we argued lightly, still in hushed tones, about whether his jeans had been left in a crumpled heap on the floor or on the bed, because after we had searched them we couldn’t remember exactly where they had been and wanted to leave everything as it was. We talked, snickeringly, of how the best thing would be to tidy the room up, then act all indignant with him when he got home.
We just couldn’t stand it any longer!
We went downstairs and cracked open a bottle of wine and sank it with alacrity while we discussed how great it was that our son probably wasn’t a dope fiend after all. The bitter irony of that evening: if we had known what was coming instead, we would have been overwhelmed with joy to discover a few dark crumbs of skunk in a matchbox in a pocket of those worn, favourite jeans or that saggy blue dressing gown hanging from the back of his graffitied door.

*

So I sit in the dock in Courtroom Number Eight at the Old Bailey, and I stare at the empty seats in the public gallery and feel both grateful for and despondent about the absences there. I have persuaded Carrie and Guy to take Adam to Morocco for a fortnight in case any reporters try to track them down. I have sold it to them as a protective measure for Adam, rather than for all of them. Guy won’t stay the whole fortnight, I know that much. A, T, C and G; the double helix. No one has ever called me Timmy except for Guy, and he hasn’t done it for a long while.

I am always there, in that dock, each morning, as are you, before the public gallery opens. We are there before the jury is admitted too, before the judge arrives. We have to be in place for the business of the court to get under way, nothing can happen without us, and so we get to sit and watch as the barristers come in, as they flick through their papers, sighing, wander over to each other’s stations and rest their elbows on their opponents’ box files and say things like, ‘I booked Val d’Isère, in the end.’ We get to sit and watch while the clerks come in to check that everyone is in place before they go and tell the judge we are all ready and waiting. And we get to stare up at the empty public gallery and wonder who will come into it today, because anybody can, of course, as long as they leave their mobile phone at home.

Why did you have no one for you, my love? I never had the chance to ask. Why no brother or sister or loyal friend? Had you ordered them to stay away, as I had my family? There are so many questions I will never get the chance to ask.

About a year after my husband and I had survived his affair, we had a row one night, in the kitchen. I thought we were safe then, and past the stage of recrimination. We had looked over the cliff edge, taken each other by the hand, and stepped back. We had closed ranks, pulled up the barricades, the drawbridge, flooded the moat, whatever. Maybe we had. Maybe our argument that night happened because we were secure again, finally, and we could allow ourselves a little nastiness, a few half-hearted forays into the blame game.

I can’t even remember what set off the argument that evening, some minor domestic matter, but whatever it was, in the midst of an otherwise innocuous debate I rounded on him, as we cleared up after a meal, suddenly finding myself with my hands clenched into fists, pressing my knuckles down on the counter-top, saying, brokenly, ‘You haven’t even told me her name!’

Guy stopped where he was, halfway across the kitchen with a cheese grater in his hand, and looked at me, his expression one of astonishment followed swiftly by resignation. He turned and sat down at the table with a sigh. ‘Look…’ he said, putting the grater on the table in front of him.

My voice, when it came, was weak and tremulous, almost a whisper. ‘You haven’t even told me her name…’ I repeated.

‘Rosa,’ he said, and the prettiness of the word lodged like a small piece of glass in my heart.

After that, there was a long silence between us while he remained seated and I moved around the kitchen distractedly. Although we did not speak, we were both continuing the argument in our heads, and that became apparent the minute we opened our mouths.

‘Look, Yvonne…’

‘Yes, yes! Look!’

‘I haven’t…’

‘Haven’t what?’

Silenced again, he pressed his lips together, evidently deciding that if I was going to be unreasonable, so was he. He pushed at the cheese grater with one finger and it tipped over with a clatter. ‘Well, you can either keep this up indefinitely or you can forgive me and move on.’

‘Oh come on, you got off pretty bloody lightly, don’t you think?’

‘Saint Yvonne,’ he sighed, rolling his eyes.

‘Would you?’ I snorted derisively.

‘Yes,’ he said, indignantly, ‘Yes, of course I would.’

‘You wouldn’t!’ I huffed, turning and opening the dishwasher, which I had loaded and set going only minutes before. Unprepared for my attentions, it billowed steam, gushed hot water. I slammed the door shut, turned on my husband. ‘If it had been me, I would never have heard the last of it. You would have held it against me for years.’

‘That’s not true,’ my husband said, his voice suddenly calm and conciliatory. He was right, it wasn’t true. I had only said it because it was the first thing in my head to throw at him. ‘I would have forgiven you; we would have talked it through. I love you, you love me, we would have put Adam and Carrie first like we always do, like we’re doing now. I would not have…’

‘Cared…?’ I mutter. That was closer to the mark, closer to what I really felt. Guy was rowing back from a full-blown row but I was not quite ready to, not just yet. I had a bit more energy left.

‘No that’s not it, of course I would have cared, I just would have been able to bear it, in the interests of keeping us together. I’m not possessive in that way, you know that. I never have been.’

This was true, and admirable, but it didn’t make me feel good. I stopped bustling around the kitchen and leaned back against the counter-top, crossing my arms and staring at him through narrowed eyes. ‘So, in other words, you wouldn’t care.’ I hated myself when I argued like this.

‘I wouldn’t care so much about physical infidelity that I would let it ruin what we have together, no.’

‘What if I fell in love? What if I fell in love with someone else, like you did?’

‘I’m sorry, you know I am, you know how sorry I am…’

And for the first time in this discussion, my voice became a little softer too. ‘I’m not asking for another apology…’ I go to the table, sit opposite him, reach out and take his hand. ‘I’m interested, seriously, do you think you would, forgive me? If I fell in love with someone else, really?’ My motive for this was not entirely intellectual. It wouldn’t do him any harm, I thought, to contemplate the possibility. He looked over at me. ‘I’m not planning on doing it,’ I laughed a little, ‘I’m just interested.’

This was always the way to pique my husband’s interest, to appeal to his analytical side.

He took the question seriously, thought for a bit. ‘You could have sex with someone else,’ he said, ‘and I wouldn’t like it, not at all, would much rather you didn’t, for the record. But I would deal with it by not thinking about it. If I imagined it I would hate it but I would manage not to imagine it, in the interests of preserving what we have, what we value, which we both know is something worth preserving.’

‘But what about love?’

He paused again, thinking it through, trying to be honest, and I always did, still do, love this about my husband, that he doesn’t try and patronise me by saying what he thinks I want to hear. ‘Yes, I would forgive you if you fell in love with someone else,’ he said evenly. ‘It would be very painful for me of course, because I’m used to the idea that you love me and only me, but I know,’ he hesitated only for a second, ‘I do know now, that it is genuinely possible to love two people at the same time. Even at the height of, of what I was doing, I never stopped loving you, not for one second; in fact in some ways I was more in love than you than ever because I knew I was jeopardising what we had. I know that sounds like an excuse, but it’s true.’

We sat for some time after that long speech. Like many men, emotional articulacy had not been my husband’s strong point in the past, for all his capacity for analysis, so I was impressed by the length of this speech and by the plain truth of what he said, touched by his capacity to be honest with himself, and me. I no longer wanted to score points off him or make him feel guilty. And then, just as I was beginning to feel warm towards him, he said something that reminded me that he was, after all, a man, and one with flaws, just as I was a woman with flaws.

‘There’s really only one thing I would find hard to forgive.’ I looked at him but he was looking down at our clasped hands, passing his thumb gently over my fingers, stroking them.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Public humiliation.’

He looked at me then, and his gaze was cold.

8

We walk out of Apple Tree Yard and into Duke of York Street. You have left me before you have gone – this often happens – but I don’t feel wounded this time, more smug than anything: I am getting the hang of this. It is as if, at the age of fifty-two, I have discovered an unexpected ability to play the piccolo, or tap dance, something that was always latent within me that I had simply failed to explore. I am walking a step or two behind you and I reach inside my coat and brush down my dress. Then, hastening after you, I button the coat up to the top, push a hand through my hair; the small gestures that arrange me to be public again.

We part at Piccadilly Circus Tube, you giving me a brusque hug, the sort I have come to expect, where you reach an arm around my back and give me a short, firm pull inwards, your forearm clutching me and releasing me the instant my body makes contact with yours. It is the sort of hug you could safely give me if your in-laws were passing by. I turn, and walk back down Piccadilly itself, cross at the pedestrian crossing and cut up Air Street. It will take me twenty minutes to get to the faculty party, walking harder than I would like to in my heels, and a light rain has started to fall, April rain, fine and drenching. I don’t mind – at that particular moment, I don’t mind anything.

I am strutting, just a little, in my high-heeled boots – they are my stiletto ones, not the lower-heeled patent boots I was wearing when we first met: party boots, show-off boots. I look at the people rushing past me as I walk up Regent Street. How many of them are really in a hurry, I wonder? How many of them are on their way home? How many are running to something or away from something else? I know the rush-hour commute so well, it’s in my muscles. The hectic pace of those around me is infectious: it feels impossible, at this time of day, to walk down the street slowly, to avoid shoving and pushing if you get on a crowded bus or Tube. How many of the people rushing past me are happy, I wonder? I am happy. A double life; and I’m good at it. Maybe it’s me that should be the spook.