The Poison Tree (34 page)

“Come with us,” I said. “
Please
. I can’t leave you.”

He shook his head. Biba was the first to move. She sprang up from her position on the floor and extended her hand, dragging me toward the stairs that led down to the kitchen. I made a weak, whimpering protest but she was silent, lips drawn into a pout the way they did when she was concentrating hard. Her movements were swift but controlled, as though she were rushing to catch a train rather than running for her life. She stopped in the garden to pick up her script before helping me to pull the loose plank to one side. I followed her through the gap and into the woods.

D
AWN HAS MADE GOOD on her threat to welcome Rex to Suffolk. I didn’t want to go, and I wasn’t going to, but Sophie told Alice that a parallel party was being arranged upstairs for them and some other girls from their class, and the whole thing was presented to me as a fait accompli.

“What shall I wear?” says Rex, standing in front of the wardrobe that he is still unfamiliar with. When I knew that he was being released, I went into Ipswich and bought him all the clothes I thought he would ever need. I felt like a pregnant woman shopping for her soon-to-be-born child, imagining the activities that would go with each outfit, from the Barbour jacket I bought him for walks along the beach to the tracksuit for wearing after swimming. When I bought the suit I’m holding up for him now, I was thinking more about job interviews than dinner parties, but it will be appropriate.

“It feels a bit formal,” he says, opening the jacket to inspect the silver silk lining. I remember another suit that he wore, a slim-fitting secondhand two-piece that he teamed with a T-shirt, and try to suppress the memory of the night he wore it.

“Isn’t this a bit much for just going over to someone’s house?”

“You don’t know Dawn Saunders,” I reply. I tease open the top button of his gray shirt before selecting my own clothes, pulling on sheer black tights and slipping a simple black shift over the top. I wonder if he, too, is comparing the clothes I am wearing now with the ones I wore that summer. What would we have said then if we were to see the selves we have now become? Rex would probably have said that we looked great. I would probably have asked where Biba was.

“What?” I say. There is something about the intensity of his gaze that is making me feel shy.

“You look beautiful,” he says. “In a really grown-up way.”

“I look old, you mean?” I tease him. He holds out his hand in a parody of a gentleman asking a lady to dance. I take it and he pulls me in for a kiss.

“You’ll always be twenty-one to me,” he says.

Dawn opens the door in a red dress. Her makeup creates a mask from her hairline to her cleavage: some kind of glitter nestles in the crepe between her breasts. She looks at the spikes of my heels and, from a console table just behind the front door, produces two little plastic moldings that she drops into my hands.

“They’re covers for your heels,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind wearing them, only marble floors are so terribly expensive.” I bend down, click the little coverlets into place, and test out the click-clack of my feet on the smooth floor. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she says, air-kissing us both, and then to Alice, “My goodness, don’t you look like your daddy?”

“Yeah,” says Alice rudely, and then she is up the stairs and into Sophie’s bedroom without a kiss or even a glance good-bye. The house is large enough and the doors solid enough that the girls’ music and squealing is inaudible from downstairs.

“Come through, come through,” says Dawn. I can see that Rex is intrigued by the house despite himself: even if the interior, with its ruffled silk Venetian blinds, marble floors, and leather furniture is not to everyone’s taste, it is hard not to be impressed by the dimensions of the rooms and the money spent in each one. I hope that he doesn’t look down. The tiles on the floor are of the same design as the black and white hall in his old house in Highgate, although naturally here they are smooth and polished and not a single tessellation is out of place.

Dawn herself is serving canapés on a silver platter. In the room she calls the drawing room, two other couples I recognize from the school gates, also crackling in formal clothes, are holding glasses of wine and balancing little towers of blini and sausage rolls in their hands. It is almost impossible to find somewhere to put the tiny doilies and napkins Dawn has provided. The room is scattered with occasional and coffee tables in matching green cut-glass, but their surfaces are forbiddingly covered in art books, arranged in little pyramids. Perhaps that is deliberate, as Dawn’s husband Andrew is keen that we should keep refilling our glasses. He declares himself sommelier, pronouncing it to rhyme with
camellia
, asking us whether we’d like to drink red or white. He even has a white napkin draped over his arm.

We all make small talk while Dawn disappears into the kitchen. Minutes later, she reemerges in an apron that is suspiciously clean apart from a single, rather ostentatious, berry-colored handprint. It looks like blood.

“Andrew,” she says, and her husband jumps to his feet at the one-word command.

“Dinner is served,” he says, opening a set of double doors that lead into the dining room. “Please take your seats.”

The long table is broken up by three fresh flower arrangements, and place cards dictate where we sit. Rex is opposite and one across from me. He sits underneath a huge reproduction Jack Vettriano painting, the kind where the print has been painted over with a sealant, brushstrokes giving it an air of authenticity. I study the painting again. Actually, knowing Dawn, it could well be an original. Tall flames lick the fireplace behind Rex, even though the central heating is on and it is not a cold night. His cheeks remain pale, but the poor women sitting on either side of him are sweltering in their satin and nylon, their faces already a mess of melting makeup and flushed cheeks.

Rex is the best-looking man here by far. He is only two or three years younger than most of Alice’s school friends’ fathers, but while they are starting to skate into middle age, he is only just beginning to grow into his beaky, awkward features.

Dawn brings course after rich course to the table, and Andrew bobs up to refill our glasses every time she totters in with another dish. Rex and I will have to walk home tonight. Once we would have driven drunk but the idea would horrify both of us now.

“My compliments to the chef,” says Rex, raising a glass to Dawn.

“Well, I like to make an effort, seeing as I don’t work,” she says, bestowing a pitying glance on the other women around the table, workers all of us. “And I do think it’s nice for people to go to a dinner party and not be served yet more Nigella or Jamie, don’t you?”

Later, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom just as Rex is on his way back from it and pass him in the hall.

“Are you all right in there?” I ask him.

“She’s nice.”

“She’s a complete nouveau,” I say, as though I came from old money myself.

“Actually, she reminds me of someone,” says Rex. I know exactly who he means and stuff my fist into my mouth. He may have only met my mother once, but he understood her immediately.

“Don’t say it,” I tell him, but he has evoked her presence and I know that, given the budget, she would have created an almost identical temple of tastelessness for her own family. It actually makes me glad that I grew up without wealth.

The lapel of Rex’s suit is beginning to curl upward and I smooth it down with a flat hand.

“She’s had the party catered,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I opened the wrong door when I was looking for the bathroom and ended up in a utility room,” he says. “There are loads of restaurant bags and foil containers and a list of when everything needs to go into the oven. Or the microwave. She hasn’t made any of this herself.”

“Sad cow,” I say, borrowing one of Alice’s phrases, but the exposure of Dawn’s tiny fraud makes me feel more secure about our own, more dreadful secret. And I need that extra confidence because when I return from the bathroom, my hands slimy with the expensive lotion Dawn keeps next to the liquid soap, the conversation has veered away from food and toward work. Rex, it appears, has reinvented himself as some kind of journeyman computer expert during my short absence.

“And what is it you were doing abroad, Rex?” Andrew is saying as I slide into my seat. Rex looks wildly at me and for an awful moment I think he has forgotten he was ever supposed to be abroad, that he’s going to tell the truth, and as he lets his mouth fall open I scramble for a subtle way to prompt him. The woman on my right breaks the top of her crème brûlée with the back of her spoon. In the silence the crack resonates like a twig snapping underfoot, and seems to help Rex recover his composure.

“Systems,” he says, cupping the bowl of his wineglass in his hand. “Nothing at all exciting, I’m afraid.”

“What would that be, contract work?” says Andrew.

“Mainly,” says Rex.

“Anything lined up at the moment?”

“I’m just reacclimatizing right now,” he says. “Just taking time to be with Karen and Alice again.”

“I might have something for you,” says Andrew thoughtfully. He jumps up from the table and returns carrying not another bottle but a business card. “E-mail your CV to me during the week and we’ll see what we can do, eh?” I don’t doubt Andrew’s sincerity, but there is a note of patronage in his voice that Dawn uses when she is talking to me. He is enjoying playing liege to Rex’s lief.

“Thanks, Andrew,” says Rex. “I’ll do that.”

He won’t, of course. His CV is a one-line summary of the diploma in computing he achieved during his time in prison. There is nobody to give him a reference, he has never been in a modern office, let alone worked in one, and besides, there is the lurking specter of a Criminal Records Bureau check that would accompany certain job offers.

To change the subject I tell the story of Dave’s arrest, naturally leaving out the part where I crouched on all fours in my bedroom fearing for my own liberty.

“You know why, don’t you?” says Andrew. “They’re running weeks behind schedule. They’re using any old unskilled labor just to make their deadline. The Poles
must
be desperate to start hiring the English.” He laughs at his own joke.

“They’ve started working on it at night,” I say. “The floodlights shine right into Alice’s bedroom. They keep her awake.”

“That building site’s a disgrace,” says Dawn. “We drove past it the other day, didn’t we, Andrew? There were kids climbing all over it. There’s no security, nothing. They’ve got these gaping holes in the ground, twenty feet deep, full of wet concrete, nothing to stop children falling in. Makes you shudder to think.” And she gives a theatrical shiver.

“That’s what you get with foreign labor,” says Andrew authoritatively, and as the conversation turns to the perceived scourge of immigration on the Suffolk coast, the heat in the dining room becomes unbearable. I am glad when the coffee is served, in gold-rimmed china.

Alice begs to stay with Sophie for the night, so at least Rex and I can walk home unburdened by a tired nine-year-old. I open the car door, not to drive but to retrieve my walking boots from the floor of the passenger seat. Ever since I was a student, I have always had at least one spare pair of shoes in the car. It is a habit I began when I would regularly go out straight after tennis, and after everything happened it became a kind of superstition, as though I had to be ready to take to my heels at a moment’s notice. The boots look ridiculous, brown clumpy boxes at the ends of my nyloned legs, but I don’t mind.

The cold snap of night air is a relief after that fire, and our flashlight cuts a swath through the navy blue night. Rex upturns the beam to make a searchlight in the sky before focusing on the road in front of us again.

“It’s funny, before I came out here, I thought that you didn’t need a flashlight in the country,” he says. His voice is thick with wine. “I thought everything would be lit by moonlight.” He extinguishes the light for a second or two. “But this is absolute darkness, isn’t it? It never got this dark in the woods, never.”

“That’s not quite true. You do learn to see in the dark after a while.” To prove my point, I turn the flashlight off when we come to the hamlet between Dawn’s house and ours, where a trio of streetlights illuminate the crossroads. By the time we are out of range of their orange glow, our eyes have adapted to the dark. The tall banks of gorse and bramble that line the lane are just distinguishable from the grays of the road and the sky.

I ask Rex to walk behind me, joking that if a car swoops out of nowhere I want him to take the hit first. That’s not the real reason, though. The euphoria I felt when the police disappeared with Dave has vanished and the familiar fear has returned. I imagine that the telephone has been ringing into the void of our house all evening. Its electric trill echoes in my ear as I walk. Would tonight have been the night that the caller identified him or herself to me? I am becoming more anxious with every day that passes. Even on a deserted country road in the middle of nowhere, at one o’clock in the morning, I cannot shake that eerie sense that I am being pursued. By asking Rex to walk behind me, at least I will know that I really am being followed, and I will know by whom.