Apple Tree Yard (25 page)

But surely, if I just give it a bit more time, he will give up, lose interest. It’s a game to him. If I don’t respond, just carry on going about my normal life, it will stop. It hasn’t been consistent, or immediate – some bits of it, like the hacking of my Hotmail account, I’m not even sure was him.

*

It happens on a Sunday. Guy is away at a weekend conference in Northampton but has just called me to say he is finishing early. I decide to go out to the deli that I know stays open till four on a Sunday and buy some bits to eat, welcome-home bits, olives and fresh anchovies in oil and over-priced focaccia. I want to greet him, my husband. I have missed him over the weekend. I’m not feeling particularly anxious or low, that day. I think I am doing quite well.

It might have happened quite differently, if Guy hadn’t called when he did, if I hadn’t gone out to the shops. It was thanks to that trip to the deli that I saw him but he didn’t see me.

I am on my way back, and as I turn the corner into our road, a thin film of September drizzle begins to fall. It is the end of the month and today, although it has been sunny, the curve towards October has begun, a change in the air quality. The weather people are predicting an Indian summer next month, October will be hot and glorious, according to them, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that today. I stop, put down my shopping bag, and lift the hood of my raincoat over my head, smoothing my hair away from my face and tucking it into the hood. And then, as I bring my head up, I see that walking towards our house, not more than a hundred yards ahead of me, is George Craddock. My stomach folds in upon itself, over and over – I can think of no other way of describing it. As I watch, he walks past our house and as he does, he slows his pace and glances at it, although he does not stop.

I turn immediately and stride back down the path. What will he do when he reaches the end of the cul-de-sac – do a circuit, or walk back the way he came? If he does a circuit, I will have time to reach the main road before he makes his way back and sees me. If he turns on his heel as soon as he passes our house, then he will see me, hurrying away.

I walk swiftly but do not run. When I reach the main road, I walk down it, and go straight to the station, passing through the wide, high-ceilinged entrance hall, slapping my Oyster card down and moving through the barriers in one swift motion, my handbag bumping against my hip and my shopping swinging in my hand. A Piccadilly Line train is right there, waiting for me, doors open. The Piccadilly Line takes a lot longer than the Metropolitan Line to get into town and usually I take the purple one and change at King’s Cross but right now, the blue one will do just fine. As I step on to it, the beeping noise begins, the doors slide shut. Only when they are shut and the train is pulling out of the station do I turn in my seat to look back and see if he has followed me into the Tube station. I can’t see him anywhere.

I take the train to Green Park. I get off and walk down into the park and, without even thinking about it, I unzip the compartment in my handbag where the pay-as-you-go phone that you gave me has been hiding all this time like a lucky charm and I turn it on and I dial the only number I have on it, your number. To my surprise, it rings. I would have expected it to go straight to voicemail. My heart leaps at the thought that you leave that phone on, although, of course, there could be any number of reasons why you do.

I am standing beneath a tree in Green Park, a large, spreading one, the leaves beginning, very faintly, to yellow, and when your phone eventually goes to voicemail I stand and listen to the silence that follows the beep and then say, stupidly, redundantly, ‘It’s me.’ I hang up.

A couple of droplets of water fall from the tree, one neatly finding a small space of bare neck between my coat collar and my hair. I go and sit on a bench, the phone in my lap. Twenty minutes later, you call. It seems completely natural that you do. I have not doubted it.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hi,’ you say back. ‘Has something happened?’

I am glad we are skipping the small talk, the how-are-yous and how-was-your-summers. I could not have tolerated those. ‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘I think so. I think I’ve got a problem. I’m sorry. Where are you?’

‘I’ve come to get cigarettes for my wife’s brother,’ you say. ‘Officially that is, I mean, that’s officially what I’m doing. I was sitting trying to think of an excuse to leave the house but luckily my brother-in-law ran out of cigarettes just as we needed milk too so that’s how come – otherwise it might have been an hour or two. Where are you?’

‘Green Park.’

‘You’re working today?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I had to leave home in a hurry. I mean, I was out anyway, but I had a visitor. I can’t go home.’ And I tell you everything, everything that’s been happening. I keep it to the facts. I don’t need to tell you what it’s been like, the last few weeks – you of all people don’t need that explained. I suppose that if this had been an ordinary call, I might have berated you for the long silence your end, but that seems immaterial right now. Now, I need you; and now, you are here. After I have finished, there is a long pause and when your voice eventually comes, it is low and warm. ‘Are you OK?’ you say.

‘I will be. I’ll give Guy a call in a bit. I’ll make up some excuse why I came into town and then go and meet him off his train at St Pancras. We can go home together then.’ I give a sniff. ‘All he did was walk past the house. It’s perfectly legal, isn’t it, walking past my house?’

You have not asked if I was sure it was him. I am grateful for that.

‘Even the hairdresser’s, it’s the main road; he could have just been passing.’

‘Hmmm…’ you say, ‘where are you tomorrow morning?’

‘I don’t know, work I suppose. I don’t want to be in work but then I can’t be at home, I don’t know. I’m easy to find.’

‘OK,’ you say, ‘this is what you’re going to do. Don’t go home, like you said. Go somewhere nice now or shop or see a film, call your husband now and arrange to meet him at St Pancras, but be really normal, don’t let him guess. It’s important to act normally, when you meet him and when you go back home together, can you manage that?’

‘Oh God…’ I say, looking up at the sky. Act normally? What else have I been doing these last few weeks?

‘You can do it. You’re stronger than you think.’

‘I know, I know,’

‘Now listen, tomorrow morning, can you take the day off work, ring in sick or something, can you get to Vauxhall by noon?’

‘Yes, of course, well, I’ll go in at the usual time and then when I get there I’ll feel unwell and leave mid-morning.’

‘OK, take the Tube to Vauxhall, be there by noon, when you get off, check your phone. I’ll call or text instructions.’

‘Am I going to see you?’

‘Oh, Yvonne, of course, of course you are.’

‘Say my name again.’

‘Yvonne. You’re going to see me tomorrow. We are going to be together tomorrow morning.’

I exhale very slowly, as if I have been holding my breath for twelve weeks. There is a silence between us while we listen to each other breathe.

After a long time you say softly, ‘I have to go now. Take care today, just be out and about, and at home with your husband this evening, and tomorrow you’re going to meet me, OK?’

‘It’s good to hear your voice,’ I say.

You pause briefly, then say, ‘It’s good to hear your voice too.’ You hang up.

I sit on the bench, the phone still in my hand. After a while, I look up at the sky. 

14

I am at Vauxhall well before noon, emerging from the Tube to the clamour of the inner-city motorway that leads up to Vauxhall Bridge. A vast shopping and office complex looms to one side, with a café with seats outside overlooking the wide intersection. I sit on one of the seats although I don’t buy a coffee; I’m jumpy enough as it is. In front of me, lanes of traffic – cars, buses, lorries – branch in all directions. The blare of so many vehicles is somehow insulting; it’s hard not to take it personally. At ten past twelve, you text me:
Where you?
I text back,
Vauxhall, by the bridge.
You reply.
Wrong side, go through arch, Kennington Road
.

Across the vast intersection is the red-brick railway arch of the mainline station, fronted by the peculiar steel structure that houses the ticket office and which once won some sort of architectural award. I have to wait for three different sets of pedestrian lights to change in my favour, trotting from the safety of one traffic island to another, before I can reach the arch. When I’ve passed through it, I negotiate two more busy intersections before I reach the beginning of Kennington Road. I take my phone out to text you for further directions, but you have already sent me a message.
New coat? Collar suits you
. I look around and although I would never have imagined myself to be up for games, I can’t help smiling as I do. I check across the street, up and down it, and am lifting my phone to text
Where are you?
when I turn and see you there, only a few feet away, in a doorway, watching me with a smile, and I feel a slight sense of anticlimax, surprisingly, for you are just a man, after all, a man standing in a shop doorway, in a suit and glasses; average height, wiry build, coarse brownish hair, and this is all so public, this reunion, and so unexpected, and I don’t know what our relationship is now or how I feel after the long silence between us – and all of this adds up to me having no idea what to do.

For a moment, I see my uncertainty mirrored in your face, then you step towards me and say in a mock-conspiratorial voice, ‘Come with me…’

We walk down Kennington Road together, then take a left turn. On the other side of a road is a park with, oddly, a small paddock and a young woman riding a horse, just five minutes from the roar of Vauxhall Station. A sign pinned on the fence, amidst some tall nettles, says,
Do Not Feed The Horses They Bite
. I stop and point at it.

‘I’ve got something better than that,’ you say. ‘Look.’

On our side of the road, there is the entrance to a city farm, and just beyond it, an animal enclosure with hay and sawdust and – sitting with its back to us, gazing around disdainfully, a white llama. Beyond the llama, a couple of unimpressed turkeys strut and peck and a goat is wrenching hay out of a stall.

‘Vauxhall has llamas.’ I say, ‘I never knew that.’

‘I think it’s just the one llama.’

‘I didn’t even know there was a farm here.’

‘I’m full of surprises,’ you say, pleased, as if it’s your farm, your animals.

We walk down the street a little further, turn a corner, and before us are two narrow roads forking away and a short terrace of Victorian houses squeezed between them, shaped like a wedge of cheese – the rooms at the apex of the triangle must be tiny. We walk past it to the far end and you stop and extract a key. I look at you – I had assumed we were going to sit in the park or a café. There are three doorbells in the entranceway. The masonry has peeling paintwork. Someone has hung a duvet cover as a makeshift curtain in the window of the ground-floor flat.

You push the door open and a slew of envelopes and advertising leaflets crests behind it. As I step in behind you, you bend to pick up the post and sift through it before tossing it on a small shelf behind the door. I watch you do all this partly because I still can’t quite believe it’s you, but also because it seems quite natural that it is. The hallway is painted the same colour of all hallways in all Victorian houses in London that have been chopped into rental flats: Landlord Magnolia, Guy used to call it. It reminds me of the flat Guy and I had when we were first married, the one with the couple upstairs, where I raised my children when they were tiny and Guy and I struggled to write our PhDs, and still, sometimes, in my roomy suburban house with its garden and two apple trees spaced wide enough apart for us to sling a hammock between them in the summer, I have to catch myself and remind myself that I don’t live somewhere like here any more.

You go ahead of me up the stairs, and I follow. It is like being a couple.

The flat is on the first floor, and before you open the door, you stop and check the cheap ply doorframe, which has some scratches on it, as if you are making sure of something. I am guessing this flat is somehow connected with your work, that you are familiar with it but don’t normally have access to it – but I’m only guessing. We step inside, into a tiny square hall. You stand and listen for a minute. It is completely quiet. Then you walk into the sitting room and I follow; a low two-seater sofa, a drop-leaf table against the wall, net curtains through which the street below is mistily visible. I take a few paces inside and look around; cheapness, emptiness, anonymity. I want to stay here for the rest of my life.

I turn back to you and you are standing a few feet away, watching me. Your gaze is soft, apologetic. ‘It’s the best I could do…’ you say quietly.

I lift both arms, then let them fall back. ‘I worked it out some time ago, what you do…’

You look at me.

‘It’s OK,’ I say, ‘I know you’re not allowed to talk about it, that’s why I haven’t asked.’ I look around the sitting room. ‘I suppose this is what you call a safe house.’

You come to me. You stand in front of me and, very gently, part my coat and push it from my shoulders. I let my arms drop to allow the coat to fall and you take it and toss it on to the sofa. Then you face me again and, still very gently, you run your hands down my upper arms, starting at my shoulders, ending at the elbows, stroking both arms at the same time, the lightest, softest of touches through my cotton shirt.

‘It’s safe enough,’ you say. ‘We’re here now, you’re safe with me.’

And I do what I have been wanting to do for twelve long weeks. I dissolve into you.

*

Later, we lie next to each other on the small double bed in the bedroom. It’s at the back of the house, with the same net curtains over the window and a view of the backs of other houses; windows and gutters and pipes. Even though the bed is nearer to being one-and-a-half than a double, it fills the room. On one side, there is a small bedside cabinet made of wooden laminate. On the other, the wardrobe has slatted sliding doors – it wouldn’t be possible to have one with doors that opened outwards. The wood-chip wallpaper is painted Landlord Magnolia like the hallway. There is a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling and a single strand of cobweb hanging down from it.