The Poison Tree (17 page)

“Rex, get me a drink,” ordered Biba, before he had time to sit down.

“Yes. Sorry,” he said, scuttling off to the bar like a butler nearing retirement age. He was back in under a minute with a jug of iced water in one hand, a pitcher of gin and tonic in the other, and three stacked glasses nestling precariously under his arm. “I’ve ordered three roast dinners as well.” I couldn’t think of a less appetizing or appropriate meal on such a hot and sticky day, but Biba clapped her hands enthusiastically and I didn’t have the heart to raise my objections.

“What do you think of this pub?” said Biba. Her earnest tone made the question feel like a test.

“It’s nice,” I said feebly. “It’s . . . atmospheric.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said. She put her hand into the water jug, fished one ice cube out of the glass, and dropped it down her back, wiping another one across her brow. Her brother slid a beer mat across the table to absorb the resulting puddle.

“Easter Sunday, 1955,” she said, slipping the cube into her mouth and crunching loudly. I made my face into a question mark and Biba sighed. “Ruth Ellis?” I shook my head again. She tucked her feet under her and rolled a cigarette, a sure sign that she was settling in to tell a good story. Rex tutted and threw up his eyes to the ceiling to show that he had already heard this one before, a daring act of insurgence by his standards, and one immediately followed by a diplomatic retreat.

“I’m off to get the Sunday papers,” he announced, and shuffled out of the bar without touching his drink.

“Who’s Ruth Ellis?” I asked when he had gone.

“Ruth Ellis?” echoed Biba, her light voice heavy with the fanatic’s contempt for the uninitiated. “Only the last woman in England to be hanged. Shot her lover
here
. She was a nightclub hostess, he was a racing car driver. Isn’t that glamorous? The bullet holes are still on the wall outside.” Rex later told me that Biba knew full well that the holes outside were from a plaque that had been removed and never filled in, but that she continued to stick to her more fantastical version of events. “Have you seen the film of it,
Dance with a Stranger
? It’s one of the things that made me want to act. It was all so romantic.”

“It’s a bit gruesome,” I said.

“Bloody hell, Karen, you’re as bad as he is.” She tilted her head toward Rex’s glass, apparently his representative in absentia. “That’s the difference between you and me, I suppose. Where you see unpleasantness, I see drama and passion. I don’t know what’s wrong with you both.”

I could not decide what was worse: Biba’s dismissal of my capacity for passion or the fact that it gave me something in common with her brother. To bring her back on my side I nudged her, pointing with my gaze to the tall bartender and raising my eyebrows.

“Australian?” I mouthed.

“Gay,” she said decisively, and I curled up in the amniotic safety of our game.

Rex returned from the newsstand, arms stacked with layers of newsprint and cellophane. He let the papers fall to the table with a thud, and his sister began to sort through and divide them up.

“Sports and travel for you,” she said, handing me folded sections casually and unapologetically. “Real estate for Rex, and down-market trash and tabloid prurience for me,” she continued, gathering the newspapers and their gaudy supplements into a loose pile and encircling them with her arms like a child shielding her exam paper from a classmate.

I wasn’t really interested in sports unless I was playing them, and travel at the remove of a journalist’s account held no real appeal for me either, so I couldn’t get excited about the supplements that Biba had allotted to me. I watched them reading instead, Biba flipping from story to picture with a manic lack of concentration, sometimes opening magazines at the back page or in the middle and working back and forth as her fancy took her. Rex was more methodical. He read every page in turn, bypassing articles about music and gadgets but frowning over stories about interior decoration, property development, or gardening. Now and again he would fold back a page and score it with the back of his thumbnail before tearing it out, folding it up and putting it to one side, presumably to be saved and pasted into one of his scrap-books when we got back to the house. His fingertips were dabbed with newsprint and there was a streak in the middle of his forehead where he kept running his hands through his hair or rubbing his brow.

Every now and then they would pick out something to read aloud. It was a charming Victorian throwback, a legacy perhaps of a childhood without television.

“Listen to this, you’ll like this,” they would say. Rex would read the odd paragraph or quote but Biba would begin with the headline and deliver a two-page story from start to finish, never stumbling over the words. Apart from the one time I saw her on stage, I think it was the longest I ever saw her go without drinking or smoking.

“Your turn, Karen,” said Biba, when she’d finished. I had the
Observer
magazine open at a page about tea shops in Granada but I hadn’t read a word. “Find something to amuse us.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” I said, and I wasn’t being modest. Then, as now, I could control my accent when I was arguing, when I was excited, even when drunk, but when I read aloud my vowels flattened and distorted.

I was too hot to judge the quality of the roast dinner that arrived to save me. Rex ate all of his, and half of Biba’s, and some of mine, using a Yorkshire pudding I couldn’t eat to mop up the gravy on her plate. He gave me a pale smile and returned to his pile of magazines. A male model advertising a chunky diving watch stared up from his page and out into the pub, looking less than impressed with us. Rex picked up this magazine and turned it over before clutching it to his chest so suddenly and with such an agonized expression that I thought he was having some kind of heart attack.

“What’s that?” I asked. “What’s wrong?” Rex shook his head, rousing Biba’s curiosity as well as mine. He could have saved the situation even then by pretending to have heartburn—it would have been a credible excuse after what he’d just eaten—or a wasp sting, or a headache, or any other minor acute ailment. But subtlety, secrecy, and subterfuge weren’t in his vocabulary, and instead his eyes traveled in a triangle of panic between the magazine, Biba, and me.

“C’mon, Rex, what’s the scandal?” Unlike his sister, Rex was no actor.

“Nothing, it’s just, it’s just a thingy about conservatories.”

“Is it fuck,” said Biba, grinning. “Come on, share it with the group.” He shook his head. “Let me see.” There was an edge to her voice now, no longer wheedling but demanding.

“You don’t want to,” said Rex. He doubled the magazine over, sat on it, and folded his arms, but you had to do better than that if you wanted to keep something away from Biba. She wrestled it from underneath his buttocks. Rex brought his head down to his hands. Biba opened the magazine and uncreased it. All three of us stared down at the cover and into the face of a ghost.

I had seen only a couple of pictures of him, and none this recent, but it was definitely him: several years older, a few pounds heavier, and very much more alive than I had believed him to be, Roger Capel. He was dressed in black; a familiar-looking young woman with long blond hair, not much older than Rex, was wrapped around him like a python. Their eyes were the same blue as the background. The cover line confirmed it in bold yellow type. “OUT OF THE DARKROOM” it announced, and in a smaller font, “The Second Coming of Roger Capel.” Biba let out the kind of snivel a frightened dog makes. She scrabbled noisily through the pages until she came to the cover story. She smoothed the pages over and over, her hands working on the paper as though by ironing it flat she could make sense of it. My eyes shuttled between her moving fingers, trying to piece together the puzzle. Columns of pictures flanked the print.

In one he was a round-faced, polo-necked youth in a self-conscious self-portrait, cigarette in one hand, cabled shutter release in the other. Another, taken much later, showed him standing outside an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery that bore his name. The most recent photograph portrayed him shoulder-to-shoulder with a grinning Tony Blair and cradling a flute of champagne. Black caterpillar eyebrows identified the out-of-focus figure behind them as Noel Gallagher.

If the first page had been a professional album, the next was spread with personal portraits. Roger Capel and the blond woman, surrounded by a brood of fair-haired children, posed in a leafy garden somewhere with a private swimming pool. The tableau was a heartbreakingly glossy upgrade from the photograph I’d found in Biba’s room, the one with his first family playing in the wading pool.

“What the
fuck
?” she repeated. Rex, unseen, had joined us on the pew and the three of us scanned the pages in silence. I clung to the solid teak of the table. I couldn’t begin to guess what they were feeling. I could only taste a diluted version of their cocktail of snatched grief and hope and confusion. Beside me, Biba shook in silence. I wanted to hug them, to congratulate them on the amazing news that their father was alive, but knew I should take my cue from their own reactions. Until they spoke, all I could do was read on.

The interviewer had made much of the fact that Roger Capel’s personal life, as well as his career, was sailing on a second wind. A caption identified the blond woman as his second wife and muse, Jules Millar. Putting a name to the face made the penny drop; she was a model who’d been in a huge ad campaign for makeup when I was a teenager. Now, Jules had evidently turned professional mother, writing books about child nutrition and creative play. Reading between the lines, I guessed that Roger Capel had granted this interview to promote her new career as much as his established one. The children in the picture seemed to be thriving: they were golden and glowing, idealized versions of middle-class childhood. They looked nothing like their half-siblings. His first family was dismissed in a couple of lines in the middle of the article. It was implied that the late seventies and early eighties had been something of a personal as well as professional wilderness, the journalist referring only to a “lost weekend that lasted two decades.” Sheila Capel was summarized as his late wife, “the troubled model with whom he had two children.” The use of the past tense pricked like a wasp sting, as did the quotation highlighted in bold type along the top of the page.

“I’ve been given a second chance at work and family,” it said. “This is my new Year Zero. Nothing matters but now.” Biba turned back a page and shook her head. The dam finally broke and tears flash-flooded her face. The paper grew opaque and the image on the other side, the photograph of her mother, shone through like a ghost. Rex wrapped a protective arm around his sister and tried to blot the paper with a pub napkin.

“Let it go, B,” he said. “He’s an arsehole.”

“Fucking . . . I’m not having this. He can’t do this. We were there first.” Her voice was rising to a shrill crescendo. She shoved the table to one side, banging it against my rib cage, and looked wildly around the pub as if to gauge which of the exits was the quickest route to fresh air. “He can’t do this,” she hissed.

“Biba, no!” shouted Rex so loudly that even the little old man looked up from his stout. Finally I found my own voice.

“He’s alive,” I managed. “Your dad. He’s alive!”

Rex has never been impatient but he came close to it then.

“Of course he’s alive,” he said. “Why wouldn’t he be?” A gust of humid air sucked my attention toward the swinging door just in time to see Biba disappear through it. Rex covered the same distance in three loping strides. I picked up the magazine and sprinted into the street after them.

B
IBA OUTRAN BOTH OF us, to my surprise and mild chagrin. I was the one who’d put in the hours on the treadmill while she spent her life smoking and starving, yet I had to draw on my deepest reserves to keep up with her. What she lacked in lung capacity and muscle power she made up for in lightness and grace. She also had the invaluable advantage of knowing where she was going: she never once turned her head to consult a street sign or check her bearings, and when she turned corners she made the swift, autopilot turns of someone who had trodden this route before. The street names here were black tiles with white lettering but I didn’t have time to read the individual names. My lungs swelled and my stomach squeezed around the mash of food and drink in my belly but I kept going. I didn’t know where she was going or what I would be preventing when I caught up with her. I had vague visions of rugby-tackling her to the ground, but I didn’t really want to stop her: my hammering heart was due to excitement as much as exercise. After weeks chipping away at Biba’s secret history, the family storybook was now opening its pages.

I was closing the gap now, and ragged gulps in my ear told me that Rex was keeping pace with me. All three of us were running in the middle of the road now. People saunter through those little private lanes and secret groves, they don’t run unless they are joggers or robbers. We weren’t dressed for running and we looked like an improbable trio of purse snatchers, but we still drew attention as we flew through the streets. We were going too fast to care about the Sunday strollers who stopped and stared.

My peripheral vision speed-read a sign for Keats House and my mind took an out-of-focus photograph of a big white mansion hidden behind a row of magnolias. As a student, I’d visited Keats’s apartment in Rome and my thoughts, so focused just seconds before, began a sharp detour toward that ocher palazzo flanking the Spanish Steps. The weirdest details reared from packed-away corners of my memory, scenes from another life: I remembered a plate of soggy spaghetti I’d shared with Simon on the edge of the piazza. It was an unremarkable reverie that came to an abrupt end when a big black SUV reversed out of a hidden driveway and the chrome of its bumper connected with my thigh.