Apple Tree Yard (29 page)

We talk in general terms about court procedures and he gives us some depressing statistics. Research done at Harvard shows that people receive messages about other people in different ways. They have done pie charts. When you are talking to someone, you receive messages from them in the following proportion: 60 per cent through how they look, 30 per cent through how they sound and only 10 per cent through what they actually say. As a scientist I am sceptical about statistics and the small, chippy part of me thinks of you, and wants to say,
But what about how someone feels and smells
? I allow myself to think this only briefly. I cannot afford to think of you. While I am drinking cafetière coffee – my favourite Guatemalan blend – in my kitchen, sitting at my own table with my husband and a sympathetic barrister, you are in a cell in Pentonville. I permit myself a brief image of you in prison garb, lying on your back on a thin mattress, hands behind your head, staring at the ceiling.

‘What should she wear to court?’ My husband cuts to the chase. He knows that we are not paying this clever, callow boy four hundred pounds an hour to drink our coffee and suck up my sarcasm.

‘Smart but not too businesslike,’ Laurence replies, ‘we do want the jury to see her feminine side.’

‘
Oh Jesus
…’ I whisper under my breath. If he hears it, Laurence shows no sign. Guy sends me another look.

‘A blouse with a bit of embellishment, say?’ Laurence smiles at me again, all teeth.

No one will be advising
you
to wear a blouse with a bit of embellishment, my sweet. What is the male equivalent? Perhaps there is no equivalent. Perhaps there is only male.

‘I’m not sure whether the prosecuting counsel will be a man or a woman,’ Laurence says, ‘but if it’s a man then it’s likely that the junior assigned to him will be a personable young woman and that she will be in charge of questioning you.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Guy asks.

Laurence shrugs. ‘Same reason they always use female defence barristers in rape cases – so the jury thinks, well if that pretty young woman is defending the bloke in the box then he can’t be all bad otherwise she wouldn’t be doing it.’ He takes a sip of coffee. ‘It’s a remarkably successful strategy, I have to say.’

I am unable to keep the ice out of my voice. ‘And if you know this, and everyone in chambers knows it, then presumably the young pretty barristers also know it when they are assigned to defend rape cases?’ I take my own sip. ‘That doesn’t bother anyone?’

Laurence’s stretches an apologetic smile over his toothiness – he is not here to fall out with me. He speaks carefully. ‘Well even rapists deserve a defence…’

‘Even if it depends on…’

Guy cuts across me, ‘So the jury is more likely to think Yvonne is guilty if she’s being cross-examined by a woman?’

‘Yes.’

I let out a short exhalation and look to one side. My husband and Laurence fall silent and I know they are both looking at me. Why have they sent me this boy? Later, I will be told sternly,
he’s the brightest advocate of his intake, razor-sharp
.

After a short pause the brightest advocate of his intake says, ‘Shall we take a break? I’m sure this isn’t easy.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ I say, lifting my head from my hands. ‘You two carry on, I’ll be back in five minutes.’

I rise from the table. Laurence smooths back his hair. Guy watches me as I leave the room. As I mount the stairs, gripping the wooden rail, I hear him get up and go to close the kitchen door. Their voices are muffled but I imagine my husband is saying something like,
She’s under a huge amount of stress at the moment
. Laurence will be nodding in sympathy.

In the bedroom, I go to the bed and lie down, flat on my back. After a moment, I put my hands behind my head, staring up at the ceiling.

*

I go back down after ten minutes or so. Guy is grim-faced when I enter the room. I look from him to Laurence. Laurence is sitting very still and looking at the table. As I sit down again, he looks up. ‘Your husband has, ah, Yvonne, he has given me a few more details.’

‘I told him a bit more about what that man did,’ Guy says, without looking at me.

Laurence looks at me sympathetically. ‘I hadn’t quite realised it was quite such a violent, er, such a… well…’

‘You thought it was just…?’ I stare at Laurence, and then I decide to let the point go. ‘In your view, does that make my situation better or worse?’

Laurence glances at Guy. ‘I was just explaining to your husband that legally speaking it makes it rather worse. It gives you motive. Of course, it doesn’t really explain why your co-defendant behaved the way he did, given you were just friends. You hadn’t know each other for that long, had you?’

‘No,’ I say. The number of things that don’t add up is so huge that the air is thick with them. The things not being said are like giant bats flying around the room – we all know it, but no one is going to say. Even Guy, my own husband, has not questioned me about the nature of the relationship between me and you. He has taken me at my word.

‘And of course, it’s hard to know how the prosecution will play it at this stage,’ Laurence adds. ‘They could go hard on how brutal Mr Craddock was in order to increase your motive or they could try and claim that you were lying about the whole thing, that you had consensual sex with Mr Craddock and lied about it in order to get him into trouble.’

I stare at Laurence, knowing that he will not recognise the dangerous quiet in my voice. ‘Why would I do that?’

Laurence shrugs, ‘Who knows, you were annoyed with Craddock because he didn’t call you afterwards, or something. That one comes up quite often.’ It is his lightness of tone that I find so offensive, his familiarity with all this – his easy and constant generalising of what happens in
these cases
. I am not general, I want to say. I am particular.

At this point, even this unintuitive boy recognises the look on my face. He tries to row back, a little. ‘I’m only playing devil’s advocate, trying to talk through all the possibilities. If we’re going to prepare you, then you need to be ready for everything that could be thrown at you and who knows, that’s one angle they might take. The big problem in prosecuting sexual assault cases is the women never seem to fight back.’ Unforgiveably, a note of genuine bafflement enters his voice. ‘It does make our job rather difficult.’

I am staring at Laurence so fiercely that it is only from the corner of my eye that I see Guy rise and turn. Then I see he has plucked a knife from the magnetic strip behind our hob and is holding the knife against Laurence’s throat. Laurence has frozen with his chin tilted upwards. He has both hands raised slightly from the table. His gaze bulges – pleadingly – at me. I stare at Guy in shock, but say nothing.

Guy’s voice is very calm. ‘What are you thinking now, Mr Walton?’ he says.

There is a silence. Laurence has clearly decided it would be a good idea not to respond.

‘Shall I tell you what you are thinking?’ Guy says helpfully. ‘Would you like to know what is going on, right now, inside your head, biologically, I mean?’ Laurence remains silent, and completely frozen – he doesn’t even gulp. Guy continues. ‘Here is how your brain functions in a situation of threat. I’ll give you the simplified version. In your medial temporal lobes, you have a group of nuclei known collectively as the amygdala. It’s part of the limbic system but let’s not concern ourselves with that now. In a situation of threat, the amygdala’s function is to tell you, as quickly as possible, to act in the way that will ensure one thing and one thing only, your survival. You also have a cortex, of course, that controls logic, but that doesn’t work as fast as the amygdala, as you are now finding out. Let me explain.’ Guy doesn’t even draw breath. It’s how he lectures, I’ve seen it, point by point without pause. ‘The logical part of your head knows there is not the remotest possibility that I am about to cut your throat,’ he continues. ‘A: lots of people know where you are. B: we are in my home and there would be blood everywhere. C: how would Yvonne and I dispose of your body? D: isn’t she in enough trouble as it is? The logical part of your head knows that I am only doing this to make a point. But your amygdala, the instinctive part of you, is saying, screaming in fact: freeze, just in case, do the instinctive thing that will save your skin. As I said, the amygdala works faster than the cortex, that’s how we’ve evolved. In a situation of threat, particularly a situation in which we are taken by surprise and there is no time to logically assess our chances of living or being killed, we are programmed to do whatever will ensure our survival. All we want to do is live, bottom line. In any situation where the level of threat is unknown, the amygdala will trump the cortex, every time.’

Guy stops speaking but does not move, and after a moment or two, Laurence slowly lifts one hand and pushes Guy’s arm away from his throat. ‘I think you’ve made your point,’ he says. Guy returns the knife to the right place on the magnetic strip and sits down.

Laurence the barrister looks at me.

I look back at him. I am damned if I’m going to apologise. Instead, I say, just gently enough, ‘You see, it’s one thing discussing this, professionally, the way you are I mean, but for us there’s a lot at stake, our whole lives.’ When he doesn’t look mollified, I add. ‘It’s been a very upsetting time, for both of us.’

Laurence lifts his chin, as if he needs to stretch his still-intact neck. ‘Yes, I’m sure it has.’

*

After Laurence has left, I lock the front door behind him, throw the bolts, put the chain on, even though it’s only mid-evening. Neither of us will be going out again tonight, after all, and no one else will be visiting. I turn and see that Guy is standing behind me. Our gazes meet. He says, ‘Let’s go up,’ and I understand from the softness of his voice and the expression on his face that, right at this moment, he can’t take any more. I nod. He turns. I watch him climb the stairs ahead of me, and I know by the slump of his shoulders that he has truly had enough, enough of being the strong one, enough of not asking questions, and quite enough of standing by me.

I follow him into the bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed, facing me, and puts his head in his hands. I go to him, kneel down before him on the carpet, between his knees. I take his hands away from his face, lower them, and look down at them. I hold his hands between mine and all at once it comes to me that now I must ask him, beg him, for the one thing I truly need from him throughout what is about to fall upon us. I don’t know whether asking him in his momentarily weakened state is a good or a terrible idea but I know I must ask him now because it is so important and I may not get another chance. This, as it turns out, is prescient on my part. In two weeks’ time, the police will come to re-arrest me. I will be told that you attempted to send a note to me from prison – a quite innocuous note, apparently, but it’s enough to count as potential contact between us, which is a breach of my bail conditions even though I didn’t initiate it. A hearing will be held, without my knowledge, and my bail will be revoked. I will spend the remainder of it, and the duration of the trial, in Holloway Prison.

Even though I am looking down at Guy’s hands, held in mine, I know he is looking at my face. In all our years together, I have never begged him for anything. We have argued, I have requested things from time to time; could he hoover the stairs because I hate hoovering, could he be more patient when he is driving, could he try and understand I get bad-tempered when I have a deadline? Could he please, for both our sakes, finish it with his young lover, for once and for all…? But even then, I didn’t beg. I have never had cause to beg as I am about to beg now.

‘Guy…’ I say. We so rarely use our names to each other. What long-term couple does? Names are for acquaintances or strangers, signifiers for those who do not know us in the other more intimate ways in which there are to know someone.

‘There’s something I have to ask you.’ The tone of my voice is plain. He can be in no doubt of the seriousness of my request.

He doesn’t say a word.

‘I have to ask you, please, whatever else, please…’ My voice does not crack or tremble. I look up at his face. He is staring at me. I still have hold of his hands. ‘Please stay away, from the trial I mean, please. Don’t come to court.’ He stares at me, so I add, ‘There’s nothing you can do.’

At this, he pulls his hands free of mine in an angry gesture and rises, steps around me. I drop my head, thinking he is about to leave, walk from the house maybe, and my voice breaks. ‘Please talk to me about this Guy,
please
…’

He goes over to the chest of drawers and rests his hands on it, lowering his head. ‘I wasn’t about to leave the room. I don’t walk out on you when you are in trouble, remember?’

I stay kneeling by the bed. I don’t reply.

Eventually he says, ‘Jas said it’s important I’m in the gallery. It will show everyone that I am standing by you. The jury will notice.
Her husband is standing by her
.’

 ‘I know,’ I say, ‘I know that’s what Jas said, maybe it’s true.’ I take a deep breath, ‘but I can’t do this if you are sitting there, listening. The things I will have to say, the things they are going to say about me, about what happened.’ My voice is almost a whisper. ‘How will I bear it? How will you? It will finish us.’

I can’t risk Guy feeling exposed and humiliated. If I had my way, I would send him to South America for the next few weeks. All the people I love, I want them away from all this.

He doesn’t reply, so I say. ‘I can’t talk about it in court if I think – I can’t…’

‘You couldn’t talk about it at home either.’

‘No,’

He turns then, his face wide open, his eyes large and hurt, ‘Why didn’t you tell me!
’
He makes a restless movement of a few paces, then back again. ‘Instead, you go to a virtual stranger, a man you hardly know, just because he works in security, a man you know so poorly that he goes and does this and now you’re involved, you’re going to be on trial with him. Sitting in a, in a…’ his voice breaks with frustration, ‘in a
dock
with him? You risked that, rather than tell
me
?’