A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) (5 page)

A fervent believer in the Protestant work ethic,
Edward Braddock was also determined that his only son was not to become a wastrel. My dropping out of university had alerted him to this possibility, and so he resolved without further ado to bring my nose into contact with the grindstone.

“You’ve had your last summer without responsibility, David,” he had said
. “It’s time for you to take your place in the world. Go out and get yourself a decent haircut. You start work on Monday.”

And so I joined the family firm.

Claire’s plans, meantime, had altered. The intention had been that following her year in Australia she would take up a place reading mathematics at Durham University, after which she would move into finance. In the event, she decided to forego the degree and, drawing on her family’s contacts, secured a position as an articled clerk in a firm of Chartered Accountants in Leicester.

We both
therefore had a foot on the bottom rung of the career ladder at the time of our first evening out together, which comprised dinner at an Italian restaurant I knew in Market Harborough. A safe venue, I thought, not wishing to rush things lest I mess up. I still felt uneasy too, for reasons I could not articulate, about the fact that Claire was Anna’s sister.

“I don’t see you as a
Chartered Accountant, Claire. I’m sorry, but I just don’t. After Monty Python, it’s impossible to take the profession seriously.”

“The starting pay is pathetic,” she told me, “
but in four years I’ll be qualified, then look out world.”

“Yes, then you can be a lion tamer.”

“At least I won’t be selling second hand cars.”

“O-o-o-h, catty.
Anyway, they’re
new
cars.”

She laughed, and her eyes flashed green
naughtiness. “So tell me, what went wrong with you and university.”

“The same as with you and
university, I expect. We weren’t suited. Only you had the good sense to recognise it early.”

“Travelling around Australia made me want to start making my way in the world. I don’t want to give up studying and go off and become a hippy, or anything like that. I just want to start earning, give myself some independence.”

“Studying to be an accountant in Leicester sounds pretty unglamorous after what you’ve been doing for the last year.”

“Glamour isn’t everything.”

“I suppose you met some interesting people out there.”

“Are you fishing?”

“No, just – making conversation.”

She looked disbelievingly at me
. “Well, yes. Especially at the hostel in Sydney. Americans, Irish, French, Canadians, and Brits, of course. Plus one guy whose family were farmers in Harare. He was gorgeous, like a young Robert Redford.”

“A black Robert Redford?”

“
White
farmers. Do you have a problem with colour?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Not at all. One of my best friends at
university was coloured.”

“
Was
. You mean he isn’t now?”

“All right, then.
Is
coloured.”

“Right.”

The meal arrived, and we sat in silence for a moment while the waiter topped up our wine glasses.

“So what happened to him?” I asked eventually
. “Robert Redford?”

“I don’t know. He and his girlfriend didn’t stay long in Sydney.”

“Oh, right,” I said, attempting to sound casual.

She put her hand on to my forearm and squeezed it
. “You’re so sweet, David. Anna was right.”

“Does she think I’m sweet, then?”

“No. She just thought I’d find you sweet. And she was right.”

I took her hand
.

“And,” she went on, “I hope you’re not going off to the slums of Calcutta for a while yet.”

“Anna told you that!” I laughed.

“But of course. We’re sisters. We tell each other everything.”

“Now I do feel uncomfortable.”

“Don’t. There’s no need. You haven’t done anything you shouldn’t have. Everything’s fine.”

“Good. I’m relieved about that.”

Autumn slid into winter. Grey short days replaced grey longer days. The wet leaves fell and turned to mulch, and the Leicestershire countryside absorbed the chilling rain like a sponge.

Claire and I had some outings, on those rare dry occasions in among the days of dampness. We drove over to Warwick Castle and to Stratford. We visited the ten locks at
Foxton, that marvel of nineteenth century engineering, which links the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union Canal with the Old Grand Union Canal. It was there that I took that first photograph of her which was to sit in my wallet for twenty years.

I do not know exactly when it was that I fell in love with her. The chronology has since perplexed me. Is there a moment, a second of refulgent time when you cross over to an altogether different existence; when something of strangeness and beauty enters your soul? I suppose there must be such an instant. Extraordinary then, that I did not mark it with some substantial entry in the diary of my life.

Perhaps I did not because my mind was distracted by an even greater enigma: Claire’s affection for me. If loving was, for me, a blessing, then being loved was by degrees miraculous.

It may be, I
muse now as I reflected then, the guilty secret of humankind is not that the heart hides so much darkness, but that it conceals so much light.

My old battered MG was parked in a country lay-by. I had badly miscalculated the weather, believing the early clouds would disperse. They had not. We sat listening to the machine-gun noises of torrential rain on the soft roof, and watched the deluge spattering and pouring down the windscreen in endless procession. It was too dangerous to drive. The wipers could not keep up with the cascade.

“I don’t understand,” I had said.

“What is there to understand?”

“You.”

“Oh, I’m very simple to understand. What you see is what you get.”

“Why me?”

“You just want me to tell you how wonderful you are, right?”

“I’m serious.”

“Yes,” her voice took on an earnest quality. “I can see that you are.”

She looked away from me, into the rain-
drenched middle distance and her eyes became unfocused.

“You could have a more exciting life than the one I’m offering you
,” I ventured.

“Are you offering me a life with you? You’ve known me less than three months,” she said softly.

“You know I am.”

“We haven’t even made love yet.”

“Bless you for that
yet
.”

“I’m not a virgin, David.”

“Thank goodness for that. I wouldn’t want the responsibility.”

She giggled, “Of breaking me in, you mean?”

“Exactly. And by the way I’m not either.”

“You seem to think it’s important to me that life is full of thrills and spills, that my chosen partner should be big, bad and dangerous to know. Why, David?”

I made a vague gesture.

“Why wouldn’t I want a kind man who loves me, and who would take care of me. A gentle, honest man. A man like you.”

“Claire –”

“
It so happens that I love you, David Braddock. I love the way you treat me, the way you treat everyone. I love your optimism and your humility. I love the fact that for you the cup is always half-full, and that tomorrow the sun will come out; that in spite of all the evidence around you to the contrary you still think people are basically good; that you will always give someone a second chance. And we all need that at some time. We all need a second chance.” She turned back to me. “Are they good enough reasons for you?”

In December the real winter began. The temperature plummeted, and all at once nothing was wet any more. Everything was frozen. Then the snow came: great soft white fluttering doves of cleansing cold. Ever since I was a child I have loved snow. It has seemed to me a conception of purity made tangible; a benevolent covering of grace across the landscape, embracing fields, trees and houses, and creating a kind of oneness.

The snow lay deep and a night wind, since departed, had piled up the crystallised whiteness into wonderful deep drifts, the first time that Claire and I made love.

We had taken a brave, or perhaps foolhardy, stroll around the farm and arrived back at the outbuildings as darkness was falling. The crisp snow crunched beneath our feet, the only sound not muffled to nothingness by the cocooning air. Our breath hung before our eyes as the lights of the farmhouse glowed ahead, offering a promise of warmth.

“Are you ready for company yet?” Claire asked.

“Am I what?”

She stopped walking and lowered her eyes for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts. Then she lifted her head, removed the glove from her right hand and touched my face.

I led her into the barn, or perhaps she led me. Either way, we knew in that moment that it was time, that we had reached a threshold from which neither of us felt inclined to turn and retrace our steps. And there, among the straw and the coldness which neither of us felt, semi-clothed, urgent and careless of discovery, our breaths a conjoined, freezing vapour, we made love to the music of silence. And afterwards, cooling, the steam rising from our bodies after that joyful release, we lay hand in hand, my lips on her brow as if in benediction.

At length, I propped myself on my elbow and stroked a stray lock of hair from her face.
Her eyes held mine.

“Like the animals, eh?” I said.

“No, darling,” she replied seriously, “like the angels.”

Then she laughed.

Looking back, that was the first time in my life I was
truly afraid. Not of commitment, or of responsibility, or even of disappointment. I had known worries, the insecurities of childhood, and the strange, sometimes neurotic concerns of the teenage years. I had known the sadness and loneliness of one that loses his mother to the unfathomable brutality of death. But this was my first experience of adult helplessness. For in that instant of love I knew both the strength and the weakness that apprehension draws from the human heart.

To find love is to grow strong, but it is also to know fear. To fear the loss of what you have found.

5

ANNA

There were days Anna
Harper wished she were still Anna Holland. Today was one of those days.

Emptying the laundry basket, she had gone through the pockets of her husband Max’s jeans and found a scrap of paper containing the words,
Call me baby xxx muah!

Either Max was once more becoming careless about his liaisons or he no longer cared whether Anna found out. She didn’t know which was worse.

Eight years of marriage and nothing had changed.

Anna had known Max was a womaniser before she married him, but like many women before her, she had been caught up in the passion and the romance of the moment.
She had managed to convince herself that he would calm down; that the act of eating wedding cake would somehow alter his brain chemistry and convert him into a loving, faithful partner.

It took less than two years for her to be disabused of this notion
when Max’s affair with a married woman had turned toxic. The woman in question had taken umbrage at being discarded by Max and, at the expense of her own failing marriage, decided to go public. She had even turned up on two occasions on Anna’s doorstep and proceeded to rant at her. A restraining order became necessary when the unhinged behaviour continued.

Max had promised Anna it was an aberration, and even he, self-confident though he was, had been shaken by the experience.

Things settled down and Anna swallowed her pride and decided to give her marriage another chance.

It was not long,
though, before Max’s eye began to rove once more. His work as a management consultant required frequent business trips out of town, so the opportunities for infidelity were many and varied.

After a while, Anna became weary of it all. She knew she should leave
Max, but the shame and humiliation of her situation wore her down. She found she couldn’t bring herself to discuss her marriage with her parents or her sister. It became a conversational no-go area.

Thank God, she reflected, that no children had come along.
Though she would have liked a child, Anna could see that might be the final nail in the coffin of her relationship. Max was not equipped to be a father. Although he had paid lip-service to having children in the early years, those discussions – like so many others about the future – had petered out.

Inconclusive
.

Like so much about her life.

Recently, and in a last-ditch effort to bring Max back into the family fold, Anna had asked her brother-in-law David to play golf with him – which he now did at least once a month, although Anna knew David was at best a lukewarm fan of golf and no great friend of her husband. But he went through the ritual for Anna’s sake.

Why couldn’t Max be more like David?

Anna put the washing into the machine and switched it on.

She sat at the kitchen table and allowed her thoughts to linger on her brother-in-law. Anna had recently asked him to give her his opinion on an unpublished work about infidelity. She couldn’t explain to herself why she had done that and the more she considered it, the less appropriate it seemed.
She rationalised that David had always been there for her as a good friend, so it was all right to meet an old friend and family member for a private lunch or coffee now and again. Wasn’t it?

Infidelity
.

It
was everywhere about her. Two couples she knew well had recently split up over extra-marital affairs. Perhaps it was something to do with the Millennium, a feeling that everything was changing, that a new order was coming, that old allegiances and certainties were being blown away. Then again, maybe it was simply an excuse for bad behaviour.

She took a letter from one of the drawers in the kitchen
cabinet and opened it. It was an unsolicited job offer from Bright Sparks Publishing. Impressed with her work, they wanted her to go to London and take up a position with them.

Anna walked through the apartment and stood out on the balcony
that looked out over green fields and a branch of the Grand Union Canal. The day was overcast, but even after two years there, she still loved the view, grey clouds or not. The fields brought back the feeling of her happy childhood on her parents’ farm. At Max’s insistence they had taken the penthouse although it was bigger than they needed, and it had been expensive. But then, what else were they going to spend their money on?

She
pushed back her red hair and looked at the letter again. If she took the job she would be ending her marriage at the same time. That worried her less than leaving her parents and sister, who had been her support over the years. But worse than missing them, she would miss seeing her brother-in-law.

And there was something not right about that.