Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard opens with main character Yvonne Carmichael in the witness box in Courtroom Number Eight. Yvonne is on trial for murder and is wrestling with difficult and frustrating questions, but she still takes time to note “There is no natural light in Courtroom Number Eight and that bothers me. In the ceiling there is an arrangement of latticed fluorescent squares and there are white tubes on the walls. It’s all so sanitized and modern and stark. The wood paneling, the drop-down seats with their green cloth covers, none of it fits: the life-changing drama of why we are here versus the deadening mundanity of the procedures.”
Yvonne is a scientist, a wife, a mother, and the main character in Doughty’s carefully plotted and executed book. She is also an adulterer. At the beginning of the book, Yvonne meets a man and very quickly an affair begins.
Yvonne’s life wasn’t perfect before she was charged with murder or before she started her extremely risqué affair. In the pre-murder charge/pre-affair days, her husband had his own affair that lasted several years. And there were other familial problems; Yvonne doesn’t have a great relationship with her son. He rarely comes home, and during one of his visits, he waits until Yvonne goes shopping to slip away—so he won’t have to endure any dramatic goodbyes.
Is her life any better after the affair and trial are over? That’s a difficult question to answer.
The story opens briefly in Courtroom Number Eight and then goes back “To begin where it began—really, it began twice. It began that cold March day in the Chapel of St. Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster, beneath the drowned saints and the roasted saints and saints in every state of torture.” It began in the Crypt Chapel, where Yvonne and the man that, for most of the book we simply know as X, have sex.
The book continues—detailing the rather sordid details of the affair, which include secret cell phones and sex in the most public of places. Shown in flashbacks are other parts of Yvonne’s life—such as how she met her husband, her car being vandalized, and just ordinary things: friendships, work, dinner with friends.
X is an intriguing character, made all the more mysterious by the letters Yvonne writes to him (and of course never sends) and his first gift to her—a pay-as-you-go phone. X gives it to Yvonne with the warning “There’s some money on it already, but you’ll need to top it up sooner or later, when you do, go to a shop in town, nowhere near your home or where you work. Never go to the same shop twice.”
The affair—which includes rendezvous where the pair have tea and cakes and then sex in a public toilet—and Yvonne’s life are interesting enough to almost make a reader forget the trial. Doughty doesn’t let that happen—with not so subtle reminders throughout the story: “The phones were never discovered by the prosecution. You took mine back from me in the car, the day it happened, and you disposed of them both.”
A drunken office party sets the rest of the story in motion, and by the beginning of the third section, titled DNA, it’s a struggle not to flip to the last page and catch a quick snippet of how the story ends. Even though the story begins, “The moment builds; it swells and builds—the moment when I realize we have lost,” the question of what is going to happen not just to Yvonne (will she be convicted? if so of what and how much time will she have to spend in prison?), but also to her family (will her husband forgive her? what about her children?) — isn’t answered until the very end (and the story ends with some things still unresolved).
The plot is strong with enough twists, turns, and hints to make the book an enjoyable, page-turning read. The characters are interesting, decidedly middle aged, and believable. The sex is down and dirty and just a little graphic. Doughty often describes things with a blunt gracefulness; she is an author that can take the simplest or smallest turn of phrase and make it memorable and powerful.
Even though the story doesn’t lack for action or sex and is tightly written, it’s the psychology of it all that might be most appealing. What makes a 50-something woman engage in this type of affair is certainly one thing to ponder. A larger theme revolves around secrets and lies and how easily Yvonne seems to think most people use them. Linked to this is how well any of the characters truly know each other and whether they know or care if they are being misled (or misleading others). By the end, these themes and questions seep out of the book and into the audience, as readers will be forced to wonder how well they really know Yvonne.