The Poison Tree (32 page)

“I’ll have that if you don’t want it,” he said, and gobbled up half of it in one bite. The sight of the food churning in his open mouth was the nail in the coffin of my relationship with bacon sandwiches. I made an excuse and went upstairs to get away from the sight, sound, and smell of him.

Sandwich demolished, Guy followed me up to the Velvet Room. I folded Rex’s dossier closed as he crumpled onto the sofa next to me and began to work on the business of his day, deftly rolling cigarette papers into a long, thin cone. His work surface was the aerial picture book, open at the page showing Biba’s clifftop. The crease between its pages was already dusted with flecks of tobacco and as I watched, more tiny brown leaves floated from his hands. He took his Zippo from the pocket of his shorts and held it underneath the rough cube of hash, crumbling it into the paper: none of this, I noticed, was wasted. He clamped the long white joint between his lips and sparked his lighter. A burst of flame, and a cloud of smoke immediately surrounded his head. He took two or three drags before easing it from his lips. I watched the smoke curl out of his nostrils before turning my attention back to Rex’s papers.

The sound of Guy’s bovine mouth breathing was an unwelcome distraction and I was relieved when he used his big toe to press the stereo into life. The CD that was in there may not have been to my taste, but the music at least masked aural evidence of his presence.

“I need a grand gesture,” said Guy after half an hour or so, apropos of nothing.

“What?” I looked up from the Land Registry document that I had been trying to decipher, wondering what “adverse possession” of a property was.

“I’m not stupid,” he said. He had gone from comatose to animated and intense, and he used the joint as a baton to underline his point, jabbing the air in front of him. “She’s going off me, and I need to win her back. So I need to make some romantic . . . statement or something to show her what she means to me. Something a bit dramatic. I don’t know with girls like Biba. I’ve never met anyone like her before. You know her better than anyone else. What can I do?” This time when he held out the joint I took it. If I had to converse with Guy it might be more bearable if I was somewhere in the orbit of whatever planet he was on. “I’m miserable like this, man,” he said. In the stoned silence that followed I watched the lights of the graphic equalizer dance up and down in time to the beats, the electric blue bars and orange neon numbers bleached almost to invisibility by the sunbeam that harpooned the room.

“What if I put the speakers out in the garden? Do you think she’d like that?”

It was such a feeble idea that I laughed. “I think it’ll take more than a new sound system, Guy. I’m sorry, I don’t know what you can do.” He wanted reassurance but he would get no encouragement of any kind from me. It was not just that I wanted him gone, but also because I knew it would be cruel to give him false hope. His eyes slowly hooded themselves and he opened them again with apparent effort. His fingers were the only fast thing about him. They worked their swift origami to conjure up another joint in under a minute. The lighter blazed again.

“Can I help out with this thing about her dad and the house that Rex is doing?”

“How do you know about that?”

“You talk as if I wasn’t in the room, you and him,” he said. “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”

The accusation smarted because it was true. In the course of our short conversation my feelings toward Guy had swung violently from irritation to pity to guilt.

“I wouldn’t get involved in that.” I tapped the blue folder and tidied the loose papers away inside it. “It’s all in here. Rex is working on it now. If Roger Capel’s own son can’t persuade him to sign over the house, then I don’t think your rhetoric will win him over.”

“My whatoric?” If, as I suspected, Guy had been expensively educated, then it had been a waste of his parents’ money.

“Doesn’t matter.”

I didn’t think Guy would be in the house long enough for it to matter whose name the property was in, but I bit my tongue. I took another drag of the joint, this time holding the sharp smoke deep in my lungs for a few seconds, savoring the sour taste for as long as I could bear to. When I exhaled I was dismayed to find that he was still talking.

“But let me get this straight. The thing that would make her happier than anything else would be to get this house?”

I tried to say that for Biba the house only represented the love and acknowledgment she craved from her father, but the perfectly formed statement remained trapped inside my head. Coldness in my limbs and tilting in my head told me that I had only seconds to go before losing consciousness. With what dignity I could salvage, I crawled to the orange beanbag, curled up on it, and let Guy’s music and his voice wisp away into silence.

When I woke up again, Rex, not Guy, was reclining on the green sofa, lit by candles rather than daylight. He was watching me indulgently and must have been in the room for a while. Guy’s belongings had been arranged into a tidy pile on the table, and the blue folder was not on the floor where I had let it drop but stacked on its side on top of the bureau.

“Oh God,” I said, stretching out, trying to stand up and finding that I still had sea legs. My mouth was stale. “What time is it? I had a smoke with Guy.”

“So he’s trying to poison my girlfriend as well as my sister, is he?” said Rex, but he looked in good humor.

“How did it go?”

“Well, I think. I mean, I didn’t get any clear promises from him and whenever I tried to get him onto the house he changed the subject. But he’s definitely softening. He said he wants us to get to know his kids—I mean, his little kids.”

“But that’s amazing!” I said. I sat up straight. Rex treated me to one of his rare smiles, all glittering eyes and teeth.

“I think Jules has been working on him, to be honest. But I don’t really care why, if it means we can build some kind of relationship.”

“Biba’s going to be so happy.” I crawled over to his feet and rested my head in his lap. He began to stroke my hair.

“And this is the best part,” he said. “I told him about you. He wants you to come, too.” His grin faded like the flame on a spent candle and the crease between his eyebrows returned. “I don’t trust all this luck in my life all of a sudden. My dad coming back. The way things are going with you. Biba’s career starting to take off. I don’t think I’ve been this happy since before my mum got ill. I didn’t really think I ever would be again and I don’t quite trust it. I never thought I’d say this but I’m actually
pleased
that Guy’s here now, getting under our feet and annoying us. He sort of puts the brakes on things, like a reality check. He stops it all from being too good to be true.”

T
HAT SUNDAY MORNING THE neighborhood looked like an urban Eden. I walked up Queenswood Lane, past Highgate station, and across Archway Road at eight o’clock and there was an unpeopled, unspoiled quality to the tree-surrounded streets.

All the shops apart from the convenience store were shuttered, and the street, usually clogged with three lanes of traffic, was deserted apart from the odd car or bus waiting patiently and alone by the traffic lights. Above me, Southwood Lane was a thin gray ribbon leading up to Highgate village. Below me, Muswell Hill Road rose and fell and rose again, cutting its way through the woods. If you squinted and forgot about the cars it was easy to freeze the vista into a sepia photograph, wide-hatted Edwardians walking to church in groups of four or five. Rex would have made a good Edwardian gentleman, I thought, imagining him in a starched collar, twirling his mustache. Biba would have been an actress and suffragette, bringing disgrace and exhilaration on the family in equal measure. I would probably have been a governess.

I bought milk, newspapers, and a liter of overpriced orange juice. Before returning home I took myself into the woods where I lay on my front on the cool and crunchy forest floor, spreading the papers out in a pool of sunlight and drinking the orange juice from its carton. I thought it again: an urban Eden. Before midnight I would be expelled from my private paradise.

There was a positive charge to the house that day. The air fizzed with our happy secret: we exchanged surreptitious smiles whenever our eyes met and sex had become a twice-daily ritual again, a new playfulness present between us. Since Rex’s meeting with his father, the blue folder had lain untouched on the bureau. We had not yet said anything to Biba, preferring to wait until the invitation to dinner in Hampstead was confirmed.

Guy, too, was in an odd mood. His characteristic moroseness had been replaced by high spirits. His cell phone was busier than ever, ringing and bleeping six or seven times a day. He kept his conversations hushed, but nobody cared to listen anymore. The last couple of days had seen a spell of manic activity as, contrary to my advice, he undertook to install a pair of speakers in the back garden. He had been doing something complex with a length of wire and strips of copper filament, shinning up and down the terrace steps with pliers between his teeth, connecting the battered, ten-year-old CD player to a pair of amplifiers better suited to an outdoor rave than a London back garden.

Whatever the reason behind Guy’s gear change, it wasn’t the hoped-for reunion with Biba. She was absorbed in a new script she would be reading at an audition next week. It was another television production but a contemporary part this time, the role of the next-door neighbor in a comedy about a man who won the lottery and kept it a secret from his wife. This screenplay was not the usual stapled few sheets but an inches-thick wedge of pages bound with a plastic spiral. She carried it with her everywhere and grew distressed if parted from it, like a child with a favorite toy. That afternoon she even eschewed her beloved Sunday tabloids in its favor. The script was balanced on her knees, and she mouthed the words to herself under her breath, occasionally sipping from a glass of red wine.

“How does that go in when you’re drinking?”

“It focuses me, darling,” she said. “Things tend not to come to life until you’re slightly drunk, don’t you find?”

It was too dark to read in the garden, but she took her script and her drink down there when, at nine o’clock, Guy summoned us to the garden to eat the meal that he had provided and to admire his handiwork. Dinner was a stack of boxed pizzas but the wine he had supplied was good and the glasses were clean. The two amplifiers stood like monoliths in the garden. Guy flipped a switch and they came to life with a soft boom. He pointed the remote control at the stereo, balanced precariously on the ledge of the terrace, and the music swelled to the sky. He alone nodded in time to the drums. Rex looked over his shoulder to the house next door. “He’s not going to like this,” he said.

Only seconds later came a violent hammering on the front door that shook the whole house. Biba rolled her eyes.

“My turn to deal with him, I think,” she said, peeling herself away from the mat she was lying on. Her script was discarded facedown on the ground. A blade of grass sprang up through a crack in its spine.

Rex turned to Guy. “Turn it down, will you?” With a sulky shrug, Guy decreased the volume so that we could hear Biba’s footsteps filter through the open windows. There was the usual creak and thud as the front door swung open and hit the wall. Instead of the patient but sarcastic exchange with Wheeler that we were expecting, we heard Biba’s yelp of surprise and a high-pitched, astonished “Daddy!” Her childlike greeting was followed by an adult, animalistic roar of rage. It was only a few strides and one staircase up to the Black and White Hall but Rex and I covered the distance so quickly that it left us both slightly breathless. Guy followed us at his own leisurely pace and slouched in shadow behind us. In the middle of the hall, a red-faced Roger Capel stood opposite his daughter, knuckles on hips, a scrolled document in his left fist. He stood directly underneath a glass lampshade, its base filled with the bodies of moths and flies. The shadows of the dead insects dappled his skin and the rolled-up paper.

“What the hell is this?” he was shouting over and over again. “What the
bloody hell
is this?” Rex recognized the document in his father’s hand seconds before I did and he made a whimpering sound inaudible to anyone but me. “I’ve never been so insulted in my life. I had to come over to check it was actually true. What did you expect to achieve by this?”

The five of us stood as still as chess pieces on the checkered floor, as though waiting for a giant hand to come and direct our next move. Rex and I had not planned for this ambush.

Capel had not been in his former family home for over ten years, I realized. In the silence that followed his tirade I tried to see the place through his eyes. A tide of old newspapers lapped at the edges of the room and the pile of empties that had never been taken to the bottle bank was waist-high. A cigarette had been ground out on the ceramic floor as though it were a bus stop pavement. Clothes that had been thrown at hooks and hat stands lay where they had fallen. He looked at Guy and me as though we were just more debris. He ran one hand over his bald head and rested it on the nape of his neck, a gesture I had seen Rex perform dozens of times. I watched the flesh of his face darken to the color of the Merlot we had been drinking all night and I realized that Roger Capel was silent not because he was growing calmer but because he was paralyzed with mounting anger.

“What the hell’s been going
on
here?” He addressed the question to his children.

“Daddy, please,” said Biba. “I don’t understand. Why are you shouting? What’s happened?”

“I’ve just come back from a weekend in the country with my family to find
this
on my doormat.” He handed her the letter and folded his arms. While she read, Capel’s eyes darted from Rex to me to Guy and back to Rex again, never allowing us a few seconds’ respite to make vital eye contact with one another.