Apple Tree Yard (28 page)

I can’t help a note of indignation entering my voice, even though my husband is sitting right in front of me. ‘But it was self-defence wasn’t it? He’s not guilty, not guilty of murder, or manslaughter, if they got into a fight and it was self-defence?’

Guy and Jas exchange looks. Then Jas says quietly. ‘His plea, his defence, Yvonne, I have to warn you, is a matter for him and his defence team. My job is to defend you.’ He lifts his left hand, turns it, looks at his palm as if there might be answers there, then back at me. ‘Yvonne, even though you will be charged with a joint enterprise crime, I need you to understand that it is time to think of yourself, for your sake and for your family’s sake.’

Guy goes quiet; we all go quiet. This lunch has taken an unexpected turn. We came in here to celebrate my bail – we shouldn’t be discussing the case at all, not here, not like this. I think of the months ahead, the acres of time there will be to have these discussions, to worry about what might happen. I shake my head slightly. At that point, Guy rises from the table and tosses his napkin down. ‘I’m just going to use the bathroom before our pizzas arrive,’ he says, although normally he wouldn’t feel the need to explain that. As he turns, he pats his jacket pocket, checking his phone is there.

Jas and I are both silent for a while. We are sitting in an alcove with some plastic greenery woven around a trellis divide. Plastic grapes hang from the plastic greenery. He looks at me, and his pressed-together lips form a small grimace. He removes his glasses, squints a little, puts them back on again, then says in a quiet voice, ‘I know you’re a scientist but I’m not quite clear what branch.’

‘I’m a geneticist,’ I say. ‘I worked on the human genome project in the developmental stages, then I went to work for a private institute called the Beaufort. It advises governments and industry. Got paid quite well but missed my own research, and the freedom. For the last few years I’ve been an Associate, two days a week in the office but I’m basically freelance. Then I went back full-time for a bit, to do some maternity cover.’

A small smile, then, ‘You must be very high-powered.’

I shrug. ‘You reach a certain level where, well, I don’t know, you’ve acquired a body of experience, I suppose. You get awarded points just for having done your job for a long time.’

‘I think, in your case Yvonne, it’s a little more than that.’ Jas is gazing at me and I realise he thinks me guilty of false modesty. No, no, I want to say, you’re quite wrong. My modesty is 100 per cent sincere.

‘As you’re a scientist,’ he says, ‘maybe there’s something you can help me with. There have been lots of experiments with chimps, haven’t there?’

‘Thousands,’ I say, ‘they are our nearest genetic cousins, 98 per cent of our DNA.’ I take a sip of water, and Jas does the same. ‘Mind you,’ I add, ‘we share 70 per cent DNA with fruit flies.’

Jas doesn’t smile. ‘Almost human, some people say. I suppose that’s why people get so upset about experiments on them.’

I realise he’s driving at something that will turn out to be relevant to the matter in hand, my criminal defence that is, and that this something has been prompted by Guy’s leaving the table.

‘You might know about this particular experiment I’m thinking of,’ Jas continues. ‘I read about it in the papers, years ago, and it has always stuck in my mind because it’s a particularly cruel one. Quite upset me. My wife and I, we’d just had our first child, our son, and of course you have children yourself, so you know that feeling, the feeling we all have, that we would die for them. You look at this baby and know you would walk into a pit of flames.’

Who would have thought my solicitor could be so confiding? On our brief acquaintance so far, he has struck me as a likeable but chilly, organised sort of person – but I know there is a point coming. With legal people, there is always a point. I glance towards the back of the restaurant but there is no sign of Guy.

‘It’s love, isn’t it?’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Pure altruism. Am I right in thinking that scientists have never really been able to explain altruism?’

I shrug, ‘A lot of scientists will tell you that altruism is very easily explained by the survival of the species. You’re genetically programmed to feel you would walk into a pit of flames to protect your son.’

‘Yes but I’m not really sure that explains romantic love between adults…’ he says.

I cut across him, ‘The propagation of the species requires…’

He cuts back, ‘But simple lust would do that, yet adult love does often involve self-sacrifice, even parents whose children have long since grown and fled the nest still feel profound and self-sacrificing love for each other.’ He pauses, a telltale pause. ‘And even couples, quite unlikely couples, can fall in love. And even when they don’t have children together, and can never have children together because of their ages or because… because they are both married to other people, even people like that can come to feel a deep and profound love, a desire to protect one another, a capacity to sacrifice themselves in order to protect the other.’

Now I understand why this conversation is only possible because Guy has left the table. How clever and tactful you must be to be a solicitor working in criminal law, I think.

‘The thing is,’ Jas continues, ‘what this particular experiment, the one I have never forgotten because it really did quite upset me, what it demonstrated, is that even the most altruistic or self-sacrificing love has its limits. It implies that there comes a point when everyone puts themselves first.’

Jas glances at the back of the restaurant as well. We are both wondering why Guy is taking so long, I think. Jas speaks softly and slowly, without looking at me as he does. ‘It was a real experiment, this one I’m thinking of. Some scientists took a chimp, a female chimp, along with her newborn baby chimp, and they put them both in a specially prepared cage. The floor of the cage was made of metal, and it had filaments in it, and gradually, they turned a dial and the floor of the cage became hotter and hotter. At first, the chimp and her baby leap about a bit from foot to foot, then of course after a short while, the baby chimp leaps into its mother’s arms, to be protected from the hot floor, and for a bit longer, the mother chimp continues leaping around the cage, trying to get away from the hot floor, trying to climb the bars that can’t be climbed, but eventually, and they did it several times and found it was always true, eventually, every mother chimp does the same thing.’

He looks at me, and all at once I wish he wouldn’t.

‘Eventually, the mother chimp puts the baby chimp down on the hot metal floor, and stands on her baby.’

‘The marinara?’ The waitress has appeared in front of our small table, two pizzas in her hand and a third balanced improbably on her forearm. She puts them down, one by one. I look down at my choice, the name of which I have already forgotten. It has an egg congealed in the middle, surrounded by a limp drape of spinach leaves and white lumps of cheese that I know will make my teeth squeak when I chew them.

*

The arrest was difficult, the hearings were difficult; the endless legalities and meetings and discussions that followed over the months I was on bail were difficult too – but nothing was as difficult as the visit from my daughter that weekend.

Carrie: how to describe her? The straight brown hair cut in a neat bob, the immaculate handwriting – she was the kind of child who emptied the shavings out of her pencil sharpener – that was Guy in her. From me she inherited her short, square physique and large eyes. She baffled me, then and now. What happened to the door-slamming, the screaming, the teenage irrationality and eye-rolling? It was only later, as we lifted our heads from the slow tidal wave of Adam’s illness that we realised – she had always had to be the good one.

So my daughter comes to visit the weekend after I have been arrested and bailed and she and I end up watching television together and discussing the extent to which female newscasters have their appearances sculpted and moulded. She sits there on the sofa perpendicular to mine, her legs tucked underneath her, poised and careful as a cat. I don’t think I have ever seen my daughter slump or lounge.

During the weather report, I pluck up the courage to say, ‘Dad’s told you about what’s going on.’ Guy is not in the room because he is spending all his time fielding phone calls and emails from friends and relatives. I’m not allowed to discuss the case with anyone, of course. Guy has become the wall between the outside world and me.

Carrie is holding a mug of green tea, a very large mug in the shape of the traditional American diner coffee mug, but huge. She bought it as a present for me when she and Sathnam went to New York, from a famous deli, but I never use it – it’s too chunky for me. I save it for her when she comes home. My daughter takes a sip and then looks at me with her large eyes as she lowers the mug and says, ‘Yes, he’s told me.’ And then she removes her gaze from mine slowly, peeling it away with all the care she might use to peel a plaster off a patient’s arm. She looks back at the television, raises the mug again.

All mothers feel judged by their daughters: it is unavoidable. As they are coming into sexual maturity, emerging from the chrysalis of childhood, we are at the other end of the reproductive cycle, sagging and desiccating. What teenage girl would want to turn into her middle-aged mother? Everything we do or say, every dress we wear or new nail varnish we apply is disgusting to them. We are what they will become when it’s all over.

I have had many failings as a mother – but in my favour I would point out that the one discussion I have never had with my daughter is the one that goes,
Have you any idea how much harder it was for my generation? Have you any idea how derided and undermined we were for even thinking we could enter the world of science?
I have never said that to my beautiful, high-achieving daughter. I have never presumed to know her inner life, or accused her of taking the freedoms she has for granted. I love her so much, and I’m so proud of her. I know she loves me too but there is something about family emotion that she can’t bear after everything we went through over Adam. I lift my legs on to a footrest in front of me and my trouser leg slides up and I see her glance over and notice the electronic tag on my ankle, a hard plastic manacle that I will never get used to. She looks quickly away.

Later Guy says he thinks she and Sathnam were considering marrying next summer but because of our crisis have put their plans on hold but when I ask him for evidence of this, he changes the subject and I go and lock myself in the bathroom and brush my teeth furiously and glare at my reflection in the mirror and spit in the sink. I decide we won’t ask her and Sathnam for Christmas, as we usually do – we won’t have friends over either, well maybe just Susannah, who has been phoning twice a day, but even her – maybe even to her we will say,
We would rather it was a quiet one this year, just us, it’s difficult
.

*

In the New Year comes the news that the trial date is set for March. Then there is the inevitable delay, and another date set, June this time. Four weeks before the trial, Guy arranges for me to have three sessions with a barrister in order to prepare me for what I might face in court – this isn’t my defence barrister, Robert, but someone who specialises in coaching witnesses. He does a lot of work with the police and public officials too, we are told. I am sitting in the bay window of the sitting room when he arrives. I have spent a lot of time on that window seat of late. I have piled it with cushions. As I have scarcely left the house for months on end, staring out of the window is an important activity for me.

The barrister whizzes past in his car. I guess it is him because the car is a sleek black convertible, its bodywork glossy, the soft-top matt. I don’t know the make; I’m not good with cars. The car is going too fast for me to see who is driving but I am in no doubt. It has to be him. He must have gone round the block because a few minutes later, he comes back from the same direction as the first time, but more slowly, as if he is casing the joint. He pulls up at the kerb, parks, and from my vantage point I can see him bend sideways, open the dashboard and extract a small dark bag. I lean back slightly against the edge of the window, so that he won’t see me if he looks towards the house. From the small bag, he takes out a compact mirror, an old-fashioned one like my aunt used to have, with a gilt lid. He checks his reflection, smooths his hair.

This first session will take place in my own home, I have been told, the next two at his chambers. He hasn’t said as much but I am guessing that he wanted to come and see me in my natural habitat. It will be the next two sessions when he gets rough with me, puts me through my paces, tries to prepare me for intimidation.

I stand in the sitting room for a bit, until I hear the doorbell, then go out into the hall. Guy emerges from the kitchen at the same time and as he does he gives me a steady look, as if to say, we’re paying a lot for this. He knows my tendency to become competitive with professionals in other fields, to behave as though I’m thinking, I could have done your job if I had wanted to, I just chose mine. I look back at him.
I know, I know.

The barrister is young, toothy, with sleek dark hair and glasses. He has his smile all ready as we open the door.

*

We sit at the kitchen table, the barrister and I, while my husband boils the kettle and fills the cafetière and I try not to think that I am about to drink what is, without doubt, the most expensive cup of coffee of my life.

The barrister continues smiling as he stirs the sugar he has added to his coffee with our thin, silver coffee spoons, then looks up from his cup and says to me, lightly, ‘So Yvonne, are you guilty?’

I resent him beginning with a trick but I have promised my husband I will be cooperative. I look right at him and say in a voice both mild and firm, ‘No, Laurence, I am not.’

Laurence the barrister smiles at me, glances at my husband, looks back at me and says, ‘Well that’s a good start, isn’t it?’ He taps the spoon on the edge of the cup, puts it down. ‘I want that in court. Firm but polite and without a hint of doubt, OK? That’s a very good start.’