The Poison Tree (28 page)

“It’s not
you
I don’t trust,” she says. My guilt is always at its strongest when she says things like this.

If my mother’s phone call puts me in a bad mood, then Rex’s late return from his walk exacerbates it. It is unheard of for him to miss our evening meal. I am convinced that someone has found him, someone intent on revenge or exposure or both. Alice eats her dinner while I push mine around the plate and Rex’s portion of lasagna shrivels in the oven. Seven, eight, nine o’clock come and go, and still no sign of him and no phone call. The struggle to get Alice to go to bed and stay there without his good night kiss takes nearly an hour, during which I at least stop watching the clock. When I finally return to the empty living room it is twenty past ten. Mentally I map the radius he can cover on foot: the forest, the beach, the construction site, miles of winding high-sided lanes and alleyways, all places he might easily be beaten up and lie undiscovered all night. A muscle in my eyelid starts to jump and flicker. When his key clicks in the front door at eleven, anger immediately subsumes relief.

“Where’ve you been?” I demand.

“Out,” he says. He won’t meet my eyes, and instead of offering me a kiss he goes straight to the kitchen, mud and leaf mold coming away from his boots in wet black flakes.

“Where?” I repeat.

“Just out,” he says, truculent as a teenager. “Doesn’t matter.” His eyes are unfocused and his speech is thick. As he retrieves his dinner from the oven and staggers to the kitchen table, I realize that he’s drunk: drunker, I expect, than he has been in ten years. He is an unlovely sight as he stabs clumsily at his food with the wrong end of a fork and when he finally figures out how to turn it around it is no better. He eats sloppily, sauce dribbling over his chin.

“I was worried about you,” I press. “Rex, what happened?”

“Nothing happened. Leave me alone.”

“Since when do we have secrets from each other?” What I mean, of course, is that while I am allowed to have secrets from him, he may not keep any from me. “You could have told me where you were going.”

He stands up and slams his fist down on the table.

“I spent ten
fucking
years in prison with every second of my day accounted for,” he hisses, spittle flying across the table and landing on my cheek. He has never seemed so much taller than I am. “I didn’t realize that I was coming home to another fucking warden.” He launches his plate across the room like a Frisbee. I brace myself for the smash of china on tile but it hits the trash can and lands softly in a basket of laundry that rests by the back door. The kitchen appliances, my clothes, and his face are all covered in food, as though someone had operated a blender with the lid off.

I have been afraid for Rex before, but never afraid
of
him until now.

“If you must know, I walked to the pub,” he says. “I sat there with loads of drifters staring at me, I got drunk, I thought about how I’m shit and I can’t get a job to provide for you both, and I thought about how much I was looking forward to coming home to you,” he says. “I wish I hadn’t bothered. When did you become such a control freak?”

“Fuck you.” I run up to the bathroom and lock the door, sit on the closed toilet, and wait for him to come up and apologize. When he doesn’t, I linger over the nightly routine of taking off my makeup, flossing and brushing my teeth until I judge we have both had time to calm down. Still, nothing can justify his behavior. I go downstairs to tell him that I want him to sleep downstairs tonight, but he is already out cold, feet hanging over the arm of the sofa, mouth lolling open. I go to bed without covering him up. When he slides into bed at five o’clock in the morning his skin is cold and goosefleshed.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve cleaned the kitchen.”

“You frightened me.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m still getting used to freedom. It all went to my head a bit. I won’t do it again.”

I can’t bring myself to offer my own apology even though I know he’s right. I
am
a control freak. I have had to be. When I was the one left holding the reins of this family, is it any wonder I grip them so tightly?

When Guy returned to the house, he kept his sunglasses on indoors and carried a laptop computer underneath his arm. It was as unlike the slim notebooks we use today as his cell phone was unlike the sleek clamshell currently in my handbag. I was familiar with computers then, but this was very different from the substantial, anchored desktop kind I worked on in the computer lab on campus. Guy’s laptop looked like a baby that had been born with all its organs outside its body. Wires sprung from sockets all over its chunky little surface. One thick black cord led to a disc drive, another to a transformer and in turn to a main plug, and the giant one that looked like the foot pump for an inflatable bed was a modem. Guy explained all this as he set it up on the bureau in the Velvet Room that had a red leather surface and was angled like an architect’s drawing board. We all looked at it expectantly.

“It’s a present for me, apparently,” said Biba.

“You’re probably receiving stolen goods,” said Rex pointedly. Guy didn’t deny this but rather smiled into the nest of wires he was untangling.

“Right,” he said eventually. “Where’s your phone extension?”

“I’m sorry?” said Rex.

“Your extension, the other phone jack. You’re not telling me that in a house this size you’ve only got that one crappy little phone down in the kitchen.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Rex.

“No,” said Guy. “This house is
riddled
with cables. I’ve seen them. There’s got to be another outlet somewhere.” He began his search at the kitchen telephone and, with blunt fingertips, began to trace the cables that snaked all over the walls. I stood in the doorway of the Velvet Room, watching him. Sometimes the wires were tacked over surfaces where the wall met the ceiling and sometimes they were buried deep under layers of wallpaper and paint. They led him along baseboards, up over doorways, and underneath picture rails. Rex joined me in the doorway and slid his arm around my waist. His body carried none of the tension that he had been holding the day before, and when I tentatively leaned back into his chest, I felt his whole body welcome mine. The wild goose chase Guy was on couldn’t have been better designed for our amusement. Occasionally we would hear a mumbled “Fuck it” as the cable disappeared through a hole in a cornice or abruptly doubled back on itself. Like everything else in the house, this was due to neglect and bad design, but I felt a small thrill of victory, as though the very layout of our home was conspiring to frustrate and reject Guy. Eventually Guy crawled in on all fours, kneading a ridge in the rug in the middle of the room. The gap between his jeans and T-shirt revealed a tanned, muscular lower back and an inch of crisp white waistband. His underpants said CALVIN KLIEN, the misspelling marking them out as street-market fakes. I wondered if this was an affectation.

“I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do with a computer,” said Biba, as though Guy wasn’t kneeling directly at her feet. He didn’t look up. He had a habit of ignoring any remark about him unless it was addressed directly to him and prefaced with his name. It gave the impression that he didn’t hear anything we said and the temptation was to talk about him, in front of him. We found out later that he had taken in far more than we gave him credit for, but by then it was too late to take back some of the things we had said.

“He’s trying to impress you,” said Rex.

Guy interrupted not with an objection but with a grunt of triumph. He had located whatever it was he’d been searching for behind a wicker bookcase that leaned against the far wall of the Velvet Room. It groaned with dusty books and magazines. With one hand Guy picked it up and deposited it ten inches to the left. A telephone jack, gray with years of disuse, protruded from the wall just above the baseboard. He traced a line in the grime with his thumb, to reveal the yellowing plastic below.

“I told you, didn’t I?” he said to us.

“Well done,” said Biba dispassionately. “Aren’t you clever?”

Rex was staring at the wall as though he’d never seen it before.

“I’ve just had the most vivid memory,” he said. “Of Mum on the green sofa talking on that phone. So there must have been one here once. Isn’t it funny how you can completely forget something and then you can remember it like it was yesterday?”

“When was this, Rex?” said Biba.

“God, I dunno . . . years ago. Dad was still here, I think. She was laughing, so . . .”

I stayed silent out of a tender respect for this memory and because I did not know how much family background Guy knew. What he and Biba talked about in her bedroom was anyone’s guess, but I could not imagine him listening with the sensitivity and attention the subject of their mother demanded. I found that I liked the idea that I knew more than he did.

“Your wiring’s all to shit,” said an apparently unmoved Guy, flinching only slightly as a blue spark shot out of the first plug he tried. Sweat began to patch his T-shirt underneath his arms and between his shoulder blades. Eventually he found a secure jack, did something that made a green light on the modem flicker on and off. A few minutes later, a bouncing buzz told us the computer was dialing a connection to the Internet. Rex, fascinated and impressed despite himself, looked over Guy’s shoulder at the little gray icon that flickered in the middle of the tiny screen. I sat on the sofa next to Biba.

“There you go. You’re online,” said Guy in triumph. Biba finished the cigarette she was rolling and sparked it before speaking.

“Now what does it do?”

“It doesn’t
do
anything unless you tell it to,” said Guy. Biba looked blank. “You don’t seem very pleased with it. I went to a lot of trouble to get this for you.”

“Yes, where exactly did you get it, Guy?” interjected Rex. “I can’t see a receipt or any packaging.”

“It’s lovely of you,” she said. “I just don’t see why I need a computer. I mean, that’s what I’ve got an agent for, CVs and stuff like that. Did Sarah Bernhardt need the Internet? Did Katharine Hepburn?”

For a moment I almost felt sorry for Guy. I understood the cold darkness you felt when the lighthouse beam of Biba’s affection swung suddenly in another direction.

“Why don’t I set you up with an e-mail address?” I said, carefully removing the computer from the bureau and placing it on my lap. The tiny keys were clustered together in the middle of the board, making my fingers seem oversized and clumsy, and my attempts at using the sensor mouse were inept. “Type your name in there,” I said, maneuvering the cursor to the appropriate box. She wrote her full name out. Watching her type was painful: each letter seemed to take her a minute to locate, index finger circling over the keyboard like a buzzard. I deduced that the theater studies department at Queen Charlotte’s had been one of the few that still allowed its students to submit essays in longhand. Her new address was displayed on the screen: bathshebaelizabethcapel@ hotmail.com.

“Now put a password in,” I said. “It has to be something close to your heart, something that makes it easy to remember, but not too obvious. Something I can’t guess.” I looked away while she typed her secret word. “There you go. You’ve got your very own e-mail address. Aren’t you modern?”

She remained unimpressed.

“I’ll bet you anything I never use it,” she said.

T
HE GREEN VELVET SOFA was the one remaining item of furniture from the suite that had given the Velvet Room its name. Nobody ever thought to bring it in from its new location at the edge of the room, one arm overhanging the flag-stones of the terrace. It meant that the French windows could not be properly closed, which left the house vulnerable to burglars. But as the front door gave way with the tiniest kick, and there was nothing inside worth stealing, nobody bothered to change things. The sofa had been dewed with splashbacks of rain during a rare downpour but I liked the sheen that the spray had made on the velvet and even the slight dampness the upholstery retained. It brought the outdoors inside. I liked to imagine that it was a huge stone, shaped to accommodate my body and covered with a spongy layer of moss.

Rex and I lay end to end on it, my left hand holding my book, my right his ankle. It was a German novel that I had studied in my first year and one of the few things I’d retrieved from the house in Brentford. I had not liked studying the book but was enjoying rereading it for pleasure. Rex drifted in and out of sleep, a thriller facedown on his lap. The
thud-thud-thud
of Guy’s music came from above, spilling out of Biba’s bedroom window and seeping through the floorboards, but we had both learned to tune it out, unlike poor Tom Wheeler who complained in vain on an almost daily basis. The music, once so oppressive, had now become part of the white noise of the city and the wood. It had gotten to the stage where I could hear the birdsong and rustle of the leaves again. So when his cell phone rang, it felt like the silence that it pierced was true.