Apple Tree Yard

by Louise Doughty

  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.

  I did not fall out of love with him, not at any stage. I did not fall out of love with our lives here, in this house, with the world we had built around us. We built it for a reason. It suited us. It was where we were meant to be. I fell out of love with something more subtle and specific. I fell out of love with the way I had coped, over the years, with the hard work I had done, with the sacrifices I had made, with my ability to raise two children, in however compromised a fashion, while doing all the other things I did.

  I had a sudden memory, while I sat on our sofa sipping the tea that Guy had made me, of how when the children were small, I would have a kettle and coffee cup all ready in my study while I was doing their bedtime routine, would be singing a song to them while I splashed them in the bath and thinking about some technical issue of protein sequencing, so that the minute the kids were down I could go straight from kissing them goodnight to my desk. Carrie used to sleep for an hour each morning after breakfast when she was an infant, and in that hour, I would sit Adam in front of the television and write frantically or read research papers. Sometimes, I would catch myself in one of these phases and allow myself this thought, nothing more smug or extreme than this: I can do this. Look at me, managing. When the children were small, we would often go and visit Guy’s mother for Sunday lunch – she died when the children were six and eight, but when they were infants, she liked to do a proper Sunday lunch for Guy and the rest of us and his two sisters, and every time he left the table to change a nappy, the three of them would practically break into the Hallelujah Chorus. Nobody praised me for all the combining I did, all the juggling. I never asked for praise. I took my own competence for granted as much as anyone else.

  I wasn’t vulnerable to you, to what I did with you, because I had fallen out of love with Guy. I was weary, and if I fell out of love with anything it was with that competence of mine. I fell out of love with myself.

  *

  I suppose there are two types of adulterers; the repeat types, and the one-offs. I fall into the latter category. I would never have had an affair if I hadn’t met you. It was one of those one-in-a-million chance events, like happening to cross the road at the very minute that the white van comes round the corner and the driver is distracted by a phone call. For those of us who are one-off adulterers, it comes at a crucial time in our marriages and is, in fact, more about the marriage than the affair. Afterwards, our shame and guilt are so deep, we can feel nothing but craven gratitude towards the spouse we have betrayed, for still being there.

  You fall into the other type, I know that now, the serial adulterer. Serial adulterers would have been unfaithful whoever they had married – although they may kid themselves otherwise. Their affairs are nothing to do with their marriages. They are som
ething they need to do, because they can’t bear life otherwise. On the face of it, the serial adulterers’ way of operating may seem more reprehensible than mine, but in fact they are likely to be better at deceit and less likely to explode a perfectly decent marriage because of the thrills they experience elsewhere. Morally, there is no difference. I know that now.

  I do not know anything about your marriage. I do not know how you conducted the ordinary part of your existence. My only guess is that you managed to lead a double life in the true sense of the phrase – at home, in Twickenham (of all places), you were, actually, ordinary. You and your wife watched television together and shared the housework. You occasionally had irritable words about whose turn it was to renew the tax disc on the car, just like me and Guy. And then there were the affairs – the almost back-to-back affairs. You could not have remained married were it not for the affairs, and the stability of your home life made the affairs possible – neither would exist without their inverse. Your life was bound to this exhausting game of ping-pong, back and forth, from one way of living to another. You had become so addicted to the adrenaline of this existence that you no longer knew how to live without it.

  And after the imagined drama that made our daily lives bearable, we got a real drama, more of a drama than we could handle, and then we wanted our daily lives back, but they didn’t exist any more. We discovered that safety and security are commodities you can sell in return for excitement, but you can never buy them back.

  I wonder what will happen when you are released from prison. Will you get your life back? I don’t think so, somehow. Your wife didn’t seem like the forgiving sort and who could blame her. Will you contact me then? Will we meet? Will we be shocked at how middle-aged and ordinary we both are? I don’t know. All I know is how Guy and I are managing now.

  We love each other. I know that much.

  *

  Slowly, our lives return to normal. Guy goes back to lecturing. Adam stays with us but says he is going to look for somewhere to rent. He’s thinking of moving to Crouch End. He’s got a friend there who plays keyboards. Crouch End is a lot nearer than Manchester. Crouch End I can live with. My probation officer, an Irishwoman in her mid-sixties, encourages me to get out of the house a bit more. She says I am doing the right thing, taking it slowly, but it’s time to start looking forward. Have I considered what job I might do, now? No, I have not considered that. I wonder if one of the local cafés or shops might take me.

  *

  About a month after I was released from prison, I found myself alone for the day and, without really thinking about it, decided to take a Tube journey up to town. If I had thought it through, I wouldn’t have done it, but I knew that, sooner or later, I would find myself in the Borough of Westminster, and I didn’t want it to be by accident. I wanted to go there on purpose, so that I wouldn’t be ambushed. The Beaufort Institute, the Houses of Parliament, Embankment Gardens – I thought I would allow myself one visit there, to see if I could spot the ghosts of ourselves at that time, as if I might bump into us, walking arm in arm along the river or sitting in a café together with our knees pressed tight beneath the table. Do it once, I thought, then let go.

  I didn’t go straight there. I did other things first, as if I could fool myself my pilgrimage was accidental. I did some shopping at John Lewis and then drifted down Bond Street peering through the open doors of the empty designer shops, glancing at the few black items hung on sparse chrome rails, the occasional immaculate assistant standing very still – and then, I swear, hardly thinking about it at all, I kept wandering south and crossed Piccadilly not far from the Royal Academy, where I glanced across at the entrance and decided I didn’t fancy the exhibition, and considered abandoning the whole idea of this trip and going straight to Piccadilly Circus Tube but instead I walked down Church Place, for no reason other than that it is pedestrianised and I felt like getting away from the traffic.

  And then I was there. I had tricked myself into being there. I was standing on Duke of York Street, halfway down, looking to the left. It had been alternately sunny and rainy all that week and the sky was a strange yellow and grey colour, thick dark rain clouds bunched together around the sun, the odd bright patch, as if anything could happen at any moment.

  The first thing I saw as I approached was that the old blackened building on the corner was covered in scaffolding. Already, half the windows were broken from demolition works on the building next to it – it was clearly next for the ball and chain. The looming office block that used to be there, the one opposite the doorway, was gone already. The blank windows I gazed at while I wondered if anyone was looking out, the sheltering bulk of the thing – it was all just sky, that grey and yellow sky. Hoardings had been put up to protect the site and a large sign said in red capitals on a white background: DEMOLITION IN PROGRESS: KEEP OUT. Behind the hoardings, I could hear the roar of the works going on, the mechanical diggers and industrial hammers, the drills, the shouts of the men in hard hats. Then, as I stood there, gazing at the hoarding, I heard a vast grinding noise like an old train creaking into a small station and the arm of a huge yellow digger swung upwards and heaved into view above the barrier, giant mouth aloft for a moment before it dived down with a crash. Even though the hoarding was between me and it, the monster, I backed away against the opposite wall.

  They are knocking it down, my love, I thought as I stood there. Apple Tree Yard is almost gone. My undoing is undone; it is being dismantled, brick by brick.

  I stood and listened to the destruction I could not see. Then I walked a little way down the street, looking for the doorway, the one where you left your DNA inside me. I couldn’t work out which one it was. They all looked too shallow – and it was dark that evening, after all. The heat of that moment, the absorption; hard to believe it now, hard to believe I was capable of any of it. Everything looked different in the daylight, and behind me, behind the hoardings, the mechanical diggers, the hammers and grinders continued their work, loud and oblivious beneath that grey and yellow sky.

  *

  And here is my guilty secret, my love. Sometimes at night, I rise. I slip from the bedroom, and Guy turns in his sleep as I do but even if I wake him by leaving the room, he knows better than to rise and follow me. I come here, upstairs, to my study. I plug in the oil-filled radiator and turn on the computer, returned to us by the police after the trial. The small lights on the computer wink as the radiator begins to click and I am dry-eyed, clear-headed, as I open up the folder, Admin. There are folders within folders, and more folders still. And eventually I get to Accountancy, and, just to be sure, I scroll through each individual document, and sometimes open them all, one by one. I have done this a dozen, maybe twenty times now, and still I cannot stop myself from doing it, these nights. I am looking for something that isn’t there. I am looking for the document VATquery3, which I began writing more than two years ago, on the night of our first encounter in the Chapel in the Crypt in the Houses of Parliament, where I recounted what we did beneath the barbecued saints and the drowned saints and the saints in every state of torture. The document doesn’t exist any more. It has been deleted, but not by me. The only person who could have deleted it is my husband. He must have come up here immediately after my arrest, perhaps even while police were in the house. And for him to do that, he must have already have known of the file’s existence. He was taking a risk in deleting it, protecting me. If he had been caught, that would have made him my accomplice.

  I am looking for the file, even though I know it isn’t there, but more than the file, I am looking for something else. I am looking for information that was never even on the computer in the first place. I am looking for a fact that would only be knowable if the relationship between a computer and the person operating it could be reversed, if the computer was a large eye watching the individual at the keyboard, recording his or her thoughts or actions. I am sitting, staring at a file that doesn’t exist any more and trying to guess whether or not Guy
read it before he deleted it.

  *

  I don’t write anything any more. I know better. I scroll through my files until I tire of the task, then close the folder and the folder it is in and the folder that one is in too… tucking the documents away for the night as if I am turning out the lights in a school dormitory one by one. Then I lean back in the chair and pull my dressing gown tighter around me and let myself be lulled by the warmth of the oil-filled radiator and the emptiness of my thoughts. It is the small hours of the morning, and I am small in my chair, and a small but painful image comes into my head. It is us. We are lying, half dressed, sated, in the Vauxhall flat I thought was a safe house but, in fact, turned out to belong to your wife’s dead uncle and was waiting to be refurbished and let. We are lying on the bare mattress with the pale heap of the duvet with no cover on it at our feet. The light through the net curtains is tinged with grey but still illuminates too much; it shows every wrinkle and age spot – all the telltale signs of what I really am but at least that’s true for you too. It is late September, and in anticipation of the hot October to come, today is surprisingly warm. The room is small and bare. We are lying facing each other, semi-clothed, wrapped around each other, entwined. You have one arm across my waist and the other wrapped around my shoulders with the fingers twisted in my hair, holding the back of my head, so my face is pressed into your chest. You are asleep, I think, you’ve slept and woken and slept again. I am wide awake, breathing in the scent of you, skin, hair, a hint of sweat, the smells of our satedness. I need the loo. I wonder if I move very, very slowly, whether I will be able to unentwine myself without waking you – it’s the hand in my hair that prevents that. I lie for a moment, enjoying the weight of your arm on my waist, its heaviness, determination, purpose. Even though my nose is pressed against your chest so close your hair is tickling my nostrils, I am able to smile to myself.