The Poison Tree (25 page)

I tried to imagine this house ever being cold. The idea of it existing in another season blew like a chilly breeze down the back of my spine.

“I thought, the weather’s nice, she’ll wrap up warm, and she’ll go. I was so happy, I thought I’d done the right thing.”

“And did she go?” I asked.

Rex closed his eyes. “When I came home from school, I saw her feet at the top of the stairs, and I knew. She’d hung herself from the banister on the first-floor landing. She’d wet herself. I could smell my own mum’s piss and her feet were all mottled and swollen. I’d have had to go upstairs to see her face, and I didn’t.” He paused and I froze, terrified that tears would come, but I guessed that he had cried himself out when it came to this. He pinched the skin between his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger and when he took his hand away white fingerprints stayed.

“I rang my dad but there was no one there so I went next door to Mrs. Howard—she used to live in the house before the Wheelers moved in. She called the ambulance and she made me a cup of cocoa and a biscuit that I couldn’t eat so I put it between the sofa cushions. She wouldn’t let me go back in on my own. That’s the worst part—that I didn’t go back in, and I always think that as bad as things had got by then, I should have gone back, and I can’t bear to think of how much worse it got because I didn’t go back.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you mean your mum was still alive?”

“No, she was dead. She’d been dead for hours, I couldn’t have done anything about that. While I was next door with Mrs. Howard, Biba came home. She was supposed to be at drama club, she wasn’t supposed to be home until seven, but her teacher was ill. The door wasn’t shut properly and she came in. She was only twelve, Karen. When the ambulance came, they found her standing on the stairs trying to hold my mum up. It took two of them to pry Biba off her . . . off the body.” He turned on his side and met my gaze with a mixture of defiance and fear. “So that’s it. That’s the story. It was my fault that Mum killed herself in the first place, and it was my fault that Biba saw it.”

“Oh, Rex,” I said, “oh, no. You’re wrong to blame yourself for either of those things. You can’t be responsible for your parents’ behavior, you were a child, you were sixteen! You weren’t to know.”

“I
was
to know. I lived with it every day,” he said. “So this is to answer your question. She might as well not have a dad, and the one parent she did have, I as good as killed. I stood up to my mum and look what happened! If I do the same and I lose Biba, that’s it, it’s over.”

“She’s done it before, hasn’t she?” I said. “Biba. She’s tried to kill herself.”

He nodded.

“When she was about sixteen, she got it into her head that she was going to go to some acting school in New York. Dad said no and I agreed with him, although for different reasons. He didn’t want to pay, I didn’t want to lose her. But I sided with Dad against her, that’s how she saw it.”

“What did she do?”

“She washed down a bottle of Tylenol with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” he said. “I don’t think she really meant it as anything more than a cry for help; she called the ambulance the second she’d done it. But that’s why I fuss over her. I daren’t risk hurting her like that again. I know what it’s like to lose someone that way and I love her too much to let that happen. She’s all I’ve got left, or she was until you came.”

He curled up into a ball, wrapped his arms around my waist and laid his head on my breast, more child than lover. I suddenly felt hot and suffocated for reasons that had nothing to do with the closed windows. The first real shaft of sun brought a new heat that filtered through the ivy that grew against the window. The leaves pressed against the pane, poison-bottle green, the size and shape of human hearts.

T
HE HOUSE IN BRENTFORD looked familiar but strange, as homes do when you’ve been on holiday. The only outward signs of neglect were the odd weed or blade of grass pushing up between the chessboard tiles of the garden path. The porch was shielded from the street by a large laurel and I had deliberately left the door on the latch to avoid a telltale buildup of free newspapers wedged in the mailbox. There were one or two such papers, plus the usual scatter of manila and white envelopes. Splashes of color were provided by takeout menus. On top of this mille-feuille of junk mail sat a huge spray of stargazer lilies, the water from their cellophane wrapping long evaporated. The flowers were curling and browning now, but they had been pink and white when fresh. Their stale and cloying scent filled the porch. My heart plunged as I read the handwritten note on the back of the birthday card nestled between two blooms.

I had been calling home regularly from Highgate, but a flip through my mental calendar alerted me to the fact that I hadn’t been in contact with them since the day before my birthday. During that conversation they must have been planning their drive down to London. Perhaps they had even booked a restaurant for the three of us. I had been so absorbed in the new family I had chosen that I had not given a thought to the one I came from. I pictured them in the car, Dad braving the heat in his favorite leather jacket, Mum reapplying her lipstick when they left the M25 as though all London was judging her. I imagined too their nightly appointment by the telephone, becoming more disappointed and concerned every night that I didn’t answer. People say that you don’t understand what anxiety is until you have children, but I had done enough worrying and listening and sympathizing over the past few weeks to gain a new sensitivity to the distress I must have caused. I gathered the disintegrating lilies in my arms, dried pollen falling like yellow ash over my clothes, and crouched to retrieve the rest of the mail.

The house looked as though it had been cleaned up for an inspection. Each cushion was perfectly plumped and arranged in a diamond on the sofa, and the empty fridge buzzed like a bee in the spotless kitchen. The first thing I did was pick up the telephone—so clean, so convenient, I thought, as I extended the antenna and walked around the house—and call my parents. It was one o’clock: Dad would be home for his lunch. They weren’t the kind of parents to haul me over the coals for something like this—for anything, really—but still I preempted a telling-off with an apology and then disarmed them with the news that I had a new boyfriend.

“Is that where you were, then? When we came over?” said Mum, while Dad told me that he hoped I’d found a proper boyfriend this time and not another “rugger-bugger idiot” like Simon. All comparisons between Rex and Simon made me smile.

“He’s as far from a rugby boy as you can imagine, Dad.”

“Glad to hear it,” he replied, and I heard him exhale as he sank into his chair.

My parents’ house appeared in my mind’s eye: the net curtains and the three-piece suite and the television that was always on and my old room, pastel blue and cream with clean sheets that smelled of fabric softener. All these things I had learned to scorn suddenly seemed desperately comforting, and I craved just one evening in my childhood home. I had a full tank of gas and no pressing engagements; if I left now I could be there in time for a home-cooked dinner. I wanted to listen to my mother moan about the new housing development in the meadow behind our house and to gossip about people I had known all my life. I wanted to hear my Dad shouting at the television in his embarrassing accent. I wanted to be somewhere I didn’t have to try to understand the people I lived with. I wanted, I realized, a day off from surprises and dark passions and dramatic revelations and dead mothers and cruel fathers. I wanted it so much and so suddenly that a lump rose in my throat.

“Can I come home, Mum?” I said. “Just for a bit?” She clicked her teeth impatiently.

“We’re going to Madeira, aren’t we?” she said, as though I should have known, and in fact I
should
have; my parents had spent the first two weeks of August at the same hotel every year since I was ten. It was in that resort that my aptitude for languages had first surfaced, when I had found myself translating an entire Portuguese menu for a table of amazed adults after only a few days in the country.

“When are you back?” I asked. She named the date my degree results were published. They would be flying into Heathrow and leaving the car in the long-term parking lot, as they always did.

“Come back and see me on the way from the airport,” I said. “You virtually go past the front door. You can help me open my results. And you can cook for me.”

It took ten minutes to sort through the mail. I separated the others’ letters into three neat piles before going to work on my own. Apart from a few bank statements that I left unopened—my checking and savings accounts had barely been touched in the last few weeks—my mail consisted mostly of prospectuses and letters from modern language departments. There was literature from all over the UK, one university in Philadelphia, another in Missouri, and one from Uppsala in Sweden. Just two months ago, I would have been flattered and excited by these foreign prospectuses. Now my first thought on seeing them was whether they would allow me to defer for a year. I wasn’t ready to leave London yet. Would I ever be, now? I called my tutor, Caroline Alba, and made an appointment to see her the following day.

The final piece of mail I nearly threw away with the junk. The postcard of a flowerbed in Perpignan airport was printed in the same gaudy colors as a takeout pizza menu. I would have rejected it as another of the same if its stiff texture hadn’t made me give it a second glance. The writing was Emma’s.

“Having a lovely time working on the vineyard and drinking lots of yummy red wine. Will you be in on results day? We’ll call you at 9 p.m. UK time. See you soon, love and hugs, E, S and C.” I put it on the mantelpiece alongside framed pictures that had been taken a lifetime ago. The parking ticket that Rex had promised to take care of had reappeared on my doormat in the form of a letter from Haringey council: the fine would double if I did not pay it within the next three days. I looked at the date. Had it really only been two weeks since that night?

The woman behind the desk at the tennis club was pleased to see me.

“I haven’t seen you and your friends for ages,” she said. “We wondered where you’d all gone. I said you were probably off being au pairs or something.” I was confused for a second, wondering why she would be expecting the Capels to visit a gym on the other side of London. Then I understood; she was used to seeing me with the girls, or Simon.

“Not me,” I said. “I’m staying in London for once.” She handed me a clean white robe and a matching fluffy towel. Like the club itself, they smelled of cleanliness and health and the twin luxuries of money and spare time.

With no tennis partner available, I hit the gym. I began on the bike and worked my way around every weight machine I knew how to operate. I knew I’d pay for it in aches and pains the next day, but I didn’t care. You’d think that so long without exercise would have made a workout grueling, but I felt that I had all those weeks’ worth of energy stored in my muscles begging for release. I finished with fifty minutes on the treadmill, a personal best. The joints I’d smoked with Biba had diminished the capacity of my lungs but to me the shortness of breath was just a challenge, a come-on. I thought of nothing but the mindless dance music that blared through the gym as I pounded the conveyor belt with my feet until my muscles sang out for mercy. In the shower afterward I savored the post-gym fatigue that bordered on euphoria. I examined my body as I soaped it; there was no denying I had put on weight. My arms and legs were looking less toned than before, and the softness and swell of my belly was new and unwelcome and all my fault. I told myself I would find a gym in Highgate, I would begin running in the woods, I wouldn’t let myself go like this again.

That evening, I trawled my bedroom for the flimsy green piece of paper that would allow me to collect another three months’ worth of contraceptive pills without having to make an appointment with my doctor. I eventually located the prescription pressed between two books on my shelf and folded it into a neat little square in my purse. Taking the pill every day had been easy to remember in my old, regimented life. In Highgate, the habit was becoming as erratic as my meals and my sleeping patterns.

Midnight was too early for me to sleep so I watched television in bed. A French film, part of the Three Colors trilogy, was on Channel Four. I couldn’t concentrate on it. I desperately missed the Capels. My ears were empty without Biba’s conversation, and my body missed Rex’s touch. It reminded me of the displaced feeling you get when you come back home after living in another country: you’re homesick for British food and television and company while you’re away, but the minute you come home you begin to pine for the place you’ve just left.

My last thought as I went to sleep was that I couldn’t remember the last time I had had to speak a foreign language. I had been abroad every summer for six or seven years. This was the first summer I had been content to live life in my mother tongue.

The staff at Queen Charlotte’s referred to their stuffy little studies as their “rooms,” a throwback to—and possibly a yearning for—older colleges that equipped their staff with suites of living and teaching rooms rather than six-foot-square boxes in a reclaimed office block. Caroline Alba’s “rooms” were smaller than most, affording a view of a standpipe on an opposing wall, but she had plastered the interior with pictures and postcards that her students sent her every summer. To the left of the plate glass window was a flyer advertising a student play I’d seen in a natural amphitheater somewhere just outside Rome and brought back for her.

She was impossible not to like: clever without being formidable and warm without being sentimental, she was the only person who understood my aptitude for language without my needing to explain. In my more narcissistic moments I wondered if I reminded her of her younger self. She had graying hair and good enough bone structure to wear it cropped. She dressed soberly but I never saw her in the same earrings twice. The day I met her in her study two ropes of amethysts strung on silver pulled on her lobes and grazed her collarbone. The file with my name on it was already on her lap when I entered.