Apple Tree Yard (7 page)

On this occasion, I ran up the steps wet and flustered and hadn’t stopped for a coffee after all and knew as soon as I entered the new building that was a mistake. Straight ahead of me was a vending machine. It’s never a good sign when there’s a vending machine in the foyer. George and Sandra were both sitting on a bench just inside the door, talking quietly. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Sandra, as they rose to their feet. ‘This lot are party people, they’ll all be late.’

‘Hi, sorry, nice to see you both again…’ I shook their hands.

‘Want to risk it?’ said George, apologetically, indicating the machine with one hand.

I pulled a face. I meant it as ‘no’ but he took it as ‘yes’, thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and began to jangle it up and down amongst the loose change in its depths.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Sandra, moving over to the machine, money already in her hand. She didn’t ask if I wanted milk or sugar.

While she got my drink, George turned to his left and pressed the lift button. Sandra brought the coffee over in a plastic cup so thin it was hard to believe the hot liquid didn’t melt it. I took a sip and winced.

‘Sorry about the coffee!’ George declared, as if he had cracked a tremendous joke. ‘Bet you’re a latte girl, eh?’

‘It’s OK,’ I said, glancing down at the cup, ‘I like to pretend I’m classy but in fact I’m really easy.’ Sandra and George smiled in the way that people do when someone with seniority makes a joke about themselves. ‘Cheap and easy, that’s me.’

The door to the lift opened and we stepped inside – it was tiny and mirror-panelled from waist-level up. It seemed an inappropriate lift to be carting gaggles of students but maybe they just bounded up the stairs. I was sweating in my business suit, with a mac on top, unable to lift my plastic coffee because Sandra and George had to stand so close to me, close enough for me to observe that George had nicked himself shaving his neck that morning, just beneath the border of his artfully scrubby beard. In eighteen months’ time, I would discover that his blood group was O positive.

I wanted to ask them what the students were like but they weren’t supposed to influence me before I heard the abstracts. In any case, Sandra was wrong about them all being late. As we entered the lecture room, twenty-five expectant faces turned towards us. They watched us as we walked towards the desks laid out for us to one side, three chairs, three bottles of water on the table. George took the chair on the left and gestured for me to sit next to him, in the middle, a position that confirmed my status. Sandra broke the tension by raising her hand to the students and saying, ‘Heavens, everyone here on time for once, just because we have a rock star with us today.’

A good-humoured murmur went around the room and I threw Sandra a smile. I remained standing for a moment, so they could all get a good look at me. I put the coffee down on the desk next to my bottle of water and removed my mac, all slowly – George leapt to his feet to take the coat from me and hang it from a hook on the back of the door. I looked at the students.

There were fewer women than the other MSc programme I examined. The other one was called Genetics of Human Disease and the majority of the students on it were female – because it was about saving the human race, I suppose. When it came to this one, Bioinformatics, the gender proportion was reversed. The young men due to present that morning sat in a row at the front. Two of them were looking down at their papers. The other three – and I knew instinctively that they were all friends – were staring at me. Directly behind them was a group of young men in a cluster, lounging back in their chairs, relaxed. It wasn’t their morning. They hadn’t got the short straws. They were here to watch their buddies and gather material for the piss-taking session that would take place, loudly, in the corridor afterwards. The seven women on the course were all grouped together at the back of the room.

The young man nearest to me was sitting at the very end of the tables with nothing in front of him and one hand resting casually on the edge of the table, leaning back in his chair, legs splayed and crotch on full display, in a gesture so obvious it made me want to laugh. I met his gaze briefly, in order to demonstrate that I wasn’t intimidated by him, and he met my gaze right back. He had thick dark hair, solid wrists, hands that were large and meaty. I had encountered this scenario or similar several times before but as I sat down, smoothing my skirt, and took my folder from my bag, I realised I was particularly alive to it that morning. These young men, so full of testosterone they bounced with it, they were like puppies. They couldn’t help themselves. What amused me as put down my notepad and wrote the place, time and date at the top of it, was the thought that if anyone, let alone me, suggested to these young males that they were responding to me on a sexual level, they would be horrified – I was old enough to be their mother, after all. But even so, they could not stop themselves from rising to the challenge. Here was I, an unknown female in their midst, in a situation in which they were potentially on show. Perhaps some of them, on top of that, were nursing a lurking Mrs Robinson fantasy or maybe some of them were intimidated by young women of their own age and preferred the idea of someone more motherly – but even if neither of these factors came into play, there was something in them that responded to me on a very elemental level, even if all they wanted was the thought of being able to brag about it afterwards:
that examiner, thinks she going to fuck me over with her marking pen, well, I’ll fuck her
. It was simple aggression on their part – that’s all really, chimpanzee behaviour. It amused me. I was safe, after all, and in a position of power.

The large boy stared me out for the whole of the morning, so obviously that I began to wonder if Sandra or George would take him to one side afterwards and reprimand him. Once in a while, he leaned to one side and whispered something to the boy sitting next to him, a smaller lad with sandy hair and keen grey eyes. Listen, Junior, I felt like saying, I’m far too old to be offended by this stuff. Have you any idea how used to it you are by my age? Those boys thought I was unsettled by their big firm bodies – but when push came to shove, so to speak, I would be reading their papers and marking them on the basis of whether they had a firm grasp of sequence analysis. Lads, lads, I wanted to say, technique is more important than stamina.

The presentations began. First up was a very short boy who coughed his way to the lectern. He took several nervous sips from a water bottle before he began, fiddling anxiously with the mouse pad on the laptop. Eventually, the title of his Powerpoint presentation was displayed on the board behind him:
Combined Use of Restriction Enzymes in Isolating Cosmids and Plasmids: a new approach?

After the third presentation, there was a break. Most of the students stayed in their seats. Two of the girls went out and came back with Diet Cokes. I excused myself and went to the Ladies so that I wouldn’t have to make small talk with Sandra and George – there would be enough of that by the end of the week. In the chilly, grey toilet, after I had washed my hands, I leaned forward into the speckled mirror and passed the tip of my forefinger under each eye, where there was the barely detectable smudge of eyeliner after my walk in the rain. I reapplied my lipstick. It was pathetic and I laughed at myself while I did it but I could not resist these small acts of vanity. How obvious and silly we all are, us humans, I thought to myself. Even me. Especially me.

Back in the room, as I approached our table, George smiled at me and patted my chair for me to sit down. Sandra said, ‘Hey ho, another day, another dollar.’

‘Not yet,’ muttered George.

We wrapped up just before one o’clock. George and Sandra would take me out for lunch on Friday so I knew I could escape without causing offence. As it happened, it was a busy week, that week. My VAT return was due and it was my first year of annual accounting. Filling in the nonsensical form made me want chew the arm of my office chair. And I had some dry-cleaning to pick up on the way home.

As I came down the steps outside the building, having said goodbye to Sandra and George in the foyer, I saw that the sandy-haired boy was waiting for me, leaning against the railings to the right of the steps with his arms folded and a cycle helmet looped over one finger. I slowed down my pace and he gazed at me with his grey eyes. He made no pretence that the encounter was accidental, giving me a half-smile of acknowledgement and propelling himself away from the railings without using his hands, just the momentum of his body. He had sunglasses on his head, even though it was December, on the pretext that a little thin winter sun was shining. I wondered if he would remember that before he put his cycle helmet on.

I nodded in acknowledgement as I passed him and walked off down the street. He followed me, doing a quickstep to catch up.

‘So what did you make of the presentations?’

I gave him a look that was meant to be stern but I suspect seemed merely ironic. ‘You wouldn’t really expect me to say, would you?’

‘I think they all did pretty well,’ the sandy-haired boy said, ‘although I thought Sundeep didn’t really get to the heart of why high through-put data analysis has transformed the way we sequence. It’s not just about speed, is it?’

I maintained a diplomatic silence.

‘We Googled you of course,’ he said casually, ‘they made such a big deal about you being our external examiner, Sandra and George, honestly, you would have thought we were having the Queen. So we all looked you up, and I have to say your CV really is impressive.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and I thought my voice was dripping with sarcasm but if he noticed, it didn’t alter his tone.

‘Basically, you have my ideal job,’ he continued. ‘In fact, I was wondering if I could pick your brains some time, about the Beaufort Institute.’ We passed a group of his friends and he raised his hand to them. Two girls in the front of the group giggled. After the group had gone past, he said in a low voice, almost a murmur. ‘I would be
extremely
grateful…’

We had reached the main road. The roar of taxis and buses was immediately apparent. I turned to him firmly and said, ‘I’m going this way,’ indicating down the street. It was a clear dismissal. The world of science is, like many others, all about patronage, about your professor giving you that sparkling reference to the right funding body at the right time, about your Head of Lab allocating you your own corner for research at just the point you need it. But, morally suspect as patronage is, there is still a convention that it is earned.

He held my gaze. ‘I would really appreciate it,’ he said, ‘and I promise not to ask any more questions about what you think about everyone else’s work, or mine either. You’ll find I’m quite…’ He trailed off, but the way he said it rendered his meaning quite unmistakable.

He paused, still staring at me with his open, grey, hungry eyes.

‘I’m very discreet,’ he added.

Oh the arrogance of youth, I thought. Let’s presume for a minute I
was
up for an affair – no, I mean a quick shag – with a boy half my age, what made him think I would choose him? I could easily have the meaty dark-haired one if I wanted; he was much closer to fantasy toy-boy material than his bold friend here. I thought of saying as much to this to this fair child-man in front of me, but there was something about him, the innocence in his direct, priapic gaze, that made me feel touched rather than offended. Not flattered, though. I am far too much of a realist to be flattered.

‘I have a card,’ he said, suddenly, as if he had only just remembered. Then the card was in his hand, and he held it out, and it was a plain white card with his name, Jamie something, and his email address and mobile phone number, and in case I didn’t get the message, he stared at me hard again as I took it from him. That’s all we need, us humans, just a stare. Peacocks spread their tails. Orang-utans hoot. But homo sapiens has evolved to the extent that we can propagate the species with one long, lingering look.

I returned the stare briefly in what I hoped was a blank, non-committal fashion, then looked at his card before I slipped it into my pocket and turned away. He gave me a smile – no, it was a half-smile. A full grin combined with that stare would have been creepy, so this was a careful half. I turned away but couldn’t resist glancing back as I walked off. He was standing there quite shamelessly on the street corner, staring after me with that half-smile on his face, and, vain creature that I am, I gave him a half-smile in return.

I know what you’re thinking. Is that it? Is that what she calls nearly having an affair? Doesn’t sound like much, in your terms, does it? You can have full coitus in the Houses of Parliament and it is still touch and go whether you would think of it as an affair. One lingering look from a boy on the street, is that it?

Well, that wasn’t quite it. I didn’t call Jamie-something, but I want you to know that I thought very seriously about doing so, planned it, envisaged it, rehearsed it even. I showered for him that night. I dressed for him the next morning. I am not sure what reflects more badly on me – my reasons for contemplating calling him, or my reasons for not doing so. Reasons for: it would be an interesting and appropriate revenge against my husband (more of that another time). It would be an uncomplicated fuck, or series of fucks – Jamie would lose interest fairly quickly, I was sure of that. He wasn’t attracted to me as an individual, after all – he just hadn’t nailed an old one yet. And I would learn something I had been curious about for some time. As a young woman, an important part of arousal for me had been the contemplation of my own body. I had loved long baths, sunbathing, keeping my skin nice. I wasn’t a beauty but I had still been a narcissist in the way that all young women are taught to be narcissists, every time they turn the page of a magazine or watch TV. Since I had had children, put on weight, aged, I had only had sex with my husband and so was still able to see my body through his eyes, as he remembered it, not as it really was. If I had sex with this boy, I would be stripped of that delusion. I would see myself through his eyes – that was if I even let him look. I would probably want to do it in the dark, or better still stay fully dressed. Maybe both.