The Poison Tree (14 page)

“If only we knew someone who fit the bill!” she said, throwing up her hands in actressy hopelessness. I kicked her under the table and she grinned mischievously.

“I’ve had an idea!” she said. “Karen, would you like to come and live here with me and Rex?”

“Funny you should say that,” I said. “There’s actually nothing I’d like more, but I’ve got to ask you something first. Are you sure you don’t just want someone nice and stable to replace Nina?”

“Who told you you were nice?” she said, then grew serious. “Absolutely not,” she said, looking me in the eye. “I want you here because you’re you.”

“Good. Because I’m not doing all the cooking,” I said.

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” she replied.

“In that case, I’m in,” I said.

“Fucking fabulous,” replied Biba, drumming a celebratory fanfare on the kitchen table with her palms. “Now then. I happen to know that Rex has hidden a good bottle of champagne in the cupboard under the stairs. He’s saving it for a special occasion. I think we should drink it now, don’t you?”

Alice is currently reading a book about a boy who cuts holes into parallel worlds with a knife. With one slash of his blade he can slice open and peel back the fabric of this universe to reveal another, fantastical world that was there all along. That’s how I felt that summer with Biba, as though a curtain had been drawn back and a door opened just in time for me to run through and embrace everything I found. I grew younger with every hour I spent with her. My adolescence had been spent in Europe, assimilating adult culture and habits along with new languages. I had learned about food, wine, and art at various universities. While these experiences, encouraged by a conformity that must be innate, had given me a kind of precocious maturity, in none of these places had I been to a party thrown by my peers, or to a nightclub. But in those early weeks Biba introduced me to the blithe rebellion of youth. Most girls my age had exhausted this phase and were moving on to the next one. But I was immature enough still to be divested of my innocence: at twenty, just old enough to know, and to appreciate it as it happened.

Innocence is an unusual quality in that it has two opposites. One is experience. The other is guilt.

I never saw my Brentford housemates again. Once they’d packed, a week early, Claire and Emma decamped to their boyfriends’ houses. We said good-bye in a series of scribbled notes and letters shoved under bedroom doors and pinned to the fridge with magnets. They wished me luck with my one remaining exam and promised to call with a contact number as soon as they had one. Sarah was only sporadically at home, prepaying bills and writing list after list of instructions on how to look after the house I’d been living in for three years.

I tidied my things with the diligence of someone about to commit suicide, getting my house in order as though I expected never to return. Not that there was anything distressing, incriminating, or even interesting to throw away: only the ordered, tidy paperwork of a life lived in translation. I packed the rucksack that had taken me all over Europe with all the summer clothes I could carry and the few cosmetics I wore. My CD player and most of my books remained in my room. Why would I need books when I had conversation?

I moved in on the day of my last exam. I didn’t end up living in Nina’s room but was shown to the attic room where Tris and Jo had slept. I was the ninth person to live there in five years and the faded lemon walls documented the previous tenants. Only Tris and Jo, true to their zero trace principles, had left no mark on the room. After carrying my bag up the forty-two stairs, Rex pointed out the bracket on the wall where someone called Hugh had ripped out a cupboard that had offended him: a ragged square inch of William Morris pattern was just visible behind the bad paint job with which a girl named Val had tried to cover up the mess. The soot marks on the underside of the bookshelf were made by someone called Phil, whose conviction that candlelight was the best way to seduce girls had nearly burned the house down one New Year’s Eve.

I hung my clothes inside the leaning canvas wardrobe and wrapped a string of fairy lights around the headboard of the bed, winding the rubbery green wire around a nail that jutted out of the picture rail so that the lights hung overhead like an awning of stars. This, the third floor, was set in the thick of the leaf canopy. There was a tiny round window, like a porthole into the sea of green, and a skylight at the foot of my bed. I lay with my head underneath it, counting not my lucky stars but my lucky leaves, when Biba came in with tumblers of red wine for the pair of us. The drink and the fairy lights and the conversation softened the comedown into darkness.

“It feels like you’ve lived here forever,” she said after an hour or so. She pointed to the tiny blisters my indoor constellation had already made in the paint. “You’re already leaving your fingerprint here. One day, I’ll look at this and trace the pattern your lights made. I’ll be able to picture how the room was when you were here.” She smiled and squeezed my arm, and despite the heat of the June night I shivered because Biba had implied that there might come a day when I didn’t live here anymore. The thought of being reduced to a throwaway anecdote like Hugh, Phil, or Val made my heart turn to ice and the walls close in around me. The house had been my home for only a couple of hours, but I already knew that my time there would not be a phase in my life but would
be
my life, would be the defining time of it. It was, of course, but for reasons I could never have guessed at that evening. Then, it seemed impossible that the summer could ever come to an end. I was already looking forward to the next summer, and the one after that, too. My father had told me that everyone has one summer and I felt desperately sorry for him. I was convinced then that this was just the first of many amazing summers, interspersed with wonderful winters and autumns and springs too. I was blind to all the signs that this summer would be the last as well as the first of its kind for me.

T
HEY TOOK MY CAR while I was asleep. The long, deep sleeps of that summer were a revelation to me. After a few days of rising at eight and waiting for hours at a kitchen table still scattered with the debris of last night’s dinner, I realized that daily lie-ins were customary when there was nothing to do—and that first week there was never anything to do. We converged for dinner, but breakfast and lunch were foraged from the fridge during the day or simply overlooked. At first the fluid time-table of the house left me in freefall. It took a few days to learn to sleep where I fell, skip meals if I felt like it, and drink red wine with brunch—a fluid term applied to any meal involving eggs and eaten before dusk—if that was what Biba was doing.

So when I woke to find the note under the door telling me that they had taken my car, it didn’t occur to me to be cross: quite the opposite. I was gratified that they thought me so relaxed and laid-back that my permission was a given. It was the first time I’d seen Biba’s handwriting other than as a graffito.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty. We didn’t want to wake you. We’re giving Nina and the kids a lift to the airport. Took the car, hope that’s OK. Back around 8ish, 9ish. See you for dinner then. B and R.” She had drawn smiley faces in the loops of their initials.

It was eleven o’clock. I had ten hours in which to occupy myself in this house and no key to secure it if I left. Letting myself out wouldn’t be a problem: the faulty latch had failed again and a chink of morning sunlight shone through the inch-wide gap between the front door and its jamb. At least this time it wasn’t swinging wide open, inviting every burglar in North London to help themselves to . . . was there anything in this house worth stealing? I looked around the black and white hall, which was empty save for a white-painted, glass-topped bamboo telephone table fifteen years too young to have any kitsch value. I listened for the click of the Yale lock and leaned a pile of telephone directories against the door to buttress the seal.

There was no milk so I drank my coffee black. The caffeine rush brought the mess of the kitchen into focus. I found an unused pair of rubber gloves and an industrial-sized bottle of bleach in the cupboard under the sink, its cap carpeted with a fuzz of gray dust. I began with the fridge. I took everything out, threw away all the food that was past its sell-by date and a couple of cheeses with green fur growing on them, then scrubbed its interior until it gleamed. I wiped crumbs and scum from the counters and then swept them from the floor, arranged toppling piles of cookbooks in height order and did four sink-loads of dishes.

The washing machine was ancient, a top-loading contraption as big and ugly as the industrial ones that line the walls of launderettes. In went the bedclothes from mine and Biba’s beds, the food-encrusted Indian bedspreads that covered springy sofas and any clothes that were littering the house. I threw the lot into the drum, hit the largest button and hoped for the best. The rattling thrum that issued from it shook the glasses on the draining board.

Gathering pace, I worked my way up, forcing open landing windows that had been painted shut for years. The stuffy house seemed to sigh with relief. I retrieved enough plates and glasses to fill the huge sink for a fifth time. In the bathrooms I chucked out all moldering toiletries. In the main bath, the one where I’d found the unconscious boy on the night of the party, I scrubbed until the only marks left were the milky-blue crackles that spiderwebbed its gleaming surface.

Lunch was a dry baguette dipped in cream cheese, eaten before I laid the quilts and cushion covers out on the terrace. It was another equatorially hot and parched day and I knew that everything would be dry within the hour.

The vacuum cleaner was a large, unwieldy piece of apparatus with a dust bag that I had to empty into the garbage and a nozzle that was too big for its metal tube and kept falling off. Progress was slow, but I drove it over each individual stair, using my fingers to pick at strands of Biba’s hair that seemed to have woven themselves into the woolen knots of the carpet. There was no question of vacuuming Biba’s bedroom floor—I’d have had to find it first—but I went in and sat on her bed for a while, breathing in the light musk that hung in her room and permeated all her clothes.

On the landing outside Rex’s bedroom I hesitated. It was the only room in the house I hadn’t yet entered. Was it ruder to neglect to clean it or to trespass into it? I used my toe to prod the edge of his door and it swung open obligingly. His room was as neat as hers was cluttered. It was the brightest and barest in the house. A pale cream color covered the walls and met the brilliant white of the ceiling in an imperfect and patchy line that betrayed the unsteady hands of an inexperienced DIYer. Magazines about interior decoration filled a pine bookcase, and on the windowsill, a row of tester pots of paint in various shades of wheat and pastel were lined up like whey-faced toy soldiers. A plain beige carpet curled at one corner to reveal not floorboards or underlay but another, older carpet in hellfire reds and oranges. I understood at once that this well-ordered, hygienic haven must have been the only thing enabling him to live among the mess and chaos created by his sister and their tenants.

The nozzle fell off again and rolled underneath Rex’s bed. I crouched on all fours and peered beneath the valance, expecting the usual underlay of dust balls and fluff, but it was as spotless as the rest of the room. Under the middle of his sagging mattress, so perfectly central that it must have been put there deliberately, was a low, oblong box, rather like the one my mother kept her wedding dress in.

The box was intriguing because it was hidden, rather than because it belonged to Rex. Had it been Biba’s room, I’m sure I would have had a sense of trepidation and guilt, but as I flattened my body and stretched out my arms to retrieve the box, I felt only the mildest curiosity. When the thing was sitting in my lap, I could see that it was actually a shoebox, and a very old one at that. The lid bore a pen-and-ink printed picture of a pair of knee-high boots that took up one side. They had cost ten pounds, a long time ago. As I lifted the lid, it occurred to me that the contents might be pornographic, and my hands hesitated, from distaste rather than guilt or respect.

It was not pornography but something that made my heart beat much faster than that. The first thing I saw was an unsorted selection of photographs of Biba, apparently in character for plays performed before I met her. Her monochrome image stared up at me from a shiny sheet of photographic paper. She was heavy-fringed and kohl-eyed, her hair ironed and sliced into the swinging geometry of the perfect sixties girl. She couldn’t have been more than about fourteen when it was taken. The second photograph showed her wearing a bikini and biting into an ice pop. A third, blown up to the size of a magazine, struck me as familiar: perhaps I’d seen Biba wearing that white dress. She stood in a buttercup meadow and smiled over her shoulder at the camera while strong sunlight lifted her dark hair into a golden aureole. A fourth showed her looking somehow older than she was now and unhappy, her dark shrug of hair bleeding into the mink of a coat that enveloped her shoulders.

A card-backed envelope, its edges frayed with age, contained sheet after sheet of glossy paper checkered with monochrome images the size of passport photographs. They were miniature storyboards chronicling the successes and failures of professional photo shoots: models poised to perfection in one tiny picture, then captured mid-blink in the next. A grungy band betrayed by the hand of a makeup artist creeping into the shot. Some sheets had been scrawled on in a china clay pencil, with images either ringed or struck through. I ran my fingers over the markings, which were raised and still tacky to the touch. I picked out a page filled with almost identical images of a man playing the piano with his back to the camera, and turned it over; on the reverse of the sheet was written, “James, 1978,” alongside a tiny sticker saying, “Roger Capel Portraits” and the address of a Soho studio. I gasped as I realized that I held in my hands their father’s work—possibly all that remained of it.