The Poison Tree (36 page)

Technically I was no longer a student at Queen Charlotte’s, but neither had I severed all links with the department. I was still in the care of their Graduate Service and would remain so for the twelve months following my results. Even if this had not been the case, I felt confident that Caroline Alba would help me with my master’s application if there was still time. At this late stage, I would go anywhere that would take me.

The elevator doors sighed open on the fourth floor and discharged me on the landing, where I found myself standing opposite the notice board where it had all started. With the new intake of students due in less than a week, someone had stripped the patchwork of flyers and notices from the board. The pinpricked cork was bare save for a poster welcoming the new intake to the languages department and showing photographs of all the staff, and a few smaller notices underneath. It was a large poster but could not quite hide the request for a native German speaker scrawled on the wall at the beginning of June. In faded red pen the letters poked out from the bottom right-hand corner of the poster. BIBA XXX. I stepped forward to touch it, traced the letters of her name and the
X
’s with my fingertip, astonished to find that I did not wish I had never met her.

My old mailbox no longer bore my name. All of the empty recesses contained the same badly photocopied leaflet advertising for graduates to work as English teachers in Switzerland. Force of habit made me remove the leaflet from the box that had been mine.

The double doors that sealed off the department corridor were not propped open with a fire extinguisher as they would be during term time, but were closed. Through the slit window I could see Caroline Alba halfway down the passage in animated conversation with another member of the staff. I leaned my hand on the steel panel and prepared to push. Then I looked down again at the leaflet in my hand. The words “immediate start” had caught my eye. I took my hand off the door, turned my back on the department, and summoned the elevator.

The woman who answered the telephone, Sylvia, was an English expat living in Bern with her family and trying, not very successfully, to establish a School of English in the city.

“The teacher I had lined up let me down,” she said. “That does happen in this line of work, I’m afraid. I am rather frantic. Term starts next week, and all the teachers here in Bern are booked up.”

“I’m not TEFL-qualified,” I told her, but reeled off a list of my qualifications, the languages I could speak well, and my experience as a classroom assistant at various schools and colleges all over the Continent.

Sylvia gave a nervous laugh. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but aren’t you a little overqualified to take this post? Why do you want to come here?” I expressed the desire to escape, the feeling that I would begin to tear off my own flesh if I had to stay in London and not see them anymore, in the mildest terms I could muster.

“I fancy a change of scenery,” I said.

Sylvia would pay my airfare and my first month’s housing if I could get to her by the beginning of the term. This was, if not the deciding factor, important. My savings, substantial at the beginning of the summer, had dwindled into the low hundreds, and with Sarah due to return from France in a couple of weeks, I would soon find myself without a home.

Thirty hours after my conversation with Sylvia, I had packed my room into the trunk of my car and driven to a parking garage in Wembley, the one I had spotted from the traffic jam on the way to Nina’s going-away party. It was more of a shack than a garage, but the owner did not ask me my name or any questions when I paid him for a year in advance and left holding only my keys and my Travelcard. Too cowardly to have the uncomfortable conversation, I wrote to my parents and to Sarah telling them where I was going. Then, stuffing a rucksack with clothes I had not worn since the previous winter, I took the train to Heathrow Airport. In the check-in line for my flight to Zurich I noticed a few fallen leaves ground into the base of my bag, the first outward sign that summer was over.

From a call box in the departure lounge I dialed the number of the old house. I let it ring for five minutes, but there was no answer.

Bern is an ancient city laced with wires. The old Gothic and medieval buildings are linked with electricity and telephone wires that crisscross above the heads of the people who walk the paved and cobbled streets below, and the cables that power the trams string the streets like fat lines of licorice. After a few days, you cease to notice this web in the sky, but in the beginning its incongruity is distracting.

I had three days to settle into the studio apartment that Sylvia had arranged for me, and I spent all of them wandering the streets, looking up at the tangle of wires that wound around and avoided each other as effortlessly and elegantly as the languages of French, Italian, German, and Romansh coexisted in the city. I avoided coffee shops and bars on my own in case I reverted to my old, cherished habit of turning to my right and pointing out an interesting passerby to Biba.

Teaching English abroad is the ideal way to surround yourself with people without the risk of intimacy or connection. There is a concatenation of students, all young and eager to talk and drink and simply to be with others. My pupils came from all over the world, either attracted to the banking industry or employed by those who were already part of that machine. They came and went. Some of them stayed for long enough to perfect their English, others took just enough classes to enable them to travel to London and wait on tables there. Many students dropped out without explanation, but there was always someone new, and every week brought a new birthday, or a departure, and there was always a reason to head into the bars when the lesson was over. During these extracurricular drinking sessions, I did unpaid overtime, listening to my students’ stories and deflecting their questions by correcting their grammar and making them repeat their anecdotes until I was satisfied. I told no anecdotes of my own. I had only one story to tell and it was not one I could share with anyone.

I dreaded the weekly call to my parents in which I assured them I was fine and they pretended not to know that I was lying. I let my hair revert to its natural dark blond. I took refuge not in exercise but in food, growing fat on chocolate and the pastries that students brought to class and the huge plates of creamy pasta that were all I could be bothered to cook in my studio apartment. And I drank, too, liters of frothy beer, not caring about the consequences. I grew unrecognizable from the girl I had been in the summer. I hid my body in ever more shapeless clothes. The afternoons drew in and I wrapped the winter around me like a scarf, grateful for the early darkness and the extra anonymity it afforded me.

I was ignorant of the British criminal justice system but presumed that Rex must soon stand trial. Occasionally I went to the Central Library and flicked through their copy of
The Times
, but the case was never mentioned. While I was there I always checked my e-mails. It was the only way that Biba could have reached me, but no message ever came. I wished I had looked over her shoulder when she was typing in her password. That way, I could have accessed her inbox and established whether she was ignoring me, or whether the mailbox was untouched and she was simply making good on her promise never to use the address I had set up for her. Emma and Caroline Alba had both written to me expressing concern. Simon had dropped me a line telling me that he was getting married to Isabel and hoping that there were no hard feelings. I sent the same curt message to all three of them saying that I was taking a year off and that I would be in touch on my return. I could not have cut the lines of communication more effectively: I have never heard from any of them again.

In November yet more wires appeared above the city streets, these studded with lanterns that outlined windows and dressed bare trees in tiny orbs of light. There was an onion festival during which several of my students dressed as onions and danced in the streets. For a few hours I genuinely forgot my troubles, until it occurred to me how much Biba would have loved it.

Christmas brought with it markets and bustle. Christmas Eve, not the day itself, is a day of national celebration in Switzerland, and I spent it with some students who had not been able to travel home. Christmas Day I was invited to spend with Sylvia and her family in their marbled apartment in the heart of the Old Town. We ate a traditional English roast and pulled crackers that they had ordered from Harrods. I think they were relieved when I went home. I know that I was. The streets leading from their apartment to my studio were almost empty of people, and the fountains in the Bundesplatz had been turned off.

The Capels were still my default thought. Nights when I did not dream about them were rare. I had thought that ignorance would be bliss but it was hell, and one day an unseen presence decided for me that knowledge, however terrible, must be preferable to the spiraling stress that was my existence. This force steered me into the Central Library, and there, instead of logging on to my e-mail page, I typed in the URL for the Lycos search engine and left me sitting in front of that blank page of possibility. I took over then, silently thanking whatever impulse it was that had guided me here. I searched for Bathsheba Capel. I found her on the Internet Movie Database Web site. Her bit part in the Charles II program was mentioned and she had another television credit to her name underneath it. The broadcast date given was spring 1998. I scrolled up and down the page, unable to make sense of this, until I read the production notes and realized with a jolt that it was the comedy about the lottery winner. While her brother was being questioned by the police, Biba had successfully auditioned for the part she had been preparing for all the previous week. I had thought that nothing about her could shock me anymore, but this did.

Rex’s name yielded very different results. I found the details I was dreading in an article on an online legal journal, cited as a model of savvy plea bargaining. The text, written by a lawyer, was muddy with legal jargon. There had been no trial. Rex had immediately pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Guy Grainger and the murder of Tom Wheeler, and it was the swiftness of those guilty pleas that meant his sentencing was exceptionally lenient for a double killer. He had been sentenced to five years for Guy’s manslaughter and twenty for Wheeler’s murder, the two sentences to run concurrently. Twenty years did not sound lenient to me: my lifetime, lived out again in incarceration.

They might not want me but they could no longer argue that I was jeopardizing my liberty or theirs. It was time to go home. I gave Sylvia two weeks’ notice and booked my flight back to London.

T
HE TRAIN HURTLED THROUGH Essex and into London’s eastern outskirts, the satellite towns and then the suburbs a blur of illegible platform signs. The landscape seemed flat and drab compared to the dramatic Swiss contours I had become accustomed to. I imagined that the black raincloud that kept pace with the train was a lurking mountain range. Liver-pool Street station came before I had even begun to acclimatize, and I walked the few blocks to Moorgate feeling like an alien in the city that I had once thought to possess. It had been raining and the puddles were black oil slicks. The city smelled and tasted of dirt and fuel, and the fanned aromas of the coffee shops and bakeries were overpowered by the heavy air. There were so many cars. There were so many
people
.

I broke into a fifty, the only sterling I had, and bought a coffee at a Pret A Manger next to Moorgate station. The unsmiling girl behind the counter handed me a crumpled pile of tired five-pound notes and some strangely familiar coins. The money looked as if it had been handled by each and every person in London. Glancing once more at the sky, I bought an umbrella in Boots. My last act before descending the steps to the Underground was to enter a phone booth and dial Biba’s old number. Even when punching unfamiliar metal keys I could do it by touch alone. The unobtainable tone came as the expected surprise.

Little black mice scurried in the void where the train belonged, camouflaged in the soot of the gutter but occasionally revealing themselves when they ran over the live steel rails. The Northern Line forks in two at Camden Town and it’s easy to take the wrong one. More than once I had absentmindedly found myself sitting on a train to Edgware, which runs through Golders Green, instead of the correct High Barnet train that would have taken me home to Highgate. On this occasion, however, I let two High Barnet trains go by and when I boarded the Edgware branch it was deliberate. The carriage was not full but it was fogged with rainwater that had evaporated from the passengers’ clothes, bags, and umbrellas and was condensing on the windows. I sank into a seat and placed my rucksack on my lap so that I wouldn’t be able to see my own reflection in the window opposite me. Next to me, a teenage boy was tracing the word BOLLOCKS in the mist with his fingertip, breathing onto the glass the better to display his artwork.