Apple Tree Yard (43 page)

The day after my mother died, I followed my father from room to room. When he got up from the kitchen table to go and sit in the sitting room, I trailed after him, and sat down on the arm of the chair he was in. When he went upstairs, I followed him up there too, and when he went into the bathroom and locked the door, unable to face me I think, I sat down outside and leaned my back against the door, hugging my knees and waiting for him to come out.

*

It is spring, the year after our trial. I am at home. My son has put up a hammock in the garden, a long one made of tough blue plastic rope. He has hung it between the two apple trees. I spend a lot of time in the hammock, wrapped in a grey blanket that Guy found in the spare room. It is unseasonably warm for April. I lie wrapped in the blanket, swinging gently between the apple trees, looking at the post-winter sky.

I was released from Holloway two days ago. Adam has been living at home the whole time I have been in prison. He says he has had enough of the scene in Manchester but I’m not sure I believe him. I think he may have moved back home to be with Guy. I was worried that my release might drive him away again, but when they brought me home he took me out into the garden and showed me the hammock, and said, ‘It’s so warm, we thought that, after everything – we thought you might like to be outside.’

That night, the night of my release, there was no alcohol or celebration. Carrie arrived from Leeds and, as she had driven down, she came with a car boot full of fresh food. Everything she made for me that evening was fresh: four different salads, an arrangement of exotic fruit on a platter. We all sat round the kitchen table, more or less in silence, and they all watched me pick at the fruit with a fork.

Carrie could only stay one night, then she had to get back up north. She and Sathnam are getting married in the summer. She has a lot to arrange.

Guy and Adam are looking after me. I see them exchange looks across me from time to time.

Sometimes, as I lie in the hammock, I can hear the phone ring inside the house. The back door to the kitchen has been left open, so I can hear the murmur of Guy’s voice as he answers. ‘Yes, she’s fine,’ I imagine him saying. ‘She’s very thin, but she’s fine.’

Adam has been helping his father clear out the garage. He looks well, and wiry, in baggy combat trousers and a cut-off T-shirt, still with the stubble that suits him. I know that when I am well again, there is a danger I will drive him away but I am not well. I lie in the hammock and stare at the sky.

*

It is just over two years since you and I first met. I was released from prison two days ago, after serving three months of a six-month sentence for perjury – I pleaded guilty at the first available opportunity and so received a relatively light sentence at my January trial. I am out on licence. I am free, but not free. If I breach the terms of my licence, I could be recalled at any time. You were found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. You were sentenced to fourteen years in prison. With the time you spent on remand and a reduction for good behaviour, you could be out five or six years from now. I was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter and released from the dock but was arrested for perjury immediately afterwards, in the corridor outside. There were three officers waiting for me as soon as I left Courtroom Number Eight. DI Cleveland followed me out and watched with his pale eyes.

*

It worked, partially, your betrayal of me. The scales tipped. My lying to the court made you seem less guilty; the bad things I had done made you seem less bad. You were found guilty of manslaughter but not guilty of murder, on the grounds of loss of control.

*

I lie in my hammock and I stare at the sky and I think about you, my lover, Mark Costley, an ex-policeman who worked in an administrative capacity in security at the Houses of Parliament, who liked outdoor sex and spinning dramatic stories because it made him feel less ordinary. The spies didn’t want you, my love. If they had taken you, none of this would have happened.

My lover, Mark: who or what was he? A man for whom the normal story of life was just too normal, a man who sought thrills, mostly through sex but also through stories, only to find that each successive thrill was not enough? Just as George Craddock’s pornography habit became more and more hardcore until it left him unable to make the distinction between the thoughts in his head and the real thing, so your need for an exciting story about yourself led to sexual adventures, to full-blown affairs and then to violence. The trouble with stories is, they are addictive.

*

Guy comes and stands on the back step. He sees me looking at him and smiles. He has a cup of tea in his hand. He raises it to his mouth, takes a sip, then lifts the cup in a gesture that means, do you want one? I shake my head, close my eyes so that he will go away. When I open them, he is still watching me, but then Adam appears at his elbow, holding up a sanding machine that we must have had for over twenty years. Guy and Adam exchange some joke about the sanding machine, and go back into the house.

About an hour later, Adam emerges onto the back step, sits down without looking at me and begins to roll a roll-up. I look up at the house to see that Guy is standing in an upstairs window, staring out into the garden. He is on his mobile phone. He is talking while gazing out at the middle distance but after a moment or so, his gaze drops, and he sees me looking up at him. Immediately, instinctively, he turns away, turns his back and walks away from the window so I can’t watch him while he talks. I wonder who he is talking to. I wonder if it’s Rosa.

*

Later that day, Susannah comes round. She comes out into the garden. She is holding a disposable cardboard tray with four styrofoam cups of coffee wedged into it, and a paper bag full of pastries. She stands for a minute, framed in our back doorway, her tall slim figure motionless, and looks at me in the hammock as if she is trying to make a brief assessment before she approaches. Then she smiles, walks over, picking her way carefully across the grass in pale wedge sandals. She sits on the edge of the rockery a couple of feet away, puts down the tray, carefully extracts two of the cups, brings one over to me. ‘Hey you,’ she says, and bends to kiss me, holding the hot coffee out of harm’s way, ‘I thought you’d maybe like a proper coffee.’ She puts the bag of pastries down on my stomach, where it remains untouched.

I wiggle my way up, awkwardly, in the hammock, so I can sip the coffee without pouring it over myself. Susannah returns to the rockery with her cup, where she can tip her face to the sun. We sit sipping our coffee in silence for a while. Then we talk for a bit, in a desultory fashion, about how I am and how she is, about what I might do in the coming weeks, about how I will have to take it easy for a while. At one point, she looks towards the house and says, ‘I thought Guy and Adam were coming out to join us.’ I don’t reply.

 Susannah, the friend I dared not hope for when I was growing up; I see her hesitate. She is struggling with something, pausing, wanting to say it with care. I wait, and eventually she starts quietly, ‘Every day, you know, every day at the end of court. It was always so terrible, leaving the public gallery and looking down at you, knowing you were going to be led away by those people, that you had no choice, that you were going back to prison. Every day I would go down the steps into the outside and it didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, I would breathe in deeply and I couldn’t believe that I could just walk away and you couldn’t. It was so strange. And I’d see that old couple sometimes, talking, the old bloke was the worst, going on about how, in his opinion, you were worse than he was. I nearly pushed the old bastard down the stairs…’ Then she gives me an infinitely gentle look. ‘First thing I had to do, before I even got on the train, was ring Guy, every day, I had to ring him. He made me promise. Every day, I’d go and collect my phone from that café and then I would stand outside, even if it was raining, and turn it on immediately, and I wouldn’t even check my messages or emails because I knew Guy would be waiting for my call. And every day I’d have to tell him everything. What did you look like? Were you holding up? Who had been in court that day and how had they done? Was our barrister doing a good job? How did I think it was going? I’d be walking down to the station, and I’d go past the bar where the cops were all drinking pints and I’d cross the road keeping one eye on the buses and taxis because that bit of the road was always really busy and the whole time I’d be talking to Guy. Even if my train was due, I couldn’t go into the station in case I lost the signal before I told him everything.’

I don’t reply. She looks down at Guy and Adam’s coffees and I know she is worrying they are getting cold. It’s unseasonably sunny for April but the air temperature is still chilly.

*

I wonder when it happened. What was the moment of your betrayal? It would have happened in the cells at the Old Bailey, I suppose, during one of the consultations that we both had with our respective barristers. You would have been impressed by that cool young woman, against your better judgement in some ways. Her obvious competence would have won you over. You would come to see her as your avenging angel, or good fairy perhaps.

Perhaps it was quite early on, when you watched Ms Bonnard plead for a delay after she had read Dr Sanderson’s report on her phone on the way to court that morning, perhaps that was when you realised how serious it was. Perhaps it was when you were in the cells, reading the report on yourself, the one in which he rubbished so effectively any diagnosis of a borderline personality disorder with elements of narcissistic personality disorder. I imagine that Ms Bonnard came to see you after she had won that adjournment. I imagine that you watched the look on her face as she explained to you, gently, that this was likely to inhibit your defence of diminished responsibility, that the debate over diagnosis that would go on in the witness box would be – I am sure she used this word – ‘problematic’. Us. They say it a lot, the barristers. ‘It’s going to be problematic for us.’

Perhaps you thought of it then, or perhaps it was when you were in the dock later, sitting only a few feet away from me, watching Dr Sanderson on the stand, watching how the usually brilliant Ms Bonnard failed to shake him an inch. Here is the strange thing: he came over as a horrible man, a man who had not one ounce of human kindness him, but no one in that courtroom would have doubted his verdict on your sanity by the end of that cross-examination. How did you feel, listening to that, hearing your chances of a not guilty verdict drown beneath the weight of his certainty? It might have been even later, of course. It might have been not until you saw Dr Sadiq falter on the stand, or heard the first of the authorities Mrs Price quoted against her. How did you feel then? How hot does the metal floor of the cage have to get before the chimpanzee puts its baby down on that floor, and stands on it?

At some point you made your decision, the decision that led your defence counsel to change the basis of your not-guilty plea to loss of control. No counsel does something like that on a whim, you would have known that – the prosecution has a field day if the nature of the defence changes mid-trial. Your counsel would only have consented to perform this loop-the-loop if new information came to light during a trial. She had to have a reason, so you gave her a reason. You looked at Ms Bonnard as she sat across the table from you in the cells at the Old Bailey, and you gave her your best stare, the open, direct one, the honest one, the one that always made a small muscle in my stomach contract, and you said to her, ‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’

*

April ends and with it the sunshine disappears. We are in for a rainy May. Adam and Guy have a discussion over breakfast one morning as to whether it’s all right to leave the hammock up or whether they should bring it in. Guy says if it was made of real rope, they would have to dismantle it but as it’s plastic, it will be OK.

I move around the house like a ghost. I don’t want to get better, to start to be in charge of my life again, in case it drives Adam away.

I spend a lot of time in my study, pretending that I am catching up with emails, reconnecting with my life. This is an adequate explanation. Sometimes, I leave the study and go and stand on the landing and listen to Guy and Adam moving around the house, talking to each other. Sometimes Guy works and Adam strums his guitar in his old bedroom. Occasionally, one of them goes out, but they never leave the house at the same time. Once, when Adam has gone out for a bit, I sit on the top step of the landing and listen to Guy downstairs, lumbering around like a big, wounded bear and all at once his loneliness down there seems unbearable. I can’t stand the thought that he might be hurt, and hiding his hurt until I am well again, so I go downstairs, but when I get downstairs, he is in the kitchen and suddenly I don’t want to go in, so I go and sit, uselessly, in the sitting room, and after a while he comes in with a mug of tea and puts it in front of me. Then he ambles out of the room with a demeanour that someone who didn’t know him would imagine to be casual. He has perfected this air of slow, methodical busyness around small domestic tasks. I want to call him back, to tell him to sit with me, so I can say, I want you to feel better, just don’t speak. It’s an unfair thing to say, so I don’t say anything at all.

Guy believes that I fell out of love with him. He has tried, and failed, to apply his thinking during his own affair. He believes he was capable of loving Rosa while still loving me because he is a man – but as I am a woman and more sincere, I couldn’t do it that way. So he has come to the conclusion that I could only have done what I did with Mark Costley if I didn’t love him any more. He is wrong. I have been more male about this than he could possibly imagine. His biological determinism on this issue is based partly on science and partly on chivalry but he is wrong on both counts. His generosity of thinking toward me is causing him more pain than he need feel.