The Poison Tree (24 page)

The days that followed my birthday seemed to span an entire season. I think that the contentment I knew in them is what my father was talking about when he gave me his “one summer” speech. I had accepted soon after moving into Queenswood Lane that the messy hedonism of Biba’s birthday party and the boisterous company of Tris and Jo would not be a daily or even weekly occurrence, but I could not have predicted the comfort I took in the loose routine that supplanted those things. I can’t tell you what we did: we drank, we ate, we talked for hours and hours, Rex and I went to bed and Biba read plays and papers, waited for her agent to call, and every few days went into the West End for auditions, classes, or mysterious informal meetings with casting directors or nebulous people she referred to only as “contacts.” Her acting friends she saw mainly in town: most of them lived centrally and apparently saw Highgate as an unconquerable backwoods, a visit to be attempted only if a fabulous party was being thrown.

So there were no visitors during those weeks. We didn’t need any. Everything we wanted and needed was almost literally within arm’s reach at all times. If we couldn’t find each other in the house we sought each other in the clearing at the edge of the wood and usually found each other there. Every now and then we would see more people in the woods than usual, and idly deduce that it must be a weekend or a bank holiday.

I walked alone in the wood daily, as if by treading their childhood paths I would somehow insinuate myself into the Capels’ pasts as well as their present and future. I loved the wood best after one of the tropical showers that characterized that summer, when the space between the topmost leaves and the ground underfoot was as sultry as any rain forest. For half an hour after the rainfall had ended, I would have the place more or less to myself and the drops would continue to fall from the trees and the shower felt like it was not happening in real time. I began to pick up litter when I saw it, to notice and mind if a bench or tree had a new graffito etched into its wood, and gradually to inherit the sense of ownership that Biba and Rex talked about. I could not conceive a time when I lived anywhere else, or with anyone else. My anger toward Roger Capel grew: he, who had so much and had done his first family so much damage, owed them the legacy of their home.
My
home.

I had intended to return to Brentford at least once a week, but didn’t bother. So what if the mail piled up and the houseplants withered without me? I could sort the mail out once a month and by the time Sarah found the dead plants I wouldn’t care what she said about them. I was never going to live with her again. I had a vague notion that I should fetch the rest of my things, bring my books and my CD player and the rest of my clothes, but I saw no rush.

Rex was happy in servitude to his sister and me. When he wasn’t ensuring our comfort or indulging our whims, he would daydream out loud about what he would do with the house when his father finally signed it over to him. He had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

R
EX HAS GONE FOR another of his evening walks, cap on and collar up, flashlight at his hip like a gun in a holster. There is an area of woodland half a mile away, a forest really, a managed and replanted working forest unlike the nature reserve that was Queen’s Wood. The pine trees are different, for a start, and it’s ten times the size. But Rex seems to be making it his own. He never sees anyone, he says. It will be different in the summertime when the local kids congregate there, but for now they are content to hang around outside the kebab shop and the trees are all Rex’s. Sometimes he goes as far as the coast, other times he stops to explore the building site that will soon be a development of luxury homes between our village and the sea. It is important that he begins to feel a sense of ownership and knowledge of this new corner of England, the one that we hope will be his home for the rest of his life. I remember how I didn’t really truly belong in Highgate until I had explored and mapped Queen’s Wood for myself.

Before he leaves I make him tell me the exact time he will come home again. He has complained that I am treating him like a child but he humors me: so far, he has always returned on or before schedule. And although I worry about him when he is out, I too need this time. It does me good to have an hour or so alone every night, to catch up on the work I can’t concentrate on when he’s tiptoeing around the house, or just to be, in silence, with no one to talk to. I pour my first glass of wine as soon as he is out of the door and it is always empty by the time I hear his key in the lock.

I turn on the computer. For a few seconds it sulks after yesterday’s abrupt shutdown. The screen remains black for a few seconds and the word ANALOG flashes on and off in a sort of primitive, robotic-looking font before the reproach ends and the familiar desktop setup resumes. I look up Alison Larch, wondering if journalists begin their investigations with Google or if they go straight into the mysterious half-official sources and databases they have access to. I don’t need secret records or hidden catalogs but strike lucky on my first hit. Alison Larch has her own Web site, listing all the documentaries she has researched, edited, written, directed, and produced (the differences between all these jobs must mean something to people in her industry). I recognize one or two of the titles, one about plastic surgery in teenagers and another about a co-faith school in Northern Ireland. It’s an interesting career she has, combining hard-hitting news with mass-audience titillation. A click on a button marked “Current Projects” opens a new window. The text tells me that Alison Larch is currently working on a freelance job for Channel Four. That could mean anything. I close the window more unsettled than if I had found out one way or the other. I enter my own telephone number into the search engine but it doesn’t come up. That doesn’t mean much either. Anyone who knew my line of work could track my details down via my agency. I must call them tomorrow and tell them not to give out my numbers or my e-mail. I will tell them I have been receiving nuisance phone calls. It is not really a lie. I check my e-mail, the same one I have had since I was a student. Along with the usual advertisements for penis enlargers and bingo Web sites, there is a reminder about the harvest festival at Alice’s school and a forwarded joke from my dad.

I turn detective on my own family and investigate what Alice and Rex were researching yesterday. A glance at the search history shows they were looking up nothing more sinister than the release dates for the new Harry Potter film. I think about booking tickets, but am loath to sit through any more teenage wizardry. Rex seems to have enjoyed the DVDs Alice has made him watch so far, as I did the first three or four times. Perhaps he’d like to take her to see the next installment on his own.

By the time I hear him scraping his boots outside the front door, I’m on to my second glass. I shut down the computer, properly this time, and pour a large one for him. White, of course.

It was the cool part of the night when the city seemed to exhale, but Rex’s bedroom was still oppressively hot. Even the fingernail-sized flame of the single candle he had lit seemed to send out a furnace of heat. I kicked the covers off, making my body into a starfish in an attempt to cool down, but the air was as warm and sticky as my skin. I looked at his watch on the bedside table: it wasn’t the first time I’d woken up to find him gone, but this time half an hour passed before he came back. By the time he returned the first sunshine had begun to percolate through the windows and bleach out the tiny flame. He carried a jug of cloudy water and two greasy, fingerprinted glasses. You might be able to forget you were in London when you looked out of the window, but you remembered when you saw the chalky, dusty recycled water. We waited for the dregs to settle before we drank.

“Where do you go when you vanish at night?” I asked.

“I watch Biba sleep,” he said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. To check that she’s alive? To check if she’s still there?” His constant checking in the night was not the voyeur’s furtive gaze but the anxious father obsessively checking the baby in the crib. Still I grew impatient with it.

“Why are you so worried about her? She’s not your responsibility, Rex,” I said.

“Oh, but she is. Whatever I do, it’s never going to be enough for her.”

Rex ran a damp hand over my breasts and belly and let his palm rest above my navel. I felt a fresh thrill at the unguessed alchemy of his flesh on mine.

“It’s my fault,” he said, the water clouding as he poured it from jug to glass. “She’s like this because of what happened with our mother, and that’s my fault.”

“What do you mean? Your mum killed
herself
.”

“But I caused it.”

“No one caused it,” I said, in what I hoped were soothing tones. “It was no one’s fault.”

“Yeah, but if you know someone’s not well, and you know that they’re going to do mad things, and you know how to stop them doing those things and you don’t stop them, even worse, if you actually provoke them, then you’re as guilty, because you knew what you were doing. Do you know what I mean?” Rex sat up, and his voice rose and grew shrill like his sister’s.

“I don’t understand,” I said. He glanced around the room as if hoping a third party would come and take over the storytelling.

“Okay. Shit. Shall I tell you?” He addressed this question not to me but to the door, on the other side of which Biba slept. “I think you ought to know, and I think you’ll be okay, and I don’t think it will wreck things for us.” I took his hands in mine and undid the fingers that had balled into tight fists, smoothed his fingers one by one, massaging the flesh between them while he talked. He took a deep breath.

“I was sixteen when she died,” he said. “By then, Mum was too ill to leave the house—I don’t mean physically infirm, she was too depressed, too mad, whatever you want to call it. Biba was twelve, and she wasn’t allowed out in the woods or the heath or anything on her own, or after dark. But Mum didn’t mind sending me running forward and backward to Hampstead, to Dad’s new flat. The fuck-flat, she called it. There was about four years between leaving Mum and meeting Jules and I think he fit a lot of women into them. There isn’t a bus between Hampstead and this part of Highgate, and if you want to get the Tube you’ve got to go all the way to Camden Town so it was quicker to walk. I used to have to go three or four times a week. I reckon I know the heath at least as well as I know this wood. Well, as you know, it’s a good few miles, and it’s hilly. It was a proper hike, hard work. That’s probably why I’m so skinny,” he said, extending a thin, white arm that resembled a knotted sheet. I kissed the inside of his elbow.

“She used to write to him,” he continued. “She spent hours writing letters on that bureau in Nina’s old room. She scented them and sometimes she used to seal them with wax, too. Sealing wax, for fuck’s sake . . . I think she thought it was romantic, like something out of a Victorian novel. It broke my heart, seeing her pour so much hope into those letters, but it made me feel a bit sick as well, if I’m honest. Is that an awful thing to say about your own mother? Especially when I knew I’d have to take it to Dad and more often than not he wouldn’t even be there. I’d get home and she’d be waiting up, asking what he’d said, what his reply was. I used to make stuff up to comfort her. I’d say that he’d said thanks, and that he’d be over to see her soon. That probably did more harm than good.”

“You did the wrong thing for the right reasons,” I interjected.

“I’m glad you see it like that. I wish I could. Anyway, this one day I’d just had enough. It was cold, I’d been playing rugby all day, which I hated, and all I wanted was to come home and curl up in the warm. She was in one of the worst states ever. She was really pissed, and she hadn’t cooked anything, and she had a letter she wanted me to take to Dad. I knew it would be more of the same: how she’d borne his children, and given up her youth, and why he should take her back, and how good it would be if he came back to his family, all that. But I read it anyway, and I wish I hadn’t. It was all about sex. She made all these offers of things she’d do for him if only he came home . . . she told him she’d . . . I can’t even say it. But you can imagine. Just the last things you want to think about your mum doing.”

“Poor baby.” I tugged his hair into little peaks.

“If you can believe it, you’re actually the first person I’ve told since Nina,” he said. “And that was when things started to go wrong between us, so you can understand why I might want to delay it.”

“It won’t change anything,” I said, kissing him to show him that I meant it. When he spoke again, he looked into my eyes.

“She said I was the man of the house now and I had to look after her, and that the best way to do that was to take the letter to Hampstead. I thought, if she wants me to act like a man I bloody well will: I’ll stand up to her. I told her I wasn’t taking her letter anywhere. In fact, I think I told her to shove it up her arse. She went mental, screaming around the house, her husband had left her and now her only son was going to do the same thing. I said I wasn’t leaving her, but I was cold, and I was hungry, and I wasn’t going to go out and take her letter, that he’d never read any of them and that I’d been lying to her. I can still see her face now. I couldn’t have said anything to hurt her more. She said she didn’t believe me but we both knew I was telling the truth. I thought I was being cruel to be kind, that I was forcing her to get dressed and go to Hampstead herself and then she’d see the truth, that he didn’t want her, and that he’d tell her to fuck off, and she’d have to get over it. I thought I’d been too soft on her and made her lazy. The next morning before school, she seemed okay. It was a nice day, freezing cold but really crisp and sunny.”