The Poison Tree (26 page)

“I wouldn’t usually say this, but your first is a foregone conclusion,” she said, smiling, flicking through papers and pamphlets.

“Do you know something I don’t?”

“No. But your existing marks are the strongest I’ve ever seen. You’re a very bright young woman. It’s lovely to be able to say this to a student, Karen: you can pursue whichever career path appeals most. What do you want to do?” Her eager face searched for similar enthusiasm in mine, but there was no point in lying.

“This sounds incredibly feeble,” I said. “But I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I haven’t got a vocation or anything. I love what I’ve done here, but I have no real ambition beyond that.”

“I don’t think I could phrase better the exact mind-set you need to remain in academia,” she said. Her earrings swung back and forth as she nodded her way down a list in front of her. They looked like Nina’s designs and I wondered whether Caroline had ever been shopping in Camden market. “It’s obvious that a master’s is the natural step for you and a doctorate after that. Then perhaps you can think about a position at one of the great universities. You do know that you’ll never be wealthy that way—that you could probably earn more as a freelance translator?”

I nodded.

“Well, you can do that on the side—I still do.”

“Do I have to decide now?”

“I think you ought to apply for these,” she said, pulling out five or six forms. I recognized the Uppsala insignia on the uppermost sheet. “In your case I feel we can begin the process before results are published.”

“What about staying here?” I asked. “Would the department be able to accommodate me as a master’s student?”

Caroline Alba blinked at me. “I do think you ought to look closely at the caliber of institutions that have expressed an interest in you, Karen. QCC is of course well respected, but the resources and sway on offer at some of these departments far outstrip anything we can give you.”

“Is that a no, then?” I asked.

“No, it’s not a no . . . I suppose we should be flattered that you’d like to stay. Okay. There are some private companies that might support someone with your talents at this level and I’d encourage you to pursue these scholarships.” From a file on her desk she pulled out another selection of papers and added them to the pile on her lap. “A living wage, especially in London, is virtually impossible without sponsorship. Naturally, publishing’s the holy grail but . . .” She gestured toward her own doctoral thesis, hard-bound in leather by the University of London’s in-house bindery but yet to be picked up by a publishing company. I thanked Caroline for her time, promising to return the forms before the week was out.

“We haven’t discussed areas you might specialize in for your MA,” she said as I stood up to leave. “Perhaps you could think of three or four aspects of linguistics you’d like to explore and we can examine them next week.”

I had decided against the foreign universities before I got to the elevator. I think I had already made up my mind that I would try to stay at Queen Charlotte’s. The silent summer corridors full of lecturers and professors in hushed, unhurried study appealed to me much as the same passageways intimidated me when filled with the clatter and chatter of students. If I could get the funding—and think of a field that would sustain my interest for the next few years—then there would be nothing to disrupt the life I wanted to live. But the disruption had already taken place during my two-day absence.

I drove home brimming with hope and lust, looking forward to dinner with Biba and bed with Rex, but the forlorn figure on the doorstep told me that both those things would have to wait. Rex crouched on the middle step, a glass of red in his hand and a nearly empty bottle by his side. Although we drank together every night, this was the first time I had seen him drunk. His mouth bore the unmistakable kiss of red wine and his face was contorted with angst.

“Where were you?” he asked. He didn’t put his arms out to me and I remained at the foot of the steps.

“What’s happened?” I said.

“It’s all gone wrong,” he said. “Why did you have to go? I couldn’t stop them.”

I pushed past him into the house and followed the dance music that blared from the Velvet Room. The furniture had been rearranged so that for a disorienting moment it felt like I was approaching the room from the wrong angle. The coffee table was up against the wall, the beanbag was in its place, and someone had pushed the green sofa over to the terrace. Biba lazed on it, her feet in the evening sunshine but the rest of her body in shadow. She was wearing my red string bikini, the straps tied too tight and the triangles puckered and gaping on her small frame. When she saw me she greeted me with a slurred, “Darling!”

The leather Chesterfield had also been pushed toward the French windows. Facedown on it lay a tanned man wearing a pair of gray tracksuit pants rolled up into shorts. The soles of his bare feet were black with dirt. When he heard Biba’s greeting, his blond head turned in my direction. Bloodshot eyes held mine for a couple of disinterested seconds.

“All right?” said Guy.

“
A
PPARENTLY SHE’S BEEN SEEING him behind my back for
weeks
,” said Rex. “She says they bumped into each other on the Tube and he apologized and she forgave him—just like that! She thinks it was a coincidence that they met.”

“Maybe it was,” I said.

“Bullshit. I wouldn’t put it past him to follow her around until he saw his opportunity.” I remembered the figure lurking in the woods but it was too late to say I’d seen him now. “What can I do? What can I do about it?” He ran his fingers from his temples to the back of his head in an obsessive and repetitive gesture.

“Personally, I think we should just let it run its course,” I said to him. “You know what she’s like. The more you tell her Guy’s a bad influence, the more attractive he’ll become to her. That’s why she didn’t tell you she was seeing him. The novelty will probably wear off now that it’s not a big exciting secret anymore.” It sounded like bogus psychology to me even as I said it, and it didn’t wash with Rex.

“She lied so convincingly,” he said. “Telling me she was off having coffee with Rachael and all the time she was meeting up with him.” He poured the remainder of the bottle into his glass. His lips and tongue were mottled with red wine and his teeth had a dark blue tinge to them. I wondered if this bottle was even his first of the evening. I took the glass from his hand and drained it.

“We can’t very well get after her for having a secret relationship,” I said.

“That was completely different. For a start, I didn’t fill you full of drugs, rape you, and leave you for dead the first time I got off with you.”

“He didn’t leave her in the woods,” I said. “And I think
rape
’s a bit strong . . .” Remembering the car journey from the theater to the house when Biba had told me in a whisper that she couldn’t wait to sleep with Guy, I was sure there had been no coercion.

“That doesn’t change the fact that he just took off,” he said. “And it’s still completely different from you and me. He’s only screwing her. He’s not in love with her.”

Rex’s panic stemmed from a sense of impotence. He was powerless to get rid of the man he saw as a threat to his sister and even to his home. But he had challenged her in the strongest terms he dared. Knowing this, it was easy to predict his next question.

“Will you talk to her?” he asked. “She’ll listen to you.”

It would be a while before I would have the chance. The house now had four residents, not three, and the dynamic shifted from that night on. I had moved in with a bang and a fanfare, a big decision and announcement that made the real event—a bagful of possessions tossed casually into the car—an anticlimax. Guy’s residency was achieved in the opposite way. It was never announced or discussed, either because Biba was too smart for that or because it really was a genuinely spontaneous and organic process. He had told us that he came from Ladbroke Grove, and we knew he disappeared for a few hours every couple of days. On the rare occasions he mentioned his West London apartment, he implied that it was little more than a squat, a crack house peopled with gangsters and drug dealers. Details were beneath Guy: he never let on exactly which complex the apartment was in, or who else lived there. He remained as vague and noncommittal as on the first evening he’d spent with us.

The silence was the first thing to go. The peace that Rex and I so treasured was usurped by the constant thud of trance and techno. He moved the speakers from the stereo so that they were out on the terrace, and produced and installed a MIDI system for Biba’s room so that he had access to amplified beats wherever he was. Guy’s music followed Rex and me down into the basement kitchen and up into my attic bedroom. For someone who spent almost all his time in Biba’s bedroom, Guy managed to fill every room in the house with his possessions: you’d find a pair of sneakers in the bathroom, a music magazine in the living room, a record bag in the hallway, a jacket slung over the back of a chair, and always a flat black cell phone in the last room he had occupied. Cell phones were becoming commonplace then for the people I still regarded as “the grown-ups,” employed people with deals to broker and money to make, but among students and the very young they were still a rarity. Guy was the first person I ever knew to have one. He carried it with him at all times. It was laughably crude compared with the ones we use today, a prototype really, but still a piece of space-age technology as far as Rex and I were concerned. Guy never used it to dial out—that he did from the house telephone—but on the rare occasions he received an incoming call, he made a big show of extending the antenna, thumbing a button, and then leaving the room to “conduct his business” away from prying ears. The garden was his favorite makeshift office. From the drawing room terrace I often watched him pacing back and forth through the waist-high grass, his hand clamped to his ear. He would have had more privacy on the other side of the fence, but as far as I know his first unfortunate excursion into the trees was the only time he went into our part of the wood.

We came back from Highgate village one day to find the white pit bull terrier tethered to the front gatepost, its domain extending from doorstep to curb. A family crossed the road to avoid it, and we were too afraid to try to run past it and had to enter the house the back way, through the woods.

“This is the last straw,” said Rex as I splintered a finger squeezing through the back fence. My fingertip glowed red and blood oozed from the tiny cut. “I’m going to go upstairs and have it out with him.” But by the time he had teased the splinter from my flesh, only Biba was left in the house.

“It was only for today,” said Biba importantly. “He needed the dog for protection.”

“If he brings anyone or anything dodgy to my house, I’m calling the police,” said Rex. “I mean it, I will.” Later that evening I found him on his hands and knees, scrubbing dog shit off the doorstep. When he was finished, he tipped his bucket out. Soapy water cascaded down the steps, and the pavement smelled of floral disinfectant for days afterward.

When he wasn’t brokering nebulous business deals or baby-sitting animals that contravened the Dangerous Dogs Act, Guy’s favorite pastime was to get very stoned and leaf through a picture book, an album of aerial photography of Great Britain that he had found somewhere in the house. Every now and then he would turn a page, stare at the photograph in silent contemplation for a few minutes before nodding and saying something like “Mad,” or “Headfuck.” The pictures were able to hold his attention for so long that he was making his way through the book at the rate of three or four pages a day. The photograph currently mesmerizing him depicted Beachy Head in Sussex, a white slice of grass-topped cliff overlooking a red-and-white-striped lighthouse. He mumbled aloud the caption that explained that as well as being a beauty spot it was also one of the country’s prime locations for suicide attempts. This immediately piqued Biba’s interest, and she scrambled from her position at his feet to sit at his side.

“Well, if you were going to kill yourself, you’d do it somewhere like that, wouldn’t you?” she said. “I’d wear my best dress and float elegantly to my death. It’s by far the most glamorous way to go.”

I knew that Rex was out but quickly scanned the room to confirm his absence. My face must have been bunched in consternation because Biba laughed and said, “Oh, come on, Karen. We’ve all secretly planned our own suicides, haven’t we?”

“No!” I said, meaning it, although months later her words would echo off the mountains in Switzerland when I would find myself on a high bridge above a tempting icy snake of river. I heard the front door open. “Rex is coming back,” I said. “Please stop talking like that.”

“God, okay,” she said, rolling her eyes. She flipped the page over to reveal a photograph of Stonehenge in the summertime.