Apple Tree Yard (20 page)

I am frozen in my chair, motionless but for the breath quickening harshly in my throat.

Yvonne – just to confirm our lecture date in Swansea next month. It’s on Thursday 28th. I suggest we meet at Paddington and travel down together. If we meet at 14.00 hrs that should give us plenty of time. I’ll confirm train times soon. The fee is £300 plus expenses. Possible to get there and back in a day but maybe we should book a hotel.

The Swansea lecture, him introducing me then chairing a discussion on examining processes, was a possibility we had discussed last time I did the external examining for him and Sandra but we hadn’t agreed a date or confirmed it; it was just something he had asked me if I was interested in. My heart is thumping, my hand shaking. My scalps feels as if it has tightened on my skull.

If I had been at home I would have stood up and run away from the computer, run downstairs to my kitchen, or left the house altogether, or locked myself in the bathroom perhaps and sat on the toilet with the lid down, as I used to do at school during playtimes rather than face the rough and tumble of the playground. But I am at work, at an Institute where I am an Associate, well-regarded, competent. I know I must act swiftly but unequivocally. I have to let him know that although I did not send police officers with handcuffs to his door, I am not going to pretend it didn’t happen. I will never be rid of him otherwise. I hit
reply
. I type very quickly.

I won’t be coming to Swansea
.
Please don’t contact me again
.

Before I hit
send
, I look at those two sentences for a long time. I shouldn’t be saying ‘please’. I should be telling him, not pleading with him. ‘Please’ was what I said, repeatedly, during the attack, and much good it did me. But if I leave it out, it’s an imperative, a command, and that might anger him. It comes to me with great force, and it is a sober and simple thought, that I am very afraid of him, viscerally afraid – afraid in the way I was afraid of dogs as a little girl, when I would take a mile-long detour home from school rather than go past a neighbour’s house that I knew contained one.

He knows about you. He has something on me. We are not safe.

Fear fought with my education, my achievements, my politics: fear won.
Please
stayed in.

I hit
send
, then block his email address.

I call you straight away. You pick up the phone and I say quickly, in a low voice, ‘It’s me, I’ve had an email.’ There is a pause on the line, then you say, ‘I’m going to have to call you back. Where are you?’

‘In the office.’

‘OK, I’ll call you right back.’

*

Right back
turns out to mean two hours. I have already deleted the email but I relate its wording to you, and my reply. You say, ‘Good.’

‘Where are you?’ I ask. A drink after work would be good, really good; an alcoholic drink, a very large, very cold, very dry glass of wine. I haven’t drunk a thing since that party, the thought has made me feel nauseous, but suddenly I want one, with you. Maybe I could even flirt with you. I am beginning to feel it is important I do that soon. I need to try and get back to how I was before.

There is a microscopic pause then you say, ‘Leytonstone,’ and I don’t believe you. I think you have told me you are on the outskirts of town so that I won’t ask you if we can meet after work.

‘You did really well,’ you say. ‘If he contacts you again, let me know.’

‘OK,’ I say, deflated.

‘I’ll call you later,’ you say, and hang up.

*

I don’t hear from you for two days. When you contact me, it is by text.
Any more emails?
I leave it an hour before I text back. At first I just type,
No
. Then I look at it for a bit and change it to
Nope
. You text back immediately.
Good x.

That isn’t enough, I think. That won’t do.

*

The next day, I get a missed call from you. I ignore it. I am at a one-day conference called ‘Metabolic Pathways and the Commercial Imperative’. Scientific conferences are not known for their snappy titles, although the Beaufort Institute’s lecture programme achieved a short-lived notoriety thanks to me when, having failed to attract enough takers for a series entitled ‘Women in Science’ it changed the title, at my urging, to ‘Sex in Science’ and found the students turned up in droves. The first thing I do, when I arrive at ‘Metabolic Pathways’, is scan the lecture theatre for George Craddock, even though commercial medicine isn’t his field and the chances of him being there are tiny. I scan the room as thoroughly as someone afraid of bombs or fire might check out the emergency exits. Only when I am sure he is not there do I sit on one of the bench seats and open the cardboard folder they have given me, bowing my head over it.

There is a buffet lunch in a crowded corridor. There are sandwiches on oval foil platters, small triangles of alternate white and brown bread with a variety of fillings, all of which exude mayonnaise. There are some chicken drumsticks covered in a very sticky, maroon-coloured paste. The man I am talking to, a Principal from Hull, has six of the drumsticks heaped on his paper plate in a pile. He notices me noticing his plate. ‘Off the carbs…’ he says apologetically, nodding at the pile.

‘Hey, Yvonne…’

I turn and see that Frances is at my elbow. She looks at the man with the drumsticks.

‘We’re colleagues,’ she says, by way of explanation. ‘We work together at the Beaufort. Frances Reason.’

‘Oh,’ he says, mouth full, raising the half-eaten drumstick, signalling as an alternative to conversation, and turns away.

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Rupa is in Rottweiler mode.’ She means my PA. ‘How was the rest of the party? Wasn’t it awful? It was just so awful I felt I had no choice but to get completely plastered. I felt terrible the next day. How about you?’

At that point, someone nudges me from behind in an attempt to get past and I use this opportunity to tip orange juice over myself – easy enough to do – my cup is held awkwardly because I have an empty paper plate in the same hand.

‘Shit,’ I say to Frances. ‘Excuse me.’ I turn and dump my plate and cup on the table.

I get to the stairwell. The Ladies toilet is on a half-landing one flight up but three people are queuing outside it. I keep going up the stairs. I keep going up and up and up, almost running now, out of breath, until I reach the top floor of the building, floor five, which is deserted. I push through a wooden door with a round porthole window and behind it there is a short, wide corridor with a disabled toilet next to a lift. I go into the toilet which is cold and tiled and I flip the handle lock and then I bend double and, holding my sides, say out loud to myself, ‘I can’t do this on my own.’

*

By the time I have composed myself, the two o’clock talk is well under way. As I leave the disabled toilet, the door bumps shut behind me. No one is around up here. At the end of the corridor is a floor-to-ceiling window but it is made of frosted glass so I can’t see out. I walk along the moist brown carpet until I reach it and then I lay my forehead against the glass. I need the anaesthetic of its cold, hard surface.

I lift out my pay-as-you-go phone and call your number. Because I need you, I don’t expect you to answer, but you do.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hi,’ you reply. ‘You OK?’

‘No,’ I say, but without drama. It’s not as if there is anything you can do, and it comes to me like a thick blanket being placed gently over my head, the knowledge that there is nothing you can do.

‘Oh dear…’ you say. ‘Oh dear…’

11

I am in a mini-supermarket close to my house when you call. It is a week after the email incident and my collapse at the one-day conference. Since then, I have cancelled as much as I can and stayed at home. So here I am, handbag on one shoulder and wire shopping basket in the other hand, standing in front of the newspaper rack and staring at a tabloid newspaper. It has a picture of a famous footballer on the front, a family man, a role model for the youth of today. He has been arrested. The four-letter word is huge. It sells newspapers, after all.

It is everywhere. It is in every television drama, news item, casual conversation. It is waiting for me when I pop into my local Costcutter for a pint of milk and a lettuce. At the moment that you decide to ring me, I am rooted in the aisle and I have just decided that I can’t stand it any more. I am about to rip the newspapers from their stands and throw them to the floor. I will punch the poor shop assistant who will rush to stop me.

‘Hi,’ I say to you. I now understand the origins of the phrase,
my heart was in my mouth
. It’s more in my throat, I think, not just my heart, all my internal organs, it’s like everything is shoved up beneath my chin. I can’t breathe.

‘Listen,’ you say, your voice brisk. ‘There’s someone I want you to talk to.’

‘OK…’ I say slowly.

‘He’s a police officer,’ you say. ‘Specially trained, one of the ones I’ve told you about…’

I cut across you. ‘I’ve told you I can’t, you know I can’t…’ I am standing in my local supermarket, in the newspaper aisle, hissing into my phone at my lover. ‘You know why I can’t. We just can’t, that’s it.’

‘Just meet this man,’ you say. ‘He’s happy to give us some informal advice. I’ve briefed him. He can help talk you through the options.’

I press the phone to my ear. I think how tired I am of telephone conversations with you – not tired of them, I suppose, tired of their limitations. Telephone calls, cafés – that’s all we are and it’s no longer enough. A woman with a pushchair shoves past me, banging the back of my heel with one of the wheels rather than saying excuse me. I shoot her a venomous look. She shoots it right back. The world is full of aggression and unpleasantness, and I am about to add to it by losing it, badly, in Costcutter.

‘What would happen if she found out?’ I ask. ‘Your wife. What would happen, if you were a witness in court and everything about us came out, not just the sex, the type of sex, where and when?’

‘She would throw me out,’ you say simply.

‘You would lose everything.’

And then you say, without flourish or emphasis, ‘If you want to go to court, I will stand in the dock and tell them what you told me. It’s called early reporting. It doesn’t mean reporting it to the police, necessarily, you can report a crime to anyone and it counts. You reported it to me. I’ll stand in the dock and say so.’

‘Everything about us will come out.’

‘Not necessarily. No one knows about us after all.’ Yes, they do, I think. George Craddock knows about us. He doesn’t know your identity but he knows of your existence and you can be sure it will be the first thing he will mention when they question him. I haven’t told you about what I said to him. I’m too ashamed. To have betrayed you in that manner, stupidly, drunkenly, and with such consequences – how can I admit to that? It is the only thing I have ever withheld from you.

‘You would lose everything,’ I say. ‘Your marriage, your home, your job maybe…’ I love you, I think. But I don’t say it, I say, ‘It’s not just about protecting you, it’s about protecting myself, my family, my home, my job too.’

‘And now you’re saying that so that I don’t feel bad about the fact you can’t go to court because of me.’

And despite it all, I smile, as I wander away from the newspapers to the fruit and veg aisle. I have to put the phone in the crook of my neck while I reach out for an iceberg lettuce with one hand and toss it into the basket I am holding with the other.

‘Let’s just meet my friend for a coffee,’ you say. ‘It can’t do any harm.’

It did do us some degree of harm, later.

*

We meet in a chain coffee store in the West End. You and I meet first. For once, you are waiting for me when I arrive. You are already seated at a small round table with three chairs, two coffees in styrofoam cups on the table and a piece of carrot cake. I look at you and you give me a soft, warm look. ‘Carrot cake,’ I say. You smile.

We don’t talk about the discussion we are about to have. I had imagined we would lay down a few rules, what we can or can’t say – it is still vital that nobody knows about us, after all. But it is as though we both feel the need to be a bit normal. We talk about what we watched on television the previous night.

When the friend comes in, I am somehow surprised, even though I didn’t know what to expect. He holds out a hand and introduces himself as Kevin. He is a small, wiry man in a navy-blue suit. He is young, but has thinning hair and a dark moustache. He strikes me as the kind of man who is normally very mild-mannered but who could, if the situation demanded it, be a right hard bastard.

He and you nod at each other, and I have the feeling that you are more respectful acquaintances than friends. I wonder if, perhaps, you have done him a favour of some sort in the past and now he is returning it.

‘Would you like me to get you a coffee?’ I say, looking round as he seats himself.

He shakes his head. ‘Thanks, sorry, I don’t have very long.’

‘Thanks for coming, Kev,’ you say, soberly. There will be no small talk, I gather, no chumming up. This will be a businesslike discussion. I feel grateful.

‘Do you want to tell me the circumstances?’ Kevin says, looking at me. I appreciate his use of euphemism, and knowing that I will not be able to get through this discussion unless I make extensive use of it myself. I leave out the bit about us, of course, everything about us, and our encounter in Apple Tree Yard. You have told Kevin that I am someone you have met through your work at the Houses of Parliament, someone who has come to you for advice, that’s all. I wonder, though, if Kevin has guessed at anything else between us – he’s a detective sergeant, after all. If he has, he gives no sign of it.

The euphemisms. How mild they seem. ‘He turned me over,’ I say at one point, and Kevin lowers his gaze discreetly.