Apple Tree Yard (3 page)

‘I like your boots,’ the woman guard said as she squeezed them lightly with both hands. ‘Bet they’ll be useful.’ She stood, turned, and handed me my pass on its string. I slipped it over my neck, then had to bend slightly to press it against the pass-reader that made the second set of glass doors swing open.

I wasn’t up before the committee for another half hour – I had arrived early enough to buy a large cappuccino and seat myself beneath the fig trees in the atrium, at a small round table. I scattered a crust of brown sugar across the top of my coffee, then, while I read through the notes I had taken the previous day, ate the remaining crystals by licking my forefinger and sticking it in the small paper packet. On the tables around me were MPs and their guests, civil servants, catering staff on a break, journalists, researchers, secretarial and support staff… Here was the day-to-day business of government, the routines, the detail, the glue that holds it all together. I was there to help a committee pronounce on recommended limitations to cloning technology – most people still think that’s what genetics is, as if there is nothing more to it than breeding experiments, how many identical sheep we can make, or identical mice, or plants. Endless wheat crops; square tomatoes; pigs that will never get sick or make us sick either – it’s the same unsubtle debates we’ve been having for years. It was three years since my first presentation to a committee but I knew when I was asked to appear again this time I would be rehearsing exactly the same arguments.

What I’m trying to say is, I was in a good mood that day but other than that, it was really ordinary.

But it wasn’t ordinary, was it? I sat there, sipping my coffee, tucking my hair behind my ear when I looked down at my notes, and all that time, I was unaware that I was being watched by you.

*

Later, you described this moment in great detail, from your point of view. At one point, apparently, I looked up and gazed around, as if someone had spoken my name, before returning to my notes. You wondered why I did that. A few minutes later, I scratched my right leg. Then I rubbed at the underside of my nose with the back of my fingers, before picking up the paper napkin on the table next to my coffee and blowing my nose. All this you observed from your table a few feet away, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t recognise you if I looked your way, because I didn’t know you.

At 10.48 a.m., I closed my folder but didn’t bother putting it back in my bag, so you knew I was on my way to a committee or meeting room nearby. Before I stood up, I folded my paper napkin and put it and the spoon into my coffee cup, a neat sort of person, you thought. I rose from my chair and smoothed my dress down, back and front, with a swift, brushing sort of gesture. I ran my fingers through my hair, either side of my face. I shouldered my bag and picked up the file. As I walked away from the table, I glanced back, just to check I hadn’t left anything behind. Later, you tell me that this is how you guessed I had children. Children are always leaving things behind and once you have developed the habit of checking a table before you walk away, it’s hard to break, even when yours have grown up and left home. You didn’t guess how old my children were, though, you got that wrong. You assumed I had had them late, once my career was established, as opposed to early, before it got under way.

I strode away from the café table confidently, according to you, a woman who was on her way somewhere. You had the opportunity to watch me as I walked right the way across the wide, airy atrium and up the open staircase to the committee rooms. My stride was purposeful, my head up, I didn’t look about me as I walked. I seemed to have no sense I might be being observed and you found this attractive, you said, because it made me seem both confident and a little naive.

Was there any inkling, for me, that day, as I sipped my coffee? You wanted to know that later, egged me on to say that I had sensed your presence, wanting me to have been aware of you. No, not in the café, I said, not a clue on my part. I was thinking about the easiest way to explain to a committee of lay people why so many of our genes are non-functioning as opposed to protein-coding. I was thinking about the best way to explain how little we know.

Not a hint? None at all? You were a little hurt, or pretended to be. How could I not have sensed you? No, not there, I would say, but perhaps, maybe, I wasn’t sure, I felt something in the committee room.

My presentation had gone according to plan and it was close to the end of my morning. I had just completed an answer to a question about the rapidity of developments in cloning technology – they are public, and reported, these enquiry committees, so they have to ask the questions that represent the public’s concerns. There was a brief hiatus while Madam Chair asked to check her papers to make sure she had got the question order right. One of the MPs to her right – his name was Christopher something, the plastic plaque in front of him said – had been gesturing in frustration. I waited patiently. I poured a little more water into my glass from the jug in front of me, took a sip. And as I did, I became aware of an odd sensation, a prickle of tension in my shoulders and neck. I felt as though there was someone extra in the room, behind me – as if, all at once, the air was full. When Madam Chair looked up at me again, I saw her glance past me, at the row of chairs behind me. Then she returned to her papers, looking up again to say, ‘I beg your pardon, Professor, I’ll be right with you.’ She leaned over to the clerk sitting on her left. I’ve never had a professorship in a British university – the only time I have ever had that title was when I was teaching in America for a year while my husband was part of the USCR Research Exchange Plan in Boston. She should have called me ‘Doctor’.

I turned. In the seats behind me, in two rows, were the MPs’ researchers with their notebooks and clipboards, the helpers, those there to learn something that might help them up the career ladder. Then, out of the periphery of my vision, I saw that the entrance door in the corner of the room was – softly, noiselessly – closing. Someone had just left the room.

‘Thank you for your patience everyone,’ said Madam Chair, and I turned back to face the committee. ‘Christopher, I beg your pardon, you
were
listed number six but I have a hand-annotated early draft and mis-read my writing.’

Christopher whoever-he-was sniffed, hunched forward in his chair and began to ask his question in a voice loud enough to betray his ignorance of basic genetics.

*

The committee broke for lunch about twenty minutes later. I had been asked to attend after the break, although we had covered the bulk of my territory. They were only playing safe so they didn’t run the risk of recalling me later in the week and paying for another day of my expenses. The clerks and researchers headed out of the door as I stood and put my papers away. Several of the MPs had made for the Members’ exit and the rest of the committee was conferring softly. The sole reporter on the press bench was making a few notes on her notepad.

The corridor outside was busy – all the committees seemed to have broken early for lunch – and I stood for a moment wondering whether to go down to the atrium café or to leave the building altogether; fresh air would be good, I thought. Eating in the same café as Members and their guests had long since lost its novelty value. While I hesitated, the corridor cleared a little, and on one of the benches opposite, there was a man. He was seated and talking quietly into a mobile phone but looking at me. When he saw I had noticed him, he spoke briefly into the phone, then slipped it into his pocket. He kept looking at me as he rose to his feet. If we had met before, the look might have said,
oh, it’s you
. But we hadn’t met before and so it said something entirely other – but still with an element of recognition. I looked right back, and all was decided in that instant, although I didn’t understand that for a very long time.

I half-smiled, turned to walk down the corridor, and the man fell in step beside me, saying, ‘You were very articulate in there. You’re good at explaining complex subjects. A lot of scientists can’t do that.’

‘I’ve done a lot of lecturing,’ I replied, ‘and I’ve had to give quite a few representations to funding bodies over the years. You can’t risk making them feel stupid.’

‘No I daresay that wouldn’t be a good idea…’

I don’t know it yet, but the man is you.

We were walking alongside each other, as if we were friends or colleagues, and the conversation between us was so easy, so natural – a passer-by would have assumed we had known each other for years – and at the same time, my breath was slightly short and I felt as if I had shed a layer of skin, as if something, simply the years perhaps, or normal reserve, had dropped away.
Good lord
, I thought,
this hasn’t happened to me in years
.

‘Do you get nervous before giving evidence?’ You continued to talk to me quite normally, and I followed your direction.

We descended the stairs to the ground level and, without either of us particularly leading the way, or so I thought, we walked across the atrium, to the top of the escalator going down to the tunnel through to the main building of the Houses of Parliament. It was a narrow escalator, too narrow to allow us to stand side by side, and you gestured for me to step on to it first. I had the opportunity to look at you, to observe your large brown eyes and direct gaze, steel-rimmed glasses, retro-ish or perhaps just old-fashioned, I couldn’t decide which, wiry brown hair with a slight wave, a little grey. I guessed you to be a few years younger than me but not much. You were a head taller than me but then most people are. As I was on the step below you on the escalator, you were a lot taller at that point. You smiled down at me as if you were acknowledging the essential silliness of this. When we reached the bottom, you fell into step next to me with one sure stride. You weren’t notably good-looking but there was something about the way you moved, a sleekness and confidence. You were wearing a dark suit that looked, to my inexpert eye, expensive. Yes, it was something about the way you held yourself that was attractive, a kind of male grace. Your movements were relaxed, you seemed at ease with yourself – I could imagine you holding your own on a tennis court. I was pretty sure you weren’t an MP.

‘So do you, get nervous I mean?’

It was only as you repeated the question that I realised there had been a silence between us as we descended. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not with this lot. I know a lot more than they do.’

‘Yes, I expect you do.’ You acknowledged my expertise with a slight nod.

We walked in silence along the tunnel, past the stone lion and unicorn on either side, until we reached the colonnade. It was the strangest thing. We were walking, people were passing, we were relaxed together in a quite familiar manner – still we had not introduced ourselves. No names, no normality – this was the way you knew, I see now. We were skipping stages, establishing that the usual rules did not and would not apply to us. All this I realised only in retrospect, of course.

As we entered the part of the colonnade that is exposed to the open air of New Palace Yard, I shuddered and crossed my arms. It seemed natural to turn left and step through the Great North Door into the Great Hall. It was full, this lunch hour – school parties, students, milling tourists. We were in the public part of the Parliamentary estate. To our left as we walked across the vast stone hall were the queues of visitors behind ropes, waiting for access to the galleries of the Houses: a group of elderly women, two men in plastic macs, a young couple standing very close together facing each other with their hands tucked into the back pockets of each other’s jeans.

At the far end of the hall, we stopped. I looked behind, at the doorway that led back outside, the white air framed like a picture. How many times in a life does a person get to feel an instant attraction for someone they have just met, the eyes locking, the sudden and overwhelming conviction that this is someone he or she is meant to know? Three, four times, maybe? For many people, it happens only as they go up the ascending escalator at a railway station or in a department store while someone else goes down the descending escalator on the other side. Some people never get to experience it at all.

I turned back to you and you looked at me again. That’s all.

You paused briefly, then said, ‘Have you seen the Chapel in the Crypt?’ Your tone was light, conversational.

I gave a small shake of the head.

‘Would you like to?’

I was on the edge of a cliff. I know that now.

‘Sure,’ I said – conversationally, mimicking your tone. Mirroring, it’s called. We do it all the time.

You bent your head slightly toward me. ‘Come with me,’ you said. As you turned, you placed one hand on my elbow, the most delicate of touches through my jacket, steering me, while hardly making contact. Even after you took your hand away, I felt the imprint of your fingers there. Together, we mounted the wide stone steps at the far end of the Hall. At the top of them, beneath the stained-glass glory of the Memorial Window, was a security guard, a stout woman with curly hair and glasses. I hung back as you approached her. You stooped to speak to her. I couldn’t hear what you said but it was clear that you were joking with her, knew her quite well.

As you walked back to me, you held up a key attached to a black plastic rectangle. ‘Remind me to give it back to Martha or I will be in a lot of trouble,’ you said.

We turned. I followed you down a smaller set of stone steps and through some black iron railings to a heavy wooden door. You opened it with the key. We stepped inside. It closed behind us with a solid
thunk
. We were at the top of another set of stone steps, quite narrow this time, which lead down a twisting stairwell. You went first. At the bottom of the stairwell was another heavy door.

*

The Crypt Chapel is small and ornate, its arches bending over like low-hanging tree branches, its ceiling covered with golden tracery. There are wrought-iron railings in intricate patterns in front of the altar and a decorated baptistery with a font – Members are allowed to baptise their children here, you tell me, or get married. You are not sure about funerals. The walls and floor of the Chapel are tiled, the columns marbled, it seems like a heavily decorated but secret place – perhaps because it is a church underground: hidden worship.