The Poison Tree (13 page)

My reply is an inadequate and defensive shrug.

“I blame myself,” he says. He pulls me close and I breathe in the wine that has soaked his shirt. “I did this to you. But I can make it all right again now. I’m home, I’m out. Don’t you understand? It’s over.”

For him, for now, perhaps.

“I know how lucky I am,” he says, and he pulls me even closer. “I will never, ever take you and Alice for granted. I’m going to get a job, and love you and protect you. Let me take the burden.”

Exasperation swells my chest. Does he realize how hard it will be to get any kind of job with his background? He could not protect us even if he was capable, because to do that he would need to be armed with all the facts and I can never tell him everything. I do not mind being the family protector as long as I am left alone to do the job without interference from him. His rib cage expands and I think he’s gearing up for another speech. I don’t want to hear it. I am not in the mood for his useless words. I just want a drink. I break away from his arms knowing that it hurts him but still I pour another glass and drain it without turning away from the sink. As the wine melts into my veins, it becomes impossible not to voice my worst fears, if only to myself. Rex’s conviction is spent and public. My own guilty verdict is a private one and my sentence one only I know about. Or is it? What if, despite all my efforts over the last ten years, someone has found out? Perhaps it is not Rex that they are chasing at all. Perhaps they are after me.

I
BEGAN TO REGRET driving to Nina’s party at the exact point it became futile to turn back and take the Tube. My rust-speckled, banana-yellow Fiat Panda had been a present from my parents on my seventeenth birthday and was far from new even then. In recent months it had begun to groan and huff like a little old man and the ground it covered had shrunk to a mile-wide radius between my house, Simon’s place, and the tennis club. It showed its lack of training for our sudden marathon around the North Circular by short-circuiting the buttons that lowered the electric windows and air-locking me in the car. A traffic jam crawled me to a halt on a section of the road flanked by a kind of favela of boarded-up houses and corrugated iron lean-tos. Wembley Stadium’s twin towers loomed large to my left, a row of lock-up garages squatting beneath them at the roadside. A young man with no shirt on began to smear gray, sudsy water over my windshield with a grimy wiper. To avoid making eye contact with him, I turned my head to stare at a handwritten sign advertising cheap vehicle storage. I finally managed to pry the sunroof open as I inched over a scorched overpass near Brent Cross.

The engine cut out a dozen yards from Biba’s front door and retorted with a backfire that displaced a tree full of wood pigeons as I pulled up in front of their neighbors’ driveway. The curtain that twitched as I struggled with the ignition was an elegantly draped white voile, not a grubby gray net, but the watcher behind it was as fixated on the street as any suburban housewife. I had only seen the top of Mr. Wheeler’s head so I had to imagine him and his pregnant wife crouched over a notebook, actively waiting for something to happen that could be recorded in their noise diary. Probably he didn’t recognize me, or if he did, he didn’t associate me with the house. If he had, my role in events would have become public knowledge. Sometimes there are advantages to being unremarkable.

I let myself in through the gap in the fence. The garden was crawling with children. Little bodies, some shorter than the unmown grass, outnumbered the adults. This promised to be a different kind of party from the last one, one with hippies and guitars and nursery rhymes rather than DJ sets and chemical excess. These were Nina’s people, not Biba’s: the adults were older and fatter. Smoke rose from a barbecue that I’d last seen lying on its side on the terrace, its grate covered in bird droppings. I resolved not to eat anything cooked on it. Searching for a face I recognized I saw only Inigo, eyes just peeping over a lavender bush. He met my stare with his usual grave expression.

“Hello, Karen,” he said formally.

“Hello, Inigo,” I replied. “How are you?”

“Tris and Jo have gone to Devon,” he told me. “And tonight we’re going to stay on Arouna’s boat, and then we’re going traveling.”

“That sounds exciting,” I said. “Who’s Arouna?”

“He’s Gaia’s dad, stupid. Do you want to see?” I let the little boy lead me by the hand to the bedroom that had been his, the room they called the Kitchen Bedroom. Clothes bulged from suitcases and spilled out of black trash bags. A man in a muumuu, nearly as tall as me even sitting down, sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed with a sleeping Gaia on his lap.

“Say hello to Arouna,” ordered Inigo. I flexed my hand in a wave at the man, whose black skin was highlighted all over with Nina’s jewelry. Silver hoops with turquoise insets hung at his ears and his neck and wrists were wound with thick ropes of the same white metal. I looked down at blond Gaia, with her button nose, green eyes, and light gold skin, far paler than Nina’s. Arouna’s skin was deep onyx and his nose thick and fleshy. If this guy was Gaia’s biological father, I was Biba’s sister.

“Hello,” he said to me in a thick accent that I recognized as West African French.

“
Ça va?
Karen,” I said. “
Il fait beau ce soir, non?
” His features puckered at my unintended insult.

“Out of respect for my hosts, we speak English,” he said gravely.

“So sorry. Of course. So . . . I expect you’ll miss Nina when she goes?”

The sigh he gave seemed to bow the walls of the room. He launched into a highly charged history of his love affair with Nina in such stilted, hesitant English that I bit my tongue to stop myself speaking to him in French. He told me that he had served her a chicken tagine in Camden Lock and fallen madly in love with her on the spot. The gap between locking up his stall, having a drink, and consummating the relationship was apparently a short one. “That’s the night we made my baby girl. When she told me about Gaia, I took her into my home,” he said. “She and her boy come and live on my boat. We were so happy. When she leave me for Rex, she break my heart
overnight
,” he said, as though the swiftness was more callous than the act of leaving itself.

Arouna was the most masculine man I’d ever shared space with, but perhaps the least sexualized. Everything about him, from his limbs to his accent, was broad and strong; but in conversation he came across as a big, stupid child. I wondered if he was what my mother would have called “special needs.”

“One minute, my boat is full of babies, the next, she meets that man—that
thin
man—and he take her away. We were going to move into a flat together. She was writing the letters for me. You know? She was my
woman
.”

“Do stop bleating, Arouna,” said the voice I’d been waiting for. “Karen doesn’t want to hear about your broken heart.” Tonight, Biba appeared to be auditioning for the part of an East End housewife in a feature film about the Blitz. She wore a loose-fitting dun pinafore over a T-shirt and her hair was wrapped in a frayed green scrap of silk. I wondered if the cigarette that dangled from her lip and completed the look was deliberate. “Nina wants you next door,” she said. Arouna stuck out his lower lip, balanced Gaia on his chest, and took the sleeping child into the other bedroom.

“Is he
really
her dad?” I asked.

“God knows with Nina,” said Biba. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“He seems a little bit . . . slow,” I ventured, not wanting to insult a close relation of the household. I needn’t have worried.

“Christ, he’s thick as shit,” said Biba, holding her cigarette between her teeth and talking as she lit it with a match. She sank down on the bed and I sat next to her. “But he’s a sweetie. He’s been really good to Nina. He’s a gentle giant. I like gentle giants.”

“But I luff her,” I said, mimicking his gruff voice. Biba clapped her hands together in delight, dropping her matchbox.

“That’s brilliant!” she said. I was so pleased I’d made her laugh that I couldn’t help returning her smile. “You should be a dialect coach. Seriously—there’s heaps of money in it. You should look at it. And then we can work together! You can come and be my personal coach when I’m in my trailer in Hollywood. You’d love it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Let me get my degree first and a secure job placement and then we can take it from there.”

“Oh, Karen,” said Biba. “You don’t want to get into all that politics and diplomacy stuff. It’s so not
you
.”

Her faith in my creative ability was flattering but insulting. How did she know what was and wasn’t me? Our conversations had so far been a one-way street: I’d listened to her hopes and ambitions but shared nothing of my own plans, as vague and provisional as they were. I felt that while I was studying her, desperate to unlock all her mysteries and moods, she had decided already what I was like. The inertia that had carried me to Queen Charlotte’s prevailed again, and this time it was my personality, not my academic career, I allowed to be molded in someone else’s vision. After all, I hadn’t really known who I was or what I wanted before I met her. I might as well become who she thought I was as anyone else.

Like a dying queen, Nina held court in the Garden Room as friends came to bid her good-bye. One by one they drifted away, making vague but confident promises to meet up somewhere on the Continent. Biba drifted off to refill our glasses while Rex hovered in the corridor between the two rooms like a stick insect in a glass box. I realized that without the distraction of Nina and the children, I’d be seeing even more of Biba’s brother.

“Can I please use your car to drop them off at the barge?” he asked.

“All of them?” I asked. I wasn’t sure that my vehicle could take two kids, Nina and Arouna’s combined bulk, and their luggage. “I suppose . . .”

“It’s okay, we can always get Arouna to get out and push. I don’t know why she wants to stay with him for her last few days,” said Rex challengingly, as though the whole thing had been my idea. “We’ve got so much more space here. Inigo’s asthma won’t be helped with all that damp. Even a couple of nights could trigger an attack.”

He had to squeeze into the room to allow Arouna to pass in the narrow corridor, a suitcase half his size hoisted effortlessly up onto his shoulder.

“Nina wants to see you,” he said to me.

She sat in the lotus position on a plain bedspread. It was the only time I had seen her without a chaotic tangle of things—food, metal, books, children—around her. She looked smaller and younger without her cloud of clutter.

“I’m so glad I get to say good-bye to you,” she said, patting an indentation next to her. “Listen, I want you to have this.” She unhooked one of the chains around her neck. A thick silver cord held an intricate turquoise flower with a tiny orange stone in the center. She hung it around my own neck. “It looks beautiful on you,” she said. “As soon as I saw you I thought, Karen will like this. It really brings out your eyes.”

“Thank you.” I was touched by the gesture, flattered that she thought of me when I wasn’t there. “I really didn’t expect anything. That’s so sweet. How are you? Are you all ready to go? Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You already have. The loan of the car is a godsend,” she said, telling me that she had been behind Rex’s request. “I’m going to call you all when I’m settled, you know. Check everything’s okay.” Why shouldn’t it be?

“I kind of hope you never do settle. When I’m a boring old fart working for the Foreign Office, promise me that you’ll be off traveling having lots of adventures on my behalf.”

Nina laughed.

“When you’re a boring old fart working for the Foreign Office, promise you won’t set Interpol on me if I still haven’t put the kids through school.” Her embrace was soft and warm. “Look after them for me.”

“Nina!” Arouna stood in the doorway, a sleepyhead Gaia clinging to his leg. “Come on. We go. Bedtime.”

Nina scooped Inigo into her arms and heaved her bulk up from the bed. Rex reached under the pillow and found Inigo’s inhaler, which he pressed into Nina’s skirt pocket.

“Thanks, babe,” she said absently. Rex blocked the kitchen stairs, holding a trash bag that was stuffed with tiny clothes. A single sock wiggled like a stripy worm through a hole in the stretched black plastic. He looked at it forlornly and I realized it wasn’t Nina he was mourning but the loss of but the children he’d helped raise for the past two years.

Nina tucked the sock into the top of the trash bag and kissed Rex softly on the cheek, to Arouna’s evident and bitter resentment. As Rex stood aside to let the family pass, Biba spoke to her brother with a tenderness I had never heard before in her voice.

“You’re doing really well,” she said. “We’ll be waiting for you when you get back. Go on. Go. It’ll be fine.”

We watched them leave from the window of the Velvet Room. The car stalled a couple of times as Rex tried to get used to the ancient, bouncy clutch. With a gentler and more patient touch than I had ever managed, he cajoled it into gear. It groaned its way along, making a noise like a firework as they rounded the corner of Muswell Hill Road, a bang loud enough to wake the neighbors, and probably earn an entry in Tom Wheeler’s noise diary.

The house echoed with the sudden absence of people.

“It’s never been just me and Rex,” she said. “Never, not since . . .” Biba trailed off. “I don’t want to be alone with him. He won’t leave me alone now he’s got no one else to fuss over. You haven’t seen what he gets like. I’ll never have a moment’s peace.”

“You could always ask someone else to move in with you,” I said.

“I could,” she conceded.

“Not a stranger, or a lodger, but someone you already know and like. Someone who’s here all the time anyway. Someone who has no one else to live with and nothing better to do.”