Apple Tree Yard (6 page)

When I had conceded this, shrieking and begging for mercy, we embraced for a long while, until I lifted a finger and traced the curve of your shoulder and asked, ‘But how
did
you know I would be in Westminster that day?’

‘I just had a feeling, that’s all,’ you said, shrugging lightly. ‘Just had a feeling it might be worth turning up.’ I looked at you. ‘Or maybe,’ you added, turning, propping your head up with one hand, elbow bent and staring at me with studied casualness, ‘or maybe I had been watching the security cameras at that entrance every morning since Tuesday, hoping to bump into you…’ As I carried on looking at you, your face became hard. ‘Or maybe I got some friends of mine to alert me if you came through the security checks.’ I looked at you, and your eyes were still hard and held mine until you observed a shadow of genuine doubt cross my face, and then you broke into a smile and said, ‘I’m only joking! It was a coincidence…’

We are semi-naked when this conversation takes place. It is six months and a whole world of happenings after the encounter we are discussing, when I see you standing on the other side of the street after the green van pulls away.

I see you standing across the street, and all at once can feel the biggest, broadest smile coming to my features, and I see it mirrored in the smile you are giving me, even though the traffic criss-crosses between us. You break the smile only to check from side to side before you step into the road.

And then you are there, in the café with me, relaxed in your navy-blue pinstripe (I have a moment to reflect that it doesn’t look as smart as the grey). You fill the small café, in fact. Your smile alone could fill it; teeth and eyes, this is what I notice about you today. ‘Well well,’ you say, as you pull out the chair and sit down opposite me at the small round table. ‘So, you are going to buy me a coffee after all.’

I turn to summon the waitress.

It will be during this meeting that I ask, the first of several occasions, ‘So, what is it you do, exactly?’

On this occasion, you will shrug, ‘Civil service, all very boring, looking after the Parliamentary Estate, oiling the wheels for the people in charge…’

It is a question to which I never get the same answer twice.

We are in the small café for an hour and a half. We have a second coffee after the first, which would be enough to make me feel speedy and strange even without your company. You pester me with questions about myself. Where do I live? Do I like my job? How long have I been married? Have I ever been unfaithful before? You seem particularly interested in that one. When I say,
not exactly
, you accuse me of being evasive. Most people embarking on an affair meet, introduce themselves, find out a bit about each other and then proceed to wild sex. We appear to be doing it the other way around.

I throw a pointed look at the broad gold ring on your wedding finger. ‘And what about you…?’ I parry. I don’t see why this should all be one-sided. We have already established that we have two children each, although mine are grown-up and yours aren’t, but I’m asking something a little more specific here.

You smile, ‘Do you mean am I about to say my wife doesn’t understand me?’ You give a tight-lipped grimace. ‘No, I’m not. She understands me all too well.’

I realise we are agreeing terms.

‘My husband and I probably married a bit young,’ I say, ‘but I don’t regret it, just when we did it maybe. When I married, not who I married.’

We are, of course, establishing that neither of us is looking for a parachute. Inexperienced as I am, I recognise the importance of this negotiation, and the significance of the fact that we both think it important.

‘What’s your wife like?’ I ask, and know immediately that I have overstepped the mark. How fine is the line between making conversation and prying.

You adopt a slightly distant look. ‘Tell me something you’ve never told your husband, just one thing.’ I hesitate and you say, ‘Something innocuous if you like.’

‘I hate his haircut,’ I say, ‘always have. The thing is, he’s not vain at all, and I like that about him. He doesn’t need petting and praising all the time, he just gets on with it, he’s quite unaware of himself in lots of ways. And although I think that’s sort of admirable, I do look at him and wish he’d get a proper haircut, but he’s always had it the same way, his hair is very straight and a bit too long so it just sort of flops. It seems a bit late to tell him after thirty years.’

You beam unselfconsciously and run a hand through your own wiry, brownish hair, revealing some grey beneath, and it occurs to me that you probably are quite vain, maybe even dye your hair on top, and if my husband were vain I would dislike this but as he is not, your vanity is, if anything, just another one of your endearing qualities. That is why I have tried to ask about your wife – it has not escaped my notice that you deflected that question. It is not that I want to pry, on the contrary – I would really prefer it if we just pretended neither of our marriages existed. I am trying to find out what your wife is like because I need ammunition. I want to arm myself with counter-qualities. Whatever she is, I want to be the opposite. Tell me she likes blue and I will never wear blue again.

I do find out what your wife looks like eventually but in what I think we can call somewhat unfortunate circumstances. Even if I had been inclined to be reasonable about her at the beginning of our affair then what came later put paid to rationality on either side. As it was, my first sight of her came when I was standing in the witness box at the Old Bailey, giving evidence at our joint trial.

It is later on, after I have broken down and told the truth to the court. I am mid-sentence, but speaking hesitantly, answering a question about the flat in Vauxhall, explaining how innocuous our discussions were on the only occasion we were able to spend a few hours together there.

When the interruption comes, it is so unexpected, it electrifies the court.

‘You bitch… filthy fucking
bitch
!’ At first, the exclamation seems to come from nowhere, from the heavens perhaps, and as I register the shock on the faces of the jury in front of me and the judge’s indignant alarm, I look around. The shout has come from the public gallery, which is to my right but behind me, raised up in the ceiling. I turn to see that, at the front of the gallery, there is a blonde woman in large glasses who is sitting in the front row, not far from Susannah. The woman’s face is a mask of hatred. She is staring at me with the palpable venom of someone who has been restraining herself for far too long.

‘You filthy, filthy, fucking,
fucking
…’ It is as though she thinks she is muttering to herself but can’t help vocalising.

The judge leans forward and speaks sharply to the clerk of the court, who already has a phone to his ear and is nodding. The door to the public gallery opens and two security guards, an attractive young black woman with a ponytail and a thick-set white man, enter. While the man waits at the top of the short flight of stairs that leads down to the front row, the young woman descends, leans across Susannah and hisses, ‘Madam! Madam!’ gesturing at the blonde woman, who says nothing, rises, clomps heavily up the steps and is ushered out.

And that, as you know, will be the first and only encounter I ever have with your wife.

*

We are still in conversation in the café on Duke of York Street, deep into our mutual exchange of confidences, when you sit back in your chair and say, abruptly, ‘I have to go now.’

If you have checked your watch you have done it surreptitiously. I feel deflated because I have had no warning, or perhaps because I sense this is the way it will always be.

You extract a phone from your pocket. ‘Give me your number.’

You punch it in as I say it out loud, then you press
dial
. Inside my jacket pocket, my phone shudders twice.

‘Now you have mine too,’ you say, efficiently, job done.

You slip your phone back in your pocket and look at me. It is a long look, a look that asks a question and gets the answer it wants.

I look back at you and say, softly, seriously, ‘Is this really going to happen?’

‘Oh yes,’ you say immediately, looking down at me as you stand. ‘I’ll call you later,’ you add. You bend slightly, glancing outside the café window as you do, grab the hair at the back of my neck and tip my head back in a quick, possessive gesture that makes some part of my insides melt, swiftly and sweetly, raspberry sorbet I think. You plant a firm, damp kiss on my lips, turn, leave.

You are taking the phone out of your pocket to make a call before you are even out of my sight down the street. While I am still looking out of the window, the waitress approaches silently, as though she has been waiting, and places the bill in a saucer on the table in front of me. I glance around and see that the café has filled up with people ordering lunch and that a couple is queuing by the door. I have outstayed my welcome.

Even as I rise, placing the money for our coffees on the saucer and reflexively pocketing the receipt, lifting my coat from the back of the chair, even as I button the coat, tie the belt, shake out my hair, I am writing another letter to you in my head.

3

Dear X,

You asked me if I have ever been unfaithful to my husband before and the honest answer, in the terms in which you meant the question, was no, but when I said, ‘Not exactly…’ I wasn’t being evasive. Although the brief incident I am thinking of came nowhere near sex, it did have significance for me. Its significance came in relation to you.

 It is not the middle of the night. It is the middle of the day, the following Monday, to be precise. It is the Monday after our Friday coffee, but the first opportunity I have had to write down my thoughts. We have only met twice but apparently, we are having an affair. I am working from home today – I’ll be in the office Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I have a thousand things to do but instead I am writing another letter to you. We have just talked on the phone for over half an hour. And the minute we stopped talking on the phone – you actually asked me what I was wearing – I came upstairs, opened up
VATquery3
, and began another letter, but letters are long, and writing is slower than talking and talking slower than thinking, and I’ve stopped writing almost immediately. I sit back in my chair. Through my study window, fat clouds are moving with improbable speed across a pale sky, like clouds in a time-lapse film. There is a flutter against the window and a bird, a starling, comes to land on the sill, sees me looking out and freezes for an instant, its head turned and one round eye regarding me with what seems like scepticism. It bats itself away. I have a feeling that all my letters to you are destined to remain unfinished, but I still need to articulate the things in my head and so I am thinking the rest of this, and I know that later I will be confused; have I thought it, or told you, or written it down? They are becoming one and the same, all blending in my head.

*

Until I met you, I was not the sort of woman to throw caution to the wind, on the basis that things thrown into the wind have a habit of blowing back in your face, as anyone who has ever tried to scatter a parent’s ashes on a cliff-top has probably discovered (as I found out at the age of eight, but that’s a whole other story). So no, I had not had an affair before I met you, but there was a small incident, about three months ago. Why do I need to tell you this story? I need you to know that when I said, ‘Well, not exactly…’ I wasn’t being evasive, although you read it as such. I need you to know about it for reasons of ego. It is worrying me, how easy you found it to have sex with me. I could have said, how easy you found it to seduce me… but seduction suggests a process of persuasion over the passage of time. You just went right ahead and I went right along with it – there wasn’t any persuading necessary. I need you to know this was not normal for me, and that if you had tried a year before or a year later, or simply when I was in a different mood, it would never have happened. You caught me at the precise moment I was ripe for it. On another occasion, it wasn’t so much that I might have said no. I wouldn’t even have realised you were asking the question.

And I need you to know the beginning of the other story, of course, and how Ms Bonnard was able to make me look so bad in court. Was it the beginning, that day? I don’t know – the sharp focus of hindsight, the endless questions, was what happened to me later inevitable, back then? When you are a rational human being, with free will and agency, is there any such thing as a point of no return?

I am fifty-two. I have status and gravitas – when I don’t have my tights around my ankles in a secluded chapel beneath the Houses of Parliament, that is. I have reached the stage of my career where my opinion is valued, paid for, and so it was that, on a rainy December day, three months before you and I met, I was running along a slick street lined by large square buildings, slightly late, on my way to sit in on a three-hour presentation seminar by MSc students at City University. It was my second year as an external examiner on two of their postgraduate programmes, which in this case meant that at the end of the winter term I had to observe as a group of prospective scientists presented live abstracts of their dissertations-in-progress. This particular morning, a Monday, was the first occasion I had met this group and the first time I had been to the department’s new premises, although I knew the two lecturers who were looking after me from the previous year, George Craddock and Sandra Doyle. They met me in the foyer of the new main building. I was late but had nearly made myself later by stopping for a takeaway coffee on the way – I had a vague memory from the previous year that I hadn’t been offered coffee. This is always one of the tricky issues of being asked to a morning event. Will you get offered coffee, or do you arrive styrofoam cup in hand, having forked out £2.60 unnecessarily, to be greeted with a disappointed look from a host or hostess who has the cafetière and biscuits all ready, neatly arranged? It is an implicit criticism to turn up with a styrofoam cup, after all.