The Poison Tree (31 page)

“Let me show you.” I reached for the buckle of his belt. In the bed I had once shared with Simon we didn’t speak and barely moved, rocking our way to a silent climax. Sex with Rex was a doubt-canceling panacea whose effectiveness increased the less he spoke. He fell asleep on my breast, his breath slowing and deepening to a rhythmic growl that I found comforting in the aftermath. At the other end of the corridor, separated from us by two closed doors, my mother was listening to my father snore, too. My last thought before I went to sleep was to wonder what Biba’s results had been, and what she was doing now.

What Biba had in fact been doing during our twenty-four-hour absence was getting her first acting job. The role was small but the production was a lavish BBC drama about the life of Charles II. It was ironic that she had spent the last few weeks pursuing grimy modern reality with Guy to contemporize her craft only to land a role in a costume drama about the Restoration that would draw on her classical training.

“The whole thing begins with a montage before the narrative kicks in where he’s basically fucking his way through the court,” she said. “It’s meant to illustrate what a randy old goat he was. So they have five-second clips of the king shagging the queen, and then all his mistresses, from Nell Gwyn to servant girls to ladies-in-waiting. And me. Get this. I play a
nun
.”

Rex scowled. “Do you have to take your clothes off?” he asked.

“Nope. I just flip up my habit so you see my legs but that’s it,” she said. “I mean, it’s only a tiny part. But the point is, it’s BBC and it’s a big-name director who seems to like me, and my agent’s really pleased.” A sudden frown pulled her features down. “I hope that it’s not too blink-and-you-miss-it, though. And I hope they don’t cover my face with one of those winged hat things.”

“You mean a wimple? Why?” I asked.

“I want my dad to know it’s me when he sees it.”

The job took ten days. Biba was right about having a rapport with the director. As well as the sex scene, which took just a morning to film, she was given a handful of lines throughout the series and was also required to appear in the background in several scenes, a significant face among dozens of nameless extras. Filming took place in the studios at Elstree and once on location at Hampton Court. A car came to pick her up every morning before the rush hour and dropped her home again after the shoot. Rex and I would always be waiting for her when she came home, eager to hear all about her day. Guy would eat with us, offering around a joint that nobody seemed to want anymore. He had sensed that Biba was drawing away from him and made repeated, wretched attempts to draw her back into his world.

“I took a call from Chris this afternoon,” he said over dinner. He had brought a curry from one of the Indian takeouts on Archway Road. Most of it remained untouched in foil containers. He alone seemed to be enjoying it, the marijuana giving him an appetite for gristly chunks of lamb bobbing like turds in a septic tank of fluorescent orange oil. An unidentifiable herb nestled between his front teeth and yellow grease infused with turmeric jaundiced the corners of his mouth. “He’s working the door at Bagley’s tonight. He can get us all on the guest list.” It was a mark of his desperation that he included me and Rex in this invitation. We turned to Biba for our cues.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m shooting tomorrow. I need an early night.”

“You never want to come out anymore.”

“Darling, I can’t keep up that party lifestyle forever,” said Biba with a wave of her hand. She had adopted a rather camp, jaded, and world-weary persona in the last few days and I wondered which veteran actress she had picked it up from. “You go, you have fun.” Guy didn’t extend the invitation to Rex and me again but went out alone.

When the shoot was over Biba slumped into a kind of depression.

“It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “You’re thrown together with other actors and crew and you form this bond so quickly, you become like family, and I know I’ll never see them again. It’s such a cruel industry.” She was too ecstatic at being employed by the industry to experience real heartbreak. Actually, the actor’s itinerant lifestyle would have been perfect for Biba, with her ability to dip in and out of intimacy.

“Don’t they have a big blowout when the shooting’s finished?” I said, dredging this knowledge from somewhere. “Wrap parties?”

She brightened. “You’re right! So I’ll see everyone again then.”

But she didn’t.

I
T WAS APPARENT TO everyone but Guy that his days at the house were numbered. He was no longer a threat or a menace to Rex and me, because Biba barely registered his presence. Occasionally she would notice him sitting at the table or on a sofa and blink, as though surprised to find him still there. There was no evidence of the fierce physical attraction that had made me so uncomfortable just a month or so before, although he still slept in her bed every night. She was in no hurry to get rid of him but she would not have begged him to stay. So why did he?

I understood one Saturday afternoon. Biba had spent the afternoon watching television, weeping and wailing along to the coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. I had thought at first that she had been grieving her own mother too, but half of London seemed to be overwhelmed by disproportionate sorrow. She had cried herself out and fallen asleep on the green sofa. The sun had traveled through the open doors and made a trapezium of white light on her bare belly. Guy stood over her, a bottle of maximum-strength sun lotion in his hand, and rubbed it into her exposed skin with a tenderness that did not wake her. I knew then that Guy loved Biba, perhaps as much as Rex and I did. He was hanging around the house not out of inertia but out of hope. His task completed, he sat at her feet and surveyed her with a kind of adoring misery that almost made me feel sorry for him. We had not taken his feelings seriously, and it was our fatal mistake. If only he had taken the hint and left then. We would all still be living in that house in the woods. Me, Biba, Rex—and Alice.

Rex’s campaign to take possession of the house accelerated in the last weeks of August. He was buoyed by Biba’s budding career and by the aggressively held belief that, in getting his sister to the age of twenty-one in one piece, he deserved the reward of his own home.

“Don’t tell her what I’m up to,” he said. “I want to protect her until I know where we stand.” He began to take the first tentative steps in finding out what his rights were, a route that would inevitably lead to confrontation rather than reconciliation. Whether he was successful or not, the close relationship both children craved with their father was not the likely outcome. No wonder he had deferred the task for so long. Rex could not afford to hire a lawyer so he did his own research. He took himself to Highgate Library on Shepherd’s Hill and taught himself to use the Internet. What he uncovered was not encouraging. He came home every day with printouts not from law firms but from housing agencies, and one afternoon I overheard him make a telephone call to the Citizens Advice Bureau asking about squatters’ rights. Squatters! He and his sister were not even tenants in their father’s house. At the stationers in Muswell Hill he bought a spiral notepad to set out his case and a foolscap file for the loose documents. In the evenings, while I found excuses not to look at letters offering me academic opportunities on the other side of the world, Rex studied his papers. He gazed at them as though the answer were there, encoded in ink and paper, not in a big house across the heath behind an impenetrable gate.

Sitting at the old red bureau where his mother had written so much of her wretched and futile correspondence, Rex began to draft letters to his father. His pen pressed through the paper onto the desk and made indentations on its leather surface, Rex’s elegant and spiky letters upon the palimpsest of his mother’s desperate scrawls. If I had been a superstitious person I would have said that this was a bad omen. Biba, had she known what her brother was doing, would certainly have interpreted it this way. But I was not superstitious or dramatic, and I did not point out the parallel. Instead, I stood close behind him and watched him write. Some of the letters were formal, with Rex’s address and Roger Capel’s laid out at the top as though for business correspondence. Some did not even bother with the formality of “Dear Dad.” Many didn’t get further than a sentence or two, tentative lines like “I am writing because . . .” or “I just felt the need to say that . . .” fading into the white nothing of the page. Some drafts were conciliatory to the point of apology; some were formal and procedural; others were emotional and rambling, memoirs rather than persuasive prose. Some letters begged. Others threatened.

“I’m trying to work out whether to win him with honey or vinegar,” said Rex, laying his ballpoint crosswise against a blank page. I picked one at random from the pile. It began formally enough but soon degenerated into rambling invective. It called its addressee a selfish cunt and threatened legal action if he didn’t sign over the property to Rex immediately. One line stood out, the letters controlled, deliberate, separate. “You owe us this much. Your leaving helped to kill Mum.”

“Well, this one’s certainly vinegar,” I said. Rex took the page from me, scanned it, and winced before folding it in half.

“Oh God, I never intended to send that one, I was just letting off a bit of steam. I meant to just make a list of the legal stuff but I got a bit carried away. It’s a bit strong, isn’t it? Can you imagine if I sent it? Although I felt better after I’d written it. Maybe getting all that pent-up anger down on paper means I won’t blurt it all out if I see him face-to-face. But I don’t seem to be getting any nearer to the one I
should
send.” My arms were around his neck now, enjoying the scratch of his unshaven cheek against my smooth one. He gave my cheek an absentminded prod with his tongue.

“Is a letter really the answer?” I asked. “Why don’t you call him? Have you got his number?” Rex recited the seven-digit London number in a flat voice, and then said, “He’ll be busy, though.”

“He might not,” I said. “Call him now, while Biba’s out and Guy’s asleep. Quickly, before you have time to think about it.”

Rex trundled out of the room, hands in pockets, and made his way slowly down the stairs. I shuffled the remaining letters into a neat pile and settled down to read them. He was back before I had had time to skim the first.

“He was out?” I presumed.

Rex’s face was scrunched in bemusement. He ran his hand through his quiff and down to the nape of his neck where it stayed. “No, he was in.”

“Oh, darling. He didn’t hang up on you?”

“No.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Something rather odd. He wants to meet me for a drink.”

“But that’s brilliant!” I said. “When?”

“Now. Well, in a couple of hours. As soon as I can get to Hampstead.” His smile was diffident. “I’ve never been for a drink with my dad before. Actually, I haven’t been on my own with him since I was about ten. He wants me to come without Biba.” I replayed the image of her lowering the rake down onto the car.

“That could be for the best,” I said. He opened the folder and pulled out a few highlighted pages of legal precedent, then threw them back on the bureau.

“What am I even doing, thinking of taking this with me? I know it all by heart anyway. He’s asked to see me, I’d be mad to confront him. He might be ready to come around. This could be it, Karen. Maybe it’s actually going to be all right. I’m going to this empty-handed and with only an open mind.”

I could taste the expectation in his kiss good-bye.

“I’m doing this for you as much as me and Biba,” he said.

“I know, darling,” I said. “I appreciate it. Good luck.”

I watched him go. He looked taller than usual and as though something was missing. In his shirtsleeves he looked
too
empty-handed, as though he had decided to jettison his burden of responsibility in favor of the light and untrustworthy onus of hope.

Guy surfaced, shirtless and yawning, in the early afternoon, when I was cooking myself a bacon sandwich in the kitchen. Unshowered and with unbrushed teeth, he wore a pair of soccer shorts and sleep cobwebbed the corners of his eyes. He had given up all pretense of hope and swagger and had begun to look rather miserable.

“All right?” he said. It was not the kind of greeting that invited a reply but I gave one anyway.

“I’m not bad, Guy,” I said. “How are you?”

“I feel like shit,” he said, peering into the pan. “Did you know that burning human flesh and cooking bacon smell exactly the same? A fireman told me that. That’s why firemen hardly ever eat bacon sandwiches.”

“Thanks for that.” I put the meat between two slices of thick white bread and pressed the bread knife diagonally along the sandwich, watching ketchup bleed from the crusts. I held it to my lips for a few seconds, unable to get Guy’s unlovely nugget of trivia out of my head. Eventually I put it back on the plate.