The Poison Tree (30 page)

The degree results were published on the last Wednesday of August. Although they were sent out by mail the same day, it was expected that students would go to campus to pick them up. Biba didn’t bother to collect her results, claiming that her degree had only ever been a means to the end of getting herself an agent. Fairly confident that my first was in the bag, I stayed away too: I didn’t want to risk running into Caroline Alba. She would want to know why I had not looked at the application forms she had given me or drafted a proposal for my MA, and I could not give her a good reason. I had picked up Rex’s head-in-the-sand attitude, every day relinquishing a little more responsibility for my own future. I was not yet too deep in denial to realize that this was a problem, and resolved to go alone to Brentford to read my delivered results and to use the space and silence I knew I would find there to make my decision. I gave myself a deadline of midnight that night either to commit to a university and a master’s subject or reject the idea altogether.

I had another reason for returning to my old house: a scheduled telephone call from the Continent, my former housemates crowded around a single telephone somewhere in France while I tore open their envelopes. None of the three would get first-class degrees, but they might scrape by with upper seconds, or in Emma’s case a lower second. Their futures were not in any case dependent on the outcome of their degrees.

The car keys were already in my hand when I told Rex not to expect me back that evening.

“Can I come with you?” he said, rounding his eyes. It was a trick he shared with Biba, a parting of upper and lower eyelid without exposing any white: instead, the pupil and iris seemed to expand and blend to fill the whole socket so that you felt you were drowning in hot chocolate. Both of them knew that this expression could be fortified by a semi-ironic projection of the lower lip that I was powerless to resist. Alice too has inherited this ability; it must be innate because neither Rex nor Biba was there to show her how to do it. “I want to know everything about you. I’d like to see how you lived before you lived here.”

“I still do live there, officially,” I said, but he had already gone to fetch his toothbrush.

I had forgotten about my parents until I turned the corner of my street and saw my father’s Ford Focus parked a few doors away from my house. Its two-week holiday in the long-stay parking lot at Terminal 4 had done nothing to take the gleam off its pale blue paint job. I did an emergency stop and threw Rex forward in his seat.

“What was that for?” he said, rubbing the back of his neck where it had rebounded against the headrest.

“Nothing,” I said. I looked in the rearview mirror to check the state of the road behind me. I was actually considering turning back, reversing all the way up the street. I tried to articulate the reason for my reluctance to introduce everybody. Had it been Biba in the passenger seat beside me I would have understood myself; I still wanted her to believe that I was the kindred bohemian spirit she had at first taken me to be, but five minutes in the company of my parents would have shattered any illusions I had managed to create about my background. But I was not with Biba. I was with Rex; undramatic, unassuming Rex, whose devotion I was sure of. Perhaps, I realized in the seconds it took to stall the engine, fire it up again, and wonder which gear to put the car into, my misgivings lay not with them but with him. Rex didn’t have Biba’s ability to flirt with and charm everyone he met. He did not have a job, or any history of employment, skills or trade or income or any of the other assets that my parents and their friends used to measure a person’s worth. He did not even have the education that they had learned to recognize as a substitute for all these things.

A car pulled up behind me and a loud blast from its horn forced me into action. I pulled into the only parking space available, directly opposite the one my parents occupied. We looked at each other through the windshield, Dad recognizing me and my car before he spotted the man sitting in the passenger seat. Rex’s face was obscured by the sunshade.

“Your neighbors seem very pleased to see you,” he said, unfastening his seatbelt. “Can you imagine Tom Wheeler waving and smiling at us like that?”

“They’re not my neighbors,” I said. “They’re my parents.” He goggled at me incredulously. “I’d
completely
forgotten they were going to be here.”

We all faced each other on the pavement, Rex hovering a few paces behind me like a queen’s consort. My mother clutched a bottle of Portuguese wine and a Marks & Spencer freezer bag.

“Mum, Dad, this is Rex. Rex, this is my mum, Linda, and my dad, John.”

I tried to see each through the others’ eyes. Mum looked good: tans age most women but my mother, whose skin is like mine, looks young and refreshed after a fortnight slathering herself in olive oil on a beach. Only her clothes let her down; her eye shadow, dress, and shoes were in an aging and overly formal coordinating shade of pale blue. Dad stood proud in his holiday wardrobe, safari shorts and a yellow polo shirt that contrasted unfortunately with lower arms baked to the color and texture of a chorizo sausage. Rex’s skin shone white and his hair and clothes were in their usual state of happy negligence.

“This is a surprise,” said Mum.

“So pleased to meet you, Mrs. Clarke,” Rex said, shaking Mum’s hand. “I’ve heard so much about you. Mr. Clarke.” He took my dad’s hand, too.

I saw from the flicker of eye contact that passed between my parents that Rex’s accent and manners had had the predictable effect of eclipsing his other shortcomings.

“Let’s get inside.” Rex and I trampled on the mail that littered the porch but Dad stopped to pick it up before handing it all to me. I took the bundle of envelopes that contained four people’s futures and put them to one side. Mum had brought milk with her and it was just as well. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to make tea and coffee for everyone and we would have had to stand awkwardly in the kitchen without cups to stare into.

“How’s that car running, Karen?” said Dad into a silence punctuated by sips and slurps.

“Fine, fine.”

“You taken her out for a good long-distance run lately?” he asked. I shook my head and Dad mirrored the action, embellishing his gesture with a tsk of disapproval.

“You noticed anything, Rex?”

“There’s a bit of a funny sound when she changes gears,” said Rex. I wasn’t used to Rex engaging in blokeish banter and wasn’t sure if the “she” he was referring to was the car or its driver. “Sounds like the exhaust dragging on the ground, but I’ve checked that out and it’s not that.” Had he? Wasn’t it? If Rex was an expert on cars, this was the first I had heard of it.

“I’d better get under her hood, see what’s going on,” said Dad, placing his cup decisively on the counter.

“I’ll come with you,” said Rex.

So my father and my boyfriend went to look at a car while my mother and I stayed in the kitchen. I helped her unpack the groceries she had picked up on the way over from the airport.

“He seems nice,” she said. “Where did you meet him?”

“His sister was at my college,” I said. Mum nodded, pleased enough with this association not to follow it up with an interrogation about Rex’s own qualifications. “She’s an actress,” I added.

“He’s quite artistic-looking, isn’t he? And he’s got a lovely speaking voice. You can tell he’s been well brought up.” The thought of Rex as artistic was as amusing as the idea of him being raised by a happy family was heartbreaking. She held a long string of my hair up to the light and then looked down at my clothes, a pair of cutoff denims and a red gypsy top with a hole in one puffed sleeve. “Your roots need doing, though. He’ll know that you’re not a natural blonde if you let it grow out. And I don’t know what you think you’ve got on. I suppose he likes you like that, though.” I did not point out that Rex already knew that I was not a natural blonde and that even weekly appointments at the hairdresser could not have convinced him otherwise.

Before dinner I opened my results, my hand steady as I sliced into the envelope with a steak knife. It was the predicted First, announced without any kind of congratulations. Most important letters are very short and this was no exception: just a printout of my name, my course, and then, in the middle of the page, the news that I had gained a first-class degree. I took it back to the table and set it before my mother.

“My baby, with a First,” said my mother, radiant with pride, and then just to check, “That’s like an A, isn’t it?”

“Well done, love,” said Dad, raising a glass of wine in my direction. Rex and Mum joined in his silent toast. “We always knew she’d do well,” he told Rex. “We’re very proud of our Karen.”

“So am I,” said Rex, his foot firm against my calf beneath the table.

I can’t remember what we ate that night—some kind of lamb, I think, with a good Vinho Verde—but I do remember that we ate it from clean, matching dishes and silverware. I remember that Rex praised the preprepared food she had brought for us as though she had been cooking from scratch for hours. I remember, too, the way his obvious gratitude warmed her face and thinking how pretty she still was when she smiled. The three of them discussed interiors, house prices, and holiday destinations as though they had known each other for years. By the end of the meal, I felt like the newcomer.

The telephone rang in the gap between the main course and whatever frozen pudding my mother had brought with her. My old friends’ results lay sealed on the top of the pile of mail and I picked them up and carried them to the kitchen table. I had expected to hear three voices and to speak to each of them in turn, but only Sarah was on the other end of the line, her voice crisp and echoing, as though she were calling from a giant underground cellar. Perhaps she was.

“Are the others with you?” I asked her.

“Hm? No, they’re all drinking in the château. I think they’re a bit nervous.” She was speaking in the chirpy, distracted tone she used when she was nervous herself. I cradled the receiver between my neck and shoulder as I tore at the envelopes: 2:1s across the board.

“Above average—well, that’s respectable,” she said. “And you?”

“A First,” I said.

“Well done you.” She was brisk and businesslike. “How’s the house?”

“Oh, you know. Ticking over. When are you coming back?”

Her answer would be the new deadline I gave myself for making a choice about what to do with the rest of my life.

“It’s looking more like early October than late September now. Charlie’s got a job to get back to then, so we might as well wait and all come back together. Apart from that, there’s no rush. I mean, it’s not as if we’ll have a summer like this again, is it?” We exchanged lies about how much we were looking forward to seeing each other again before putting the phone down. It was the last time I ever spoke to her.

I lingered awhile in the doorway before returning. Mellow evening sunshine gilded the dining room and its contents that night. Rex sat with his back to the window, and seeing the light pick out strands of copper and fawn I wondered how anyone could call hair that shade mousy or colorless. He was lit from within, too, by a simple happiness I think he’d been chasing his whole life and finally found in the banal setting of a suburban dining room. He had never looked more beautiful to me than he did that night. In the months immediately after we parted, that was how I chose to remember him, illuminated and animated, not as I last saw him, white and clenched and already becoming a ghost of his own potential.

At ten o’clock my parents, who had traveled from a country only one hour ahead of British Summer Time, claimed to be jet-lagged. They went to sleep in the master bedroom with bathroom that had been Sarah’s and the house finally became mine and Rex’s.

“Did they like me?” he asked, perched on the edge of the sofa.

“They
loved
you. I think they liked you more than they like me.”

“It explains a lot, meeting them,” he said. I tensed. “Where you get your strength and integrity from. That must be what comes of having parents like yours, who are still together and who love you and are proud of you.”

He lit the fat white candles that stood on waist-high, wrought-iron sticks on either side of the mantelpiece and in the corners of the room. Those candles had stood in place from the day we had moved into the house and no one had ever taken a flame to their wicks before. I made a mental note to gather a few of them up and take them back to Highgate where they would burn every night. The flames were reflected in a glass frame on the mantelpiece. It contained a photograph of Sarah, Claire, Emma, and me with our erstwhile boyfriends and portrayed a version of myself I no longer recognized: wholesomely drunk, hair freshly highlighted and neatly bobbed, a pink pashmina scarf slung over my shoulders and diamond studs in my ears. Simon’s arm was tossed around my neck in a chummy headlock. The smile on my face had been genuine enough at the time but the whole tableau now looked like a dress rehearsal for real life. Rex traced the outline of my face in the thin dust that had gathered on the frame.

“Is this him?” he asked. I nodded.

“That’s my old life in that picture,” I said.

“Did you love him more than me?” The jealousy he showed toward his sister was directed my way for the first time.

“Rex! I didn’t love him at all. I’m not sure I ever even liked him. He was just something I did, like tennis.”

His hands were on my cheeks. I let them stay there, one or all of my senses telling me that if I tried to move, he would not allow it.

“You do love me, don’t you?’ ” There is only one acceptable answer to that question and I did not give it then. He told me he loved me, he said it every day, but I had yet to make my own reciprocal declaration. Was what I felt for Rex love? Doubts about the pedantic and neurotic aspects of his character still surfaced whenever there was a long enough gap between our lovemaking. There was attraction and affection, but love—that obsessive, all-encompassing feeling that all the songs are written about—was still a word that described how I felt about Biba. On a good day I convinced myself that it was him I had first recognized in her, but most of the time it was the other way around.